#Eilooxara expounds

[eilooxara]

Resting is a skill that you MUST develop

Like

If you can't stop ruminating on the stresses of life without an active distraction, you aren't resting

What you need to do is only pay attention to the stuff around you. Admire the view or the weave of fabric in your clothing or way the little bits of leaf move in your teacup or whatever.

Find something beautiful about whatever is there. And cultivate beauty in your environment to the extent that you are able. Then you can sit there and just appreciate it, sometimes.

That's the thing you need

And it's not easy to do! I think things are set up to keep us from doing this. Not as a like, Vast Conspiracy but as a "this doesn't make anyone rich, and when the way people live is designed by others, this is not considered important"

And the excision of ornament from the things that surround us is absolutely part of the problem. Plain, flat buildings and plain, flat furniture.

But it can't all be removed. Perhaps there's a cobweb in the corner, a loose thread in your sleeve shaped just so, a tiny plant growing in a crack.

That's a place to start

[eilooxara]

I'm tired of people who pretend categorization is inherently bad

Like sure, bad categorization is bad

But regular old categorization is actually good!

(I know this sounds like it's about gender and sexuality but it's actually about music)

Someone said "genre is fake" and they could not be more wrong

(maybe they were riffing on "gender is fake" but that's ALSO wrong, actually for the same reasons, but THIS POST IS ABOUT MUSIC)

Like yes. There exist genres that are fake. "Pop" is one. That's not a judgment about the relative quality of pop music, that's a statement about the existence of pop as a kind of music at all.

It just means popular, what's popular changes over time, many unrelated styles can be popular at the same time, there's no inherent musical similarity among the set of music that has been called pop

So why is pop music a thing? Well it's an industry category. Broadcasters and record labels care about what's pop music because it fits into their business model a certain way.

So, pop is not a real genre. Alternative rock isn't a genre for the same reason: it's a product category created to be sold to the people who don't like pop music (whatever that may be). These are inventions by corporations for selling products.

(Now, the "genre is fake" person was talking about the distinction between "country" and "Americana", which is a corner of music I know absolutely nothing about. Maybe one or both of those genres are fake. Maybe these categorizations don't tell you anything useful about the sound of the music in question. I suspect the former is absolutely fake, because I keep being surprised at what gets called "country" because none of it has anything in common with the other stuff I've heard called that.)

But most music genres are in fact real! They are based on specific characteristics shared in common among the whole set of music in that genre and, critically, each new piece of music is not created in vacuo but in response to the music that already exists, with characteristics in common with some subset of all extant music

So when new music is made it's going to belong to a genre! If I play power chords on an electric guitar with a lot of distortion and growl it's going to be metal. If I play a bodhrán and sing in 3/4 time with four measure phrases with stress on beats 1 and 3, it's an Irish jig.

"But Xara, what about when someone makes completely new music that's not like anything anyone's ever heard before?" ok well first of all that doesn't happen as much as you're implying, second if it did happen it would be dogshit, and third if it's good enough that anyone cares about it then that's just a new genre, which happens all the time anyway. Many musicians defy categorization; they combine influences and novel sounds in a way that hasn't been done before, amd if anyone cares, a new genre is born.

Like, say, death metal. What happened is that a band called Death played metal in a way that was novel and those who drew inspiration from that formed a new genre called death metal and that proliferated away from the source material as each new death metal band was riffing on the work of all previous death metal rather than just Death

SO, categories are created because they convey information! If I tell someone who knows what death metal is that a band is death metal, they're going to know it involves fast tempo, heavily distorted rhythm guitar played with a palm muting technique, a particular style of growled vocals, and frequent key changes. If it does something ELSE, like say it's also got a bodhrán and 3/4 timing in 4-measure phrases with stress on beats 1 and 3, then I can tell someone it's a death metal Irish jig.

(this is why genre labels get long)

People like to make fun of genre names that start with "post". But that label carries information (with one exception) just like any good category label does. What it means is that musicians who are very familiar with, say, rock, are creating something (post-rock) that is heavily influenced by rock but defies some central element of the genre (verse and chorus structure for example) to an extent that it can't really be called rock anymore. (or punk or hardcore or whatever we're being post of [except metal. Post-metal is actually metal inspired by post-rock, so it IS still metal. If you want a genre that's actually the post of metal, it doesn't get called that but it's whatever Anathema played since A Natural Disaster])

It's like

There's the whole "is a hot dog a sandwich" thing

And the thing is that if I tell someone who knows what a sandwich is that they're getting a sandwich, they'll know it's going to be a food that they can pick up with their hands and take a bite from, probably without getting their hands sticky, and that this is the normal and expected way to eat the food

The category contains information!!

