Tag Archives: sound

Arts and Letters

MondayMap: Music

everynoise

If you decide to do only one thing today, do this: visit everynoise, discover new music and have some expansive auditory fun.

Every Noise At Once is the brainchild of Glenn McDonald, a self-described data alchemist. He has sampled and categorized popular music into an astounding 1,264 genres — at current estimates.

You’re probably familiar with glam rock, emo punk, motown, ambient, garage, house, dub step, rap, metal and so on. But are you up on: neo-synthpop, fallen angel, deep orgcore, neurostep, death metal, skweee and cow punk? Well, here’s your chance to find out and expand your senses and your mind.

From the Guardian:

Music used to be easy. Some people liked rock. Some people liked pop. Some people liked jazz, blues or classical. And, basically, that was sort of it. However, musicians are a restless bunch and you can only play Smoke on the Water, Always Crashing in the Same Car or Roast Fish and Cornbread so many times before someone is bound to say: “Hang on a minute, what would happen if we played them all at the same time?” And so it is that new genres are born. Now imagine that happening for at least half a century or so – all over the world – and you reach a point at which, according to the engineer and “data alchemist” Glenn McDonald, there are now 1,264 genres of popular music; all you need to do is go directly to his startlingly cleverEveryNoise.com website and look – well, listen – for yourself.

Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt to build an algorithmically generated map of the entire musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analysed by Spotify’s music-intelligence division, The Echo Nest. It is also – in truth – one of the greatest time-eating devices ever created. You thought you had some kind of idea of just how much music is out there? You don’t. I don’t. But McDonald does. So he’s covered those genres – such as death metal, techno or hip-hop, which you’ll have heard of. Others, such as electro trash, indietronica or hard glam you may only have the most passing acquaintance with. Then, rather wonderfully, there are the outliers, those genres that you almost certainly didn’t even know existed – much less ever explored – suomi rock, shimmer psych,fourth world – right there at your fingertips any time you please. But the question is: what lives even further out than the outliers? How odd can it all get? Well, here are 10 genres (we could have nominated about 50) that even mouth-breathing indie record-shop blowhards (full disclosure: I used to be a mouth-breathing indie-record shop blowhard) would be hardpressed to help you find …

Read the entire story and sample some bands here.

Image: Every Noise at Once, screenshot. Courtesy of Glenn McDonald, Every Noise at Once.

Idea Soup

Privacy and Potato Chips

Google-search-potato-chip

Privacy and lack thereof is much in the news and on or minds. New revelations of data breaches, phone taps, corporate hackers and governmental overreach surface on a daily basis. So, it is no surprise to learn that researchers have found a cheap way to eavesdrop on our conversations via a potato chip (crisp, to our British-English readers) packet. No news yet on which flavor of chip makes for the best spying!

From ars technica:

Watch enough spy thrillers, and you’ll undoubtedly see someone setting up a bit of equipment that points a laser at a distant window, letting the snoop listen to conversations on the other side of the glass. This isn’t something Hollywood made up; high-tech snooping devices of this sort do exist, and they take advantage of the extremely high-precision measurements made possible with lasers in order to measure the subtle vibrations caused by sound waves.

A team of researchers has now shown, however, that you can skip the lasers. All you really need is a consumer-level digital camera and a conveniently located bag of Doritos. A glass of water or a plant would also do.

Good vibrations

Despite the differences in the technology involved, both approaches rely on the same principle: sound travels on waves of higher and lower pressure in the air. When these waves reach a flexible object, they set off small vibrations in the object. If you can detect these vibrations, it’s possible to reconstruct the sound. Laser-based systems detect the vibrations by watching for changes in the reflections of the laser light, but researchers wondered whether you could simply observe the object directly, using the ambient light it reflects. (The team involved researchers at MIT, Adobe Research, and Microsoft Research.)

The research team started with a simple test system made from a loudspeaker playing a rising tone, a high-speed camera, and a variety of objects: water, cardboard, a candy wrapper, some metallic foil, and (as a control) a brick. Each of these (even the brick) showed some response at the lowest end of the tonal range, but the other objects, particularly the cardboard and foil, had a response into much higher tonal regions. To observe the changes in ambient light, the camera didn’t have to capture the object at high resolution—it was used at 700 x 700 pixels or less—but it did have to be high-speed, capturing as many as 20,000 frames a second.

Processing the images wasn’t simple, however. A computer had to perform a weighted average over all the pixels captured, and even a twin 3.5GHz machine with 32GB of RAM took more than two hours to process one capture. Nevertheless, the results were impressive, as the algorithm was able to detect motion on the order of a thousandth of a pixel. This enabled the system to recreate the audio waves emitted by the loudspeaker.

Most of the rest of the paper describing the results involved making things harder on the system, as the researchers shifted to using human voices and moving the camera outside the room. They also showed that pre-testing the vibrating object’s response to a tone scale could help them improve their processing.

