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ginnysgraffiti · 1 year ago

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dirty thoughts, riding, self-relief, needy

y/n, partner half asleep.

KING HAL (HENRY V) x yn.

you were his fabric doll, as he started to call you after the official marriage.

softness, kindness, a giving nature and wisdom; that's how he described you.

hal spent hours worshipping and absorbing every tiny detail about you, and if you only asked, he could go on and on.

he usually got lost in your fair wavy hair, doe eyes, blushed porcelain cheeks and delicate little hands.

"all your grace is in your vagueness, my queen. your soft voice, your manner languid, your features blurred and dreamy." his shooting words waking you up the morning after the marriage.

and then he got lost again in your features, measuring the distance from one freckle to the other, the softness of your lower lip, more evident than the upper one, before primitively undressing you and making the bed creak until small hours.

his place was between your legs, no doubt.

and anyone who dared to lay eyes on you would meet the guillotine the following morning, at the bell's heavy ringing, and you knew it.

but the sticky words of his, sweet like honey, they only dripped down the walls of the royal halls, during boring and long meals, where you represented a public image and inspiration source.

yes, because with you, you and you only, in private, hal was the most alive animal you had ever seen.

and you missed all this.

you missed the taste of his tongue, the heat of his thighs, his overly expert hands and his hungry gaze.

he made you feel so loved, beyond every limit.

now, however, the peace pacts and bloody wars were consuming him to the core, badly scratching his armor, crumbling his tolerance.

you could rarely see hal during the day, and even when you hoped to enjoy his company in the late evening, he was usually too tired or busy checking the artillery.

you felt neglected, even though you knew very well that it wasn't his fault at all.

but now the gazes of the other nobles became more focused on your skin, and the caresses he used to give you left an empty space under the covers.

(...)

one evening, when the flame crackled particularly on the medieval torch on the wall, your steps drew their way towards your room.

the latter creaked slightly, and hal's sleeping figure gave you such a view.

he was shirtless, as always, lying belly up, lost in a deep and calm breath.

you approached the mattress, making sure to not make any noise. you quickly got changed in your pajamas and sat next to him.

something about his position and his presence was awakening something brutal and hot inside your knotted stomach.

you could feel your stomach juices flaring up.

fuck, you needed him.

the sin was now rising to the neurons of your brain, consuming you alive.

you didn't know if he would forgive you, no, but you knew that that was all you had to do.

such dirty thoughts for a queen.

(...)

you found yourself straddling him with only your underwear, you had taken off almost everything. you molded yourself to his pelvis and the hardness you felt between his thighs took your breath away.

you stopped breathing. your eyes widened and you felt your cheeks burning.

you felt his erection quiver under the thin layer of your panties and with an inhibition that was unknown to you and an incessant need to attenuate the devastating heat that you felt between your thighs, you rubbed yourself against him, moving your pelvis dangerously.

faster, faster.

faster.

faster until you could feel yourself soaked.

you could feel his hips bones the more you moved, and your mouth was wide open.

you looked at him hypnotized in his most regal sleep. his perfect face teasing you slowly, in such a perverse way that made you even wetter.

you panted.

the breathing heavy and wet.

no longer able to bear the powerful pulsations between your legs you moved even faster but slowing down every now and then, when small grunts came out of his soft lips.

without even realizing it you were already entertaining yourself, rubbing your fingers against the fabric of your own underwear.

dirty moans filled your ears.

you didn't know what you were doing, but you knew you had never felt better.

"are you going to cum on me so soon?" asked a husky voice in your ear, panting.

fuck.

you couldn't look up, you couldn't allow yourself to sink into your wet perversity like this.

you could barely nod.

an ashamed queen ashamed of her own actions.

how disgusting.

hal grabbed your hips and with one move made you lay on your belly, making you let out a small cry of surprise that you knew would excite him even more. your smells mixed with the spicy ones of the room, the bodies merge. this position made everything more intimate and awkward.

"how naive to think i was really asleep..."

you worshipped him, as if you had a god in your hands, while he slammed you onto the mattress with incredible force.

now you found yourself with your cheek against the pillow and your pelvis raised to the height of his cock. with one hand he grabbed your buttock, he placed the other on the back of your neck to keep you still. you felt dizzy and hot.

he moaned like a caged animal.

you knew he was just holding back and that if you could turn around you would catch a murderous look waiting for you.

the one look you needed to know when he wanted to push himself into you.

he needed.

instantly.

he squeezed your buttocks vehemently and your eyes widened when he gave you a resounding slap on your buttock which made you let out a very powerful scream and which, to your enormous surprise, made you terribly more excited. you felt him lean over you, his massive chest pressed against your thin back. he loomed over your body, brought his mouth close to your ear and, in a husky, sensual voice, murmured, "fuck, i didn't know my queen could have such a twisted mind within these walls."

"i-...i can explain...your majesty...forgive m-"

he pulled your hair to make your back arch and the loudest moan left your wet lips.

your legs trembled in the middle due to your own sound.

how pathetic.

that's just how you were when you needed hal.

"there's no need, just let me fill you up with my cum until my queen is completely satisfied beyond any physical limit. and call me hal, only hal." a soft wet kiss delivered on your shoulder.

"forget your queen duties tomorrow."

the last famous words you fucking craved for so long.

#timothee chalamet #timothee x y/n #timothee imagine #timothee chalamet x reader #timothée chalamet #timothee chalamet x you #&. HAL #&. HENRY V #the king #haltheking #timotheehal #timothéehal #&. HAL x yn #&. HENRY V x yn #&. HAL x reader #&. HENRY V x reader

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ghoulodont · 10 months ago

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Sapwood

Mushy May 2024 — (shut up) I'm taking care of you. Dewdrop lets Rain past the surface, if only a little. Set after β-Lactam.

Relationship: Raindrop Characters: Dewdrop, Rain Words: 3.3k

Sickfic, Pre-relationship, tour bus lore

Mushy May prompts by @forlorn-crows

Read below or on AO3

Between the bus moving and people moving, getting in and out of their bunks, shuffling past each other in the narrow hallway, it’s never completely quiet at night — the white noise from the engine and the wheels can’t mask everything, and the heavy blackout curtain that separates each individual bunk from the common space only attenuates so much. Currently, someone just past said curtain seems to be wrestling with an inanimate object, a brief but violent crash filtering in through the thick fabric.

Rain rolls over in his bunk, turning away from the sound. He should be sympathetic, of course, as he has no doubt been the source of noise at night too, dropping things or tripping over an errant shoe on the floor, but the longer the tour goes on the more he yearns for his own very private bedroom at the ministry, with its cherished door and coveted lock. The occasional hotel room is a far cry from that luxury. Whoever makes noise is an enemy right now.

But then that same someone swears quietly, and it’s definitely Dewdrop.

Rain hasn’t seen him since he retreated into his bunk soon after the two of them got on the bus, nor has he gotten any messages from him, despite the offer to bring him anything he needed — an interaction that churns endlessly in Rain’s head, urging him to cringe at what now feels like an overbearing intrusion.

The best course of action is surely to curl up into the tightest ball he possibly can so that the memory can no longer worm its way inside. Dew is probably fine. That might not have been him, anyway. It might not have been anyone — a trick of his tired mind, just his imagination. It might have been a coincidence. Things fall over on the bus all the time.

Outside, the distinct clunk of the door between the bunk compartment and the front lounge closing brings his thoughts to a simmer again. Maybe Dew is not fine. Maybe he should be asking for help, and he’s not. It wouldn’t be a surprise, really.

Eventually, the worry sinks its claws deep enough to spur Rain to action. He pulls back his curtain and peeks out. Dew isn’t in the hallway, nor is he in his bunk — its curtain has been left halfway pulled back, the space beyond it in profound disarray.

Rain slips out of his bunk and makes his way to the front lounge door. He stands there in the rocking darkness, listening carefully. Nothing of note emerges from the tangle of overlaid background noises, the hum of the air conditioning unit on the ceiling draping him in waves of cool air, the drone of the engine churning somewhere behind him, the whine of the wheels beneath the floor gripping the pavement.

It could have been nothing, no one. The possibility that it wasn’t keeps him standing there. It pushes him to open the door to the front lounge.

Dew is there on one of the couches, wrapped in the standard-issue blanket from his bunk. His head snaps up to look toward the door as Rain steps through and wordlessly pulls it closed.

When Rain continues toward the couch, Dew pulls the edge of the blanket up over his nose and mouth. “What are you doing?” His voice is a forced whisper muffled by fabric. “Go back to sleep.”

