Matrixsynth points to this gem, from the US educational kids’ program 3-2-1 Contact, produced by Children’s Television Workshop. (I can’t think of any science programs today for young people quite like it, sadly. Ordinarily I’d hold off for Matrix’s wonderful Week in Synths, but I just can’t wait on this one. Good Sunday evening watching.)

Suzanne Ciani, the synthesis pioneer, multi-Grammy nominee, and composer of everything from New Age music to classic 70s jingles and sound effects (including the distinctive synthesized Coke-unbottling sound), explains the fundamentals of acoustics and synthesis in terms children could understand:

A Prophet figures prominently, but other than that it’s almost an all-Buchla show. She’s a virtuoso at patching a Buchla patch. And between her and the host, I guarantee you’ll be extremely calm within the first few seconds.

For many of us, our studio and our home are one and the same. The speakers we use to monitor mixes are the ones we use for rehearsals, improvisations, and casual listening. I first got interested in the Anthony Gallo A’Diva series speakers partly because I’ve long admired Gallo’s home speaker products, but also because the Gallos seemed to be comfortable walking this home/studio line.

Normally, engineers steer far clear of home audio equipment when it comes to monitoring. But producer Neal Pogue has been using the A’Diva speakers for just that, including five songs on the new Stevie Wonder album, and projects for Nelly Furtado, Indie Ari, Earth Wind and Fire, and Outkast. (See studioexpresso profile, or a 2004 interview in Electronic Musician for more about Pogue’s production background.) That’s pretty unusual for speakers aimed at the home market.

Having lived with a 2.1 set of the A’Diva Ti satellites for a while, I’m impressed, as well. The sound is uncolored and clear, with really gorgeous high-frequency definition. It makes these speakers sound both much larger than they are (you can fit them in your hand), and much more expensive. (They run just over US$200 a speaker, but you could easily fool someone into thinking they went for more.) That could make these ideal for complementing your existing set of monitors. I got to talk to Anthony Gallo, the speaker’s creator, about his background and, most importantly, why the speakers are spherical in the first place.

We hear lots of discussion of how to make better digital instruments. But to fully understand instrument design, it’s often best to look at instruments from around the world that have evolved over centuries. (Hey, these synthesizers and such, by comparison, are mere infants.)

Here’s a fantastically virtuostic performance from 11 year-old Sirena Huang, via June Cohen on the TEDtalks blog. Following the music, she discusses in frank terms why the instrument is such a timeless design. She’s got a smart audience for such thoughts: the performance comes from the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, a legendary gathering of “thinkers and doers”. And while Sirena feigns surprise that her violin would be included with “real” technology like an iPod, I think she recognizes the violin is the better design by far.

Embedding their videos doesn’t seem to work, so I suggest checking out the story directly:

Sirena Huang on TEDTalks [Video links and comments, TEDblog]

Thanks to our friend Matrix of Matrixsynth fame for this. The TEDblog has plenty of other music coverage, including a similarly virtuostic video of pianist Jennifer Lin, not to mention lots of other general cool tech and non-tech topics.

Notably, on the topic of violins, the blog has a mini review of the book Stradivari’s Genius by Tony Faber, exploring the history of the most famous of violins.

Will digital instruments ever match an instrument like the violin? I tend to look at it the other way: watching a great performance is as much about the player as it is the design of the instrument. Practice your favorite digital instrument for a lifetime, and see what happens. And keep in mind that “easier” isn’t always better. A violin is anything but intuitive, and sounds awful when you first play it.

Tuning pianos involves some heavy science and art. In other words, Reyburn Pocket RCT has absolutely no relation to that simple guitar tuner you’ve got in your gig bag. It’s a US$900 powerhouse of visual tuning:

Reyburn Cyber Tuner / Pocket RCT, for PocketPC (Windows Mobile)

This is probably old news if you’re a piano tuner (either this or the Mac/Windows laptop version), but I saw it this weekend while I was staying at my parents’ house and a tuner came over to adjust our Baldwin grand. The tuner was more than happy to show it to me. You can’t tell in this screenshot, but the UI pulses like some sort of alien eye as you near the pitch. The software was able to guess that the piano was a grand of more than six feet just by listening to the harmonic content of the sound (already impressed); it can compensate tuning for the size of the piano. The system uses aural tuning, meaning it looks not only at the fundamental but directly samples and matches partials, which is the way tuners are trained to work.

