Full disclosure: I love waves. Analog, digital, acoustic, we’re talking vibrations in sound (and other substances, as well — and light). I don’t think you get into this area without having a certain wave addiction. If you love waves, you could easily get lost in exploring videos of vibrating guitar strings and pondering the physics of the string.

This story begins not with how guitar strings actually vibrate, but a curious phenomenon when combining the regular oscillation of the string with the rolling shutter of a CMOS digital camera — namely, the iPhone’s. To accurately capture motion, you need to record an image all at once (or at least come close). Rolling shutter or line scan as exhibited in a CMOS camera sensor like the iPhone is a side effect of the capture being scanned from top to bottom, so the bottom portion of the image is saved later than the top. That causes motion to skew across the image. (Long before digital, people played around with the same effect in analog video and even using film photography – all you need is something moving and a way of capturing the image that moves gradually in a different direction.)

When the regular oscillation of the scanning combines with the oscillation of what you’re filming – as with a vibrating guitar string, or the rotating propeller on an airplane — the two frequencies effectively phase, causing some curious distortion. In the case of the guitar, this means seeing the appearance of standing waves that, while they can occur in nature, don’t occur on any conventional guitar. (You can also think of the basic effect as aliasing, as seen optically when video shutters capture the frequency of rotation of a rotating car wheel in such a way that it appears to move backwards.)

As with many concepts in physics, it’s all easier to see than explain, so I’ll turn it over to some terrific videos. I’ve contrasted two at the top of the story; here are more examples.

Below, a high-speed camera operating at 600 and 1200 frames per second, played back 20x and 40x, respectively, slower than you’d see with your naked eye.

And here’s another example of how that might appear on a camera like the iPhone:

Of course, that means – fodder for our sister site Create Digital Motion – potential for more creative abuse, beyond the mere novelty.

What’s also amusing is the heated discussion this triggered as the iPhone video went viral. Read some angry comments – and some solid science among them — at Reddit:
Guitar string oscillations captured on video [reddit.com]

I’m glad people don’t behave (yet) in person the way they do on the Internet.

In person: “Excuse me; I think your fly is open.”

On the Internet: “That guy’s fly is open. He doesn’t even know his fly is open. That’s bullshit. I mean, what kind of person leaves their pants just *(&$#ing open like that? Look, look, look at his open fly. I’m never talking to him again. I’m not even going to wear pants from now on.”

(Seriously, happily, many of the comments are perfectly polite and well-informed!)

School’s out for just about everyone, but I’m going to remember to file this away for the next time I have to explain sound vibration. Now, back to the beach, or wherever you’re relaxing.

Thanks to Alexander Chen, from whom I lifted this via Google+. (See his own work on CDM here and here. Alex is just the kind of person I want to see this, as he’s been working with the aesthetics of vibrating strings! So, hurrah, Google+…

It’s not in any way digital – we’re in paper and needle territory – but clever design transforms packaging and notecard into playable music device. Create Transducer Music, anyone?

Designer Kelli Anderson concocted a novel approach to the wedding invitation for her friends Karen and Mike: turn the paper invite into a playable sound device. The couple even made and recorded their own song for the occasion. (The story of the individuals is worth mentioning – Karen advocates for the rights of makers and coders and Mike is a Grammy-nominated engineer.)

The device itself plays music without electricity or circuits. You may recall the FlexiDisc, the inexpensive records (normally made of vinyl, not paper), as seen in magazines, books, and comics. Here, a sewing needle is the entire playback mechanism, amplified by the paper and the kinetic energy of a person using their hand to rotate the disc. Working with her partner and music podcaster Daniel, Kelli turned to the power of geometry. (And I never miss an opportunity to work geometry into this site.)

A major breakthrough came when we realized that the ideal sound was produced when the tented page created a perfect right triangle with the flexidisc. The needle needed to be perfectly perpendicular to the flexidisc. (@Pythagorean theorem: at long last, you are an ally!) We also discovered that the “tent” needed two loosely-swinging bends to allow the record needle to travel as freely as possible. By creating two parallel folds, we essentially made the angle at the peak of the tent variable as needed. At the beginning of the track, the ideal angle of this peak is about 15 degrees. By the end of the track, the arm needed to stretch further towards the center of the flexi, with an ideal peak angle of about 35 degrees.

If you do want to play the results on a proper turntable, you can drop the same flexidisc on your (electrically-powered) record player for better sound.

Details on Kelli’s (beautiful) blog:
A Paper Record Player

And listen to the song the couple wrote for everybody

Aside from being a chance to nerd out about sound, I’m going to take this as yet another example of inventive packaging for musical objects. I’ can also imagine it as the way we’ll listen to music should environmental catastrophe mean that we don’t have access to electricity on Earth any more. File this away for your next post-oil-crisis sci-fi short story, a la the (excellent) book on that theme, The Windup Girl.

Thanks to Howard Shin for this great tip – and Howard, Kelli, Daniel, Karen, Mike, and Pythagoras, I owe any one of you a drink if I see you.

