I write letters

Dear Honorable Senator,

I am writing to encourage you to protect meaningful health care reform by protecting the public option and women's access to reproductive health services. In order to be meaningful, the public option must be available to everyone, even if their employers offer health insurance. I would chose government-run health care and would like the right to do so no matter what my employment situation.

I'm alarmed about the abortion amendment tacked on to the house version of the bill. I hope that the senate is able to protect women's rights to access abortion.

Thank you for your leadership on health issues.

Sincerely,
C Hutchins

• http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe
• https://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm

TuningLib

Yesterday, I added a new Quark to Supercollider, called TuningLib. It requires a recent version of MathLib, one with the Bessel.sc file included. There are several classes in the new Quark, all realted to tuning.

Stuff from Jascha

Scala - This class is based on the SCL class from Jascha Narveson, but updated so it's a subclass of the newer Tuning class. It opens Scala Files, which means you can use the large and interesting scala file library of thousands of tunings.

Key - Jascha's SCL file also did a bunch of other interesting tuning-related things that the newer Tuning class does not, so I put these features in Key. It tracks your key changes and can interpolate between a given frequency or tuning ratio and the current active Scale.

Dissonance Curves

DissonanceCurve - is, I think, the most interesting part of the TuningLib. It generates Tunings, on the fly, for a given timbre. Give it your spectrum as lists of frequencies and amplitudes, or as a FFT buffer or as the specs for an FM tone, and it makes two different scales.

The first kind of scale it makes is the sort described by Bill Sethares. If you want to see the generated curve, you can plot it. Or you can get a Tuning from it. Or, you can get a scale made up of the n most consonant Tuning ratios. This is used in the second section of my piece Blakes 9

The other sort of tuning it does is based on a similar idea, but using the classic Just Intonation notions of consonance. Like with Sethares' algorithm, every partial of a timbre's spectrum is compared against every partial of the proposed tuning. It calculates the ratio between the frequencies. This could be 3/2, for example, or 115/114 or any whole number ratio. The numerator and denominator of that ratio are summed. In just intonation, smaller numbers are considered more consonant, so the smaller the sum, the more consonant the ratio. (This sum is related to Clarence Barlow's ideas of 'digestibility.') Then, the resultant sum is scaled by the amplitude of the quieter of the two partials. So if they are 3/2 and one has an amplitude of 0.2 and the other of 0.1, the result will be 0.5 ( = (3 + 2) * 0.1). This process repeats for every partial, and the results for each are summed, giving the level of dissonance (or digestibility) of the proposed tuning.

After computing the relative dissonance of all 1200 possible tunings in an octave, the next step is to figure out which ones to select as members of a scale. For this, the algorithm uses a moving window of n potential tunings. For a given tuning, if it is the most consonant of the n/2 tunings below it and the n/2 tunings above it, then it gets added to the Tuning returned by digestibleTuning.

I don't have any sound examples for this usage yet, but I'm working on some. I don't know of any pieces by anybody else using this algorithm either, but I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it. If you know of any prior work using this idea, please leave a comment.

Tuning Tables

Lattice - This is based on some tuning methods that Ellen Fullman showed me a few years ago. Based on the numbers you feed it, which should be an array of 2 and then odd numbers, it generates a tuning table. for [2, 5, 3, 7, 9], it creates:

 1/1  5/4  3/2  7/4  9/8
 8/5  1/1  6/5  7/5  9/5
 4/3  5/3  1/1  7/6  3/2
 8/7  10/7 12/7 1/1  9/7
 16/9 10/9 4/3  14/9 1/1

You can use this class to navigate around in your generated table. For otonality, adjacent fractions are horizontal neighbors, so they share a denominator. For utonality, neighbors are on the vertical axis, so they have the same numerator. Three neighboring ratios make up a triad. You can walk around the table, so that you're playing a triad, and then pick a member f that triad to be a pivot. Then, create a new triad on the other axis that contains your pivot as one of the members.

For example, one possible walk around the table, starting at 0,0 would be [1/1, 5/4, 3/2], [5/4, 1/1, 5/3], [3/2, 4/3, 5/3], [8/5, 4/3, 8/7], [8/7, 9/7, 1/1] etc. As you can (hopefully) see, the table wraps around at the edges.

