GUITAR IN THE SPACE AGE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 316/ 06 Nov 2020 10:55

Music and electronics have gone hand-in-hand for me from the very beginning. The folk songs we were taught in junior school didn’t really grab me, and the first tunes that really did when I was 15 were two guitar instrumentals, Apache by Cliff Richard’s band the Shadows, and Ghost Riders In The Sky by US band The Ramrods. Both made gloriously excessive use of echo machines, and I badly wanted one.

 
Around that time (1960) Britain was still peppered with shops and dumps selling ex-WWII electronic surplus: we had a local one, a corrugated-iron Nissen Hut in a farmer’s field full of RAF-surplus radar sets and similar stuff. We used to hang out there, buying bits to make crystal sets - or even one-valve sets for the more ambitious - on which to listen to Radio Luxembourg, which was the only place, apart from café juke-boxes, we could hear proper rock ‘n roll in those days. I bought ex-RAF intercom carbon microphones, and attached one to a cheap, nasty Eko acoustic guitar as a pickup, to be played through the family radiogram as an amplifier. It sounded awful, but not awful enough so I made an echo machine using the coiled wire element from an old electric fire stretched between two more carbon mikes as a mechanical delay line. Then I learned Ghost Riders In The Sky and Apache.

A couple of years later I was among a team of 6th-formers who won a prize for building an analog computer that could solve sixth-order differential equations, using op-amps made out of RAF surplus components, including a green-screen radar oscilloscope as output. I went off to college in The Big Smoke where one could purchase real electric guitars (a Hofner Colorama) and real electronic effects, like a tape-based Watkins Copicat echo and the first Fuzz Face distortion box. I graduated from surf-rock to jazz, then to free jazz. Alongside an excellent bop alto sax player, I played gigs where I sat on a small Fenton Weill amplifier, playing my Colorama with lots of feedback and Mike Bloomfield-style bends and occasionally a violin bow. That amp had a crazy built-in tremolo effect, and by twiddling its rate and depth knobs I could make it work like a primitive beat-box.

I was never a jazz purist: in those days boundaries weren’t so sharp. I revered B.B. King and Hendrix and Clapton and Jeff Beck. I bought a Harmony Sovereign acoustic and learned ragtime blues finger-picking. I loved the classic jazz guitarists like Joe Pass, Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel, but didn’t want to play like them (clean-toned archtop guitars and fast fancy chord and scale work). Nor, later on, did I fancy becoming a heavy-metal shredder. No, tone was becoming most important to me, and electronics were the way to great tones.

Nowadays I have a nice vintage, Made-In-Japan Fender Stratocaster, an Ibanez Artcore semi-acoustic, plus looper, delay, tremolo and freeze pedals and a multi-effects box crammed with signal-processors that can emulate 100 different effects, amplifiers and rooms. This is a golden but whacky age for guitar playing, in which people debate endlessly about the tonal properties of different woods (and pay outrageous prices for them) but I don’t buy any of that: it’s all in the electronics.

Regular readers may recall my frequent mentions of the US guitarist Bill Frisell, which is because he’s been my hero and role model in all matters guitar for many years. He has pulled together all the genres that I most enjoy - surf rock, blues, pop, bluegrass and free jazz - into a seamless synthesis, but better still tone is his artform and effects his principal instrument. His pedal board isn’t large, it’s what he does with it: at centre is a Line 6 DL4 delay pedal which lets him not just record and repeat passages, but speed them up, reverse them and much more: stooped over to twiddle its knobs in mid-performance, Frisell gets unearthly sounds far deeper and richer than any synthesiser just by mangling the signal from his Telecaster.

