Fifteen weeks in. Podcast 85 is up.
Six Selahs this week, pulled from the morning streams as always — and a behind-the-scenes update I’m genuinely excited about, for the curious among you.
In This Episode
Six spontaneous pieces, drawn from two mornings — May 21 and May 25. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters, and each link goes back to the full morning the piece came from:
Teaching a Machine to Hear Tempo
Here’s the update. When I play live, I breathe with the music — speeding up, pulling back, sitting in a moment. That’s the life of it, but it’s also the hardest part to clean up afterward. The editing software (Logic’s Smart Tempo) tries to map all that ebb and flow onto a grid so the notes line up, and it gets it mostly right — which means I spend a lot of quiet hours nudging the rest of it back by hand.
So this past week I ran an experiment. I took 56 of my own past edits — every Selah from the last dozen-plus podcasts — and had the AI I use behind the scenes (Anthropic’s Fable) study them, to learn how I actually hear and correct the timing, and try doing that first pass itself instead of Smart Tempo. Fun fact: this very episode was one of its test cases.
The result honestly surprised me. Through the middle of a song, it now matches my hand-editing almost note for note. Where it still stumbles is the big turns — the moments where the music changes feel entirely — and one wrong guess there throws off everything after it. So it’s not ready to take the wheel yet; I’ve set it on the shelf for now, and it keeps learning a little more from every episode I edit by hand. But the day a computer can hear a ritardando the way a human does is closer than I expected, and that’s a fun thing to watch unfold.
A Quick Heads-Up
The back half of July is busy — student camp the week of the 25th (I’ll be helping lead worship), and family vacation right after. This is one of the episodes I recorded ahead so the music and the prayer keep coming while I’m away. If you don’t hear from me for a couple weeks, that’s why — but the Selahs will still be landing each Saturday.
This Week’s Pray the Bible
To close — a Pray the Bible short, and a favorite: 1 John 4. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God. There is no fear in love; perfect love casts out fear.
If the embed isn’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/hs665uSujKU.
Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying.
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