#really love that the original pitch for transistor was ->

[roychewtoy]

supergiant games are 3 for 3 [sorry bastion..... i haven't played u bastion.....] to me. transistor, pyre and hades BEEEELOOOOOVEEEDDDD

[thekingofgear]

(Photo by Chris Lee)

A few weeks ago, the New York Philharmonic gave two performances of Jonny Greenwood’s live score to There Will Be Blood. Mary Chun performed the ondes martenot part. Before the second performance, I met with Mary at Lincoln Center to discuss playing the score and the ondes martenot more broadly.

Chun is a San Francisco-based conductor and music director who’s renowned worldwide for her work in Opera and New Music. She’s collaborated with composers including John Adams and Olivier Messiaen, and given many key premiers of their works. With Earplay, she’s championed the chamber works of contemporary composers including Tristan Murail, Thomas Adès, and Krzysztof Penderecki. She’s directed musicals too, perhaps most notably in bringing Broadway plays like Man of La Mancha and Avenue Q to China. And on the ondes martenot, she’s performed early electronic works such as André Jolivet's Incantation and Ives’s Fourth Symphony, and served as a key interpreter of Messiaen’s works in the United States. Mary was also the cover conductor and one of the 3 ondistes in the 2003 San Francisco Opera’s production of Saint François d’Assise, the only production of Messiaen’s only opera in this country.

I wanted ask you about your approach to this score. Did you know the movie and score before you were approached?

Mary Chun: I have to confess that I was ignorant of it. I knew that Jonny was working a lot with ondes martenot. I got the music, I just sort of studied it, and I said, you know, this is very ondes-friendly. [Jonny] wrote really, really well for the ondes and wrote the best kind of expression that the ondes is good for.

How was that expression written into the score?

M: It was notated, like going from nothing and growing over a long period of time. And in fact there were bracketed dynamics, because they did the recording for the soundtrack – they had one set of dynamics that were very loud, but for live screening, it says in the score use the bracketed dynamics for live screening. So we can replicate the relationship with the dialogue and sound effects to the orchestra. So we’re playing softer dynamics than the soundtrack was recorded at. I was really curious about that as a musician, because of course if you crescendo to a double forte, you’re playing with a certain force and feeling, and certain molecules are vibrating differently to play really loud. But you have to subdue that: your whole scale drops down and everything about your performance also flattens out a little bit.

How does working with a movie over your head compare to an opera like Messiaen’s Saint François d'Assise, where you’re in the pit?

M: It’s pretty different, because if you’re playing opera or symphony you are the main event, you are what people are there for. If you’re playing movie soundtracks live – I do a lot, because I play synthesizers also, I just did a few harry potters this year – you’re basically backing up the film, and especially with Jonny’s score, where he really underpinned the unspoken emotions of the scene.

Do you just do live scoring, or have you played on soundtracks as well?

M: Both. Playing on soundtracks is actually fun, because you can play with full expression. They [compress] it in post production later. But doing it here, it’s sort of like you have to be really aware not to get too energetic.

That’s such a let down, in a way.

M: It is a little bit, because I can see the double sets of dynamics, I can see where it says piano to double forte. For the rest off the orchestra it was more of a challenge, because they’re used to playing acoustic more of the time, and for me-

Did you just turn it down a little?

M: No I didn’t. I thought about just putting the maximum volume lower, but I didn’t because I wanted to have that headroom. Probably the loudest you heard me was my mezzo forte.

A photo of the stage at the David Geffen Hall, from what is probably the intermission of the second New York Philharmonic performance of There WIll Be Blood (tonylee333).

How did you adjust your instrument for this hall in particular?

M: It took me a couple of hours to get set, my ears to set, to figure out how I could hear it correctly to how other people could hear it. It was tricky. It’s an interesting acoustic, the Geffen hall… You notice I have all of my speakers together because partly it’s a space issue and partly because the performance is not “spatially-designed”. That is, the sound of the ondes is only needed to appear from one single location.

When did you actually get your ondes martenot?

M: ’85

So you have one of the very last transistor models, I imagine?