Rain isn’t deterred. When he sits down next to him, the leather of the couch creaking, Dew sinks a little further into his blanket like a turtle. His eyebrows furrow slightly. Below them, his pupils are wide in the dim light.

“I think if you’re going to get me sick it’s probably already happened,” Rain says.

Dew hums, ambivalent, but he lets the blanket fall away from his face, revealing a dejected frown.

“Why are you out here?” Rain keeps his voice low, presses gently.

“Can’t sleep. And I’m cold.”

Rain frowns. He reaches a cautious hand towards Dew’s forehead, slowly enough that it’s a request.

Dew doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t move at all, apart from his eyes fluttering closed.

“You’re really warm,” Rain says, the words tumbling out of his mouth before he really has a chance to think about them. The skin under his fingers is as hot as the last time he felt it, a startling, uncomfortable heat, like the stones of the path in the cloister after baking for hours in the summer sun.

“Well, I feel really cold.”

As Rain lets his hand fall to his side, Dew’s eyes slide open like they were never shut.

“My throat hurts. And my —” He shakes his head. “Everything hurts.” He pulls the blanket a little tighter around himself.

“Can I make you some tea? Maybe it would help?”

“Maybe,” he muses, gaze fixed out the window, through the streetlights that endlessly slip past, spires against a sky beginning to brighten at the horizon. Then, more decisively, “I can do it.”

“Let me do it,” Rain offers, one hand firm against Dew’s blanket, stilling the sluggish motion that stirs underneath it, pushing back against his attempt at stubborn self-sufficiency before it can gain any traction.

Dew sinks back against the couch.

A few steps away, Rain pours water into an electric kettle, a cheap plastic thing picked up at some labyrinthian superstore on the first day of the tour. It’s one of several similar appliances in this space that qualifies as their kitchen, barely four feet of counter space and a diminutive stainless steel sink. He settles it onto its base between a weathered coffee maker and a toaster with a penchant for thermal destruction, and sets it to boil.

He turns to Dew, whose eyes are now downcast and unfocused. “I’ll be right back,” Rain assures him. He holds a cautious stay right there on his tongue, a don’t get up, like Dew will jump out the window, will be running down the highway if he turns his back.

All he can do is tell himself that won’t happen, that he hasn’t pushed so hard as to make asphalt and gravel preferable over his ministrations. The door laments a low creak as he pulls it open, then closed behind him.

The front lounge is dimly lit, but the bunk compartment is truly dark, windowless, like a narrow rock passage in the depths of a cave. Rain reaches into the familiar space of his bunk before his eyes have a chance to adjust.

He braces one hand against the bunk above it when the bus hits a bump, the whole hallway tipping gently to one side and back, counterbalancing before returning to upright. He peels a blanket from where it’s still tucked under the far side of the mattress, trying his best to make as little noise as possible.

The fleece fabric is soft under his fingers, the same as when he reached out and touched it absentmindedly when he walked past it at the store — plush but lightweight, not too thick. It was the second day of the tour and they were picking up all the items they had forgotten to buy on the first day, odds and ends, things they only realized they needed after spending time without them. It was the same store too, albeit in a different city; the layout was similar enough that it felt like they had been there before.

Rain gathers the blanket in his arms. The smiling green frogs printed on it appear in the darkness to be indistinct gray blobs. A gentle snore filters through the curtain of one of the bunks behind him.

When he returns to the front lounge, the kettle has begun its characteristic quiet roar, another layer of white noise shrouding the already heavy space. It expands and fills every corner, enveloping them, and, maybe, just barely, pushing them closer together.

The central item of bedding provided for each person on the bus is a fluffy comforter. In the small space of the bunk its volume is satisfying, an ample sort of nest-making material, but it’s not quite as thick as it looks, or as warm. Dew has it wrapped around himself like he’s preparing to endure a harsh winter, pulled tight, his body huddled in the center. Rain drapes his blanket on top.

Dew looks on, his brows furrowed again. “This is your blanket.”

“It is.”

“You’ll be cold.”

“No, it’s okay, I have another one.” This is true, technically, if you include the comforter still in his bunk.

Behind him, the kettle clicks as it reaches a boil, and the accompanying sound of bubbles leaping forth from the heat quickly drops off. The void left in the atmosphere is a nudge toward the task he’s deviated from; he took advantage of the idle time it offered and now it’s outpaced him, left him behind.

He returns to the kitchen with intent, an objective in mind. He picks through one disorganized cabinet until he finds what he’s looking for. As he extricates the cardboard box from the surrounding mess, he doesn’t expect to hear Dew’s hushed voice again, commenting on it.

“Are you stealing stuff from Cumulus?”

Rain glances down at the box in his hand, and at the big fluffy cloud doodled on it in black marker. He is, indeed, stealing from Cumulus, and is perfectly aware he is doing so.

“She won’t mind.” It’s half an assertion and half a prayer. Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, at least in this situation.

Dew’s face remains painted in worry at the prospect. He’s digging his heels in against this situation, this offer of support, and providing endless excuses and detours, whether he realizes it or not.

“Really, let me take care of you. Don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with it.”

Somehow, that’s enough for Dew, who doesn’t push any further. He tucks his chin into the mass of blankets around him.

Rain plucks a teabag from the box and unwraps it from its paper packet. He places it in a cup from the stack of them in the cabinet, then pours hot water into the cup. The teabag blooms gold against the white of the waxy laminated paper inside.

He finds himself opening the cabinet again without a clear reason, occupying himself while the tea steeps. Does it need something else? There’s a bottle of honey next to the cups — it feels like an appropriate addition. It all but vanishes as it streams into the deepening tea, the two substances the same color.

He holds one hand loosely around the cup as he works, wary of the precariousness of an open container on a moving vehicle. The liquid inside billows with steam. It smells medicinal, maybe a bit spicy, like gingerbread and something else he can’t place. The teabag jostles around awkwardly as he stirs it, caught in the vortex created by a plastic spoon from a box in a nearby drawer.

When he turns around, cup in hand, Dew has his eyes closed again. Rain pauses — it would be counterproductive to wake him, after all — but his eyes snap open in the pressing stillness, like he can somehow feel Rain’s gaze linger on him, brush over his face like a gentle hand.

Rain offers him the cup. He has to unravel his blanket cocoon just a bit to free a single hand with which to accept it. Rain stands there in front of him, arms hanging awkwardly at his sides. The bus rattles; his knees absorb the movement.

Dew raises the cup to his mouth and takes a tiny sip. Rain doesn’t miss the brief grimace, quickly masked away, as he swallows.

“How is it?”

“It’s really sweet.”

“I put honey in it.” Suddenly that feels like it might actually have been the wrong decision — like maybe all of this was a mistake.

Dew doesn’t say anything. He takes another tiny sip.

“Is it okay?”

“It’s good,” Dew says. And, not as an afterthought, but as a cautious confession, “thanks.”

There’s only a moment of relative silence between them, of stillness, before Rain succumbs to the anxious call of the kitchen again, a ward against helplessness. He pulls open the drawer where they keep their hodgepodge of medicines and first aid supplies. He selects a bottle of garishly red liquid and holds it up for Dew’s regard.

“Do you want this?”

Dew stares at him vacantly.

“To help you sleep,” Rain clarifies. He turns the bottle around and looks at the label on the front, where the ingredients are listed. Then, carefully feigning ignorance, like he hadn’t recently spent his evening scrolling through search engine results on this very topic, “I think it might help with your throat too.”

Dew wrinkles his nose. “I don’t know, isn’t it late? When is soundcheck tomorrow?” His phone lays discarded on the couch next to him; its screen glows when he turns it on, a pale torch illuminating his hovering fingers.

“Don’t worry about it,” Rain soothes, another half-prayer, something else to figure out later. “It’s going to get taken care of.”

Dew’s phone screen dims. He tucks his free hand back under his blanket.

Rain turns the bottle around and lifts it closer to his face. He blinks at the small text on the back of it. The measuring cup mentioned in the dosing instructions must have been misplaced at some point, or maybe just discarded — an image of Cirrus taking a gulp straight from the bottle drifts through his mind.

He turns back towards the kitchen and begins to browse through drawers and shelves, pulling less familiar cabinet doors open slowly in case their contents are poised spill out, having shifted in transit. There’s a shot glass above the sink, sturdy and emblazoned with the cheerful logo of the gas station chain it was purchased at — places that all seem to blur together at this point, but this one was memorable enough to warrant a souvenir. It’s close enough to the right size, considering the other options available.

