Well, maybe should we get started just on some intros, um, knowing that, uh, Julia and Lelitha aren't here yet and that we are being recorded by Orca Media. So not like too, too deep, but just, you know, a little bit more to get to introduce ourselves to Jeremy. And we'll hold on a few minutes to have Jeremy introduce himself just in case Julia and Lelitha can join. But yeah, I'm, I can start. I'm Shayna. I share pronouns. I live on Kent Street, um, up by the College of Fine Arts. I, um, do community organizing work for my jobs. I work with community action works, just I'm logged in with my work account here. And I, um, work with community groups fighting pollution threats in their neighborhoods and facilitate a national coalition of grassroots groups fighting PFAS contamination in their communities. And, um, I, yeah, have been doing a lot of stress baking. Probably could be doing more stress baking. So it's all, it all evens out in the wash, you know, so it's been good. Um, I'll hand it to Michael who's on me then. Hi, um, I'm Michael Sherman. Um, I live, um, also near the Pumat College of College Hill. I've been a resident here about over 30 years. I was the former director of the Vermont Historical Society. I taught at the Vermont College before it became the College of Fine Arts and the Adult Degree Program. I've been a baker at the Mangi's Bakery. I'm currently the editor of Vermont History, the Journal of the Vermont Historical Society. What else am I supposed to say? Um, just got appointed to the police review, uh, committee. Oh, hey, I didn't really think of that. There you go. As the, and I made a point of saying that I was on the, on this committee and that we hadn't made us, and that I was not speaking for the committee, but was going to be our reporting kind of a liaison to the committee. Um, I think that's all I need to say. Welcome, Jeremy. I'm glad you're glad you're with us. I'll introduce myself. My name is Peter Marien. I am the staff liaison for this committee. I am the assistant city manager and sort of help guide the work that needs to be done on the city side for this committee. I can go next if it is OK with Lauren. I'm Pylen Kohn and welcome to Jeremy. I work for Norwich University. My job has recently changed. Now I am full-time lecturer for Norwich University and also leadership. Exciting. Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm so happy because I was working part-time before and now I am full-time and also I am, uh, the leadership program coordinator, which is really, you know, but my PhD about and my all professional, you know, experience. So I know to many, to many is not good for most of the people, but it was good for me at least with the, you know, job part. I don't want to be like too happy, but I'm glad. And I moved here three years ago from Turkey. I'm originally Turkish and it is hard to believe that three year pass, the time passes really quickly. Then you count the winter and cold, windy days. It is not very quick, but then you look at generally, yeah, we are in our fourth year living in Montpelier and we are very happy and I'm very happy being part of this committee too. And I can introduce myself. I'm Lauren Hurl and I am the city council representative. So I'm from district one. I live up on Deerfield Drive. So I've been on council just for a year and a half, I guess, and have been on this committee since I joined council and in my day job, I run an advocacy group for Mont Conservation Voters. So I do a lot of environmental advocacy and some electoral work. So I've been really busy this fall and got two kids at Union Elementary and I'm really excited by what's coming up with this group. So, so grateful that you're all here and welcome, Jeremy. So, yes, I think Janelle and Lilipa are joining late. I'm not going to go back from Julia yet. So why do you mind introducing yourself? Well, it's great to be here. It's nice to meet all of you. And I look forward to getting to know you better over the course of the committee's work. So yeah, my name is Jeremy Baudry. You see him pronouns live up on Elm Street, just about right across from the North Branch Nature Center. Here with me and my home are my partner and our three children who are ages five, nine and 11. They do not go to school. They're unschooled. So that means we haven't seen a huge change on the surface with, you know, the pandemic restrictions around schooling, but of course they're impacted pretty deeply and not being able to do the things they normally do with their their friend groups. So I work for the University of Vermont Medical Center and I work for a design and innovation lab that's embedded in the health network by profession. I'm what's called an experience or a service designer and basically the work that we try and do at the UVM health network is to transform health care services for the better for patients and providers and caregivers any number of folks who kind of come together to make health care what it is. Been working remotely like many folks now since March of this year feel very privileged that I am able to work remotely and stay safe doing so in my home. So we're we're hunkered down like a lot of folks, but doing well fairly new to Vermont myself moved up here in 2015 from Philadelphia because of the job change that I made previously was an academic was running and teaching in a grad design program in Philadelphia. So Vermont is still very strange. For me, although we like it quite a bit, we feel grateful to be here grateful to be in Montpelier. I think originally didn't think we would live so far outside of Burlington where I work, but Mount Peters made all the difference in terms of us finding the community of people and feeling settled and really just loving being here. So I think I can just be brief with that. I would say I would love to schedule time with each of you individually over the next few weeks just to get to know you all better and and also really to learn about your experience on the committee just so I can kind of help learn more about the work and and get up to speed and and figure out how I can be of service. So thank you again and it's great to meet you all. Awesome. Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm sorry we didn't get a check in beforehand. It's just, you know, it's been it's been a week. It's been a month. It's been a year. Here's a beer barrette. So OK, um, so all this kind of dive us in. So on our agenda, yeah, we've got introductions and then public comment, which I don't think there is any. We'll review and improve the minutes from our last meeting and that will hopefully get a little bit up to speed for Jeremy. And then our issue check in. So we want to do our check in about our outreach and what's been going on there and our fundraising check in and creative discourses work plan. That's our our. What's it called? Our consultants. Oh my god. Work plan check in and then other business, which I think Michael, I'd love to hear about any update on the police commission if there's anything more than what you just shared. Maybe who else is on it and things like that. I hadn't seen that. And then we'll add this to our agenda for our next meeting and then review action items. And I guess my only other thing about other businesses, do we want to have a conversation about potentially moving this time? I'm just just knowing, Warren, you said it's been really hard for you. And did someone else say that this time doesn't only work too? Or do I think I think Julia was concerned about the time. The last Julia. Yeah, Julie can't make today. But so yeah, maybe we should have that Congress put that on the agenda for next time. Well, she made. Didn't she say she was going to split her time between the board, the Board of Education's discussion of the SOR. That's what's happening today. And I'm coming here. So we may see her here. Okay. So maybe, maybe we'll see her. That's exciting. That's exciting that that's happening tonight. But maybe we can just have that discussion by email, because that should be fine to do by email. So can I get a motion to approve the agenda? I'll move to approve the agenda. Michael moves. Helen, do you want a second? Yeah, I second. All in favor. Any opposed? All right, we've got our agenda. So I'm seeing no public comment. And folks want to pull up the email that Michael sent. And if it's helpful, I can also show it on my screen, but I always think it's a little bit easier just to. Oh my gosh, this is the minute you're talking about, right? The minutes. Yeah. Okay. And then Michael, actually, do you mind just walking us through the minutes just to kind of catch Lauren and hear me back up? Okay. So with the usual stuff, the the update with with the creative discourse, Keisha did most, I guess Keisha and Tabitha were with this. And they will be the people we're in touch with most. Susan McCormick is going to be mostly involved with working with the Montoya Roxbury School District. But she'll be available mostly to Keisha and Tabitha, but sometimes to us to check in and answer. And I guess also, I think there was something about getting information to us about what's going on with the school district as they that develops, because creative design, this course also has the contract to work with the with the school district. So they will get ready to start in December when they're not ready, but they're planning to start in December and have the they've identified 10 different groups, constituency focus groups, and they'll run those conversations through February. Either on Zoom or some other platform, they will prepare a survey as a result of that, they'll prepare a survey that we have yet to talk about how that's going to be distributed. But the idea is to have it go out widely in the community. And and as they get the results of that, from that and from this, from the community conversations, they will prepare a report, some report of what we are now thinking of as phase one that will come to us and to the city council, and I assume will be widely available also in the committee. So we just we discussed then the composition of those focus groups and and they were going to make some revisions based on that. So our job is mostly responsibility for outreach, including helping the the CD folks identify individuals for each of the groups publicity, securing additional funding. And I just found another typo in my minutes. OK, fun funding for for those group meetings, designing, distributing, analyzing the survey, preparing, distributing and reporting the summary of findings. We are also we we are responsible for the fundraising as well as the outreach. And so we have as of the last meeting, Shayna and Palin reported that they had submitted grant applications to Vermont