> and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer.
So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.
And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians?
We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)
I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
I was speaking with my 14 year old nephew via messaging last month. It was about a deep topic, synthetic consciousness. He wrote such an intelligent reply that I asked him: hey, was this from an LLM? He was insulted. I did research with his parents and found out that 99% no, he's just a smart kid.
Is there a phrase for this this mode of confusion yet?
DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and cacheing, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class).
The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers.
And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Animats!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.
Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads?
Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.
I've never needed or benefited from most of the EE curriculum. There is an opportunity cost in learning things you don't need.
Networking, OS, and Distributed Systems is increasingly treated as CompE or even EE nowadays.
> Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path
Mind you, I'm primarily in Cybersecurity and DeepTech adjacent spaces.
From what I've seen, the most successful founders are those who are able to adeptly reason and problem solve, but are also able to communicate to technical buyers because you are selling a technical product where those people make the decision.
Just because an approach isn't useful today doesn't necessarily imply it isn't in the future and being exposed to those kinds of knowledge and foundational principles makes it easier for one to evaluate and reason through problem spaces that are similar but not necessarily the same - for example, going to the Nagle's example - this was a bog standard networking concept that has now become critical in foundation model training because interconnect performance is a critical problem which can impact margins.
A lot of foundational knowledge is useful no matter what, and is why we fund founders and hire talent at competitive rates.
While some try to make it as exact science, it is not, there are things you still cannot put a number on and it works ...
I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.
The guy built his own guitar as a teenager and has played it for the rest of his career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special
Further down there is a sentence: "First, the Fuzz Face is a two-transistor feedback amplifier that turns a gentle sinusoid signal into an almost binary “fuzzy” output." But the figure does not match this - there is no "gentle sinusoid" wave shown on the first fuzz face plot.
All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.
See: https://www.scribd.com/document/55134776/48787070-Bob-Ostert...
With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.
There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup).
Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre.
Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.
I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.
Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.
Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.
> Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects.
The story is not quite so simple. Your synthesizer is going to have a buffered output so it wont have the complex impedance loading interactions with the amplifier as the guitar pickup.
This is actually critical to how early distortion effects such as the classic Fuzzface work and imo is essential for the kind of complex timbres you can produce with a guitar + tube amp.
In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.
Synth music elevated electric bound tones to anything ever heard.
I remidn you that most of the rock and roll and rock music was about speed and mimicking the sound of a rumbling car engine, as it was a symbol of the freedom in America, being able to run away from your toxic communities to find yourself better anywhere else.
That was the message for the young with rock and roll: a speedy engine for your ears.
Electronic music was like replacing a car with UFO evoking you a space travel.
With the progressive subgenre of techno music you got the same feeling, but with no subtle hints. Heck, one of the most known songs in Spain ever, "Flying Free", literally remixes the sounds of drifting cars between the melodies, making the listener really happy in a very direct way as tons of youngs in the 90's got into the outskirt night clubs... by car. So they felt as driving an infinite highway rave with no end for days.
I often lament the lack of other electric instruments.
But is it one of the most versatile instruments? You can do signal transforms with any kind of audio input, although it's done more with the electric guitar than any other instruments.
I would say it in practice, it has the most versatile sonic profile.
Some people always get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard them. Well, they get defensive about the part where I think that the reason is also this human expression problem.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0gED3rn2Tc
One of the great things about a hi-gain setup like Hendrix's is how the feedback loop will inject an element of controlled chaos into the sound. It allows for emergent fluctuations in timbre that Hendrix can wrangle, but never fully control. It's the squealing, chaotic element in something like his 'Star Spangled Banner'. It's a positive feedback loop that can run away from the player and create all kinds of unexpected elements.
The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.
A great place to hear artful feedback would be the intro to Prince's 'Computer Blue'. It's the squealing "birdsong" at the beginning and ending of the record. You can hear it particularly well if you search for 'Computer Blue - Hallway Speech Version' with the extended intro.
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