On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, Derek Holzer wrote:
As I said already, I'm not interested in predictability. Analog
nonlinearity is interesting to me, much more so than digital
pseudo-randomness.
I wonder what you mean by nonlinearity... it seems that there are wholly
different definitions of it. Because I wonder why you compare those two
things, and not also compare with digital nonlinearity and/or analog
pseudo-randomness.
But my main interest is in being able to maintain a live performance in
the midst of all this unpredictability.
That must take a lot of nerve... I hope that the audience can feel that
you're dealing with impredictability.
When digital stuff fails, it tends to fail catastrophically--in other
words NO SOUND. Game over.
I know what you mean. It might be because decisional processes are
inherently digital, so, naturally, decisional processes is a thing people
want to do with computers (because they can't do it with anything else),
and then decisions always have an either-or aspect to them, which excludes
gradual failing by necessity.
But if you mean hardware failures, then also yes, the large majority of
digital crashes fail catastrophically, though the weirdest non-crashing
hardware failure I have ever had was with trying to run GridFlow on a K7
computer that had a really bad heatsink. In a wave propagation simulation,
large garbage values would sometimes pop out of nowhere and replace a
small or zero value. Because the wave propagation is a feedback effect,
you'd see the computation error propagate itself as a wave across the
screen. It was interesting, but for many other reasons (occasional hard
freezes and data corruption) I had to add some extra cooling:
http://artengine.ca/matju/pics/fan.jpg
(And a few weeks later I defenestrated the whole box.)
The "errors" that I get from analog instabilities are much more
interesting than anything I've managed to predictively compute.
Ah, that's another difference that is not a basic analog-digital
difference. I play a lot with digital instabilities and I also play with
digital stabilities that I haven't tried to predict.
Top-down processes use reason to predict and produce, whereas bottom-up
processes start provoking a good source of interesting stuff and then sort
through whatever come out of it. Naturally, finding and provoking a good
source of interestingness are activities that also can benefit from reason
and intuitions and a taste of adventure, all at once. In a top-down
perspective, an error is something that you didn't want upfront, whether
in a bottom-up perspective, an error is something that you don't want
after it's done.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801
_______________________________________________
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list
UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management ->
http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
