metamusic @metamusic-blog - Tumblr Blog

picture of john cage wearing a t-shirt with his own face on it and trying not to smile, posted here for motivational reasons, or “just because”. we write about john cage a lot in the newspaper, because he’s great and he’s funny and we love him.

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Jimmy Page at Sol Studios, 1973

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freeindie

This speaker lights up in flames with every beat.

nerdology

This is really cool.

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astronautt

If you think instrumental music is stupid you can decrescendo out of my life

whatshouldwecallclarinet

When the low brass have the melody with the clarinets

harrattanparhar

Visit Original Link

lacienegasmiled

As Jackson couldn’t fluently play any instruments, he would sing and beatbox out how he wanted his songs to sound by himself on tape, layering the vocals, harmonies and rhythm before having instrumentalists come in to complete the songs.

One of his engineers Robmix on how Jackson worked: “One morning MJ came in with a new song he had written overnight. We called in a guitar player, and Michael sang every note of every chord to him. “here’s the first chord first note, second note, third note. Here’s the second chord first note, second note, third note”, etc., etc. We then witnessed him giving the most heartfelt and profound vocal performance, live in the control room through an SM57. He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part. Steve Porcaro once told me he witnessed MJ doing that with the string section in the room. Had it all in his head, harmony and everything. Not just little eight bar loop ideas. he would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro-cassette recorder complete with stops and fills.”

quixon

LISTEN TO THIS GENIUS

neurosciencestuff

Nanopores underlie our ability to tune in to a single voice

Inner-ear membrane uses tiny pores to mechanically separate sounds, researchers find.

Even in a crowded room full of background noise, the human ear is remarkably adept at tuning in to a single voice — a feat that has proved remarkably difficult for computers to match. A new analysis of the underlying mechanisms, conducted by researchers at MIT, has provided insights that could ultimately lead to better machine hearing, and perhaps to better hearing aids as well.

Our ears’ selectivity, it turns out, arises from evolution’s precise tuning of a tiny membrane, inside the inner ear, called the tectorial membrane. The viscosity of this membrane — its firmness, or lack thereof — depends on the size and distribution of tiny pores, just a few tens of nanometers wide. This, in turn, provides mechanical filtering that helps to sort out specific sounds.

The new findings are reported in the Biophysical Journal by a team led by MIT graduate student Jonathan Sellon, and including research scientist Roozbeh Ghaffari, former graduate student Shirin Farrahi, and professor of electrical engineering Dennis Freeman. The team collaborated with biologist Guy Richardson of the University of Sussex.

Elusive understanding

In discriminating among competing sounds, the human ear is “extraordinary compared to conventional speech- and sound-recognition technologies,” Freeman says. The exact reasons have remained elusive — but the importance of the tectorial membrane, located inside the cochlea, or inner ear, has become clear in recent years, largely through the work of Freeman and his colleagues. Now it seems that a flawed assumption contributed to the longstanding difficulty in understanding the importance of this membrane.

Much of our ability to differentiate among sounds is frequency-based, Freeman says — so researchers had “assumed that the better we could resolve frequency, the better we could hear.” But this assumption turns out not always to be true.

In fact, Freeman and his co-authors previously found that tectorial membranes with a certain genetic defect are actually highly sensitive to variations in frequency — and the result is worse hearing, not better.

The MIT team found “a fundamental tradeoff between how well you can resolve different frequencies and how long it takes to do it,” Freeman explains. That makes the finer frequency discrimination too slow to be useful in real-world sound selectivity.

Too fast for neurons

Previous work by Freeman and colleagues has shown that the tectorial membrane plays a fundamental role in sound discrimination by carrying waves that stimulate a particular kind of sensory receptor. This process is essential in deciphering competing sounds, but it takes place too quickly for neural processes to keep pace. Nature, over the course of evolution, appears to have produced a very effective electromechanical system, Freeman says, that can keep up with the speed of these sound waves.

The new work explains how the membrane’s structure determines how well it filters sound. The team studied two genetic variants that cause nanopores within the tectorial membrane to be smaller or larger than normal. The pore size affects the viscosity of the membrane and its sensitivity to different frequencies.

The tectorial membrane is spongelike, riddled with tiny pores. By studying how its viscosity varies with pore size, the team was able to determine that the typical pore size observed in mice — about 40 nanometers across — represents an optimal size for combining frequency discrimination with overall sensitivity. Pores that are larger or smaller impair hearing.

“It really changes the way we think about this structure,” Ghaffari says. The new findings show that fluid viscosity and pores are actually essential to its performance. Changing the sizes of tectorial membrane nanopores, via biochemical manipulation or other means, can provide unique ways to alter hearing sensitivity and frequency discrimination.

William Brownell, a professor of otolaryngology at Baylor College of Medicine, says, “This is the first study to suggest that porosity may affect cochlear tuning.” This work, he adds, “could provide insight” into the development of specific hearing problems.

mahlerian

"He always raved about Mahler. When I asked him which of his symphonies he rated highest, he hesitated and answered: ‘The First, to be sure, also the Second… and the Third… and also the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh… and the Eighth is marvellous… and the Ninth! And also the Tenth! But if someone told me that I had only one more hour to live, I would want to listen to the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde."

Krzysztof Meyer on Dmitri Shostakovich

Hey, I feel the same way, Shosty. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone.

(via mahlerian)

My body trembles at the thought of sound waves

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Posted by WALLQ

metamusic-blog

I will probably reblog every time I see one of these because it's a pet peeve of mine. Everyone loves a warm bass and crisp treble so usually headphone companies will have a built in EQ to accommodate this. Sometimes sound engineers in mixing and mastering will also account for this too. EQing the music yourself then would be a nightmare as the mix is triple compounded on the bass and treble leaving no room for mids. What you do with your music is fine but keep that in mind.