鬼打牆

於是
我還在這邊打轉

繼續在所有
我想做的我能做的我該做的
中間
選擇

看了一篇一篇的文章一本一本的書一個一個的影片
我都懂
但是對我來說還是不夠具體

我到底是要別人告訴我
我該怎麼做
還是我有一天會自己想出來

其實
我沒有害怕
只是有點焦慮

然後我越來越無言
不曉得要說什麼

Nervous, Panic, Stressed out, Exciting

這禮拜阿德來
我們在Silicon Valley
每天行程都是滿的
阿德的networking沒話說
朋友幫忙介紹的朋友都給了我們很多的建議

這邊的環境很好
坐在餐廳裡面
隔壁桌在談論的事情都是startup
這裡很有冒險跟拓荒的精神
人人都相信
This is gonna work. We are gonna change the world.
我想這對我們很重要
--

看了很多前輩的文章
列舉了很多創業應該要注意的事情
恩 我懂
可是真的面臨的時候
我們會做出怎樣的決定?

其實我反而沒有很害怕做決定
因為我總覺得
不管怎樣
我們都會做出當下最好的決定
如果之後覺得不好了
always可以改變方向

對於這樣的態度
我個人是非常喜歡啦
畢竟我也是個變來變去的人...
--

我慢慢可以體會阿德的心情了
本來我一直都不理解為什麼他會每天都像坐雲霄飛車一樣
身為一個要做所有決定的人
真的沒有心臟夠大顆還沒有辦法
像我就沒辦法
我只是在旁邊給我的建議然後跟他討論
leave the decision part to him
--

大家一起期待有什麼事情會發生的感覺真有趣
我們可以建構我們理想的園地 的工作環境還有公司的文化
絕對長得跟別人的不一樣
這種一磚一瓦地蓋起來我們想要的地方的過程
真好玩
我可以想像為什麼有人欲罷不能了

我們會是一個很棒的公司!

Audio For Games

這學期陰錯陽差修了這個Audio for games的課
因為原本想修的課都被cancel了
所以就跟同學跑去修這個
整個課就是真的幫一個遊戲製作音效
我們得要去買Unreal Tournament 3
然後用裡面的map editor
抽換所有武器車輛以及背景音效之類的
我還不是很確定要怎麼用

剛好我這次從台灣帶回來一本算是杜篤之的傳記
杜篤之可以說是所有台灣電影的音效之父
幾乎所有台灣甚至香港大陸的電影
都是由他負責錄音以及音效的部份
看到他從到處去收集聲音的材料
然後在那個還沒有電腦的年代要如何配聲音
或是解決同步錄音的問題
這個聲音的東西真是學問很大
很羨慕他可以跟所有這些有名的導演合作 (王家衛 蔡明亮 侯孝賢)

就覺得如果可以透過這門課稍微一窺音效的世界
會很有趣

We will see.

Music Hack Day at Boston

Last weekend I went to this music hack day in Boston locating in NERD (microsoft New England Research and Development center) close to MIT right across the Charles River. Absolutely beautiful place to work.

Attended several talks which the topics are basically those start-ups who would like people to use their APIs to build stuff. Anyway, pp and I tried Echonest's API's which have two major functions. One is to analyze music using signal processing and machine learning techniques (similar to what I am doing) and the other is text searching for all music related metadata including blogs, comments, etc.

What we did? We took pp's musicpainter which is a graphical collaborative composing interface and align the canvas grid with any music using Echonest's APIs to get tempo, beats and key. Then one can play or compose along with the music you like. (sort of) It is been great fun working with pp. I had a good time there. Lots of free food in the office and delicious home made dishes at pp's. So warm!

Hard to define

The definition or I should say the composition of music is the interaction between silence and sound, just like an image consists of light and shadow...

Envisioning Information

Recently skimmed through this book "Envisioning Information" written by Edward R. Tufte. Though it is published in 1990, the concept of visualization is kinda useful.

I did not read closely page by page, basically I just look at the graphs and try to get the idea of what he is trying to explain. Not bad! Below I would like to list the chapter titles of this book, which are the main concept of thinking about visualization I think.

Micro/Macro Readings
Layering and Separation
Small Multiples
Color and Information
Narratives of Space and Time

Definitely I will come back and read through the whole book in detail. But for now I just wanna get some idea whirling in my head when I am searching for ideas.

Remembering names

I know that social ability is very crucial here and I am trying to develop is little by little. Recently I found that there are some name issues hard to deal with.