Like sure sandwichness is fake I guess if you think that the existence of boundary cases makes a category fake, but sandwichness is a USEFUL construct that helps people convey information

If I am expecting a sandwich I'd be more satisfied with a burrito than a plate of spaghetti, and I'd be more satisfied with a plate of spaghetti than a concrete brick

Genre is not fake! Categorization is not bad! Nothing is "just a word" (except when it is, like pop music)!

As with all my rants, anyone who tries to pick a fight with me on this is getting blocked, not responded to.

[eilooxara]

Ok time for an infodump I guess

Noise Control: How To Make That Fucking Thing Stop

Perhaps you hate noise. Perhaps you have neighbors or roommates or a washing machine or whatever that, despite your suffering, persists in making noise.

In that, you are like me. But one way we may differ is that I've studied physical acoustics extensively back in grad school and I know a lot about what can be done about noise.

There are a lot of methods to control noise, but they are not all equally effective; in fact, there is a strict hierarchy of efficacy, and each tier is only worth trying if you can't meaningfully do anything in the tier before it.

Tier 1: Stop it at the source

The best way to keep a noise out of your ears is to make the noise never come into existence in the first place. It's like if you have a prophesied enemy who'll destroy you so you kill their parents before they're born. Sensible!

Stopping it at the source depends, of course, on the source.

For your squeaking and creaking noises, these come from microscopic slipping and catching of two or more solid surfaces in contact with each other. There are two ways to stop these sorts: make it EASIER for the surfaces to move against one another--no catching--or make it IMPOSSIBLE (not just more difficult) for them to move against one another--no slipping. Which is better will depend on the thing! A creaky metal bed frame might be best fixed by welding the joints to prevent any movement. If you own your home and have a creaky floorboard, you could (though it's a big project) replace flooring nails with screws, because screws will keep the boards from pulling up as they flex over time. A squeaking doorknob, hinge, etc just wants some oil. Use 3 in 1 oil rather than WD40, it's a better lubricant in most cases. If you've got a fan or something that squeals, take it apart and clean it, then lubricate the bearings.

For your thumps and bumps, the noise is caused by the rapid impact of one thing on another. The best way to stop sounds like this is to soften the impact points. I'm mostly thinking of footsteps in the floor above you--a rug or carpet, especially with a soft pad underneath, will help a lot in making those footfalls not make sound in the first place.

Traffic noise mostly comes from the tires rubbing against the road. You may have noticed that traffic noise is less when there's a soft layer of snow.

But you can't make it snow (can you? If you can, DM ME PLEASE).

Time for Tier 2: I can't stop the source, but I can block the way

Sound propagates through anything. The ones that matter most here will be air and solid structures.

What to do next depends on which it's doing.

If the sound is propagating through air--your roommate is having a party outside your door, there's somebody outside with a leaf blower and it's illegal to murder them in your area, etc., then the best thing you can do is block the path of sound. Sound is great at turning around corners, so putting a shield directly between you and the source will not help much (though it may still make a noticeable difference). You want to completely fill the space between you and the sound source: a door with a 3 inch gap lets through nearly as much sound as a door that is all the way open. If you've got a little gap at the bottom of the door or window, stuff it with something. The best gap fillers will be malleable to press and fill whatever gaps exist, and they'll be heavy, and they'll be complex in shape (more on that later). But whatever you can manage is better than open air.

Ok, so what if the sound isn't coming to you through air? Your upstairs neighbors are playing DDR and the sound is coming from your ceiling.

Unfortunately, blocking the path when the sound is propagating through a structure is much harder to do. You'd have to dismantle the ceiling/wall/etc and introduce gaps between the structure on your side and on their side. If you own your home this is possible but expensive and elaborate. If you're renting then you obviously can't.

Or perhaps the source of the sound is in open air and you want to be outside, and blocking the path would mean building some sort of elaborate dome over you or it. Impractical!

