The End Of The Beginning

People still bring this up to me. Yes, I remember it.

After working on the Aleator for maybe a year and a half, much of it in abstraction, I deployed my project to Unicron and started streaming Facets in the spring of 2014. At that point, I thought I was pretty far along in my endeavor to endlessly generate live music that people would actually want to listen to. Three years and several false starts later, it’s fair to say that I was way off on that assessment. Regardless, I finally have a stable solution that writes, performs and immediately broadcasts what has been described as “pretty good” music by some and met with slackjawed incredulity by others. I also have the infrastructure in place to create new instances of my environment and easily spawn new streams. It’s been a long road and it’s great to finally take a break from development.

A lot of the work I do on Staggered is late at night and/or at varying levels of sobriety. Often, I go with the easy implementation as opposed to the correct one. That led to me using while loops...what an awful idea. I can’t guess how many man hours I lost to addressing the issues it caused and ultimately changing the approach. The plugin would get trapped in one of these loops when filling the MIDI queue and basically stall out. To the listener, this meant that the song being written was never completed and the stream remained silent until it was restarted. Obviously, knowing that was a possibility didn’t make me want to draw attention to the project.

That’s all done now though. Both streams are up and running without issue, fallbacks are working as designed and I’m in a good position to promote and talk about what I’m doing. I will most likely be on a dev hiatus until the new year. In the upcoming months, I’ll be curating a series of Static Void test files on SoundCloud (while it’s still a thing) and working on an um...80s influenced mixtape that should be pretty fun. Recordings are not a focus for me, but they are the primary way that music is consumed and a tool I can use to engage with those who might not understand or care about Staggered otherwise. They are also a very fun distraction when you’ve been coding for too long.

Oh - and maybe Static Void gets another progression set or two. As always, I’ll see where it goes.