#1 Sharing co-working space with my wife.

#2 my home office! (I transitioned from music industry work into data science over the last few years)

me :: Musician a, Developer b => a -> b

This week I reached the end of a long journey and the start of the next one!

When I signed up here I shared a rant about where I was at the time:
https://devrant.com/rants/1279742/...

This week I accepted a decent salaried role as the leading Data Scientist in a well funded nonprofit organisation based close to my home! I’ll be the only technical professional in software development or analytics in the organisation and it’s a new role, so I imagine there’ll be a reasonable degree of flexibility in figuring things out and implementing them.

Have spent the last week (and will continue until my start date) building up a realistic collection of best practices while brushing up on tools they use (as well as tools and methodologies that I plan to bring with me).

After over a decade working as a self employed freelance, I’m looking forward to them change and to building out on different areas of my skillset!

I perform music concerts by sequencing various synthesis and sampling equipment in real-time, from an interface of pure text!

https://youtube.com/watch/...

This week I reached a major milestone in a Machine Learning/Music Analysis project that I've been working on for a long time!!

I'm really proud to launch 'The Harmonic Algorithm' as an open source project! It represents the evolution of something that's grown with me through two thesis' (initially in music analysis and later in creative computation) and has been a vessel for my passion in both Music and Computation/Machine Learning for a number of years.

For more info, detailed usage examples (with video clips) and installation instructions for anyone inclined to try it out, have a look at the GitHub repo for the project:

https://github.com/OscarSouth/...

"The Harmonic Algorithm, written in Haskell and R, generates musical domain specific data inside user defined constraints then filters it down and deterministically ranks it using a tailored Markov Chain model trained on ingested musical data. This presents a unique tool in the hands of the composer or performer which can be used as a writing aid, analysis device, for instrumental study or even in live performance."

Trying to type in a normal text editor after 7-8 hours of editing with vim is the same feeling as spinning yourself on the spot until you can’t stand anymore then trying to walk in a strait line.jhw

Anyone interested to see mine and my wife’s culture & technology crossover performance/arts/music project?

The name is UDAGANuniverse. Udagan in Sakha (northeast Siberia) language toughly translates to ‘she shaman’. I met my wife while she was touring in Europe with a traditional Sakha group (I was touring Celtic trad music that time).

The project is incorporating all our interests, artforms and professional skills under a shamanistic aesthetic. Functional Programming, Live Coding and Machine Learning play a big part in my input and live performance role.

First episode of our newly launched podcast:
https://udaganuniverse.com/news/...

My personal articles — arts based and touching on functional programming + category theory:
https://udaganuniverse.com/music

I’ll be posting new articles more specifically on Coding and ML in performance in the next weeks.

If you’d like to see a little personal backstory (how we came to fuse performance with code/ML) check out this rant here:
https://devrant.com/rants/1279742/...

Hope that you enjoy and please let us know any comments or feedback!

Self promotion:
I've just uploaded my first article to mine an my wife's collaborative arts/culture project blog --UDAGANuniverse.

I've lead a varied career path so far which has kept me closely connected with cutting edge tech in both creative & business environments. This introductory article serves as an introduction to the driving force behind what has motivated me down that path.

Check it out here if you'd like to read it!:
http://udaganuniverse.com/blog/4

Later articles will get into how I've incorporated coding into performance. I only touch on it in this post.

Saydyy (my wife) has also posted her introduction, which I'd highly recommend reading! She has lead an inspiring and incredible journey in her life and introduces herself and her earliest motivations in her writing.

Hope that you enjoy it!

Anyone else here a massive fan of ggplot2?

I love the whole TidyVerse package library (such a well designed workflow) and ggplot2 is the crowing jewel, a thing of real tangible beauty, a reason to love R, even though its indexes start at 1..

First class coffee-machineship in play here.

Who else loves that beautiful moment when you wake up fully alert and you can tangibly see the solution to the problem in your project that you went to sleep (too damn late) on, floating right there in the front of your mind?

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!