M: Yeah yeah, it’s like 385. When I bought my instrument, I was on a waiting list for Palme, and then they closed…

But it’s great that you have three originals diffusers that still work.

M: But I’m very, very fussy about how my instruments go out, how they come back, and I oversee everything physically. It went by a crate, by air freight. I felt confident, because I personally knew the person who built the crate. On my instrument, the only thing that’s been touched... I was really worried about the plugs: handmade French, just little tongues… you can’t replace those. So I had a technician friend who’s really big on sound design change them to RCA plugs, so I have RCA plugs. Oh, and I have a tuner. I only have my one single ondes from 1985. I didn’t really want to go further than what I had, because I was disappointed with the one I own, because I was trained on [a vacuum tube model]. It was so rich, so alive, it really had a heart-beat.

A sixth-generation vacuum tube ondes Martenot from 1960 (photo by Andrew Garton).

I know that, if they work anymore, those have an amazing sound, right?

M: That’s why I fell in love with the instrument. When I first learned, I was young and stupid, I was assistant conductor to an orchestra in California, and we were doing a big Messiaen cycle, and my conductor, Kent Nagano, just says “Mary, I want you to play the ondes martenot solo in Turangalîla next year. I didn’t really know what that was. I mean, I loved Messiaen’s music, but-

So you just picked it up from that?

M: Well, because I was playing everything in the orchestra, I was playing keyboards, I was playing organ, I was playing harpsichord… I mean, I just didn’t say no to anything. you know, you’re just a starting musician and you don’t say no to anything. Plus it’s really interesting, it’s super interesting! So I said yes, I will play the ondes solo, and I saw a picture and said this looks like a keyboard… but of course when it came, it was not anything like that.

We found an old vacuum tube ondes that was owned by Ronnie Montrose, from Gamma. Ronnie was very interested as a guitarist, like Jonny Greenwood, in all these electronic instruments, so he bought one from Bernie Krause in LA, the sound effects guy. it didn’t really work when he bought it, but he tinkered with it, and actually improved it, stabilized it a little bit. So he brought it over to me and say “I’m going to lend [it] to the orchestra for the year, you can practice and learn it. Here’s the manual.” It was a little, typewritten thing, like five pages, that just described the buttons, the ring, the switches, the speakers.

So did you teach yourself?

M: Yeah, I taught myself. But then later, when I had fallen in love with the instrument, because that sound was so warm, the vacuum tubes were so warm, but it was so particular because it had to heat up for a certain amount of time to get tuned, and then if was on too long, it would go the other way, as you go up the keyboard it would roll down tritones.

We kept doing the Messiaen cycles, and then the Messiaens came to America and we worked with them, Olivier and Yvonne, and Jeanne Loriod. I became her interpreter, because I had worked in Lyon for a long time, and she gave me some master lessons, because we were playing Saint Francis together. She had heard about me, and I was so terrified to play for her, because I’m, you know, self-taught and she’s, you know, the Master. She only corrected a couple things about my technique, and the rest of it she said “no, you’re doing a great job.”

That was the US premier of Saint Francis, right?

M: It was the US premier of some scenes, you know it’s three and a half  hours. Later I did do the whole thing at the San Francisco opera. I was the associate conductor as well as one of the ondists, where I played with Genevieve [Grenier] and Jean [Laurendeau].

Were you running back and forth?

M: We had two associate [conductors] and myself, so I was [conducting] a lot of stage rehearsals, when we didn’t have the orchestra. But then when we had the orchestra again the director was conducting.

A photo from the San Francisco Opera’s 2003 production of Saint François d’Assise (photo by Friedman).

You’re a conductor and an ondes player – do you think that if people want to learn it, they should learn something else too? I know [Jean] Laurendeau plays clarinet and ondes martenot. Is it an instrument best for multi-instrumentalists?

M: You know, it’s not at all keyboard-like, the sensation of playing. So when players take to it really well, because of the the fingering, the pitch identification first and the breath later, – you know, Geneviève, she’s a flutiest, and Jean is a clarinetist, and they took to it very well. I’ve had had violin friends come to my house, and they seem to manage it ok… but any of my keyboard friends are just whaaa? They just can’t deal with it.

