Music on not quite an expert

Untethered

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Having left my previous job, not having decided my next job, I’m exploring the remaining Smithsonian museums, completing the sense untethered.

Last time I was exploring the Smithsonian museums, I was checking Slack and had to interrupt my exploration to handle issues as the only engineer on my project. This time I have no deadline except when the museums close. If I don’t see something today, I can see it tomorrow; if I don’t see something tomorrow, I can see it whatever day.

Concept albums

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Compared to many books I’ve read, the critically acclaimed concept albums Wallsocket and Magic, Alive! have less developed characters and less coherent narrative flows. So why do I listen to and enjoy these albums so much?

“The medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan claims, or less strongly, “the medium shapes the message”, I claim. Detailed dialogue and exposition generally don’t make for compelling lyrics in music. However, music incorporates additional distinct channels - instrumentation, tempo, and volume, to name a few - that communicate meaning, and more broadly build a differently compelling story.

Exactly what I want

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

They produce so much content that I often find exactly what I want without knowing I wanted it. For example:

As it gets easier to produce content, even generate content (via prompts), I worry that I’ll get exactly what I want and not much else, missing out on content that would challenge me and expand my tastes.

Set up wall shelf, set up ssh

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I run a music server on my spare headless computer. However, after running for a few hours, especially after I suspend to disk, the music server needs to restart.

Previously, I would connect my headless computer to my projector and keyboard to run some commands. However, with my wall shelf up, and my projector up on it, that takes too much effort now.

So I set up ssh into my headless computer to run those same commands. Even seemingly unrelated projects influence each other in a shared space.

Fruits III: persimmon

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In high school, I played clarinet and listened primarily to classical music (and EDM). Then in my freshman internship I grew sick of it, and sought out new music.

The first album that spoke to me came from Japanese Breakfast. In her debut album Psychopomp, and later in her memoir Crying in H Mart, she details her mother’s death from cancer: the love, the loss, and the yearning. I re-listen and re-read in hard times.

Sidegrading your audio

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I watch Steve Guttenberg for the crustiness. The lack of polish suggests an authenticity, an honesty. If audio equipment ever did have a past golden age, Steve embodies it.

As with every Black Friday, I considered buying new audio equipment. In the video above, Steve recommends getting something drastically different. Rather than spending progressively more upgrading the same type of setup, try a different setup. In my case, instead of upgrading my bookshelf speakers, I got an entry-level record player.

Chords

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I play guitar, the notes A, C, and E form the A minor chord. The notes A, C#, and E form the A major chord.

When I type on my stenotype keyboard, the chord HAOEL pressed simultaneously forms “heel.” The chord HAEL pressed simultaneously forms “heal.”

When I write Chinese, the simplified Han characters 花 and 园 form the segment 花园, meaning garden. The characters 花 and 椒 form the segment 花椒, meaning Sichuan peppercorn.

Look at all those links to other posts! I’ve started to notice the idea of “chords” across domains. You can combine notes, keys, characters, whatever you’d like to call them, to form distinct meanings.

Bottlehead Crack

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For Cyber Monday, I ended up purchasing the Bottlehead Crack, a DIY headphones amplifier targeted at high impedance headphones like the Sennheiser HD 6XX I already owned. In this post, I’d like to break down why.

Optimizing seller perspective

I think of price from the seller’s perspective as the sum of

cost of inputs + cost of logistics + value of performance + value of marketing + value of usability

Assuming, I cannot control the cost of inputs nor logistics, if I hold the price constant and want to maximize the value of performance, I would “diminish” the value of marketing and usability.

Comparing audio equipment

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This week, while shopping for a new headphones amp, I’ve been looking for “best” headphones amps. This begs the question: how do we best compare audio equipment?

Resolution vs. profile

Okay, so obviously on a high level the “best” audio equipment produces the “best” audio. However, what constitutes “best” audio turns out much more challenging than you might expect.

An easy (and in my not-quite-an-expert opinion, bad) definition of “best” audio relates to resolution. You could say the “best” audio equipment setup utilizes the most and loses the least music “information” in producing audio. However, as I covered in a previous post:

Why do you play (music)?

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I asked my friend, while they were playing their recently bought guitar.

