mrutssamoht

Changed my website url ⚰️⚰️⚰️⚰️⚰️

Ah Mer Ah Su - the stage name of Star Amerasu. Her music style has been described as electropop and poptronic. Her music covers subject matter from failed relationships to drug abuse. She released her first full length album “Star” this year and has definitely earned her pop princess title.

Itsbambii - Youtuber and Hiphop/Rap artist. Her first album “Clean & Clear” was released last year and “My LGBT Story” is a must listen.

Kim Petras - This German pop artist has yet to release an album or EP, but has released 3 amazing singles this year. She says she draws inspiration for her music from early 00s pop and 1980s italo disco. She was covered extensively by the media after transitioning at a young age and has said she wants people to focus on her music, not her.

Quay Dash - This hiphop/rap artist has a whole amazing EP titled “Transphobic.” She’s said “I think talking about transgender issues (in her music) is important, but at the same time i’m here to make my music and do what I have to do. Her music is brazen and unapologetic and we all know lady rappers are the best rappers.

Shea Diamond - Pop/Soul singer who began performing at trans music festivals after her incarceration in a mens correctional facility. She released her first EP “Seen it all” this year, and “I am her” is a lovely and empowering track.

Miss Blanks - Australian hiphop/rap artist who’s spoken out about the sexism and double standards in Australia’s rap scene. In her words Miss Blank is “Unapologetic, fierce, and petty.” Her latest single “Good Good D” was released this year.

Sateen - The band name of Exquisite (a trans lesbian woman) and her wife Queen Sateen. The lesbian queer disco duo first got famous as a “het drag couple” in the New York queer scene. They released their self titled EP just last year.

Peppermint - the stage and drag name of Agnes Moore. She creates dance/electronica/house/and homo hop music. She was the first trans woman to ever be out prior to her appearance on Rupaul’s Drag Race. She’s collaborated on a bunch of new singles this year, and released her debut album last year!

She/Her/Hers - The stage name of folk punk artist Emma Grrrl. She just released her first album “Grrrl Angst” this year! “Gender is boring” is very catchy.

SOPHIE - Scottish Synth/“Hyperkinetic” pop artist and producer. Her debut album “Oil of every pearl’s un-insides” was released this year! She uses the Elektron Mononachine to create sounds similar to latex, bubbles, and plastic in her music.

listen to bulldog eyes/georgie too!! she’s a really good indie pop/rock artist very similar to stuff like guided by voices and kim deal, very dreamy lo-fi guitar music. her album “asleep” is my fave

Her music focuses a lot on her personal experiences of being a trans woman and mentally ill. She has two EP’s out currently!

She’s a German goth musician who creates AMAZING Darkwave music, of the more Neo-classical and Medieval style depending on what stage of her discography you’re listening to.

Her music is very macabre, dark, elegant, creepy and poetic. In later albums, she’s been more straightforward about transness in some of her songs (warning: that includes touching upon her self-hatred, she touches on suicide as well). She has a great dark sense of humor as well that has been showing in her latest work.

She has a pretty extensive discography considering she started Sopor Aeternus in 1989.

My favorite songs by Sopor Aeternus are The Feast of Blood, Holy Water Moonlight, Hades “Pluton”, Across the Bridge, Dead Souls, Birth - Fiendish Figuration, In der Palästra, and Baptisma.

http://www.soporaeternus.de/

https://soporaeternus.bandcamp.com/

I would highly recommend checking out Titica, an Angolan kuduro singer / musician that blends portuguese, angolan, and house music together to create some of the most fun, wild, and unique music I’ve heard from 2018. Her new album “Pra Quê Julgar“ is on most streaming platforms but here’s a link to some official audio on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QXSHOKymbU&list=RD6QXSHOKymbU&start_radio=1).

also check out Elysia Crampton, an Aymara experimental electronic music composer and producer who’s newest S/T album is definitively my album of the year. Seriously one of the most futuristic things I’ve ever heard. It uniquely blends andean folk music, cumbia, and house music in a whirling collage of sound. Nice interview with her here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/04/transgender-producer-elysia-crampton-bolivia-aymaran-heritage

Wabot-1, 1973

performance of “for Richard Wakeham” on “The” a custom instrument that controls field recordings.

Video documentation of my debut of the “The,” a homemade sampler designed to control field recordings I made over the last seven years.

[Make Caows and Shapcho - MeganAnn]

[Pitsilised Koekirjad Cushion Sampler Poncho - Maeve]

[Lacy 2047 - michaela112358]

I use algorithms called neural networks to write humor. What’s fun about neural networks is they learn by example - give them a bunch of some sort of data, and they’ll try to figure out rules that let them imitate it. They power corporate finances, recognize faces, translate text, and more. I, however, like to give them silly datasets. I’ve trained neural networks to generate new paint colors, new Halloween costumes, and new candy heart messages. When the problem is tough, the results are mixed (there was that one candy heart that just said HOLE).

