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@@ -3,9 +3,11 @@ Zachary Kanfer
 
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+[View transcript](#transcript)
 
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+[View transcript for Q&A](#transcript-questions)
 
 During quarantine, I found myself spending time with an Android app.
 One of the features this app has is composing music that loops
@@ -77,3 +79,231 @@ something worth looking into.
 
 # Notes
 Notes, references, and links at <https://zck.org/emacsconf2020>
+
+
+<!-- transcript: 2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--35-waveing-at-repetitive-repetitive-repetitive-music-zmusic--zachary-kanfer.vtt -->
+
+<a name="transcript"></a>
+# Transcript
+
+(00:04) Hi. I'm Zachary Kanfer, and this is waving at repetitive
+repetitive repetitive music. Over quarantine, I've been bored, and I
+found this Android app that has a bunch of mini-games, one of which
+lets you compose music. And it works, but I want a little bit more
+functionality than it offers, it's not very flexible. So, I thought
+what if I made this, and what programs could I make this in that are
+really flexible, are really customizable. Emacs. So, I looked into
+it, and Emacs can play sounds, right? If you hit control g a couple of
+times, you'll hear like an error tone, and it turns out that, that is
+actually playing a WAVE file, but what's a WAVE file?
+
+(00:58) Well, it turns out that WAVE is a musical file format, or
+really an annoying file format. So, data in it can be an unsigned
+integer or a signed integer, it's not consistent, and it's
+little-endian by default which is not the way I like to think about
+it. Now, you can set a WAVE file to be big-endian, but if you do
+that, Emacs can't play it. So, little-endian it is. There's also
+duplicate data fields. Here are some fields that are fine, but then
+there's a fourth field that's calculated based on multiplying two of
+the other ones together, and then there's another data field that's…
+you multiply those three ones together. So, it's just repetitive and
+unnecessary, but you have to do it, or it's not a valid WAVE file.
+Also, the last part of the file is described as data or as one website
+I found said, the actual sound data.
+
+(02:04) Now, I don't know about you but when I see that, I think, what
+is data? It turns out that sound is just a wave, and the data is just
+a bunch of measurements of the height of that wave forming each
+sample. So, this wave starts at 8 goes 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, and then
+back down. If you just take those measurements, those numbers, put
+them in a file, that's all your data is.
+
+(02:35) All right. Let's go to a demo of my program. So, this is what
+zmusic looks like. The blue highlighted row is a single beat, there's
+16 of them in this zmusic file, and each dash in the row is a single
+note increasing…, starting really low all the way on the left and
+going up as we go to the right. So, if we started playing, we won't
+hear anything, but we'll see the highlighted beat is the currently
+playing one, and we see that it loops. So, we can stop it, and now we
+can click to add some notes. [Music] Even more than one note at the
+same time works. [Music] And we can even add notes while it's
+playing. [Music]
+
+(04:08) Okay, here are some other features that I didn't have time to
+demo. So, you can save the music to a file, and this is interesting
+because normally if there's no note in a beat, we just don't play that
+beat, but if you're writing to a file you have to put something in, so
+when it's playing it knows to not make a sound there. We can also use
+different scales. We're using the minor pentatonic in the demo, but
+you can use the major scale the minor scale or anything else. And
+there's also keyboard support, but it sounds really bad, and I'll
+explain why later.
+
+(04:48) Here are some things I learned while writing zmusic. Emacs
+has buttons which are great as long as you don't put two of them right
+next to each other. So, if you do that, mousing over one of them
+highlights both of them. Now, that's because a button is really just
+a series of characters with a text property to highlight them. So,
+the fix is, you put another character between the two buttons, then
+mousing over one of them only highlights the one you want, but even
+this doesn't work really great for zmusic, because zmusic has a lot of
+very small buttons in a row. So, it's really easy to accidentally put
+your cursor over the space and click on that instead of the button.
+So, I looked into unicode, and I found this character called a
+zero-width space. So, we should be able to put that between buttons
+and not be able to accidentally click on it. Unfortunately, a
+zero-width space isn't actually zero width. If we put a hundred of
+them between two other characters, you can see there's space there,
+and I think what's happening is, the space is zero width but then
+Emacs `put` uses one pixel between each pair of characters for the
+cursor, so it's almost zero width. Some ways to play sound that don't
+quite work! `play-sound` plays music, but it blocks, you can't do
+things like, set other notes or even pause the music. And if you
+throw it into async.el, it's silent, and I don't know why. So, the
+solution I went with is taking that WAVE file, ran into the file
+system, and then shelling out to a native executable to play the
+sound. And that works fine as long as you only do it once, because if
+you do it a couple of times at the same time like if you have a chord,
+and you want to play three notes simultaneously, you get this weird
+interference, and that's actually why the keyboard from before didn't
+work. Also, side effects have this unexpected impact, when you saw
+the demo it was running pretty smoothly, but if I just add one message
+statement every beat for debugging purposes, I was getting lag and
+jitter.
+
+(07:03) Here's the one thing I learned about music theory, music
+theory is not easy to program. I was looking around to see what
+concepts we can use to code the scales, to code the notes, the first
+thing that I saw is scale degrees, and this when I looked into it, you
+don't want to program in scale degrees. So, you see we have the
+first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh but then it wraps
+around. That octave up is also a first, and that's because both of
+those notes are C, so that didn't work, and also you couldn't really
+easily specify a flat or sharp. You could say a sharp third or you
+know, a flat seventh or whatever, but then you kind of have these two
+pieces of data that indicate the note, and I didn't love that.
+
+(07:55) So, I looked again, and I found intervals, and then I thought