As for music, the Pythagorean Theorem and Trigonometry are always your ally.

Previously: Reclaim the Album’s Soul: Tips for Handmade CD Artwork

Last Days of Compact Disco: Album Lovers Hand-Make Musical Objects

Comfort and creativity – the mystery of what makes certain vintage gear so appealing remains. There are few people closer to the meeting place of digital and analog, reason and sentiment, than Dr. David Berners. He’s the chief scientist for Universal Audio, responsible for modeling in digital software form the characteristics of sought-after, beloved analog gear. It’s science: Berners cut his teeth as an engineer working on the physics of nuclear fusion, going on to pursue a love of music and sound. Now he uses knowledge of physics and the characteristics of sound equipment to model computationally what makes this gear sound the way it does. But it’s also commerce: UA’s DSP platforms unlock access to a range of a la carte plug-ins, bringing a menu of sounds from the past to modern engineers without the associated bulk, inconvenience, and cost of the real thing.

So, if you’re curious to know a bit about what makes analog and digital gear tick, what that analog gear means in a digital age, Dave’s a good place to start. The timing’s good: UA’s on a bit of a roll. The company’s heritage begins entirely in the analog domain, founded in 1958 by Bill Putnam, Senior and resurrected in 1999 by his sons, James and Bill, to make new tools in both hardware and software. UA has recently introduced an elaborate software model of the Studer A800 tape recorder, one that seeks to make a digital workstation sound like a beloved, high-fidelity multitrack tape setup. There are also new models of the SSL console, authorized by manufacturer Solid State Logic, providing the channel strip and bus compressor; the real thing earned more Platinum records than any other gear, so it’s more or less guaranteed you’ve heard it unless you’ve been holed up on a farm listening to old-timey AM for the past few decades. And they’re expanding compatibility, with new support for Pro Tools and, via FireWire, all those Mac laptops that lack ExpressCard slots.

None of that, though, really winds up being the focus of our conversation. Dr. Berners is also Professor Berners, teaching the elements of DSP to students at Stanford with another UA alum and former CTO. Here, class is in session, as he talks about his laboratory-style approach to understanding how equipment works, and why having a theoretical model is so essential. He hedges on the question of why analog gear is appealing, leaving that to others, but opens up when explaining why he fell in love with engineering.

And, in the process, we get some serious gear porn courtesy of photography (and UA PR rep) Marsha Vdovin. She takes us inside the UA studio for a glimpse of a treasure trove of drool-worthy vintage gear and modern test equipment.

Deafening us with science, here’s Dr. Berners, proudly sponsored by our favorite advertiser, The Field of Mathematics. (They’ve been working on improving their PR lately. I hear they’re on Twitter.)

But deep beneath all that science, all the most empirical techniques for modeling, you might just discover how and why digital audio today could find its connection to the past.

CDM: Can you tell us a bit about how you wound up in this field? What led you to working in the science of DSP?

Dave: My parents told me that I wanted to be an engineer, ever since I was about five years old. I described to them the job that I wanted to do, and I asked them what it was called – and they said, that’s called an engineer. As far as I remember, that’s always what I figured I would end up doing.

After finishing a Masters Degree in power supply stuff, I worked at NASA a while on some design stuff for a couple of different projects, and then after that I worked at the Lawrence National Lab in Berkeley. It was some physics projects related to fusion power plants, so that was very different from audio. While I was doing all those things I didn’t realize I could find work in audio. I always liked the idea of doing audio-related stuff, but I didn’t know there would be any way I’d be realistically able to do it. While I was working at those two places, I found out about the CCRMA center at Stanford and decided to apply there for a graduate program [in the early 90s.] That was when I met Bill [Putnam, Jr. founder of the modern UA], because he was also a student there. I had done a little bit of DSP before that, but that was where I learned most of what I know.

And you’re teaching now at CCRMA.

Yes, along with Jonathan Abel. There’s one course in the fall that’s an introductory DSP, Discrete Time Filtering class. That was a course that was created by Julius Smith. He’s written the textbook for it. It’s meant for people who are just getting their feet wet … with no prerequisite other than high school math. The other class is the one Jonathan and I created, and that one’s more related to audio effects processing — tricks, I guess, on how to define DSP effects.

How did your background apply to coming the Universal Audio? Was there an additional learning curve, getting into work in audio?

For me personally, it was pretty smooth because I had real strong musical interests, the whole time I grew up. I had been an amateur musician my whole life, and spent a lot of hours playing music and working on music. Somehow that gave me an advantage – if I discovered I had made a bug or done something wrong, it gave me a good intuition — if something isn’t sounding right, what is it likely to be?

How much of modeling is intuition? I’d imagine that, with audio, the ultimate test is sort of if it sounds right, it is right?

