Archive for the ‘butter’ Category
disney: audio experience
Former Disney audio experience engineer, Mr. Q, reveals how he assisted in developing a complex algorithm to arrange over 15,000 speakers around the Disney World theme park. All to achieve the ideal ambient music for “manufacturing emotion.”
The last time I visited Disney World, I was a bit distracted by the nausea that followed one too many rides after five too many scoops of ice cream. The visits before that though, I was entirely clearheaded. Yet not a single time did I notice the always present background music switch tunes.
Mr. Q would be laughing maniacally if he read those words. That’s because those words mean that his baby, the project he worked on in the 1990s, grew up to be a success.
Apparently the original Disney World speaker system, set up in 1968, had an unnoticeable flaw: minuscule variations in sound volume along pathways. As someone walked closer to a speaker, music would seem louder than a few steps away. Despite not a single visitor ever complaining about this common sound effect, twenty years later good ol’ Mickey decided to do something about it. Some work and a team effort later, they had Mr. Q’s system and algorithm:
The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.
So how is a system which strives to be unnoticed manufacturing emotion? According to Mr. Q, the “life is sucked out of” the park when the speakers fail. Even a slightly flawed speaker system could lead to frowns, while perfect music ambiance only leaves Goofy’s creepiness to achieve that.
http://gizmodo.com/5400675/how-mickey-mouse-and-mr-q-manufactured-emotion
talk without talking
thanx hiang!
Invented by Michael Callahan: Three pill-size electrodes on the throat pick up electrical signals generated between the brain and the vocal cords. A processor in the device then filters and amplifies the signals and sends them to an adjacent PC, where software decodes them and turns them into words spoken through the PC’s speakers. By placing the electrodes on the neck and “speaking” silently through vocal-cord movements (but without moving the mouth), the wearer generates enough neural activity to trigger this chain of events.
Audeo is capable of more than just giving a voice to those physically impaired though. It could be used to speak on the phone without ever actually vocalizing anything, opening up the possibilities to fantastical spy or military applications. That and it could one day get rid of that is-he-talking-to-me-or-someone-on-the-phone confusion around people wearing BlueTooth headsets.
http://gizmodo.com/5400810/audeo-captures-electrical-signals-from-the-brain-to-create-sound
frozen—sound as space
Frozen is an exhibition of experiments in the representation of sound in media beyond the auditory. It examines the sound signal as a virtual space, presenting possible mappings that visualize or interpret the structures contained within the soundwaves. The representation of sound as spatial structures, realized as physical objects through the use of digital fabrication technologies.
Frozen pulls the plug and presents audio art, prints, and sculptures as independent, but interconnected works of art.
Multi-channel sound pieces can be experienced over an advanced speaker setup, accompanied by sound in a “frozen” form: Images and sculptural objects made using sound as input. These artworks use audio analysis and custom software processes to extract meaningful data from the sound signal, creating a mapping between audio and other media. Frozen features digital prints as well as four “sound sculptures” created using digital fabrication technology such as rapid prototyping, CNC and laser cutting, which allow for the direct translation of a digital model into physical form.
http://www.generatorx.no/?
the eye and the ear
With our eyes we see the world in perspective and as such we look only at a fragment of the world surrounding us. Our vision is selective, since we have to look in the direction of that, we wish to see. Also, vision places us in the periphery of our world. From here we look into our environment finding ourselves at a distance from what we see. This distance is a necessary one, since we cannot see or survey things that are too close. On the contrary, our ears situate us in the middle of our environment. The sounding space is anthropocentric (regarding humankind as the central of existence) in nature. Literally speaking, we cannot close our ear the way we can close our eye. Therefore sound, as a consequence of our spherical hearing, informs us about actions and sounding phenomena taking place outside of our visual perspective. In other words, sound enhances the visual space and the form of our ears and the distance between them, enables us to position the sounding object quite precisely in that space. Furthermore the eye cannot see through objects. Since we do not have an x-ray vision, the eye only reaches the surface of things. Sound on the other hand can be heard through solid objects like a wall and it runs around corners due to the way sound waves diffuse. Consequently we are able to hear what is happening behind a closed door. As formulated by Victor Zuckerkandl “the eye discloses space to me in that it excludes me form it” while the ear “disclose space in that it lets me participate in it” [1, p. 291] Also, we participate in space in that the sound moves us. Not just in the psychological sense but also in the physical sense. Sound grasps the body and shakes it (so to speak). In short sound immerses the listener into the world. It makes the environment come alive.
The Aesthetic Experience of Sound, Breinbjerg, Morten
the history of noise in music
The first composer to consciously operate with noise as music was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, writing the manifesto “The Art of Noise” in 1913. He constructed the so-called “intonarumori” (noise intonators) and composed a few works for these machines. They were quite primitive, each instrument making a single sound when turning a handle, and the music still had a residue of the mimetic, illustrative function. But the idea of allowing all sounds to be music was a crucial turning point.
