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Why not have a look at IRCAM's OpenMusic? http://repmus.ircam.fr/openmus... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Compared to what Stockhausen was doing forty years earlier, the music of Aphex Twin is trite and banal. There are such amazing possibilities in electronics. Too bad Richard D. James doesn't exploit them, instead playing it safe. If you want amazing electronic music these days, look to IRCAM.

I've recently been at IRCAM, where I could hear their wave field synthesis sound reproduction system:

Using a wall of flat panels as speakers, they have the ability to turn a room into a sonic landscape, where the audience can walk around multiple moving sound sources as if virtual speakers where spread in the room. In a way it's a kind of analog to lightfield rendering in image synthesis.

The effect has to be heard to fully grasp how this represents the next step beyond X.1 sound reproduction. If you get a chance to go to an exhibition that uses this technology, I strongly recommend you go just to immerse yourself in such a soundscape.

Perhaps the poster's technology could help make this technology affordable ?

I've recently been at IRCAM, where I could hear their wave field synthesis sound reproduction system:

Using a wall of flat panels as speakers, they have the ability to turn a room into a sonic landscape, where the audience can walk around multiple moving sound sources as if virtual speakers where spread in the room. In a way it's a kind of analog to lightfield rendering in image synthesis.

The effect has to be heard to fully grasp how this represents the next step beyond X.1 sound reproduction. If you get a chance to go to an exhibition that uses this technology, I strongly recommend you go just to immerse yourself in such a soundscape.

Perhaps the poster's technology could help make this technology affordable ?

If you have any computer skills and really enjoy composing music then linux is at least as good a choice as windows. For starters, you chould checkout Rosegarden ("the closest native equivalent to Cubase® for Linux" according to Sound on Sound). If you prefer a lower-level solution then give ChucK a try. Or maybe you want a compromise of the two, perhaps similar to Max/MSP with a block diagrams interface? Look at Pure Data or jMax

If those don't tickle your fancy then maybe you should take a look at the list of Software Sound Synthesis & Music Composition Packages available for linux! Oh, and if you're completely new to linux then Ubuntu Studio offers a baby spoon-fed approach to creating a linux digital audio workstation (the project is still in its infancy, but it looks promising).

Aphex Twin, as has often been pointed out by music historians, is just repeating what Karlheinz Stockhausen did fifty years ago now in works like Kontakte , except Richard James dumbs it down considerably. Where's the twelve-tone row in a given Aphex Twin track? Where are the aperiodic rhythms?

In showing the legitimacy of creating music from sampling, it's better to use the innovators like Stockhausen or Berio as examples, or those who continue this tradition but at the highest levels of rigour, such as those connected with IRCAM.

• VideoLAN primary mirror - France - Download (HTTP)
• VIA Centrale Reseaux, École Centrale Paris - France - Download (HTTP)
• Twente University - Netherlands - Download (HTTP)
• IRCAM - France - Download (HTTP)
• Université de Strasbourg - France - Download (FTP)
• Cr@ns, ENS Cachan - France - Download (FTP)
• Providence University - Taiwan - Download (FTP)
• Endpoint Corporation - Sweden - Download (FTP)
• Optralan - USA - Download (HTTP)
• Brno University of Technology - Czech Republic - Download (HTTP)
• Brno University of Technology - Czech Republic - Download (FTP)
• Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná - Brazil - Download (FTP)

> Admittedly, not too much open-source in that field.

You've got to be joking! I've been doing software synthesis for a least a decade with Csound, long before VST. VST plug-ins are a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the rich history of software synthesis. For more information about the field, I'd suggest The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads.

Look at Linux MIDI & Sound page and tell me there aren't "much" open source soft synths. Besides Csound, pd and jMax might be worth investigating.

There is a talk about Dirac and related BBC projects available at the webpage of the "First European seminar on Free Software for Multimedia Streaming over the Internet" that took place at IRCAM June 23/24, 2004.

The talk is available as Ogg Vorbis audio, you can obtain the presentation slides in pdf format.

There is a talk about Dirac and related BBC projects available at the webpage of the "First European seminar on Free Software for Multimedia Streaming over the Internet" that took place at IRCAM June 23/24, 2004.

The talk is available as Ogg Vorbis audio, you can obtain the presentation slides in pdf format.