Community Foundation Spark grant and Ben and Jerry's Foundations Community Action Team grant. Janelle and I are supposed to research and contact. There were two specific ones mentioned cooperative development and local initiative support corporations and I'll report on that later. And Shayna was going to contact the Montpelier alive, I guess, Dan Groberg to discuss their small grant program. Um, contributions from individuals. We are starting to gear up on that. We the first round we had the first part we had sent with a suggested people send contributions to the Montpelier Foundation that turned out to be not a good idea. And so now they're going directly to the city and with C. Jack in the memo line and will go the money will go directly onto our line line line in the city budget. What else? Oh, we have yet to figure out how we're going to thank people for that. And I think that. We'll report back on that in just a minute. Yeah. And then other outreach and then some we have we have a mailing list. We're developing a mailing list of several people signed up. Committee was encouraged to recruit others. Other business I reported that I had submitted an application for appointment to the police review committee and explained in there that I would not be voting speaking for us but but via liaison and that we were still recruiting new board members and welcome, Jeremy, you responded. Thank you. And so we're all we are all on the alert to keep, you know, to keep our eyes out and ears open for other possible new members. And then next next meetings were announced for November 5th today, November 19th, December 3rd, so far to be at 5 30 p.m. And then what the agenda topics for our current is. So that's the that's that's the minutes. If you didn't get chance to read them. Thank you. Yeah. And then does anyone have any questions about what's going on? I'm sure there's only a lot, but any specific things. OK. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, I had a quick question about donations. Is there a way for folks to donate online? Yeah, we haven't set up like an official account. I've just been collecting online donations through PayPal and then just, you know, great keeping track of that and then writing a check, which I actually have not done yet. So I do need to do that. Oh, my tool is actually for debt today. Pay a lot of things today did not do that one. So but that's just yeah, through PayPal.me slash Shayna Casper. It's easy. I'm the only one. But yeah, I can send that alone around again too. Perfect. So can I get a motion to approve the minutes? We do it again, Michael. Can you make a motion to? Well, since I wrote them, I shouldn't be the one to make it. That's right. All right. Well, I'll make a motion to approve the minutes. Helen, do you want a second? I second. All in favor. I guess all three of us. I and you post. OK, here we go. Um, all right. So outreach check-ins. This is to those 10 group members, which in writing up the notes from the last writing up my email, like to prep for this with the notes from our last meeting and to prep for this one, realize that we still have it. We don't have them. What what are those 10 groups that Creative Discourses is looking for? I don't know, Cameron, if you do. I have. Do you have them in the notes? No, not not in my notes I do, but not not in the minutes, because I thought that was not a little too specific. Yeah. So maybe it's not appropriate for right here then too. But well, no, I think it's OK. Because there was some question about whether they were going to be changed at all. And we didn't we didn't have to take a vote on that. So I didn't go make it into the minutes. But as it was originally proposed, one was Black, Indigenous and people of color. It was group one. And that, I think, was meant to be just internal on city government staff and elected and appointed. Is that correct, Cameron? My list. You can hear me, right? I'm sorry, these are headphones. OK, great. My list for who I was supposed to contact, which is just the staff is a they wanted to include folks that had a connection to the public. So a lot of our front facing staff, they wanted me to identify the folks who identify as people of color that work for us. They want to talk to them privately, not a not a big meeting. And then they wanted to include a separate group of HR police and finance. They kind of they said that was important. So this is on our staff agenda to talk about on Monday. So I will follow up with y'all who has stepped forward for that by our next meeting. So so that's groups one and two because it is what you're talking about. The city employees in general and then specifically the the Black, Indigenous and people of color. Right. And then the group three was the police department and we did talk about whether the fire where the fire department goes and all that. And then group four is leaders of community led organizations. Group five is Black, Indigenous and people of color residents of Montpelier. So outside of the city employees. Group six is the LGBTQ residents in the committee of the community. Group seven is people with disabilities. Group eight is young people. Young not having been defined. Group nine is people experience financial stress, precarious housing, things like that, people at risk, I suppose. And then group 10 is leaders of community service organizations. And that's distinct from the leaders of community led organizations. Oh, there's Julia. Hi, Julia. So that's the that's the 10 groups that we discussed with the question about where the fire department goes to remaining. And I didn't see that addressed in their plan, but their revised plan didn't really talk about these groups at all. They did say that they would help us identify them, right? The members of them, they're not going to. Yes. And we're supposed to and we're supposed to help them identify them as well. But they didn't they didn't elaborate on on those 10, nor did they address the question about the fire department. I'm going to ask them on Monday, see what the chief feels like. OK. So that's that's the answer to that question. But I think you guys brought up a good point last time just to pontificate for a second about like, you know, they do interact with the public in a pretty intimate way. So it would make sense that they were included. Yeah, I think we should. Well, the fire department would include the emergency of the EMS people. Yes, they're one and the same. Yes, right. So I can jump in. Yeah, I just had some calls with BCIL later in the week. The Vermont Center for Independent Living, the last time we met and set up a call with some folks for the next Saturday, which was a no show. And so God set up again for this week. So we'll see for for no, not this Saturday, this Saturday after this Saturday. So we will we'll see how it goes. But that's so I haven't actually met with anyone from BCIL yet. I can report and I think I did report that I had a conversation with Joan Duval, Joan Javier Duval, who's the Minister of the Unitarian Church and who is on the board of Justice for All, the Burlington and she is interested in she's interested in being part of the group of community led organizations. And I recommend that we we put her on the list. She's been very active over the past several years from since she came here in dealing with issues about racial discrimination. And so from and she herself is from a family from that from originally from the Philippines. So Julia, yeah, we're just doing report backs of our of our community outreach over the past two weeks. Are we going to take votes on on admitting people or how is this going to work, Shayna? On admitting people. Well, I mean, I mean, sending names forward to to creative discourse, what happens with this list of people that we recommend or who agree to do this? I think we're just snowballing here, right? And that's what I my understanding was. So we're coming up with our list and well, and they're coming up with their list of, you know, of folks too. And they'll then reach out to other folk, you know, have conversations with them and reach out to other folks. I don't think it's a official, like, focus group type of thing. Was my understanding. I don't think we need to vote on passing these names along. Does anyone want to question that? So I think I would say only if like, if we end up referring too many people to them, we can get into those conversations. If they say this is too big a group, you've got to narrow it down and we can maybe have those conversations. But they haven't given us any indication of what the size of that group is going to be, have they? I think it would be a good problem to have to have too many people. Yeah, bridge them again to us. Yeah. I can share an update, which is that I reached out to three people who I think all would be good people to have included either in the in the focus group of BIPOC folks or I can't remember if there was like one for informal community leaders or if that were slicing or dicing that. Yeah. But they're all people that are engaging in activism within the community that I've worked closely with. Amandha Gar says Beth Nolan and Kaya Santana. Could you send me either spell them out or send me the list so I can get them in the in the minutes? Yeah, I can. How about I? How about I? I'll put it in the chat after I talk. None of them are.  I don't want that in the minutes yet. Just yet, Michael, actually, because they're just our names in particular, because none of them have said yes, definitely. And I realize work is here. So I I I should I rewind if I could. So sorry, those three. They've all none of none none of them. I haven't spoken directly like in person to any of them. It was all electronic so far. It wasn't like a cheering. Yes, for me so far.  