Out of the Blue

In January 2019, I collaborated with my wife, choreographer Renay Aumiller, to create a modern dance piece called Out of the Blue. I wrote a program that prompted the audience to contribute a list of body parts and dance qualities, and then fed that creative input into an algorithm to randomly g... (more)

A Music Composition Language With a Functional Backbone

A couple months ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak about Alda at the Compose::Melbourne conference in Australia! Compose is a conference all about functional programming as it pertains to professionals, academics and hobbyists alike. The conference was great and I had a fantastic... (more)

Exit Mice and an ode to grunge pop

Hello, I started a new band called Exit Mice! It’s always exciting to start a new musical project, and this one is no exception. We just released our debut EP (which you can listen to below) and we’ll be playing our first show this Thursday, July 5, at The Pour House in Raleigh. If you’re in the... (more)

Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

I’ve been thinking a lot about task management lately. I’ve actually been thinking about it for years. I’ve always been searching for the optimal way to sort through the bajillion things I have to do and remain productive. This all started when, as a programmer, I realized that I had the ... (more)

A History of the Architecture of Alda

In my last blog post, I talked about an important evolution in the implementation of alda.lisp, a sort of DSL or “mini-language” that represents a musical score and compiles down to data that can be interpreted and performed by Alda’s sound engine. In this post, I’ll discuss another way i... (more)

Alda for Clojurists

A more FP-friendly Alda Just recently, I rewrote a big chunk of the Alda codebase; the result is something I’m a lot happier with, as a Clojure programmer. Clojure is a language that encourages programming in a functional style, minimizing the need to keep track of the state of variables and re... (more)

Alda: A Music Programming Language Built With Clojure

I gave this talk about Alda a few months ago as part of Clojure Remote, the world’s first remote-only Clojure conference. This talk serves as a quick introduction to music programming languages and the philosophy that led me to create Alda. I talk a little bit about what Alda is and a few of th... (more)

Vignettes: Vimwiki, HTTPie, jq

I tried this once before and it was pretty fun. I continue to find and use awesome things (the internet has many of them), so here are a few more things I’ve been enjoying lately. Vimwiki I think keeping a personal wiki is a great way to organize your life. It’s like the digital equivale... (more)

moar no love videos!!!

I haven’t been diligent about posting stuff about No Love, the band I play drums in. So here’s a handful of videos I found on YouTube – enjoy! 6/20/15: Rock 'n Roll Party Fest I 9/2015: Hopscotch 2015 4/1/16: Full set at a house in Raleigh For those of you in the Triangle area, we h... (more)

Alda Has a Bunch of New Features

Three months ago, I wrote a blog post introducing the music programming language Alda and walking through the basics of using it to write a musical score. To my amazement and delight, my blog post went mildly viral on Reddit and Hacker News, bringing about a spike in activity on GitHub. I’m tha... (more)