Today, the first of synthember 2023 I am starting this phlog to celebrate two challenges: #synthember by @AlgoCompSynth@ravenation.club and #100daystooffload by @82mhz@oldbytes.space both of the mastodon (giant tusked surface gophers) For synthember, my feeling is that we must each discover our own meaning of synthember, though the core challenge is TRACKADAY. My first track is a beep, with raw audio generated in lisp: #+BEGIN_SRC 000.ksh #!/bin/ksh ecl <<EOG (with-open-file (out #p"000.raw" :direction :output :if-exists :supersede) (loop repeat 440 do (loop for val in (list (+ 127 1) (- 127 1)) do (loop repeat 50 do (write-byte val out))))) EOG mpv --demuxer=rawaudio \ --demuxer-rawaudio-channels=1 \ --demuxer-rawaudio-format=u8 \ --demuxer-rawaudio-rate=44100 \ 000.raw #+END_SRC Since I have 30 days / 100 days and phosts, I'm not going to rush through my decisions. On linux, the shebang might be #!/usr/bin/env sh and here I am using ecl, embeddable common lisp and mpv for a portable audio layer. dooooooot CHUNK audio totally succeeded ;p My friend Fugue State Audio, @fstateaudio@mastodon.sdf.org whose weekly show is #NoiseTherapy (see mastodon) had a hardware failure last week. If you can, please support and help fstateaudio who is also doing this challenge get their simfing back online and alive! They are at https://fstateaudio.com and on the mastodon. Second challenge wise, 82mhz introduced us to a round of #100daystooffload https://82MHz.net/posts/2023/09/100-days-to-offload/ And their first webpost shares a bunch of us gophers who joined, with an explanation of gopher to the uninitiated readers. I am a lisp hacker; this gopherhole and corrolary, provided by ~club for this challenge is going to be lisp powered synthing experiments, and also have the theme of me trying to learn Chinese, and integrate Chinese language into my programming system, ecosystem and writing, and I would like to connect better in both directions with my Chinese first language friends. IN ADDITION both these challenges, I want to use art and my art (lisp) to help the environment. @bruceturner@toad.social showed me their friend's work turning air quality data into sound. So another quest for this month is to use synth to relate prehistoric and the modern anthropogenic climate crisis histories. In my planning toot on the mastodon, I had planned lisp clim2 for day 0. But putting my synthesised beep into a clim2 rich interface will be day 1 instead. I am looking forward to reading and listening to everyone in #synthember and #100daystooffload too ! I saw quite a few people are already phosting/tooting/ webposting! Thanks for reading and participating everyone. (Oh, I am screwtape from the lispy gopher show w/ screwtape with screwtape) tfw.