sophisted | Reading

yhlee

The adventure begins. :)

(Alternately, I have misidentified the bag and it's really mohair?!)

yhlee

(cross-posted with slight adjustments from

foxmoth at

communal_creator)

Howdy! I’m Yoon, an MFA student in media composition and orchestration. I am here today to talk to you about sampled orchestral mockups in composing music.... It’s a niche field even in (media) composition due to the cost + tech barriers to entry. I thought folks might be curious (and maybe interested in trying their hand at a lower-cost version of it).

To the extent that I have musical training (mostly Obligatory Asian-American Piano Lessons by volume), it’s classically inflected. Even folks who hate classical music :) probably know it exists. A more “traditional”/conservatory approach to writing for (symphony) orchestra might involve pen-and-paper composing to generate sheet music. This is my background and I still do a lot of sketching on staff paper.

This inherently means you’re reading (Western classical) music notation (of which more anon) and often means you’re wrassling explicitly with music theory and related topics.

However! These day, hiring a session orchestra is semi-doable by a dedicated individual if you have the money lying around. ( Read more... )

So most mortals who are doing orchesstral or hybrid orchestral scores for film or TV and especially non-AAA video games are using sampled orchestra mockups.

Note: unless otherwise specified, if I say “music notation” or “music theory” I’m referencing more or less common practice Western (European-derived)-style music notation simply in the interests of avoiding unwieldiness in this overview. ( some further observations )

Hiring a session orchestra may be surprisingly semi-doable by a normal human but most work in orchestral media composition (film, TV, video game scores) is now done in software via sampled orchestral mockup. This includes classical-ish, e.g. John Williams everything or Carlos Rafael Rivera’s score for The Queen’s Gambit, or hybrid orchestra (e.g. Two Steps from Hell) with synth or “modern” instrumentation elements.

A quick and dirty (incomplete) overview of terms you might come across in this space, with simplified explanations. There’s a LOT of jargon, some of which is obscure or confusing even to e.g. classical musicians entering this space! ( Read more... )

This has all been in the way of preliminaries, apologies! This is an extremely technical field so the jargon alone is A Lot.

These days, composers often write (in that workflow) using engraving software. In this context, this means “music typesetting for sheet music,” and for session work specifically there are strict formatting rules to save time (money). The other workflow for computer-based composition + production (i.e. not tracking live instruments, of which more discussion later) involves taking everything into the DAW and producing realistic-sounding mockups in software. I will (in future posts) run through DAW examples of this (hopefully with video + audio capture so you can see the workflow).

Happy to answer any questions; it’s almost impossible even to gesture at a bunch of the music or tech stuff in a small space, and I have almost certainly missed some useful jargon because it's UNENDING. :p

yhlee

Perhaps overly ambitious for a project, but I'm doing this as a fun hobby fidget with no expectation it'll turn out "well." (In real-life, this is fiber-based trolling.)

I started this a few years ago but life got busy.

(Technical details posted elsewhere to

prototypediablerie.)

yhlee

I figure if I'm spinning anyway, I may as well entertain myself by spinning my own silk thread (largely the white on the left, mulberry/bombyx, with a random foray into the darker yellow on the left, eri silk) for needle lace.

(Ignore the red/yellow nonsense on the bobbin, which is sari silk; I was too lazy to reel it off because my bobbin situation is hilariously dire.)

yhlee

At this point, because life is too short, I block on sight people I see recommending anything by/to do with the serial racist TERF harasser Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Zen Cho's summary), who now writes as "Maria Ying" (with someone else)? (WinterFox, Requires Hate, whatever the hell other pseudonyms and/or monikers). There's a chance current readers/recommenders/etc. have no idea and just haven't heard, but like I said, life is too short, so why give any more time of day than "nope, blocking" to someone running around reccing a harasser?

(I was in her targeting crosshairs but fortunately only in a glancing fashion, unlike people I know whom she harassed in pretty awful ways, in an ongoing pattern of behavior.)

yhlee

yhlee

Taking a break from MUD coding.

Latest singles preparing for a 3-ply "leaf" yarn!

This one is also slated for Local Astronomer Knitter Friend. :)

This book has genuinely been my favorite read all YEAR. It's so engagingly written (I love technical/craft instructional books), wry moments of humor, but incredibly clear explanations of the engineering of a spinning wheel along with the MATH.

telophase

One of the things I have been doing with myself in the last three months is watching videos in an online interior design course, mostly because various things about the house bother me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's not mean to be a pro-level course, and there's various things I already know, but it's helped me figure out one room so far, by forcing me to slow down and first think about who uses the room, what for and how it's used.

It's the laundry room. One would think, "Laundry, duh." But it's also circulation space, because it connects the house to the garage which is the door we use 99% of the time, and it's also storage space. And I would like it to be hang-dry space as well, because the other options for hanging clothes to dry are untenable for various reasons:

1) the first and foremost is my ADHD. The more steps I have to do, the less likely it is to get done. Get out the drying rack, take it somewhere in the house or back porch, set it up, hang clothes, check if they're dry, collect them, bring them in, break down the drying rack, and put it back where it's stored? OH HELL NO.

2) drying outside also makes the clothes smell like the outside and I've never had problems with this before, but both

myrialux and I concur that the outdoors smell we get on clothes here is not appealing. Plus, we live in POLLEN CENTRAL and would like to not be allergic to our clothes.

