Some ramblings on mue [sic]

[lethargic_man]

Having recently moved house, I set up the other day and plugged in my Beeb and Hybrid Music System, and booted it up to have a tinkle on the ivories plastics. Previously when doing this I've been disciplined and made myself go through all the scales first, to bring my standard of playing back up from pretty awful to almost tolerable. The problem about that is that by the time I've gone through all the scales, I no longer feel like playing everything. This time I gave up halfway and had fun struggling through the Bach fughetta I impressed my piano teacher with fourteen years ago playing in one of her show-off-the-students concerts without using any music.

The following evening I fired it up again to listen to the AMPLE album "Ashes" by Michael Harbour, who would be highly embarrassed to know I was still listening to it. Harbour wrote the album aged sixteen; five years later on looking for my place in an exam in my second year at Cambridge, I noticed "Harbour M." a few places behind me. I went up to talk to him afterward, and to my horror and his mortification, I went into gushing fan mode. Why do people do that? The album's not the best piece of music in the world... but it is one of the AMPLE pieces I still listen to after all this time.

The output of the Hybrid Music System sounds pretty cheesy nowadays -- very much computer-generated (though at the time you'd have had to have paid a lot more to get a higher quality computer music system). Whilst listening it occurred to me (for the nth time) it would be nice to be able to convert the music to something modern simply so it can sound better. (Robin Terry has converted AMPLE for Risc OS, however I don't have a Risc PC, and it still sounds somewhat computer-generated IMO.) A few years ago I copied everything I still had on 5.25" disks, including my collection of AMPLE pieces, onto CD-ROM, so I can get to the programs from my PC. Now it occurred to me to wonder whether the programs were tokenised or in plaintext; so I moved my hands from my Beeb's keyboard to that of my laptop -- and the gears of my brain promptly completely jammed up. I'd started to type "rise12" LOAD SHOW, and my brain had to fight past such alternatives as *TY. rise12 before I finally got it back into Linux gear and was able to come up with less rise12.

(And the upshot of the story: The AMPLE is is tokenised, so the files I have are useless to me unless I (a) painstakingly transfer them across again in plaintext, (b) write a detokeniser of my own (working out how to do so in the first place), or (c) get a Beeb emulator for luminiferous. However, it's not the end of the world as I wasn't particularly planning to do anything with them now anyway.)

Comments

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Wow -- I had one of those things, many many moons ago.

And there's also my one claim to pseudofame -- engineering the B-side of Erasure's Chains of Love 12" and CD single, during which Vince Clark wrote the whole piece on a BBC Model B based sequencer. :-)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Wow -- I had one of those things, many many moons ago.

My Music 500 (music-generating hardware) and Music 4000 (keyboard) were Barmitzvah presents from my parents. (The Music 4000 was supposed to be released shortly after my barmitzvah (March 1986), but I ended up having to wait over four hundred days for it.) The Beeb (actually a Master) I'm running them with was the last of Heriot Watt University (http://www.hw.ac.uk) Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering (http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/)'s eight-bit machines, which I caught on the way to the skip in 1997, equipped with my father's defunct Model B's original 1984 vintage (though increasingly flaky) Torch Z80 disk drives (minus the Z80 processor, which is hanging on a nail in the wall in my father's study).

And there's also my one claim to pseudofame --

Sarah, you have so many claims to coolness you don't need any pseudofame to wow your friends. :o)

engineering the B-side of Erasure's Chains of Love 12" and CD single, during which Vince Clark wrote the whole piece on a BBC Model B based sequencer. :-)

Cool. It's amazing the professional jobs that were done at the time with BBC Micros. (Remember also the graphics on The Adventure Game on BBC Two?)