Music 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.

UX for Toddlers

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This was a micro-slot talk at Oxford Geek Nights #51.

As my son found his feet and began to walk, he found his hands at perfect height to reach the piano. Music is very important to us, and I could not have been more delighted to see him walk over to the piano and press the keys with the tips of his fingers.

A decade of Folk Tune Finder, an open manifesto for the decade to come

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks the release of the Digital Folk report, a study into the way that folk music is being played and shared in the digital age. The report opens with a timeline of some of the tools available and their history. It reminded me that Folk Tune Finder is ten years old this year - the folktunefinder.com domain was registered at half past nine in the morning on the 27th of January 2008. This seems like a good time to look back at the last decade and think about the future.

Skint 2016

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 22:00:00 +0000

Skint is a weekend of music and dancing, with workshops, bals and sessions all run by volunteers. I’m on the committee.

This year’s Skint was a joy. I am immensely grateful to everyone who came and made it what it was, which, as I’ve said, a joy.

These are not the best photos in the world, but they are mine.

Bundpolska Workshop.

Hands up who’s here for the first time.

Effectiveness of interval histogram Euclidean distance for predicting tune similarity

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 20:02:14 +0000

In an attempt to quickly find almost exact melodic duplicates (give or take a note or two) in the folktunefinder.com algorithm I tried comparing the Euclidean distance between their interval histograms.

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.

All OxLork code samples online

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:06:57 +0000

I am hosting all of the OxLork ChucK lecture code samples here: https://github.com/afandian/oxlork-lecture-code

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 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.

Birthday Shinbash

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 17:17:45 +0000

A few shaky photos from a magnificent 18 hour birthday stint.

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.

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.

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…

Tracks that use Gradual onset of Distortion to Great Effect

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:37:25 +0000

I love Spotify. I refuse to participate in the ‘social networking’ aspect of things. Indeed I find the idea of assuming I want everyone knowing what I listen to, and the assumption that I want to see what other people are listening to mildly offensive. That’s ok, I don’t mind being offended.

That said, here is a list of songs (not a playlist) which use the gradual onset of distortion to great effect. Distortion has been used since the dawn of time to make guitars fuzzier, vocals warmer, snares more brutal.

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.

FolkTuneFinder version 4 out now

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:48:15 +0000

On Monday 9th January 2011, version 4 of FolkTuneFinder.com went public. It was a bit of a journey getting to this point.

I run FolkTuneFinder in my spare time. Mostly it runs itself without intervention. I keep an eye on things, monitor spam (except for a recent occasion when it got out of hand) and answer mail. There is a fair amount of programming behind it, and I’ve re-written the search engine a few times over the years. The melody search is the main point of the site and the bulk of the programming, but recently the extra bits, such as comments, favourites, blogs etc have become more significant.

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).

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.

Fixing a leaky Castagnari Lilly

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:52 +0000

After a brilliant Swanage Folk Festival, I got my box home and, to my horror, heard a slight hissing sound. Nightmare. A few seconds’ listening suggested it was coming from behind the grille. So off it came.

Somehow the wax on the pallets had melted and allowed a valve or two to slip out of place. The wax melts at a very low temperature (a bit too low in my opinion). I carefully used a soldering iron to warm the armature (not the wax itself!) in short bursts. It took very little heating indeed to allow me to move the valves back in place.

De-Dusting Melodeon Air Vents

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:55 +0000

My third- (or perhaps fourth-) hand Dino Baffetti melodeon has some pretty impressive basses, but the tonics on the chord side (key-note) have slowly started to sound a bit out of tune. Jon Spiers suggested that whilst it might be a problem with the reeds, the shape of the chamber also affects how reeds speak. It was noticeable that the tuning was fine at low volume, but at higher pressure the tone bent up as much as 50 cents. I took apart the chamber and bellows to see if anything was amiss, but it all looks in order. I did notice that the dust filters on the air vents were looking a bit mucky and that that might be causing the problem: