Arts on Joe's Blog

A new harmonium Part 3: Bellows

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Start with Part 1.

Bellows are a mystery to me. Even now. There are plenty of tutorials showing you how to draw lines on paper and then fold them up, but my brain doesn’t find it easy to visualise it. Easily solved, I’ll just make a model.

A new Harmonium 2: Deconstruction

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Start with Part 1.

I just wanted another portable harmonium. Whether that meant buying or building one.

I saw one on eBay, listed as a fixer-upper that doesn’t play. I had to get it. In the best case I would have a harmonium. In the worst case I would have learned something.

The seller was quite open about it not working. I took the gamble, and met him in a car park off the M4. It looked exactly like its photo.

A new harmonium 1: Springs

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I should be clear that I already have a harmonium. It has three octaves, two ranks (voices) and knee-pedals to operate the swells. It’s small, and folds up smaller. If you saw me carrying it you might mistakenly think I was struggling with a very heavy suitcase.

Performance of folktunefinder.com and Cloudflare

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Long story short

I put Cloudflare and a CAPTCHA on Folk Tune Finder. It’s a pragmatic decision, which ensures that the limited resources of the site are used for the people it’s intended for. It’s an uneasy trade-off that doesn’t align with all of my principles. It does, though, align with the fundamental principle of folk tune finder: helping people to find tunes.

Three Bean Salad: Jingleography

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I have been asked to pass on the following message to Three Bean Salad Podcast:

Esteemed Beans,

Your recent episode, “Elevators”, was so flagrant in its profligate use of jingles that I must break my silence and share my top secret research project.

Unlike many, I don’t use your podcast to go to sleep. But I do use it to wake up, and the jingles really get me out of bed. Knowing the exact timings of each episode is crucial for my scientific lifestyle. I have therefore scientifically catalogued every jingle and cross-referenced it against every episode.

Pipes and Paper: Ancient Abstractions (or: hacking my ReMarkable tablet into a live presentation tool)

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

None of the below is particularly original. That’s kind of the point.

Paper

I’m addicted to paper. When reviewing documents I prefer to print them out and scribble on them. That’s all well and good in an office located on a planet with infinite trees, but I find myself in neither of those situations.

As a programmer, I also find it useful to scribble things down on paper, point at various scribble marks and ask people questions. I do enjoy making carefully perfected, data generated, diagrams with arcane tools. But scribbling is a necessary precursor.

A Light Box in Heavy Times

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My son is nearing his second birthday, which makes him nearly two years old. When he was only four months old I decided that I would make him something with buttons. I didn’t have much more of an idea than that, but I ordered one hundred illuminated buttons and started mulling what to do with them. Nothing much happened for a few months; I knew this was a long term plan. But every so often my subconscious would come up for breath, and I would open the drawer and get them out. Just to see how they felt.

Save Aldershot Leopard Barn

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 20:57:02 +0000

None of the regulars I speak to at The Old Pump in Aldershot have a bad word to say about ‘hapless’ Sandra. She’s has been a well-liked member of the community since before it was known as The Old Pump, before when it was known as the Pumping Station and before that, when it actually was the pumping station for Aldershot’s sewage system. ‘Some things never change,’ they mutter into their pints.

Christmas Lights Competition 2015

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 14:52:33 +0000

Standards are high at the annual Christmas lights event. It’s important that every entry is a strong in order to outperform the competition.

To a toaster

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 22:55:48 +0000

O Toaster! What the hell with thee is wrong?

Thy kind hath served my kind for decades long.

A bond hath formed between two nations great,

That decades bond, though, weareth thin of late.

Photoshop Bug

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 21:14:35 +0000

A fascinating bug in Adobe Photoshop. Presented here as a photographic essay. Bug report as photojournalism. I only created one triangle and moved it around a bit.

International Bagpipe Day at the Pitt Rivers

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:41:51 +0000

An event to celebrate the second International Bagpipe Day! Held at the Pitt Rivers museum, Oxford.

OxLork perform at the Ashmolean

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 20:31:22 +0000

OxLork, a band of musicians in possession of computers (and, I hope, an increasing knowledge of how to make new things with them) had a gig at the Ashmolean Museum on Friday. Very exciting.

Not brilliant photos, but better than nothing.

