Notescast

New Small Findings! It’s about energy, consciousness, and Canada.

Well, I’m gonna be on the antidepressants now. I think my depression (by which I mean having trouble doing things I don’t like) is caused by external factors, rather than some kind of body-driven state change. The doctor also thought so. Still, those external factors aren’t going to change, and the next several years are going to be rough. If you’re gonna be in a dystopia, you gotta dystopiate.

This chord progression, when transplanted out of Zelda, can easily end up sounding really maudlin. Hat salute to Koji Kondo once again.

This is Signals in the Valley, which I made with relative-room-readers , which is a web app that simulates situations in which there are multiple players that are some distance from each other. So each player plays something, but it will take some time for what they play to reach the other players. When it does, though, those players will respond, and the cycle will continue. Most of the responses...

Unsure if I can make more out of this, but I find this not hilarious.

This is my rearrangement remix of Subbubbling, which I crunched out a few weeks ago to submit to Music for Sleep. It has since been released as part of the compilation. I wondered if I'd like it with fresh ears, and it turned out I did not. So, here is a cut that I think leads better and has levels that are more balanced. (Cutting two tracks did half the work.) It's based on a field recording of a...

This is Moving Walkways. It's a tribute to moving walkways throughout the United States and all over the world.

Here is The Orb, Ascending. No one said ascending was going to be easy. (There's a lot of low humming in this, so it may be hard to hear without headphones or with computer speakers.)

Working up from the bottom

I didn’t quite capture it, the acoustics of the Tufts music building’s lobby is really great for ambience. Things like people walking and typing sound good.

Accidental stealth mission

This is Imagined Scandinavian Dance. I thought this sounded interesting, so I recorded it on my phone, then recorded backing chords. I thought maybe I'd develop and use the riff later. Arbitrarily, though, I decided I should keep some things spontaneous and picked this to fill that spontaneity quota! So, instead, I retrofitted a drum beat to it, and here it is. I have no idea what Scandinavian dan...

Cicada waves

I tried to continue the pump up downstairs with more of the Pikmin match, but it turns out that moment is over. He said he wanted to think quietly during breakfast, so I switched it to Baba Is You.

The guy has put on some Pikmin march to pump himself up for the first day of school.

The only thing I did for music programming today was get Scramble to handle mono .

This is Scrambled Plea. It turned out less musical than I would have liked, which was a known risk, but I think it's interesting for now. I wrote Scramble to make this.

Bonus is at the vet. A hard day for him has started.

On surly garage guy

Alex gave me a guitar. It’s a Fender Squier, so I feel free to mess it up. The first thing I did was change the strings and tune down to B. Kinda cool, but the floppy strings feel very awkward, so I might actually buy heavy strings. I might see if there’s some interesting cheap pickups out there. And I’m also considering cutting the body into another shape.

Impromptu soundtrack for reading about microplastics getting into your food .

Today in inappropriate beats

Shoe and cat pee

I wrote (most of) a song that’s mostly in 15/8 that I’ve been trying to play up to speed for months now. I still play it really awkwardly. However, this is still better than it was, unbelievably. (To be clear, it’s not the 15/8 meter than makes it hard for me to play. It’s that I’m not sure to playing two sixteenth notes at one pitch then immediately playing another pair at another pitch on anothe...

I wrote this on the plane while barely able to hear what I was writing. I don’t recommend that technique.