@celesteh@post.lurk.org

Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Jul 27, 2026

Boosted by

Furbland's Very Family-Friendly Account™ @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social

Greetings people of #ErrorCamp

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Jul 09, 2026

Replying to @pettter@social.accum.se

@pettter@social.accum.se He is witty and comes up with clever terminology, but he's also solidly liberal-right and comes up with the kinds of solutions that would have been mentioned in speeches by Ronald Reagan. The best you can say about his analysis is that it's largely correct. The best you can say about his proposed solutions is to never mention them.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · May 15, 2026

Overly intellectualised shitposting is "provocations"

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · May 15, 2026

The long shadow of acousmatic techniques chills us all.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · May 15, 2026

A computer must never make a decision, therefore computers can never improvise.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · May 15, 2026

I won't lie, computer music feels kind of dystopian in general right now

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · May 15, 2026

History of computer music keynote

Computers were slow in the 1970s. Composers then started with a blank screen, without even instruments predefined. Oliveros said, "you have to build your own instrument."

Everything was new and exciting. Their computers were built for the military industrial complex. Special hardware for audio was needed. They were big and expensive machines.

This is why FM was exciting - it was cheaper.

DAC were also expensive and not made for music.

But CDs had high quality DACs, which was new. The mac came out. The DX7 came out. It was multiphonic. The laser printer also came out that year, kicking off desktop publishing.

Now, we can synthesise more sounds in real time than we can hope to manually control. The complexity makes composing slower.

In 1976 it was time to start thinking about automated control with "musical intelligence". Will neural nets save us, the speaker wonders?

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 22, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Another problem with 'forgetting racism' is that there are white people who are highly motivated to pass on the knowledge of bigotry. To 'forget' would imply ignoring them, which cedes to them all discourse and narrative as to why the maintenance of systemic bias is, to them, good. The problem is thus not just of whether we should retain memories, but who controls them. Who should transmit them, the victims or the perpetrators? In 1977, a Nazi bookstore opened in San Francisco, named for Rudolf Hess, prominent Nazi who was still alive at the time. It was across from a synagogue. The store was very rightly attacked. The synagogue had its windows broken. The eventual result is that the bookstore is gone, the synagogue still stands and Holocaust survivors took control of the memory. They established a Holocaust Centre to do education. Public Holocaust education was happening from the moment that bookstore opened,but the victims did not get control of transmission until the following year. This act of public remberance of trauma also was a catalyst for offering survivors support and help. https://jweekly.com/2026/04/14/how-a-nazi-bookstore-led-to-s-f-s-yom-hashoah-observance-and-the-courage-to-act/

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 16, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

There are still some people living who faced significant discrimination for being left-handed, but thanks to a major social shift, it's extremely rare for lefty kids to face the systemic abuse of generations past. Virtually nobody would describe left handed people as 'sinister'. We have _not_ forgotten these ideas, but we have quit applying them. However, systemic bias against left-handed people is not actually a solved problem. Tools continue to be designed for right handed people and lefties who try to use them can end up grievously injured as a result. Again, forgetting bigotry is not the solution to this.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 16, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

One knowledge that gets transmitted generationally is racism and other bigotries. Could we just forget racism? Black people need to teach their children how to be safe, so the question here is better formed as "can white people just forget racism?" Once phrased like that, this seems like a re-wording of the proposal that white people become 'colourblind.' Alas, we know this doesn't work. (I won't be providing a citation here, but there is quite a lot of scholarship documenting that this idea fails in practice.) There are two major points of failure. The first of which is bias. Unconscious bias is a form of received knowledge, but, as the name suggests, it's not one that people know they know. IT is possible for motivated people to reduce the amount of bias they carry, but part of this process involves becoming conscious of the bias. It's not forgetting but enhancing one's memory that is required. Indeed, it's not enough to simply change one's attitudes to fight systemic bias. To illustrate this, we can discuss a solved bigotry, left-handedness.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 16, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Reviving this thread for two reasons:

I forgot to include citations!
I think it's maybe my unfair gloss to suggest that Jack Halberstam might endorse forgetting as a way of disrupting intergenerational trauma.

Indeed, in Wellerstein's post, he identifies two kinds of knowledge: book learning and tacit knowledge. Book learning are the plans for how to make a rocket. Tacit knowledge is having the skills to do the precision welding on the fuel lines. You need both of these to run the nuclear programme. This is the required technical knowledge.

