So.. finals are finally over. Most intensive finals week I've been through.. All the stuff that I have to know, and i didn't do that thorough a job of cramming, cos things came out on the exam that I didn't pay attention to. Like the molecular structure of cadherins and how they work molecularly, or what is the multi-hit model of cancer, or why did Prussia rise in the 18th century.. couldn't thnk of anything except that Prussia encouraged people to plant potatoes..

Oh well, they're over. 3h exams are too long. I don't have the stamina to stay through them. How on earth did I manage to go through A levels where exams are 3h of continuous thinking and writing with no break? At least now I can afford to use the 3h leisurely, think questions over carefully, for the bio finals at least, no time to think for hum. Not very confident of any of my grades, depending largely on the rest of the class to do badly.. Only confirmed A I got is that music class that I took for P/NP. Grr..

For that music class, we were supposed to come up with a program that do something cool related to computer music. And there were some really good projects. The one that I found to be the most impressive was this algorithmic composer that had 4 voices (SATB) in beautiful strings sounds. The user pick the key and type of scale (major, minor, pentatonic, blues..), and then the voices will randomly pick pitches from the scale (which is probably weighted, meaning some notes of the scale is more likely to be played), randomly pick length of note and randomly pick articulation of the note. The wonderful thing about this composer is that it counts in phrases, I don't know how he did it, but this composer only responds to key changes, tempo changes after a complete phrase, and the voices somehow all know where in the phrase they are, and when you press stop, they only stop after a complete phrase. The result is something that is very tonal, very "follow-the-rules-of-music-theory" type of tune. Sounds beautiful.

Other interesting ideas, but prob not so successful results include this girl who somehow converted the firing of 5 rat neurons into binary and made it into sound, so a sound comes out every time a neuron fired. The plan was to map location of the neurons into the speakers, so it would be like the listener is standing in the middle of the neurons and the neurons firing around him. Didn't turn out to be that impressive, just hear a bunch of ticks. Could be interesting though if the different firings get different pitches or something like that..

Another guy made this thing that record surrounding sounds from 3 microphones and then fade them in and out and add effects and so on, basically mixing a 3min piece from a 20s recording. Again, very interesting idea, but didn't sound so good.

I think I like pd. It's not very advance, some functions that need a lot of programming is probably present as a button in some other program, but there's a lot of things that I can do with it. Considering turning into a keyboardist with a laptop. In the meantime, I'll try, note try, to improve my melody generator and get a composition out of it.

Some pictures taken in school

Forgot if I posted this picture. Found some golden mushroom sprouting out after the rain. They are really gold in colour.


Giant Cat in the Hat to celebrate the don't know how old birthday of the cat in the hat created by Dr Seuss outside the library named after him


Flowers blooming. It's spring!


A bunny I saw hanging out next to the tree I was taking pictures of in the med school, so took picture of it too