He pours an honest approximation of the listed dosage into the shot glass, maybe a two-thirds of its volume or so — it’s hard to tell given the tapered shape. The liquid inside sloshes gently with the movement of the bus, leaving a stained-glass ring around the inner perimeter, tinting wherever it touches with its cloying hue. He holds it out to Dew, who untangles his other hand.

Solemnly and without ceremony, Dew leans his head back and tips the contents of the glass into his mouth. When he returns upright, a particular kind of panic washes over his face that has Rain scrambling to find something for him to throw up into, but it quickly passes. He sips from the cup in his other hand, grimaces, and takes a deliberate breath. He passes the empty shot glass back to Rain.

Rain places it in the sink — washing dishes feels like the least important thing in the world right now. Instead, he returns to the couch. He sits down again, but doesn’t say anything.

“You can go back to sleep,” Dew says. “If you want.”

Rain pauses with words on his tongue again, words that might come from somewhere too deep, too close to his heart, and reveal a little too much, too directly. “It’s okay,” he assures, sufficiently vague.

Dew shifts under his blankets. He’s staring into the cup of tea, which he’s holding up to his face, near his mouth — for warmth, maybe, but it almost looks like he’s trying to hide behind it. “This is all so fucking stupid. And embarrassing.”

“I’m sorry.” Rain looks away, down at his own hands folded in his lap. “I’m not judging you.”

“I know.”

His heart lifts at the tiny spark of validation that response ignites, once he processes it.

Dew sets the half-full cup on the table next to him. Carefully, he lifts one edge of the blanket and places it over Rain’s lap, or at least as far as it will reach — it’s not quite big enough for both of them. Then, he leans back and closes his eyes.

Rain’s mind spins in place, rotating around a single thought. It’s a question answered, at least — neither of them found the words to admit it, but Dew’s actions said all they needed to say.

It’s a decision made, as well. He can’t get up now, so he closes his eyes too and lets the bus carry them forward.

—

Rain jolts awake to something flopping onto his lap and a startled rush of adrenaline.

The something is Dew’s limp, sleep-heavy arm. The events that brought the two of them here, into this situation, rush back into his mind, a turbulent wash of fragmented memories that settle into a still pool of reality. He blinks hard. Mid-morning sun filters through the bus windows.

Dew’s head lolls to one side, lips parted and brows pinched together. Sweat beads on his brow, darkens his hairline. His cheeks are red, the flush oozing down toward his neck. He groans quietly.

Rain’s heart thumps — this situation is in stark contrast with the calm he fell asleep to. He grabs Dew’s haphazard tangle of blankets and lifts them away, gathering them into a big ball in his arms. He tosses them aside on the couch.

Dew huffs. He retracts his arm from Rain’s lap and tucks it tight against his own body. He rolls his shoulders forward, tips his chin down, like he’s trying to curl in on himself.

Rain separates his extra blanket from Dew’s comforter with a few gentle shakes. As the ball of bedding unravels, the comforter flops onto the floor. He drapes the thinner blanket over Dew’s body, pulling it up over his shoulders and down across his legs.

After a few anxious moments, Dew seems to relax a bit. His head sinks back, wrapped arms loosen from his torso. Still, tension remains in his forehead and jaw. The length of his nose glistens with sweat.

The best Rain can provide is a paper towel wet with the lukewarm water at the kitchen sink. Next to him on the couch, the sides of their thighs pressed together through fuzzy frog-print fabric, he sponges Dew’s forehead with delicate touches. It feels inadequate, rough, but it’s what he has available here in this wasteland of single-use disposable products.

Dew sighs, and Rain can feel his hot breath against his wrist.

When the paper towel starts to become too warm he tosses it onto the nearby table, where it lands with a sad, soggy sound. He can throw it away later.

Dew shifts again. His arm rolls — gently, this time — out from under the blanket and comes to a stop resting against Rain’s thigh.

Absentmindedly, Rain traces one finger over a raised vein on the back of Dew’s hand. When he moves, a little twitch of his index finger, Rain freezes in place. An anticipatory wave of shame rolls over him, of panic, his mind completely blank as he searches for an excuse for this behavior, but Dew doesn’t stir any further. His eyes dart back and forth behind his eyelids, some dream holding him in the realm of sleep.

Rain continues following the lines and contours of his hand, a prominent bone at his wrist, a tendon cresting the knuckle of his index finger. He lets his shame abate, but not completely, keeping himself on alert. Based on the light outside, the others will be awake soon — maybe already are. The calm here feels crystalline, liable to shatter at any moment.

As if in response to his wariness, the door to the bunk compartment opens. Rain pulls his hand away, composes himself, prepares to justify why he’s here and what he’s doing. He sweeps away thoughts he doesn’t want to explain, as if someone might peer into his head and see them. Nevertheless, in a corner of his mind, the same thought keeps spinning over and over, impossible to ignore.

#ghost band fanfic #raindrop ghost #sorry that im posting this in october. i was just really slow #i only proofread this once instead of my usual 3-5 times so also sorry if theres any issues. ill try again tomorrow #fic i wrote

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canmom · 2 years ago

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Music Theory Notes (for science bitches) 1: chords & such

This is one of these series where I use my blog as a kind of study blog type thing. If you're knowledgeable about music theory, it will be very basic. But that's kind of the problem, I've really struggled to absorb those basics!

When I was a teenager I learned to play violin and played in orchestras. I could read music, and play decently enough, but I didn't really understand music. I just read what was on the page, and played the scales I had to play for exams.

Lately I've been trying to learn music again. This time my instruments are zhonghu, voice, and DAWs. At some point I might get my violin back too. But really, I'm a total beginner again, and this time I want to do it properly.

For a long time when I tried to learn about music I would get overwhelmed with terminology and jargon and conventions. I might watch videos on composition and they'd be interesting but a lot of it would just fly over my head, I'd just have to nod along because I had no idea what all the different types of chord and such were. I tried to learn from sites like musictheory.net, but I found it hard to figure out the logical structure to fit it all into.

I feel like I'm finally making a bit of headway, so it's time to take some notes. The idea here is not just to answer the what, but also to give some sense of why, a motivation. So in a sense this is a first attempt at writing the introduction to music theory I wish I'd had. This is going to assume you know a little bit about physics, but basically nothing about music.

What is music? From first principles.

This is impossible to answer in full generality, especially since as certain people would be quick to remind me, there's a whole corner of avant-garde composers who will cook up counterexamples to whatever claim you make. So let's narrow our focus: I'm talking about the 'most common' type of music in the society I inhabit, which is called 'tonal music'. (However some observations may be relevant to other types of music such as noise or purely rhythmic music.)

Music is generally an art form involving arranging sound waves in time into patterns (in the sense that illustration is about creating patterns on a 2D surface with light, animation is arranging illustrations in time, etc.).

Physically, sound is a pressure wave propagating through a medium, primarily air. As sound waves propagate, they will reflect off surfaces and go into superposition, and depending on the materials around, certain frequencies might be attenuated or amplified. So the way sound waves propagate in a space is very complicated!

But in general we've found we can pretty decently approximate the experience of listening to something using one or two 'audio tracks', which are played back at just one or two points. So for the sake of making headway, we will make an approximation: rather than worry about the entire sound field, we're going to talk about a one-dimensional function of time, namely the pressure at the idealised audio source. This is what gets displayed inside an audio editor. For example, here's me playing the zhonghu, recorded on a mic, as seen inside Audacity.

A wrinkle that is not relevant for this discussion: The idealised 'pressure wave' is a continuous real function of the reals (time to pressure). By contrast, computer audio is quantised in both the pressure level and time, and this is used to reconstruct a continuous pressure wave by convolution at playback time. (Just like a pixel is not a little square, an audio sample is not a constant pressure!) But I'm going to talk about real numbers until quantisation becomes relevant.

When the human eye receives light, the cone cells in the eye respond to the frequencies of EM radiation, creating just three different neural signals, but with incredibly high sensitivity to direction. By contrast, when the human ear receives sound, it is directed into an organ called the cochlea which is kind of like a cone rolled up into a spiral...

Inside this organ, the sound wave moves around the spiral, which has a fascinatingly complex structure that means different frequencies of wave will excite tiny hairs at different points along the tube. In effect, the cochlea performs a short-time Fourier transform of the incoming sound wave. Information about the direction of the incoming wave is given by the way it reflects off the shape of the ear, the difference between ears, and the movement of our head.

So! In contrast to light, where the brain receives a huge amount of information about directions of incoming light but only limited information of the frequency spectrum, with sound we receive a huge amount of information about the frequency spectrum but only quite limited information about its direction.

Music thus generally involves creating patterns with vibration frequencies in the sound wave. More than this, it's also generally about creating repeating patterns on a longer timescale, which is known as rhythm. This has something to do with the way neurons respond to signals but that's something I'm not well-versed in, and in any case it is heavily culturally mediated.