What what are the I really want to know like what if there are reservations, what they are. I want to know if there are barriers, what they are. I'm feeling there's like I get the sense that it's a little bit more on the level of reservations than barriers. And so I'm going to dig deeper into that, but that's where that's what I'm working on. And I just want to say hi, Jeremy. Well, yeah, sorry, there you go. Julie, we did a good round of intros at the beginning. Do you want to do it yourself? No. Yeah. Hi. So I'm Julia Shaffetz. I've been on the committee since it started in 2018, August 2018. I think that was. I'm also a parent of a says almost seven year old who's it goes to? Whoa. And my therapist and some of social workroom private practice and have been getting involved in some and a lot of efforts related to the schools like and really like building equity into the school, especially at the parents group level and also looking into the SRO issue as a result of just hearing from while hearing from clients of mine as well as like friends of mine who are experiencing difficulties. So. Yeah. Great, Julia, and I said to the others, I'm hoping to find some time just to chat with people one on one just to learn more about your experience. And I know of you because my partner is Meredith Warner, who has been doing a lot of work with the SRO stuff. So yeah, oh, great. That's right. Now I'd like to thank you for mentioning that because now it all comes together for me. I'll look forward to speaking with you, meeting with you. Great. Well, and this is also just making me think that perhaps for if we get like an enthusiastic yes, someone wants to, you know, participate just to like send them in an email to Julia and me because we're going to be the ones doing that interfacing directly with Keisha. And so then that way we don't like go through our whole list each week, essentially, you know. And and then that way it's not like recorded or being like, oh, we have this really hard cover, you know, like I'm not sure how much of that needs to be on the public record on Orca. But do do does anyone want to like have, you know, other like relationships or are, you know, folks that they want to be reaching out to right now, is there a gap where where we want to, you know, make sure that someone's covering it because I feel like that's kind of what I did with like VCL is like, oh, I don't know if there's anyone in our group that like has talked about working in like the disability community before. And so I was like, I want to like I want to do that, you know. And so it's kind of like why I reached out. But if there's like other young people, people experiencing housing, leaders of community service organizations, LGBTQ community members. And yeah, if there's those are just people we haven't explicitly said that we're having meetings with folks yet. But otherwise, I think like, we're all just going to continue doing the outreach and like hold each other accountable. Does that make sense? Yeah, I have a question. These particular individuals that you've been discussing, are these folks who can then help create a discourse start to build their participant list for the focus groups? So there's like a contact for different kind of populations within. So the first phase of having where we can hear you, Michael, can you hear us?  I'm going to have to call in as I did last time. But give me a phone number quickly. It is. Oh, shoot. Hold on. Sorry, Michael, I have to pull it up on my computer. Just write it up and put it in front so I can. I'm trying. I'm sorry. It's not a fast process. I'll put it in the chat, Michael. Yeah, did you get it before I did? I think I've got it. OK. Sorry, I don't know why this is happening. It happened earlier today. Oh, there it is. So the second number is the meeting ID. OK. So, Shayna, I can reach out to the Homeless Youth Program and the Basement Teen Center work closely with them. So I'll reach out for them by next meeting. So the Homeless Youth Center and the which one? So the basement, the Basement Teen Center, there's a teen center in the basement of City Hall. Yep. They're just called the Basement Teen Center and the sort of states Homeless Youth Program. Cool. Great. Awesome. I can also reach out to I think I'll reach out to I have a friend of the guidance counselor at Montpelier High School, see if she's got maybe young people that might be interested in high school students and also the RDA, Racial Justice Alliance at the high school as well. Do we would we? I wonder about like, like would we want any like school staff? Like, you know, would that be like some I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm I'm like, no. And this is this.  So we're we're doing a series of focus groups with these 10 community groups to kind of where we're creative discourse is going to like ask a series of questions and try to pull out what are the key topics of conversation as a full city and then have bring together folks from those from those focus groups and probably other community members as well and potentially open it up to like the public at large for like a summit and then potentially from there a series of like of ongoing conversations with a smaller group of like cross sector, right? But these kind of like identity based groups or our you know, key marginalized community groups in particular, you know, having conversations there first to be able to identify like what are the key points of of tension or of concern to dig in on moving forward. And so why and then so simultaneously creative discourses has also been hired by the Montpelier Roxbury School District to be doing a similar type of equity analysis with the school. And so I think because of that, we don't think we need to reach out to the teachers and like superintendents and stuff like that. PTA, but I I that's my understanding. Does that sound right? Yeah, and and they're starting to build their building relationships there. So they might know they might know if there's someone appropriate in as well. And the reason I was late is that I was at their first meeting, they were facilitating about the school safety stuff. So yeah. Also, just this is this is a small community and the people that might be interested in this are going to overlap anyway. So I think I think you'll find that. It's all the same people doing all the things. There's very small pool. Lalitha's here. Yeah. Hi, do you welcome? Do you want to say hi and settle in and introduce yourself to our new member, Jeremy here? Hi, everybody. My name is Lalitha, my logarithm. I live in Montpellier, Vermont. I've been in the committee since what, two, three years? I'm not sure. Thanks. OK. Yeah. And Jeremy's our newest member and we're going to try to set Jeremy up with, yeah, one to one with all members. Be great. Cool. And then Lalitha, we are just going through all of the people, all of the focus group folks that we are going to do outreach for for creative discourses to be able to have the focus groups. And so if you've had any of these conversations, have any people who are like, awesome, we're ready to go. Feel free to email them to Julia and me or if there's any like organizations that you want to reach out to would love to, you know, divide and conquer here. But otherwise, yeah, anything else to say on this outreach? Oh, newsletter. That is the other thing. Anything else about reporting back on meetings with community leaders or organizations? Cool. So the new Michael, you back. I can't even get a telephone connection. Is there some other way to?  But the telephone is not working. So I'll just I'll do my best to keep up with you. But. Oh, no, it's all right. That's so weird. Yes. Totally, totally unexplainable. All right. So keep going. I'm sorry. Well, no. I yeah, I don't I guess the only other solution that I can offer is what I've done sometimes before is like you call me and I put you on speakerphone and like hold you up next to the camera. But if your phone's not working, that's not going to. That's not going to work. I'm I'm only hearing fragments of what you're saying. So if there's another telephone number that you that you know I can use. Yeah, there's another one. Let me pull up the call list again. You can call from this number. Try this one. Hold on. You see the one that Cameron just put in the chat. Michael. What? And also try that one. All right, I'll try that one. Thank you, Cameron. So the only other thing, too, is the newsletter check in. Michael is the one who emailed me that he had heard back from some folks saying what like why is this newsletter like coming from Action Network? Like that's weird. And so I don't think there was like a solution offered here, but like just to name that we're we're sending people to this like third party site in order to keep, you know, track of everyone who gets the newsletter, how many people open it, if people like click any links in it, all of that type of stuff that it's like a party that can do that. But and they can do it for free and everything else. But does has anyone else been hearing any of these concerns? Should we move it to just like an email spreadsheet that we can be CC? I just I feel like I feel more comfortable being on an email list where there's like an unsubscribed button at the bottom. But I don't know if anyone else had concerns. Yay, you're back, Michael. Yeah, OK. I would just say I saw that and thought it was spam and didn't do it. So I don't know if it discourages some people from. I'm like, I'm not signing up for one more list. I'm literally on this committee. So they're and you might scare off some people from having to subscribe to something that they don't know what they're signing up for. But I see the advantages of doing it that way, too. And another option if that's like so if it doesn't let you it doesn't let you change who who it's from if it's from Action Network. I thought I set it up. So it's I guess it says it's from me from Shayna and the Montpelier Social Network Justice Advisory Committee. But the email is like through Action Network. Got it. Is I guess how it works. Well, and it was like I don't I mean, I see you all saw it. I mean, it comes in. It's like all designed in a way that it looks like it doesn't look like a like a regular email from us that just happens to be managed through a program. It looks like a kind of spammy email, I thought. But. OK. So hearing this from Lauren and for Michael, maybe like what did it make sense to if we have people sign up and then before I send the newsletter update, like just download the email list and just send it out in a BCC. Is that the way to do this? Or another any other ideas of solutions? Another option. I've used MailChimp a bit recently.  Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of MailChimp. Because they OK. Because that one, it looks like it comes from you. Yeah, right. But that's about it. I looked at the homepage for the Action Network and they and they can you hear me? Yeah. OK. And they say that they they promise not to share the mailing list. So this all came about because I was I tried out on a few people a sample letter that I was going to send out more widely. And one of them went ahead and signed up and was surprised to get this thing from the Action Network. So I revised my invitation letter to say that they were working and haven't set it out yet, working as a under a contract or an agreement with the city. Which word should I use, Cameron? Definitely not a contract.  