Do you have any advice for young people who might want to pick up the ondes? Because you picked it up in such an usual way…

M: I was required to because I had an assignment to play it!

But you kept going!

M: Oh, because I fell in love with the instrument… I could not continue living if I did not have my own ondes. And if you have that passion go for it, get one, teach yourself or go to Paris! I mean, it’s an instrument, so people do this all the time – “oh, I want to learn to play the guitar, I’m going to buy a guitar…”

But there’s no rank and file musicians that play ondes martenot. There’s either people who specialize, or people who’ve never heard of it. There’s not ondes martenot in every home like guitar.

M: Not yet!

Not yet!

M: You know, Martenot himself had this idea – like you know how at one time in the US there were pianos in every house? He wanted to do that in France, because he made little ondes martenot – there’s still people in this country and in France who say “oh, I have this thing in the garage, this thing in the basement” – I was playing in Atlanta several years ago, and someone called the Atlanta Symphony and said “can I talk to your ondes martenot player, because we might have one?” he had the keyboard body, but no other parts. He didn’t have the speakers, he didn’t have the cables – it was an ondes made for US electricity.

[mpalkoblog]

My father, a patient Champion

When I originally wrote this, I didn’t know that Super Bowl LII (in 2018) would be my father’s last.  That game was also the last time he watched the Eagle play.

I credit my father for my love of sports.  Baseball and football broadcasts filled my childhood homes and most car rides.  One of my earliest childhood memories is listening to the 1969 World Series on a transistor radio as my mom and I waited for my sister to be dismissed from school.  My father took the time to play sports with me and watch me play. He threw me countless pitches, and we tossed a football for hours; a large one for outside, a smaller one for indoors while watching games on TV.  I was pretty good at grabbing his passes from the couch before they hit the carpet.  He taught me everything he knew about the games, too.  And he knew a lot.  A big grin always came across his face when he talked about his playing days, and I’m pretty sure he carried in his wallet the dog-eared newspaper clipping about the day he pitched a no-hitter.  He faced the minimum that Sunday afternoon, picking off the one batter he walked.

Living in Pottsville, a small town in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region, about 100 miles north of Philadelphia, he and I were, of course, fans of the Eagles and Phillies.  My team loyalties occasionally wavered.  I spent a few of my childhood years rooting for other clubs. During the mid ‘70s I traded my Eagle green for the purple and gold of the Minnesota Vikings and my Phillies’ red for the black and gold of the cross-state Pirates. In retrospect, I can see why: those teams had more success than my hometown teams. The Vikings went to 4 Super Bowls between 1969 and 1976 (they still haven’t won one), and I watched the Pirates win 2 titles before my 14th birthday.

At no time did my father’s devotion to the hometown teams waver, but I do remember him lamenting, “I guess we’re just not meant to win.” and “That stuff just doesn’t happen to us.”

You can imagine then, how we rejoiced when the Phillies won their first World Series in 1980.  I was lucky enough to be at the ballpark the night they clinched that title, and he and I talked about it for hours on end that winter.  But a Super Bowl championship always seemed to elude the Eagles and my father.  I can remember him cheering (and cursing) some really good (and some less than good) teams lead by the likes of Roman Gabriel, Bill Bergey, Tom Dempsey, Ron Jaworski, Willbert Montgomery, Harold Carmichael, Reggie White and Buddy Ryan’s Gang Green defenses.  The Eagles made it to Super Bowl XV only to be crushed (much like hearts and spirits of their fans) by the Oakland Raiders.

By the time the Eagles made it back to the Super Bowl in 2004 (XXIX), I had long left his house and PA. I was in North Carolina, freshly removed from almost 15 years living in and around Boston cheering for the New England Patriots. (Yes, I cheered for them when they wore the ugly red uniforms, lost more than they won and when many games were “blacked out” on local Boston TV stations because fans wouldn’t fill the stadium.)  The Patriots got their first Super Bowl title, and thus I got mine, in 2001, a feeling of elation that I will never forget.  And 3 years later, my adopted team was going head-to-head with my father’s team.  His Eagles fell short, again.

