[03] Chapter

Software

Websites and tools for musicians, small businesses and archives. Recent work includes Vairë, which listens to a private collection of about 34,000 tracks so that any passage can be found by describing it, and Local Historian, which makes town-meeting recordings searchable.

03.1Local HistorianMakes town-meeting recordings searchable.Shipped
03.2AthelasA restoration workbench for old recordings.Unfinished
03.3VairëFinds passages in about 34,000 tracks by description.Active prototype
03.4ClearancePre-1930 recordings, researched for public-domain status.Research platform
03.53LAn AI tutor for learning a second language.Live prototype
03.6OffstageContent for people who don’t want to sell themselves.Tabled
03.7Client workA festival website and an advisory platform.For clients
03.8Contact

03.1 Local Historian

Local Historian.

Towns record hours of public meetings that nobody can search. Local Historian transcribes them and answers plain questions with the exact moment and the person who said it. It also opens up oral-history interviews for researchers.

Shipped

localhistorian.ai (opens in a new tab)

It began with the Seneca Falls Historical Society. I digitized the Society’s cassette collection, restored it, and published it with transcripts on a portal I built.

Shipped and market-tested. I pitched it to thousands of towns and libraries, and adoption so far is near zero. The tech works. The timing is the hard part, and I’d rather tell you that than hide it.

localhistorian.ai, the Glen Cove section: a card offering searchable meetings and questions answered with timestamped citations, over a film frame of a council chamber.

The Seneca Falls Historical Society portal, with its 12 recordings from 1980 to 1989: the heading “Where the Movement Began.” over a photograph of the canal.

A frame from the Local Historian film: a road made of sound waves running toward a large moon.

From the site
Hosting is not access.
From the site
We digitize, restore, transcribe, and connect your record — meetings, minutes, laws, histories — into one searchable public portal.

The tape sequence from the Local Historian film · generated imagery, stitched together and edited by me

Appendix 03.1Watch the film, with the site it was made for

03.1 Next

Where it is going.

Since September 2026 the work has turned toward records intelligence for land-use decisions in New York: following a zoning matter, its conditions and its sources over time, with every claim cited to a page of a document or a moment in a meeting. For now it is a design prototype over public records, with names redacted here.

A relationship graph: one land-use matter linked to its organization, its parcel, the Board of Zoning Appeals, a code provision and a state licence. Names and numbers are covered by ink bars. — One matter and what it connects toPrototype, mock interface over public records · names redacted

A matter's drawer after a historical replay: under “Why this matters”, an approval stayed granted while its stated term moved a year. Names, address and case number are covered by ink bars. — An approval stayed granted while its term moved a yearPrototype, mock interface over public records · names redacted

The same drawer further down: the record over time in three dated steps, and the source a claim rests on, with the page and the quoted line. — The record over time, and its sourcePrototype, mock interface over public records · names redacted

03.2 Athelas

Athelas.

A restoration workbench for old recordings: 78s, worn records, cassette tape. It is unfinished, and it is mine.

The name

athelas

/ˈaθelas/AH-theh-lahs

noun

SindarinOne of Tolkien’s Elvish languages

[From las, “leaf”, and athe-, a shortened athae, which Tolkien tied to a root meaning ease and healing. He never translated it outright; “healing leaf” is the usual reading.]

1
In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a healing herb with long leaves. Crushed, or steeped in hot water, they give off a scent that refreshes and clears the mind. It eases pain, helps wounds heal, and can rouse people from a deep, deathly sleep.
2
In Gondor, an herb whose healing use had been forgotten. The herb-masters kept it only for its smell, while an old rhyme held that its full power showed in a king’s hands.

Alsokingsfoil, its name in the Common Speech (foil is an old word for leaf, as in trefoil); asëa aranion in Quenya.

Why the name Athelas is a healing herb, and the tool treats damaged recordings with the same care: it examines first, tries several remedies, keeps the one that works best, and returns the original untouched when none improves on it.

Switch while it plays.

Raw transferAbove 8 kHz, on average −35 dB

The Old Oaken Bucket · Knickerbocker Quartet · acoustic 78, 1910s18 s Public domain · raw is the Internet Archive’s transfer · both versions at the same loudness · 0 dB is the loudest momentarchive.org (opens in a new tab)

It measures what is wrong with a recording first: clicks, crackle, hum, hiss, clipping, lost high end. Then it tries a few repair chains on a short excerpt and scores each one against doing nothing. It runs the winner on the whole file, checks its own result, and returns the original if nothing beat it.

Some of the repair is done by models I fine-tune on custom audio sets, each one built to train for a specific problem. It runs on my own machine and is not a public product.

