Joe's Blog

Tuesday: Floods reach Abingdon Road

27 Nov, 2012 flooding

Today, Tuesday. Deepest yet; getting out of my boat I was plunged waist-deep. The river is bringing it to the residents of Abingdon Road. A lunchtime stroll. Street deserted of cars. Very quiet.

Oxford Flooding: The Cold Light of Monday

26 Nov, 2012 flooding

A short lunchtime stroll on Monday after a weekend of flooding. The water is still rising and becoming worryingly strong in places (both in the river and across footpaths thigh-deep).

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS

24 Nov, 2012 flooding

Give me a cup of tea and a dressing gown and I’m made. Who cares if it’s flooding up to my thighs.

I came home last night and was just about able to make it in wellington boots on tip-toe. Come 1am my landing stage was covered. Up at 7am to check things over and have a stroll. It came up almost to my waist in places. I wouldn’t drink this stuff.

Unit Testing in Go: talk at Oxford Geek Night

21 Nov, 2012

Download the slides for the ‘Unit Testing in Go’, a microslot (exactly 5 minutes!) at Oxford Geek Nights 29 on the 21st November.

Oxford Laptop Orchestra – Lecture 4 — Modulation

10 Nov, 2012 oxlork

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

9 Nov, 2012 oxlork

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

22 Oct, 2012 oxlork

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.

Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Dead?

22 Oct, 2012

According to Ian Betteridge,

‘Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no’

But is this long-standing principle of journalism now dead?

Oxford Laptop Orchestra : Lecture 1 : Music and Programming

17 Oct, 2012 oxlork

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.