+about it, and you don't really want to program in intervals either.
+It fixes some of the problems with scale degrees, you see, all the way
+on the right you have an octave, so you wrap to 8, and you go 9, 10
+and that works. But you solve the same problem, you see you have a
+major third but below we also have a minor third, so you saw that
+problem of having two pieces of information.
+
+(08:20) So, I thought about it. Music is really frequencies. Like an A
+is 440 hertz. So, at a low level that's what we're going to do, we're
+just going to use frequencies. And then at the one level above that,
+that's a little bit easier for humans to think about, we're going to
+use semitones up from the root, which is kind of like scale degrees,
+but instead of just counting each note as one more, we're going to say
+how many semitones up it is. So, if there's a sharp between two
+notes, that's going to be two steps up instead of just one. And then
+we translate those two frequencies, so your A is 440 hertz, another
+note might be 613.5, or whatever, and that's we use the low level to
+play.
+
+(09:02) Some future work I have, I want to add some drums. I want to
+make that keyboard actually work, and computers and synthesizers are
+the only place you hear a pure sine wave like the one we have here, so
+I want to add overtones or other octaves above it just to make it
+sound a little bit more realistic. I've put notes references and the
+source code up at <https://zck.org/emacsconf2020> [updated]. I'm one
+of the organizers of EmacsNYC check that out. And if you take a look
+or have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them, and thanks so much for
+coming to my talk.
+
+<!-- /transcript -->
+
+
+<!-- transcript: 2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--35-waveing-at-repetitive-repetitive-repetitive-music-zmusic--questions--zachary-kanfer.vtt -->
+
+<a name="transcript-questions"></a>
+# Transcript: Q&A
+
+(00:09) Okay, yeah, so I'm Zachary Kanfer, let's go to the
+questions. The first question, "Why do we go top to bottom for time
+progression, and left to right for low to high?" Interesting, I
+think…, so the initial thing I was copying, that initial app work this
+way, and yeah, I mean, certainly traditional music, you know, on a
+staff does go left to right like this. I mean, going top to bottom
+does make it easier to add more beats without having to wrap, but
+certainly that could be managed. Yeah, I had not really thought about
+it, but it is definitely something worth looking into.
+
+(01:21) Two, "Will you play us another song?" Not now, I can make some
+recordings of it, or certainly you can try it. I couldn't quite get
+the microphone and the webcam and everything to work with the sound
+playing now. So, I can record some. Also, I have put a link in the
+Etherpad, <https://zck.org/emacsconf2020> [updated], where you can go
+and get the source, and you can try it yourself. There's no
+dependencies needed, so it's just all in Emacs. So, please, you know,
+try it yourself.
+
+(01:57) "Any chance for an Emacs tracker or mod player?" I don't
+really know what a mod player or tracker are, but I mean, I'm sure
+that would be cool, maybe there's one on now, but I don't know.
+
+(02:11) My musical background. So, I've played various instruments
+since about the third grade. Started recorder, play cello, I play
+guitar now. But yeah, so just kind of random instruments, and I guess
+kind of some of those things influence how I think about music.
+
+(02:33) "Are there any open source musical management sample libraries
+that could be used?" Good question, I'm sure there are, I don't know
+any of that integrate really well with Emacs. One of the cool things
+that I liked about this is that there are no dependencies, you know,
+you don't need any external program to generate the music. I mean, it
+does shell out to to play, but that should be able to be done on any
+operating system, as always, you have something that can play WAVE
+files, but yeah, it is interesting to kind of try the different sounds
+and different tones that you could get with different instruments.
+
+(03:14) Have I written any actual songs? Nothing super well put
+together, I kind of just been playing around with this. It's kind of…
+making this was one of those things where once I made it, I was like,
+okay, now I can play with it, and I did a little bit, and was like, I
+don't know if I feel like it right now. You know, which I've found
+that to be the case with some things that I've implemented in Emacs
+where it's… I make it, and then it's the kind of some of the desire to
+use it all the time goes away, but I'm sure I'll circle back around at
+some point especially kind of maybe once I add in different tones or
+something.
+
+(03:54) I guess a similar question for pre-recorded sounds. Yeah, I
+mean, if it's… part of what I did, what I wrote was a WAVE generation
+library, so, if you kind of have the data, you could use those and
+chop them up and take certain lengths of them and make a WAVE file, so
+it's not plug and play right now, but you could certainly add those
+notes to do it.
+
+(04:19) "Any MIDI mapping possibilities?" I haven't looked into it,
+but I'm sure you definitely could output to MIDI which is another
+benefit of having that multiple layers with the top layer is just, you
+know, if the root note is this, we're just two semitones up or seven
+semitones up or whatever it is. It should be relatively simple to
+kind of switch out that layer underneath from WAVE to MIDI or other
+things.
+
+(04:44) "What were some of the challenges with writing a special mode
+for Emacs?" Interested in getting into this, not sure where to start.
+This isn't the first mode I've written, so that's right…, certainly
+that helps. I actually… I have a video that we recorded it as part of
+EmacsNYC on making a major mode. That's basically starts from
+nothing, and kind of builds up to an implementation of tic-tac-toe,
+but so it kind of goes into printing things out and buttons and making
+the mode. I mean, one of the best parts about Emacs is, because it's
+so configurable and so introspectible, you can start pretty simply,
+and just kind of ask Emacs about things, and then make one little
+change. It's really… it's not that bad, so, I'll try to throw a link
+up on that page I put up, or please email me for whoever asked this
+question to get a link to that video, or just look at the source code
+of this or any other major mode. Emacs makes it pretty easy to extend
+major modes.
+
+(05:54) And I think that's the last question in the Etherpad, so,
+thanks so much everybody for coming. (Amin: Thank you so much to
+Zachary for your awesome talk, and for doing live questions. Thank
+you.) Thank you. (Amin: Cheers.)
+
+<!-- /transcript -->