During his long career Frisell has played with the best of the best, like ex-Miles Davis sidemen Paul Motian and Ron Carter, and has run two long-term trios of his own. If you want a taste of his music to see whether you’d like it, try his gorgeous solo rendition of the Beatles ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ at https://youtu.be/DioXHQmGQko. If you liked that, a 1995 concert with two late greats, ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker and ex-Ornette Coleman bassist Charlie Haden is much wilder: https://youtu.be/AwBtJm7JiDI while if you’re still on board after that, this marvellous set might hook you for good: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwGTKZ6uNxXkrjkDlToJXU2EPG2awfGFx

A NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER

Dick Pountain /Idealog 317/ 04 Dec 2020 10:43

World-changing innovations are like London buses: you wait for ages and then three come along at once. The recent wait has been particularly irksome, as under pandemic lockdown virology and epidemiology felt like the only relevant sciences – apart from rocket science, to get us all off this pestilential planet and to Mars (joke). Then suddenly, blam, three arrive in the same month: I’m writing this at the beginning of December 2020.

Most important and welcome was the arrival of not one but three coronavirus vaccines, all produced in record-breaking time and apparently highly effective (though that will only become certain once they’ve been deployed widely for a while). While their speed of development, testing and approval is remarkable, that’s not the innovation I meant though. The innovation is that two of the three are totally synthetic. Most vaccines up till now have required the target virus to be cultured in animal cells, then deactivated or broken apart and bits injected into live animals to generate antibodies. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are for the first time purely chemical: strings of Messenger RNA assembled from scratch by those sophisticated gene-sequencing and nucleotide assembling machines that have been invented over recent decades by harnessing powerful computers to robotic chemical processing. Injected into your arm, this mRNA tells your own cells to start making one harmless spike-protein of the coronavirus, a sort of pretend infection that generates antibodies against the real one.

The second innovation is in the same area of molecular biology, namely a great breakthrough in solving the ‘protein-folding problem’. All the biological processes that animate living things are driven by enzymes, which are proteins - very long chains made up from 20 or so different amino acid units. These chains don’t just flap around like pieces of string but fold themselves into compact lumps whose exact 3D shape, their cavities and crevices, enable them to work by fitting the molecules they work upon in lock-and-key fashion. These lumps are held together by bonds between amino acids from different points in the chain, and to design artificial enzymes, or drugs that alter the action of natural enzymes by fitting their slots, then you must simulate the way any particular chain of amino acids will fold itself. Since every link in the chain can rotate freely this is a crushingly difficult computational task if the chain is thousands long.

Back in October 2002, PC-owning nerds were being encouraged to donate their spare CPU cycles to a world-wide distributed network for solving protein-folding problems run by Stanford University. 30,000 donors helped crack protein structures around 50 amino acids, but 100 amino acids would need another 270,000. On 30th November 2020 an article in Nature related how Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind – famous for cracking the board game Go sufficiently to beat the human world-champion – had made a similar breakthrough in protein-folding simulation.

DeepMind’s program AlphaFold 2 had outperformed around 100 other teams in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction). The performance of folding prediction programmes is measured against physical  experimental evidence of a protein’s structure from X-ray Diffraction Crystallography or the newer Cryo-Electron Microscopy, which pictures the individual atoms: AlphaFold 2 scored close to a 90% match in this challenge. An earlier version of AlphaFold worked entirely by deep-learning, that is by examining the amino acid sequences versus 3D structures of many proteins, which enabled matches of around 60-70% accuracy. For AlphaFold 2 the team added an extra level, not of deep-learning but of constraint-solving. Consider any pair of amino acids linked together and physical chemistry can tell you how they can rotate about that bond and what resistance will be encountered: similar data is available for the close approach of active groups on remote amino acids. Applying such constraints to a purely learned prediction can boost the accuracy to 90%. The implications for the study of human biochemistry, disease and the speeding of up future drug design are massive, potentially world-changing.

The third innovation unveiled in November relates tangentially to the other two: Apple released its M1 CPU chip, which has two perhaps world-changing virtues. Firstly it breaks Apple’s own dependency upon Intel and more importantly elevates the ARM architecture, which already owns the mobile market, to desktop PC status, thus threatening Intel’s x86 hold there. (Ironically enough our dimwitted government recently allowed ARM to be sold abroad). Secondly the M1 chipset contains not only eight general-purpose ARM cores and an 8-core graphics unit, but also a 16-core Neural Engine capable of performing up to 11 trillion deep-learning operations a second. Alongside those gene-sequencing and nucleotide assembling machines, M1-powered computers running AlphaFold-style software promise a new era of computer-aided biology, a sort of Lego with living cells.