But, I will argue, it's not the only kind of knowledges and not the only kind needed to run a nuclear programme. In order to run a nuclear programme, especially one with the ability to literally kill everyone, you need to want to run such a programme. It's not a binary decision to be able to end the world, but thousands or millions of smaller decisions about how and why to build such a massive, sprawling system.

The 'why' is another form of transmitted knowledge. Why on earth did people in the 1950s decide that they wanted to run the world as a suicide pact? This cultural mindset, which persisted until at least the 1980s was engendered in people, an invisible form of knowledge transfer.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 09, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

The transmission of intergenerational trauma is also disrupted by forgetting, but the transmission of memory is also often a moral mandate. My mother suffered terribly for her belief in Hell and was careful to try to replicate that in my brother and I. Hell has specific aspects that function to keep it within memory. Failure to communicate the idea of Hell is punished by Hell itself. What's more, failure to learn of Hell also damns the ignorant. To avoid the 'reality' of Hell, one must be aware of the idea of Hell and pledge to communicate it further. Rothko's Basilisk is just a special case of Christian Hell, less pernicious because it has a mechanism for forgiving the innocent. Fed Clark has more on hell: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2026/04/07/the-pedagogy-of-moral-accommodation/

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 09, 2026

I learned the word "qualia" yesterday and my first thought to synthesise that knowledge was (unfortunately?) "something which cannot be experienced by an LLM"

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 08, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Joseph is sold by his brothers to the Ishmaelites, then pulled from the pit by the Midianites, who sell him to the Ishmaelites, who taken him to Egypt. And meanwhile the Midianites sold him in Egypt to Potiphar. This conflicting narrative is an extreme act of memory, but it also confuses and obscures the details of the story. We know Joseph was taken to Egypt as property, but by who? How did they acquire him? The redactor's refusal to pick a version makes a clear narrative arc untellable without using some omissions they refused to make. If forgetting creates a fog of confusion where once there was clear knowledge, then so does too much memory.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 08, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Then Wellerstein continues, "As a whole, 'nuclear weapons' aren’t even just the weapons themselves, but the entire large technical system that is required for them to exist and be sustained. Obviously many of the technical details of these systems can be, and are, written down. But MacKenzie and Spinardi argue that much of their production must also be in the form of tacit knowledge, locked up in the heads and hands of the people who build and maintain them." And the final bit of the thread is in Joel Baden's Book 'The Composition of the Pentateuch', which discusses how several conflicting oral versions of the torah were compiled into the first five books of the bible. In that compilation, it was the goal that _nothing_ be forgotten, so the stories loop back on themselves and form contradictions, as every element is included chronologically, even if relates a specific event differently than what it said only a sentence or two earlier.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Apr 08, 2026

Some disparate ideas that share a common thread:

In 'The Queer Art of Failure', Halberstam advances a notion of queer forgetting as a way of interrupting the continual renewal of heteronormative power relations (including an implied break with intergenerational trauma).

In his latest 'Doomsday Machines' newsletter, Alex Wellserstein discusses a 1995 academic paper, "A relevant and provocative argument from the sociology of nuclear technology can be found in Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi’s “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1995.3 The argument that MacKenzie and Spinardi make is about the nature of knowledge and forgetting, and its possible relevance to nuclear weapons."
He goes on to discuss 'tacit knowledge', as a distinct category from book knowledge, in that it's learned through muscle memory.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 29, 2026

This album is all based on the sounds of the ratchet, a percussion instrument that is also sometimes a children's toy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_(instrument)

It is wildly experimental and also surprisingly musical.

Amirkhanian is a percussionist and his compositions are usually Text Sound Poetry. This album uses those techniques applied to a percussion instrument and some collaboration with other instrumentalists.

It really shows that 'tape music' techniques still have a lot of life in them. It is super interesting.

Ratchet Attach It from Charles Amirkhanian

https://othermindsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/ratchet-attach-it

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 26, 2026

Fmod is this cool music system for game design that's sort of both static and responsive. The composer creates themes and also composes transitional segments.

So if your character is hanging out at a fun place they hear happy music, but if they move into a sad zone, the music becomes sad in a way that sounds composed and intentional.

So as I'm writing some stuff for busking organ, I realise that part of what I want is this kind of reactivity. Are we doing another loop around the verse and refrain or are we headed for the code and the next piece?

Indeed, can we play theme A and use algorithm B to generate an accompaniment in real time? Ideally I could use a few inputs to move through different musical regions that might be fully or only partly deterministic.

I kind of don't want to reimplement fmod in python, though. Maybe there's already a library.

I spent a lot of time today making an arrangement of La Danse des Canards today and its fun, but I can already tell that its too fixed.

