sonic surrounds

a conceptual sketch of a post in progress …
- so as to plot the ideas in minimal time so they can be joined further in the future… more or less.
- in which you the reader put together the story by following the links, watching the videos therein, and having your own mind blown at the 1960s’ 20/20 vision of the computing present and imagine your own future of computing…. (ok, so it is 3am as i write this)

the tour will take you from Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (and the magnificent phd thesis that inspired this post) through the mother of all demos, via Alan Kay’s incredible 1987 talk hosted on archive.org (see the thumbnails), or the separated sections of a 2003 version of the talk documented by lisa rein.

from a demonstration of some flow chart software using the Rand Tablet input system (drawing process blocks - an early version of the patcher paradigm that brings us Pd and Max/MSP) - a point that’s apparently little appreciated in responses to this presentation, though Alan himself says of it: “For the first time I felt like I was touching the information structures.”

to the “once and future” smalltalk programming language (inspired by sketchpad and simula)… used by young teenagers to write animation software in a page or two of code in Kay’s 1987 video mentioned above.

[and a diversion to livecoding, often done in the smalltalk-inspired supercollider, - see the LOSS festival happening now in Sheffield, UK. Among other video demos on the LOSS site, check out the Fluxus and Al-Jazari demo - the former a live-coding game environment in which the latter, a live-coding audio environment has been coded…]

to the present open source smalltalk squeak, from which has been developed tools such as sophie presentation software, now running on the one laptop per child.

watch out for a (not too distant?) future when millions of the world’s poorest children are live coding new visions of computing!

If a great musician plays great music but no one hears… was he really any good?

- no, that quote is not some ridiculous hubris on my part, but the question posed by an article in the Washington Post, Pearls Before Breakfast, by Gene Weingarten, in which preeminent violinist (though in my ignorance of that world i’d never heard of him), Joshua Bell performed 6 classical pieces over 43 minutes on a $3.5 meeellion dollar violin in a Washington subway station, as an experiment. Well worth a read. This via the ambisonicbootlegs mailing list.