But the action, but the the action network is just an arrangement with us. It's not it's not any formal arrangement with the city. No, no, it's just an online service that manages your mailing list. So you can say, you know, we're using Action Network to manage our newsletter. That's sort of what I said in my second draft. But I will I will put that into my final version. Well, and again, our goal here was just to keep people updated, recruit people to be part of these focus groups and for the work later on, recruit people to donate all, you know, keep people informed about this work. And so I think we're at the school of doing it like every two weeks. So for the next one, probably this weekend, all this download the list and send it out at the DCC. So it'll come from me. We'll be able to reply to me. I think that makes sense. So I'm good to folks. How many people are on the list right now? Like we're getting close to 40. I don't know. Yeah. Look, that's more than showed up to your information sessions. Things are growing like you said earlier, snowballing. And that's the important part. Couldn't have gotten a much smaller and still exist. All right, well, that moves us along nicely to our fundraising check in. But as we said, pellet, let's let's do a high five through the Internet. Well, we got our first grant in. Yeah. And Lalitha, we're going to get another granted in January. Right. High five. Well, that's not working. OK. Yeah. OK. Um, so we're getting some granted grants in, which is great. Haven't heard back from any and probably won't hear back from them for a while. Um, I think it was Julia and Michael were going to do some research on some other grants for for funding this work. There's one last one about that. So the co-op, the co-operative co-operative, whatever that was, that was really just for co-op to not for us. And the other one, the initiative is not we're not eligible because we're not a 501 degree to the agency. So, um, and the A.J. Musty Foundation, which was very promising, they're not accepting any grants from for a while. And it looks like we didn't we don't qualify in any case because we get some city funding. So I'll just keep going through that list that I that I assembled and I sent that information to Janelle. She has that big, thick volume that I use and we'll keep mining the lists that I put together and any that she comes up with. And if we find one that looks promising, we'll we'll put together a grant proposal. But so far, I haven't found anything that we're qualified for under under their guidelines. Oh, there was the Thompson Foundation, which is in Brattleboro, but they only make grants to Wyndham County and Dutchess County, New York. So go figure. I don't have it. Um, and so you said initiatives was not for us because we're not a C3. I do. I think we are a C3 through the city, right? Because the city of Montpeliers not so the Montpeliers not a C3. I think she said no. OK, cool. Sometimes those we have been we as the city, some of our other committees have been successful in just giving those groups a phone call.  And a municipality is technically not for profit. So but we don't have the same like tax clearance. It's not the same. We're a different sort of entity under tax law. So sometimes they'll be willing to change the rules for it be, especially the smaller foundations might bend a little bit, but it's up to you to determine if it's worth a phone call. Any other fundraising updates? Seconds, ideas? I got the ball. I haven't reached out to people I was going to reach out to this past these past two weeks. I I looked at the Awesome Foundation. I think it's kind of a long shot, but it's a pretty easy application. So I'm just going to submit it. It's basically like tell us your awesome idea. And then there's like local chapters and the closest local chapter is in Boston. So I have to like figure out how to pitch it as an awesome idea. Like, I don't know, just like fit to fit the vibe, but I'll try it. We hire consultants. That's very awesome. No, it's like it's an awesome.  So I wasn't sure if it's if it's like a bad idea to kind of like pigeonhole the funding that way. It's it's only a thousand dollars. So I imagine we can find a way to use it pretty easily. So I I figured that's how I would pitch it to them. But I wanted to run that by you all. I love that idea. OK. Now I'm not really your voting member here, but I think that's a really cool idea. You know, that's something that the city is really going to have a hard time budgeting for. And that's where support would really be. I would broaden it and not not just make it stipends because that might drive them away. But just to say we when you talked about it the last time you said trying to remove barriers to participation and you included stipends, childcare, food, whatever. And I think if you can if you can put it in removing barriers, that might make it more awesome. OK, that's a good idea. I will. I have a question. Is this fundraising to support the work that is under the purview of creative discourse? Yeah, to support their work like facilitating this project. Yeah. So that and the history is that we so we get we issued an RFP. The city is OK, $10,000 this year and hopefully $10,000 next year. That we put out an RFP. They came back with one for $52,000 that would be a two year process. And so it's important that we finish that process that we not. So we have we basically have enough money to start that process that we need to finish it. And so a lot of that what we're hoping to do is fund the beyond $10,000 that we have now. OK, great. The other I heard I was listening to a podcast today and there was a I didn't write anything down because I'm walking but there was a Casey Foundation that was like a new Casey Foundation. I haven't normally heard advertised on on podcasts. It's like there's not the Annie Casey Foundation. It's like a new one. And it was all about like civic engagement and like so I haven't looked into it at all. I just heard heard the advertisement today. And I think it was like Casey Foundation dot org or something like that. So that's probably worth looking into if anybody has the. Yeah, Marguerite Casey Foundation for economic justice. There you go. Well done. Interesting. I'll send it. But I'll put a link in the chat. Very cool. I'm. And then Julia and Cameron do you want to share your thank you notes? I don't know. I wrote to thank you notes. Michael, the other one was to your dad. I don't know if they've arrived yet. I think I sent them on Thursday. Michael, do you get a thank you note yet? What? I was just going to ask if he had gotten his yet. I haven't talked to him. Yeah, my dad donated. That was one of the. That's really sweet. It's really sweet. OK. And then I need to get on by getting the money out of my PayPal account. So I will I will do that. Um, all right. And then the last like big thing on our agenda here is the creative discourse work plan update, which just Keech had sent just kind of right after our last meeting. So I just wanted to I think we just want to check in on that. I don't know if there's anything else like significant to share. So that was on the attachment of the email that I had sent earlier today. Yeah, I guess. What are our goals of going over this section? I'm not sure if there was anything in particular that we wanted to talk about. And Lisa, if you're talking, we can't hear you muted. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I was like looking at my phone looking for the attachment. That's so sorry. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, we can share a stream, but I'm worried that'll mess us up.  She didn't make a note where they changed, but I think it adopted a lot of what you talked about last time, but especially with the timeline. A little bit more realistic. I mean, I guess it's just we also have other things besides outreach on the list of what we're responsible for here. So creating flyers and social media messages, you know, reaching out to community partners who can help spread the word as well as the list of people to invite and starting to have these conversations of identifying people and CJAC or trusted community members to extend invitations to. And then I. And I'm thinking we're not going to start the survey conversation until we check back in, right? OK, great. So I think, yeah. So go ahead. Sorry, I hate interrupting Zoom. This is the worst. Inevitable. I apologize. I really wanted to sort of under reiterate my understanding of the survey timeline just so I'm on the same page as y'all. They wanted to talk to some of our focus groups first so that they could form with the question you're nodding. OK, I'm getting it. All right, thank you. Also, certainly it says CJAC is responsible for things like flyers and social media, but that's something that the city staff is totally able to help with. That's not you're on your own on that one. So would we want to do that broad outreach of saying like sign up for our get on our list with all the problems that's come with that? And if you're part of your like what a member of these communities and maybe like. I really have not thought this way when I'm sorry. I'm the cure.  But if there like should we put like checkboxes on the newsletter list of being like I am a member of like these communities, you know, like of or is that does that get into weird sticky areas? If you're asking people to disclose that they have a disability or if they're in as long as it's not required. Yeah. Yeah. You mean when they sign up for the mailing list? Yeah. Maybe it's maybe it should be more like we're looking for a phone like email us if you want to be part of the conversation. You know, so there's a little bit more a little less like we're going to get we'll invite you if you give us this information and it's a little bit more like hey we really want you to be part of the conversation, especially people who are you know, I mean and I think listing out some examples of the of the areas in which we're recruiting like organizations and folks from marginalized populations and again that list is not at the top of my head, but like I think maybe sharing that with people and saying if you are if you are a member of any of these groups we really want to make sure that we're contacting you or if you have suggestions about folks we should reach out to please let us know. Yeah, I agree. I think once we have clarification from CD about the the names or the or the identifying the 10 answer maybe going to be more groups then we can we in a newsletter you can say here are the 10 groups that we have that we're working with if you are interested in one or another of those letters no or you can put a checkbox next to each one and say you know check those that might interest you or you would be of hope before. So then they can just sort of respond to that as part of the plan. Do you know do you know if created this for us will be doing any kind of kind of free focus for free interview