Loosely inspired by how much people seemed to enjoy a similar question I asked on Games about unappreciated titles. But answers don’t have to be media related (they still can be though).
Sound engineering. Most people think sound is somehow sine waves and that’s it. And well, that’s technically correct on some level, but you can layer sound waves on top of each other to create triangle waves or square waves or what specific instruments happen to sound like:
SourceAnd well, these aspects have implications. Like with an oboe, even the basic waveform is quite interesting, so it’s excellent for solos.
On the other hand, with a more boring sound, like a sine wave, you can do relatively wild things in terms of melody or combining them into intervals, and listeners won’t feel overwhelmed as quickly.And then you’ve got the fun field of drums. You can often just take white noise (or pink noise etc.) and just make its volume drop off rapidly and that already sounds similar to a drum.
Which is again interesting on the boring/interesting spectrum. That noise signal adds a short moment of chaos into the mix. But then we often make drums play quite structured rhythms to entertain a different boring/interesting spectrum over time.I love sound engineering and design as a whole. Music production was what got me into it. It’s still mind boggling to me how much you can do with a simple sine wave and process it into essentially unlimited amounts of various sounds.
I never knew a thing about music theory, synthesizers, drum machines, etc. Almost 7 years down this path and I’m still learning as I go and just as curious as when I first started.
Seeing different instruments through an oscilloscope or watching the different frequencies dance as a whole on an EQ plugin is my favorite.
The thing for me is, I did already know large chunks of music theory before getting into sound design, but traditional music theory doesn’t concern itself with waveforms.
So, I know that a fourth interval sounds spiritual or that a triad in the base key sounds like ‘home’, i.e. you probably don’t want to return there fully, unless you’re concluding the journey / music piece.
But like, these are two completely random, basic examples and I don’t know what the waveforms look like for them. Whether there’s anything in the waveforms that correlates with that perception.So, it feels like I learned most of the chemistry without any of the physics. And that I do now need to learn the physics to discover more of the chemistry. That there’s potentially even quite large chunks of uncharted territory for music theory, because everyone’s so obsessed with chemistry. Will have to see, if I’ll discover as grand things as I’m hoping for.
This is interesting! How can I get into this? Do I have to invest in some equipment or can I just use software to create sounds?
No idea, if there is any guided path into this. Much like the other commenter stumbled into it via music production, I stumbled into it via composing.
Personally, I’ve mostly dicked around with SurgeXT and MilkyTracker.
SurgeXT is a so-called VST plugin for use in digital audio workstations (DAWs), which is what the big boys & gals use to make electronic music. But it can also be started standalone, as just a digital instrument. And then you can type on your computer keyboard to play your sound like on a piano. SurgeXT is powerful, it will overwhelm you. Still does for me.
MilkyTracker presents an old-school way of making complete songs, generally 8- or 16-bit songs.
It’s quite reduced in its features, which makes it a lot less daunting, and does allow playing around with waveforms for instruments rather directly.Honestly, I don’t think, you can really make a wrong start into this field. Lots of modulation methods have been around since the 70s and 80s, which you’ll find in basically any music software.
Try to find something that’s fun to you, to do with those sounds, so you keep coming back to try out new things.For example, I’m a musician, so somedays I do just jam out to myself.
But working towards a little 8-bit song and just trying to create pseudo-instruments is also cool.If you do have fun with it, you can splurge on hardware, like good headphones and a MIDI keyboard, but you don’t need those to get into it.
Thank you!
Googology. The “study” of ridiculously large numbers. It’s a rabbit hole of recursion and mathematics that starts with stuff like googolplex (1010100) and never really ends.
Is it not (10*10^100)?
By 1010100 I mean 10(10100), which is significantly larger than (1010)100 = 10^(10*100).
But isn’t that googolplex? If it’s not, I’m so sorry lol
Yes, 1010100 is equal to a googolplex.
Sorry, I read it initially as googol
I feel like people could benefit from what I know about Butt Stuff™.
please, go on
He would, but it’s trademarked.
NA and NULL values.
In R (programming language) they have some interesting differences. You can think of a vector as a train with many cars, and each can hold a number. Let’s say I have train with three cars and I store the number 2, 3 and 5 in them. That would be a normal well behaved vector (2, 3, 5).
I could take away one of those numbers and leave that seat vacant. It could look like this (2, NA, 5).
If I tell you to find the third number in that vector, that’s easy. It’s 5. If I tell you to find the ninth one, that just doesn’t make sense and the answer would be NULL.
So in other words, NA is a vacant seat with no number sitting in it. NULL is a place where there is no seat to begin with.
I personally think if you are writing code and you reference outside your memory space, then you should receive an error. I guess a null is already considered an error value, but I think notifying why you got a null would be great.
