Sensory Dispensary

“The record you didn’t know you needed is what I am listening to in the other room.”

AI_IMAGE: A dimly lit vintage record store back room, shot at eye level across wooden bins overflowing with vinyl LPs. Warm amber light from a single hanging bulb casts deep shadows. Faded concert posters line the dark walls. Wisps of incense smoke curl through the golden light. The mood is intimate, analog, and deeply atmospheric with rich sepia and brown tones against near-black shadows. | photorealistic | landscape

Multitudes

B-Sides / Scott’s Odds & Sods

I am human, I am complex and multi-faceted. I am singularly me and I strive to embrace my own uniqueness. In fact, my willingness to accept my uniqueness is in itself, I believe, something unique about me. I think if we all allowed ourselves, and others, to be different, we would be much happier.

Anyway, because I do contain multitudes, this page features some of my other projects, stuff I have done, have built or am building. It is my hope that you find this interesting and that knowing about these things will help you to better know me.

Collage of vintage rock music, books, films, and psychedelic memorabilia

Scrobble Analyzer – Clean scrobbles are happy scrobbles

When I started using last.fm back in 2006, it was still just a program called AudioScrobbler. The idea was simple, it logged the songs you listened to, to maintain a historical record and to provide statistics and charts and such.

Music! Data! Music Data! Fuck yeah, count me in!

Over the years though, I realized that all the charts and statistics were only as good as the underlying data, and unfortunately the underlying data was a mess. I couldn’t find anything to help me find and fix these variations, so I built something, hence Scrobble Analyzer was born.

A screenshot of the Scrobble Analyzer Interface

It helps you find artist name variations, album duplicates, tracks scattered across remastered editions, and even entries that look identical but contain hidden Unicode characters.

I released this as a free open source project and it is available for anyone to use, and I am still actively developing and improving it. Read more and put it to use at it’s home on github.

Liner Notes

I always believed that my now 20 year old library of listens on last.fm would tell an interesting story about me, so I utilized a really smart model of Claude and had it analyze my history and use it to create an autobiography of sorts, of me and my music. It dug deep, found patterns, counted and recounted, asked me some questions and then wrote my own personal Liner Notes.

The header of my liner notes page, showing data and charts of my listens

WSMB – Custom Radio Station

This is still very much a work in progress but it is coming along nicely. The idea comes from back in the old days when I used to make mix tapes for myself. I would put them in the car and listen for a bit and then I would toss them in the back seat for about a year, and then retrieve and listen again.

I would always say that those tapes were what a radio station would sound like if I programmed it. No genre limitations, no era limitations, anything and everything I liked was fair game, and it all got dumped together on one tape. Segues would sometimes be alarming but that is what made them beautiful.

So I was thinking about how I could recreate that experience in the modern age. So, again with really smart Claude, we built WSMB. Right now it is a three hour Spotify playlist, generated on demand, using a custom algorithm we created together, and that we are tweaking almost daily.

Essentially, and we are using my last.fm data again here, it pulls music from my library as classified into one of four categories:

  1. Comfort: Songs I still play. Familiar and from across everything I’ve actually listened to lately rather than just my greatest hits.
  2. Dormant: Songs I once played heavily but haven’t touched in years. Misplaced.
  3. Neglected: Songs by artists I love, that I have somehow barely played. I am a deep cuts guy by nature, but these are the album tracks that never made it into rotation.
  4. Adjacent: Songs from the edges of my library. Artists I’ve dabbled with but never dug into, and the ones connected to my favorites. This is the hardest one to fill but we are working on it. This should bring back some interesting items but it should also incorporate new songs I haven’t heard before, but I should like, based on a number of super secret factors.

If you would like to give this a listen, here is the playlist we created. Remember, it is refreshed on demand so I can’t tell you what will be on it when you look at or listen to it. Because it does change frequently, assume it will be different the next time you play it, or it might just change right in the middle while you are listening.

Let me know what you think. This is such a fascinating project and I am super excited about it, and I love working on it.

More!

This page will be updated as I finish writing up more sections, and as I add new projects. Some things in the hopper include:

Inspiration

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Today and tomorrow and yesterday too

The flowers are dying like all things do

Follow me close - I’m going to Bally-Na-Lee

I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me

I fuss with my hair and I fight blood feuds . . . I contain multitudes


Gotta tell tale heart like Mr. Poe

Got skeletons in the walls of people you know

I’ll drink to the truth of things that we said

I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed

I paint landscapes - I paint nudes . . . I contain multitudes


A red Cadillac and a black moustache

Rings on my fingers that sparkle and flash

Tell me what’s next - what shall we do

Half my soul baby belongs to you

I rollick and I frolic with all the young dudes . . . I contain multitudes


I’m just like Anne Frank - like Indiana Jones

And them British bad boys the Rolling Stones

I go right to the edge - I go right to the end

I go right where all things lost - are made good again


I sing the songs of experience like William Blake

I have no apologies to make

Everything’s flowin’ all at the same time

I live on the boulevard of crime

I drive fast cars and I eat fast foods . . . I contain multitudes


Pink pedal pushers and red blue jeans

All the pretty maids and all the old queens

All the old queens from all my past lives

I carry four pistols and two large knives

I’m a man of contradictions and a man of many moods . . . I contain multitudes


Greedy old wolf - I’ll show you my heart

But not all of it - only the hateful part

I’ll sell you down the river - I’ll put a price on your head

What more can I tell ya - I sleep with life and death in the same bed


Get lost Madam - get up off my knee

Keep your mouth away from me

I’ll keep the path open - the path in my mind

I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind

I play Beethoven sonatas Chopin’s preludes . . . I contain multitudes