screening of the participant list? I think it's more like that's what they're asking us to do. A little bit like I don't know that they're doing any I don't I don't know that they have to I don't it doesn't to me seem like they've got time built in to do that. It's more I think they're sort of and they haven't really given us criteria necessarily other than the like categories of groups. Yeah. But am I misremembering that I thought they at one point somebody said that they had connections to and that they would be looking around for people in our community that they might know. Yes. Yeah. I guess I was the more thing and be like they would reach out to the person they know and we'd be like OK and here's our list of people to participate and they'd be like do you feel comfortable and safe to be able to have like a real conversation with these other people and you know like that level of screening but not like a Googling. Yeah, let me also explain some really good questions. So when when I do research interviews, which is a big part of my work, you know, we'll put out a more general call for people who might be interested in participating in research interviews or workshops. And then we might do a kind of screening with folks that could be like a 15 minute conversation just to make sure we're getting the right people in the room. And I didn't know if that was part of creative discourses process when they do these kinds of research activities. I definitely don't think they're going for statistical like greatness here. I think it's just trying to get people in the room to have frank conversations. So probably not. But Julie and I can check in with them when we connect. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I think let me explain my reason for wanting to know that is how specific do we make our call for participation so that because I think some people might say, well, that's not me or that's not me or they don't want to self identify in a particular way. And so what are the what's the kind of least amount of effort we can put on people to kind of express a willingness to participate in this kind of activity versus just being more kind of defined in making sure we check off each individual box within those 10 categories. So I'm just trying to understand that, I guess. Yeah, I know we'll check in on that. But so do we want to start making like social media or other like outreach materials or, you know, does someone want to commit to posting up from Fort Form this week or something like that just to continue to do that broad outreach as well as this deep outreach. If you give me stuff to share, I will share it wherever you need me to, you know, I, you know, I'll create fires, I'll create whatever some I would love to have the the written part doesn't have to be final draft. But what you the draft of what you want to say, and I will share it on all of the things. Can the city of Montpelier Facebook page share our. Um. Yeah, can we do that? That'd be good. And all of our other associated pages if they want to. And at this point, we're just saying, hey, these are coming if you're interested. Let us like get in touch with us. Right, we're not because that's all we they're coming in January ish, right? Well, they said December, but probably. The start in December, right? They wanted to get started in December, recognizing that there would be a long pause for the holidays and then pick it up again in January. Right. The plan is to be done with those in February. I do see on the work plan that under focus groups, there is a bullet for distributing stipends. Steps are available for participants. That's on us. So we do have some donations to be able to come. That's what yeah, part that we're responsible for. We have some individual contributions to be able to cover some folks so far. And and then Montpelier Life has committed to getting some like gift cards and stuff for for participants as needed as well. You know, we haven't talked about the specifics of it yet, but the general commitment is there. OK. Yeah. You know, supporting local businesses and. Oh, let's feel good things and important things. Sorry, this is all yeah. Oh, great. OK, other business, Michael, do you want to share about? Oh, Julia, we're going to do it. Did we identify somebody to do a to do a from porch firm post this point or flyers or anything like that? I think Cameron said that she could post on from for me and then Facebook. And yeah, I did. So I was thinking you were wanting us to send you something to post, but you're willing to write it up. That's fine. Shane, if you want dust verbal vomit on an email and I will get it out there. Hopefully it'll be a little bit better than verbal vomit. You know what I mean? I'm sorry, you know, like sometimes that's what's going to come out in a week. OK, I mean that in the best possible way. Yeah, no. OK, so then Michael, do you want to share a little bit about the police commission and then have Julia share about the school meeting and anything else? Other business report back stuff. Maybe a warm city council just update too. That's OK. OK, great. OK, Michael, no. So you can find this. There's an article about this in Vermont Digger. Oh, no, Times, August was November 3rd with the with the report. The city appointed two members of the council, Lauren and Jack McCaw. And then six of the people who applied. There was some discussion about how large in the open part about how large the committee should be. They couldn't they couldn't make a decision on that. And when they went into executive session, they selected one, two, three, four, five, five of us, me, Jen, Duggan, Alissa, Sharon, Dan, towel and who they did another guy. We haven't obviously have not met yet. And Cameron, you're needed. Sorry, it's Daniel, towel. Toal. Toal, all right. I think it's told. Oh, then we have 60 days to go back to the council and suggest either to to expand the number and to give some idea of what what criteria with the council should use in trying to get any unrepresented groups or backgrounds that would be of help. So we'll hear soon from, I guess, the the city manager's staff about when when they were going to convene for the first time. And once we that happens, well, I guess our discussions will initially be how much how much larger should the committee be and who's missing. And the rest as for the rest of it, I don't know if you saw the advertisement that was that the city put out, which gave the six areas that the committee is supposed to be looking at. I can circulate this to you if you haven't already seen it. And I'll do that. And I'm just now, you know, I have the police chief's preliminary report based on his. On his first, you know, first couple of months, his initial organization assessment and strategic plan, which he published in August. And I've read to that a couple of times. And I've read through the report of the president's commission on policing, the new year of public safety. And I've been collecting articles and reading, reading and collecting articles on policing and the history of police. And we'll see. I mean, I think everybody who was briefly, briefly had two minutes to introduce each of ourselves. And it sounds to me like it's a group of people who are well informed and sort of focused on some of the some of the questions that are we are supposed to address and discharge. That's all I can tell you at this point, because we haven't, you know, we haven't met yet. Thanks. And I did just find it. Sorry, I had not read it yet. So much going on. Um, Julia, do you want to share about the SNRO? Yeah, what would be helpful to share? I don't know. What it was. Because this is the one that's intersecting with the creative discourse is doing, right? Yeah. So I left early so I could come here. I was splitting, splitting the difference a little. But so they started with some group agreements. It's a big group. There's 14 people on the committee. And then there were like a handful, I would say five between five and 10 guest members of the public. Sue and Keisha didn't I thought did a nice job of like including members of the public. It wasn't one of it wasn't a typical school board meeting where you can talk at the beginning and then you have to just watch the rest of the time. It was more participatory than that. They talked about think one of the things that they're hoping to do, one of the biggest things they're hoping to do is identify some shared values around safety and justice in the schools. I don't know how much you want me to do an editorial side. But I don't know. I mean, they talked about some group agreements they talked about. They were they were asking people I left right as they were breaking out into breakout groups to ask people to share like a little bit more sort of individual or in like on a more personal level their experiences. Yeah.  We haven't seen you in the final. Yeah, if there's just anything you want to share. No, I mean, I think of most relevance to this group. I mean, obviously the police committee, Michael described really well. I mean, I think the other thing that could be important for this group is, you know, we're looking at a massive budget shortfall like one point seven million dollar of our fourteen million dollar budget or something. So in both in terms of how that conversation goes in terms of what's the city is setting as priorities and what is going to be on the chopping block, you know, how equity and the values of this committee get rolled into that. I think I mean, that's that's a statement of our city values is what we fund. So I would just hope and, you know, I think I don't know, Cameron would have more details on like when we'll start seeing like different scenarios and what we would get.  