Tbh I'm mostly modifying existing arrangements to be in a playable key and it feels both like a lot of bother and also insufficient.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 26, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

This is a very hilarious* riff on Cornelius Cardew's denunciation of Stockhausen.

Why did Cardew denounce Stockhausen? Because he was a Maoist and their major activity is denunciations.

Not actually funny.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 26, 2026

All the problems of notation will be solved by kazoo

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 24, 2026

Replying to @TodePond@mas.to

@TodePond@mas.to Thank you

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 24, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

The London Permacomputing club just got a calendar and we were discussing listing live code events, since they're fairly FLOSS/perma adjacent. First, I need to get some admin access to make that happen. And also to know what was on the old events page.....

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 24, 2026

Hey, #pastagang , did you kill the London events page on purpose? https://pastagang.cc/london

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 24, 2026

Replying to @coolsquid@438punk.house

@coolsquid@438punk.house If you feel worried, it is 100% beyond reproach to meet them in a public space where other adults are around. Like a coffee shop or a library etc.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 23, 2026

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

In the early 90s, safeguarding concerns were used to push young people out of queer community. There were occasional youth groups, but in general, most adult queers were frightened to talk to people 12-18. This was a bad, isolating experience as a young person. I knew gay people existed, but I was stranded in a conservative mileue. I've been a huge proponent of all ages spaces since I was a youth. All ages music venues are especially important. Counterculture needs to be accessible to people who need it and a lot of those people are young.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Mar 23, 2026

When I was a tween or young teen, there weren't very many kids online or on the BBSes I used to use, so I talked to people of all ages all the time and probably annoyed them occasionally, but it was fine.

Eventually, my dad signed us up for something a bit more kid friendly/educational and we joined Prodigy.

Holy shit Prodigy was infested with paedophiles.

I think making something specifically for kids is a way bigger safeguarding concern than kids turning up to a thing not pitched at them, as long as there's no scope for DMs, but the people who wrote the rulesabout online interactions were Meta lobbyists, not people who actually have experience with being a kid in unsafe spaces.

Its not inherently bad to for a twelve year old to talk to an adult who is not related to them or paid to talk to them. For most of human history, its been normal. I had cross generational friendships at that age, one of which has lasted until the other person died of old age. (RIP Bob) These adults tended to be friends of my parents, adults I knew from volunteering or church, or sometimes neighbours. And one guy from a BBS.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Feb 02, 2026

Replying to @cassolotl__dup_28883@eldritch.cafe

@cassolotl I had an earring hole that got infected off and on for years. This did eventually stop.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Jan 28, 2026

Replying to @ComplotsFaciles@amicale.net

@ComplotsFaciles Plus de colonialisme sera tout réparer!

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Jul 29, 2025

Replying to @larsi@graz.social

@larsi@graz.social thank you!

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Jul 28, 2025

Replying to @winfried@graz.social

@winfried@graz.social @murpunktat@graz.social Thats super. Do you happen to know anything about the data collected?

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Jul 27, 2025

Replying to @murpunktat@graz.social

@murpunktat@graz.social

Hello,

This looks very interesting! I have a background in network music, data sonification and public engagement and I'd like to apply, but I have a couple of questions.

Is this open to non-EU citizens? I have British and US passports.
Can you say anything about the data? It seems like this has already started? What kind of data are you collecting? What kinds of questions and prompts have you used thus far?

Thank you!

Charles

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Oct 05, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Oh, hey, if only there hadn't been such an UGENCY, this would have been useful. https://journals.qucosa.de/array/issue/view/272

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Oct 04, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Here's a quick cheat sheet of characteristics of white supremacy culture. This has helpful antidotes you can use to try to effect cultural change in your organisation. https://www.sbctc.edu/resources/documents/about/edi/characteristics-of-white-supremacy-visual.pdf

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Oct 04, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

"Critical Race (Electroacoustic Music) Theory" would be a great theme for a conference or journal call that I am in no way qualified to organise

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Oct 04, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

