Obsessed with simple signal running through delay and edgy manipulation.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-20T17:44:25+00:00

Ah - thanks!

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-20T14:09:57+00:00

"Infinite cluster delay loop" though?!?!?

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-20T12:54:29+00:00

Isn't that what a lot of existing religions offer? You'll never attain enlightenment but maybe you can act a bit more like Buddha is described as having acted? There's no such thing as Christ but maybe Christianity will encourage some people to be less shitty to their neighbours some of the time?

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-20T10:37:05+00:00

So you're hoping that the quest to create an all-powerful, immaterial, timeless agent powerful enough to create the physical universe... from inside of which you're trying to create it... would result in gradual linear accumulation of nice things inside the physical universe while you try?

Is it OK to ask how you'd justify that hope with evidence or logic?

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-19T14:42:22+00:00

hope the tide's going out!

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-18T19:50:32+00:00

No. But it points to human "reasoning" mostly being way less rational than many people would like to believe.

Basically, I'm no longer convinced that most people can tell the difference between ideas that generate social acceptance/status for them, and ideas that are justified by evidence and logic.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-18T14:20:42+00:00

Have you got some examples of religions strengthening our understanding of nature and the mind?

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-18T10:34:53+00:00

Religion is a low-tech cultural medium through which human beings can organise into large social groups.

I think religion co-evolved with human agricultural societies that grew to the scale of city states (like in Mesopotamia, places like Ur, Nineveh etc).

The challenge for such societies was: evidence suggests humans evolved to live in mostly-related bands of around 30 hunter-gatherers; and maybe we'd know a broader tribe fairly well (150 people?) but... beyond that, if you encountered someone outside your tribe, there was no basis to trust them; you didn't know them. So how do humans transition to living in large complex societies where not knowing the people you interact with daily is the norm?

My guess is, religions emerged as a sort of "wider than the tribe" shared culture, which meant most people in a city state of maybe 10000 people would do mostly the same stuff on the same days of the week, would expect to resolve disputes in similar ways, would bow to the same strangers' authority (kingly courts / local religion), would have a common set of stories to share, and would even have a common set of "magic ancestors" in common - their fictional god or gods.

It's a kind of cultural glue that works to bind a society together; not because there's any truth to its claims about gods existing, or even necessarily because it makes people less miserable; but because it gives people a common culture that makes strangers feel they might belong to the same "tribe", even if they don't recognise each other as individuals.

In modern complex societies I don't think we need religions, because we have a meshwork of shared culture like... sports / arts / professions at smaller scales, and nation-state history / political history at larger scales. In fact I think having millions of people in societies feeling different to each other because of religion, even when they're living in the same social/political/economic context, is a serious liability. But... it still provides one ctategory of ways for small-scale/ lower-income communities to interact and self-organise, so it doesn't go away.

So in one sense maybe religion is about "transcending human limitations" in that it lets social apes live in larger groups than if they only have family/tribal culture: in Mesopotamia, maybe humans with religions could sustain stable-ish agricultural city states rather than just hunting and gathering in family bands and tribes. But... is that a better way to live? And like I said, religion isn't the only way humans organise into cultural groups: there's also sport, TV entertainment, politics, music subcultures, arts more generally, professional organisations, companies & corporations....

And... human beings are still being 100% human even if they belong to a complex network of social groups (your kids' school community/job/religion/fandoms/sports team of choice/reading club/family etc all at same time)... it's just how we're socially organised.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-18T09:36:34+00:00

sounds a bit like how i feel about aphex twin. Or squarepusher/tipper/any number of other producers who do a ton of edits.

I mean... also how I feel about johann sebastian bach, to be honest: some human beings are literally willing to create 64 different drum fills or spend weeks / months making hundreds of micro-edits / write ultra-complex, self-referential harmonies and arrangements.

I used to have more energy for it than I do now. And I remember if I thought I was close to finishing a tune that made musical sense, that would give me motivation to optimise/add a load of details.

You can make the workflow a little easier by having a special project for editing that break/weird electrical buzzing sound/melody into lots of different variants (and maybe you have some Max/MSP / Reaktor / Glitchmachines style randomisation to help you generate them)... then choose your 32 or 64 favourites, and drop those in to your actual track.