For romantic others

My friend thought it romantic to serenade a partner with a ballad on the guitar. Many a sappy love song come originally or well arranged for an acoustic guitar.

For platonic others

I jokingly asked if they wanted to annoy others at parties by playing guitar. Though in an intimate setting, two or three people, I like the idea of singing along together with a guitar. At the same time, I feel shy enough about singing that I don’t know if I could muster the will.

Audiophilia: resolution vs. profile

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Take these two side-by-side images of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: One of them has the resolution 3858x2592 pixels, the other 1929x1296 pixels (scaled back up to 3858x2592 for comparison). Can you tell them apart?

I can’t. If you can, I bet you have to look really close to notice a difference. If I take a 12x12 sample of each’s bottom-left corner (and scale it up), you cal tell the difference: The left side has the lower resolution.

Small touches

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I haven’t been cooking as much as I would like lately. To fill that gap, I’ve been watching videos from the emmymade channel:

Go to 6:04 and watch for 15 seconds. No really, I’ll wait. These words won’t disappear when you’re not looking.

Snow boots

Did you see that? When Emmy walked out of the shot, the camera focused on the snow boots, helpfully labeled “snow boots.”

Let's actually build a random Spotify album selector!

Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Introduction

Okay, for real this time. I’m going to do it in Rust because I like Rust. Code is available in a GitHub repo for reference, and I’ll be linking files where I can.

We’re going to cover a lot of technologies (including a pretty large tour of Rust), so get ready! Here’s a preview of what we’ll end up covering:

Installing Rust
Cargo
Rocket
OAuth
Rust types (enums, structs, and traits)
Environment variables (.env)
serde
Pagination APIs
Caches
Concurrency (for HTTP asynchronousness)
Options and Results
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Dynamic web content
HTML templating
Deployment
Debugging
Optimizing web content

Installing Rust

Installing Rust is easy (on non-Windows systems). In terminal, run:

Let's build a random Spotify album selector!

Sat, 09 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

You read the title; let’s do it!

Meta-goals

I have 2 main goals for this post:

Describe the process of making something.
Write some code! I’ve been itching to code for a while.

So how do (should¹) we make something?

Audience

Let’s start with the most basic, perhaps most important question:

Who’s this for, anyway?

How you answer this question strongly influences every step of making something. Different audiences have wildly different needs, behaviors, and environments. For example, making food for newborn babies is vastly different than making food for 30-something adults. A newborn baby needs food that can be digested without chewing; the 30-something makes their own decisions on where and when to consume food.

The unique challenge of different instruments

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I recently started learning guitar. Depending on if you count the voice as an instrument (for this post I don’t), and ignoring the brief period where I tried to learn bass clarinet, the guitar will be the third instrument I have learned. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to describe the different challenges that come with playing each instrument without pictures.

Piano

I started piano when I was 6 because I saw my older sister play the piano. As a shy child, the piano helped me open up to performing in front of others.

Music at 1.4x speed

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For a few years, I listened to music at 1.4x (not 1.3x, not 1.5x, exactly 1.4x) speed. When I told this to other people, their reactions ranged from “whatever” to “what?” to “WHATTT???”. I thought it would be interesting to go over some conversations, with varying degrees of convincingness, I encountered with the “WHATTT???” people.

Not convincing (to me)

“You’re not respecting the artists’ intentions!”

This argument can be broken down into 2 components that are not convincing to me:

Music on not quite an expert

Untethered

Concept albums

Exactly what I want

Set up wall shelf, set up ssh

Fruits III: persimmon

Sidegrading your audio

Chords

Bottlehead Crack

Introduction

Optimizing seller perspective

Comparing audio equipment

Introduction

Resolution vs. profile

Why do you play (music)?

For romantic others

For platonic others

Audiophilia: resolution vs. profile

Introduction

Small touches

Introduction

Snow boots

Let's actually build a random Spotify album selector!

Introduction

Installing Rust

Let's build a random Spotify album selector!

Introduction

Meta-goals

So how do (should1) we make something?

Audience

The unique challenge of different instruments

Introduction

Piano

Music at 1.4x speed

Introduction

Not convincing (to me)

“You’re not respecting the artists’ intentions!”

So how do (should¹) we make something?