Music is sound, which is sufficient in itself. —Roland Kayn
Music is sound, which is sufficient in itself.
—Roland Kayn
Posts tagged sound
So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a…
So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.
—Luc Ferrari
Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river…
“Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context… are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.”
–Iannis Xenakis
Closed-Captioned Sounds from Twin Peaks: The Return (Part 8)
revolver clicks
gunshots echo
ominous atmospheric music
ominous atmospheric music builds
distorted moaning
distorted moaning intensifies
ominous whooshing
discordant instrumentation
atmospheric wind
intense atmospheric whooshing
boom
explosions booming
explosions rumbling
static sputtering
warbling static sputtering
brooding atmospheric music
static sputtering continues
electrical scratching
otherworldly exhaling
intense discordant music
atmospheric rumbling
wind whooshing
atmospheric whooshing
ambient vintage music playing over gramophone
distant music
alarming metallic clanking
footsteps oddly reverberating
eerie atmospheric music
ominous atmospheric music
serene atmospheric music
atmospheric hum
atmospheric wind
crinkling, squishing
crickets chirping
engine revving
ominous scratching noise
distorted wail
distorted scream
blood dripping
splat
whimpering
soft groaning
radio static humming
radio static crackling softly
distant rumbling
Introducing Chromaprint
Many ideas were based on a paper by Yan Ke, Derek Hoiem, and Rahul Sukthankar called “Computer Vision for Music Identification” (2005). In fact, even the Last.fm fingerprinter uses the code published by the authors of this paper. This is where I learned that audio identification is more about machine learning that it is about DSP. Many useful methods for extracting interesting features from audio streams are well-known and the problem is more about how to apply and index them the best way. The basic idea here is to treat audio as a spectral image and index the content of the image. I’ll explain this in more detail and how Chromaprint uses this in a following post. Another important paper for me was “Pairwise Boosted Audio Fingerprint” (2009) by Dalwon Jang, Chang D. Yoo, Sunil Lee, Sungwoong Kim and Ton Kalker (Ton Kalker is a co-author of a historically important paper “Robust Audio Hashing for Content Identification” (2001) published by Philips Research), which combined previous experiments of the authors with audio identification based on spectral centroid features and the indexing approach similar to the one suggested by Y. Ke, D. Hoiem and R. Sukthankar. For a long time this was the best solution I had and since it was actually not very hard to implement, the most time I spent on tweaking the configuration to get the best results. The last major change came after I learned about “chroma” features by reading the “Efficient Index-Based Audio Matching” (2008) by Frank Kurth and Meinard Müller. I’ve read more papers about chroma features later, but this was the first and also the most important one for me and some ideas about processing the feature vectors from it are implemented in Chromaprint. Chroma features are typically used for music identification, as opposed to audio file identification, but I tried to use them with the approach I already had implemented and it nicely improved the quality of the fingerprinting function and actually reduced complexity which allowed me to use much larger training data sets.
“acoustic levitation“
The Sound That Haunted Diplomats in Cuba? Crickets
These noises sound strange, unnatural, and even mechanical because most of us have absolutely no idea what the vast majority of animals sound like. Here, for example, are some lynx that (starting about 40 seconds in) wail like drunk banshees.
via https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/sound-haunted-diplomats-cuba-crickets/579637/
A Sound You Can’t Unhear (and What It Says About Your Brain)
She starts with a clip that’s been digitally altered to sound like jibberish. On first listen, to my ears, it was entirely meaningless. Next, Das plays the original, unaltered clip: a woman’s voice saying, “The Constitution Center is at the next stop.” Then we hear the jibberish clip again, and woven inside what had sounded like nonsense, we hear “The Constitution Center is at the next stop.” The point is: When our brains know what to expect to hear, they do, even if, in reality, it is impossible. Not one person could decipher that clip without knowing what they were hearing, but with the prompt, it’s impossible not to hear the message in the jibberish. This is a wonderful audio illusion.
via https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/sounds-you-cant-unhear/373036/
Silence
Hempton went on to make a vocation of listening. He discovered that the use of a microphone turned him into a better listener, because he learned to take his cue from that tool, which didn’t judge the relative value of the different sounds it was absorbing. Having always in the past striven to listen for the “important” sounds, Hempton stopped trying to prioritize based on his own limited perspective and discovered the majesty of the uncurated soundscape. In beginning to hear without privileging certain sounds over others, he found that every place on earth has a unique sonic character. But, intriguingly, Hempton defines his different experiences of geographically specific auditory signatures as experiences of silence, which he calls the “poetics of space.”