Visualising folk tune structures

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 19:43:30 +0000

Traditional tunes have a particular shape to them. Many, especially northern European, have two parts, each repeated, possibly with first and second time bars. Within this arching structure that spans the tune in a few leaps, there are smaller repeated phrases, callbacks and variations. I remembered a visualisation I saw a long time ago which took a MIDI file and visualised the structure. I wanted to do something for the tunes in FolkTuneFinder.

Using TASCAM US-122 audio/midi interface with Mountain Lion

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 18:19:45 +0000

(punchline: give up it won’t work but it’s an interesting story)

Oxford Laptop Orchestra – Lecture 4 — Modulation

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 18:54:47 +0000

This is number 4 in my series of lectures in music technology and ChucK to the Oxford Laptop Orchestra. Delivered on the 5th of November 2012 at the Faculty of Music. Give the first three a read before reading this.

The content is complete here (except for a bit about Nyquist) so feel free to read this. But I intend to do a bit of copy-editing, and include sound samples before I declare it complete.

This week we look at low frequency oscillators, using them to modulate other oscillators and in the process how to do more than thing at once._

Oxford Laptop Orchestra — Lecture 3 — Transcending Analogue

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:35:54 +0000

This is number 3 in my series of lectures in music technology and ChucK to the Oxford Laptop Orchestra. Read the other two first. Sorry this blog post was a couple of weeks late. It’s quite substantial, but conceptually it underpins a lot of material. Persevere, read, ask questions.

This week sees a bit of a philosophical turn as we contemplate what ‘digital’ really means and how we can use it to play Bach on organ without having to build one first.

Oxford Laptop Orchestra – Lecture 2 – Control Structures and Timbres

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:00:38 +0000

This is number 2 in my series of lectures in music technology and ChucK to the Oxford Laptop Orchestra. Give the first lecture a read before reading this.

Last week we took a look at why, in my opinion, music and programming are natural bedfellows. We talked about what a program actually is and how it relates to Western music notation. We compared structural features of music and computer programs. We pinned down what the words ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ actually mean, how sound is transmitted, and finally we wrote a program that plays a tune.

This week we’re going to continue down two parallel paths: more about the programming language and the nature of sound in general. The reason for all of this is to give you the tools to think about what you hear, apply analytical thought to the process of composition and creation, and to enable you to conceive of and make your own ChucK sounds.

Oxford Laptop Orchestra : Lecture 1 : Music and Programming

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:19:21 +0000

I’m very excited to be involved with the nascent Oxford Laptop Orchestra. This project, run by and for students at the University of Oxford, follows on from the work of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. PLOrk, as its known, and now OxLork, is an effort to reproduce the form of performance embodied by a real orchestra or chamber group — that is, a number of individuals performing in concert, in a certain arrangement in space — with modern advances in electroacoustic music.

My first piece of digital audio music: A Very Great Sadness

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:49:58 +0000

I used to make music on computers when I was a teenager. I used to spend hours in my room on a MIDI sequencer with a keyboard, a synthesiser and a mouse. These tracks were all MIDI. No they didn’t sound awful I had a nice sound module, but they do sound a bit dated now. But that was MIDI.

I very clearly remember a turning point. The day I bought my first (and, it turns out only) microphone. A Røde NT1A vocal mic.

Sound file Plotter in Go using gosndfile / libsndfile

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 21:27:46 +0000

It’s no secret that golang is my new favourite language. I’ve used it to implement the latest folktunefinder search engine and really enjoyed it.

On an unrelated note, whilst looking at what libraries are available I came across the gosndfile library written by Matt Kane / @nynexrepublic. It’s a wrapper for libsndfile, a C library for reading and writing sound files.

Jaga Jazzist Concert at the Barbican

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 19:04:49 +0000

I have been a devoted fan of Jaga Jazzist, a Norwegian group (they pretty much defy description) since around 2003, when I heard one of their tracks on a sampler CD issued by the Norwegian Embassy in London. This is the third gig of theirs I have been to. The first two were in the normal venues you would expect, with a lot of space for movement in response to the music.

Graffiti Tribute to Hussain Mohammed

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:53:36 +0000

I live not far from the spot where Hussein Mohammed jumped in the Thames and drowned. Local youths have spray-painted their tributes in the underside of the bridge. Touching.

