Video: A Laptop Like You

This is a video I made for Jonathan Coulton’s song ‘A Laptop Like You‘. It stars my trusty PowerBook G4, which I bought in early 2005, just before moving from New Zealand to Geneva. I recently replaced it with a MacBook Pro, but my PowerBook wanted to become an internet superstar before retiring, and I just can’t say no to that sweet little thing. I love the song, I love my Mac, and I have all the right props, so I knew I had to make this video.

The song in the credits is ‘When You Go‘, also by Jonathan Coulton. His song ‘Code Monkey‘ is also referred to in this video, and a few other songs directly or tangentially related to Jonathan Coulton are referenced in the Skype userlist. Bram Tant, who valiantly confronted various Vista hassles in order to pretend to be my not-really-love-interest for about 50 seconds, and then unexpectedly got a MacBook Pro on the day he filmed his part, also makes music. He hopes his new laptop will help him record songs for the Masters of Song Fu competition.

The Future Soon, Cyborg Remix

Here’s a remix I made of Jonathan Coulton’s song, ‘The Future Soon’. For much of the song, it’s identical to the original, but Jonathan’s singing is replaced by two different Mac voices at appropriate places in the song, so that he sounds more and more robotic. It starts with Alex, the most recent, and presumably most high-quality, voice. Alex sounds a bit silly singing this high; in retrospect, perhaps I should have used ‘The Future Soon in C’ instead. This changes to Trinoids, an intentionally robotic-sounding voice which has been around at least since I got my first Mac 15 years ago. Being an older voice, Trinoids sings a little out of time, so I had to do a fair bit of fiddling to get it to sing at the right speed.

Last December, Spektagulo released UltraStar files for 25 Jonathan Coulton songs. UltraStar is a karaoke game similar to SingStar, and the song files for it give lyrics and the notes and timing that you’re supposed to sing them with. I pretty much immediately recognized these as a potential input for my robot choir, and soon afterwards had my robots singing along to UltraStar files reasonably well. I was still puzzled by part of the format, though, and couldn’t get UltraStar to run on my PowerBook in order to experiment with the song editor. I could get it to sing the songs recognizably, but the pauses between lines were all wrong. So I let it go for a while.

Now I have a MacBook Pro which can run both UltraStar and UltraStar deluxe, and I found some actual documentation on the UltraStar file format. I was at a LAN party last weekend, so I had the whole night to do whatever I felt like on my Mac, and this is what I felt like doing. The documentation basically told me I could ignore the extra numbers that were confusing me, but whichever way I looked at it, the pauses between lines were about twice as long as they should have been. I ended up concluding that UltraStar must interpret the timing differently when there’s no singing, and resigned myself to adjusting the timing manually. Not a problem: I had all night.

Here’s a remix I made of Jonathan Coulton’s song, ‘The Future Soon‘, with the help of my robot choir.

For much of the song, it’s identical to the original, but Jonathan’s singing is replaced by two different MacInTalk voices at appropriate places in the song, so that he sounds more and more robotic. It starts with Alex, the newest and presumably highest-quality voice. Alex sounds a bit silly singing this high; in retrospect, perhaps I should have used the version of The Future Soon that Rob Gonzo transposed into the key of C instead.

Alex then passes the mic to Trinoids, an intentionally robotic-sounding voice which has been around at least since I got my first Mac 15 years ago. Being an old-timer, Trinoids sings a little out of time (technically speaking, it’s a MacInTalk 2 voice, and doesn’t seem to fully respect the TUNE commands), so I had to do a fair bit of post-synthesis fiddling to get it to sing at the right speed. Apart from that, since many people are annoyed by the beeps in the original, I updated them to the ’90s equivalent.

Offshoots Readings

As I mentioned in my last post, Offshoots X will be launched after the workshop of the Geneva Writers’ Conference tomorrow. There will be readings from Offshoots from 17:00, and you’re welcome to come along and listen, or even come earlier for the workshop.

There will be two other readings: one at Payot from 18:00 to 20:00 on Thursday October 1, and one at BooksBooksBooks in Lausanne at 18.30 on Tuesday, November 24. I’ll be reading my poem at the Payot event. I would recommend going to all three if you can. I’m not sure if I can make it to the Lausanne one.

