Current Activities
I've not been very good at updating here recently so I'll bundle this up.
What I should have been doing
- Cleaning this house (it is a bloody mess).
- Tidying the garden and field (it is one big jungle).
- Finding some paid work (I am skint).
- Practicing clarinet, guitar and keyboards (I am lazy).
But I have been busy.
What I have been doing
My ADHD means sticking to a routine is rather alien to me, but aside from the above, I have been relatively good at it recently. I wake up at 7 and take my Ritalin, make a coffee, doomscroll, get out of bed around 9. I take Claudio out for two walks a day (short, it's hard work in this heat). Beer cellar with Jacopo on a Saturday night, walk up to Silvano's bar in Castiglione on a Sunday (when I have the energy).
Most mornings I have a couple of hours in the music room. This mostly amounts to practice of sorts, though I am frequently uploading a solo jam up to YouTube, over here. I'm slowly working on the not-too-difficult second album (here's the first : Attone). This will be themed - inspired by mythical medieval creatures, such as those from the Aberdeen Bestiary. So far I have done the Bonnacon and the Griffin.
Most of the rest of the day I spend at the computer. Current projects :
Research into potential earthquake prediction
This is something I've been looking anto, on and off, for a few years now. I recently decided to get back to it. There are two things which I think may make a difference : extended data (natural radio and astronomical) and recent developments in AI (transformer model, GPT-aided coding). I'm pulling seismic and radio data from Italy and Japan for model training as well as creating an avalanche-based simulator I'm hoping will be suitable for generating synthetic data. It's still early days in what is bound to be a long-term project (even if it works). Details at ELFQuake.
Generative music software
The main thrust of this has been Downspout, a set of Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) plugins. All very experimental.
I usually use Reaper DAW, but it can get a bit clunky when setting up the generative plugins. Given that I have an AI assistant to help (Codex), I thought I'd have a go at making a tool designed for this purpose from the bottom up. I already had a node & arc graph-oriented system (designed mostly for text processing) Transmissions so I used that as a reference and made Transmission.