But then what services do we cut and what's the right balance there. So anyway, I would love some conversation of this group of, you know, what's what that risk or what are the different things or what would we want to maybe push for some things to, you know, obviously, there's our own like project budget, but I think it's broader than that. So that's the big thing I see coming up. Don't have an exact timeline. We're aiming for our budget meetings to start into December. So we're having our internal budget meetings in a couple weeks. We're working on it now. We're just going to hash it out to a more final presentation for council in a couple of weeks. So I'll have more information then. I don't have any other insight other than Lauren just shared other than it is a really rough year. We're facing almost a $2 million deficit going into the next fiscal year. Yeah, I almost want to name I don't know if the next meeting is like I don't yeah, of doing some sort of, you know, exercise as a committee to just like think through how we want to bring this to city council and to our community and or how to how to have these conversations to to, you know, not come up with like a proposal. Here's the policy that we should be it should look like, but of potentially like what values are or align how to align our values into that process could be cool. Should we do that? Should we plan on doing that at our next meeting? November 19th, because does that make sense to, you know, start this maybe before the the actual nuts and bolts get discussed? Yeah, I'll think through what that facilitation would actually look like. But if anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear it. With the caveat that I'm very new and I don't know anything, I could I'd be happy to work with you to talk through how that conversation might be told and what the location of it might look like. I would love that, Jeremy. Thank you so much. I often think the very new people are the those are the ones who are like least your least like, uh, exactly. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to bring my ignorance to the table. Excellent. Thank you. But which we're all in the dark. Yeah. But I think the Lauren's suggestion that we look beyond our own project is is important and powerful because that I think that's what the city really wants. What meant for this committee to be advisory and not and not just sort of, you know, waving our own flag but really trying to sort of help them out with some direction to go. And we have no we'll have more, of course, once we get started with this. But I think anything that we can bring to the table at this point is useful. I also think, you know, like you said, I just want to underscore the way you said, Shayna about like sort of helping I think our role to some extent, too, rather than saying, you know, I don't think we are going to get to a point where we can make recommendations of what budgets how the budget should look. But just to really help city council members remember their values and act on them and, you know, kind of keep it at that at that level. And if we can find a way to communicate that well with them, that would be and support them and and and support and support them if we can with community voices so that so that they're they're backed up on those values. When would the when would it be most important Cameron for us to be able to pass along information that we've gathered? How long can we wait before we're out of the out of the realm of, you know, out of the discussion? Well, you're not out of the discussion until it all goes to vote, right? So but I would recommend if you want to bring this to city staff's attention and council's attention sooner rather than later. We have our budget hearings not the next meeting, but the following meetings. So the first meeting in December, we're going to start getting into the budget. So probably the first meeting in December would be when I recommend coming to council. You know, we won't have any results in the focus groups by that point, which is unfortunate.  No, there's I mean, no promises from anybody on anything. But I I think that would be important and powerful. So yeah, so it sounds like our homework for our next meeting is. Yeah, Jeremy and I will discuss this this facilitation. We'll all be doing our outreach conversations and postings and emailing the any, you know, committed, committed yeses to get on the list. We'll do our fundraising work, either individual or grant writing or research or any whatever the fundraising work that we've got committed. We I'll send out the newsletter will all have a conversation with Jeremy will be such a great. Yeah, check in. And then Julia and I are having a conversation with Keisha anything else for like next steps here. OK, and then on our next agenda, we'll start off as we normally do, you know, all the intros and agendas and everything else. And then it looks like how to bring our committee values to the budget and city council conversations. Conversation, a little meta, have a conversation about a conversation about a conversation. And then we'll do the outreach check in and fundraising check in. And I think those are really it because it'll all be kind of related to to these focus groups that are coming up. Yeah, Lauren. One thought. I don't know how easy it would be Cameron for you or I could dig around. I'm thinking for anyone who has capacity to watch the chunk of the council discussion about budget, the meeting that we had this week was just last night. Yeah, like everybody was just kind of sharing their perspective on, you know, how do we deal with this really unprecedented massive budget cut and it might just be instructive as we try to think about how do we engage council productively just to see where people's starting points are for anyone who's able to watch that was probably a, I don't know, 20 minute discussion. Yeah, Orca wasn't actually there last night because of our schedule change. They were at the school board. So it's no, it's recorded. I recorded it on our Zoom. Though I have a link, I've got to make it public. So I will that was on my list today did not get checked off. So I will have that on our social media and I'll make sure to email it to y'all tomorrow. Do you have a sense of what time in the meeting and that was? Oh, we went pretty quick through the meeting yesterday. So probably right after an hour, I would say. Yeah, it was the last budget or the last item. So probably if you go to like the last half hour or something, you'd find. Yeah, it was not a long one last night for for the first time in a while. Yeah. Well, yeah. And if you want, I can figure out where it is and then send out that time with the notes or not with the notes, because I don't like to know with the next steps. OK, anything else? Yeah, Pella and Alitha. Jeremy. Right. Well, thank you guys all so much. My roommate made some really delicious smelling food and I'm very eager to pick the pan. So yeah, guys, we can we can get through these next couple of days. I'm telling this for myself. Deep breaths. But OK, great to see you all. I know. Take care. Bye.


Okay, so let's get started, because I have a lot to cover, and I want to make room for the fun stuff at the end, so my name's Lauren Siegel, I'm on Twitter, Elle Siegel, you can tweet at me, follow me, I tweet about fun stuff. This is just a warning, there's going to be music in this talk, so if that's a problem for you, the doors still open, otherwise feel free to join us. But what is music? So to me, music is sound and rhythm put together in some interesting way, that's music. So we're going to be looking at sound in this talk, and we're not going to be looking at rhythm, but we're going to replace it with another interesting R that we know very well, Ruby, and we're going to be talking about sound and Ruby, and that's going to be this talk. So let's start with sound. In our context, there's sort of two ways to look at sound. The first one is analog, think about analog audio, and so analog audio is all about vibrations. Basically we have a continuous signal, there's somewhere in this room there's electrical wire running to the speakers that you guys are listening to, and that has an electrical signal in it that is oscillating some voltage, plus voltage, minus voltage, plus voltage, minus voltage drawn on the screen over there, and that is driving the speaker to vibrate back and forth a bunch of times per second, which pushes sound waves out that you guys eventually hear. The other side of audio and the side that we care about as programmers is the digital audio, because we live in the digital world, and we don't have the benefits of dealing with these infinity electrical signals, and we have to deal with samples, and so a lot of people, because there's this computer sitting between your speaker system, a lot of people think there's some kind of magic involved in the computer to the speaker's kind of the pipeline, so hopefully this talk will sort of explain what is happening in between your computer and your speakers. Effectively, what we're trying to do is trying to emulate what happens in the electrical analog world, and so what we do is we create, we get samples in time of the signal that we want to emulate, and we try to sort of emulate that signal that we're doing, that we want to create, so it's not a continuous signal, it's just samples of the signal at points in time, and so what we do is we take a bunch of samples, and then we take more samples, and then we take more samples, and more samples, and more samples until we get a really close approximation to that signal that we're trying to create. So that brings us to our very first vocabulary term, which is the sample rate, and the sample rate is really just representing the bunch of numbers, a bunch of numbers that we want to push at our audio, at our speaker system for one given second of audio, so a bunch of numbers representing one second of audio. If we had a sample rate of 20, 20 samples per second, and you wanted to generate some kind of oscillation for that 20 second, this is what it would look like inside a ruby, and so you generate a bunch of numbers, oscillating positive to negative, positive to negative for 20 samples, that would generate one second of audio at 20 samples per second. Now actual sample rates are much higher than 20, they're a couple orders of magnitude higher, we're looking at somewhere between 44,000 to almost 100,000 samples per second, and basically it just means there's more numbers, that's all it is.  