Hearing over the din of noise is something that humans do a lot better than computers. A new mathematical technique promises to provide highly accurate models of sound, even with broadband noise in the picture. Why does this matter, aside from mathematical curiosity? For one, better sonic analysis could mean more realistic models of instruments and more flexible sound editing tools, inspiring a new generation of music software.

From our friend kokorozashi:

‘In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcelo Magnasco, professor and head of the Mathematical Physics Laboratory at Rockefeller University, has published a paper that may prove to be a sound-analysis breakthrough, featuring a mathematical method or “algorithmâ€Â? that’s far more nuanced at transforming sound into a visual representation than current methods. “This outperforms everything in the market as a general method of sound analysis,â€Â? Magnasco says. In fact, he notes, it may be the same type of method the brain actually uses.’

Full article:
New mathematical method provides better way to analyze noise [Physorg.com]

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time new algorithms yielded scientific advances and musical advances alike. Even the famed (or infamous) AutoTune plug-in benefits from data processing techniques used in oil exploration. (Lesson: it takes a lot of science to make Jessica Simpson sing in tune. Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Of course, the converse is true, too: better sound processing can be very useful to a broad range of sciences, because, well, sound is just about everywhere.

[Updated] Tom Duff has managed to hunt down the actual paper so you can get this straight from the source:

Sparse time-frequency representations,
Timothy J. Gardner and Marcelo O. Magnasco [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]

While I wouldn’t normally say this of academic papers, it has really pretty pictures. (Seriously: visual renderings of the analyses not only illustrate the point, but also happen to look gorgeous.)

If you frequent experimental music concerts and performance art events, you might have seen them: mysterious, spherical and polyhedronalish speaker arrays, looking a bit like an unmanned space probe or an alien soccer ball.

Now you can have one of your very own: Electrotap has announced they’re shipping the Hemisphere speaker array. And forget the odd looks of other speakers for a second: this sounds downright practical. It weighs just 17 lbs., but contains six Polk Audio db525 fullrange drivers. It sits on a surface. Sound fills the space, but it actually comes from the location where you’re playing. And at US$599, many of you can afford it.

Most importantly, with the flat base on the new model, you can finally discourage alien beings attending your gigs from trying to play interdimensional space hockey with it. I get kicked out of more clubs that way . . .

(Don’t miss the history of the device assembled there, with shots like the 1997 model shown below — bless those Princeton sound wizards!)

Converting sample rate and bit depth to lower-resolution data, as you’d do when a project was finished for output to CD and online files or when converting prior to assembling a project, is a dangerous task. It’s the moment at which you can lose a lot of what you put into your sound: the spectral content that gives the result the extra ’sparkle’ you want.

A test performed by Mac developer AudioEase recently took a shot at the sound quality in BIAS Peak, the flagship audio editor and perennial Mac fave. I’ve chatted with BIAS about this, and needless to say they were unhappy about the AudioEase tests and wanted to investigate (partly because they thought they’d have no problem refuting them). Now it’s their turn to fire back, with an extensive white paper and sound fidelity test of the new Peak Pro 5 and how it converts sample rates. Peak’s new SRC engine should not only sound better than competing products, but it also drives Peak’s new tape scrubbing feature, a feature competing editors lack that sounds better than anything I’ve used. (It’s great fun, scrubbing to find exact edit points like you would with analog tape.)

I have to say, the results are pretty compelling: their evidence seems to suggest that Peak 5 has the cleanest sample rate conversion available. The results are subtle — images like the one shown here have been modified to bring artifacts into relief — but they would be audible. I’ve been very happy with the SRC I did with Peak, and with POW-r dithering for bit rate conversion, plus batch processing features, it could become your primary file converting powerhouse if you’re on the Mac.