Of course you need to remember one's name before any social ability to be repeated. For me it is always the case: "Hey my name is xxx." "Nice to meet you!" This is usually the starting point and I usually do not get the name at the first place unless it is very common one (especially in US there are so many weird name including mine everywhere...). Rarely I asked again and try to write down and memorize but usually I just let it go and when the next time we met, it is a little bit embarrassing. I am pretty sure that the other guy feels the same because my name is definitely more difficult. This is the first and big obstacle to me then.

Anyway, trying to figure out a way to remember more names... Maybe just need to pay more attention when a name is presented...

IDEA: Music shaker

Just read a paper from ismir 2009 that several music snippets are remixed according to their tonal and tempo information. I mean, I have this idea very long time ago... But I did not do anything and now it is others' contribution. Though I am not saying I will be able to solve the question, I am just lazy and think way much more than work.

Anyway, if the technology is already there, what else can we do? Or can we go beyond this? Therefore the application idea pop out, simply an iphone app. If we can pick two songs and shake the iphone which indicates that blend/mix this two songs together in "a way". Can be if shake harder, they will blend better like phrase by phrase blend or something. And the technology required are tempo estimation as well as key detection with phase vocoder to synchronize these two attributes.

Arc diagram

This is a current project I have been working for a while. Check out Shape of Song, Martin Wattenberg created this way to visualize a song, but from midi data, which you know exactly the notes. What I did is using the similar arc diagram on real audio data, to be specific, on the feature extracted from real audio data.

From the plot, basically the structure of the song is described. The idea of this arc diagram is that when those two points are identical (highly similar) you draw an arc line to connect those two dots. So when there are repeated patterns, they will be displayed. I am still exploring different features to be used while the same time trying to figure out better way to put the information in this plot. BTW, this song is a classical piano song "Fur Elise" (aka the trash truck song in Taiwan if I did not mix match).

IDEA: Piano paint

Oh well, I know the name is kinda lame. Anyway, cause the idea is vague too. Just a quick note about an idea come up to my mind the other day.

What if we can paint by playing instrument? Try to narrow down, the first experiment will be build a system which takes the input of a keyboard as midi signal and then plot something on to the screen. I have a feeling that this is gonna be fun and a pretty cool interactive art. Though I have not put much thought to it yet.

Below are some quick memos:
Randomly pick the starting point for each music sentence. According to the note and harmony you played, different color can be chosen and the size of the stroke and touch can be related to how hard you play the keyboard (loudness). Like I can imagine that if some weird chord series are played loudly, there will be some explosive color objects appeared on the screen.

I am sure that this idea must be down by someone already. But I would love to build one too. Maybe when I have time, can start doing some literature search first (google...). And I am thinking about taking this as a chance to learn max/msp.

Visualization

Recently I am pretty into information/data visualization. The idea is to explore some ways to visualize music in different levels. Level here means from within a song level to further the whole music collection level.

So the idea for visualization is to show something human might not be able to perceive if they are described in the old ways. For example, when you are listening to music, it is harder to tell the structure of the music (verse vs chorus, how many times the chorus got repeated, so on and so forth). However, those information can be easily shown by a simple 2-D plot. This is just one application and we believe that there are much more possibilities out there for exploration. If the plot does not mean anything, at least it needs to be beautiful and pleasant to see.

Just had a meeting with my adviser who also has an engineering background and claim that he does not really know about aesthetic. Oh well, neither do I... I just started to read the book "Visualizing Data" by Ben Fry, a guy from MIT media lab who did his PhD work in "Computational Information Design" and also the co-inventor of a well known visualization sketch tool called "Processing". I do not have much to discuss about the book yet, so far I can see that the whole process of visualizing data is laid out in the book. And I have played with processing a bit, pretty friendly and intuitive programming language.

Good start though, will see how far I can go, probably will go take one to two classes about visualization and graphical design next semester in order to learn the thinking process of a designer. Looking forward to it!

The new role of this blog

I am going to add one more function to this blog here, that I would like to write down things related to my research including thoughts, idea, memos, etc. Just try to catch some transient memory and see what I can really achieve.

Music, Visualization, Machine Learning and Interaction

Well, 需要關注的領域越來越多了
這是念phD的毛病嗎?
我以為phD是要越念越專精的
只不過在我找到自己覺得很酷的研究題目之前
看的東西越來越多

只希望有一天
這些所有我看過的東西
能夠變成一個很酷炫又對人類有幫助的題目

現在對我來說
還是兩條不太有焦點的線
科技 工程 vs 音樂 藝術 設計 互動
有沒有一個道理可以把他們串起來呢

一發不可收拾
這些問題
一輩子也解不完吧

只希望可以讓自己開心

所謂的好的創作

或許就是可以歷久不衰吧
對於我
過了很久的一段時間
再回去聽某些歌曲
我還是會覺得好聽
聽到還是有想要哭的感覺

那就是我夢想中有朝一日我也能做出來的好的創作!

