We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake—like putting a fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door.

–Marvin Minsky (The Society of Mind)

Music in Search of AI & Marvin Minsky

Some­time dur­ing the ‘90s I decided to set Mar­vin Minsky’s The Soci­ety of Mind to music. I did. This is not that piece.

What this piece is, is music I wrote while search­ing for Minsky’s The Soci­ety of Mind. You see, dur­ing the early to mid-‘90s you couldn’t just hop on over to your near­est com­put­ery device and order every book that had ever existed and have it deliv­ered in two days for free while watch­ing the lat­est episode of some TV show or some­thing. You had to work to find books. Read More →

12 May 2013 – 3:54 PM | By David Bellows | Posted in Music | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Alot of Arguments About BCE/CE v. BC/AD

Up till now you’ve only been given two issues of style in a post. But not no longer! Today you get three! But they’re kind of short. Two are pretty con­tro­ver­sial and one is just plain sexy. As usual you can get the entire style guide up to this point by a-clickin’ this link here. …

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6 May 2013 – 3:36 PM | By David Bellows | Posted in Style guide | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Music for Gertrude Stein’s “A Birthday Book”

Like many a young per­son engaged in the pur­suit of music, I became enthralled with the poetry of Gertrude Stein. Actu­ally that may not be so com­mon an occur­rence. What­ever, it should be or maybe at least could be? In any case I was. For­tu­nately I lived near a library at that time, a col­lege library. …

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29 April 2013 – 8:43 AM | By David Bellows | Posted in Music | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

A Sci-fi Novel: First Few Pages

A sci-fi, so-called, novel you ask? Why yes indeed! Thanks for ask­ing! I am work­ing on a novel! A sciencey-fictiony one at that! It’s got stuff and mys­tery and maybe some humor and some­thing a lit­tle sad and maybe even a bit of phi­los­o­phy thrown in for good mea­sure! I’ve got like 30 pages writ­ten …

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12 April 2013 – 11:39 AM | By David Bellows | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Prelude and 3 Variations for Piano

Con­tin­u­ing from an idea in my last piece, here’s my Pre­lude and 3 Vari­a­tions. The idea is that at each moment, or musi­cal event, either new ele­ments are intro­duced or ear­lier ele­ments are copied over which then may or may not be altered (pitch, dura­tion, dynam­ics, etc.). These ele­ments then become seed mate­r­ial for future …

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9 April 2013 – 7:18 PM | By David Bellows | Posted in Music | Tagged , | Comments (0)

How Many Spaces After a Period? It’s Complicated.

Actu­ally it’s not all the com­pli­cated. The answer to how many spaces, that is, it’s more just a clever title, as you’ll see. Any­hoo, here’s the next install­ment of the Mike & Dave’s Bar Band’s Style Guide to the Eng­lish Language!

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4 April 2013 – 11:42 AM | By David Bellows | Posted in Style guide | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Semi-Automatic Colophon for LuaTex or XeTeX

The para­dox of lazi­ness is that I came to resent updat­ing the colophons man­u­ally in my projects when­ever I wanted to exper­i­ment with a new font—a task tak­ing all of 17 seconds—so I spent 12 hours devel­op­ing a method that semi-automates gen­er­at­ing the colophon.

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31 March 2013 – 1:51 PM | By David Bellows | Posted in Typography | Tagged | Comments (0)

Piano Sonata #1

Twenty years later and this piece, the Piano Sonata #1, finally gets to the see the light of day. Of all my very ear­li­est pieces this was the first one that I wrote that I didn’t get to hear till recently.

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27 March 2013 – 5:13 PM | By David Bellows | Posted in Music | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Typography on the Web

Wait, we still can’t just ren­der web­sites as pdfs and inte­grate the expe­ri­ence seam­lessly? Dang, I really thought we’d be there by now. But instead progress has been made in bring­ing the web closer to typo­graphic stan­dards. So close you can almost taste the goodness.

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24 March 2013 – 8:28 AM | By David Bellows | Posted in Typography | Tagged | Comments (0)

Suite #1 for Piano

The “Fan­ta­sia” is the fourth move­ment of the Suite #1 for Piano. It is the first piece of music I ever began writ­ing. I had just had my requite­lessed heart bro­ken and in a fit of musi­cal inspi­ra­tion started bang­ing out some hor­ri­bly dis­so­nant chords with my right hand while the left played a sad’n’depressing …

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16 March 2013 – 10:53 AM | By David Bellows | Posted in Music | Tagged , | Comments (0)