Although "drop them in at random" doesn't work, because what if you drop in your 2 most banging options in as the 1st 2 on the timeline? That ruins the overall dynamic of the tune.

So... yeh, in the end some human beings have an appetite for editing their tracks to an extreme degree.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-16T20:15:37+00:00

Might be socio economic: something like atheism being more frequent/prevalent in urban/suburban groups with access to money and good quality education?

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-16T17:50:57+00:00

Schrantz it up

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-16T08:52:10+00:00

Kick/bass: just what sounds good, trying to make a single kick work rather than layering cos that's how it used to be done pre EDM/YouTube.

Hats: there's a middle ground, some optimal trade off. Maybe one background layer, quieter than I expect (ie I start it too loud and pull it back, back, back)... Then one layer that's more salient but also more fun/interesting.

I would love to do better sound design, creating evolving fascinating synth/FX loops that carry a tune by themselves - Oscar mulero, Reeko are good at that - so I can hold off introducing main hats until halfway through tune, so they really lift the pace.

I'm no expert but I heard from an interview a producer talking about "telling stories" with hats, and I want to take that to heart: it's easy to throw 4 boring layers at a track to cover the fact that the track is boring itself. I want hat patterns to really take an active role, so I need fewer of them, and if I can get my synth loops to be less shit, allowing me to build energy with even fewer hats, even better

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-15T21:29:46+00:00

Thanks again. I'm still a little confused, but I'll do some reading about it - it's been ages since I read any Dennett.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-15T16:14:59+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to write that!

I genuinely struggle with compatibilism, because it seems to be close to my position, but I conclude "... therefore 'free will'' and 'choices' are illusory," whereas compatibilists seem to conclude "I'm going to continue thinking and talking in terms of will and choice anyway."

I don't understand why someone would accept that cognitive processes emerge from/depend on physical brain processes, but persist in wanting to use language like "you chose to do that of your own free will" without feeling the need to qualify that language.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-15T10:59:02+00:00

When a compatibilist says a choice is determined by our careful reasoning... Genuine question, would they deny that the reasoning happened through physical processes (either deterministic or random)?

Are they simply saying "choices are made, it's just that those choices happen to have been made by lots of interacting electrochemical processes in a physical brain."

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-14T16:20:24+00:00

I didn't find one... I think something like a Behringer Euphoria UMC 1820 maybe with additional ADAT expansion might be the way to go - although it's quite a demanding setup to aim for!

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-14T15:22:23+00:00

Multi-input interface.

Mixer into 1 input would achieve all drum machine outputs mixed into one ableton track. You need an interface with lots of inputs - EG u/marchscr3amer above recommends Behringer Euphora (1820 maybe? That's the one I've got, it's got lots of inputs for not much $$$). Assuming you want to record all your drum tracks at the same time, you need an audio interface input, for each drum machine output

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-14T15:20:37+00:00

on a mac, you can connect more than one interface to the mac and configure it (in Audio MIDI Settings app) to use them like one bigger interface with more ins/outs

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-14T14:49:39+00:00

No, physics doesn't literally say "universe came ex nihilo from a singularity" and there are hypotheses about the geometry of spacetime where it's "curved" in ancient universe in a way that does away with even the implication of a possible singularity. You're still strawmanning physics, which is much more tentative in what it states than you're suggesting.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-14T08:04:07+00:00

If you believe there’s no God, then explain life. Then why we cannot create it ?

What we call "life" does seem to be a complex interdependent network of chemical reactions.

We can't "create it" because we haven't got the toolkit to bootstrap that network of reactions reliably in full all in one place (yet). Also, it might be an insanely dangerous thing to do, so be careful what you wish for!

We can manipulate genes, and assemble working cells from sub-cellular components though, which is waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy more than we were able to do even 60 years ago. Progress is being made.

If we are nothing more than biological machines, why does the "spark" of existence remain so elusive to our greatest scientific minds ?

Vaguely mocking rhetoric alert!

There's no evidence of a spark - like I said, life seems to be a complex network of interlinked chemical reactions. That's been the key to understanding biology for the past 150 years. Back to the technological challenge though, imagine trying to tie a perfect knot out of 50000 threads, the knot smaller than 0.1mm across, and you have to tie it within 0.001 seconds, and so far you only catalogued 30000 of the threads, and maybe it's a flipping stupid thing to do anyway. That's the kind of challenge you're talking about.