Unfortunately we're at Tier 3: stuff that sort of works

Sound can be reduced in intensity by making it turn a lot of corners or go through a lot of changes in medium. Even sound that still has a direct path to your ears can be mitigated by putting something along its route that will suck some of its energy away.

What can do that?

- complex surfaces. This is where things like acoustic foam, or fluffy fabrics, or bags of sand, or shelves full of books come in. What these all have in common is very complex geometry. When a sound wave gets inside them, it has many tiny bounces and turns and twists before it gets back out.

- heavy weight. Air is light. Not-air is comparatively heavy. Every time sound moves from a light thing to a heavy thing, it loses some energy. If the sound is in a structure, like say your ceiling, your best option is to put a heavy-ass layer in between (one that's heavier than the stuff the structure is made of). Hard to do. But it would help.

[eilooxara]

Ok so like

There's the whole thing around "unlearning cultural biases" right

Do people know how to do that??

Legit question. that's not rhetorical. Do they? Do you?

I get the impression that people believe the action of unlearning cultural biases entails "try to think things you don't believe" or something like that. Like "imagine a person who's not racist or transphobic or homophobic. What would they be thinking? Think that."

This is dumb.

I speculate that this is why people overcorrect so hard, with the like... just uncritically accepting the word of whatever person you've decided is the voice of the oppressed

Like. The actual thing you need to do is... when you think a thing, consider where that thought comes from and whether it reflects your actual values and objective reality

If you don't know enough about objective reality then like... Take some time to learn about that. Just like... regular research. There are people who'll lie to you about that stuff but you've got to learn to figure out when that's happening. Learn to discern the credibility of an information source. Think about whether they're being driven by bias themselves. Who are they, what is their group affiliation, what is their reputation, where do their assertions come from. Cause the thing is, being a good person isn't some mystery, it's just about basing your thoughts on reality.

And this is the part where listening actually comes in, because people have already done some of that work for you. Many books exist surveying decades of research about fatness and dieting and the health effects of calorie limits. Statistics about whether trans women commit sexual assault in bathrooms are not hard to find. Trans women who don't do that are even easier to find.

This doesn't mean every person will tell you the truth, it means that the truth is findable and if you are capable of thinking you'll begin to see the patterns in what things you've been told by Society™ are true and what are false

So again. Serious question. Is this new information?

[eilooxara]

I really like bells y'all

I'm pretty keen on metallurgy too

Did you know that before glass silvering was developed mirrors were made out of a polished high-tin bronze called speculum metal

It's metallurgically similar to bell metal but has an even higher tin content

Like for bronzes you have like. Your typical sword/tool/candlestick/whatever bronze of like 10% tin and 90% copper. I think bronze sculptures are somewhat lower tin, not sure exactly. Then your bell metal is like 20-25% tin, it's harder than normal bronze and slightly more brittle but won't dent when the bell clapper strikes it (or crack when the cannon fires). Then your speculum metal is like 30-35% tin, and the goal there is to make as SHINY a metal as possible without using prohibitively expensive silver and gold. Speculum metal is quite hard and brittle because of the high tin content but that actually makes it ideal for polishing; in general you can get a higher luster out of a harder metal. When making jewelry you often want to work-harden it before polishing 1) for more shine and 2) for more durability

So BELLS have two largely independent mode shapes for their vibration when struck: you've got your mode where the bell bends from side to side, and you've got your mode where the bell bulges in and out (called the hum tone), and if you don't make these two natural frequencies align well, your bell will sound like shit.

Also hardness/brittleness is desirable for bells because if the metal is too soft/ductile it will transform mechanical vibration into heat, absorbing the sound too quickly (bells work by NOT doing that) which is why bronze is better than brass for bells.

Iron works for bells, it's pretty hard, but it has the whole rust problem which bronze and brass do not. Like they corrode a tiny bit but then the patina protects them.

