Snow And Pianos

More snow than I have seen for twenty years here yesterday! It even drifted which made for a great walk early yesterday morning. Snow Angels were made by eldest and lots of it was eaten by youngest who is yet to show symptoms of any bead reaction. It was still snowing and blowing when we went out but within an hour of lunchtime it was losing its sharp edge and by the evening was just ice in a cold wind. There is still a lot of it on the ground but it’s no use for anything other than malicious ice-balls which are not encouraged in this household. Nice to be able to use the Beach/Snow setting on the camera though!

All this and the completion of at least one musical program, meaning I was able to get a version of Piano Phase working. Unfortunately, because Piano Phase requires an accurate phasing between two Midi channels, it has to have a continuous loop running to check the accuracy of the time – the difference between the lengths of each note is 0.005 of a second which requires deep interrogation of the PC clock. Unfortunately this means a 100% CPU utilisation (unless you have two processors). I am trying to work out how to reduce this. For normal timing, the 55ms resolution of the clock is fine. In addition to this, I have finally read up on how to use Windows API calls to access the MIDI channels correctly rather than having to rely on the MIDI control I downloaded. This means that I can produce an executable without having to rely on the installation of the control. I am a little miffed that the amount of code to do this was about one line for each function; the only advantage to the control was to avoid all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace – er .. sorry .. in hex. Unfortunately I only have the first part of the score to Piano Phase which is a 12-note bar. When this has been phased, a new 8 -note melody is substituted and then a final one, the length of which is unclear. Bearing in mind that this gives a maximum of 26 notes in the three bars, it seems a bit much to pay for the score. At least I have more of a chance with Six Pianos which I have bought. May post the Piano Phase executable but it will take everything you’ve got.

We finally got around to the final two episodes of To Serve Them All My Days which seemed to gloss over the complexities of the conclusion of the book, in a way that was a little disappointing. It was possible that Andrew Davies wanted more episodes to wrap it up and was turned down by the BBC because of the unknown appeal of such a thing. It was missing a certain sense of completeness that the book has, despite that ending in the middle of the Second World War.

The Mark Steel lecture on Descartes was very good.