But perhaps the biggest surprise came when they showed that they didn’t actually need a specialized, high-speed camera. It turns out that most consumer-grade equipment doesn’t expose its entire sensor at once and instead scans an image across the sensor grid in a line-by-line fashion. Using a consumer video camera, the researchers were able to determine that there’s a 16 microsecond delay between each line, with a five millisecond delay between frames. Using this information, they treated each line as a separate exposure and were able to reproduce sound that way.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

 

 

Technica

Sounds of Extinction

Camera aficionados will find themselves lamenting the demise of the film advance. Now that the world has moved on from film to digital you will no longer hear that distinctive mechanical sound as you wind on the film, and hope the teeth on the spool engage the plastic of the film.

Hardcore computer buffs will no doubt miss the beep-beep-hiss sound of the 56K modem — that now seemingly ancient box that once connected us to… well, who knows what it actually connected us to at that speed.

Our favorite arcane sounds, soon to become relegated to the audio graveyard: the telephone handset slam, the click and carriage return of the typewriter, the whir of reel-to-reel tape, the crackle of the diamond stylus as it first hits an empty groove on a 33.

More sounds you may (or may not) miss below.

From Wired:

The forward march of technology has a drum beat. These days, it’s custom text-message alerts, or your friend saying “OK, Glass” every five minutes like a tech-drunk parrot. And meanwhile, some of the most beloved sounds are falling out of the marching band.

The boops and beeps of bygone technology can be used to chart its evolution. From the zzzzzzap of the Tesla coil to the tap-tap-tap of Morse code being sent via telegraph, what were once the most important nerd sounds in the world are now just historical signposts. But progress marches forward, and for every irritatingly smug Angry Pigs grunt we have to listen to, we move further away from the sound of the Defender ship exploding.

Let’s celebrate the dying cries of technology’s past. The follow sounds are either gone forever, or definitely on their way out. Bow your heads in silence and bid them a fond farewell.

The Telephone Slam

Ending a heated telephone conversation by slamming the receiver down in anger was so incredibly satisfying. There was no better way to punctuate your frustration with the person on the other end of the line. And when that receiver hit the phone, the clack of plastic against plastic was accompanied by a slight ringing of the phone’s internal bell. That’s how you knew you were really pissed — when you slammed the phone so hard, it rang.

There are other sounds we’ll miss from the phone. The busy signal died with the rise of voicemail (although my dad refuses to get voicemail or call waiting, so he’s still OG), and the rapid click-click-click of the dial on a rotary phone is gone. But none of those compare with hanging up the phone with a forceful slam.

Tapping a touchscreen just does not cut it. So the closest thing we have now is throwing the pitifully fragile smartphone against the wall.

…

The CRT Television

The only TVs left that still use cathode-ray tubes are stashed in the most depressing places — the waiting rooms of hospitals, used car dealerships, and the dusty guest bedroom at your grandparents’ house. But before we all fell prey to the magical resolution of zeros and ones, boxy CRT televisions warmed (literally) the living rooms of every home in America. The sounds they made when you turned them on warmed our hearts, too — the gentle whoosh of the degaussing coil as the set was brought to life with the heavy tug of a pull-switch, or the satisfying mechanical clunk of a power button. As the tube warmed up, you’d see the visuals slowly brighten on the screen, giving you ample time to settle into the couch to enjoy latest episode of Seinfeld.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Wired.

BigBang

The Hiddeous Sound of Chalk on a Blackboard

We promise. There is no screeching embedded audio of someone slowly dragging a piece of chalk, or worse, fingernails, across a blackboard! Though, even the thought of this sound causes many to shudder. Why? A plausible explanation over at Wired UK.

[div class=attrib]From Wired:[end-div]

Much time has been spent, over the past century, on working out exactly what it is about the sound of fingernails on a blackboard that’s so unpleasant. A new study pins the blame on psychology and the design of our ear canals.

Previous research on the subject suggested that the sound is acoustically similar to the warning call of a primate, but that theory was debunked after monkeys responded to amplitude-matched white noise and other high-pitched sounds, whereas humans did not. Another study, in 1986, manipulated a recording of blackboard scraping and found that the medium-pitched frequencies are the source of the adverse reaction, rather than the the higher pitches (as previously thought). The work won author Randolph Blake an Ig Nobel Prize in 2006.

The latest study, conducted by musicologists Michael Oehler of the Macromedia University for Media and Communication in Cologne, Germany, and Christoph Reuter of the University of Vienna, looked at other sounds that generate a similar reaction — including chalk on slate, styrofoam squeaks, a plate being scraped by a fork, and the ol’ fingernails on blackboard.

Some participants were told the genuine source of the sound, and others were told that the sounds were part of a contemporary music composition. Researchers asked the participants to rank which were the worst, and also monitored physical indicators of distress — heart rate, blood pressure and the electrical conductivity of skin.

They found that disturbing sounds do cause a measurable physical reaction, with skin conductivity changing significantly, and that the frequencies involved with unpleasant sounds also lie firmly within the range of human speech — between 2,000 and 4,000 Hz. Removing those frequencies from the sound made them much easier to listen to. But, interestingly, removing the noisy, scraping part of the sound made little difference.

A powerful psychological component was identified. If the listeners knew that the sound was fingernails on the chalkboard, they rated it as more unpleasant than if they were told it was from a musical composition. Even when they thought it was from music, however, their skin conductivity still changed consistently, suggesting that the physical part of the response remained.

[div class=attrib]Read the full article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Images courtesy of Wired / Flickr.[end-div]