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.
The RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer (1955): The Synthesis of Music (“Blue Skies,” by Irving Berlin)
This clip is from a series of 45s released by RCA to accompany the announcement of its then-new Electronic Music Synthesizer. In it, the narrator guides you through the creation of a synth version of “Blue Skies,” by Irving Berlin. It’s fun to hear someone talk about synthesizers from a time when the technology was so new. (So new, in fact, that the tunes on it were still sequenced using a player piano-like roll.)
What I find craziest about this is how fragile the song sounds at the end, like the oscillators are always about to fall out of tune, and the rhythm is about to come undone. With so much talk about the objectivity and precision of machines, it’s nice to hear machines sounding so close to the edge of failure.
You can listen to mp3s of the whole box set here.
(via Chris Ariza)
Because this blog needed some blatant synth porn, enjoy this video of someone twiddling the knobs of a Buchla oscillator module.
This “drum machine” uses photosensors and a rotating can with a light source inside to sequence beats. That is actually a terrible description of what it does, as it is basically a totally crazy batch photo-controlled oscillators that, according to this video, can also be used to modulate sound from external sources.
The video is long, but click around—this contraption does a lot of things.
(via SynthGear)
![I am a big fan of efforts to define “instrument” in a way that is expansive enough to include consumer music playback devices.
Ethan Hein does it in this blog post, in a way that is totally unlike how I think of it, but still fascinating:
There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: an oscillator, a source of noise, some kind of modulation, and a resonator.
For the curious, my definition has more to do with the relationship between players and machinery that produces predefined groups of frequencies, and is introduced somewhere in my undergrad thesis [pdf link].
(via Ethan Hein’s metablog)](http://30.media.tumblr.com/SzTNzpRx2qj5ln4gqUAFQGtVo1_400.jpg)
I am a big fan of efforts to define “instrument” in a way that is expansive enough to include consumer music playback devices.
Ethan Hein does it in this blog post, in a way that is totally unlike how I think of it, but still fascinating:
There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: an oscillator, a source of noise, some kind of modulation, and a resonator.
For the curious, my definition has more to do with the relationship between players and machinery that produces predefined groups of frequencies, and is introduced somewhere in my undergrad thesis [pdf link].
(via Ethan Hein’s metablog)
