Friday March 20th

Animism came to mind this morning, and I started thinking about something I wrote a while ago about locating agency in process based music. The question where do you place agency in process based music? ended up being mostly rhetorical. Diffusing the question by articulating real systems and situations placed in a perceptual context felt like a more naturally interesting project to me than trying to locate agency in any sense, really.

This morning I’m reframing that insinct to try to dismantle the question as a aspiration to the universality of agency, and asking myself: do I extend this instinct to software, too?

My language is harsher with software – any anthropomorphising is disclaimered with a “so-called” or a follow-up explicit thinging of some sort.

I pick up a rock and I say “look at this little guy” not “look at this little so-called guy”.

Saturday March 14th

Seems like there’s something wrong with one of the amplifier modules in the contraption! This explains a lot, two channels are really quiet for some reason. I think maybe a bad solder job by yours truly on the gain pot? I’ll have to take it apart to see, and I’m considering just redoing the whole thing since I made all the audio connections with thin gauge wire for some dumb reason. They’re short connections so it’s probably fine? But the more junk I cram into the box, the more likely I’ll want some nice shielded audio connections between the amp and breakouts…

I made a little bit of progress on the mixer module, but I’m realizing now I don’t really know exactly what I want. I’m experimenting with using the little four channel mixer I typically use to decide, but I’d really like to build similar / expanded functionality directly into the contraption.

The Rube Goldberg version of this idea is an esp32 dingus connected to one or more electro-smith daisy boards via SPI, and have the daisies stream their audio outputs to the esp32 (in theory as many channels as the latency/bandwidth allows) where they are routed back out to virtual channels via wifi?

The idea is that all inputs to the computer are streamed over wifi from the esp32 (or maybe a couple esp32s, depending on bandwidth/channels?) and the input mixer is controlled via wifi, sending control messages via SPI to the daisies which do the mixing (and some basic channel strip type filtering etc likely, maybe some fx too?) and have four line level analog inputs each broken out on the faceplate of the module…

It would be amazing to stack three daisies for 12 input channels, but I wonder if I can squeeze all those channels plus a bidirectional control stream over SPI?

I plan to use the faderfox for most knobs and faders, but down the road a custom controller could connect to the same wifi network and send control messages to the mixer directly, too…

Sunday March 8th

Monday March 2nd