All right, so, this is the medium we have to play with. When we analyse an audio signal that represents music, we chop it up into small windows, and use a Fourier transform to find out the 'frequencies that are present in the signal'.

Most musical instruments are designed to make sounds that are combinations of certain frequencies at integer ratios. For example here is a plot of the [discrete] Fourier transform of a note played on the zhonghu:

The intensity of the signal is written in decibels, so it's actually a logarithmic scale despite looking linear. The frequency of the wave is written in Hertz, and plotted logarithmically as well. A pure sine wave would look like a thin vertical line; a slightly wider spike means it's a combination of a bunch of sine waves of very close frequencies.

The signal consists of one strong peak at 397Hz and nearby frequencies, and a series of peaks at (roughly) integer multiples of this frequency. In this case the second and third peaks are measured at 786Hz, and 1176Hz. Exact integer ratios would give us 794Hz and 1191Hz, but because the first peak is quite wide we'd expect there to be some error.

Some terminology: The first peak is called the fundamental, and the remaining peaks are known as overtones. The frequency of the fundamental is what defines this signal as a particular musical note, and the intensities of the overtone and widths of the peaks define the quality of the note - the thing that makes a flute and a violin playing the same fundamental frequency sound different when we listen to them. If you played two different notes at the same time, you'd get the spectrums of both notes added together - each note has its own fundamental and overtones.

OK, so far that's just basic audio analysis, nothing is specific to music. To go further we need to start imposing some kind of logical structure on the sound, defining relationships between the different notes.

The twelve-tone music system

There are many ways to do this, but in the West, one specific system has evolved as a kind of 'common language' that the vast majority of music is written in. As a language, it gives names to the notes, and defines a space of emotional connotations. We unconsciously learn this language as we go through the process of socialisation, just as we learn to interpret pictures, watch films, etc.

The system I'm about to outline is known as 12-tone equal temperament or "12TET". It was first cooked up in the 16th century almost simultaneously in China and Europe, but it truly became the standard tuning in the West around the 18th century, distilled from a hodgepodge of musical systems in use previously. In the 20th century, classical composers became rather bored of it and started experimenting with other systems of tonality. Nevertheless, it's the system used for the vast majority of popular music, film and game soundtracks, etc.

Other systems exist, just as complex. Western music tends to create scales of seven notes in an octave, but there are variants that use other amounts, like 6. And for example classical Indian music uses its own variant of a seven-note scale; there are also nuances within Western music such as 'just intonation' which we'll discuss in a bit; really, everything in music is really fucking complicated!

I'll be primarily discussing 12TET because 1. it's hard enough to understand just one system and this one is the most accessible; 2. this has a very nice mathematical structure which tickles my autismbrain. However, along the way we'll visit some variants, such as 'Pythagorean intervals'.

The goal is to try and not just say 'this is what the notation means' but explain why we might construct music this way. Since a lot of musical stuff is kept around for historical reasons, that will require some detours into history.

Octaves

So, what's the big idea here? Well, let's start with the idea of an octave. If you have two notes, let's call then M and N, and the frequency of N is twice the frequency of M... well, to the human ear, they sound very very closely related. In fact N is the first overtone of M - if you play M on almost any instrument, you're also hearing N.

Harmony, which we'll talk about in a minute, is the idea that two notes sound especially pleasant together - but this goes even further. So in many many music systems around the world, these two notes with frequency ratio of 2 are actually identified - they are in some sense 'the same note', and they're given the same name. This also means that further powers of 2, of e.g. 4, 8, 16, and so on, are also 'the same note'. We call the relationship between M and N an octave - we say if two notes are 'an octave apart', one has twice the frequency of the other.

For example, a note whose fundamental frequency is 261.626Hz is known as 'C' in the convention of 'concert pitch'. This implies an infinite series of other Cs, but since the human ear has a limited range of frequencies, in practice you have Cs from 8.176Hz up through 16744.036. These are given a series of numbers by convention, so 261.626Hz is called C4, often 'middle C'. 523.251Hz is C5, 1046.502Hz is C6, and so on. However, a lot of the time it doesn't matter which C you're talking about, so you just say 'C'.

But the identification of "C" with 261.626Hz * 2^N is just a convention (known as 'concert pitch'). Nothing is stopping you tuning to any other frequency: to build up the rest of the structure you just need some note to start with, and the rest unfolds using ratios.

Harmony and intervals

Music is less about individual notes, and more about the relationship between notes - either notes played at the same time, or in succession.

Between any two notes we have something called an interval determined by the ratio of their fundamental frequencies. We've already seen one interval: the octave, which has ratio 2.

The next interval to bring up is the 'fifth'. There are a few different variants of this idea, but generally speaking if two notes have a ratio of 1.5, they sound really really nice together. Why is this called a 'fifth'? Historical reasons, there is no way to shake this terminology, we're stuck with it. Just bear with me here, it will become semi-clear in a minute.

In the same vein, other ratios of small integers tend to sound 'harmonious'. They're satisfying to hear together. Ratios of larger integers, by contrast, feel unsatisfying. But this creates an idea of 'tension' and 'resolution'. If you play two notes together that don't harmonise as nicely, you create a feeling of expectation and tension; when you you play some notes that harmonise really well, that 'resolves' the tension and creates a sense of relief.

Building a scale - just intonation

The exact 3:2 integer ratio used in two tuning systems called 'Pythagorean tuning' and 'just intonation'. Using these kinds of integer ratios, you can unfold out a whole series of other notes, and that's how the Europeans generally did things before 12TET came along. For example, in 'just intonation', you might start with some frequency, and then procede in the ratios 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 5/3, 15/8, and at last 2 (the octave). These would be given a series of letters, creating a 'scale'.

What is a scale? A scale is something like the 'colour palette' for a piece of music. It's a set of notes you use. You might use notes from outside the scale but only very occasionally. Different scales are associated with different feelings - for example, the 'major scale' generally feels happy and triumphant, while a 'minor scale' tends to feel sad and forlorn. We'll talk a lot more about scales soon.

In the European musical tradition, a 'scale' consists of seven notes in each octave, so the notes are named by the first seven notes of the alphabet, i.e. A B C D E F G. A scale has a 'base note', and then you'd unfold the other frequencies using the ratios. An instrument such as a piano would be tuned to play a particular scale. The ratios above are one definition of a 'major scale', and starting with C as the base note, the resulting set of notes is called 'C Major'.

All these nice small-number ratios tend to sound really good together. But it becomes rather tricky if you want to play multiple scales on the same instrument. For example, say your piano is tuned in just intonation to C Major. This means, assuming you have a starting frequency we'll call C, you have the following notes available in a given octave:

C, D=(9/8)C, E=(5/4)C, F=(4/3)C, G=(3/2)C [the fifth!], A=(5/3)C, B=(15/8)C, and 2C [the start of the next octave].

Note: the interval we named the 'fifth' is the fifth note in this scale. It's actually the fifth note in the various minor scales too.

But now suppose you want to play with some different notes - let's say a scale we'll call 'A major', which has the same frequency ratios starting on the note we previously called A. Does our piano have the right keys to play this scale?

Well, the next note up from A would be (9/8)A, which would be (9/8)(5/3)C=(15/8)C - that's our B key, so far so good. Then (5/4)A=(5/4)(5/3)C=(25/12)C and... uh oh! We don't have a (25/12)C key, we have 2C, so if we start at A and go up two keys, we have a note that is slightly lower frequency than the one we're looking for.

What this means is that, depending on your tuning, you could only approximate the pretty integer ratios for any scale besides C major. (25/12) is pretty close to 2, so that might not seem so bad, but sometimes we'd land right in between two notes. We can approximate these notes by adding some more 'in between' piano keys. How should we work out what 'extra' keys to include? Well, there were multiple conventions, but we'll see there is some logic to it...

[You might ask, why are you spending so long on this historical system that is now considered obsolete? Well, intervals and their harmonious qualities are still really important in modern music, and it makes most sense to introduce them with the idea of 'small-integer ratios'.]

The semitone

We've seen if we build the 'major scale' using a bunch of 'nice' ratios, we have trouble playing other scales. The gap above may look rather haphazard and arbitrary, but hold on, we're working in exponential space here - shouldn't we be using a logarithmic scale? If I switch to a logarithmic x-axis, we suddenly get a rather appealing pattern...