The feeling thing is important. The way I like to think about it is that it’s not really among the design criteria. It’s more of a check. Ideally, what I would like is to be able to get a bunch of information about a product — schematics, info about the physics of how it works, whatever I need to understand the processes by which it operates — make a model, and implement the model. Human hearing comes into play, psychoacoustics, to determine what may or may not be important perceptually. But what I always hope is that by the time we get to the listening phase, there’s not anything left that we’re trying to tune, so to speak. It’d be more like catching bugs.

I do rely on our listening team — Will Shanks, in particular. He’s in charge of the qualification of our products in terms of our sound. I rely on him a lot, but it’s more that he’s finding little mistakes and errors. I don’t ever want to get into a situation where we listen to something and compare it to the original and say, well, I wish this sounded a little brighter. I would be very unhappy if I got in that position. I would much rather be able to have a complete understanding of how the original equipment works, and match that.

There’s a particular reason why I developed that opinion, and it has to do with the non-linearities that exist in a lot of this gear. If we had a totally linear system, like an equalizer that has no measurable distortion, that kind of system can be characterized fully just with one measurement. If I make a very good measurement in a careful way, for whatever setting the controls on the equipment is at, I can know everything there is to know about that piece of equipment. I can be totally confident that no matter what signal somebody puts through it, I can predict the behavior, just on the basis of my one measurement. What happens is if there’s any sort of non-linearity at all, unless we can characterize the non-linearity in a very specific way … it becomes absolutely impossible to characterize by measurement. There would always be the fear that even though you’d listen to a thousand audio snippets and they’d all sound identical, the next one that you try could sound different. It’s very difficult to have confidence in a model of a non-linear system, unless you know how that system works.

That goes hand in hand with how we do our measurements. We do use specific signals to cross-check our model — I’ll take a piece of gear, and start with the schematic, and write out with a pencil how it works. And then it’ll turn out that there are certain things in that circuit that aren’t really specified by that schematic. There’s a lot of behavior of different components – say you have a transistor or a tube or something – [where] you can write the part number on the schematic, but that doesn’t fully specify what that part does. We do have to do some measurements, but the only way we can trust the results of the measurements is if they’re informed. If I try to just take a piece of equipment as a black box, if I didn’t already know what was inside the box, it’d be impossible to make a good model.

You can do signal modeling, where you have some array of test signals that maybe you’ve developed and see what happens to them when they go through the equipment — and that to me is the risky way to do it. And then the other method is called physical modeling, where you try to understand all the processes that are happening inside the box. With that type of a model, you have to build the behavior from the bottom up, and then once you’re done, you need to verify that you’ve got all your parameters right. So instead of unknown types of behavior you just have unknown parameters. So you might say, I know there’s a capacitor inside here, and it probably has some resistance associated with it, and that resistance doesn’t appear on the schematic, because nobody knows what it is. But I can find out what it is by doing a particular measurement.

So then what happens is we’ll build up a behavioral model based on the physics of all the parts. And then only after we make the model can we decide what test signals are appropriate to expose all the unknown parameters. Every model that we make of a different piece of gear, we’ll have to invent a completely different set of test signals to find out the parameters of all the different components. Hopefully we’ll be able to do something without taking everything apart. In some cases, there are behaviors that are unobservable directly. Sometimes we’ll have to unsolder all the components and measure them separately and then put it back together. In general, we’re more comfortable trying to understand the real processes that are happening inside a box.

I’d assume you get better at doing this over time. Does what you learn in one place carry over to another?

Yeah, that’s half of it, and then the other half is, as time goes on, we have more and more processing power available to us. There are certain things that we would have liked to do in 1999 but couldn’t. We already foresaw that we might eventually be able to add some of these effects in. Every once in a long while, it’s worth revisiting some of these things and saying, well, now I have one hundred times more computational power available to me, so now I can start putting in more effects that are less noticeable than the ones we put in already, but maybe above the threshold of being able to be perceived.

So not only do we learn more as we do more projects, but we also have more opportunity to include effects that would have been too expensive ten years ago.

That seems to be a story that’s largely untold. People are aware of the trajectory of CPU power over the years. People are now looking at the area of the GPU and low-power CPUs. But people seem unaware that DSP chips has grown, too. It seems the bang for your buck is better today than it was even recently.

Oh, yeah, I’d say definitely. I think the tangible manifestation of that idea can be seen by the difference between our original UAD-1 card and the UAD-2. Over the last couple of years since the UAD-2 came out, we’ve had increasingly power-hungry processors that we’ve released. Now we’re to the point that a lot of this stuff would not have run even one instance on the old card. But we can still do it. We always feel like if there’s a question whether to include a part of the model that’s a little bit expensive, so far, we always put it in. The amount of processing power is never going to be reduced. We’d rather include more right now, because then we’re ahead of the curve.

Sometimes, it’ll turn out that we’re at a certain point in complexity, and in order to gain a tiny bit of perceptual improvement, it’d take a huge computational cost. And so then we figure we’re at a sweet spot, and so that’s good. Other times, we’ll look at something, and maybe by increasing computational cost a tiny bit, we could get a significant perceptual improvement. Then we may be inclined to put it in even if it stretches the current capacity of our hardware. There’s also cases where, if we feel like something’s gotten really expensive, sometimes we’ll make two versions of a plug-in. We always try to order everything so we take care of the major artifacts first.

