music and sound

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Mortal Kombat X - How Gruesome Fatalities Sounds Are Made. Mortal Kombat X trailer delves into fatalities sounds effects and how they are made.

Note, this video just shows source recordings and not any subsequent audio processing (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMeghQYbFYE)

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First Quantum Music Composition Unveiled | MIT Technology Review

Physicists have mapped out how to create quantum music, an experience that will be profoundly different for every member of the audience, they say.

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The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video. Outstanding stuff. Abe Davis Michael Rubinstein Neal Wadhwa Gautham J. Mysore Fredo Durand William T. Freeman Project webpage: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/

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Extinguishing fires with sound frequencies

"Two senior engineering majors at George Mason University appear to have invented and built a way to use sound waves to put out fires.

It started as an idea for a senior research project, and after a year of trial and error and spending about $600 of their own money, they have built a somewhat portable sound generator, amplifier, power source and focusing tube that would seem to have great potential in attacking fires in a variety of situations.”

Read more here

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This is pure audio pleasure. Drumming on an actual ice lake! Lake Baikal ice sounds from Irkutsk ethnic percussion group «ETHNOBEAT». Playing on frozen water of the largest lake in the world. The siberian lake contains 20% of the world's unfrozen surface water. Video created by Natalia Vlasevskaia for BAIKALSTORY Recording made with Rode Video mic (Stereo) wearing DeadCat wind shield.

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Composing ringtones

An interview I gave to the Chicago Sun-Times a few years back:

Conor O'Sullivan | The beep goes on, but not for long

What are the tools of your trade?

They all relate to electronic sound and sound in general: Computers, different types of software. But the most important tools are my ears, because I work with sound, and I try to hear what people hear, and am always conscious of hearing things in different environments.

You are a composer?

For sure. It's a different kind of composition. It is composing in very short spaces.

What are the lengths of your compositions?

They can last milliseconds to 15 or 20 seconds.

How long are your longest compositions?

About 15 seconds. But a lot of the carrier networks, the T-Mobiles and [AT&T], their voicemail will cut in in about 20 seconds. That number varies, plus or minus five seconds. That's the time period we have to work with.

So your best work will always be interrupted by someone answering the phone?

Hopefully, it will be interrupted because people have heard it. And that's the primary purpose.

Are some of your compositions more popular than the songs on the pop charts?

They do have a huge audience. The first thing you hear out the box is the sound on the phones.

Your music is heard all over the world. Are there cultural differences?

I got to work on Motofone, which is for emerging markets, and our primary customers are non-Western users. I grew up in a Western country (Ireland) and grew up listening to Western music. In different cultures, different sounds don't necessarily mean the same thing. We designed a different set of interface sounds for Motofone. It was an amazing project because I got to hear how people in different countries heard sound and hear music.

Are you a composer of music?

I compose ringtones. There are between 20 and 40 ringtones on a cell phone. These are ring sounds and text message sounds. I also write UI (user interface) sounds, which give you information about where you are and what you are doing when you are navigating through the menu in a phone. UI sounds give the users feedback that they are not otherwise getting. Sound allows you to offset visual information.

For example, if you are scrolling down and hit the end of a list, you get a sound that tells you that's what you're doing. They can last milliseconds. Most people call them the beeps.

Conor O'Sullivan wrote the "Hello Moto" ringtone, his best-selling work.

INTERVIEW BY HOWARD WOLINSKY

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Nice sound installation video featuring 14 acoustic guitars, 31 dc motors, 300 m cable, fabric and computer. @truben_dhers Neues Museum Weimar, Germany

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Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper The 4 tracks of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

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daft punk in motion

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Sounds of Street View

Google Street View is the go-to application for exploring the world digitally, but it has a missing ingredient which we take for granted.

Sounds of Street View is a digital explorative sound experiment by Amplifon which gives users a 3-dimensional sound experience in a Street View environment. Utilising the Web Audio API platform, sounds are designated as though they were ordinary Google Maps markers, but instead of an image and information being assigned to the marker, a sound is instead.

The Sounds of Street View Framework gives developers with minimal coding experience, the opportunity to create bespoke street view soundscapes with ease.

The framework includes all of the calculations used to create the full 3-dimensional Sounds of Street View experience, as explained within the “How it’s created” area. This means that by simply downloading a small number of assets and adding their own sounds, developers have the power to craft life-like sound-scapes in a 3-dimensional environment, almost anywhere in the world.

 Read more, and hear a 3d sound experience when you wear headphones here.

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Electronic 'hot' music

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Band names - a comprehensive infographic

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How playing a musical instrument benefits your brain

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Valencell, a company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, developed and licenses technology it says can accurately track vital signs like heart rate, temperature, and respiration rate from the same earbuds you’d use to listen to music. It does this with photoplethysmography, or PPG, which measures changes in blood flow by shining a light on the skin and measuring how it scatters off blood vessels (this is often done in hospitals with a device that fits over your fingertip).

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New Toronto restaurant staffed with deaf waiters

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Music is becoming a multimedia experience

Music is becoming a multimedia experience

By Adrian North, Curtin University

Stranger - Goldfrapp.

Paul McCartney has released five of his classic post-Beatles albums as tablet apps. Band on the Run, RAM, McCartney, McCartney 2, and Wings Over America contain interviews, video footage, artwork and photos in addition to the music itself, and you still get change from A$10.

Of course the integration of music and smartphone tech is nothing new. Brian Eno’s fascinating 2008 Bloom app is an infinite music generator that responds to screen taps from the listener to mould the musical experience.

And since you’re on the internet reading an article about music then you probably know that Bjork’s hugely successful Biophilia app links each musical piece to an interactive art work so that you watch as much as listen; and that there is a worldwide trend for adding YouTube views to Top 10 sales charts.

I would be interested in whatever tune Paul whistles to himself even as he makes his tea, and if he is into apps then we have to look seriously at the commercial potential it indicates. But the limitations inherent to the walled garden of smartphone apps have launched a thousand op-ed pieces, suggesting that apps per se might not be the future of music.

McCartney’s move is interesting though in signalling the coming of age of a broader trend: the digital age is seeing a blossoming of multimedia content, so that the radio is turning into TV (via in-studio cameras), the TV is turning into the internet (via smart TVs and on demand programming), and music is becoming visual.

Last year English electronic duo Goldfrapp released probably the greatest album in the history of all known music, Tales Of Us, which illustrates where multimedia music might be heading. Rather than release just a conventional album and videos for two or three stand-out tracks, there was an iPhone app which allows the user to produce images redolent of the style of the album’s artwork; there was a series of five thematically-linked videos that play a key role in adding real meaning to the songs - there is nothing in the lyrics to indicate that Stranger is really about a mass murderer of married women - that was filmed on a shoestring budget; and there was a live cinema event across dozens of locations in which a broadcast of the videos was followed by an exclusive live performance.

There is nothing in itself revolutionary about any of these in isolation, but it does a good job of illustrating the more general shift away from music as the product to music as one element of a multimedia art form, and away from the release of the audio album as the event to instead representing just one event in a series of linked media releases.

Paul McCartney of course has considerable form as a spotter of trends that are ready for market. His move signals that music may be on the verge of evolving into a new cross-platform multimedia art form.

Adrian North does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Breaking Bad Composer Dave Porter's Studio