So we sort of have a good, hopefully you guys have an understanding of like, okay, numbers pushing at the sound card, driving the sound card, trying to emulate this signal, how do we actually create those numbers, what are those numbers representing? So to understand that we have to understand the fundamental waves that will create waveforms, and the first fundamental waveform is the sine wave, and so I'm going to preface this with, there's going to be some math in this part, math, and I'm going to try to keep it high level, I'm not going to try to go into details, but there's going to be some funky numbers, so if you don't really understand it, don't worry about it, I want you guys to understand the concepts, not the math. So this is the function for a sine wave, don't worry about the pi and all the symbols, the important ones we care about are the frequency and amplitude. And so those things basically explain how we scale this sine wave, both in the horizontal and vertical axes. And so amplitude makes it taller, frequency makes those things, those peaks closer together, and that brings us to our next set of vocabulary terms, which is amplitude, which controls loudness, how loud the sound is, or how quiet it is, and then frequency, which basically is pitch, how high or how low the pitch is. And then there's this S value, which I sort of skipped over, because it's not that important, it's basically our sample rate, because we are scaling this value to a number of samples per second, we want to scale that mathematical function to have T equals one second equals 44,000 samples. So I mentioned frequency as well, so frequency higher frequency equals higher pitch, lower frequency equals lower pitch, but what's some context behind that, what are the actual numbers? So humans typically have a range somewhere between 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz, that's the typical range for human hearing. So the range for, if you were to pick any number between that 20,000 to 20,000, you would have some kind of sound that would be audible to most humans. But to give you more context, the middle A note that we sort of, if you've ever played guitar, you've tuned a guitar, this is sort of the frequency that we tune our instruments around. It's the middle A key, and this is sort of the pitch that I'm speaking at right now, very close to the pitch that you hear music at. Music goes between around like 200, 2000 hertz, that kind of range. And so, and obviously there's higher and lower, but most of the sound we hear is around that range. So pick a number between there and you'll probably hear something that sounds like music, or sounds. So if we take those numbers, we take the 440, we take the 44,000 samples per second, we take an amplitude of one, we get this sine function, which looks like this. And basically, it's just a sine function, not too magical. If we got to 44,000 on the X scale, we would see that basically there are 440 oscillations in this sine wave. And that's all it means is that sine wave is oscillating top to bottom 440 times within that one second of time. So the next fundamental wave form is the square wave. And the square wave looks pretty much like what it sounds like. It looks like a square. And so basically what you're doing is you're oscillating from the negative maxima to the positive maxima to the negative maxima and back again. Again, 440 times per second or whatever your frequency is. Don't worry about the math, it's not that important. And basically, if you connected the lines, those lines going up and down don't actually exist. But if you connected them, it would look like a square. And so that's where the name square wave comes from. Then we have the triangle wave, which again looks exactly like what it sounds like. It looks like a triangle. It goes up and down and up and down and just oscillates. So anything that oscillates is going to create some kind of sound. And then we have the sawtooth wave, which again looks like what it sounds like. Instead, it's very similar to the triangle wave instead of going up. It just goes down, down, down. Then we have the noise wave, which seems weird to call it a wave. It's really just noise. And it really is just randomness. And it may seem weird to bring this up, but you'll see why I brought this up in the talk later on. So this is another kind of wave you can create. Probably the easiest one you can create. So rather than talking about this stuff, let's actually hear some noise. So I have this audio tool open up here that I'm going to load up. That is really, really small. So I might have to bump down my settings here. I apologize to the people doing visuals right now because I'm going to mess with the presentation. All right, so hopefully you can see that over here. That's better. Okay, cool.  All right, so I'm going to play one note here. So that's a sine wave. Sounds like a sine wave. Basically, what happens if I can play a sine wave like that, I could go up one octave and you're going to see the sort of the peaks getting closer together. So you can see how that happens. So they get closer together as the pitch goes up. That's basically it. Next, we have a square wave. And this is going to be a little bit more noisy because square waves are a little noisy in general. So you see the same thing happens there. Ignore the little noise that you see at the top and the bottom here for now. I'll explain why that's there in a bit. But that's the square wave. Then we have the triangle wave. So that's a triangle wave. And then we have the saw wave, which again is a little noisier but cool. And then we have noise, which is going to look like randomness and going to sound like it too. That's noise. And then you can take these sound waves and you can add them together. So we could take one sine wave and add it to another sine wave. And that really just does the sort of addition of two waves together. And you'll see how they sort of interoperate. Let me just move that. So you can see the interplay of these two waves added together. And they sort of because they have different frequencies, they sort of create this really interesting intermix. Every sound is basically every sound that you're going to hear in the real world of my voice, some guitar instruments, any instrument is not just one frequency. It's multiple waves put together. So this kind of thing over here is really just like that's what sound really looks like. It's the addition of multiple waves put together. So let's jump back into our talk. And let's keep going. So we talked about audio synthesis, which is basically creating audio from nothing. And we're going to talk a little bit about analysis of audio. And basically analysis of audio is all about transforming audio, visualizing it, looking at it. There's one important tool that is used when you're analyzing audio. And I'm not going to talk about it too much, but it is called the Fourier Transform. And the Fourier Transform is probably like the most important tool that you can use when you're when you're doing audio processing. I'm not going to talk about the math. It's actually, it's pretty complex. It's literally complex. It's complex math. So I'm not going to talk about too much about it. It would be way too much to talk about here. I do want to talk about the sort of fundamental principles behind it because they're pretty easy to understand. And hopefully it'll sort of make things more clear. The way I like to think of the Fourier Transform is you have this waveform on the left of time domain. This sort of this is a square wave going up and down. And the way I like to think of it is you take this square wave at a point in time, and you turn it sideways. And you're looking at this two dimensional view now of this wave. And you're looking at the side view of the wave. And it's sort of every single frequency because I mentioned every wave form has multiple sort of frequencies involved in it. You're sort of looking at every single frequency involved in the creation of that wave on the left. So you're sort of turning it sideways and looking at frequency mode. That's the way I like to think about it and it makes it easier for me. If you want to learn more, there's a website called the4a-transform.com. It's really has a lot of good information about the Fourier Transform. Really well named domain. The thing I like the most is there's a quote from the author on that site, which really is a good fundamental explanation of what this theory is. It basically says that every single wave form that is created, that you see, that the square wave that we saw, the noise waves that we saw, my voice, every single sound that you hear can be recreated using nothing but sine waves. So nothing but sine waves. So all the other waves that we saw, the square wave, can be recreated using nothing but the addition of sine waves. That's a really powerful concept because it means not only can you add a bunch of sine waves to recreate any single sound, it also means you can take any single sound and decompose it into the set of sine waves that created it. And that's really powerful because every sine wave has one frequency. So you can see how that works. So here's an example of that. Here's a wave form on the right that we're going to try to approximate using adding a bunch of sine waves together. So we add in one sine wave on the left. It doesn't look anything like it. Let's add another sine wave. OK, now it's starting to get closer. We'll add another one. OK, getting closer. And then finally, we add the fourth sine wave and look at that. It's exactly like the wave on the right. And it turns out that this wave on the right was actually created using the exact summation of those four waves. So I told you guys to ignore the noise in the square wave. The reason why was because Ableton Live is actually creating those square waves using the addition of sine waves. And this is why over here that you see the noise is because we're actually adding sine waves. And if you don't approximate to infinity, you're going to see a little bit of noise at the top and bottom where those oscillations happen in the sine waves.  So what are some applications of analysis? The first one I like to call passive analysis. Passive analysis of waveforms. And that's basically pitch detection, tuning, visualization. Instrument tuners are a really good example of that. You sort of get the frequency mode, sort of look at it, figure out if you're on the right tune.  The second one is wave shaping. And that is when you actively change the waveform. So we go into frequency mode, we take this waveform, we turn it into frequency mode, we have all the frequencies that are involved in this audio sample. And then let's say we want to get rid of the low frequencies. So we delete the low frequencies, we get rid of them. And then we take those remaining frequencies and we turn them back into time domain. And now we have this sound that has everything but the low frequencies involved. And that's all that equalization is, is going into frequency mode, manipulating those frequency waves, going back into time domain, and now you have a manipulated sound. Auto tuning works very similarly. It uses pitch tracking to figure out what the actual sound is. And then it sort of manipulates those frequencies that don't match and then slightly moves the ones that do and then brings it back into time domain to create an auto-tune sound. So I'm not going to show a 4-day transformer auto-tune stuff like that. That would be awesome but I don't have enough time. Instead I'm just going to show you guys sort of what this looks like. So I have this graph over here. Let me just load up the sine wave that we saw before. Okay cool. And so I'm going to play one note here. I'm going to play it really quietly so it doesn't bother you guys. But basically what happens is I'm playing a sine wave note and you'll notice again sine waves have one frequency involved in them. So you'll see that one peak represents that one frequency of the sine wave and that represents about 900 Hertz. It's the A4 note and it's about 900 Hertz. And so I could go up an octave and then you'll see how the pitch changes in the frequency. So that's basically what it looks like.  