Can guitar frets perform multiplication?

6 hours ago (charlespetzold.com)

https://vimeo.com/194116649

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.

Loved the article. Didn't love being blue-balled by the conclusion but still great stuff.

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.