(don't polish a bell even though bell metal is like speculum metal)

(it will remove the protective patina and possibly also alter the sound)

[eilooxara]

Occasionally I see "character development" questionnaires that ask things like "what is their favorite food" and "what kind of movies do they like" and that's

Uh

Not character development

Like yeah you can decide these things if you want but they do not make a character go from a loose assemblage of traits to a character

And just filling out the questionnaire like that will simply make more traits for the loose assemblage

What you gotta actually know is "what is the point of the story that I am telling with this character"

That's it that's the only question that matters

You can make variations upon it if it helps you reach the answer but like

All the important questions are just that, framed a little differently

And all the good characters are ones where that question has an answer

[eilooxara]

I feel like something missing from the cultural conversation about the concept of "cringe" is that if you like good things and understand what's good about them, you are immune

And perhaps that's what people are getting at when they say "don't worry about being cringe, be earnest"

And you should be earnest! Because earnestness is how you open your eyes to what makes art of any kind true and beautiful

Once you've touched the sublime you don't care what anyone thinks about your taste in art

I'm sure someone could find something to make fun of in my taste in idk music or literature or whatever but like. They'd either be straight-up wrong or focusing on things that don't matter. I'm not afraid of them.

I think people who talk a lot about "cringe" haven't ever experienced the sublime and don't even know it's possible and that's sad for them

[eilooxara]

The thing about CDs is they have a sample rate of 44,100 Hz

And that is not enough

See the nyquist frequency (maximum frequency that it is POSSIBLE to reproduce accurately at a given sample rate) there is 22,100 Hz

Which seems OK at a glance because hey that's just about the top of human hearing right??

But the nyquist frequency is not a frequency that you can IN PRACTICE reproduce accurately. The aliasing will be very severe at the nyquist frequency. You're sampling a half-wave (so, a thing that goes up and then down again) at ONE point. If you're very lucky you will land that point at the peak and get accurate reproduction. But you won't be that lucky most of the time, and your reproduction will be wildly inaccurate otherwise. You could wind up sampling it at the base and have NO IDEA how high the peak goes. You have a 100% margin of error.

At 3 samples per cycle your margin of error drops to 50%. That's still really bad. The threshold where you might stop being able to hear it (so your error is about 11%, corresponding to about 1 dB, commonly taken to be the threshold for a human being able to tell the difference between two sounds) is about 6.7 samples per cycle.

So the highest frequency that can accurately be reproduced on a CD is only about 6.6 kHz

You will notice that this is dogshit what with human hearing going at least an octave above that and a lot of important sounds living up in that range. A lot of the richness and detail of your instrumental tone is lost when sampling at 44100 Hz.

[eilooxara]

Stop for a moment

Are you operating under the assumption that you are a reactive non-agent, not responsible for your internality and actions, and that others are always agents and culpable for everything they do, responsible for your reactions to them? Are you ascribing meanings to the actions of others that are not based in fact?

If so, don't.

Just don't do that. There's nothing more to it.

Ok resume scrolling

[eilooxara]

The Iterated Action Dilemma

Rules:

Two players, A and B, each have a goal, 1 or 2. If you desire outcome 1, outcome 2 is neutral. If you desire outcome 2, outcome 1 is negative. Outcome 3 is negative to both players.

Each iteration, each player simultaneously chooses Action or Inaction.

If either player chooses Action, and both players desire outcome 1, outcome 1 occurs

If either player chooses Action, and any player does not desire outcome 1, outcome 3 occurs

If both players choose Inaction, outcome 2 occurs regardless of goals

Strategy:

Suppose we have player A who desires outcome 1, and player B who desires outcome 2.

Player B's choice is easy. Action always has negative effects and Inaction is either negative or positive.

Player A is somewhat more complicated because it depends on what they know about player B. An impatient A might choose Action, but then immediately get a negative outcome when they could have had a neutral outcome by choosing Inaction. So it makes sense, one could argue, to choose Inaction at first and then wait to see if player B chooses Action, thereby indicating a desire for outcome 1.

And that's an easy strategy to fall into.

But!

What if both players desire outcome 1?

Each will be motivated to choose Inaction and wait for the other to choose Action and ensure outcome 1

How can they tell the difference between that and a desire for outcome 2?

Now suppose that each player's goal has the potential to change at any time

What if they are more likely to change from desiring outcome 2 to outcome 1 than vice versa?

Then waiting it out by choosing Inaction goes from a neutral strategy to a winning move IF you wait long enough

But of course waiting longer means going longer without winning AND appearing more like you desire outcome 2.

It's mathematically a tough problem

And I think the only REAL solution is to stop being afraid of outcome 3