personal projects

It turns out there are a few treatments for tinnitus. Most of these treatments involve sound therapy, where the ultimate goal is to help retrain your brain to tune out the tinnitus. These therapies have been shown to be effective for some percentage of people with tinnitus – probably less than 50%.

The most recent tonal therapy is called Acoustic CR® Neuromodulation, and there’s a dandy scientific paper that describes it. I saw that someone on reddit created a nice program for generating ACRN tones. It occurred to me that there might be a way to implement a simple and useful ACRN web-app using modern javascript libraries. It gave me something to focus on during my times of significant woe.

I put it up @ http://www.generalfuzz.net/acrn/

If you have tinnitus, give it a whirl. It’ll cost you nothing. It may or may not be exactly the same as the $5000 ANM ACRN treatment, but it should give you a good idea what it would be like. I’m always open to suggestions/feedback to improve the project.

Jasper (5 years old) and I were waiting for a BART train downtown at the end of an epic all day adventure. As we waited, we heard the sound of the muni trains arriving overhead.

Jasper said, “I think it’s a J.”

I said, “I think its a N.”

Jasper waited a few beats, and said “Nope, its a K” with full confidence despite complete ignorance.

I thought to myself “Wow. There’s a great game for a five-year-old”

A couple hundred hours later, I finished building 1.0 of that game.

I ended up building it using the ionic framework, and have published the android version of it on Google play. If you have 60MB to spare on your phone (due to lots of tiny videos of Jasper) and a small child who likes to guess things and touch screens, you should totally install it. I even wrote a theme song for the app.

“Nope!” uses realtime data from 511.org. If there is no internet, it just makes it up like Jasper would.

I also made the source code available. That’s just how I roll.

I’ve put time and care into the creation of my eigth album, Study Music, and created something I feel proud of.

Looking backwards, though, I had a hard time with the reception to my seventh album, “Oughta See”, from a few years ago. I was surprised that people didn’t seem to dig it as much my as previous work. It motivated me to ensure that things would go better with my next release.

I determined that I wanted to engage my listeners by soliciting more feedback before I released my next album. I built a stand-alone music feedback web-app - a tool for doing market research of your music within your fan base.

I then used it to test my latest songs before releasing the new album. The feedback that I got helped evolve the songs and album structure, and allowed me to feel confident about the new music before releasing the album.

I open sourced the feedback app to anyone who thinks they will find it useful. Here is the demo, a demo of the data collection page, and the github source.

There are a few slightly technical steps required to install the app: you’ll need an AWS account, a dynamodb service, and a couple of AWS storage buckets. This is all explained in the github readme.

Some use cases I’ve come up with for my feedback tool:

• Get feedback on tracks that are currently in process
• Determine which song(s) to prioritize making videos for
• Determine which track to submit to Spotify for playlist inclusion
• A/B testing tool for determining song direction

I also hope it can be used by other people in ways I haven’t considered.

For point of reference, I made two posts to my Facebook audience of almost 3,000 people. Without using any ads, a little over 100 people used my new tool, of which almost half left additional feedback in addition to rating tracks. It was a great experiment in programming and engagement which also helped me to dial in my album.

In the last two decades, I have produced a lot of high quality chill out music, releasing eight albums during that time. I am not a singer, and my music has no vocals.

In 2019, my wife inquired why I have yet to combine my sense of humor/play with my music. I took that to heart. During Covid, I created a new musical persona (headphone james) to explore creating silly, family friendly, music. Since then, I have produced a number of goofy “rap” videos, pushing me way out of my comfort zone to be performing in front of a camera (very hard for me), and performing lyrics for my music (totally new).

I just released my latest video, which is a song of about Cape Cod. I’m real proud of it. It coalesces separate skill sets (music production, making videos, poetry, humor, and ability to execute something from start to finish) into a single project. I produced the music, the concept, the content, directed people, had the vision, put in the work (easily over 100 hours of my life) to produce this 2 and a half minute long video, because it is the realization of my purpose.

It captures this time of life, when my in-laws are still alive and healthy, and my son is 12 years old and still excited to be part of my projects. Not only does he gets to participate, but he also learns the parts to the process as he pays a little attention.

It is the best thing I’ve ever done, and here it is.

It honestly doesn’t matter too much if anybody outside my family and friends watches it. I have no attachment to what happens with it now that it is done, but, I saw it all the way through.

This is what it looks like when I swing for the fences.

My name is James Kirsch, and my purpose is fun and connection.