Edgar Varèse and John Cage both started from that point. For Varèse, the important thing was to expand the possibilities of music within the tradition of an autonomous artwork, i.e. including new sounds, formerly rendered non-musical, now without their illustrative effect. He tried to emancipate noise from its function, abstracting it as purely aesthetic in works like Ionisation (1931), where he used sirens because of their glissando possibilities rather than alluding to an emergency. By shifting the focus from the notes to the sound, by seeing music as layered, organized sound rather than melodic-harmonic development and by experimenting with electronic instruments, Varèse is the probably most important pioneer of electronic music.
John Cage had similar visions, developing from an expansion of musical sounds in his invention of the prepared piano to the postwar philosophy that all music is just sound, and hence that all sound is music. He wanted to open our ears to all the sounds that surround us, emancipating all noises.
After the Second World War musique concrète evolved in France, using tape technology to make music of found sounds. Pioneers were Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Pure electronic music was made possible by the mid-fifties, centered around the Cologne studio with composers like Gottfried Michael König, Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. The inclusion of electronic noise and a distinction between various noise qualities was an integral part of this period.
Noise in rock music is centered on two effects, both connected to the electric guitar and developed in the sixties: feedback and distortion. Feedback is the back-coupling of the sound when the small pick-ups on the guitar react to the sound from the amplifier, i.e. the sound they themselves transmit. Distortion is the fraying of the guitar sound originally produced by amplifier overload, now normally by pedals.
Jimi Hendrix constructed a whole catalogue of noise effects, using them with virtuosity in his blues-inspired rock compositions. Aesthetically, the influence on noise rock came from The Velvet Underground, with their minimal, lo-fi, sinister music and disillusioned texts.
The term “noise rock” (in Danish: støjrock) denotes a part of the post-punk scene rising from the ashes of punk in the late 70s. The use of guitar noise becomes a characteristic feature for a lot of bands, exploring its possibilities further. Post-punk is characterized by a certain preoccupation with the sinister, melancholy, pain, fear, death, excess, perversion – in short, what the philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) has called “the heterogeneous”. This term denotes that which does not fit into the normal and rational in modern society, that which cannot be subjugated by the public utility or profit. One of the important ways to achieve this is by using noise. Noise rock is not a coherent style, but a loose term for quite different approaches to a noise aesthetic within a post-punk idiom.
Electronica uses noise in many different ways, sometimes so integrated that any distinction between noise and music is heavily blurred. Samples, drumloops, fast breakbeats, dub bass and of course all sorts of computer-generated sounds can be more or less noisy. An important trend is “glitch”, where errors are inflicted on CDs causing it to skip and get stuck.
The Aesthetics of Noise, Sangild, Torben
writing had silenced the words from one’s voice
from Noise Water Meat, Kahn, Douglas, Listening Through History, p.9
Colours of Noise
The classification of noise by spectral density (power distribution in the frequency spectrum) is given “colour” terminology, with different types named after different colours, and is common in disciplines like acoustics, electrical engineering, and physics. The colour names are derived from a loose analogy between the spectrum of sound wave frequencies (as shown in the blue diagrams) and the equivalent spectrum of light wave frequencies. That means when the sound wave pattern of “blue noise” were translated into light waves, the resulting light would be blue, and so on. The Federal Standard 1037C Telecommunications Glossary defines white, pink, blue, and black.
White noise is a signal, named by analogy to white light, with equal energy per cycle (hertz). Just as white light is a combination of all the different coloured (frequencies) lights, white noise is a combination of all of the different frequencies of sound. This produces a flat frequency spectrum in linear space.
The frequency spectrum of pink noise is flat in logarithmic space; it has equal power in bands that are proportionally wide. The power density, compared with white noise, decreases by 3 dB per octave.
Many people describe white or pink noise as similar to running water, rain, or noise on a vacant TV channel. Most of the “sleep” machines on the market are based on generating variations of white or pink noise.
Blue noise is also called azure noise. Blue noise’s power density increases 3 dB per octave with increasing frequency over a finite frequency range. In computer graphics, the term “blue noise” is sometimes used more loosely as any noise with minimal low frequency components and no concentrated spikes in energy. This can be good noise for dithering; retinal cells are arranged in a blue-noise-like pattern for this reason.
Green noise is supposedly the background noise of the world. A really long term power spectrum averaged over several outdoor sites. Rather like pink noise with a hump added around 500 Hz.
Black noise has various associations. It has a frequency spectrum of predominantly zero power level over all frequencies except for a few narrow bands or spikes hence also referred to as silence. “The output of an active noise control system which cancels an existing noise, leaving the local environment noise free. Iron Man used to have a “black light beam” that could darken a room like this, and popular science fiction has a tendency to portray active noise control in this light.” The Batman Beyond supervillian Shriek also had a weapon like this, which effectively blocked out all noise.
driftwood 