NA is not applicable or?
I don’t like this approachThe best thing about R is that it was written by statisticians. The worst thing about R is that it was written by statisticians.
I guess this NULL thing would be one of those cases.
NA would not be applicable, because it’s a placeholder for a missing value. In data analysis, you tend to have have lots of NA-values, and dealing with them is super common. Every function needs to be able to handle them gracefully. For instance
mean(someValues, na.rm=TRUE)would be a command for calculating the mean of a particular vector while igrnoring all NA-values. Super handy. Excel handles these missing values in a very annoying manner, but that’s a topic for another rant.NULL can be considered an error value, but obviously it’s not very helpful because it doesn’t tell you what went wrong. Obviously, R does have all sorts of error messages, but in this case it just says NULL instead. If you find that some variable has NULL in it, you can be pretty sure something went wrong and it’s most likely due to going outside the space of a particular variable. Likewise interger(0), character(0) or logical(0) are the results you get when you’re searching for something that doesn’t exist. Not really my favorite type of error.
Theology. I’ve read so many religious texts from all sorts of religions and while many people might discuss the organizations of religion a lot, or make fun of religious people, I rarely get to talk about the belief systems and their cultural relevance to various peoples both now and in the past or even discuss the possibilities of God and what God may be if one existed. I don’t study for the belief itself, I personally am an atheist; but knowing these belief systems helps understand people a bit better. Plus some of them are actually full of kick ass stories. Hindu is insane with space battles and shit.
I’m also an atheist who’s read most of the major religious texts, and you’re right, this is the best way to read them. If I’d sat there going, Ha ha, this is all very illogical, I can prove this didn’t happen… well, I wouldn’t have had a lot of fun!
I love the bit early in the Mahabharata where two brothers keep fighting and causing chaos. Eventually the gods get annoyed at them and turn one of them into a turtle and the other into an elephant. BUT! They find a shallow lake, so that they can keep fighting, but that causes loads of flooding, so then another god (who’s a bird) comes and picks them up and puts them in a giant tree.
Absolute classic, pure mad mythology.
Are you telling me a bird picked up an elephant? That’s preposterous!
And a giant turtle. In its other claw.
Tell me more about Hindu space battles.
As someone who grew up with those stories, I’m also curious what are considered space battles since I don’t recall any.
The Vehemas and some of the wars depicted where they used them are pretty spacey.
Asian beauty items, specifically kbeauty and jbeauty skincare. I love hearing about people’s skincare routines and new niche items, ingredients and brands. But my friends irl aren’t really into beauty (everyone i know is so pragmatic lol).
I really love beauty empties- I used to follow subreddits related to finishing beauty products, aka panning them (panning meaning hitting the metal pan at the base of powder cosmetics; panning has come to generally mean using up your products). There is something so satisfying about using up your stuff and I like vicariously experiencing it through other people. I mentioned that I was saving my empties for a few months to review which ones were worth repurchasing and my friends laughed at me, thinking I was joking.
Chess! I suck ass at it so I don’t fit in with actual chess players, and everyone I know is totally disinterested in the game. I can only fuel my love for the game by watching Gotham trash talk 1200 rated players when I know that I’m a lichess 700
Astronomy! Not astrology! No, that’s not a smudge on the lens, that’s M3, and it took me an hour to find it in this Bortle class 7 suburb with my 4.5" dob, and I’m damn proud of myself for that
Anime! No, I haven’t seen Naruto, or DBZ, and I ain’t got time for One Piece. How’s about Shinsekai Yori, Haibanei Renmei, or ACCA? Nah, nobody I know has seen those, even though we’re in our late 20s and are a bit old for shounen at this point
Hey fellow chess lover! I’m like 900 on lichess :-D
It’s such a rich game it’s incredible, and the history about it. Crazy actually.
Morrowind.
True conspiracies. Cryonics.(emergency alert system) videos. love them, don’t know anyone irl who actually like it or even know that it exists.
Zabbix
FPGAs, love the damn things. They’re circuits that you can re-program at will after they’ve been manufactured! If you build, like, a 2-input AND gate, that’s all it will ever be. It can only take in 2 inputs and AND them together. But with an FPGA, they’re manufactured to be versatile; you “program” the circuit you want to achieve onto the chip, and it will achieve that functionality! You can make a 2-input AND gate, slap it onto a bread board, and have yourself that nifty little AND gate, but if you later decide you wanted it to be a NAND gate, just reprogram the chip and like magic, what was once an AND gate is now a NAND gate. They’re great!
I wanted to get into FPGAs when I was making some custom boards with MCUs but I really had a hard time finding a good idea for a starter project with them. How did you get started? Any recommendations?