Clandestine Mazurka, Brighton

Sun, 06 May 2012 23:47:28 +0000

Music in the bandstand in Brighton. Cold wind and rain by turns. We played and danced to keep warm.

I took a couple of audio recordings but this one just seemed perfectly to sum up the day.

Almost identifying the music in a BBC trailer

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:56:29 +0000

The BBC love their esoteric, obscure electronic music. I think it all started with Sigur Rós in Planet Earth and proliferated from there. It’s even started creeping into BBC Radio 4 trailers now. The trailer for Will Self’s ‘A Point of View: In Defence of Obscure Words’ had just such a music bed. I decided that I would very much like to know what that music was.

Animals and Documents

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:30:59 +0000

A friend asked on Facebook why there were no documents penned by animals. He claimed that ’not a single one was to my knowledge written by an animal other than a human’. I disagree. Here are some notable quotes I have collected on the subject.

‘A cat could no more write a thesis on the plight of man than a man could on the condition of being a cat’

On the Nature of Existence, Jeramiah Bullock, 1808

What did YOU do on Tuesday evening?

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:22:17 +0000

Some bizarre ancient ritual that takes place in the last week of March?

No, it’s Mano Panforreteiro playing his Gaita bagpipes in Oxford. With help from some pipes of another kind.

Mucking about in the Umeå snow

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:30:32 +0000

When visiting Umefolk recently we came across a snow castle in the city centre. It would have been impossible not to have a go…

The end of Umefolk 2012

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:23:22 +0000

Play the MP3 and imagine this. I recorded it walking through the musicians.

A weekend festival, with a 25 year heritage and massive following, is drawing to a close. Hundreds and hundreds of people must have passed through its doors. Headliners such as Garmana and Hoven Droven have drawn in crowds, impromptu sessions have brought out nyckelharpa players, and a large variety of players from all over north-east Europe have entertained and captivated. The event is winding up, and on the dance floor Anton and about 30 young people are playing for the final dance…

Umea and Umefolk

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:26:32 +0000

I spent the last week at Umefolk, a folk music festival in Umeå in the north of Sweden. We met Anton Teljebäck, who runs the festival, at a small festival in the UK and he invited us. Umefolk is well established (the first was in 1986), and Anton was keen to spread the word further afield.

We are no strangers to Scandanavian music in Oxford. There is a budding session which has found its feet in the last few months, run by Ed Pritchard, who plays a nyckelharpa amongst other things. I also listen to whatever I can get my hands on on Spotify and around the web. So we jumped at the chance to go.

A snowy journey to work

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:32:21 +0000

I’m not normally given to taking photos of my commute, but in the case of the snow I made an exception.

Old entries from simpler times: Busking

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:09:31 +0000

Whilst going over (and deleting) unwanted content on Facebook, I came across a few bits and pieces. I miss busking.

Found this old post from 4th August 2007.

Day five of ‘my’ Fringe, and the thought police are out in force. It feels like day two to me, but a lot has happened (including a technical rehearsal that finished at midnight, a street urchin and a stand-up routine about health and safety). The Fringe is getting started proper and potential audiences wonder round the city being picked off by hungry flyer-ers.

From La Mantovana to the Moldau. Musical similarity in the absence of rhythm and what it means to FolkTuneFinder

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:24:54 +0000

Má Vlast is a set of pieces written by the composer Smetana in the late 1800s about his homeland, Czechoslovakia. One of the pieces in the set, The Moldau (Vltava in Czech) is one of my favourite symphonies of all time ever. It could be something in my partially Czech blood, it could be the fact that I’m soppy about Romantic-period orchestral music, whatever it is, I love this piece of music and know it intimately.

The Rime of the Housemate

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:16:08 +0000

This was a facebook comment that got out of hand. If this isn’t the kind of pointless string of words that belongs in a blog, I don’t know what is. The first part follows the Rime of the Ancient Mariner reasonably closely. The rest correlates with the worst excesses of Roald Dahl at his most metrically depraved.

It is an ancient housemate,

And he washeth one of three.

‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye

FolkTuneFinder: Why are the search results so different to what I typed?

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:44:58 +0000

When searching FolkTuneFinder, you may find search results that you don’t agree with or can’t understand. You may think tune has nothing to do with your query, or the highlighted notes bear no relevance to what you typed. Here’s why.