I've done several pieces using this class, usually initializing it with odd numbers up to 21. Two examples are Beep and Bell Tolls

Undocumented

There is also a class FMSpectrum that will compute the spectrum for a FM tone if given the carrier frequency, the modulation frequency and depth (in Hz). I would like to also add in a class to calculate the spectrum of phase-modulated signals, but I don't have the formula for this. If you know it (or where to find it), leave a comment!

Gay Marriage Fails in Maine

"If you put it up to the vote of the people, we'd have slavery again." --Jesse Ventura on CNN, 11/3/2009

I don't much care for Ventura, but he has a point here. Most civil rights protections in the states have been expanded via case law, not by the ballot box. In fact, I think the whole concept of civil rights is at odds with voting on them. The idea is to protect minorities from majorities. When we say something is a civil right, we take an abstraction of principles that we mostly all agree on and then apply them to the specific. Most Americans think freedom of religion is a pretty good idea, so that must also apply to Mormons and Muslims and Pagans. Our agreed-upon principles lead us to protect actions and people who would not necessarily receive such protections if things were put up for a vote.

Interracial marriage became legal with the court case Loving v Virginia, decided by the Supreme Court. This decision was not popular, but it wasn't unpopular enough to amend the Constitution over. If it had been put up for a vote even five years after it became law, it would not have passed. Honestly, I would be worried about what people would vote on this even now. In that decision, the court found that marriage was a fundamental right, something I think we all agree upon. And we're all supposed to be equal under the law. And there's not a compelling state interest to keep people of different races from marrying. Therefore, it must be allowed.

The SCOTUS needs to rule on gay marriage. This is not a battle that's going to be won by voting. It needs to be a combination of activism and case law. That winning combination is what desegregated buses and then later protected our speech. March and sue!

Eventually, gay rights will be a settled question, but right now, it's still legal to discriminate in several states and on a federal level. We don't have ENDA (nor have we been added to the Civil Right Act, which would give us full protections. Even after we have ENDA, we won't be done.). We can't serve openly in the military. Hate crime legislation is less than a month old. It's not surprising that people feel comfortable discriminating against us in the ballot box, when they're fully allowed to in other contexts. Indeed, these other contexts are somewhat more vital for many LGBT people. I'm certainly in favor of Same Sex Marriage, but even more, I'm in favor of not being fired from a job for being trans.

I think there's more resources going towards marriage right now, and that might be because people who have enough resources to pay for political campaigns are not worried about losing their jobs. There are people who are still in the closet at work, who are afraid to come out or to transition. If they get fired for being LGBT, they have no recourse and they can kiss their health insurance goodbye. A legally recognized marriage is not the top agenda for people in that situation and I don't know if it should be top agenda for the LGBT community in general. Let's pass the gender-inclusive ENDA, make it clear that discrimination being wrong is a matter of law and then sue for marriage. Or hell, let's sue to get rid of having legal sexes at all, then we'll get marriage by default.

Terre Thaemlitz says

When I look at members of the transsexual community who are actively seeking out physical alteration of their bodies... on the one hand, of course, I have this anti-essentialist reaction against it - that it’s about transforming bodies towards something that is, in the end, I think, conservative. But on the other hand, I do have this envy of their body transformations, which I feel are beyond my capacity. And part of that is because of the mythology in the media about the beautiful, successful transsexual. Because that’s who you see in the media. You don’t see the people who got totally fucked up, and look totally fucked up - which I would say are the majority.

-- The Laurence Rassel Show "On Transgendered Authorship"

Terre Thaemlitz thinks that "the majority" of transsexuals "look totally fucked up." And published an mp3 saying so. Why should we care what this Julie Bindel-wannabe thinks about trans people? Because Thaemlitz is one of two serious composers that I know of who are out as trans.

Yes, he says, "I'm a transgendered identified male (both my transgenderism and maleness are documented in different public spheres)" (http://www.chaindlk.com/interviews/index.php?interview=TerreThaemlitz) No, that doesn't mean that he's ftm. He's a very subversive guy who dresses up like a woman sometimes in order to fight patriarchy. Or something. I'm not being terribly respectful of his identity in that description, but I'm afraid I'm infuriated by his failure to respect mine.