The “print hello world” equivalent of FPGAs is to make an LED blink. That teaches you how to use an FPGA’s clock, divide it down to a frequency the human eye can actually see, and route it out to a pin (the LED on your board). Then you can experiment with your catalog of digital circuit building blocks using buttons, switches, LEDs, and 7-segment displays. You can make your own custom logic of ANDs and ORs to display different logic.
Some super beginner projects I found fun back in college:
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Create a counter, and increment the counter every time you press a button. That’s the easy part. Then display the value on a 4-digit 7-segment display. It’s harder than it sounds, because you have to learn about time multiplexing! (At any one instance in time, only one digit is on, and the other three are off. Human persistence of vision makes us believe all 4 digits are being shown at once, but in reality, the system cycles through each digit, flashing one on for a few milliseconds, then turning it off and moving to the next one. Implementing this takes effort!)
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Learning Finite State Machines and then implementing your own is fun. I made a “vending machine” state machine once, where different buttons corresponded to inserting different coins, and then once a certain amount of money was put in, you could select which beverage you wanted, the machine would “vend” (an LED would flash), and then change is administered. Another fun and classic FSM is the pattern detector, where you input a series of 1s and 0s, and the machine will blink an LED if it detects a certain pattern in the sequence, say, 11010. This one is a lot harder than it sounds, because it requires a lot of thinking of the different edge cases! If I input 111, for example, the system shouldn’t be like, “well he inputted 111 but I was expecting 110…, so I’m gonna start over”, because I could input “111111010” and the pattern is there, just at the end. This one teaches you how to draw state diagrams and Mealy/Moore machines!
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Then you can get into using peripherals, like RGB LEDs, gyroscopes, graphics on a screen, ethernet connections, etc. You just need to learn the protocols and follow the correct logic in your own logic. It’s a lot of copy and pasting at first, but if you put in the effort to understand what you’re copying, you’ll pick up on it fast.
Really, the world’s your oyster, all you need is a development kit and a program that will synthesize/place&route your Verilog or VHDL.
And if you’d like to start at the very, very beginning, HDLBits is an amazing resource to learn Verilog: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page
Let me know if I can ever be of any assistance :)
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Obscure 80s and 90s hip hop records that very few people have heard of because they sold less than a couple hundred thousand records, some much less
Classic black and white films and TV shows. No one I know in real life enjoys these.
Can you give us some examples of both? Some that you think we will find obscure and some that you yourself find obscure?
This is copied from my reply to another person here.
Most of the music is on Soulseek.
MC Rell is rapper from the late 80s that dropped a pretty good album, very few people have heard of him.
The Lootpack is a 90s hip hop group from LA that was good but for some reason it never caught on, I don’t know anyone else who’s heard their album.
The older films I like aren’t really that obscure, I just don’t know any film nerds in real life. I’m a big fan of the Preston Sturges comedy films, film nerds know them but no one I know in real life watches old movies.
Have Gun, Will Travel is one of my favorite western TV shows. It’s kind of stuck around but, not like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners did.
There was a series of b movies about a detective called The Falcon. They were kind of a mix of The Thin Man films and the Sam Spade films.
They were lots of fun to watch but I don’t know anyone else who’s seen them.
Ah, I love Preston Sturges. I guess I’m lucky to know a few film and TV nerds in real life. ETA: The Lady Eve is one of my favorite movies. (When I’m asked what my favorite movies are, I say that and I Know Where I’m Going by Powell and Pressburger.)
I’ve seen The Lady Eve a few times over the years but not in a while. TCM used to do Preston Sturges marathons every year or so.
I have never seen I Know Where I’m going but the entry on Wikipedia makes it seem interesting.
Please check it out. I’ve seen it many times over the years, eventually owning a couple of copies. It’s magical. P&P made some really great films - Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes really stand out.
You should digitalise those and share them (I mean it would be very cool if you did!), I’m sure lots of people would like it, they just haven’t got the time/energy/possibility to find those kind of things.
I’d be interested for example :-)
Most of the music is on Soulseek.
MC Rell is rapper from the late 80s that dropped a pretty good album, very few people have heard of him.
The Lootpack is a 90s hip hop group from LA that was good but for some reason it never caught on, I don’t know anyone else who’s heard their album.
The older films I like aren’t really that obscure, I just don’t know any film nerds in real life. I’m a big fan of the Preston Sturges comedy films, film nerds know them but no one I know in real life watches old movies.
Have Gun, Will Travel is one of my favorite western TV shows. It’s kind of stuck around but, not like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners did.
There was a series of b movies about a detective called The Falcon. They were kind of a mix of The Thin Man films and the Sam Spade films.
They were lots of fun to watch but I don’t know anyone else who’s seen them.
Took some time but I’m enjoying lootpack right now, very nice!