Let’s talk about the Studer. First, to revisit this idea of process, where do you start modeling something like this? In some ways, it’s not the most non-linear of the things you’ve had to model. It does seem like it’s a complex system. There was a lot there to take into account in the design.

Yeah — the signal path is long, and there’s a lot of things happening in there. Also, the non-linearities, while they may not be as dramatic as, say, a guitar stompbox or something, they’re considerably complex. There’s a lot of behavior that has a fair amount of subtlety. I think that just about any magnetic mechanism is going to be complicated, because of the hysteresis that you get in magnetic processes. Not only is the tape deck magnetic, but it has a spatial extent. So whereas, if you have say a transformer or an inductor with a magnetic core, unless you’re being very picky, the coils of the wire don’t really move. They might deflect a tiny bit when current goes through them, but for the most part they stay put. And if you imagine the coils of wire are actually fixed on a transformer, the fields that are created don’t change their shape that much, unless you have a material that’s really saturating a lot. Basically, you have a one-dimensional system.

Whereas with the tape, there’s the thickness of the tape and then the width of the tape, and then there’s the length of the tape on which you’re making the recording. That’s all going by the heads, the record and the playback heads, and so the geometries become really important. Any time you have a system that’s got a spatial extent, and especially one that’s got moving parts like that, the computational complexity can go way up. Let’s say you have a tape that’s magnetized, it’s not going to be uniformly magnetized. The magnetization will be a function of the depth of the tape and the width of the tape and of course the length. If you wanted to keep track of all of that stuff, you have this sort of geometric explosion of complexity. It was really necessary to think very hard about how we could have some kind of a model that would be practical to implement – keep all the subtlety that we wanted to have.

Even though the original intent of the [Studer] deck was to be as linear as possible, to be a transparent recording medium, all those different factors made it one of the longer-term projects that we’ve ever done – just trying to figure out how to do the simplifications that we were going to have to do in a way that wouldn’t really detract from the fidelity of the model.

So, how much of this was theoretical? At what point do you have to look at the actual hardware?

We knew that we’d have to have a machine. Just distinguishing between the different tape formulations, it would be very difficult to be confident in those models done all in the abstract. This is one of those cases where we like to have a model, but it’s very important to be able to cross-check the results with the real thing. We had a Studer deck that we got from Ocean Way [Recording, the legendary Hollywood studio] and brought it into our studio. It’s been here for the last year and a half or so, and we’ve used it heavily. It’s really tough to take something like that apart; the cards plug into the interior of the machine. So we’d take the cards out and work on them, and I soldered a bunch of leads on different parts of the circuit that I wanted to look at, and then we could temporarily just lift a component if we really needed it to be disconnected.

For this, we ended up bringing in a bunch of scopes and other test equipment into the control room. I soldered flying leads onto the cards. It really turned out to be critical that we could look at different points inside the circuitry while we were using the deck.

It’s kind of related to the stuff I was trying to describe before. Even if we know a model for the whole process, if we want to expose a particular non-linearity or behavior at a certain point in the circuit, it’s a lot easier if we can look at data right from some internal circuit node rather than the output. So that’s how we did our verification – and obviously, listening, too.

It’s well known that the Studer is really carefully designed to have high fidelity and be well-behaved. But in spite of that, it turns out that there’s a little bit of non-linearity on the record amplifier, so the signal’s [got] some artifacts associated with it on the way to the record head. So that’s why we felt we had to monitor all these points on the circuit.

On the other hand, if we would have just started hooking up wires at different places and blindly tried to figure out what’s going on without knowing anything about how this stuff works, there’d be no way to work out a workable model. If we put out some signal that we just made up out of thin air, it would be overwhelming.

Having gotten intimate with this equipment, can you comment on what makes this gear so desirable in the first place, aside from pleasant associations with it historically?

I’m comfortable with audio and music, but I don’t want to decide upfront that something will be unpleasant or undesirable and leave it out. I’d rather put everything in. It’s never obvious, really, which artifacts are the desirable ones.

It seems really the opposite from what we’re seeing in consumer photography. There, when you see iPhone apps like Hipstamatic and Instamatic, the idea is to apply very specific, desirable qualities from a camera intentionally, rather than to model the whole camera. So they really have decided what’s desirable.

[laughs] If we had as many customers as the iPhone, maybe we’d charge $2 for an app.

Hey, in that case, maybe you’d just listen to your entire song library as if it were coming through the Studer.

That’s right. That could actually be great.