The Athelas playground: four modes (Auto, Restore, Restore + Level, Level only), a choice of source (record, tape, voice), and a place to drop a file.

The Drop Deck, a tool for long tapes. Its chain is written out in plain words: declick, deep clean, level, studio re-render, house finish. — The Drop Deck, for long tapes, its chain in plain words

03.3 Vairë

Vairë.

Vairë listens to every track in my collection, about 34,000 of them, in overlapping 30-second windows and writes a short description of how each passage sounds. I type a description and it jumps to the matching moment on the waveform.

The name

Vairë

/ˈvai̯re/VYE-reh

proper noun

QuenyaOne of Tolkien’s Elvish languages

[From a root meaning “weave”. Tolkien glossed the name “the Weaver”, and in later notes “Ever-weaving”. He reworked the root several times and never quite settled it.]

1
In Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, one of the Valier, the queens of the Valar, and the wife of Mandos. She weaves everything that has happened in time into tapestries that hang in his halls, and the halls grow wider as the ages pass.
2
In his early, abandoned drafts (The Book of Lost Tales), an Elf who keeps the Cottage of Lost Play with her husband, Lindo, and is one of the storytellers who tell its old tales.

NoteThe two dots only mark that the final e is spoken.

Why the name Vairë weaves a record of everything that has happened, and the tool tries something similar on a much smaller scale: it listens to every passage in a large collection and keeps a description of each, so that any moment can be found again.

Active prototype

Search, redrawn from the prototype The query and its first two results, each landing on a 30-second window · waveforms traced from the screenshot

Around the search.

03.3a
Cues and sample banks
Cue markers and regions on a zoomable waveform, each with its own notes and tags, gathered into sample banks.
03.3b
Stems
Stem separation on demand. All six stems are kept, for a mixer in the browser.
03.3c
Album splitter
Full-album recordings cut into tracks, from published track lengths or from the silences between them, and checked in an editor before anything is cut.
03.3d
Rights research
What is known about a recording’s identity, composition, master and contact, scored, with the year its U.S. copyright as a sound recording runs out.

One track opened in Vairë: an amber region and coloured cue markers on its waveform, with duration, key, tempo and its confidence, loudness, and a row of actions such as Stems and Pitch & Tempo.

Sample banks in Vairë: banks named Bass, Drums, Loops, Horns and others, and the Loops bank open with my own cue labels and mood tags.

The prototype shipped as Sampler Brain, the name in the screenshots, and I never stopped adding features long enough to rename it. Vairë was the intended name, and the larger idea behind it was a rights marketplace for old recordings, called Revival. The collection is my own, so none of it plays here.

03.4 Clearance

Research platform

Clearance.

Pre-1930 recordings, researched for public-domain status.

Records made before 1930 often come with almost no reliable information. Clearance matches each one to what is known, researches its public-domain status and drafts notes about it. Anything uncertain waits for a person to review.

Clearance library: a grid of old 78 rpm record labels, with filters for collection, status and genre.

Clearance works database: a table of recordings with year, public-domain year, category and public-domain status for each.

03.5 3L

Live prototype

3L.

A language tutor, built in under a week.

3L turns a specific method for learning a second language into an AI tutor. The method is my friend Tony’s: he teaches English in Japan, and he built it out of 3L, a term from our childhood. The tutor runs exercises, role-plays conversations and records progress quietly instead of scoring it. It is a working prototype.

Beta link on request.

3L home screen: the 3L mark, “Exercise Studio”, and three lenses to choose how feedback is given on the same work.

3L on a phone: setting up a freewrite, with the note that every keystroke is final and backspace is turned off.

03.6 Offstage

Tabled

Offstage.

Content for people who don’t want to sell themselves: automate it, and show the work.

I built a local prototype. It imports a work session, links it to the git history, proposes stories with their sources, and renders a vertical video that has to be approved before it can be exported.

I set it aside because the monitoring it needs, several lanes at once, some passive and some active, could not yet be built at a cost I could carry. I intend to come back to it.

The Offstage concept page, headed “Build privately. Publish selectively.” — Concept page

Synthetic demo, no sound

03.7 Client work

Client work.

Blaine Harbor Music FestivalFestival website
DéWarriorHolistic advisory platform

03.8 Contact

Contact

For lessons, sessions or projects, write to me through the contact form. I usually reply within a day.

Contact

Software

Local Historian.

Where it is going.

Athelas.

Vairë.

Around the search.

Cues and sample banks

Stems

Album splitter

Rights research

Clearance.

3L.

Offstage.

Client work.

Contact