FishFace

I get annoyed just seeing all of these spelled out.

Speed is an absolute requirement for a launcher, and if one of the search providers is taking too long it needs to be removed until its speed makes it usable. There’s no way I want to wait for web results if they take between 1 and 10 seconds. The number of local results should always be such that it can be held in memory without being a burden, and return in an imperceptible amount of time.

Yeah, I guess it looks cool. Tho I think lots of instruments, and playing them, look cool :P

I don’t think you really answered (or even whether you were trying to).

I don’t think randomly going off-pitch is an aesthetic goal; I think if you wanted to do that you could easily, in an electric instrument, introduce a random pitch bend. No-one ever does… What people do do is introduce intentional pitch bends - vibrato is an obvious example, but also pushing the tuning of certain intervals outside what the typical equal-tempered distances would be.

The reason I asked the question above the way I did is because it seems universally acknowledged that intonation on the theremin synthesiser is significantly harder than on a fretless string-instrument, which affords the same expressiveness in pitch. Unless there is genuinely an advantage to its setup (and, again, randomly bad pitch is not one IMO) should we not want to make it easier?

I, of course, was not saying I demanded perfect intonation, which does not exist. But intonation that I, an at-best-moderately critical listener, can tell is way off, is not what I would aim for and I have heard that in a professional recording.

Why don’t I reframe it: why would you not want an instrument which is like the theremin synthesiser but which instead of placing the hands in free space you place them on some kind of board? How does it get worse?

Muscle memory is not enough when playing a string instrument, so I can’t imagine it is when playing the theremin synthesiser either! Muscle memory gets you in the right ball-park but you need tactile cues as well as to listen to be as accurate as possible. Typing on a touchscreen keyboard gives you visual cues (it’s usually close to where you’re looking, closer than a physical keyboard) and I believe accuracy suffers compared to a keyboard with its tactile feedback (that is, if your fingers are off, you feel that you’re hitting the edges of the keys).

It seems to me that anything you can do in the free air you should be able to do with an appropriately-scaled slider or other control system. I was enamoured of the theremin synthesiser when I first heard about it, but when I realised it is just using the hand position to affect two single capacitance values, rather than anything more complicated, I was disappointed!

I always thought the theremin was an overly impractical synthesiser. Even having the two control axes controlled by wheels or rods would make more sense.

I play cello and it’s notable that hitting a note when you have to arrive there by sliding the finger into position is a lot easier than when you have to place the finger in the correct position from the air (during a shift - the latter is fine if the whole hand is in position)

That is to say, having a tactile reference is better than waving your arms around in the air. This was reinforced for me when I heard a theremin recording by a pro and the intonation was noticeably bad.

Yeah you might be right.

I should clarify I use GIMP. A lot! But this is one way it sucks. By this point I don’t know what other similar programs even have over it - it finally got adjustment layers after some decades. So if I can recognise this shortcoming anyone should be able to ;)

The other major thing was switching to single window mode. Floating windows for everything was absolutely batshit.

The first two sets of instructions are for drawing a disc, rather than a circle (a disc being a filled-in circle) and don’t extend to drawing a circle easily. The last method does, but it is about 10x as long. The traditional method for drawing a circle was to select the inner circle, save the selection to a channel, grow the selection by the pixel width of the stroke you want, subtract the saved selection, then fill. Wonderful /s

GIMP does not (unless I missed it in a ~recent update) have a shape tool like most image editors. The GIMP documentation in any case suggests using Inkscape for the purpose.