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Prot Asks: Hjalmar about Emacs for music, the joy of art, and Internet sociability
About this film
In this 2-hour video, I talk with Hjalmar about using Emacs to write music, the joy of artistic expression, and sociability in the Internet era. Hjalmar is a viola player and composer who currently studies composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music. We start our discussion with me asking how it is to study music. I learn about Hjalmar’s experiences in that regard. Hjalmar writes music in Emacs using a setup that involves Org, the Org Babel system, and the LilyPond music notation. Hjalmar describes in further detail how this process works. I was curious how Hjalmar discovered Emacs to learn that it was a hobby that developed during the Covid pandemic. We discuss how even though Emacs is known as a programmer’s tool, it is equally capable for people who do not write code, such as musicians, academics, and journalists. A large part of that is Org and its wider ecosystem of extended functionality. I ask about Hjalmar’s creative process. It is an iterative process of accumulating lots of pieces and then jumbling them to produce a result. Hjalmar will typically settle for the second version, given that it is an attempt to address all the mistakes of the first draft. A large part of ou…
Directors & creators
Protesilaos Stavrou
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