3) the best place to dry inside is the spare room/gym and if clothes are hanging there that I need to move before working out, I won't work out (ADHD again). The spare bath is taken up by the litterbox, and the main bath is back to issue #1, with the added problem of fitting the drying rack in the tub. Any other room gets HUMID and GROSS.

So! I have a PLAN for the laundry room, once we get the $$$ saved up. Steps:

1) hire our neighborhood appliance handyman company to stack the washer and dryer on one side of the TINY room and swap the dryer door to open on the same side as the washer.

2) measure the back wall, to allow for power and water outlets and the dryer vent in the next step, which is...

3) install simple shelving of the rails-screwed-into-studs with shelves on them type, adroitly avoiding the outlets and vents above, as well as pegboard on part of it, to allow for...

4) the wall-mounted drying racks that will require a bit of space to extend/fold out. And then finally...

5) a closet rod installed across the room for clothing that can be put on hangers and hung.

SIMPLY RENDERED PEECTURES BELOW THE CUT...
( you know you want to know more about my laundry room )

telophase

It's been a mildly eventful few weeks, mostly because I ended up with a cold for a week and a half. Other than that, nothing too hairy happening.

I did get baby's first AO3 scam comment! It enthused over my story, especially the way I brought the world and the characters to life, making it real and immersive, pulling the reader in. And, of course, sparked creative ideas of their own and they wanted me to talk to them on Telegram or whatnot, presumably to try to scam me out of money for fanart that'll never arrive. Blocked, deleted, reported.

This, uh, is the work that they loved so much. You can see the GLARING PROBLEM with the bot's comment about my...story. XD

white_aster

Because of the state of the world and Our AI Overlords, I'm thinking more and more of just pulling my stuff into fewer and fewer places. My TF stuff is still up on fanfiction.net, as when I switched to AO3 (when it started lol) it was the main fandom I was in.

Now, ff.net mostly seems to be a source of random spam PMs, and I'm thinking of just taking down the stories and leaving a profile that points to AO3. Does anyone see any downsides to this plan?

I am amazed to see that some folks are still, evidently, actively posting to ff.net. God, that thing is an UNDEAD Pit of Voles.

white_aster

I am still reading all the things I was reading last week:

Fiction: Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee and City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett - Enjoying both! Hopefully I can finish both before they go back.

Nonfiction: Stories Are Weapons by Annalee Newitz and The Technological Republic by Nicholas Zamiska and Alexander Karp

In particular, the two nonfiction books are ahahaha fun to read together. The Technological Republic is making me cringe, but it's not that long (and so very repetitive, so it's not a hard read), so I'll finish it out of spite. It's about what you'd expect from some guys who run a defense contractor company. It's also hilariously self-contradicting. For two guys who keep talking about how kids these days don't ~believe~ in anything and how the focus on not ~offending~ people is such a blight on society, they sure seem awfully ~offended~ that people have beliefs that mean they don't want to work for Palantir. Curious. Standard privileged folks who are trying to say "you have no moral compass! you're wasting your talents!" when anyone outside their box is like, "...no, I believe in things, just not the same things YOU do."

yhlee

Music reel. :3 Thoughts/feedback welcome (although I'm still learning industry norms for composition/orchestration); I graduate in 2028 but figure I'd hit the learning curve accreting a reel starting now.

Note: it's the norm for people in composition/orchestration to have audio-only reels (unless, I suppose, you have some gigantic AAA-videogame or Star Wars-level movie credit you have permission to show off as a video clip!).

thistleingrey

I've decided not to read The Future of the Responsible Company: What We've Learned from Patagonia's 50 Years (2023), which is available plentifully at the big-city library system but would cost me nontrivial transit fees and time to consult. Were a copy available at one of the systems closer by, I'd skim it. Sort of hilariously, I have a mini-paper to write on Patagonia's company culture, which must be related to why the big-city system owns about a dozen copies of what really sounds like a self-pub puff piece, but I can write it without a pilgrimage.

Spolsky is on hold again (though not for three years, I hope) while I evict my small bias about the monograph's approach.

Meanwhile, I've begun Laura Spinney's Proto, as in Proto-Indo-European. Spinney is a journalist, not a specialist in a relevant domain, which is consistent with how the book reads. (If I could identify more than one minor error at a 20-year-plus remove from my small learning of relevance, I bet an active practitioner would find more.) I'm not worried about reading with a sure sense of bias here---it's this: Spinney has inherited the shameful blindness to Afro-Asiatic concerns that her chief sources had---because her take isn't potentially controversial.

Nearly traversed: Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which someone once recced to a roomful of people that included me. Still WIP, besides Spolsky: Everett's James, which I'm enjoying but needed to let rest a bit; Allingham's Case of the Late Pig.

yhlee

a.k.a. I haven't had time to code anything yet lol.

cf.

telophase's once-upon-a-time of sketch featuring BUSTY BLONDE CHERIS with her SPACE FERRET. (I still have the pic,

telophase, not sure if I have permission to reshare or where there's a link? XD)

yhlee

Sorry about the laundry in the background. Meanwhile, it's not even 8 a.m. and it's too hot already to stay outside. Nice sunny day means at least the laundry will dry quickly?!

yhlee

I had some leftover of a single I'd spun and decided to be cheap and DIY a loom to explore weaving it in a smol format. Still in progress but this will be going to

eller. :3