As I mentioned in my last post, Offshoots X will be launched at the Geneva Press Club after the workshop of the Geneva Writers’ Group tomorrow. There will be readings from Offshoots from 17:00, and you’re welcome to come along and listen, or even come earlier for the workshop or critiquing session.

There will be two other readings: one at Payot Chantepoulet from 18:00 to 20:00 on Thursday October 1, and one at BooksBooksBooks in Lausanne at 18.30 on Tuesday, November 24. I’ll be reading my poem at the Payot event, and I would recommend going to all three if you can. I’m not sure if I can make it to the Lausanne one.

Video: Coffee pavlova recipe

I am working on some more writing-related things, and I encourage people who are here for the writing to go to the launch of Offshoots X (which includes my poem, Role Reversal) after the September 19 workshop but since Writing Cards and Letters finished I also have time to play with other things, such as video.

For my birthday this year, I made my favourite dessert… a New Zealand invention called a pavlova. It’s like a giant meringue which is soft in the centre. Since my friends often ask how to make one, I filmed myself making it in time-lapse mode. I also took photographs of the ingredients, mostly in multilingual Swiss packets, which might help people looking for the ingredients in French-, German- or Italian-speaking countries. I then added music and titles to create this video recipe:

Creative Output

I’ve mentioned a few times that ‘Writing Cards and Letters’ is no longer a relevant name for this blog now that the Writing Cards and Letters project is over. Not only am I not writing about cards and letters any more, I’m also publishing other creative things I’ve done which are not necessarily writing. Perhaps the least imaginative name for what this blog will become is ‘Creative Output’, and since I had a nice idea for an image to go with that phrase, it’s the least imaginative name that I went for.

Now, I’m no graphic artist, but sometimes I can take decent photos of beautiful things, and scribble on them in ways that I like. That’s what I did today, and here is my art to represent Creative Output.

The original is 4000×2878 pixels, and has quite a bit of detail, with bits of my writing, programming and maths mixed in. I’m not sure why I made it that big when the website will only get this small version, and the software I used often ran out of memory and crashed while trying to save it. Perhaps I’m destined to print it on a poster or something.

I’d like to change the theme of this blog so that I can better integrate this image into the header, but alas, this is the only theme on wordpress.com which has variable width and a customisable header.

Two Macs singing happy birthday to the London Science Museum

A few days ago I got a shiny new MacBook Pro. I’m usually monomacous, so it’s the first time in four years that I’ve had two Macs at the same time. This had me wondering what to do with them, and one of the first ideas was to have them sing a duet. Of course, it’s easy enough to get a single Mac to sing something twice in different voices and then edit them together (as I did with You’ve gotta be happy), but with two Macs I could make a somewhat interesting video. A friend of mine suggested it would be good to do a round, and I agreed.

While I was still thinking about which round to get them to sing, I saw a link to this article, showing a video of three robots humming happy birthday to the London Science Museum. They’re a lot more sophisticated than my own ‘robot choir’, having actually learnt to sing together, but nonetheless I decided to get my Macs to sing it too. Here is the result:

It was easy enough; a short song with music available. I think I spent the most time deciding on appropriate desktop pictures for my Macs to wear on stage. The other challenge was tapping ‘Start Speaking’ at the same time on both computers. As you can hear, I didn’t quite manage it the first time around. I could have done it automatically, with a script starting it on both computers at a given time, but then the video would have been essentially two unchanging computer screens with some singing in the background. This is a ‘live’ performance, and dalrymples are obligatory.

Audio of the successful attempt will soon be available on the podcast.

Podcast: Things To Listen To

 

Things To Listen To: Not to be taken orally

I said a while ago that I’d make a podcast of the various songs and poems I’ve recorded. Well, I finally got around to working around the bugs of the podcast hosting system I planned to use, and I now have a working podcast. It’s called Things To Listen To, with each word beginning with a capital letter, because it  looked funny with one ‘To’ and one ‘to’, and it didn’t seem right to make half a phrasal verb lowercase. As the name implies, Things To Listen To is an audio-only podcast. I might create a separate video podcast later, but I will not add video to this podcast.

