Tools for thought are a beautiful idea—inventions which can “change the thought patterns of an entire civilization.” But that’s a 30 year old quote. Why are they so hard to make? @michael_nielsen and I try to answer that question and suggest paths forward:

@Vincent_Cavez BTW: I found this paper through Google Scholar alerts for SpaceInk, a paper with a creative marginalia design that I still really want in my reading software. . This paper shares two authors (Emmanuel Pietriga, Caroline Appert). I'm glad they're still.

@Vincent_Cavez There's so much very thoughtful design work and writing in this paper! I really admire the commitment to modelessness, to informality, to the nonlinear realities of the creative process, to the expressivity of ink. I wish my reading and writing environments had half this.

@Vincent_Cavez Also supporting theme-and-variation: EtherPen can fuzzy-search for a selection (including only by pitch or duration). So if a sequence is repeated but transposed or doubled in time, that'll show up too. There's also a novel minimap representation.

@Vincent_Cavez Notes (both engraved and handwritten!) can be selected and directly manipulated in pitch and time. EtherPen also allows you to select only the pitches or durations of notes—useful for theme-and-variation. e.g. copy pitches and paste them over notes in a different bar without

@Vincent_Cavez On the "main" staves, engraved notes, handwritten notes, audio files all co-exist in continuous playback. So you can capture one section by humming, one section by drawing, and one through formal notation. (You can also take a photo and anchor it to a measure, but it won't yet be

@Vincent_Cavez EuterPen can interpret handwritten music (e.g. for playback or manipulation) *without* needing to replace your ink with engraved notes. In fact, you can non-destructively switch between handwritten and engraved representations. This lets composers visually indicate what's still

@Vincent_Cavez Staves can be created within a pensieve, and they work just like in the "real" score: they can be played, manipulated, and copied into the main score.

@Vincent_Cavez EuterPen relaxes many of those constraints, but it also offers dedicated scratch spaces, "pensieves", for non-linear exploration. Pensieves can be global or spatially anchored below staves (using a SpaceInk-like gesture). The pensieve can hold ink, engraved music, audio files,

@Vincent_Cavez The paper: .A demo video: Music engraving software suffers from the tyranny of formality[1]: musical notation has to follow lots of rules (e.g. 4 beats per bar in common time). That really gets in the way when jotting down ideas.

This is an appreciation thread for EuterPen, a multimodal music notation system by @Vincent_Cavez et al. It aims to support the non-linear process of exploration during composition. It's the most sensitive and imaginative academic HCI design work I've seen in quite some time!

Lots of details on process and logistics, but I particularly liked this sweet little system for figuring out who makes lunch (is there any creative-collaborative technology more enabling than a daily group lunch??). Q: Can you briefly explain the lunch rota?. Assemble:."The lunch.

Q: How did/do you feel about sharing the authorship of your art?. åyr:."It is as annoying as it is liberating. When we try to write with individual voices, we end up editing each other to the point that the whole separation of voices loses its point. So it’s something that we are.

Q: What is the division of labour between you; and is it the same in every project?. Raqs Media Collective:."Let us imagine a trio of mathematicians with different strengths, say a good geometer, a statistician, a specialist in number theory. In working together, they would find.

I was particularly struck in these interviews by the artists' willingness to subsume their own creative identities to the unknown, often-richer whole of the group. Q: How do you feel about sharing the authorship of your work and art?. Raqs Media Collective:."All our projects are.

This was a nice anthology of brief interviews with artist collaborators and collectives. I've been curious to learn more about these scenes as I noodle on how I want to structure collaborations in my own work. Some excerpts below…

I would really love to apprentice myself to some great game designers for a year or two someday. Entry one zillion in "game designers make us software designers look like hamsters…".

Skeuomorphic, flat, glass—sure, OK, but I'd like about more of whatever this is! Not just visually, but also conceptually, spiritually….

We oil our butcher block countertop every few months. Over ~8 years, it's soaked up ~12 liters of mineral oil. That's a lot of volume! Where does it go?. It can't evaporate. I can't imagine it's all sitting inside the wood. Does it all just rub off on food and during cleaning?.

(In view of what-about-ism, I want to register that I believe Anthropic being for-profit clearly creates hypocritical and enormously perverse incentives, despite the persistent denials of my many friends who are employees there. But at least they were up front about it.).

Maybe this is a mistake-theory/conflict-theory thing? Like I'm over here trying to figure out an internally-consistent world model for why anyone would want to help this team win… but maybe I should relate more to the disorientation I feel when I meet someone in law or sales.