Fast forward to February 2018.  I’ve passed on my love of sports to my own son, and our Patriots are headed to their tenth Super Bowl. My son and I shared the joy of being associated with champions MANY times and now our football team seemed poised to win (and were favored to win) their sixth title.  The opponent this time? Again, the Philadelphia Eagles.  The week before the game I asked my father if he was betting on the game with his head or his heart.  Without hesitating he said “I’m betting with my head.  I’m taking the Eagles.”  Needless to say, I had a foot in both camps for Super Bowl LII.  I loved that feeling of victory, of punching the air and high-fiving my son.  Fifty-one Super Bowls had come and gone, one for each year of my life, and a part of me wanted my father, 82, to experience, for the first time, that mid-winter joy.

The game quickly becoming an instant classic.  At halftime, I called my father, joking that he should make sure that he’d turned off the notifications sent from his pacemaker to his doctor’s office.   I spent the last few minutes of the game on the phone with him, watching, talking, just he and I, like we had so many times before, critiquing, correcting, wishing.  Despite his age, he was still sharp.  He knew the players, statistics, formations and just what he was seeing.  When the final pass of the game fell to the ground in the end zone, the game clock showed all zeros.  His Eagles were ahead on the scoreboard, and I heard him leave out a sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath since the very first Super Bowl.  “You did it!” I said.  He was home alone, and I was happy to be the first to congratulate him.  All of those years watching “The Birds” with me, with his uncle, his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, his nieces and nephews, and, of course my mom, sister and I. Hundreds of games watched from the same chair he was sitting in that night.  Still others watched with his friends from his usual stool at the Eagles Nest, the seasonal name for the local American Legion Hall.  All of them leading him to that very moment.

I wished him good night because by then my phone was buzzing with post-game messages from New England fans, my PA family and Patriot haters.  One of the messages was from a former Boston coworker, fellow Patriot fan and someone who already knew most of this story.  Larry wrote “Game over. Give your dad a high five for me. Congrats daddy Palko.”

What happened the next day was something I could have never expected.  Larry told me that he’d told his son, Ryan, about my father’s wait for a Super Bowl victory and now Ryan wanted to give my father his Nick Foles jersey. Foles, the Eagles quarterback was voted the Super Bowl’s Most Valuable Player.  Having started the season as the team’s backup quarterback, Foles was thrust into the leading role when the starter suffered a season-ending injury prior to the playoffs.  When the Patriots won their first Super Bowl, I slept in my team jersey.  I was 36. But now this 17 year old wanted to give his team jersey to my father in celebration.  Ryan told his dad, “You’re not selling it are you?  You have to give it to him.”

Now I’ll be first to admit that professional sports are what they are:  kids’ games played by adults.  And I realize that unless you put on the pads and strap on the helmet, you have no influence over the outcome, but this one was more than a game to me.  It was a culmination of almost a lifetime of patience, preparation, perseverance and waiting.  I am so grateful that I got to be on that journey with my father and to know that he now knows joy associated with it.

To Larry and Ryan, a sincere thank you for helping to crown my father as a champion.  I’m humbled by your awareness and generosity.

To my father I say, “Pop, you ARE meant to win and that stuff DOES happen to us!”

[willoslab]

Project Three

Project Three! Not was I was expecting.

Here was my original pitch: You send messages from one piece of ceramic to another using vibrations. The vibrations are sensed by a piezo pickup on one piece, and sent to a web server. A p5.js application reads from the web server, and tells another Arduino when the piezo reads vibration. The receiver Arduino drives a speaker to match the frequency picked up by the piezo. The piezo could be read by following an Arduino knock sensor example (6).

Now in retrospect, there are several things that make this idea a lot of trouble. First, the piezo pickups I have are noisy and unpredictable, and generate a very low amount of signal. Secondly, there are three different points of failure in communicating from one Arduino to the other. The web server, p5.js app, and serial server must all work in tandem to send one message.

I did a lot of research to make the above idea possible.

