Can guitar frets perform multiplication?
charlespetzold.com48 points by wibbily 7 hours ago
48 points by wibbily 7 hours ago
Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question.
Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded a seat up close for two in the balcony so my future wife could join me.
I threw together a logarithmic slider for HTML (when I knew little about JavaScript and HTML). I hoped someone would take it and run with it and we would see more logarithmic slide rule calculators on the web.
(Top, yellow slider, cannot be interacted with):
https://www.engineersneedart.com/ohmslaw/index.html
Sources (such as they are):
Hard to believe that article doesn't contain the phrase "slide guitar".
This post is by the same author as the Lost Art of Logarithms. https://www.lostartoflogarithms.com/
Discussed about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356314 (196 comments)
I'm blocked for some reason, probably too much HN referred requests...
Enable JavaScript and let the site issue a “not an AI” cookie and it should then be usable. (I have a JS button for this on my toolbar and it’s come in handy a lot recently..)
Loved the article. Didn't love being blue-balled by the conclusion but still great stuff.
The question is can those frets run Doom
Vibrating strings are Turing-complete
That just reminded ne of something from here I had completely forgotten about. Someone had posted making sort of dubious claim of guitar power chords being Turing complete. I made some small improvements (as I saw it, chiefly around how they had implemented their clock) to the code they posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42294766 which lead me down a rabbit hole of guitar tab as opcodes, which eventually lead to something useful after throwing away the silly guitar virtual machine, since I had now done the work of implementing far more than the simple tablature parsing code I intended. That project that resulted from the silly toying around with tab notation as machine code lead to a midi-to-tab generator, which lead to audio to midi to tab, and a bunch more.
That project, for anyone interested in such things, is today https://github.com/scottvr/gtrsnipe There are useful demonstrations in the repo's wiki.