The only "positive" to come out of this is that it shows the paucity of scholarship in electroacoustic music and race. One thing that sticks out for me, in the scramble of paper reviews that I suddenly, urgently had to do was that the way in which we talk about the entire genre is already problematic. We tend to define ourselves by our difference. What we do is valuable because it is *unlike* other people. The entire musical genre is riddled with individualism. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/individualism.html The causes of this are probably many, including American ideology, the close association with university publishing/grants culture, and a deliberate whitewashing and white supremacist power grab over the genre. This is also evident in historical decisions about who got in the canon and in academic hirings. Babbit was briefly fired from his post for being Jewish, for example. These forces are present in all western art music to various extents.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Oct 04, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Welp. The conversation about whether to delete this list had several examples of white supremacist culture. Aside from the overt racism present in the discussion, the power structures that perpetuate white supremacy were very evident. Indeed, the major driving factor was a false sense of urgency. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/urgency.html And what was so urgent? The "one right way" problem. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/one-right-way.html Which was driven by binary thinking. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/eitheror--the-binary.html The list was obviously useful and was causing zero problems, but suddenly I had to provide an academic article explaining exactly why it was useful. The obvious utility to teachers - and that it was actively being used was not enough. This 'standard' is not evenly applied. And indeed, is another part of white supremacist culture. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/worship-of-written-word.html

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Oct 02, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Just got an email notification that i still donate to the wiki foundation. LOL. Yikes.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 27, 2023

Replying to @yaxu@post.lurk.org

@yaxu@post.lurk.org Oh heck, yeah. I've definitely witnessed this in action. And enough sexism that I've had to develop strategies for conferences. Like, people will approach me with questions and ignore the woman next to me, so now I'll introduce her as an expert before I make my own answer.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 27, 2023

Replying to @yaxu@post.lurk.org

@yaxu@post.lurk.org This is perhaps nitpicking, but I think people largely defended it partly because it was the basis of their careers and in the unacceptable way that they did because the person who called it into question is Black. (This is vaguely adjacent to my area.)

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 27, 2023

Replying to @yaxu@post.lurk.org

@yaxu@post.lurk.org Anti-GRT prejudice is certainly embedded and extreme. I've yet to encounter antisemitism in music theory, aside from historical writing, like the Schenker thing. It's disappointing to learn this is an ongoing problem. Thank you for your comment on WP.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 27, 2023

Replying to @yaxu@post.lurk.org

@yaxu@post.lurk.org As an aside, I'm not sure antisemitism is an ongoing barrier to the same extent that anti-Black racism is. It certainly impacted people's careers in the 20th century, but I don't think there's a systemic erasure. Whether or not anitsemitism is "racism" specifically is an ongoing debate because, of course, not all Jews are white / white-passing.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 27, 2023

Replying to @jrp@hub.kliklak.net

@jrp I would like to please ask you to chime in if you're able. I suspect this is futile, but I don't want to give up without fighting.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 27, 2023

Replying to @yaxu@post.lurk.org

@yaxu@post.lurk.org I'm sure whatever comment you made on the deletion discussion would be helpful

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 26, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

@yaxu@post.lurk.org breaking this up into several separate lists across separate pages makes it less useful for it's current use case, makes every new list also susceptible to deletion and introduces new problems. US composers of colour is a valid category, as is perhaps Australian or European, but it gets more awkward as we move into areas that are post colonial. The insistence on the part of the deletionist that groupings are solely by musical style or practice is not resolved by breaking it up by continent or country either.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 26, 2023

Replying to @yaxu@post.lurk.org

@yaxu@post.lurk.org yay. a research project.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 26, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

I should copy this list to my own website before it gets deleted.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 26, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

We can get rid of racism by getting rid of efforts to mitigate the effects of racism.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 26, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

El-Dabh's wikipedia page mentions Schaeffer, but Schaeffer's page doesn't mention El-Dabh. Systemic eracism and Euro-supremacy is still impacting textbooks. In the struggle to get recognition for women's musical work, people wrote books that were just short canned bios and lists of works by women. This became a resource for people writing articles and textbooks. Today, we can write books or we can just use existing resources to create a useful compendium.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 26, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

The deletionist's point, ' "Of color" is a very American-centric phrase that essentially categorizes people as "white" or "not", smushing everyone in the "not" category into one homogenous mass with no respect to actual cultural differences that may be relevant.' is at least partly valid. The entire genre of music has a history of serious whitewash, however. Schaeffer is is often credited as an inventor, but his Railway Study came four years after Halim El-Dabh's The Expression of Zaar. Electroacoustic music was invented in Africa. And not secretly. El-Dabh moved to the US and was a central figure in a bunch of scenes you've heard of, even if you've never heard of him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halim_El-Dabh So yeah, it's smooshing him in - because he was smooshed out by racism.

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Charles 𝄢 H @celesteh@post.lurk.org · Sep 26, 2023

Replying to @celesteh@post.lurk.org

Have you used this list as a resource? Now would be a good time to chime in saying so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_electroacoustic_composers_of_color

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