User Profile

I work extremely hard, but lots of people work extremely hard. Lots of people are smart and talented and produce quality work. But a great deal of our careers and our lives are predicated on pure chance, and while I wholeheartedly believe you can benefit from all the lessons and advice in this book, I can’t share the rest of my story without telling you: I know, a lot has worked out for me in absolutely improbable ways. I don’t know why.

— Make Your Own Rules by Andrew Huang

If you understand what you read and translate it into the different context of your own thinking, materialised in the slip-box, you cannot help but transform the findings and thoughts of others into something that is new and your own. It works both ways: The series of notes in the slip-box develops into arguments, which are shaped by the theories, ideas and mental models you have in your head. And the theories, ideas and mental models in your head are also shaped by the things you read. They are constantly changing and challenged by the surprising connections with which the slip-box confronts you. The richer the slip-box becomes, the richer your own thinking becomes. The slip-box is an idea generator that develops in lockstep with your own intellectual development. Together, you can turn previously separated or even isolated facts into a critical mass of interconnected ideas.

— How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

In my scattered and eclectic fashion, I tend to take things even further than the above; I’m more than willing to straddle lines that people often advise me against. I will publish both dark, deeply serious pieces and lighthearted, comedic ones. I will just as readily release a song I made in an afternoon and one I labored over for years. I will create an album where I’m determined to write and play every part myself, and then another that relies on generative composition processes, machine learning tools, and mountains of other people’s samples. Nothing is off-limits, and the only rules are the ones I’ve made up for the current moment. DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE—that’s the Andrew Huang way.

— Make Your Own Rules by Andrew Huang

More and more rejection started to creep into my musical expression. Why was I still using ideas I knew from rock or rap or classical music? Could I come up with something of my own, beyond all that—or even entirely separate from it? I began removing the elements I’d been brought up to believe turned sound into music: song structure, key signatures and time signatures, traditional instrumentation and traditional recording processes. Actually, why not jettison notes and rhythms entirely?I was listening to ever more obscure experimental music. Musique concrète. Power electronics. Noise. Harsh washes of static, shrill metallic reverberations and low drones, spliced tape, mutated voices, the clicks and glitches of modified or dying electronic devices. In my own work I experimented with more abrasive tones and abnormal structures. Squelchy soundscapes made with obscure freeware. My untrained playing on a borrowed saxophone, shredded beyond recognition with editing and distortion. Half an hour of echoing pulse waves from a modified video game console, slowed down 800 percent and layered with radio static humming through guitar pedals. My creations became rough, sprawling masses of sound.I went down this path of rejection and abandonment, trying to find what was outside the music I knew, and I discovered a lot. The promise of a new musical language was tantalizing, but it never quite materialized. It started to feel like I was pushing against a wall. I realized that, as much as I enjoyed the thrill of discovery each time I found a new way to manipulate sound, my creations left me unsatisfied.

— Make Your Own Rules by Andrew Huang

Often, creative ideas, attitudes, and working methods seem to be at odds with each other or mutually exclusive. Do you create for yourself or for others, plan or improvise, chase inspiration or let it come to you? Across different seasons of our lives—or even moments of our days—there’s much more room than we usually give ourselves to try something different from what we, or the world, usually expect. Living in this fluidity is a massive advantage when everyone else is trying to categorize and stabilize, valuing solid ground over taking flight.

— Make Your Own Rules by Andrew Huang

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

— The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the key features of live coding to me is that openness, and I’m not just talking about free software but the intention to collaborate in nonhierarchical and noncompetitive ways. The next step is to dismantle capitalism—see you there <3. (--Lucy Cheesman aka Heavy Lifting)

— Live Coding by Alan F. Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, and 2 others

I have, however, experienced a major transformation that I will try to explain. In the last edition I wrote that human sexuality was an enigma or a riddle. Since then this enigma has become endowed with even more significance for me. Scientific progress, while it may bring clear practical benefits, more often than not makes the human condition more rather than less difficult to understand. No doubt there are exceptions, but in my experience they have been few. One particularly telling example, which I will revisit at several points in this book, is brain imaging. We may use brain imaging to study what happens in the brain when we become sexually aroused, or to compare and contrast individuals with normal and low levels of sexual desire. What we find is a multiplicity of interactive brain functions that do not slot easily into our preconceived concepts of ‘sexual arousal’ or ‘sexual desire’. And why should they? The common assumption that we can work out, with our brains, how those brains work, is one aspect of the arrogance of human beings. There are many, beyond the field of brain science, who believe that it is only a matter of time before science gets everything worked out. This has not made me nihilistic about scientific research, far from it; the practical benefits of research continue to be considerable. But it has made me more humble, and in the process has intensified my sense of spirituality.

— Human Sexuality And Its Problems, 3rd ed. by John Bancroft

I have, however, experienced a major transformation that I will try to explain. In the last edition I wrote that human sexuality was an enigma or a riddle. Since then this enigma has become endowed with even more significance for me. Scientific progress, while it may bring clear practical benefits, more often than not makes the human condition more rather than less difficult to understand. No doubt there are exceptions, but in my experience they have been few. One particularly telling example, which I will revisit at several points in this book, is brain imaging. We may use brain imaging to study what happens in the brain when we become sexually aroused, or to compare and contrast individuals with normal and low levels of sexual desire. What we find is a multiplicity of interactive brain functions that do not slot easily into our preconceived concepts of ‘sexual arousal’ or ‘sexual desire’. And why should they? The common assumption that we can work out, with our brains, how those brains work, is one aspect of the arrogance of human beings. There are many, beyond the field of brain science, who believe that it is only a matter of time before science gets everything worked out. This has not made me nihilistic about scientific research, far from it; the practical benefits of research continue to be considerable. But it has made me more humble, and in the process has intensified my sense of spirituality.

— Human Sexuality And Its Problems, 3rd ed. by John Bancroft

While live coding aspires to be an inclusive community of practice, it is not always as simple as that. As live coder JA points out, “Computing has been coded masculine.” The gateway of entry might well be open in principle, but this does not always mean that its threshold is easily crossed. Networks and communities emerge through complex webs of association and initiation, friendship, and fraternity.

— Live Coding by Alan F. Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, and 2 others