Upcoming Poster

I am attending the Digital Music Research Network (DMRN) workshop on Tuesday to present a poster, Digging into Atlas: Engaging with Archived Code and Sound. This is initial work on the Eric Sunderland archive at Manchester, which has become a larger project than intended.

I will be running an initial tool to begin mapping the data that includes an initial move to creating Text Encoding Initiative versions of some of the documents and some very basic Linked Data. I did begin refactoring the templates as well, so I think that there are legs for future work. More once the initial presentation is over.

December 14, 2025 – 3:50 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Programming, sonification | Tagged | Comments (0)

Resonant Computing

The Resonant Computing Manifesto has been launched and has five principles: Private, Dedicated, Plural, Adaptable, and Prosocial The scale of software is a core concern , where the rough edges of a being a human can be sanded off with a tendency to the average. The manifesto suggests that AI might help in responding to […]

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December 14, 2025 – 3:34 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Programming | Comments (0)

There’s a Buzz in the Air?

I came across an Arduino being used to control sound using a Passive Infra Red Sensor and a Douk Audio to play the instrument that was picked up from an old barn. More information on Daric Gill‘s blog about building it and the challenges.

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November 29, 2025 – 6:05 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in projects, sonification | Tagged | Comments (0)

Hearing 50 years old music

As I may have mentioned, I have been working to extract a sound from the old printouts. I spent some time using OpenCV to convert some low quality images into grey scale so that I could use Tesseract on them. It did need hand correction – but I think I can see some ways of […]

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November 28, 2025 – 6:19 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge, Programming, sonification | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Text and Audio Generation and Understanding

I have recently come back to text and audio generation using a Hugging Face account with a Gradio interface. I’m not sold on Gradio, but right now it seems sane. My first use is with Stability Audio where I’ve been usng both the toolkit and the diffusion options. Last time that I used the toolkit […]

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November 26, 2025 – 11:58 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in Programming, sonification | Tagged | Comments (0)

Extracting Music Streams from Printouts

I have gone back to work on the Eric Sunderland archive. I also sent in a poster abstract to DMRN + 20 (Digital Music Research Network) with initial comments. It will become part of a talk to be given next year. A focus for this trip was to take some more photos of the printouts […]

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November 16, 2025 – 8:04 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Programming, Text Mining | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Zeehaven as a social port of call

A while ago, I was chatting to Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru about converting data. Jonathan was interested in tiny tools that I understood as a software that does one or a very few things and I was thinking about lightweight ways of converting data from Zeeschuimer into a CSV file for students. There are […]

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October 17, 2025 – 8:35 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in Information Retrieval, Open Knowledge, Programming | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Organising After Deadlines

Deadlines are finally over. Well for a bit. Two fellowships have been submitted and the one thing that links them is the challenge of communicating technical aspects of research. As a tldr; I began to really appreciate trying to find a narrative for technical research. One focussed on community and the second on a research […]

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October 10, 2025 – 3:28 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge, Programming, Software Engineering | Tagged | Comments (0)

Down with Cubicle Land

I thought that the Early Days of Agile Development GoTo podcast with James Lewis and Martin Fowler might be interesting. Indeed it was. One of the things that I really thought interesting was the breakdown of “Cubicle Land”. Recently, I have been put into an office without much contact with other colleagues, apart from the […]

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September 28, 2025 – 3:55 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Programming, Software Engineering | Comments (0)

Working through a Development Process

I have recently been writing and updating various bits of code recently. Through working on a Google Summer of Code project as a mentor, I have found that I am updating how I use repositories. Like many developers, I use varying git repositories such as Gitlab and Github among others. My first year on the […]

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September 17, 2025 – 1:59 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Programming, Software Engineering | Tagged , | Comments (0)