For now Things To Listen To has the three recordings I made during the Writing Cards and Letters project: Pretender, You’ve Gotta Be Happy, and Fork and Tongs. Let’s pretend the recording of me singing My Favourite Strings never existed, shall we? Perhaps I’ll add Code Monkey Like though.

The Writing Cards and Letters project, by the way, is what used to be known as Thing A Week. I will soon change this blog title to something more general.

The podcast will also turn into something more general. Here are some things it is likely to contain:

• Robot choir recordings of the poems from Writing Cards and Letters which have tunes.
• Robot choir covers and remixes of other people’s songs, most likely Jonathan Coulton’s because the licensing and availability of source tracks makes it easier.
• More recordings of me reading my poems and prose.
• Any recordings I manage to obtain of actual singers or voice actors performing my work. Feel free to volunteer.
• Things not covered by this list.

You can subscribe to the podcast here. If you find any technical problems with it, or even just details which could be improved, let me know. Although I’ve listened to tens of thousands of podcasts, this is the first one I’ve made, and I’m sure to have done something wrong.

Geneva Writers’ Group Readings

Yesterday was the annual evening of readings of the Geneva Writers’ Group. I really enjoyed listening to the pieces people read. You can read some of their blogs and other works if you want to know what you missed.

I also read a few poems of my own. I had the welcome problem of having written too much, and not knowing which poems to read. In the end I went with Grand Unification and Love Letters. I was a little unsure about the former, since some parts would be enjoyed more by physicists, but by the time it was my turn, a few poems about the LHC had already been read, so I decided to continue the theme. People seemed to like it.

A few people came up to me afterwards asking if they could have copies, so I pointed them to my blog. This post should make it easier for them to find those two poems.

When a poem rights a person

A while ago I asked you which Things I should submit to Offshoots, the biennial anthology of the Geneva Writers’ Group. Then, rather than deciding what to submit based on the results, I submitted the two poems which my printer had managed to print before succumbing to persistent paper jams. I guess it’s official enough now that I can announce that ɘloЯ was accepted. However, the editors thought the last line could be more interesting, and wanted a title which was unlikely to cause typographic problems. So I renamed it to ‘Role Reversal’ and changed the last stanza. This is the new version of the poem:

One ev’’ning I went to the pub for a beer
and later went home to my bed.
As I went off to sleep I was feeling quite queer,
and the world turned around in my head.

The pieces of bread dipped us humans in cheese,
the cheese made by cows from our milk.
Early worms got the birds, while they made their pongees
from our swaddling, and christened it silk.

As letters sent men they would each seal a kiss,
which itself stole a beau, what a turnoff.
And Soviet Russia was in all of this,
poking fun at our man Yakov Smirnoff.

The horses on knightback were chased by the steeple,
convinced they should set the truth free.
And wars fought in soldiers then started the people,
till their shoes walked a mile in me.

Then science was checked by remains prehistoric:
the reptiles who warmed up the air
and caused the extinction of things meteoric
while the common were sought by the rare.

At some point, I think I awoke my alarm,
but I don’t know quite when in the tale,
for certain events have a true-to-life charm,
for a man who is drunk by his ale.

I’m not sure when this volume of Offshoots will be published, but I hope you’ll all rush out to buy them when they do, and then come home disappointed because unless you live in Geneva, you’re unlikely to find any. I’ll probably send some copies to friends. I’ve read previous volumes and they’re full of interesting writing. I probably shouldn’t compliment it too much, though, since my poem is apparently just as good, and one kind of poetic conceit is enough for me.

It’s been a while since I’ve had anything published; indeed, it had been a while since I’d written anything. I plan to submit a few more of my favourite Things to various appropriate publications. I’m also working on a few other spinoffs from this project, so there should be more updates soon. This has certainly worked; I keep coming up with ideas for things to write, and then not writing them because I have no deadline.

Thing A Week Word Cloud (with Jokers)

I forgot to add the two jokers to the previous word cloud, so here’s a new one including the entire Thing A Week:

Nice to see pants make an appearance. There are many interesting word combinations in this one, but those of you who still have living brains can find them yourself. And for all you zombies out there, remember, never eyes.