First, the piezo was not providing usable values. I explored amplifying the signal with a transistor, but eventually discovered a great resource about op-amps (5). The resulting signal with the same piezo was so much clearer and true-to-life that it made the idea feasible again for some time.

Second was web communication. I used the modified example WiFiNINA web server by W Michelle Harris (10). The edits in this example assume you will be connecting to the RIT WiFi, like I was, but it is built on the general example web server, which is extremely helpful.

Third was p5.js communication with the web server. I got my professor's help on this one and no matter what we tried, it never worked. The p5.js httpGet example (9) was able to connect to the example website, but very few others. Sometimes it would run into CORS errors, but in the case of my Arduino's server's IP address, it just failed to fetch and gave no explanation.

In a last ditch effort, I switched to serial communication between two Arduinos, using a very good video tutorial (8). In spite of the video's clarity and the simplicity of the task, I was never able to trigger a response in the receiver Arduino. I could tell data was being sent and received using the serial monitor and logging the messages received by the receiver Arduino. However, data sent from the transmitter never registered as equal to itself in an if/else statement. I really don't know what could have gone wrong.

This is why my final project is missing serial or web communication. I did all I could with the time and experience that I could bring to the project. I'm very embarrassed about this because I love the idea, and all the various methods of Arduino communication have gripped my curiosity from the learning I did. I cannot get it done in time.

So what did I do? Earlier in the year I started building a very simple synthesizer using the Arduino tone library (2). I was still excited to work with the resonance in ceramic bowls and other pieces, so I blended these things together.

To get the synthesizer put together, I needed to figure out those breadboard buttons whose use had eluded me. There's a good tutorial on them (3).

Next, I decided I could use the piezo sensor as a controller for the keyboard instead of the set of buttons. Then, even if there was no serial communication, I could at least have two interactable bowls. I set up a circuit to take analog input from the piezo and then activate the circuit with PWM. This worked alright until I noticed that after a few beeps, the Arduino would lose connection to the computer and stop functioning. This usually followed a high reading on the piezo. I don't know what it is about my circuit, but I believe I was overloading the analog input.

It was after this, too, broke down that I decided to put my original tone keyboard back together, leave the piezo, and come in with something that I could show. It was 11:30 PM and I had been working straight through the last two days.

Here's a photo of my next-to-final project- the IC in the center is my op-amp, amplifying the signal from the piezo. The other side of the breadboard drives the speaker.

My final project is the example keyboard. The code for my final piece is taken from reference 2 and written by Tom Igoe. The schematic of my breadboard and wiring is also roughly the same, but I have also attached a photo of the circuit.

References:

http://thezhut.com/?page_id=1437

Arduino Tone Keyboard Example

good button tutorial

resistor color code calculator (this isn't cited I just need it all the time)

Op-amp Basics

Arduino Knock Sensor Example

datasheet for my AS358p op-amp

'How to make two arduino boards talk to each other' on YouTube

httpGet p5.js reference

the modified example WiFiNINA web server by W Michelle Harris

[tech-battery]

Intel's manufacturing is broken and new Rocket Lake CPUs prove it

Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake CPUs prove it is in a crisis of existential proportions. The next six months will decide both its fate and the future direction of the PC as a whole. Hyperbolic? Much? Actually, no.

It’s a somewhat speculative interpretation, to be sure. But tales of Intel’s woes have become so routine of late that the very existence of Rocket Lake and what it implies has been largely overlooked. Rocket Lake says very, very bad things about the viability of Intel’s entire business model. And that, in turn, makes it very significant for the PC as a whole.

Rocket Lake, of course, is Intel’s next desktop CPU architecture. It’s essentially a 14nm backport of Intel’s 10nm Sunny Cove CPU core architecture, as seen in 10th Gen Ice Lake notebook chips. Rocket Lake won’t be released until next year, which means Intel will be launching a new CPU design in 2021 on the ancient 14nm node. Intel’s original plan was to move to 10nm in 2016. Yes, really.

Intel has sold the whole ‘backporting’ thing as a positive, a sort of groovy and inclusive approach to CPU manufacturing. “Hey guys, relax. We’re flexible, we can port from node to node. It’s freestyle. It’s all good,” Intel seems to be saying.