One of the toughest problems I’ve ever tried? Knitting patterns.

I knew almost nothing about knitting when @[email protected] sent me the suggestion one day. She sent me to the Ravelry knitting site, and to its adults-only, often-indecorous LSG forum, who as you will see are amazing people. (When asked how I should describe them, one wrote “don’t forget the glitter and swearing!”)

And so, we embarked upon Operation Hilarious Knitting Disaster.

The knitters helped me crowdsource a dataset of 500 knitting patterns, ranging from hats to squids to unmentionables. JC Briar exported another 4728 patterns from the site stitch-maps.com. 

I gave the knitting patterns to a couple of neural networks that I collectively named “SkyKnit”. Then, not knowing if they had produced anything remotely knittable, I started posting the patterns. Here’s an early example.

MrsNoddyNoddy wrote, “it’s difficult to explain why 6395, 71, 70, 77 is so asthma-inducingly funny.” (It seems that a 6000-plus stitch count is, as GloriaHanlon put it, “optimism”). 

As training progressed, and as I tried some higher-performance models, SkyKnit improved. Here’s a later example.

Even at its best, SkyKnit had problems. It would sometimes repeat rows, or leave them out entirely. It could count rows fairly reliably up to about 22, but after that would start haphazardly guessing random largish numbers. SkyKnit also had trouble counting stitches, and would confidently declare at the end of certain lines that it contained 12 stitches when it was nothing of the sort.

But the knitters began knitting them. This possibly marks one of the few times in history when a computer generated code to be executed by humans.

[Mystery lace - datasock]

[Reverss Shawl - citikas]

[Frost - Odonata]

The knitters didn’t follow SkyKnit’s directions exactly, as it turns out. For most of its patterns, doing them exactly as written would result in the pattern immediately unraveling (due to many dropped stitches), or turning into long whiplike tentacles (due to lots of leftover stitches). Or, to make the row counts match up with one another, they would have had to keep repeating the pattern until they’d reached a multiple of each row count - sometimes this was possible after a few repeats, while other times they would have had to make the pattern tens of thousands of stitches long. And other times, missing rows made the directions just plain impossible. 

So, the knitters just started fixing SkyKnit’s patterns.

Knitters are very good at debugging patterns, as it turns out. Not only are there a lot of knitters who are coders, but debugging is such a regular part of knitting that the complicated math becomes second nature. Notation is not always consistent, some patterns need to be adjusted for size, and some simply have mistakes. The knitters were used to taking these problems in stride. When working with one of SkyKnit’s patterns, GloriaHanlon wrote, “I’m trying not to fudge too much, basically working on the principle that the pattern was written by an elderly relative who doesn’t speak much English.”

Each pattern required a different debugging approach, and sometimes knitters would each produce their own very different-looking versions. Here are three versions of “Paw Not Pointed 2 Stitch 2″.

[Top - ActualJellyfish; Middle - LadyAurian; Bottom (sock version) - ShoelessJane]

Once, knitter MeganAnn came across a stitch that didn’t even exist (something SkyKnit called ’pbk’). So she had to improvise. “I googled it and went with the first definition I got, which was ‘place bead and knit’.” The resulting pattern is “Ribbed Rib Rib” below (note bead).

[Ribbed Rib Rib - MeganAnn]

Even debugged, the patterns were weird. Like, really, really nonhumanly weird.

“I love how organic it comes out,“ wrote Vastra. SylviaTX agreed, loving “the organic seeming randomness. Like bubbles on water or something,” 

SkyKnit’s patterns were also a pain. Michaela112358 called Row 15 of Mystery Lace (above) “a bit of a head melter”, commenting that it “lacked the rhythm that you tend to get with a normal pattern”. Maeve_ish wrote that Shetland Bird Pat “made my brain hurt so I went to bed.” ShoelessJane asked, “Okay, now who here has read Snow Crash?”

[Winder Socks (2 versions) - TotesMyName]

“I was laughing a few days ago because I was trying to math a Skyknit pattern and my brain…froze. Like, no longer could number at all. I stared blankly at my scribbles and at the screen wondering what had happened til somehow I rebooted. Yup, Skyknit crashed my brain.” - Rayn63

[Paw chain 2 - HMSChicago]

On the pattern SkyKnit called “Cherry and Acorns Twisted To”:

“Couple notes on the knitting experience, which while funny wasn’t terribly pleasurable: Because there’s no rhythm or symmetry to the pattern, I felt I was white-knuckling it through each line, really having to concentrate. There are also some stitch combinations that aren’t very comfortable to execute physically, YO, SSK in particular.

