Still Drupal after all these years

I thought I was done with Drupal in 2016 when we rebuilt Meedan’s fact-checking platform, Check, using Ruby / React. It felt like a breath of fresh air to decouple the frontend from the backend, and further subdivide the application into a set of services that...

How to prepare your Web application for Web MIDI on Firefox

In this note, I explain the process of preparing your Web application to use Wed MIDI API on Firefox, because this process is different from Chrome and involves a few more steps that may be counter-intuitive or surprising. I include screenshots and code snippets from my own app.

Uploading Zoom meeting recordings to AWS S3

While helping out my friends at Labyrinth Online set up their platform for online music courses, I had the opportunity to work on an interesting function to automate the upload of recorded meetings from Zoom to AWS S3.

Visualizing musical tunings in the browser

One of my recurring intellectual joys is to learn about the deep connections between music and mathematics. About a decade ago, I discovered the amazing work of Gareth Loy, “Musimathics: The Mathematical Foundations of Music”, a generous 2-volume overview of the mathematics and physics underlying many...

Documenting the MusicXML schema

The latest MusicXML version is 3.1. However, the official MusicXML documentation stops at version 3.0, and the Music Notation Community Group’s plan to keep the documentation updated is unclear.

First release of iReal Pro to MusicXML converter

Yesterday, I finally published an online demo of my iReal Pro to MusicXML converter (unimaginatively called ireal-musicxml), having spent around 300% of the time I had originally anticipated to reach the first release of this module. In this post, I hope to summarize the...

Validating MusicXML files without the tears

MusicXML is a standard open format for exchanging digital sheet music, supported by a large number of music applications. Version 3.1 is the first version to be released by the W3C Music Notation Community Group.

It’s a complex format, aiming at capturing...

Music blogging

I’m interested in music blogging, to document my journey as a music practicioner. By “music blogging”, I mean inserting music snippets within regular blog posts, just like one does with mathematical notation, code snippets, media objects, etc.

A query tool for heterogeneous sheet music indexes

As a practicing musician, I often need to refer to sheet music when I learn a new tune. Oftentimes, I prefer to refer to multiple transcriptions of the same song in order to fine-tune my own interpretation of it. To help me locate the various transcriptions, I’ve created a small...

Extracting and manipulating the media database from Synology NAS

As a dedicated music listener, I care about my media library. I run a Synology DS411+ NAS which has been excellent at serving large amounts of media, but their audio apps (Audio Station on the browser, DS audio on mobile) inevitably have missing features that I wish I could use...

Converting an audio album to a YouTube video

YouTube is a great way to quickly disseminate obscure, long-tail music albums that carry cultural significance. As long as you remain under the radar of our friends at the music labels, of course

Here’s a recipe to prepare audio files for YouTube upload. The video is a looping slideshow...

My interest in machine learning

I submitted the following essay to UBC as the introduction to a Master’s program letter of intent, so please forgive the self-engrossed tone. Haven’t heard back yet, hoping for good news!

<essay>

There is a paradigm shift afoot in the software industry. The expectations of software...

Music localization for cultural preservation

Following is a talk proposal I submitted (actually: mis-submitted, but that’s not important) to the “Music and hacking” 2017 conference organized by IRCAM at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Please forgive the self-aggrandizing tone - doubly so that I ended up not even attending the conference...