There is a talk about Dirac and related BBC projects available at the webpage of the "First European seminar on Free Software for Multimedia Streaming over the Internet" that took place at IRCAM June 23/24, 2004.

The talk is available as Ogg Vorbis audio, you can obtain the presentation slides in pdf format.

There is a talk about Dirac and related BBC projects available at the webpage of the "First European seminar on Free Software for Multimedia Streaming over the Internet" that took place at IRCAM June 23/24, 2004.

The talk is available as Ogg Vorbis audio, you can obtain the presentation slides in pdf format.

Ok, I get how the WFS works to generate wave fronts that look like they came from various points behind (or even in front of) the speaker array.

But according to this site:

" Virtual point sources situated in front of the loudspeaker array. An extension of the WFS principle allows the synthesis of sources within the listening area at positions where no physical sources are actually present. These "sound holograms" are created when a wave front created by the loudspeaker array converges onto a fixed position inside of the listening room. The wave front is then naturally re-emitted from the target position to the rest of the listening area. The sound field is therefore inaccurate between the loudspeaker array and the target position but perfectly valid beyond it."

So a sound "appearing" in the center isle will have to pass through both sides of the theater before being generated. How can this be done without, at best, having some sort of phasey distorted pre-echo before the main wave from the center source reaches your ears?

While IRCAM says:

Huyghens' Principle
To illustrate Huyghens' principle, let us consider a simple example. A rock (or primary source) thrown in the middle of a pond generates a wave front that propagates along the surface. Huyghens' principle indicates that an identical wave front can be generated by simultaneously dropping an infinite number of rocks (secondary sources) along any position defined by the passage of the primary wave front. This synthesized wave front will be perfectly accurate outside of the zone delimited by the secondary source distribution. The secondary sources therefore act as a "relay", and can reproduce the original primary wave front in absence of a primary source!

Origins of Wave Field Synthesis
Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) is based on a series of simplifications of the previous principle. The first work to have been published on the subject dates back to 1988 and is attributed to Professor A.J. Berkhout of the acoustics and seismology team of the Technological University of Delft (T.U.D.) in Holland. This research was continued throughout the 90's by the T.U.D. as well as by the Research and Development department of France Telecom Lannion.

loc. cit.

CC.

The IOSONO people didn't invent wave field synthesis. People got serious about it in the Netherlands and France in the 1980's (here).

However, the reason why it took until the 1980's to do it isn't that people didn't think of it before, but simply that hardware and software had developed to the point that that became feasible. I suspect that if you do some digging, you can probably find the suggestion earlier. It's really a pretty straightforward idea.

Of course, that won't keep people from trying to slice their patents out of it. It's MP3 all over again.

Whilst googling for another place to download the ISO (I'm late to the party and the agnula.org site is smoldering), I found this mailing list announcement that mentions their French Mirror, graciously hosted by IRCAM:

http://freesoftware.ircam.fr/mirrors/agnula/1.1/1. 1.1/demudi-live-cd_1.1.1.iso

Now that my download is almost complete, I feel I can share the love.

I'd go for a graphical programming language like PD or jMax . While mainly aimed at musical applications, you can do a lot of generic stuff or graphical stuff as well, and the whole concept of interconnecting "little machines" with "wires" is easy to learn.

Yep, it's been done, and well.

Max/MSP by Cycling74. It's mostly for creating audio and video applications used in live performance. It was Mac-only for years, but they just released a Windows version. Not sure if everything works cross-platform or not.

Then there's the open-source version, JMax

Vocaloid has been covered on Slashdot before. It is one of the many impressive projects to have at least in part come out of the Music Technology Group at Institut Universitari de L'Audiovisual in Barcelona.

This is one of many impressive Music Technology groups in the world who is kind enough to provide us with open source software such as CLAM. Similarly there are some groups out there doing interesting things. Needless to say, I could link all day...

I am a graduate student in this field

They may have sought a license from Roland, but I think the reason you guys have been having problems is that your software needs the ROM file from an MT-32, whilst programs like REBirth and all of the Native Instruments ones are a complete simulation of the sound-making circuitry of these old synths...i.e. they use mathematical models of the way the old circuitry worked to emulate the sound.

It's basically pyshical modelling, albeit easier than doing it for a real instrument (i.e. Trumpet, Flute) because its not having to generate the nuances and harmonic distortion that real instruments have as part of their unique make-up.