The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
Between December 30, 2016, and February 9, 2017, at least three C.I.A. officers working under diplomatic cover in Cuba had reported troubling sensations that seemed to leave serious injuries. When the agency sent reinforcements to Havana, at least two of them were afflicted as well. All the victims described being bombarded by waves of pressure in their heads. Unlike Lee, though, the C.I.A. officers said that they heard loud sounds, similar to cicadas, which seemed to follow them from one room to another. But when they opened an outside door the sounds abruptly stopped. Some of the victims said that it felt as if they were standing in an invisible beam of energy.
via https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/the-mystery-of-the-havana-syndrome
Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation
This book is a survey and an analysis of different ways of using deep learning (deep artificial neural networks) to generate musical content. At first, we propose a methodology based on four dimensions for our analysis: - objective - What musical content is to be generated? (e.g., melody, accompaniment…); - representation - What are the information formats used for the corpus and for the expected generated output? (e.g., MIDI, piano roll, text…); - architecture - What type of deep neural network is to be used? (e.g., recurrent network, autoencoder, generative adversarial networks…); - strategy - How to model and control the process of generation (e.g., direct feedforward, sampling, unit selection…). For each dimension, we conduct a comparative analysis of various models and techniques. For the strategy dimension, we propose some tentative typology of possible approaches and mechanisms. This classification is bottom-up, based on the analysis of many existing deep-learning based systems for music generation, which are described in this book
Mika Vainio’s quiet influence on electronic music was deafening
Vainio’s influence on ambient and industrial electronic music was somewhat unspoken in his lifetime. He was not a figurehead of a scene, but pretty much all booming palettes of mechanical sound being made today nod in some way to Vainio and his work with Pan Sonic […] Vainio’s beats weren’t beats at all, they were the sound and feeling of a black hole opening up in the centre of your chest.[…] like “flares, vapour trails, LEDs, neon tubes close to death, heart murmurs, apertures opening and closing in cement walls, tiny mechanised guillotines snipping the heads from tin soldiers, sheets of led unfurling in underground car parks”.
ERD/WORM pre release [000]
“…a circuit bent speak and spell that’s been left in the mud for a week…”
via https://soundcloud.com/martin_howse/erdworm-pre-release–000
The world is louder than ever, and it’s causing ‘schizophonia’
During the noisiest time in history — when the age of the automobile butts up against the era of electronics and gets smashed into dense urban populations — hearing loss is only a portion of what’s at stake. The field of “acoustic ecology” aims to reverse the noise pollution of today’s technology-driven world, but more importantly, to consciously create living environments that actually sound beautiful. The father of acoustic ecology is a composer and pedagogue named Murray Schafer. His 1977 book, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, shaped a new dialogue around reducing and protecting certain sounds. He asked two big questions: What is the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change? And which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply?
Nothing that’s ever said is final, assume that there are always other possibilities. Where language ends, music begins.
“Nothing that’s ever said is final, assume that there are always other possibilities. Where language ends, music begins.”
This Is What Jupiter Sounds Like
Scientists have long known that Jupiter is noisy: The planet produces intense radio storms powered by interactions between the planet and its moons, not to mention the wild gases at play on the planet itself. But they didn’t realize that Juno’s entry into Jupiter’s orbit would produce such complex data. “While this transition from the solar wind into the magnetosphere was predicted to occur at some point in time,” the agency writes in the blog post, “the structure of the boundary between those two regions proved to be unexpectedly complex, with different instruments reporting unusual signatures both before and after the nominal crossing.”
via http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-jupiter-sounds–180959686/?no-ist
Trailer for a new documentary entitled, “Sonic Sea,” produced by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and which will…
Trailer for a new documentary entitled, “Sonic Sea,” produced by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and which will premiere on the Discovery Channel on May 19. Description of the documentary from NRDC:
Beneath the surface of our oceans lies a finely balanced, living world of sound, most of which we never hear topside. But to whales, dolphins, and other marine life, sound is survival, the key to how they navigate, find mates, hunt for food, communicate over vast distances, and protect themselves against predators in waters dark and deep.
Our oceans, though, have become vast junkyards of industrial noise — often louder than a rock concert — from commercial shipping, military sonar, and seismic blasts that test for oil and gas. The seas have become so loud, in places, that these great animals are drowning in noise that threatens their health, their future, and their very lives.
On May 19, the Discovery Channel will premiere an important new NRDC film that documents this shattering underwater peril. Sonic Sea calls on us to turn down the volume before it’s too late.
To the future of marine life worldwide, deafening noise is hardly the only threat. It is compounding the stress ocean life faces a growing litany of environmental ills.
Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias
Because of the nature of onomatopoeia, there are many words which show a similar pronunciation in the languages of the world.
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias
The singing comet
But one observation has taken the RPC scientists somewhat by surprise. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased by a factor of about 10,000.
Supersonic Stereo
The sonic boom would be the first thing the target would hear. It would be followed by several sounds played over one another, including both reversed music (rising slightly in pitch as it fades out) and forward-playing music (which would play at half speed and an octave too low), followed by the crash of a stereo demolishing your neighbor’s shed.
‘A great silence is spreading over the natural world’
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening,” he writes in a new book, The Great Animal Orchestra. “Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened. There has been a massive decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small. The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/03/bernie-krause-natural-world-recordings
Ambient noise of the International Space Station
Ambient noise of the International Space Station
The Soviet synthesizer that bridged occultism and electronic music
The Russian avant garde was far ahead of the West in the development of electronic instruments. Leon Theremin, inventor of the first mass produced electronic instrument, is the best remembered experimenter of this period. The Theremin synthesizes motion and sound the same way the ANS sythesizes images and sound. But his eponymous instrument was hardly Theremin’s only experiment. “Theremin worked on countless projects, striving to bring music, light, movement, smell and touch together in a single technology,” Smirnov and Pchelkina wrote. Scriabin would have been proud.
What you’re hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network
Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.