The reality is that there’s really no such thing as a node-agnostic CPU architecture. It’s going to cost a huge amount of money to port those Sunny Cove cores, PCI Express 4.0 I/O and Xe-based graphics to 14nm for Rocket Lake.

So, it’s not groovy or flexible. It’s a move made out of desperation because Intel’s 10nm production node still isn’t good enough for the prime time. Let’s repeat that. Rocket Lake will be launched in 2021 in 14nm because Intel’s 10nm still won’t be good enough for a desktop CPU launch.

That’s going to come at a cost. For Rocket Lake, Intel is regressing from 10 cores, as seen in the current Core i9-10900K, back to eight cores. Because those Sunny Cove cores were never intended for 14nm. And they’re big and fat and power hungry when ported to 14nm.

There are further factors that make Rocket Lake look plain odd. In September, Intel officially confirmed an eight-core ‘H’ version of its latest 10nm Tiger Lake laptop chips exists. It’s a CPU that would make Rocket Lake totally redundant. So why doesn’t Intel launch that chip on the desktop instead of Rocket Lake? The only plausible reason is that 10nm remains fundamentally broken.

As a short term stop gap, Rocket Lake probably just about makes sense, even if Intel’s marketing pitch for the step back to eight cores is almost certainly going to make your ears bleed. But further out, this ‘backporting’ shizzle surely isn’t a goer.

Currently, Intel says its first 10nm desktop CPU will be Alder Lake, due in the second half of next year. That’s the one with the new big.LITTLE hybrid architecture and up to eight performance cores and eight efficiency cores. If backporting Ice Lake to 14nm came with compromises, backporting Alder Lake to 14nm would surely be even less appealing.

In short, Alder Lake probably has to be on 10nm to be viable. But there are no signs at all that Intel’s 10nm is going to be good enough in a little over six months. It’s worth remembering that, to date, Intel is still only selling quad-core mobile CPUs on 10nm. The launch of the 10nm Ice Lake-SP server chip, once due in 2019, has been delayed once again into early 2021. And you’d be brave to assume it’ll hit that deadline.

What’s more, earlier this summer Intel conceded that its 7nm node, once touted as the solution to all its 10nm woes, was behind schedule by what it characterised as a full year. 7nm won’t be on stream until at least late 2022. Being realistic, then, 2023 is the earliest you’ll see Intel 7nm processors. And if you had to bet, you probably wouldn't fancy 2023 much.

Meanwhile, the Taiwanese chip foundry that powers many of Intel’s competitors, TSMC, seems to be going from strength to strength. Admittedly, direct comparisons of production nodes are tricky. Most observers agree that Intel’s 10nm node is equivalent to TSMC’s 7nm for transistor density. But you can, today, buy actual shipping consumer products powered by fairly large, complex chips built on not only TSMC 7nm but TSMC 5nm.

Fair to say, then, that TSMC 5nm looks healthier than Intel 10nm right now. Which puts TSMC not just one but two full nodes ahead. That is an awful indictment of Intel’s predicament.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that Intel is rapidly approaching a crunch point of existential proportions. It can probably just about get away with Rocket Lake. But if it can’t bend 10nm into some kind of shape in time for Alder Lake in the second half of 2021 then it’s entire future roadmap becomes non-viable and Intel will surely have to seriously consider the previously unthinkable. Namely, giving up on making its own chips and farming them out to a third party foundry. At which point it’s no longer Intel as we knew it.

Indeed, there’s a good chance Intel has either already made that call or is right in the thick of thrashing it out. It’s just possible Intel has already decided to make that fundamental strategic shift, to not invest the billions required to make 7nm happen, but to spend that money turning itself into an IP-based business like AMD rather than what it is today—a manufacturing business that needs in-house chip designs to keep those billion-dollar fabs fed.

Of course, speculation about future events is often a mug’s game. It can take years for events to unfold. But this time it’s different. Intel is approaching that existential crunch point and fast. Six months from now, we’ll know if Intel has turned things around. Or if the fundamental technological landscape that underpins the PC we love is about to go through a dramatic change.