There is a place for that line of thought. And to me, that place is to make forward progress. Let’s say that we’ve analyzed a hundred highly-prized pieces of vintage gear, and tried to understand what makes them all special. Now, it gives us hopefully a good information base, and maybe a little intuition ourselves of how we’d design a new piece of equipment if we wanted it to have a specific sound. If we were going to design something like that, then we’d have a lot of freedom that we wouldn’t [otherwise], if we’re not claiming it’s identical to something.

For us, it’s worth it to do the modeling just to achieve the models ourselves. And when we are doing a model, we don’t want to interpose our own ideas about what’s important. The one case where we do is if there’s really solid evidence from psychoacoustic experiments that people will not be able to perceive something, then we will neglect that if it turns out to be expensive to put things in.

We’re willing to accept the fact that people will be unable to perceive certain things. But what we’re not willing to do is to decide whether something will be pleasant or unpleasant.

What were some of your favorite projects from UA’s now fairly large back catalog – or what were the toughest models you worked on?

Almost the first two models were the 1176 and the LA2A. And it’s kind of interesting to think about those, because they both were difficult, but for different reasons. The LA2A has this little electro-luminescent panel in there that lights up and shines on a light-sensitive resistor, and that’s how the compression happens. And it turned out that the physics of that panel were very difficult for us to understand. And so we spent a long time trying to figure out how in the world we would even understand the mechanism of how that worked but then characterize them somehow. The behavior was just very, very complex and multi-dimensional. It just was very difficult. It really was satisfying to finally get a model that had the right behavior.

The thing that made the 1176 very hard was that the attack is very fast. It’s actually faster than one sampling interval if you’re at 44k. The attack is pretty much just about complete by the time you advance one sample forward in time. Even though we could characterize the behavior of the 1176 more easily than the LA2A, implementing the plug-in became very, very tough, because we had to make this feedback loop. It’s a feedback compressor, and we had to make the loop behave properly, even though these processes were happening much faster than one sample period. So we had to think really hard in terms of how to implement the thing. There’s a lot of different ways to get stuck — you could get stuck trying to understand the actual process, or you might understand the process but then think, “How can I implement this as a digital system?” So at different times, we’ve had different things that stuck out as the tough part of a project.

It does sound like you have a strong philosophy.

When I first started working at UA, Bill met with me and said he had the idea and the vision to do these models, based on physical process. It’s been a company point of view, irrespective of who does the work. There’s actually three or four of us now that do algorithms here, all working with the same ideas and the same ways of going about things. It’s a broad angle of attack that we as a company decided to do, not something that any one person developed.

Bill’s been really great to work with from the days when we were in school together up until now. One thing I really admire about Bill is that he can look at a problem and reduce it to the important components immediately. He can look at something that’s really complex and has a lot of different factors that are difficult to dis-entangle for someone else and get right down to what the important behaviors are going to be. It’s just a really nice, organized way of thinking that he has.

I should also mention Jonathan Abel. [founder of Kind of Loud before it merged with UA]. He had a lot of input – a huge effect into the shape that the first batch of plugins evolved. He worked a lot in the trenches on the algorithms with me, and had a huge impact on how that stuff came out.

So why model historic gear in the first place? And once you are done with the process, what does that tell you about why people value these tools?

That’s a tough question to answer definitively. It’d be very hard for me to make a convincing argument that someone should want to have those models and use them all the time. But if you just want to answer the question, why would someone ever want them, then it’s easier to answer that question.

There are thousands and thousands of vintage projects that have been designed. The ones we focus on are the ones that for some reason have become highly coveted. In a lot of cases, those ones are the ones that were the most carefully designed or the most expensive things available at the time. Not all of them – some of the stuff that turns out to be really popular and sound great, some of those things have a lot of their good characteristics almost accidentally. I’m absolutely sure when we do a lot of these models, we know things about the circuit that the engineers didn’t. People would design something and then just put up with a little bit of an artifact without understanding it or caring about it, whereas we, if we want to recreate that, have to go down into the weeds and really understand it to a higher degree than sometimes the people who designed the gear.

For whatever reason, there are certain pieces of gear that have become super-popular. Whether it’s an intrinsic human characteristic to like those things, or whether it’s cultural weight, or familiarity, for whatever reason, they’re pleasing. And so, for people to have those sounds available to them I think is always going to be beneficial, until people just forget about those sounds, if that ever happens.

I think familiarity definitely leads to comfort, and comfort can lead to creativity just as well as being off-balance can. They’re two different kinds of things. It seems you were making the point that there’s a whole world of new stuff out there where you could make new sounds, and that’s probably true. I hope that people – even us – continue to do that kind of work, too. On the other hand, there are certain sounds people are used to and enjoy, and I think it’s good to have those sounds at their disposal, too.

These tools allow someone to make a recording with a grounding, that gives it a pleasant, familiar, comfortable sound. And then you still have the freedom to add your own novel ideas to the music. Maybe someone’s never used that piece of equipment before, but they’ve probably heard records that were made with that equipment.

