From a62c9c749a87332f229e439e66b28459506e46de Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Chris Korda Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2024 21:53:42 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Update polymeter_sleeve_notes.html --- news/polymeter_sleeve_notes.html | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/news/polymeter_sleeve_notes.html b/news/polymeter_sleeve_notes.html index d255201..9d9b9d5 100644 --- a/news/polymeter_sleeve_notes.html +++ b/news/polymeter_sleeve_notes.html @@ -30,7 +30,7 @@

Polymeter Sleeve Notes

In order to create this album, I had to write my own MIDI sequencer from scratch, because commercial MIDI sequencers lack the necessary degrees of freedom. My sequencer is also called Polymeter, and I started writing it in 1994. I used a relatively primitive version of it to create my earlier techno and electro releases, but the rapid evolution of computer technology made my original software hopelessly obsolete by the 21st century. Like its immediate predecessor “Akoko Ajeji,” this album was created using a much more sophisticated version of my sequencer. It took me many years to learn the programming skills I needed to modernize my sequencer, which is one reason why such a long hiatus occurred between my older and newer releases. -

I think of myself as a cyborg. The technologies I create and collaborate with are extensions of myself, in the same sense that Marshall McLuhan referred to media as extensions of man. More generally, all modern people are cyborgs. A person using a wearable vacuum has temporarily turned themselves into a vacuuming cyborg, just as a roofer nailing down a roof with a pneumatic nail gun is temporarily a roofing cyborg. Similarly, driving a car obliges you to infuse your consciousness into a machine, in order to gain increased autonomy. You and the car bring different capabilities to the union: the car provides brute force, and you provide decision-making. Car are rapidly encroaching on the decision-making, and soon won’t need us. +

I think of myself as a cyborg. The technologies I create and collaborate with are extensions of myself, in the same sense that Marshall McLuhan referred to media as extensions of man. More generally, all modern people are cyborgs. A person using a wearable vacuum has temporarily turned themselves into a vacuuming cyborg, just as a roofer nailing down a roof with a pneumatic nail gun is temporarily a roofing cyborg. Similarly, driving a car obliges you to infuse your consciousness into a machine, in order to gain increased autonomy. You and the car bring different capabilities to the union: the car provides brute force, and you provide decision-making. Cars are rapidly encroaching on the decision-making, and soon won’t need us.

Music has always co-evolved with technology. A piano is obviously a machine, as anyone who has looked inside one can recognize. Modern brass instruments require sophisticated metallurgy and couldn't have been built before the industrial revolution. Even the equal-tempered chromatic scale was revolutionary in its day. Yet today baroque music, and even renaissance music harmlessly coexist with jazz, rock and techno. Romantics will insist that there's a "natural” way to make music. I contend that piano players are cyborgs, that modern life is fundamentally unnatural, and that in order to expand our musical horizons we will increasingly use technology to access the countless hidden worlds that lie beyond the limitations of our meat.