October 2009
58 posts
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Nick Seaver: Britney Study #5
Another Pop Study.
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Machines to Interpret for Them
I’m reading Inventing Entertainment, an enthusiast’s history of the player piano, and while it is generally light reading (most interesting for anecdotes), I’m occasionally finding really provocative stuff in it. One such passage, an excerpt from Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice:
“By chance,” explains the main character, Peter Hogarth, an eminent...
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The RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer (1955): The...
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Blog Roll
Special news: I’ve joined the world of “real” bloggers by sticking a blogroll in my sidebar. My technique for putting it together was basically to go back through old posts and see where I find most of my stuff. So yeah, if you’ve got a hunger for more posts or want to taste of the crystal-clear headwaters of this blog, come and check out the sidebar. You won’t regret...
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Nick Seaver: Ciara Study #13
This is one of the...
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Machines to Listen for You 2
If you’ve ever used Shazam on the iPhone and wondered how it works, there is an article on Slate for you!
The article itself isn’t too explanatory, but luckily it links to both another blog post with a more detailed description of how the Shazam ID system works and a PDF of the paper written by the inventor to describe it!
edit to add: Shazam is that thing that lets you record a...
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No More Indeterminacy
If you like glitchy sounds but fear glitchy electronics, Sidsonic has come to the rescue with a sample set of “5 GB of pure Circuit Bend Soundmaterial.”
All samplesets are fully playable with three velocity zones. Common problems for Circuit Bending like pitch and tone fluctuations got eliminated, without curbing the typical sound and the unique experience only Circuit Bending can...
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WatchIn this video from TED, Julian Treasure (good name) describes four effects sound can have on you: physiological, psychological, cognitive, and behavioral.
I bet you all can think of some more.
(Also, the talk appears to be a promotion for come kind of sonic branding endeavor? He’s like the R. Murray Schafer of retail.)
(via Christina Oscillator)
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Yes please
No way.
acousmata:
Katzenklavier (Cat piano)
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Machines to Listen for You
A recent story on NPR’s Morning Edition describes a new software system to analyze songs for hit potential. Quoth Music Intelligence Solutions CEO David Meredith:
“[It’s] a series of algorithms that we use to look at what’s the potential of a song to be sticky with a listener,” Meredith says. “To have those patterns in the music that would correspond with what...
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WatchMore from Peter Ablinger (of the child-voiced piano): This time, he’s taken a letter from Schoenberg and done his piano-vocoder magic with it. (Basically running a spectrum analysis and using the keys of the piano to play back the frequency data, like a lo-res vocoder.) It seems like there are some extra notes in there too, perhaps a musical quote from Schoenberg? I’m not sure.
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WatchA charming (and educational!) video about how optical sound recording worked on films with sound from 1929.
(via Resources for studying sound recordings)
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WatchThis is an interesting idea (although the video does seem to drag after a while): use some sort of magic microphones to capture the sounds (and I think magnetic interference) of a computer in operation.
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The QRS PlayASax. What a marvelous instrument.
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WatchIf high frequencies are good for keeping away unruly teenagers, then low frequencies are good for keeping away hail storms. (Maybe.)
In the video, you can hear a hail cannon in action. (I kind of wish that link was a game based on hail cannons, not just a flash animation.)
See more pictures from a hail cannon supplier here.
(via nacken)
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WatchWouldn’t have thought I’d be posting unboxing videos to the blog, but this one is of one of those mosquito devices. Worth clicking ahead to the end to see what they look like, if you’re not a big fan of cardboard boxes, tapes, and packing peanuts.
And it looks like the wikipedia page on “the mosquito” has a lot more information on it than the last time I looked....
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Machines to Play Machines for Them
The reason posts have been a little light lately (not in number, but in content) is that the thesis season has begun in earnest. A little over a week ago my classmates and I gave our preliminary thesis presentations, making a “public commitment,” to use the words of my thesis advisor. This post is an adaptation/abridgement of that presentation into blog format, as another form of...