That said, I’m nearly tempted to add a bit of random AI lace to a project, perhaps as cuffs on a sweater or a short-row lace panel in part of a scarf, like Sylvia McFadden does in many of her shawl designs. As another person in the thread said, it would add a touch of spider-on-LSD.” -SarahScully

[cherry and acorns twisted to - Sarah Scully]

BridgetJ’s comments on “Butnet Scarf”:

“Four repeats in to this oddball, daintily alien-looking 8-row lace pattern, and I have, improbably, begun to internalize it and get in to a rhythm like every other lace pattern.

I still have a lingering suspicion that I’m knitting a pattern that could someday communicate to an AI that I want to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War, but I suppose at least I’ll have a scarf at the end of it?” -BridgetJ

[butnet scarf - BridgetJ]

There was also this beauty of a pattern, that SkyKnit called “Tiny Baby Whale Soto”. GloriaHanlon managed somehow to knit it and described it as “a bona fide eldritch horror. Think Slenderman meets Cthulu and you wouldn’t be far wrong.”

[Tiny Baby Whale Soto - GloriaHanlon]

Other than being a bit afraid of Tiny Baby Whale Soto, the knitters seem happy to do the bidding of SkyKnit, brain melts and all.

“I cast on for a lovely MKAL with a designer I totally trust and became immediately suspicious because the pattern made sense. All rows increase in an orderly manner. There are no “huh?” moments. There are no maths at all…it has all been done for me. I thought I would be happy, yo. Instead, I am kind of missing the brain scrambling and I keep looking for pigs and tentacles. Go figure.” - Rayn63

Check out the rest of the SkyKnit-generated patterns, and the glorious rainbow of weird test-knits at SkyKnit: The Collection and InfiKnit. 

There’s also a great article in the Atlantic that talks a bit more about the debugging. 

If you feel so inspired (and don’t mind the kind-hearted yet vigorous swearing), join the conversation on the LSG Ravelry SkyKnit thread - many of SkyKnit’s creations have not yet been test-knit at all, and others transform with every new knitter’s interpretation. Compare notes, commiserate, and do SkyKnit’s inscrutable bidding!

Heck yeah there is bonus material this week. Have some neural net-generated knitting & crochet titles. Some of them are mixed with metal band names for added creepiness. Enter your email here to get more like these:

The organic-ness of some of these is really rather lovely. Paw Chain 2 (as interpreted by HMS Chicago) would look great as lace in a sweater. Turns out if you repeat any shape, the brain starts to interpret it as pretty.

I hope some knit designer takes this and runs with it. I’d love to see (actually knitable) patterns that are a human-AI collaboration.

Composing With Tape Recorders : Musique Concrète For Beginners (1971)  by Terence Dwyer (PDF) : http://bit.ly/2t1YS6I

This score has been performed as a lecture at Winchester School of Art, as a participation piece at the same place, and with a grand piano at Reading University, all with the creative advice and assistance of David Lister.

More extensive copies of the score can be obtained from Arbigland, Littleton, Winchester, Hants, for 5s.

A, B and C are three four-track tape-recorders, the dotted line passing between them is a continuous loop of tape. A and B are recording on different tracks of the tape, and C is playing back tracks of the tape simultaneously.

A noise made at a given time will record on both tracks of the tape, and will be played back at C after a delay, this delay dependent on the distance between the separate machines, and on the rotation speed of the tape. When the noise is played back at C, it is re-recorded on both A and B, but this time it will be recorded in a decayed state due to such factors as the imperfect ability of tape recorders, the acoustics and natural echo of the room, the influx of incidental noises obscuring the original.

After a delay, the noise plays back in its decayed state, and is again re-recorded, once more incurring delay. The piece can last for any length of time.

Example: suppose that the distance AB is 10 and the distance BC is 15. A noise is made at a time x and recorded on A and B. The recording on B plays back at x+15, and is re-recorded on A and B. The initial recording at A plays back at x+25 (i.e. 10+15) and this is followed by the re-recording at B which plays back at x+30. And so on.

Some alternatives and developments: input, and consequently output, may be modified by altering the volume and tone controls on the recording machines.

Speed of tape affects accuracy of recording.

Action by performers may vary from simply switching the apparatus on and allowing the incidental noises of the environment to become the substance of the piece, to an accurate and measured use of the equipment as an instrument on its own or in conjunction with others.

The apparatus may be wired to any number of contact microphones, which in turn would be wired to, for example, the chairs on which the audience are seated, or to all the moving parts of the building in which the piece is being performed - taps, doors, windows, floors, lavatory attachments.