Still skeptical? BIAS has released a full explanation, and lets you not only download their white paper but try to reproduce their results. I’d love to hear someone more knowledgable than me on these matters weigh in.

BIAS Resampling White Paper Page

In response to yesterday’s Doppler Birthday Roundup, Adrian Anders points us to a terrific-looking Doppler plug-in for just GBP15:

Spacestation [Windows VST]

My colleagues at Computer Music like it, but here’s my kind of endorsement (from KVR: “. . . I spent the evening in front of my monitors listening to the same noise swirling around in space again and again.” I could give you more specs, but doesn’t that say it all?

Lots of other cool stuff over there, like endless audio effects, experimental filters, and freeware plugs. Just the motivation I need to go fix my poor Windows PC. It’s okay: I occasionally enjoy the perverse pleasures of reformatting. See you on the flipside, Windows fans.

November 29 is the 205th birthday anniversary of Christian Doppler, the Austrian mathematician and physicist who hypothesized what’s now called the Doppler Effect. (You know, that effect when an ambulance or other fast-moving vehicle flies by and the perceived pitch changes.) That calls for Doppler trivia, astrophysics, audio software, and a drink.

In celebration, go check out the excellent Wikipedia page on the Doppler Effect, including one of my favorite Physics equations (while I wasn’t failing.) And if the idea isn’t sinking in, there are plenty of online demonstrations of why this effect occurs. (Science aside, I also recommend celebrating by imitating the sound of an English police car driving by in a movie. It works best if you simultaneously run by your significant other at high speeds.)

Because light can be a wave as well as a particle, the Doppler effect applies to light as well as sound. An increase in the observed wavelength of light emanating from a star is called a redshift. The principle is the same: as the source gets further from you, the wavelength (what it sound we perceive as pitch) shifts; in the case of a star, that translates to observed color.

Here’s the mind-bending caveat: there’s a misconception that Doppler-like redshifts are what allow astrophysicists to measure the expansion of the universe. Wrong! Why? Because it’s not the stars moving away from you (a la the Doppler ambulance); it’s the intervening space stretching, as per the understanding of General Relativity. There you go; if that hasn’t convinced you to go have a drink in honor of Christian Doppler, nothing will. (Heck, it’d probably convince him to have a few drinks, were he alive.)

Back to digital audio: If you want to reproduce the Doppler effect accurately, GRM Tools Classic has one of the best Doppler plug-ins I know of, available for both Pro Tools (RTAS/TDM) and VST. See the detailed review from Electronic Musician of a few years ago. GRM Tools is a great collection of plug-ins, but if you’re on Windows you can also opt for the much-cheaper GBP 15 a la carte option, Spacestation (VST). (Thanks, Afro!)

Or just go have that Dopplertini. (Anyone got a good recipe? I think it involves throwing the drink at high velocity . . .)

[Updated: Had the wrong record label -- it's not Muti, it's Pretension. Though Pretension is also cool.]

I asked readers to brag about their work, and, wow, does Cynthia Bruyns have amazing things to brag about:

She’s a DJ — check out her mixes

She’s working part-time with Apple’s Interactive Media group

She’s involved with a really cool electronic record label

She’s been busy modeling instruments in 3D

The Vibration Lab is a sophisticated 3D modeling app for the Mac that accurately models percussive sounds. (Digitally-modeled cowbell? Not so far-fetched, after all!) See the project page for audio samples. She presented the work as part of a three-member team at SIGGRAPH and recently completed her Master’s thesis on new instruments. And yes, she’s looking at commercializing the technology.

Still more information:

Lab Notes: Modeling the Sound of Music [Research from Berkeley Engineering]

Vibration Lab Models Music [Daily Californian; though see her site for corrections]

Thanks, Cynthia. Now . . . uh . . . I’ll have whatever coffee you’re having.