Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
Denoising Field Recordings documents an early attempt at using denoising-techniques in a creative and compositional manner. Instead of utilising noise-reduction-algorithms for their intended purpose (the restoration of damaged audio signals), these processes are applied to various field recordings of trains, streets, swimminghalls and public transport. Due to the fact that these recordings consist entirely of noises this operation transforms the originals into an uncanny hybrid of newly introduced processing artefacts, occasional silence and sporadically audible traces of the original field recordings. What kind of sound-aesthetics can emerge while denoising field recordings? Which audible parameters are able to resist this »audio-erasement-process«? How are these traces comparable to the visual remanences of Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of a de Kooning drawing?
Shimmering, gorgeous results of applying noise reduction algorithms to “noise.” Click through to hear samples.
(via Everyday Listening)
Codeorgan is a flash app that uses a (delightfully) arbitrary algorithm to convert the <body> of any website into music. Here is one of the rules:
Firstly, the codeorgan scans the page contents and removes all characters not found in the musical scale (A to G), and then analyses the remaining characters to find the most commonly used ‘note.’ If this is an even number the page is translated in to the major pentatonic scale of that particular note; it becomes minor if there is an uneven number
Fun.
(via waxy)
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 song that’s playing and then tells you what it is. Totally magic. Once IDed a Lindsay Lohan song playing in the background of a noisy seaside clam shack for me.
(via Slate Magazine)