(這是我在聽完黃小楨的幾首歌以後的感覺)

I wonder...

anyone still comes to this place?

Bye Bye SF

這幾個月來實在太多情緒了
連續地相聚別離其實讓我有點疲憊
不知不覺因為害怕在某個時間點突然崩潰而先把自己的堤防蓋好
於是我很早就開始不想要感覺到我要走了
很努力地當作什麼都沒發生
而且其實也是這樣
沒有什麼離去的
因為已經緊密地連結了就不會分開
這是我相信著的而我也會努力去維持

前幾天回LA
Shelly問我說
"你覺得哪裡是你的家"
我說
"我也不曉得
這次回台灣開始覺得台北不是我的家了"
想說加州是我的家又覺得那我又要離開
其實也不盡然
想了想
說了
"哪裡有朋友哪裡就是我的家"

我想我真的是這樣覺得吧
流浪了幾年
早就練就了一身其實到哪裡都可以的本領
雖然我是個慢熟的人
但是因為我很宅
只要有網路的地方
我就可以活得好好的
也越來越會處理自己跟自己相處的情緒
只要感覺到我有一群好朋友
我就覺得我是幸福的
因此可以賴以維生

從LA回來以後
照常打打球
跟小家庭hang out
一直都很正常很低調
就是不喜歡感傷的場面

真的很謝謝快樂兒童餐陪我笑得半死
每天笑一笑就過去了
讓這段日子變得很輕鬆很自在

我想
physically我就是個過客吧
來來去去
但是我永遠不會離開
就像地縛靈一樣
所以你們也不用擔心
只要想到我
我就會在的

Shelly John 肇偉一家人 你們都要好好的
小家庭 我很愛你們 你們都要幸福

是的 我回來了

終於回到美國
兩個月好像讓我開始有點習慣台灣而覺得美國有點怪怪的
但是好像又不會太嚴重
所以我搞不清楚到底怎麼了

還好第一站就是到Shelly姊姊家
這個地方永遠都是那麼安全
我馬上回復我的宅男身分
(躺在沙發上抱著睡袋+電腦)
決定要好好放空一兩天順便調時差還要整理心情

這趟回台灣
真的好像做了很多事情發生很多事情的感覺
很多心情跟感覺都來不及消化就過去了
是不是有點可惜
不過所有發生過的事情
我想都會記在我的某個地方
在我孤單又很長的phD之路的某個時間
被我拿出來仔細回想吧...

我很慶幸我之所以為我
有你們的陪伴
所以我現在很開心很滿足
有很多愛我的人跟我愛的人
所以我可以繼續努力

你們都要好好的
我會一直很愛你們

Woody Woody

因為張譯仁的關係
星期一晚上跑到謝維家
他是Woody Woody的吉他手
Woody Woody是個兩把木吉他的雙吉他組合
沒有vocal
純粹木吉他finger style的呈現
另外一個人叫做仲麟

Woody Woody之湛藍海岸


謝維是張譯仁東海的同學
建築念完以後
就開始了吉他表演的生活
已經在蠻多大大小小的場地
包括河岸留言有定期的表演

跟謝維小聊了一下
然後就把吉他拿出來
我跟他就這樣jam了起來
其實我很害怕
我一向就是個說的一嘴好音樂的人
但是真的要彈要jam的時候
整個半調子沒信心

結果我們隨便亂jam一通
就還蠻好玩的
只不過時間有點短
後來仲麟來跟他開會
我就覺得留在那邊吵人好像有點不好意思
就拉著張譯仁走了
一點都還沒有過癮
等我回去練琴以後再來玩

喔 還有
我們有聽他們最新製作出來的ep
還沒有開始賣
有一種純手工製作
很純粹喜歡音樂的感覺

我也想來做ep
不過要等我把新歌都寫完

再貼上幾個Woody Woody的表演

我希望 你們都能夠幸福

噗浪

plurk出現以後
blog就真的越來越沒用了耶

我也不曉得這樣好不好
對我來說
兩個東西是完全不一樣的

但是的確沒有那麼多時間去兼顧
雖然我嘗試著要把小而零碎的碎碎念用plurk呈現
大而比較有組織的文章用blog呈現

可是還是沒有那麼多時間
而且我又不喜歡兩個地方講到重複的事情

所以
誰知道接下來會怎麼樣

不過最近是有點開始討厭plurk了
我可能真的天性反骨吧
當越來越多人開始用一個東西的時候
我就會開始討厭他...