All the gaps between successive notes are about the same size, except for the gap between E and F, and B and C, which are about half that size. If you try to work that out exactly, you run into the problems we saw above, where C to D is 9/8 or 1.125, but D to E is 10/9 or 1.11111... Even so, you can imagine how people who were playing around with sounds might notice, damn, these are nice even steps we have here. Though you might also notice places where, in this scheme, it's not completely even - for example G to A (ratio 10/9) is noticeably smaller than A to B (ratio 9/8).

We've obliquely approached the idea of dividing the octave up into 12 steps, where each step is about the size of the gap between E and F or B and C. We call each of these steps a 'semitone'. Two semitones make a 'whole tone'. We might fill in all the missing semitones in our scale here using whole-number ratios, which gives you the black keys on the piano. There are multiple schemes for doing this, and the ratios tend to get a bit uglier. In the system we've outlined so far, a 'semitone' is not a fixed ratio, even though it's always somewhere around 1.06.

The set of 12 semitones is called the 'chromatic scale'. It is something like the 'colour space' for Western music. When you compose a piece, you select some subset of the 12 semitones as your 'palette' - the 'scale of' a piece of music.

But we still have a problem here, which is the unevenness of the gaps we discussed above. This could be considered a feature, not a bug, since each scale would have its own 'character' - it's defined by a slightly different set of ratios. But it does add a lot of complication when moving between scales.

So let's say we take all this irregularity as a bug, and try to fix it. The solution is 'equal temperament', which is the idea that the semitone should always be the exact same ratio, allowing the instrument to play any scale you please without difficulty.

Posed like this, it's easy to work out what that ratio should be: if you want 12 equal steps to be an octave, each step must be the 12th root of 2. Which is an irrational number that is about 1.05946...

At this point you say, wait, Bryn, didn't you just start this all off by saying that the human ear likes to hear nice simple integer ratios of frequencies? And now you're telling me that we should actually use an irrational number, which can't be represented by any integer ratio? What gives? But it turns out the human ear isn't quite that picky. If you have a ratio of 7 semitones, or a ratio of 2^(7/12)=1.4983..., that's close enough to 1.5 to feel almost as good. And this brings a lot of huge advantages: you can easily move ('transpose') between different scales of the same type, and trust that all the relevant ratios will be the same.

Equal temperament was the eventual standard, but there was a gradual process of approaching it called stuff like 'well-tempered' or 'good temperament'. One of the major steps along the way was Bach's collection 'the well-tempered klavier', showing how a keyboard instrument with a suitable tuning could play music in every single established scale. Here's one of those pieces:

youtube

Although we're using these irrational numbers, inside the scale are certain intervals that are considered to have certain meanings - some that are 'consonant' and some that are 'dissonant'. We've already mentioned the 'fifth', which is the 'most consonant' ratio. The fifth consists of 7 semitones and it's roughly a 1.5 ratio in equal temperament. Its close cousin is the 'fourth', which consists of 5 semitones. Because it's so nice, the fifth is kind of 'neutral' - it's just there but it doesn't mean a lot on its own.

For the other important intervals we've got to introduce different types of scale.

The scale zoo

So, up above we introduced the 'major' scale. In semitones, the major scale is intervals of 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1. This is also called a 'mode', specifically the 'Ionian mode'. There are seven different 'modes', representing different permutations of these intervals, which all have funky Greek names.

The major scale generally connotes "upbeat, happy, triumphant". There are 12 different major scales, taking the 12 different notes of the chromatic scale as the starting point for each one.

Next is the minor scale, which tends to feel more sad or mysterious. Actually there are a few different minor scales. The 'natural minor' goes 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2. You might notice this is a cyclic permutation of the major scale! So in fact a natural minor scale is the same set of notes as a major scale. What makes it different?

Well, remember when we talked about tension and resolution? It's about how the notes are organised. Our starting note is the 'root' note of the scale, usually established early on in the piece of music - quite often the very first note of the piece. The way you move around that root note determines whether the piece 'feels' major or minor. So every major scale has a companion natural minor scale, and vice versa. The set of notes in a piece is enough to narrow it down to one minor and one major, but you have to look closer to figure out which one is most relevant.

The 'harmonic minor' is almost the same, but it raises the second-last note (the 7th) a semitone. So its semitone intervals are 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 3, 1.

The 'melodic minor' raises both the 6th and 7th by one semitone, (edit: but usually only on the way up). So its semitone intervals are 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1. (edit: When you come back down you tend to use the natural minor.)

If you talk about a 'minor scale' unqualified, you mean the natural minor. It's also the 'Aeolian mode' in that system of funky Greek names I mentioned earlier.

So that leads to a set of 24 scales, a major and minor scale for every semitone. These are the most common scale types that almost all Western tonal music is written in.

But we ain't done. Because remember I said there were all those other "modes"? These are actually just cyclic permutations of the major scale. There's a really nerdy Youtube channel called '8-bit music theory' that has a bunch of videos analysing them in the context of videogame music which I'm going to watch at some point now I finally have enough background to understand wtf he's talking about.

youtube

And of top of that you have all sorts of other variants that come from shifting a note up or down a semitone.

The cast of intervals

OK, so we've established the idea of scales. Now let's talk intervals. As you might guess from the 'fifth', the intervals are named after their position in the scale.

Let me repeat the two most common scale modes, in terms of number of semitones relative to the root note:

position: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 major: 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12 minor: 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12

So you can see the fourth and fifth are the same in both. But there's a difference in three places: the third, the sixth, and the seventh. In each case, the minor is down a semitone from the major.

The interval names are... not quite as simple as 'place in the scale', but that's mostly how it works. e.g. the 'major third' is four semitones and the 'minor third' is three.

The fourth and fifth, which are dual to each other (meaning going up a fifth takes you to the same note as going down a fourth, and vice versa) are called 'perfect'. The note right in between them, an interval of 6 semitones, is called the 'tritone'.

(You can also refer to these intervals as 'augmented' or 'diminished' versions of adjacent intervals. Just in case there wasn't enough terminology in the air. See the table for the names of every interval.)

So, with these names, what's the significance of each one? The thirds, sixths and sevenths are important, because they tell us whether we're in minor or major land when we're building chords. (More on that soon.)

The fifth and the octave are super consonant, as we've said. But the notes that are close to them, like the seventh, the second and even more so the tritone, are quite dissonant - they're near to a nice thing and ironically that leads to awkward ratios which feel uncomfy to our ears. So generally speaking, you use them to build tension and anticipation and set up for a resolution later. (Or don't, and deliberately leave them hanging.)

Of course all of these positions in the scale also have funky Latin names that describe their function.

There's a lot more complicated nuances that make the meaning of a particular interval very contextual, and I certainly couldn't claim to really understand in much depth, but that's basically what I understand about intervals so far.

Our goofy-ass musical notation system

So if semitones are the building block of everything, naturally the musical notation system we use in the modern 12TET era spaces everything out neatly in terms of semitones, right?

Right...?

Lmao no. Actually sheet music is written so that each row of the stave (or staff, the five lines you write notes on) represents a note of the C major scale. All the notes that aren't on the C major scale are represented with special symbols, namely ♯ (read 'sharp') which means 'go up a semitone', and ♭ (read 'flat') which means 'go down a semitone'. That means the same note can be notated in two different ways: A♯ and B♭ are the same note.

The above image shows the chromatic scale, notated in two different ways. Every step is exactly one semitone.

Since a given scale might end up using one of these 'in between' notes that has to be marked sharp or flat, and you don't want to do that for every single time that note appears. Luckily, it turns out that each major/minor scale pair ends up defining a unique set of notes to be adjusted up or down a semitone, called the 'key signature'. So you can write the key signature at the beginning of the piece, and it lasts until you change key signature. For example, the key of 'A♭ major' ends up having four sharps:

There is a formula you can use to work out the set of sharps or flats to write for a given key. (That's about the point I checked out on musictheory.net.)

There is some advantage to this system, which is that it very clearly tells you when the composer intends to shift into a different scale, and it saves space since with the usual scales there are no wasted lines. But it's also annoyingly arbitrary. You just have to remember that B to C is only a semitone, and the same for E to F.

What are those weird squiggly symbols? Those are 'clefs'. Each one assigns notes to specific lines. The first one 𝄞 is the 'treble clef', the second one 𝄢 is the 'bass clef'. Well, actually these are the 'G-clef' and the 'F-clef', and where they go on the stave determines note assignment, but thankfully this has been standardised and you will only ever see them in one place. The treble clef declares the lines to be E G B D F and the bass clef G B D F A.

There is also a rarer 'C-clef' which looks like 𝄡. This is usually used as the 'Alto clef' which means F A C E G.

