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Entries with tag "music"
Nano-tonal mouth organ
A nano-tonal mouth organ. The instrument is made out primarily of six dog whistles, wood, cork, and string. The dog whistles are tuned at around 10,000Hz, with slight deviations between each other. The mouth organ produces very clearly audible difference tones when played with enough strength, so relatively low pitches can be heard together with the high pitches of the whistles.
Omar Hernandez dies
Omar Hernández, one of the most amazing musicians I've known, was recently killed. Another depressing day... man is, indeed, the wolf of man.
- Posted on:
- 2010.06.12 -0500
- Tags:
- art , homo homini lupus , music , people
Fonoptera instrument
Dot matrix printer heads are very soft sounding. They are not powerful at all. The loud irritating noise we hear when they print away is mainly due to the printer enclosure, which serves as a resonator. The fact that the printhead actually hits the paper is another important factor in the amplification of the sound. Once the printhead is removed from the printer enclosure, the loudness is gone. Since I was not interested at all in keeping the enclosure of the printer, I needed to find an elegant way to recover the amplification provided by the enclosure. After trying a couple different things I ended up with the design in the image. It is essentially a double resonator: the first and most important is the plastic membrane/cone. The prinhead hits the membrane projecting the sound forward, exactly like a drum. The other part is the wooden base to which the printhead is attached.
- Posted on:
- 2009.12.13 -0600
- Tags:
- Fonoptera , music , Tepozchiquilichtli
Real-time Linux for time critical tasks
My Tepozchiquilichtli pieces so far have required a time resolution of 1 millisecond (1 millisecond is the tatum of the pieces). Controlling the timing of the pieces using the Python time.sleep( ) function from within my general purpose computer (Intel Core Duo CPU T2250 @ 1.73GHz, cpu MHz: 800.000, cache: 2048 KB) running plain vanilla Linux proved useless. The function is unable to sleep for less than 4 milliseconds and the inaccuracy is too high.
One way around this problem is to have a dedicated micro-controller do the timing and have it send all the data to the printers. This works great and has the advantages of compactness (there are other issues with this solution, but accurate timing is not one of them). I still wanted to find a way to get the accuracy I need from a general purpose computer because this is more convenient for testing and prototyping.
Enter Real-time Linux and powernap. powernap is a Python module that uses the real-time clock (dev/rtc) to do the timing. With powernap and RT Linux I can get the accuracy of 1 millisecond I need with variances of about 0.002 milliseconds.
The powernap website point to this real-time module, but since there's no documentation for it, I decided to go with the Linux kernel and the CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT Patch instead. Here are instructions to compile the Linux kernel in Debian, and here are general instructions for patching the source for real-time capabilities.
- Posted on:
- 2009.09.04 -0500
- Tags:
- code , gnu/linux , music , Tepozchiquilichtli
Dotmatrix printhead driver
First working PCB of a dot matrix printhead driver. The circuit is a simple transistor array with a 74HC595 shift register, which simultaneously triggers the printhead’s tiny hammers. The PCB is designed to be daisy-chained with other identical copies, allowing one to control multiple printheads at once.
- Posted on:
- 2009.09.01 -0500
- Tags:
- music , Tepozchiquilichtli
Draftmasters live
The audio-visual duo The Draftmasters performing with Daniel Iglesia. Jeff Snyder and I control the pen plotters live via the Manta (top half) while Dan captures the drawings in real time and creates 3D projections (bottom half). You need 3D glasses to perceive the effect.
Ruwet on musical analysis
Methods of analysis in musicology (1966)[going from the message to the code, i.e. in analysis] The work of the analyst then consists of deconstructing and manipulating the corpus (all given messages) in various ways in order to derive the units, classes of units, and rules of their combination which together constitute the code. [...] Once the code has been deciphered, a reverse procedure allows the generation of messages from this code [...].
[...] A code consists essentially of two parts: inventories of elements, and rules of their combination and operation. Now, analytical models tend to favour the inventory, whilst neglecting the question of rules.
