Friday, January 31, 2014

Mental Map of Integer Computer Operators

In celebration of the coming arrival of my good friend Ezra Buchla on campusius, I will present a mental map of integer computer operations.  They are the candy of DSP.  Ezra has built a sound computer using blackfin, which he says is fixed point, I think he said at 32.32...  A gigabyte of frac pernt!  Floating point is going obsolete because it causes too much heat.  Meanwhile fixed point, which is old, can also be new.  Aleph Sound Computer.  Shnth.  Roulette::Mixology Festival::NYC::February 8 and 8+1.  Ezra lectures in SuperCollider class on integers math in the Aleph.

The mental map is on the first floor of the BMA, Baltimore Museum of Art.  It occurs in my dreams but also when thinking about algorithms during the day.  It is like a transparent overlay over the math.   It takes the form of a gift shop, lit well with fluorescent lights, but it is not the gift shop of the BMA, which sells postcards and cutesy Baltimore paraphernalia.  Instead, it is more like the giftshop of a science museum: crystal growing kits, bug boxes, maybe some sea monkeys.  One other point about the giftshop mental map: it is not in the actual floor location of the BMA giftshop, but rather it occupies the area where African and Native American artefacts can be seen; their faded leather geometries and totemic forms transmute into hypercolor plastic toys for science boys and tomboys. 

This mental map can be seen when figuring basic integer dsp algorithms mentally, such as random number generators, bit shift operations, arithmetic and logic, fixed point multiplication, which provides for intergrators and thus resonators, mechanical triangle wave oscillators, and my favorite derivative of that: the nume deno oscillator.

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