This notation system seems needlessly convoluted, but we're rather stuck with it, because most of the music has been written in it already. It's not uncommon for people to come up with alternative notations, though, such as 'tabs' for a stringed instrument which indicate which position should be played on each string. Nowadays on computers, a lot of DAWs will instead use a 'piano roll' presentation which is organised by semitone.

And then there's chords.

Chords! And arpeggios!

A chord is when you play 3 or more notes at the same time.

Simple enough right? But if you wanna talk about it, you gotta have a way to give them names. And that's where things get fucking nuts.

But the basic chord type is a 'triad', consisting of three notes, separated by certain intervals. There are two standard types, which you basically assemble by taking every other note of a scale. In terms of semitones, these are:

Major triad: 0 - 4 - 7 Minor triad: 0 - 3 - 7

Then there's a bunch of variations, for example:

Augmented: 0 - 4 - 8 Diminished: 0 - 3 - 6 Suspended: 0 - 2 - 7 (sus2) or 0 - 5 - 7 (sus4) Dominant seventh: 0 - 4 - 7 - 10 Power: 0 - 7

There is a notation scheme for chords in pop, jazz, rock, etc., which starts with a root note and then adds a bunch of superscripts to tell you about any special features of a chord. So 'C' means the C Major triad (namely C,E,G) and 'Cm' or 'c' means the C Minor triad (namely C,E♭,G).

In musical composition, you usually tend to surround the melody (single voice) with a 'chord progression' that both harmonises and creates a sense of 'movement' from one chord to another. Some instruments like guitar and piano are really good at playing chords. On instruments that can't play chords, they can still play 'arpeggios', which is what happens if you take a chord and unroll it into a sequence of notes. Or you play in an ensemble and harmonise with the other players to create a chord together. Awww.

Given a scale, you can construct a series of seven triad chords, starting from each note of the scale. These are generally given scale-specific Roman numerals corresponding to the position in the scale, and they're used to analyse the progression of chords in a song. I pretty much learned about this today while writing this post, so I can't tell you much more than that.

Right now, that's about as far as I've gotten with chords. On a violin, you can play just two strings at the same time after all - I never had much need to learn about them so it remains a huge hole in my understanding of music. I can't recognise chords by ear at all. So I gotta learn more about them.

As much as I wrote this for my own benefit... if you found this post interesting, let me know. I might write more if people find this style of presentation appealing. ^^'

#Youtube #music #music theory #notes #music notes

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crimsonxe · 10 days ago

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New interview with new notes about The Old Peace:

Seemingly one of the reasons for going back to Operator was 10 years of Operator being a good excuse to do the remaster

Its meant to be parallel track to 1999 with Lotus Eaters being the branch point to reinforce LE's importance

The team was of mixed minds about any nods or cameo types of things, reaching a middle ground. So probably not going to be any far reach ones

The Margulis blink-and-you-miss-it is mentioned as "important" o.o

Excal Prime again stated to NOT be putting in the market, instead they view putting him in TOP as an honoring nod towards the founders. Which ngl adds to my annoyance with the I think niche crowd trying to make noise about it.

Tauron is an expansion on existing Focus schools, not its own unique one (just to be clear)

The ult used in the trailer was a giant melee sword because of it being Naramon, others will have their own different ult.

Don't want to hype it up but am noting that Rebb kind of withheld comment cause she didn't want to give the wrong answer about whether the quest is linear or will have choices o.o Obviously if it does have those I'd expect it to be in the vein of prior cinematic quests that go towards narrative world vs. actual changing story. Though I'd stress that it could be nothing, so measured expectations to avoid any disappointment given the interpretative-ness of this.

ngl could be getting it wrong but seemingly think Rebb mentions that The Devil's Triad won't be accessible till after TOP but will be a side-story not per se addressing things in it; like Entrati isn't going to be popping up in TOP in order to lead into TDT.

Bit of trivia Ballas's use of "devil" is towards anything he hates vs. any religious/deity veins.

Love that part of them going with the Devil theme for Uriel has to do with a follow up to Jade's Angelic theme. From a cosmic level not a "they're connected" type of thing.

The thought process for protos is a thematic one, Harrow and Wisp were chosen cause of them knowing they were doing a devil frame and them being able to be fit into that story. Also mentioned Harrow's connection to Wally o.o

They will be looking at and discussing attenuation on the Sept. Devstream.

#warframe #the old peace

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kuliak · 1 year ago

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Organismic call/response, programmed rhythms.

Tried out a lot of new controls in this patch, trying to get deeper into modules I have a pretty narrow workflow with.

Percussion is just DFAM and Crucible. On DFAM I have a couple of channels from Pam's mixed together to decouple triggers and advances, which lets me ratchet certain steps. I did this rather simply today, but I think there's a lot more goodness to explore. Crucible is receiving SIX different sequences: a separate sequence into edge, mid, and choke, then clocked CVs from Maestro into velocity, decay, and transform. The choke trigger sequence is gated by the velocity CV, which together allow for a pretty significant change in timbre without it getting out of control. My initial motivation to pick up crucible was listening to more complex cymbal sequences in notable IDM tracks, so it's very rewarding to get closer to that. Percussion mix went through Milky Way for a nice delay, controlled by Planar.

Three Body is technically the only other sound source. I have a self-patched Volley from Just Friends clocked by Pam's which controls PM amounts of Osc 3->Osc 1 and Osc 1->Osc 2, creating a throbbing 3-OP FM sound. Sine goes through Waver for waveshaping with volume envelope coming from JF's identity output, then "Megatron Versio" and QPAS. This all goes through Magneto creating a chord-y reverb. I have Ikarie in the feedback loop, with the initial intention of creating some monotron-style grittiness but really lending more of a choral quality, so I'll need to revisit this in another patch.

A saw out of Osc 2 goes through Piston Honda to act as a waveshaper, with the other side free-running to leave some tonal content. An attenuverter in the chain changes the timbre of the noisy bursts. This goes through Sinc Bucina, gated by a trigger derived from another JF output for the formant-y noise pulses. This chain goes through Erbe-Verb.

Finally, I've got a crossfader setup on Tetrapad controlling the wet levels of both Magneto and Erbe-Verb, with a few offsets and attenuation in the path to keep the volume as consistent as possible, which allows for smooth morphing of the textures.

Lots of new ideas in here, and lots more to flesh out in further patches!

#eurorack #modular synth #gif #flashing gif #technology #cybercore #tech aesthetic #aesthetic #cyber aesthetic #ambient #glitch #idm #industrial music #artists on tumblr #my art #my music #ambient music

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jullbnt · 2 years ago

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I just received some amazing gifts through the mail 😭

I’m flattening them with LoZ artbooks! Epona is a 40x40 cm print and the Hero of Time one is 60x60 (was curious to see if it would pixelate at that size but it doesn’t!)

I am SO HAPPY!! They’re going to need frames 😍

I also tried a few other things:

A notebook I'm in love with, an iPhone case for my sister, a print on metallic photo paper, a sticker and a magnet! And I'm still waiting for a few other things :)

The sticker and the magnet came out a bit blurry (my phone makes it worse haha), maybe because of the noise effect I applied to my files. I think it looks good on screen but maybe not that much on paper, especially in the case of small prints. That's what it looks like on the biggest one:

You have to look closely at the print to see it but I think it can be a problem. I'm going to attenuate that effect before I make the prints available, just to be sure.

All of these are from Redbubble but I only had the time to order them before they were deleted from my account. Looks like you can sell LoZ stuff on Redbubble as long as the main characters are not depicted, or something like that (Korok stickers for example). I think I’m going to try Society6 instead, they do sell Zelda prints.

I also got approved on Inprnt! I ordered samples from them too but it looks like it's going to take a while. Now that I’ve seen the Redbubble prints I think I'm going to get started anyway.

I'll tell you guys when it's done :)

(Those are my Linktober drawings, masterlist here)

#loz #loz fanart #art prints #zelda #linktober #linktober 2023

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bimboficationblues · 1 year ago

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post-punk 🎶

HEHEHE I'm kicking my feet and squeeing thank you

probably my favorite genre (and definitely one of my Top 5), though it's something of an imprecise term owing to its kind of awkward dual use as a periodization term (the music that followed punk) and a genre term (forms of music adjacent to punk that skewed towards the danceable, the somber, or the experimental) - it covers a lot of goth rock, new wave, noise rock, jangle pop, art punk, dance-punk, various forms of alternative and experimental rock, and also gets applied to a lot of bands that existed before and during punk's initial break (like Wire, Television, and Talking Heads). most of the bands that at one point fell into this genre category eventually end up doing something that is extremely attenuated from "punk" at all. but that is one of the main things I like about it, the way that it proceeded from the kind of "spirit" or tenor of punk while not limiting itself to that basic toolset. I like that basic toolset a lot! but it can get stagnant really fast.