[Dick Pountain would like an M1-powered Chromebook for Christmas (perhaps not this one)]  

BOOKISH MATTERS

Dick Pountain/Idealog 315/11:48 Monday, October 5th, 2020

One of my lockdown activities has been extending my reading of the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, which included his If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, a serio-comic, postmodern novel about books. The narrator (perhaps also the reader) begins a novel that ends abruptly because it's been wrongly bound with duplicated sections. Returning it to the bookshop he meets a girl with a similarly defective copy, and together they set out to finish the story, which becomes ever more complicated. A bewildering sequence of partial novels by different (or not) authors about sex, war, spies, all totally gripping, none ever proceeding to an ending. It's not another book about the dreaded abstraction 'narrative', but about the material existence of books, which had been on my mind for two reasons.

Back in Idealog 227, 2013, I recounted my adventures trying to publish my book Sampling Reality, about the intersection of philosophy, information theory and neuroscience – as a Kindle Book, using a then state-of-the-art conversion tool called Calibre. I was beset by problems like all special characters displaying as '⎽' and suffered agonies trying to get table-of-contents to work, employing every conceivable different input format like docx, pdf, rtf, odf and more. I eventually got it accepted, and it’s since failed to disturb the best-sellers list, but at least it’s there.

Reflecting on this a few weeks ago I’d decided perhaps to give the book away as a PDF, when almost immediately after this thought occurred to me, Kindle Direct Publishing emailed to announce that they’ve just launched a paperback book print service in addition to ebooks. Too good to ignore, I set about downloading the new version of their production tool Kindle Create. It’s available for PC and Mac only so I installed it onto my Windows laptop, which has lain unused except as a print server for several years, and has a developed a sporadic problem involving a locust-like system process called ‘Runtime Broker’ that gobbles CPU and memory until I squash it in Task Manager.

I’d far rather have done the conversion on my Chromebook, but I soldiered on in semi-crippled Windows and it went better than Calibre, give or take fixing the odd missing contents item. I uploaded the resulting .kcb file to KDP, only to be curtly told it wouldn’t fit into the default 6” x 9“ page size. I’d never considered page size with my ebook of course. Having seen enough of Task Manager, I went downstairs to my Chromebook and reformatted the original .docx in Google Docs, emailed it to myself and went back upstairs to re-do the Kindle Create, which was now accepted. Made a new cover using Kindle Cover Creator, which went well, submitted it all and 72 hours later was given a PDF proof and told my paperback, now 191 pages long rather than 155, has been published. Result.

The second bookish adventure involved reviewing Thomas Piketty’s 1093-page Capital And Ideology for The Political Quarterly. The review copy arrived and is the size of two house-bricks and at 1.7kg almost as heavy. My normal mode of reading, flat on my back on the sofa, was entirely out of the question, and even propping it up on the table was problematic - laid flat it won’t stay open at your page, propped up it slides downwards. I purchased a neat little lectern on Amazon, made in Germany from bamboo and chromed wire.

The book’s spine width and weight were too much for it until I bent the wires into a different shape, and then constructed an ingenious – if I say so myself – system of rubber bands and grommets to hold the pages open. After a week or so of this I contacted Belknap and asked whether they had a Kindle edition. They didn’t but their charming UK PR sent me a PDF instead. It’s also big, at 25Mb, and unusably slow in Adobe Reader, but fortunately I have a better PDF viewer, the marvellous Chrome extension PDF.js. A community-driven GitHub project, built with HTML5 and available free from the Web Store, it’s maintained by Rob Wu (PDF Viewer Chrome extension) who describes it thus: “Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs.”

And oh boy does it parse, searching the huge book fast enough to be my principal means of navigation, and its page zoom is far nicer than Adobe’s too. Over the months my review took I barely touched the printed book again. So what exactly is the postmodern moral of this story? Are e-books finished, are they still the future, or are they just yet another tool that has its place when applied to the right problems?