So let's look at what those waves look like in sort of frequency domain mode. So this is the square wave. Let me just... So that is that. I'm gonna not keep it on too loud. Okay there we go. So that was the square wave. You can see that it's actually the addition of a bunch of different frequencies. And those frequencies were created using sine waves. And so that's really all that's really what it looks like. And so if I wanted to get rid of one of those frequencies I could sort of delete one of those go back into time domain. I'd get a completely different sound. Cool. So now it's time to get practical. So we learned how audio is represented. We got a little bit of information about that. We learned how to create that stuff, those numbers that we have to push our audio card. And then we looked at sort of how you could process that audio. And now it's time to actually figure out how we can use that information to write audio with Ruby. So I'm going to show you guys three audio libraries that you can use today to create sound using Ruby. The first one is called Ruby Audio. This basically lets you write audio directly to wavefiles.wav files on disk. It's basically a libsoundfile wrapper.  Don't worry too much about the code here. Basically we're creating a buffer that contains 4,800,000 samples. We have 48,000 samples per second. For 10 seconds, 4,800,000 samples. And then we fill it with a sine wave that we saw before, that little function we saw before. And then we just write it up to disk at the bottom there. Nothing too crazy. This is a really fun way to sort of write out music, play it, test around with writing functions out and see what they sound like. But it's a really slow feedback loop. You have to write it out, you have to play it back, it takes 10 seconds, blah, blah. What we really want to do is we run it right directly to our sound card so we can get instant real-time feedback. And so when I was doing this talk I wanted to get instant feedback on the stuff that I was playing with. So I wrote a library called Easy Audio, which lets you basically write directly to your sound card and hear that stuff in real-time. It's basically a port audio wrapper, which is port audio itself is an audio library that is cross platform, lets you basically it abstracts out the OS layer when dealing with audio. And there are FFI bindings in Ruby for this as well, so you can get the port audio gem and just use them directly. But the low-level API is really difficult to use and it's not fun. So I made Easy Audio and it's basically way easier to use and you can just play a sine wave with that one line, you can open a stream, pass in a lambda that processes one frame of audio at a time, play a sine wave, you could do fun things like taking a triangle wave, starting at a frequency of 220, increase the frequency over time, and let me just play that for you real quick. So this is the increased frequency one, I'm going to play it here. So that's what that sounds like. Let's move on. Cool, so we can play with audio, we can do fun stuff live, but there's one problem with writing directly to your sound card is the fact that you don't get it to take advantage of all the other fun stuff that your system, all the other audio tools that you have on your computer, synthesizers, filters like delay and gain and all that fun stuff, so you can't really do anything if you're writing directly to your sound card. What we really want to do is we want to write to our audio tool like Ableton Live that I was using before, so that Ableton Live can also add in its ability to synthesize and sample and do all those other, that other fun stuff. So we want to write an audio plug-in, which means we want to write a VST, that's typically the most common plug-in that you'll find out in the wild. There's different kinds of audio plug-in formats, but VSTs are definitely by four of the most popular. Any audio tool that you'll use, if it supports plug-ins, will most likely support VSTs. So I wrote a VST that will embed Ruby, so that I can actually write Ruby in Ableton Live and actually play around with sound in Live, get the benefit of all the tools and visualizations inside of Live. So basically what I did was I embedded Ruby inside of a C++ application. Don't worry too much about the code here. The important part is it's basically embedded Ruby calling out to an external DRB process. So I'm calling out to another process that actually processes the audio locally on the system. And then every single frame where the VSTs asking me to process a bunch of frames for samples, I basically call out to that remote Ruby object sitting on my local machine. I return back with the samples and then it returns back to the audio system. Let's see it. So this is where it gets fun. This is where we can all have our fun here. I'm going to load up the VST code here. So I'm going to go into easy VST and I'm going to type rake. That's going to drop me into an interactive shell which basically has the music server loaded up, the server side of my component here. And I'm going to load up a audio, a little set that I created with that VST setup at the bottom here on the left. And so that I have the VST loaded up and I have the server side component loaded up. Let me just show you some of the code here. This is the server. I created a bunch of instruments that process sort of one frame of music. So here's the sine wave function. So that's a sine wave function. That's a square wave function. That's a triangle wave function, etc. And then there's just a little bit of a music server that actually processes that audio. So what I can do with this music server is I can set a function. So let's play a sine wave and then I can go into live here and I can actually play one note. Sorry about the pitch there. So there's a pitch, there's some sine waves action going on there. This is a sine wave that's created with Ruby. Same kind of deal with the octaves. So I can do that. I can create sine waves. I can create square waves. Warning, this is going to be a little bit noisy. So that's a square wave. You'll note that we're actually using the exact square wave function. We're not approximating with sine waves. There's no noise at the top and the bottom. We can do other fun stuff. So we can create, we can add sine waves together. This is three sine waves added together with different frequencies. And so you can see you get the same thing. And we can do, we could do really fun stuff. Like we can take the frequency right down here. I don't know if you could see that. So this phased constant right here is really this crazy function that actually oscillates the frequency over time with another sine function. So it's actually oscillating the frequency over time. So it's going to sound a little bit crazy. Bear with me here. Let us... Cool one did that. So you do fun stuff like that. You can play around with Ruby's function. Create interesting functions, random things. Do all this weird stuff. And you get the feedback live in Ruby. It's really fun to play around with all this stuff. So you can do all that fun stuff. We can also do real things with sound. We can actually create real sounds.  So I'm going to use a linear fall off here. And this linear fall off is basically going to make the amplitude reduce over time linearly.  So we can do that kind of stuff. And then we can actually make it fall off exponentially. So we can make that sound like this. Let me just bump that up a bit. So you can do fun stuff that sounds like maybe like a string instrument. So we're getting close to instrumentation here. Cool. So we're getting closer to making music. Let's create some cooler instruments. Let's create a bass drum. So what's a bass drum if not just a sine wave times the exponential fall off thing. So let's go back to that. I don't have to change code. It actually is the same thing because, so this doesn't sound like a bass drum, but that does. So a bass drum is really just a sine wave that has a really low frequency. And so that's our bass drum. So let's create a snare drum. Okay. So snare drum is really just noise. So let me bump that up. Cool. So we have a snare drum. We have a bass drum. We have a sine wave playing like a string instrument. We have a bunch of cool stuff. And so now you guys have the tools to create music with Ruby. But it would be unfair me to get you guys all the way here and not actually create music with Ruby.  And I hope you guys enjoy this song that I created using nothing but the Ruby samples that I talked about in this talk and I showed you guys. So hopefully it's not too loud. There we go. That's sound using nothing but Ruby. So I'm just going to close off this talk with a little summary here. Basically audio is not scary.  You're just telling it to vibrate a speaker system. That's all you're doing.  So we learned how sound is represented.  We also learned what those numbers actually should be. Like how to actually create those numbers using sine waves and different functions that oscillate. Like sine waves, square waves, solid waves, triangle waves. We also looked at how you can use Fourier transforms to sort of process and analyze audio as well as do funky things with those sine waves. And then finally we took that knowledge and put it all together and actually applied it to Ruby using three libraries. One that lets you write out two wave files. One that lets you write directly your sound card. And then one that actually acts as a VST plugin that you can use to plug into other sound tools. And then finally we made actual real music with Ruby. So I blog about stuff, various things. Lately I've been blogging about music so if you want to read more about all the music stuff that I've been digging into you can go to my blog. I have a couple posts up there. I'm going to be adding a couple posts later on with all the stuff that I talked about in this talk and more. All the code is available on GitHub so you can go check out Easy Audio and Easy VST and play around with them and do fun stuff with them. Again I'm on Twitter you can tweet at me, follow me, ask me questions, etc. And again I just want to say thank you. I have two passions. One of them is programming and the other one is music so I really enjoyed the fact that I was able to pitch a talk at RubyConf that included both my passions and actually got accepted. So thank you guys for actually coming here and letting me play music for you guys and letting me sort of share my two passions. So thanks.