Inputs

This month, I read Ted Chiang’s two books of short stories, Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others, both of which were incredible. Chiang’s stories are often presented in the first person, and he allows the circumstances of the story and protagonist to affect the writing style of a story; two of my favorite stories, Story of Your Life (which was the basis for the movie Arrival) and Understand, are both good examples of this. He also has a very creative way of exploring questions of science; contrasted with Andy Weir, who I read recently as well, he seems to focus much more on the implications of scientific facts or discoveries on human culture.

My favorite musical discovery this month was Nala Sinephro’s immersive and relaxing debut, Space 1.8:

I also enjoyed spending time this month with recordings by Caroline Rose, who I had heard before but never listened to deeply, and Snail Mail, who is an old favorite.

Outputs

I mentioned my in-progress random drum loop generator in last month’s update, and I did manage to get that project into a state that I was happy with. You can see it at loops.bpapillon.com; clicking the prompt button will generate a random drum loop, and you can keep clicking it to get new random loops. After a good bit of tuning, I’m fairly happy with the quality of the loops; a lot of them sound bad, but quite a few of them are surprisingly musical. I hope to spend more time working on generative music projects in the coming months, perhaps incorporating some of my own samples and more user interaction.

This was a bad writing month for me; no new published posts! I’ll try to do better in October.