Michael Earls - cerkit.com

New acquisition - MPC One

In my 40+ years of making music with electronic devices, I find the MPC to be the best workflow, so far. The MPC introduced me to a quick way to lay down my ideas and get the sound I'm looking for without being distracted by email, instant messages, and notifications on my computer.

Picture of a Raspberry Pi 400 Single-board computer in the window with the forest in the background.

Electronics

Four day weekend without the Internet

It was just like I remember it back in the days before the Internet. If you wanted to make the computer do something, you just had to figure it out. You got to your destination by trying new things and repeating with small permutations over and over until you get the desired result.

3D Printing

The main reason I decided not to get a Prusa Mini

So when I looked over at it taking up some of my table space, I considered what I could do to replace it with something smaller. I immediately thought of the Prusa Mini.

Music

Why I got rid of most of my synth hardware

I recently made some silly purchases. I am an amateur musician. I have a rudimentary home studio consisting of a few MIDI controllers, a Native Instruments Maschine Mk2, and a Korg Wavestate. I also use computers to write my music. I kept seeing videos ("not sponsored" (but provided free/loaned

Getting Started with Retro Computers - Writing Code for the SC131

About a year ago, I built a SC131 Pocket Sized Computer designed and developed by Stephen C Cousins on Tindie. I soldered the kit and got it up and running, but left it alone for a long time. I bought it because I'm interested in learning how computers work at

Art

Creating Music and Animation in VR

I've spent the past few weeks learning how to create animation and music using only my Virtual Reality headset. I've been using Quill and Virtuoso (paired with my DAW) extensively. My first animation was the result of me trying to keep up with Goro Fujita's Patreon supporter class. He works

Music

Play your Favorite Daw from Within Virtual Reality

In this post, I briefly discuss interfacing a VR headset with the Reason Studios Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

My first taste of Virtual Reality

I recently made a childhood dream come true and bought myself a Virtual Reality headset. I have been following the technology since the very beginning.

VR

Sculpting in Virtual Reality

I have spent the last few days holed up in a virtual reality drawing and animation studio called Quill. I've been learning the environment and tools and I have been very impressed. I've been able to create some fun and creative artwork already in only a few days' worth of practice.

Electronics

My Obsession with Feedback Continues

I have been working diligently at building my own synthesizer using an FPGA. I will be using a breadboard-mounted Cmod A7: Artix-7 FPGA Module.

Musings

Managing Infinite Concepts with Finite Constraints

There are infinite concepts, but when one applies finite constraints to those concepts, one can accomplish miracles. This is the foundation of life as I perceive it. The constraints of words challenge us to think about the world a specific way in order to communicate what we are thinking and

New Music Experiment - Now with Video

I began exploring the use of a video synthesizer. I found out about Cathodemer from an online source. I have been using it to create visuals for some of my music and posting it on YouTube. For my recordings using this tool, I used the output of the Soma laboratory's

Music

Converting a Haiku into Music using a Context Free Grammar

In this post, I will demonstrate how I converted a Haiku into algorithmic music using a context free grammar.

Music

Anatomy of a Song: Using Scripture as a Song Grammar

I have designed a simple context-free grammar using Psalm 71:22 to drive the creation of a song.

Architecture

"Power wants to be free" - Intentional Software Development and Management

It seems that we are approaching a time when the scope of systems development is changing such that more power is being placed into the hands of the end users, allowing software developers to focus on higher-level tasks to assist them with special cases.

Integrating Microsoft Power Automate with LinkedIn

I am testing integration between Microsoft Power Automate and LinkedIn. My future posts should appear in LinkedIn after they are published.

New Twitter Integration

I am testing a new Twitter integration with Microsoft Power Automate for new posts. All of my future posts should also show up on Twitter.

Architecture

My First Architecture Diagram

Back around 1992-1993, I worked at a company that created Form Filling software in the Real Estate space. I was phone tech support for one of their software packages. It was my first introduction to how a technical company worked. While working there, I had grand visions for how I

Music

Not Giving Up...

I recently sold my mac, so I am not longer maintaining my Intentional Music program in Swift. However, I am a .NET developer, so using C# to write a new Intentional Music program was a no-brainer. I started the program on my PC over the weekend and got it caught

Music

Not at all what I Intended

A few months ago, when I started my Intentional Music project, I wanted a way to create music with computer code by defining my "intents" and then writing an algorithm that would process those intents to generate long-form ambient music.

Music

Adding Scales to Intentional Music

I spent last few days adding another algorithm to my Intentional Music (algorithmic composition) arsenal. This time, I chose to focus on adding the ability to choose notes from musical scales.

Programming

Major Improvements to Intentional Music Program

I spent the morning refactoring my Intentional Music Program to move away from Swift Playgrounds and make it a full-on console application.

Graphic Design

New Artwork for my Music

I've been working a lot on the artwork for my music lately. I've created the artwork for a few albums and singles this week. The artwork for the singles displays on the Now Playing screen when you're using the Bandcamp app. Here are just a few of the pieces of art.

Graphic Design

Some Experimental Graphics

I played around with the blend tool in Illustrator. I then brought the image into Photoshop to apply clouds. Here are the results.

Music

What makes an Intentional Music Program?

I began considering the idea of intentional music back in the early 90's. I was into the Chaos theory and I loved exploring Fractal generation software. I spent a lot of time pondering the beauty of self similarity. One thing that always stood out to me about the Mandelbrot set