And terribly, terribly disappointed. I wrote about this guy in MA thesis and thought he was awesome, especially since he was not only out as trans, but tackling trans issues head-on through his work. He would show up to very technology-based music institutions in Germany and give lectures that were full of gender theory. He, like me, wants cis people to have to think about gender sometimes and how it's constructed. Heck, the purpose of this project I've quoted from is purportedly, to "[deal] with issues of authorship and copy-left from feminist and transgendered perspectives." (Ibid) But for him, despite using a plural form on "perspectives," I guess there's only one legitimate gender position and that's his. People who transitioning are "reactionarily conservative," passive victims of the "medical industry" He says, "The transsexual community that focuses on transitioning the body . . . in the end, it's capitulatory." ("On Transgendered Authorship")

He says, authoritatively, as a cissexual,

For me, transgenderism arises out of the problem of not fitting in. and it comes out of those crisis - not only a gender crisis, but a larger crisis of social relations. It's not so much a crisis of the body, which Gender Identity Disorder and the medical industry want to present it as being about.

(Ibid)

It's really great for him that he's never experienced dysphoria. But he goes from "I've never experienced dysphoria," to "therefore it must not exist." Well, a lot of men have never experienced any kind of trans identity. So if bloke A has never experienced wanting to cross dress, does that mean that it also doesn't exist as a valid perspective?

A big part of Thamelitz's problem is that he sees trans a a radikewl thing to do. A way to challenge patriarchy. Alas for him, my goal is not to "[indtroduce] a new breed of masculinity into the male workplace, into the male social structure." (ibid) Heck, I don't think my masculinity is especially new or in any way subversive. Indeed, I object even to the idea of "the male workplace." Alas, the gender balance of some workplaces is not ideal, but I can't imagine terming any place the male workplace. What kind of feminism and transgenderism in this, pushed forward by a male-identified man? I'm starting to think he doesn't actually understand what these words mean.

The piece I really loved from him before dealt with problems faced by intersexed people, who were often forced into surgery as babies, which was treated as an emergency when it was not at all life-threatening, just a social crisis. But now I fear he doesn't see IS people as people, just as symbols of non-gender essentialism. Living examples to prove his theory. The ultimate gender queers. And I wonder why he feels like he has to exploit trans identities and IS identities to prove his point.

This is profoundly disappointing and an example of how divisions can be sewn among trans people. If there are multiple perspectives, one of them must be wrong, because I can be the only right one. And in his case, it's not enough that he be the only true transperson, he has to fall into a load of transphobic, sexist, and transmysoginist language. Does he really think he isn't just repeating a tired old trope when he says that transwomen are ugly? Trust me, this idea has been well circulated previously. It's tiresome, untrue and sexist as hell. Judging women by their appearance is not feminist. Maybe the reason the German government backed out of broadcasting this is not because feminism is not "sexy" (http://www.chaindlk.com/interviews/index.php?interview=TerreThaemlitz) but because he's failing at it.

Terre Thaemlitz, I used to think you were cool.

Who's Streets?

I found a call for recordings for a politically themed musical thing, which always makes me happy because this sort of thing motivates me a lot. It's got an item for consideration, "How do we view the fact that our instruments for organising sounds are linked to instruments designed to control? Is there a relationship between organising and controlling?" (the whole thing is at http://www.sonoscop.net/pop-up/convzepp09ENG.html)

So I was thinking I could use some recordings I made of people chanting at the G20 protests in London and then juxtapose that with recordings of military chants that I could steal from YouTube.

And I am astounded, perplexed and unnerved that pretty much, crowds watching troop drills sound exactly like crowds at protests with chanting. I would not be able to listen to a recording and know if I'm watching an implicitly normative crowd cheering for marching at a football game or a bunch of leftists out to reclaim the streets. (I mean, the words are different, but playing recordings for a non-english speaking audience looses that signifier.)

This is kind of worrying because it suggests that there's not so much difference between how these positions are articulated or perhaps even between the positions themselves as they manifest in a public space.

Which manifestations are empowering and which are alarming would only seem to have to do with whether your own advantage is the one being promoted. Of course, I think there's more to it than that. Are we supporting the rights of people who already have power or people who do not? But this suggests that both positions might fill the same needs for observers and participants. And somehow that's disturbing me. Maybe people are more empowered by being reactionary. How can we reach out to them in that case?

Speaking of protests, there's one today about biofuels and I don't know whether or not I want to go. Burning acres of rainforest to grow soybeans for fuel has a worse carbon footprint than burning a whole lot of petrol. Is there a role for non-waste oil biodiesel in a green, sustainable model for fuel? I don't know. I really believed in biodiesel.