Tracks: the lisping Vampire

[mdlbear]

Only worked on one track this evening, but it was a fun one: "Vampire Megabyte". You see, it has this line: "...and the modem beeped and twittered as the mainframe lost its mind..." -- and it really wanted a suitable sound effect.

Turns out Audacity plugins are written in this Lisp-based language called Nyquist. "Aha!", says I to myself, says I. "I can play that game..."

It's been a while since I wrote any serious Lisp beyond the occasional Emacs tweak. But it all comes back.

It took about three hours. No loops -- it was all done with map functions and recursion, in proper Lispish style. Hey, when I was a boy...

I ended up doing some serious kludging to make up for being too lazy to figure out how to string a sequence of sounds together as an actual composition (Nyquist is rather csound-like in the way it builds music out of sound generators), eventually settling for writing each bit to a file and appending them with cat.

I didn't use actual modem tones. What I used was a variant on the Kansas City Standard for recording data on audio cassettes, only using 261Hz and 1046Hz (C4 and C6) instead of 1200Hz and 2400Hz. It works out to about 65 baud, which is all you could expect out of a drum-based computer anyway. But the song's in the key of Am, you see. And the drum is spinning at 440Hz. Running on avionics current, you see.

[lyrics] [ogg] [mp3]. [code]

In other album-related news, I spent some time consolidating my customer data someplace where it can be backed up safely, in an encrypted form, offsite. I hope to finally get around to sending emails sometime early this week. (\me grovels contritely) I am now very close to having something I can send to Oasis, though it's probably going to be the week after Westercon at the rate I'm going.