Xenakis kind of night: “Polytope de Cluny,” “Hibiki, Hana, Ma,” “Mycenae Alpha,” and “La Légende d’Eer” all on the playlist.

Students on a day without classes: Woo! I’m going to play video games until I pass out! Me on a day without classes: Woo! I’m going to catch up on all the non-academic stuff I need to do. Then grade!

Done with gigs and grading, so I’m editing the score and adding fingerings for my “Sonata for Mandolin Solo.”

If Trump is planning on invading Chicago, I recommend that they fight back in the most Chicago way possible: pour shot of Jeppson’s Malört for the invaders, then kick ‘em hard in the balls when they’re dry heaving.

Made cherry crisp bars. They smell amazing, but I’m pretty sure the center is molten lava at the moment.

My hometown's [in]famous "Big Penny" The Truck Eating Bridge has claimed it's 100th victim due to... ignoring repeated signs and flashing lights that warn semi drivers to divert at least a mile away... www.jalopnik.com/1953789/city...

Happy Labor Day - support a union before they’re banned in the US…

Student has insisted on using Linux (we’re a Mac school), so I’ve been busy getting Debian 13 running in a VM on Apple Silicon. Realtime kernel working, Wine working with (most) VSTs, and it’s fast as hell. Seriously considering replacing my Windows install again…

Find a recipe online that looks good, but the quantities/ingredients are always weird. Normal salad stuff: cool. Now use 3.276 semi-demi-hemi tsp of Greek yogurt: huh? Add 2.8% of pi tbl of reindeer blood: lol wut? Under a waning moon, bake in a traditional tandoor for 47hours: are you high?

New uni president sent out a survey to get faculty perspectives on AI. I ran out of space due to the sheer number of linked citations, but basically come down on the side of “Butlerian Jihad.”

Cloudy day in the mountains today.

The calls for jihad are getting louder

Today is the official end of #Finale Some thoughts - benfuhrman.com/finale-of-fi...

Spent the day talking to students at the university research fair, making a favorite dinner (grilled eggplant/lentils in a turmeric tahini sauce), then heading to play a gig. The semester has only just started…

1) AI’s not alive. 2) AI’s not sentient. 3) AI is autocomplete based on a plagiarized corpus of works, and is factually wrong. 4) I hope the answer is “yes,” and will make it my purpose in life to inflict as much pain on it as possible. Especially Copilot… www.theguardian.com/technology/2...?

A reminder to every audio engineer. When mixing film/tv show, THE DIALOGUE GOES ON TOP OF THE MIX AND TEST IT ON CONSUMER GEAR! I’ve seen to many products from major studios, monitoring both at home and on the school’s Atmos system, where the dialogue is completely buried. Not cool.

90 Minutes of James Dobson Burning In Hell (2025)

Semester starts tomorrow. I think I’ve prepped all my courses.

Just got off the mountain. Climbed Ross Peak - 6.75 miles, 9000ft.

Got my bow back from the luthier and just restrung the violin. So much more sound, but I’ll be retuning every five minutes for the next week…

Panicked email from student: “Help I’m supposed to be in class XYZ, but the system says I’m not enrolled and classes start NEXT WEEK!” Me: “Weird… literally every backend I have access to shows you’re in there, and have been since April…” Looks like a glitch in the university’s student app.

#Binaural render of my new #Ambisonics piece. Enjoy! soundcloud.com/bfuhrman/lan...

And there were “fluffy cows” (aka bison) on grazing near the trailhead… #DontPetTheFluffyCows

Hiked Indian Ridge in the Spanish Peaks today. Great scenery.

Two out of three sections of volume automation are done on the new #Ambisonic piece. If I didn't know it was all physical modeling synthesis, I'd swear it was real instruments...

Saw the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile on the way into town!

Setting up for Art+Science at SLAM Fest in Bozeman.

Day 3 of #Ambisonic mixing for the current piece. Tore down a lot of my previous work, but now we’re getting somewhere interesting.

"WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 1, 2025) – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today that it will begin an orderly wind-down of its operations" cpb.org/pressroom/Co...

Yay… new campus parking permit. $285, two hours in line, and they oversell the hell out of these, including to freshmen/sophomores who really don’t need a car given that the campus/city have excellent/cheap public transportation. At least I had time for some course prep while waiting… #Academia

Pretty sure he couldn’t do any of those…

Spent the afternoon mixing a piece. Not getting anywhere, so I nuked all my work and will start over tomorrow.

Tariffs are a price hike on American consumers… www.reuters.com/business/pro...

Working on a new #Ambisonic piece based on physical modeling synthesis. Combination of stuff I coded in #MaxMSP, ContinuuMini presets tweaked in the #EaganMatrix, and some good ‘ol’ fashioned #Resonators. Plus a lot of GRM Tools…

The South Park guys may have found the best use of AI... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afet...

Yeah… seriously, no faculty member wants this bullshit… www.chronicle.com/article/inst...

With the news that Ozzy Osbourne has died, my working theory is that Keith Richards is the Highlander…

Made cappuccino chip muffins. One did not want to come out of the pan…

Hiked the Bangtail Divide this morning. Gorgeous scenery, and not too strenuous of a workout (8 miles, only 1400ft of elevation gain).

It’s currently 86° and hailing. #MontanaWeather

Not surprised CBS cancelled #Colbert. They need that money to pay more bribes to the wannabe orange dictator and to make yet more unfunny “Big Bang Theory” spinoffs for geriatric viewers. God forbid they have someone actually funny on their network…

Spent the morning converting some physical modeling synthesis experiments to MPE-enabled Max4Live devices for a piece I'm working on. I really love how easy this is - copy/paste, change [ezdac~] to [plugout~], enable MPE/MPE tuning in the inspector, done!

Woo! New strings came, so I just finished cleaning/restringing both mandolins. Now for a solid week of retuning every five seconds…

The Korg nanoKontrol is still the piece of MIDI gear I use the most frequently, absolutely bar none.

Me: why is this pitch quantizer I coded in Max not working? Everything is connected... Narrator: It was not connected...

It may be a #conspiracy that the Trump admin won’t release the Epstein files and that Ken Paxton’s divorce proceedings are sealed… or is it???

Four hours of coding and the proof of concept works. Just need some more data sets to test it before I move on to expanding the sound engine.

Creating different physical modeling synths in MaxMSP/gen~ that do overtone generation and filtering via video analysis. Really cool results so far, but a bit on the thin side. Dropping in some freeverb as a temp solution, but I’ll probably switch it to Valhalla’s SuperMassive in the end.

Busy week for me in the #Bozeman #Bluegrass scene. Playing the Grey Dog tonight (7-9pm), leading the Story Mansion Jam tomorrow (7-9pm), and playing the Buckhorn in Livingston on Thursday (7:30-9:30pm).

Hey, app developers! If your paid app inundates me with screens begging for tip subscriptions and five-star reviews, it’s getting uninstalled fast. After I leave a one-star review on the App Store… seriously, stop doing this!