[...] it remains the case that explicit discovery procedures, even if partially insufficient, are indispensable, if only to guarantee that the synthetic model will not change into a normative system.
[...] consider the present state of musicology from the perspective of the distinction between the two models [analystic and synthetic]. a) that the theoretical problem of this distinction has never been raised; b) that no analytical model has ever been explicitly elaborated; c) that musical analyses [...] do not formulate the discovery criteria on which they depend.
Nicolas Ruwet
Artist as illusionist
If we, as mischievous scientists, happen to separate out the cues associated with legitimate clustering and to manipulate them independently, then it should come as no surprise that we can "fool" the ear into perceiving "illusions." [p.13]Rhythm and Transforms (2007)
William A. Sethares
Listening conditions
Composer Stefano Gervasoni came to seminar this week. One of the ideas he discussed resonated in me. The idea that it is not enough for a composer (or for him at least) to define the sound sequences; one should also define the listening conditions. There are many listening conditions a composer cannot control, but there are some that he can. The choice of instrumentation is itself a listening condition. It is not the same experience to hear a sound X coming from a device A (e.g. a violin) than to hear a sound X' (very similar or identical to X) coming from a device B (e.g. a general purpose computer). A program note handed in at a concert or written in a CD booklet is another listening condition very much controllable by the composer...
LilyPond bug: grace notes, breaks, proportional
Ok, this is the first serious bug i run into in LilyPond. Line/page breaks immediately before \grace notes or immediately after \afterGrace notes when proportional notation is ON makes LilyPond throw programming errors and formats incorrectly:
\version "2.11.64"
\include "english.ly"
\layout{
\context{ \Score
proportionalNotationDuration = #(ly:make-moment 1 34)
\override SpacingSpanner #'strict-note-spacing =##t
%\override SpacingSpanner #'strict-grace-spacing = ##t
%\override SpacingSpanner #'uniform-stretching = ##t
}
}
{
\new Voice{
\time 1/4
c'4
\break
\afterGrace c'4 {g'64}
\break
c'4
\break
c'4
}
\new Voice{
\time 1/4
c'4
\break
\grace{ g'64 }
c'4
\break
c'4
\break
c'4
}
}
- Posted on:
- 2008.11.20 -0600
- Tags:
- music
Towards fat-free music?
- How much time does it take to make magic?
- How much data does one need to make magic?
- Posted on:
- 2008.10.15 -0500
- Tags:
- Los ingenieros del tiempo , music
Can't talk new music
Just returned from a public presentation of an analysis of a contemporary musical piece. Main observation? We do not have the tools or the language to describe or analyze certain types of music effectively. The musical tools we do have belong to an old and narrow musical tradition (the western pitch centric tradition) and do not lend themselves well to contemporary musical conceptions. We borrow the concepts and assumptions from this theoretical framework and force their application onto new music. A new music requires the development of a new language to describe it.
- Posted on:
- 2008.03.26 -0500
- Tags:
- music
Premier: La espiral quebrada
Wilfrido Terrazas premiered "La espiral quebrada [Mvltiplexor III]" a couple of days ago. There were, unfortunately, a few sound pops coming out of the 8 channel diffusion probably caused by improper shielding in the octopus...
The pictures show Wilfrido in action during the rehearsal, with the Octopus clinging to the flute.
- Posted on:
- 2007.05.09 -0500
- Tags:
- La espiral quebrada , music
The Octopus
The Octopus: an 8 channel electret microphone device to be used in the performance of "La espiral quebrada" [Mvltiplexor III], for spatially diffused solo flute. I built the 8 channel power supply + preamp based on these schematics and it works pretty well for a home made device.
- Posted on:
- 2007.04.02 -0500
- Tags:
- La espiral quebrada , music
PCA on audio recording
- Do 148-dimensional embedding on audio snippet (in the time domain).
- Apply PCA.
- Keep only the first n principal components.
Original recording
Only first 5 principal components are kept
Only first principal component is kept
- Posted on:
- 2005.10.21 -0500
- Tags:
- music