For stuff that emulates real instruments look no further than some of the software that IRCAM, the amazing state-funded audio research institute located underground (how cool is that?!?) beneath the Centre Georges Pompidou (really ugly modern building) in Paris. My old Music Teacher came to Europe to study there under Pierre Boulez (all you musos know who he is) and said the place is amazing, loads of custom equipment in the studios, a huge performance space that can have its acoustics changed easily etc. They never got any much sleep though, teaching was 16 hours a day, and the rest of the time the students were allowed to use the studios free of charge! :o)

There are in fact ways to have a sort of 3D perception of sound using only 2 speakers.

The room acoustics research teamat the IRCAM works on this. Their spatialisateur application allows you to use many different speakers configurations to enhance the spatial perception of a given piece, and using 2 speakers is an option. This is based on lots of psycho-acoustic research etc., and it works.

It's more intended for concerts and things like that rather than mp3 players, but the technolgy exists.

Sound & sound perception are far more complicated and full of surprises than one may think first...

And btw, 16/24 and 24/92 refer to the bitrate and samplerate (in khz) of recorded audio, a completely different subject.

There are in fact ways to have a sort of 3D perception of sound using only 2 speakers.

The room acoustics research teamat the IRCAM works on this. Their spatialisateur application allows you to use many different speakers configurations to enhance the spatial perception of a given piece, and using 2 speakers is an option. This is based on lots of psycho-acoustic research etc., and it works.

It's more intended for concerts and things like that rather than mp3 players, but the technolgy exists.

Sound & sound perception are far more complicated and full of surprises than one may think first...

And btw, 16/24 and 24/92 refer to the bitrate and samplerate (in khz) of recorded audio, a completely different subject.

There are in fact ways to have a sort of 3D perception of sound using only 2 speakers.

The room acoustics research teamat the IRCAM works on this. Their spatialisateur application allows you to use many different speakers configurations to enhance the spatial perception of a given piece, and using 2 speakers is an option. This is based on lots of psycho-acoustic research etc., and it works.

It's more intended for concerts and things like that rather than mp3 players, but the technolgy exists.

Sound & sound perception are far more complicated and full of surprises than one may think first...

And btw, 16/24 and 24/92 refer to the bitrate and samplerate (in khz) of recorded audio, a completely different subject.

yeah, once there is a pro quality audio sequencer with decent support for good virtual instruments...

as much as I like Linux on the desktop, saying 'music production on Linux really will rock' is kind of misleading... There just aren't the apps there.

sure, there's a decent multichannel hard disk recorder, and there's a bunch of interesting software packages you can run, but the sequencers tend to suck badly.

(correcting me by providing links to good sequencers would make me happy.... :)

If only we could get some high quality instruments...

We already have several graphical softsynths available:

Pd: http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html

jMax http://www.ircam.fr/equipes/temps-reel/jmax/en/res ources.html

Also, there are also several well-respected text-oriented softsynths available:

Csound: http://www.csounds.com

sfront: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/sfman/user/ install/

If you look hard enough, and know where to look, one can find an amazing set of "toys" that could be easily modified and/or mass-produced into something useful.

One such page I visited described research in the field of gesture capture, interfaces, and applications to sound synthesis and performance. Yes, it's for music & peformance now, but could be used for communications either by handicapped, or by individuals and situations where the human and/or NON-human voice is muted.

Vocoders are another set of techologies I personally find interesting. Here is a page that offers schematics on how to roll-your-own speach synths, text-to-speech and other goodies ... including do-it-yourself for some rather old computers.

Here's something for you young sprites trying to fake out mom so she thinks your practicing your paino. But remember, you're only cheating yourself !

Of course, you hardwire geeks already know about this one ... PAiA Electronics ... offering user assembled kits for all sorts of electronic products for hobbyists, musicians, education.

Of course, having cut my teeth in electronic music back in the late 70's, in an old analog studio, we saw all sorts of home brewed devices our mad PhD professor put together. From a rubber-band articulator (a record tone arm nailed to a board with a rubber-band and nails to change pitch) to using two tape recorders to get true double-deck dealay (the more nails, the bigger the delay !-). Here is a site that lists similar do it yourself projects.