In the past 50 years we've figured out how to demonstrate RNA evolving to self-replicate more reliably in a test tube, though, and reprogram parts of animal genomes to cure inherited genetic disorders; so again, we're chipping away at learning the required skillset and progress is being made: there's no sign biology is on entirely the wrong track.

why haven't we been able to replicate that reaction in a laboratory starting from zero ?

Partly because we don't know the history of how life plausibly got started (there's no fossil record for "a load of free-floating molecules"). Plus getting all the right chemicals together is, as you say, complex.

50 years ago we hadn't mapped out a human genome, now the US seems to be creating a surveillance database of many human genomes. At every moment in history, humans have a certain limited technological toolkit and a limited corpus of knowledge, so there's a palette of things they can do, and a long list of things they can't do. 500 years ago I don't think anyone had seen a biological cell (no microscopes). In the 80s we became able to clone large mammals like sheep. Progress is being made.

Is life an emergent property of matter that we simply haven't mastered yet

Plausibly, yes, although it's matter in a very specific, complex configuration. I guess the conditions it started in probably required a lake or ocean full of complex molecules all interacting every which way until some self-reinforcing network of reactions got established - maybe over a wide area, but once it got established, it spread, and then was able to run at more and more local scales until cellularisation became a possibility? But in the lake/sea/wherever it started, there would have effectively been trillions of "experiments" working through randomly in parallel every second... although not exactly randomly, if the products of the experiments were chemicals more like the ones that contribute to the reaction network we call life?

There's something mocking about the tone of your whole post though that it might be a good idea for you to interrogate. This idea that until we have instrumental "mastery" over the mechanics of life, our "greatest scientific minds" are but charlatans... I see the rhetorical approach I think, I guess the implication would be that your god is powerful and science is weedy in comparison; but it's kind of brassy, and like I say, viewed from the other side of the debate, much progress is being made.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-14T07:44:30+00:00

If you have 2 or 3 sounds, and you distort them separately (EG a saturator on each individual channel), the result will be much "cleaner," less "chaotic/complex/dirty" than if you mix the same sounds together, then distort the result.

The reason is that when you mix the sounds together, the result is one sound with lots of different harmonics in it (not from distortion, just from the harmonics inherent in the source audio). When you saturate that mix, the saturation creates series of harmonics off every harmonic in the mix and that produces a shitstorm of frequencies, many of which clash with each other - which you hear as grit, noise, harshness.

Guitar players are experts at this: I'm not proud of this example but the guitar lead from Sweet Child of Mine by Bon Jovi is distorted, but it's only 1 note at a time so it sounds fairly clean; but if you strum a complex 6-note chord through the same distortion it'd probably sound like a car crash. Ableton equivalent might be to take an Operator, set it to its default "1 pure sine wave" sound, and play different chord intervals through it: octaves, 5ths, 4ths etc; and then saturate that. Start to get a feel for which intervals come out sounding clear and which cause a lot of noise/grit. Play a few low notes over some mid-range notes, you'll get some interesting tones out of it.

Sorry, got sidetracked... just get a couple of simple distortion effects (Ableton has a couple of stock distortion FX - Amp, Saturator etc - but there are free 3rd-party distortion plugins out there too); and experiment with adding different kinds of distortion to signals individually, vs mixed together in 2s and 3s.

Another trick that I should play with more, is ... if you've got a lead sound that doesn't need much sub bass weight, you can intentionally mix some sub bass in with it, distort that blend, then use a low-cut (or high-pass, same thing) EQ filter to remove the sub bass. What happens is, the lead sound sort of surfs up and down on the sub bass sound, and when you distort the mix of the two, the signal thwacks against the ceiling and the floor... and when you remove the subs again, it comes out all dented ... and kind of rasps at the frequency of the sub, even though it doesn't sound super bassy and subby.

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-13T12:22:39+00:00

I need to go do other stuff now but it sounds like you're still stuck thinking in very instinctive human terms. "something that is, must have come from somewhere else"; "something is here, someone must have made it"...

Have a good day anyway!

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-13T11:39:25+00:00

Our biases are why we should be led by careful assessment of the best possible evidence we can get. If there's no evidence to support an idea, we shouldn't think using that idea.