I do feel a little picky about people working in the genre these days. I definitely like bands that are willing to take some larger risks in terms of bringing different energies, instruments, and songwriting structures to the table and not just endlessly do new takes on New Order (you may notice that Interpol are conspicuously absent from my favorites). There's a lot of bands on the current post-punk circuit that do very little for me (Fontaines D.C. is the big one that has a very passionate fanbase but I find totally boring; Dry Cleaning and Wet Leg are a couple of women-led acts that I respect but aren't my cup of tea).

On the flipside: I *highly, highly, highly* recommend anyone who is thinking of checking out contemporary post-punk music to listen to HMLTD's album West of Eden, which has some fantastically catchy and emotionally resonant songs, an interesting thematic thrust (including two of my favorite songs about gender dysphoria, the "Joanna" duology), and also kind of acts sonically as a grab-bag of a bunch of different post-punk styles from over the years while still sounding pretty cohesive. it did not get the love it deserved. Parquet Courts' Wide Awake was great for similar reasons, but got a way better reception popularly and critically.

here are some "classics" of the genre that I am a fan of:

and some contemporaries (from like the past couple decades) I really like or am keeping an eye on for whatever they do in the future:

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noiseproblems · 1 year ago

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Diffuser panel vs. acoustic panels

Diffuser panel and acoustic panels both work to accomplish the same result, an improved sound ambience with better speech quality and less echo. Nonetheless, they work in various ways to accomplish this result. So what is better to use, diffuser panels or acoustic panels?

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Should I use diffuser panels or acoustic panels?

Enhanced sound quality

As acoustic panels lessen echo while adhering to the NRC rating, they can enhance sound quality and clarity, creating clear, crisp sound in a space. That is why they are extensively used in studios, while sound quality is important.

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lexical-lushes · 2 years ago

Text

Sacrifice

“You go first,” my Maker says sweetly, cutting the deck between us from where she sits opposite me. The cards are deep and dark and ominous in the lamplight of the library; their backs are inked in black and gold, patterned with my Maker’s sigil.

I know the game. I’ve watched my mistress play it before: with guests, with other dolls that share my inclinations. I’ve practised, shared a hand-made deck between my sisters in the hours between our chores and used old coins and buttons as counters. But this is the first time I have ever played against my Maker herself, ever touched her cards, ever dared to challenge her at the game.

I take a small breath, let myself grow Still. I asked for this.

Reaching out, I draw mice and rabbits and wolves. An average enough hand.

I lay out my chosen cards upon the table, delicately and purposefully lining each card up within the golden inlays that mark the playing field.

She calls the game “sacrifice”. Each session tells a story of fear and hunger and pain and death, of the primal fight for survival and the things one is willing to leave behind to seize another day.

I watch as she draws her own cards, amber eyes flicking across her hand in the gloom, expression unreadable. Her slender, taloned fingers place down a family of mice, then sacrifices them to her raven. She stacks the cards beneath it, sliding the cards together across the table towards one of my empty spaces. I nod slowly in recognition – she’s caused me a wound.

My fingers drift to the scale that sits to one side of the table, loaded with even stacks of little weighted counters on each side – hers black, mine white.

I swallow, hesitate.

“Bad luck, dear, but you asked to play.”

I nod again and delicately pluck a counter from my stack, set it down on the table, and close my eyes.

One of the ten narrow knives floating behind me darts down, embedding itself in my thigh. The pain is hot, and sharp, and somehow still unexpected even with all the anticipation and dread I’d mustered to try and ready myself. The silvered edge cuts me as if I were still quite human, dark oil welling from the wound in a slow trickle.

My eyes fly open with the cry that chokes in my throat, becomes nothing but a hollow gasp. She’s watching me, bemused.

I asked for this.

I can’t scream. I can’t cry out. I know full well the rules, I know that you forfeit your turn if you make too much noise for my Maker’s liking.

She tips one hand in my direction, silently indicating that it’s my turn again.

I ball my jointed fingers into fists, hold them like that for a moment, then relax.

I draw more cards for my hand. Wolves, hunters – a good combination. Willing myself to forget the knife sticking from my thigh, I slide my fingers gracefully across the table, making what sacrifices I can – two stacks slide towards my mistress’ side of the board, and she dutifully removes two counters from her side of the scale. The delicate arm tips in my favour.

No knives punish her for her failures, of course. That’s not the point.

We play in silence for the next few turns, amassing sacrifices, probing each other’s defences. All the while I feel hot oil dripping down my leg, seeping into my joints and dripping down onto the floor beneath me. The pain attenuates, becomes background noise, a simple warning signal of my vessel.

I can do this. I asked for this.

The next knife embeds itself in my thigh close to the first, and I grit my teeth.

The third strikes me in my lower back, and I force myself not to double over, let out only the quietest whimper. My dress staunches the bleeding, growing hot and wet against me as it darkens with oil.

My Maker smiles pleasantly across from me, one talon idly resting atop her deck. Her amber eyes are bright in the gloom, gleaming with reflected lamplight. I feel so very small, like she’s towering over me, larger than the looming bookshelves that surround us.

When I claim another three of her tokens and the scale dips dangerously low, she tips her head to me.

“You’re doing very well, dear. I wondered, at first, if it had been a mistake to let you play.”

I shake my head, unexpectedly defensive at the notion that I might not have been fit to challenge her. I tell her that I’ve been practising, that playing against her is an honour. I thank her for the privilege and sing her heartfelt praises for her kindness. I’m just a doll, after all – I play only by her good graces.

She smiles warmly, then plays her cards across the table to effortlessly evade my defensive lines. The next knife sets itself firmly into my shoulder.

When I finally regain enough control of myself to stop silently sobbing, I draw again, my arm now trembling uncontrollably. I wonder, dimly, if the weakness is from the pain or from some line or mechanism having been severed.

I asked for this.

More turns pass, my desperation growing as her wolves and bears and hunters devour my own, stripping away my defences even as I try to pierce hers. She continues to compliment me, lavishing me with praise for lasting this long, for putting up such a fight.

Most dolls, she assures me, would have already lost by now.

I nod, thank her weakly for the praise. My side is slick with oil, infiltrating all my seams and soaking my clothing as if it were nothing more than rags.

Winning was never really the point, after all.

The game is like a test; we play it not to win the game, but to see how far we can push ourselves, how well we can embrace our dollhood. Each knife that kisses us is another opportunity to find our Stillness and see how tightly we can hold onto it.

Both our decks are nearly empty by this point. I do my best to recall the game so far, closing my eyes and letting the memories replay behind my sculpted lids. I count the cards we’ve each sacrificed, then open my eyes again to study my hand.

I think, maybe, I can beat her.

But it won’t come easy.

Steeling myself, I take my turn, a feint towards her weakened flank. Her retribution for the failed attack is swift, and I watch as her cards slip past me.

I asked for this, I remind myself under my breath.

There’s an unexpected heavy thunk as my punishment embeds itself in the table, piercing through my hand and wedging its blade between the fine machinery inside. I jerk back reflexively, scramble to keep my Stillness, fail, and let out a little shriek while my flailing jolts the table and sets the scales swaying, knocking the meticulously-arranged cards askew.

I’m pinned. Oil is beginning to pool across the table, threatening the cards.

My Maker makes a little tsk noise, and with a creeping dread I realize my mistake.

“That forfeits your turn, dear,” she says evenly, the words only confirming what I’d already recognized.

Eyes watering at the pain, I watch as she draws her last few cards and sets them against me. Teeth tear through scared little animals. She waits, ever so patiently, as I wince and shudder and lift my useful, trembling arm to remove more counters from the scale. It tilts, my side nearly touching the table now.

Pain lances straight through my chest, and I feel every severed hose and cracked mechanism burn as the wicked blade pierces out the front of me. The shock of it rocks me forwards, nearly knocks my metronome out of sync – with a wet sputter, I cough up a thick spew of hot, black oil across the table.

“Now look what you’ve done,” my Maker chides, flicking droplets of my lubricant off herself distastefully. “You’ve bled all over the cards.”

Every motion I make sends another spike of pain through me, my gears grinding hopelessly against the blade inside of me, the silvered edge cutting into them with ease, a mirrored twin to the Is Not that animates me. I feel something else rupture, something crack sharply, and more oil bubbles up my throat and out of my mouth.

It takes every bit of strength I have, but I lift my arm.

I reach for my deck.

I asked for this.

