Sound as Pure Form (sapf) – a new sound language

I have just come across the sapf (Sound as Pure Form) language (github source) from the creator of SuperCollider. I am currently looking through some of documentation and videos before diving in and exploring it properly.

However, the examples are intriguing enough to want to investigate further and see where it might all go. More intriguing, well to me , is the link between the language, its influences, and various concepts.

Other sapf links:

pulusound: first look at sapf: https://www.youtube.com/live/jN5Ij3Cazh8

pulusound: sequencing in sapf: https://www.youtube.com/live/V2oRfXulHio

June 26, 2025 – 10:43 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in algorithms, Programming, sonification | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Common Circuits

I heard about Luis Felipe R. Murillo’s Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures (Stanford University Press, 2025) on a Digital Labour list. I wasn’t able to attend the advertised talk but did pick up the book and read on the flight to Lisbon for a conference. I have become slightly wary of Hackerspace books either […]

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June 24, 2025 – 5:27 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in projects, sonification | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Illusions of the Thinking Machine

I read Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip last week as I am interested in the history of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). I did find it frustrating in that it is another great Silicon Valley man history, which is a tired trope really, but interesting in what […]

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May 9, 2025 – 10:36 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in Programming | Tagged | Comments (0)

Archiving Sites

One job that I have been taking on over the last few weeks is archiving some old project sites using a CMS. We tend to render a copy into static HTML to keep them alive, but no longer updateable. Normally, I would use wget -r <site here> to flatten the site. Occasionally the –no-check-certificate option […]

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April 11, 2025 – 11:33 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in algorithms, Information Retrieval | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Off to Lisbon

I had the fortune of getting a paper accepted for this year’s Digital Humanities conference, which will be in Lisbon. I will be talking about computational audible infrastructures as extension of Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier’s audible infrastructures. I will follow this up by talking at the MoCREN event that is straight afterwards. I will […]

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March 11, 2025 – 7:22 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in projects | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Baudot Code and Signals

I was recently playing around with an Arduino and Baltic Lab’s Baudot Code for a quick experiment. I do want to continue doing some work on this to understand some of the issues in Strachey’s code for the Manchester Machine as in David Link’s article on God Save the Queen in Computer Resurrection #76. I […]

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January 29, 2025 – 5:59 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Programming, projects, Software Engineering, sonification | Comments (0)

Playlists, Bots, and Hollowing Out

I have been reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria / One Signal Publishers, 2025), which is an interesting trip into the work of Spotify playlists. I got it on a hunch and it plays out very well against the previous Spotify book that I […]

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January 19, 2025 – 5:12 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in algorithms | Tagged | Comments (0)

You have not Read Your Favourite Book about Your Favourite Song

I was reading You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song (McDonald, 2024) today while doing some initial research for an overview paper. I had high hopes for it, but found that it was very one dimensional. Questions about culture and algorithms are largely pushed to one side and limited to a few things with […]

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January 9, 2025 – 6:04 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in algorithms | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Go at Your Own Pace and Be Social?

I was recently re-reading Paula Bialski’s Middle Tech (Bialski, 2024), an ethnographic account of her time at a German software company that explores culture of Good Enough in software. It is an engaging book that seemingly moves against the Move Fast and Break Things culture, but I am wondering if it holds water there as […]

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January 9, 2025 – 5:37 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in algorithms, Software Engineering | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Porosity, Computation, and the City

David Berry’s Stunlaw blog has a series of interesting posts that are building to something very useful as well as through provoking. The one that I want to focus is the recent one on Porosity and Computation. The term porosity comes from the Naples essay by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (Benjamin and L?cis, 1925) […]

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December 30, 2024 – 6:03 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in algorithms, Software Engineering | Tagged , , | Comments (0)