The thing about folk tunes is that they’ve survived in the aural tradition, in many cases for quite a long time. A good tune spreads because people like it, and different parts of a tune may appeal to different people. We all hear and experience tunes slightly differently, and we can interpret and remember them differently too.

Recent downtime on FolkTuneFinder.com

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:54:26 +0000

I started FolkTuneFinder as a student project back in 2008. I’d done websites for a few years before, but this was the first serious one with any kind of heavy lifting or interesting behaviour. Over the years I added features that allowed people to interact, such as the commenting and FolkTuneFinder blogs, which has been surprisingly popular.

I have always had a very small problem with spam: I received perhaps a small handful of blog posts a month, which was fine to deal with. It wasn’t a problem, and the most time-effective way of dealing with it was to delete the posts when they arose. There has always been a battle with spare time, and various interesting things have happened to me since 2008 meaning that I haven’t quite had as much time as I’d like.

Day of the Dead

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:42:58 +0000

Today is Day of the Dead. The Hurly-Burly-Bright-And-Early Band was out in force this evening celebrating. Or rather, mourning the passing of the Summer. Exactly six months to the day (give or take) since May Day.

My pipe is at a worrying angle.

The Gribbin

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 20:24:14 +0000

There’s no hiding musicianship. Lock it up, put it in a box, or — crucially — ply it with significant quantities of drink … still it will shine through. There’s something immutable about musicianship that means that a bottle of Pimms and and half a bottle of whiskey later, it still keeps on playing.

It was in circumstances such as these that The Gribbin came together for the first — and last — time. In the heady days of 2006, The Pimms Sessions were recorded in a murky studio in scenic Oxford and (and subsequently presented to the unsuspecting, and arguably undeserving world).

The Stage Hand: The Flyerer

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:24:43 +0000

Back in the day I used to do a lot of sound and lighting for student theatre. I did a lot in Oxford, and went up to Edinburgh a number of times to do the Edinburgh Fringe. I did not go to Oxford University, but I did hang around with a lot of people who did. Once or twice I contributed to a theatre column in a student paper. It’s a bit thespy because it’s okay to experiment with language when you’re young. Reprinted here because why not.

Stage Whispers: The Techie

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:21:25 +0000

Back in the day I used to do a lot of sound and lighting for student theatre. I did a lot in Oxford, and went up to Edinburgh a number of times to do the Edinburgh Fringe. I did not go to Oxford University, but I did hang around with a lot of people who did. Once or twice I contributed to a theatre column in a student paper. It’s a bit thespy because it’s okay to experiment with language when you’re young. Reprinted here because why not.

Stage Whispers: The Stage Hand

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:16:53 +0000

Back in the day I used to do a lot of sound and lighting for student theatre. I did a lot in Oxford, and went up to Edinburgh a number of times to do the Edinburgh Fringe. I did not go to Oxford University, but I did hang around with a lot of people who did. Once or twice I contributed to a theatre column in a student paper. It’s a bit thespy because it’s okay to experiment with language when you’re young. Reprinted here because why not.

Theatre Shows I Have Teched For

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:42 +0000

During my time as a student (and during my time as a human) I’ve done a fair bit of lighting design and teching for student theatre. Here is a list of shows I have worked on.

2010

**Bent **(Lighting Designer; O’Reilly, Oxford)

**Paradise Lost **(Lighting Designer; O’Reilly, Oxford)

**The Blue Room **(Lighting Designer; O’Reilly, Oxford)

2009

**Captain Improv **ICE

**Much Ado About Nothing **(Lighting Designer; O’Reilly, Oxford)

**The Tempest **(Lighting Designer; Moser, Oxford)

**The Truth **(Lighting Designer & Op; OFS, Oxford)

My Instrument Zoo

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:30 +0000

I like instruments and have somewhat of a menagerie. Here are some of the less embarrassing inmates.

Squeezeboxes

Here is a Castagnari Lilly. It’s a small, single-voice D/G melodeon. Because of its size and the fact it has one reed per note, the reeds are mounted directly on the board rather than in a reed-block. It sounds a bit like a concertina. The buttons are much smaller than a normal melodeon so it’s easier to play fiddly things.