Aesthetic Dot Computer
Readings of essays from Aesthetic.Computer, in @jeffrey's voice. Each episode is a single essay read start to finish sourced from A mobile-first runtime and social network for creative computing, read aloud. papers.aesthetic.computer
Aesthetic Dot Computer
Weekend Build Log — a juke, a bag of pads, and a launch
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A reading of the essay, weekend build log, a juke, a bag of pads, and a launch by a Jeffrey. Approximately four minutes. This was a weekend spent close to the machine. No single giant announcement to point at. Well, one, but I'll get there. Mostly a lot of small rooms getting furnished. Let me walk you through the house. Started with the Juke. There's a little app called Juke Wizard that holds the whole pop catalog. Every track I've been making, released and unreleased, over a hundred of them now. All weekend it slowly turned from a plain list into something you'd actually want to open. First it learned a sort, newest rendered on top, so I can see what I made last. Then it started showing the album art, with little buttons to open each song on Spotify or Apple or YouTube. Then, because a juke should look like a juke, I gave it a compact disc for an icon, a real shiny translucent one, not a rainbow sticker, and I put that disc up in the menu bar where it spins while a song plays, faster or slower, to match the track's tempo. And then the whole window got a winamp style redesign, playback up top, with the album Art Big, or the music video streaming right there if the song's been released, and the track list underneath, every row dressed in its own color. By Sunday, it was running on two machines at once. While that was happening, a new idea got a name, pads. In the prompt you type a caret and a word, pads, and you get a bag, a curated little container of pieces. The pads themselves are instruments you play by tapping and dragging, and each one is a marriage, a visual generator crossed with a synth voice, a reaction diffusion pattern that sounds like a bell, an L system fern that plays a flute, lightning wired to a zap, caustics to a steel pan, a polyrhythm clock to a drum. By the end of the weekend there were 47 of them, all sharing one engine, all holding 60 frames a second on the little native machine, because they learned to watch their own performance and back off when they got greedy. There were reels too. Short audio visual pieces that run themselves synced to real synth audio, drawing as they sound. Prism, Lull, Ember Drift, Moulton, Lava Bath, Bloomwell, and a set of button instruments that keep time against the actual clock, so two of them started in two different rooms. Stay in step. The one thing I can actually point at menu band shipped. Version 153 is live on the Mac App Store. The App Store is the front door now. The direct download moved to a back room called Advanced. It took a couple of rejections and a dropped Bluetooth permission to get there, but it's out. Then there's whistlegraph.org, which had a strange and wonderful weekend. 1,500 old videos came out of hiding, clips that had been private for years, and folding them back in brought the song count from around 260 to 600. The hard part was the unmerging. Some songs had been glued together across video bridges, and teaching the site to split them cleanly, each anchored to its own seed, took most of a day. And under all of it, the plumbing. The memory system learned to search my whole prompt history across the fleet, right from a menu. The released music finally all lives on our own network now. The covers, the audio, the little canvas videos. Nothing borrowed. There's a tool that drops a file onto my phone with zero taps. The desktop app answers to its own web address. Little pipes, but they're the ones you feel every day. That's the weekend. A juke you want to open, a bag of 47 instruments, a launch, 600 songs pulled out of the dark, and a lot of quiet plumbing. Back to it. Here ends the reading.