It’s happened to me in development. For example, when we did our very first Neve EQ model, I worked out all of the math, designed all of the filters and everything. And then I got hold of the hardware, and started cross-checking the results of my design with the hardware. And I started playing music through both. It was really eye-opening to me. I made some adjustments, and thought – oh, it’s that sound. I know what that sound is; I’ve heard a lot of records that sound like that. But I never knew that that was a 1073 making that sound. But now I do. And it’s the same thing with the 1176 – you know, like I said, if you put that on a drum kit, you think, oh, it’s that, it’s this record and that record, and it’s a beautiful sound, and I always wondered how people got that sound. To me, it’s kind of exciting to have that comfortable feeling of thinking, I love that sound, and now I can do it.

By the way, I’m a design engineer, not a professional musician or a recording engineer, so these perspectives should probably be given very little weight. But I’m just telling you my personal opinion. There’s other people even within UA that probably should carry a lot more weight. I don’t know — I like creativity in music, but also a grounding in some aspect of it that sound comfortable and familiar.

Thanks, Dave. We’ll be taking a closer look at the Universal Audio solutions and where to begin using their stuff in your music, as well as their new FireWire-based Satellite for you Mac users. And in the interest of balance, I also have a very different take on modeling analog, from guy named Dave. I spoke with Dave Hill about HEAT, the Avid product; watch for that interview soon. HEAT is quite different from the UA stuff, but you’ll hear some familiar themes about the larger picture. Got questions for this Dave and UA? Thoughts on your own experiences with hardware and software? Let us know in comments.

http://www.uaudio.com/

The miracle of human hearing goes well beyond audiophile snobbery over “high fidelity,” or the machinations of sometimes-arbitrary, designed-by-committee industry specifications. But, in the context of my rant about perceived myths in audio, what can we hear, really?

And how much perceptible sound can you squeeze into an MP3?

For his master’s thesis at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Kyle McDonald investigated the deeper, existential issues behind common digital audio specifications. The question: what if you could play every single distinguishable sound that the MP3 specification can accommodate? (For the technically minded, that means iterating through every possible MP3 frame.)

The resulting sonic composition holds a mirror to the way the specification describes our own psychoacoustic capabilities. Just don’t expect to be able to process the answer if you’re in a hurry. Kyle’s “answer” to this ultimate question of noise, encoding, and everything takes some 10^450 years to complete. (That’s a lot of zeros, if you’re keeping score at home.)

Kyle explains:

The composition iterates through all the possible sounds MP3 can handle, and assuming that corresponds to our psychoacoustic limitations, all the sounds we can handle. I have some hour-long excerpts up, which should be easier to skip through than the live stream from last month

I wrote a short thesis exploring these ideas, too:

http://oelf.googlecode.com/files/mcdonald-thesis.pdf [link fixed]
Dealing with questions like “what is noise” and “how are biases embedded and revealed”.

I’m not as interested in copyright issues as I am in asking MP3: “what do you sound like, really?”, exploring the intersection of glitch art and enumerative pieces (Every Icon/Wishing Well) + “empty” conceptual art (4’33″, Duchamp’s “Fountain”).

The results aren’t going to settle any debates, but they might at least silence a debate. The results, to me, are strangely beautiful. The sonification vibrates and chirps like a small collection of half-cyborg insects, humming away a summer evening on an alien world. You could meditate to it. (If CDM ever starts a digital audio healing center, we’ll be set.)

The visualizations, at top, are just as aesthetically beautiful, and begin to provide actual information about the quantity and patterns of data that emerge.

A question like “does this MP3 sound good?” or “is this recording any good?” seems simple enough. Kyle’s thesis doesn’t answer any questions, so much as reframe those questions in a beautiful way. But that’s not to say this is all meaningless. The scale of real-world frequencies your ear and brain can perceive is immense and measurable. It’s enormous to conceive, but it’s a real thing. The potential data storage of our technology is vast, too, but it’s still no match for your mind. And if that doesn’t give you an excuse to invest in some ear protection before the next concert, or just give yourself part of this afternoon off, listen to an album, and let your brain relax a bit, I don’t know what will. If you’re still not convinced, breathe deeply and listen to some of Kyle’s sound excerpts for half an hour and get back to me.

http://kylemcdonald.net/oelf

Humans Turning Up Volume In Oceans [NPR “Science Out of the Box”]

A new report shows the way in which sound travels through the ocean has been impacted by global warming. A growing community of artists are working in media like sound to address environmental challenges. But it seems the planet is making some “sound art” of its own. Curious to hear what people think of the report.

Amidst some of the gimmicky options, some serious tools are making their way to Apple’s mobile platform. Case in point: Faber Acoustical, a developer of audio analysis and acoustical tools for the Mac, has new iPhone apps for generating and analyzing signals.

SignalScope is a real-time spectrum analyzer and oscilloscope. Interestingly, it’s not just for sound – you can even analyze signal from the built-in accelerometer. That should make this a prized educational tool. You can zoom in and pan analysis displays with multi-touch gestures and save images to the iPhone photo album. US$24.99.

