Free Wheeling

Free Wheeling is a piece of software created by coder and musician J.P. Mercury specifically in order to help him compose music live in the fashion which works for him.

That is so cool I can barely stand it.

He’s got a couple songs on the project page, which I really like, and a link to a bunch of his music, creative-commons licensed and housed on Archive.org.

I am in awe.

Alas, I am not on board, cause I couldn’t get it to compile on OS X. It wanted “libfreetype6,” whatever that is.

Hydrogen/Ardour/Synth thing

I put this together today. The melody is something I dorked together a couple days ago using “midikeys” and “simplesynth” to play a soundfont into ardour while a click track played in the background. Today I designed a a drumbeat to go with it. It was trippy — once I set up the synchronization between Jack and Hydrogen as described in the tutorial, not only did hydrogen start playing when I started recording in Ardour, but when I started playing my Hydrogen stuff while I composed it, it triggered my melody to play in Ardour! So I could put the drum track together in Hydrogen and have the melody play in the background in sync with the patterns I was composing. Neat.

Fictional Language Created for Xbox Game

Tho Fan, via James. Cool article, giving the whole history of the language and its creator.

I used to dabble in conlanging for roleplaying game cultures. What killed me as a conlanger was getting stuck in the idea that I needed to know everything about how real languages work to do it “right.” I ended up endlessly studying real-world linguistics, and never actually creating anything.

I would advise anyone starting a creative project to learn as little as possible about the field before diving into it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing — too much knowledge is lethal.