I’ll play through to the end.

My Maker laughs, getting up from her seat and lazily circling around to me.

“I think I’m finished with this game, dear,” she says in a tone that’s sickly-sweet, mocking me, denying me the chance to end this on my own terms.

I whimper. I shake my head, desperate. Tears are streaming down my faceplate, eyes shut tight.

Please, I beg.

She bends down, talons tipping beneath my oil-slick chin, lifting my face up to look at her. Those amber eyes are so close, now. So intense. I lose myself in them, forget the pain if only for a moment.

“I love you, dear,” she promises me, then pushes forwards to kiss me deeply. When she pulls away, her lips are smeared with my blood, black and glossy like lipstick.

“There’s a good doll... clean up the mess you made by morning,” she commands, and then she’s gone, striding away with the click of heels against the tiled floor.

I allow myself to sob once she’s gone, quietly.

My hand is still pinned to the table.

I can still hardly move without the knives inside me cutting deeper.

I asked for this.

#lushposting #empty spaces

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anotherhumaninthisworld · 2 years ago

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Give me the last words of every figure that had a role in the French revolution

(Maybe it will be to many so you can give a little of if you want)

Louis XVI — on January 22 1793, Suite du Journal de Perlet reported the folllwing about the execution that had taken place the day before:

[Louis] climbs the scaffold, the executioner cuts his hair, this operation makes him flinch a little. He turns towards the people, or rather towards the armed forces which filled the whole place, and with a very loud voice, pronounces these words: “Frenchmen, I die innocent, it is from the top of the scaffold, and ready to appear before God, that I tell this truth; I forgive my enemies, I desire that France…” Here he was interrupted by the noise of the drums, which covered some voices crying for mercy, he himself took off his collar and presented himself to death, his head fell, it was a quarter past ten.

Jean-Paul Marat — several people who came to witness during the trial of Charlotte Corday reported Marat’s last words to have been a cry for help to his fiancée Simonne Évrard:

Laurent Basse, courier, testifies that being on Saturday, July 15 (sic), at Citizen Marat's house, between seven and eight o'clock in the evening, busy folding newspapers, he saw the accused come, whom citoyenne Évrard and the portress refused entrance. Nevertheless, citizen Marat, who had received a letter from this woman, heard her insist and ordered her to enter, which she did. A few minutes later, on leaving, he heard a cry: ”Help me, my dear friend, help me!” (À moi, ma chere amie, à moi !). Hearing this, having entered the room where citizen Marat was, he saw blood come out of his bosom in great volumes; at this sight, himself terrified, he cried out for help, and nevertheless, for fear that the woman should make an effort to escape, he barred the door with chairs and struck her in the head with a blow; the owner came and took it out of his hands.

The president challenges the accused to state what she has to answer. I have nothing to answer, the accused says, the fact is true.

Another witness, Jeanne Maréchal, cook, submits the same facts; she adds that Marat, immediately taken from his bathtub and put in his bed, did not stir.

The accused says the fact is true.

Another witness, Marie-Barbe Aubin, portress of the house where citizen Marat lived, testifies that on the morning of July 13, she saw the accused come to the house and ask to speak to citizen Marat, who answered her that it was impossible to speak to him at the moment, attenuated the state where he had been for some time, so she gave a letter to deliver to him. In the evening she came back again, and insisted on speaking to him. Aubin and citoyenne Évrard refused to let her in; she insisted, and Marat, who had just asked who it was, having learned that it was a woman, ordered her to be let in; which happened immediately. A few moments later, she heard a cry: "Help me, my dear friend!” (À moi, ma chere amie !);she entered, and saw Marat, blood streaming from his bosom; frightened, she fell to the floor and shouted with all her might: À la garde! Au secours !

The accused says that everything the witness says is the most exact truth.

Girondins — Number 64 of Bulletin du Tribunal Criminel, written shortly after the execution, reports that, once arrived at Place de la Révolution, the Girondins sang Veillons au Salut de l’Empire together while waiting for their turn to mount the scaffold. Lehardy’s last words are reported to have been Vive la République, ”which was generally heard, thanks to the vigorous lungs nature had provided him with.”

Hébertists — On March 31, a week after the execution, Suite de Journal de Perlet reported the following anecdote, though I’ll let it be unsaid whether it should be taken seriously or not:

Here is an anecdote which can serve to make better known the eighteen conspirators whom the sword of the law has struck. On the day of their execution, several heads had already fallen when General Laumur's turn arrived. Ronsin and Vincent looked at him at the scaffold and said to Hébert: ”Without the clumsiness of this j... f... we would have succeeded.” They were alluding to the indiscretion of Laumur, who would tell anyone who would listen that the Convention had to be destroyed.

In Mémoires sur Carnot par son fils (1861), Carnot’s son also claims that, on the day of the execution, his father got stuck in the crowd witnessing the tumbrils pass on their way to the scaffold, close enough to hear Cloots say: “My friends, please do not confuse me with these rascals.”

Dantonists — the famous idea that Danton’s last words were: ”show my head to the people, it’s worth seeing” is, according to Michel Biard, at best backed by a dubious source — Souvernirs d’un sexagénaire (1833) by Antoine Vincent Arnault:

I found there all the expression of the sentiment which inspired Danton with his last words; terrible words which I could not hear, but which people repeated to each other, quivering with horror and admiration. ”Above all, don't forget,” he said to the executioner with the accent of a Gracque, ”don't forget to show my head to the people; it’s worth seeing.” At the foot of the scaffold he had said another word worthy of being recorded, because it characterizes both the circumstance which inspired it, and the man who uttered it. With his hands tied behind his back, Danton was waiting his turn at the foot of the stairs, when his friend Lacroix, whose turn had come, was brought there. As they rushed towards each other to give each other the farewell kiss, a guard, envying them this painful consolation, threw himself between them and brutally separated them. "At least you won't prevent our heads from kissing each other in the basket," Danton told him with a hideous smile.

Biard does however question how reliant Arnault really is, considering his account partly contradicts what earlier, more reliable ones, had to say about the execution. None of the authentic to somewhat autentic descriptions of the dantonist execution I’ve been able to find mention any recorded last words from Danton or his fellow convicts. That has not hindered authors and historians throughout the centuries to let their imagination run wild with the execution — look for example at how many have had Danton say something menacing about Robespierre on his way to the scaffold. Early Desmoulins biographers often have him be a sobbing mess, saying things like "Citizens! it is your preservers who are being sacrificed. It was I — I, who on July 12th called you first to arms! I first proclaimed liberty… My sole crime has been pity...” (Methley, 1915) or ”Thus, then, the first apostle of Liberty ends!” (Claretie,1876) and for Fabre there exists the claim that he hummed his song Il pleut bergère on his way to the scaffold, or muttered his biggest regret was not being able to finish his vers (verses), to which Danton replied that, within a week, he’ll have more vers (worms) than he can dream of. None of these statements do however appear to be backed by any primary sources. Finally, John Gideon Millingen, twelve years old at the time of the execution, reported in his Recollections of Republican France 1791-1801 (1848) that ”[Danton’s] execution witnessed one of those scenes of levity that seemed to render death to a jocose matter. Lacroix, who was beheaded with him, was a man of colossal stature, and, as he descended from the cart, leaning upon Danton, he observed, ”Do you see that axe, Danton? Well, even when my head is struck off I shall be taller than you!” It does however strike me as unlikely for Milligen to actually have been able to hear anything of what the condemned had to say.

Robespierrists — like with the dantonists, we have several alleged last words from more or less unreliable sources. The apocryphal memoirs of the Sansons does for example report Saint-Just’s last words to have an emotionless ”Adieu” to Robespierre, and for the latter we have a story that his last recorded words were ”Merci Monsieur,” which he said to a man for giving him a handkerchief to wipe away the blood coming out of his shattered jaw with. However, here I have again collected trustworthy descriptions, and none of them record any last words. In this instance it’s not exactly strange either, given the fact many of the condemned had been injured so badly they were more or less unconscious by the time of the execution.

Other alleged final words can be found in this post, among others Madame Roland’s ”Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name” and Bailly’s ”I’m cold.” I will however doubt the authenticity of all of them until someone shows me a serious source for them (the author of the post doesn’t cite any at all). Like I wrote above, I doubt anyone actually stood close enough to hear any eventual last words.

#french revolution #frev #robespierre #danton #brissot #hébert #louis xvi #desmoulins #fabre d’eglantine #ronsin #vincent #ask #the extent actual historians have fictionalized the death of actual people is pretty f:ed up if you ask me #read biard’s la liberté ou la mort: mourir en depute and you’ll see…

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