SignalSuite is a signal generator with basic waveforms, session saving, and per-channel left/right control. “Suite” is a bit misleading, as it’s just one app. (Well, I guess it’s a suite of waveforms.) But it should be useful for testing purposes. US$9.99.

Faber Acoustical iPhone Products

Thanks to Tommy Birchett for the tip. He writes, “I’d love to see a synth that takes advantage of the iphone’s multi-touch and motion detection for changing frequency, amplitude, pan, etc. maybe even utilize the GPS somehow.” I agree – and if we see better sound synthesis capabilities on other mobile devices (Android, perhaps?), this could be a possibility on mobile platforms in general.

We did see one accelerometer-controlled synth in the form of iPhone Synth, as spotted in our iPhone round-up. That isn’t an official App Store app (yet, at least), but it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.

In other news of “serious apps,” on Create Digital Motion we take a first look at a DMX controller for lighting rigs and other devices. It’s really a full-blown app, with a price to match — US$99.99.

Luminair: Gorgeous DMX Controller on iPhone, iPod Touch Runs Your Rocking Light Show

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.

A’Divas on Test

First, if you’re like me, you’ve probably had some less-than-amazing experience with small speakers. There are plenty of small speakers that sound great at lower levels, but become harsh as you drive them. I was able to crank my A’Diva Ti setup to nearly painfully-loud levels without losing any clarity. It’s actually a little spooky: normally, “transparent” sound refers to the acoustic properties of speakers, but in the case of these two little spheres sitting on a shelf, there’s something unnerving about little tiny speakers making so much sound.

The drivers on the speakers are a combination of titanium and paper, hence the name and greater treble extension performance. There’s a 1″ voice coil for greater dynamic range, and to me, part of the reason these sound so good has to do with dynamic range and not just frequency range. I moved them around my living room studio and tried them both as traditional monitors and in a home stereo setup, and was pleased with the results for both. They’re small enough, as well, that you could easily mount them even in close quarters. Normally, that would allow you to set up a home theater, but it also happens to make them ideal as a secondary set of monitors for a studio.

The A’Diva Ti 2.1 setup I received for testing was mated with a 250-watt TR-2 subwoofer. Subwoofers are where home equipment tends to really reveal itself as a home product, but the TR-2 sounds terrific: rather than sounding boomy, it retains dynamic clarity right through the low end. (It’s good enough, in fact, that it revealed all kinds of nasty low-end mastering errors in my DVD collection, particularly with TV shows. Some disturbing up-mixing and down-mixing tends to happen when shows get tossed on DVD.) And, of course, those 250 watts are powerful in a way that’s incompatible with Manhattan living; after some brief fun in the middle of the afternoon, I decided I had to turn the level down as much as I could just to avoid getting evicted. (+6 dB boost? Uh, no, thanks, say the people on the fourth floor.) I think the 100-watt TR-1 would probably be fine if you’re in an 850 square-foot apartment. But if you want theater-sized bass and happen to live in the suburbs, you might look at the TR-2.

Just as with the satellites, the subwoofer eschews a rectangular design for a cylindrical enclosure. Unlike most subwoofers, the result feels well-crafted and looks quite lovely on its own. I was also pleased to find some decent options on the TR-2: low- and high-level I/O, plus EQ and a continuously-variable knob for phase.

Back to the original question, though: why am I bothering talking about “home theater” speakers on CDM in the first place? I can see a number of reasons why these would make sense. First, while I wouldn’t rely on them as my only studio monitors, they make a perfect second set, particularly when you want to experience what a 2.1 setup will do to your mix — but without the added coloration and, frankly, poor performance of a lot of inexpensive home speakers. Second, their size and shielding are perfect any time you need flexible placement. I’ve been looking for good speakers to use for installations, so I’m interested in them even for that. But when you’re in cramped quarters, even studio placement becomes an issue. Lastly, a lot of us have limited budgets and need speakers for our home setups. You want those to sound as good as your studio monitors, and you want them to be able to occasionally do double-duty. For me, at least, the A’Diva Ti’s fit the bill.

Now, I’m a fan of a very simple monitoring philosophy: listen in as many different ways as possible. I wish I still had my old Volvo 240 so I could try out mixes on its blown-out cassette and stereo system; if a mix worked there, it worked anywhere. “Mastering” is a pretty misleading concept because it suggests you know what people will listen on, when you don’t. So, I’m still going to hook up mixes — especially anything I’m considering for surround delivery — to some low-end setups, as well. But having the A’Diva setup to hear what’s going on across the frequency and dynamic range in more detail, and hear it the way it will sound in a 2.1 or 5.1 configuration, and have the setup for listening for enjoyment — that, to me, is the ideal.

I would never make a speaker recommendation blind (or is that deaf?); Gallo gets wide distribution so odds are you may have a set nearby you can go hear for yourself, and compare to some of the other available offerings. I will, however, stand by my feeling that you need more than one set of speakers to give your mix a good listening. And I’ll say, as well, more affordable surround setups like the Gallo could be just what we need to dip into surround, which has largely remained elusive to the home musician.

