Cory Doctorow points to John McDaid's cool story, "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," now available for a limited time at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction's website, since it's up for a Nebula Award.
I pull out the 440 fork and ping it on the ratchet. We've turned the corner of Euclid and Adelbert, a grainy Cleveland municipal theme on the earbuds. They cluster around. Most of the talented ones who make it this far do not realize just how blessed, insulated, and elevated they truly are. They have lived in a world of self-adjusting devices that never slip out of tune. Unless told to do so.
"A real sound tech needs to know how to run things — in real time — just in case the prod hardware goes down. You gotta be able to do things, precisely, but deal with changes. 'Sdiff between repeat marks and copy-paste."
"But why realtime? Whatsa crunch about that?" Unsurprisingly, this is Friction Boy; blush response pinking up his already doomed neck. Minor mistakes don't eliminate first rounders, but the pressure's only going to increase.
"Okay. Take the score for the Goldbergs. You could break that down into pure MIDI data, right? And you could record the key attack information one note at a time, then assemble it onto a timeline. And, hoc est corpus, you've got Bach."
"Arhh, that's brain-dead siff-ma propaganda."
"Is it? Don't you feel that there is some value in being able to play Variation Twenty-six in real time, doing those crossover runs from hand to hand? Is it really the same to build it synthetically? PAInos still don't quite get it. You've spent your whole life developing that skill. You tell me that's completely worthless."
Some time around 1985, John showed me an early beta version of this new hypertext app for the Macintosh called Storyspace. Hypertext was a rare enough term back then that John had to explain to me what it meant, and what it meant for the future of computing. Good to see he's still out there on the edge.
[via boing-boing]
Posted by johndanseven at January 10, 2006 12:18 PM