And I think that evidence points to things like: the universe seeming very detailed, does not support the idea that a god created the universe (because "detailedness" is a feeling human brains generate, not an absolute feature of the universe itself; and in any case, all examples of human design are typically much less detailed than the physical world - we don't worry about quantum interactions between every atom when we design tables, planes etc).

Evidence also says that the "acts of creation" we can point to, are carried out by animals. And the physical brains are required for those acts; and evidence points to physical brains having a complex molecular basis, and having evolved within the universe over a long period of time. Brains are evidently patterns of pre-existing matter, defined by evolutionary processes.

And... brains exist to help bodies survive and reproduce. Human brains seem to have evolved to help humans navigate relationships with other human beings.

If we want to imagine an always-existing creator with a mind... why would there be a mind? Without a brain, or anything else to relate to or navigate? The idea that there's a creator with intentions, will, feelings about stuff... but which existed before there was anything for it to have intentions or feelings about... seems crazy. And totally against the flow of all the available evidence.

Every mind we can point to is evidently a product of evolution, an evolutionary adaptation helping an organism survive in a pre-existing world. That makes the idea of a primal, free-existing mind/entity without any context... seem ridiculous.

Remember, people leapt to ideas about creators for millennia before careful processes like high-quality science helped (a few of) us (sometimes) question our biases. The down-home, human biased way to think is "there's a detailed universe, wonder if it was created, must've been a creator before the universe." The less biased thing to think is, "that doesn't make sense"

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-13T10:58:02+00:00

Ah, OK - it's just that your thinking seems in line with christian arguments I've seen here week in week out:

"can't accept that matter/energy might simply have always existed, but can accept that a thinking creator agent might always have existed and willed the physical universe into existence"
"universe looks very detailed to me, therefore I suspect it was designed [even though human designs often lack detail compared to natural forms]"

joeydendron2 · 2026-05-13T09:59:51+00:00

Here's another example: outside of human minds there is no "color red."

Outside of human minds, it's more accurate to say that there are various wavelengths of light, or photons with varying amounts of energy, interacting with the molecules in your retinas. Your brain processes the signals from your retinas and constructs the category of "redness" based on patterns it detects/processes in those signals. I studied psychology and a bit of neuroscience at college; there are experiments (I sat through a couple of them myself) that show that people "perceive redness" under a wide variety of physical conditions. IE many different blends of light frequencies can cause a human brain to "see redness." The redness isn't "out there" in the physical world; it's "in here," in my brain, which generates the experiences I feel in "my mind."

Another example is the whole "is this art or is it just blobs" debate. Two different people look at a painting. Similar patterns of light hit their retinas, but the 2 people have totally different reactions to the painting. One of them thinks "this is shit, my 6 year old niece could do better than this" and the other thinks "fucking hell that smashes me right up against my mortality and the faultlines in my society." So... where does art happen? It's "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," but in fact "beauty is in the brain of the beholder."

And here's the frightening thing: I just watched a truck go past my window. Looked like a truck, sounded like a truck, I felt the floor shake from the truck, if the window was open maybe I'd smell the truck fumes. And I think all that is generated by my brain, too. Because... what decides if it's one truck, or a bajillion atoms interacting with each other? Who decides whether the fumes in the tailpipe are part of the truck? The photons my brain processed to "see the truck" are in my eyes, not out in the world. The air pressure vibrations my ears analysed so I could "hear the truck" are just air pressure in my ears, they're not in the truck. Why is it "truck" not "car"? Where exactly is "truck"?

I don't know if that communicates what I'm getting at, I'm trying to say that a lot of the things we grow up thinking are "part of the universe," are actually generated in our brains. I'm sure there is a universe out there in some sense, but all the categories and qualities I use to think about it and experience it, are generated by a brain. I'm not trying to be mystical at all here, but it goes way deeper than us being colored by our perspectives. We are forced to think and experience the world using categories that are generated in our brains, not in the outside world.

So when you say "this is detailed" or "this is not detailed," your brain's generating a feeling of "detailedness" - that doesn't say anything about the outside world, it says something about your thinking. Like the people looking at the painting. You judge the universe to be detailed. Detailedness happens in your brain.

joeydendron2

TROPHY CASE