Of course, the one major downside of the A’Diva line is that they are configured as 2.1, which may rule them out as your primary monitors. Gallo is aware of this feedback, though, so perhaps we’ll see speakers geared for the studio in the future.

A’Diva Speaker Series Product Page (I evaluated the slightly higher-end Ti series with titanium drivers)

TR-2 subwoofers; Full surround line

Conversation with Anthony Gallo

Anthony Gallo Acoustics really is the result of the designs of an engineer named Anthony Gallo. I always enjoy talking to the people who actually design the stuff, so I was pleased to get to talk to Anthony a bit about his background and the thinking behind his designs.

Anthony began building sound equipment early in his teenage years, designing speakers as young as 13. He told me that his early work with electrostatics had a big influence on his current designs. (He notes in the company history that he got a “shocked a zillion times.” Well, they are electrostatics, after all.) I’ve found most designers I’ve talked to got started with childhood tinkering, all the more reason to encourage Make Magazine-style experimentation in the next generation of young men and women.

A brief excerpt from our conversations:

Peter: It seems like there’s a resurgence of DIY electronics, after a long lull. Do you see more people becoming interested in DIY electronics?

Anthony: It’s harder to know if there are more DIY’ers out there today. It seems like there are because of the internet. You notice a lot more of them, but to say it’s a trend I’m really not sure. I’m glad to see there are a lot of people out there that have the same passion as I do.

Peter: Did those early experiments impact your work today?

Yes it does. However, when I was experimenting on my own over 20 years ago I didn’t have the resources to develop drivers or even enclosures that I knew in my heart would sound much better than wood. Such as utlra-rigid spherical structures and enclosures with curves. They are inherently much more rigid.

Peter: There’s a lot of confusion, it seems, about speaker wire. I know you sell your own wire for your speakers. What kinds of differences do you hear between different speaker wire; what differentiates yours?

Anthony: For every person you ask, everyone will have a different opinion on the sound of wire. I have selected a wire that is cost-effective and sounds excellent with our products. And in general, I tend to like solid core wire, rather than a lot of the stranded alternatives.

Depending on the type of wire, it could range from a grungy, bloated sound quality, to a crisp, clear transparent on the other extreme. And then there is every variation in between.

Peter: For the layperson, why spheres? And can you talk about how you personally came across spherical cabinets?

Anthony: Firstly, it is the lowest coincidence of external diffraction. External diffraction is what occurs when sound leaves the driver and wraps itself around the enclosure. If there are sharp projections, such as edges on a box speaker, it will interfere with the propagation of the driver and projects different frequencies. Also, the sphere is the most rigid enclosure and since it’s so rigid, the wall can be made very thin, which saves internal air volume and allows the speaker to be smaller than wooden/plastic boxes.

I read about it back in the 70’s, however it’s been well documented as early as the 30’s, that the sphere is the optimal shape for sound. (See attached the graph with frequency response for various enclosure shapes). Since I discovered this, I started seeking out hollow round structures that could be used.

Finding this graph in a textbook was an “ah-hah” moment in his own designs, Anthony says.

I know some readers here build their own loudspeakers, so I’ll be curious to see your own non-commercial designs, as well — and if we now have Anthony as a CDM reader, you can share them with someone who’s well-known in the business!

We’ll keep an eye on the new designs coming from Gallo in the future, as it sounds as though they’ve become more interested in the audio/music production market as well as home theaters. In the meantime, as usual, I expect there are many of you who know more about this than I do, so we welcome comments as always.

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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.

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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.

The tuner was especially pleased by two features: first, that you can keep records of tunings of different pianos, giving the tuner virtual “medical records” of the way a piano has held its tuning over time. (That helps diagnose how the piano itself behaves, and how it responds to the environment.) She was also happy that she could perform extremely accurate overtuning that would anticipate how the tuning would settle over time; because of the enormous sensitivity of pianos, they don’t hold their initial tuning exactly.

I know a couple of musicologist friends who would love playing around with this, particularly the 57 historical tunings from Owen Jorgensen. Now you can finally play the Well-Tempered Clavier on a piano that’s actually well-tempered. For those learning to tune professionally, the software even includes exams, but it sounded as though pros could comfortably use the technology to augment rather than replace their existing craft and experience.

We have at least a couple of pro tuners reading CDM, so I’d love to hear what you think of this. Maybe some of you think this new-fangled tech is useless; I don’t know.

Updated: Via comments, Veritune is a formidable competitor to this product. The concept is the same, but Veritune has a real-time spectral display, multiple simultaneous partials, far more notes measured (76 vs. 6), note switching for all notes, no required measurement step, and other features. It’s also available in an integrated, rugged hardware unit as well as for your existing PocketPC, and Veritune claims it’s easier to use. Anyone who’s used one or the other, let us know what you think. Thanks to Carl Lumma, formerly of Keyboard Magazine.

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