Toys ... yup ... but I suspect there is also utility for it all.

jMax is a graphical programming environment for interactive real-time audio applications. It is based on Max, an ancient realtime enviroment still alive on the Mac. jMax consists of a C(++) realtime server that does all the work on and a graphical Java client where you can easily drag and drop your enviroments a la Logic audio. jMax is not suited for your average harddisk recording project but it's an object oriented enviroment for creating realtime midi/audio/video/whatever artwork. The project's page isn't that informative but do check out the mailinglist, that's where the action is...
Note that the project is still under development fully GPL'ed and has an anonymous CVS-server that will get you the latest sources for your favourite platform (Irix, Linux (x86+PPC) OS-X...

Go check it out!

jMax is a graphical programming environment for interactive real-time audio applications. It is based on Max, an ancient realtime enviroment still alive on the Mac. jMax consists of a C(++) realtime server that does all the work on and a graphical Java client where you can easily drag and drop your enviroments a la Logic audio. jMax is not suited for your average harddisk recording project but it's an object oriented enviroment for creating realtime midi/audio/video/whatever artwork. The project's page isn't that informative but do check out the mailinglist, that's where the action is...
Note that the project is still under development fully GPL'ed and has an anonymous CVS-server that will get you the latest sources for your favourite platform (Irix, Linux (x86+PPC) OS-X...

Go check it out!

That's a pretty good idea. There is a programming environment kind of like this on the Mac platform that is used mainly for audio programming, called Max. You plop down some boxes, set some values, add user-interfaces, and wire it all up with patch cords (pipes). There are Win32 (Pd) and Linux (Pd or jMax).

Perhaps these can be extended to unix commands.

It's obviously easy to find in a search, but if you are as lazy as I am you'll welcom the link:

JMax

• RTcmix - a real time sound synthesis/processing language/library. RTcmix is dope. I don't think the newest version (2.1), which adds really good Linux support, is publicly available yet, but it should be out the door real soon if it isn't yet. RTcmix can be easily interfaced with applications, because it can listen for commands on a TCP/IP socket. Trust me, it's very cool, and much easier to use/learn than CSOUND. Dave Topper (topper@virginia.edu) is the primary maintainer or RTcmix, as far as I know.
• Max - jMax was released by IRCAM under the GPL recently, but it needs crazy work in order to get to the state that the Mac version is in. Max is probably the coolest music application ever written. For those of you who don't know, it is a visual programming environment for real time control of anything MIDI controllable. Work is underway, as far as I know, to hook up RTcmix to Max as a signal processing engine (similar to MSP).
• Rt - Paul Lansky's real-time digital mixing program is a fabulous tool for mixing sounds. I haven't used it for performances yet, but it is damn good for constructing certain kinds of pieces. Several attempts at porting to Linux are in progress, but none of them are terribly stable yet. Check out Dave Phillips' page for more info.

• RTcmix - a real time sound synthesis/processing language/library. RTcmix is dope. I don't think the newest version (2.1), which adds really good Linux support, is publicly available yet, but it should be out the door real soon if it isn't yet. RTcmix can be easily interfaced with applications, because it can listen for commands on a TCP/IP socket. Trust me, it's very cool, and much easier to use/learn than CSOUND. Dave Topper (topper@virginia.edu) is the primary maintainer or RTcmix, as far as I know.
• Max - jMax was released by IRCAM under the GPL recently, but it needs crazy work in order to get to the state that the Mac version is in. Max is probably the coolest music application ever written. For those of you who don't know, it is a visual programming environment for real time control of anything MIDI controllable. Work is underway, as far as I know, to hook up RTcmix to Max as a signal processing engine (similar to MSP).
• Rt - Paul Lansky's real-time digital mixing program is a fabulous tool for mixing sounds. I haven't used it for performances yet, but it is damn good for constructing certain kinds of pieces. Several attempts at porting to Linux are in progress, but none of them are terribly stable yet. Check out Dave Phillips' page for more info.

It's more of a music environment than a music application. Along the same lines as MAX/MSP for the mac (and windows forthcoming) or PD on NT. Or (more recently) the excellent Audiomulch for Windows.

Also, I hear nice things about Columbia's RTCMix.

As far as stability goes, it doesn't matter. Linux will crash just as bad as Windows or Powerbooks will. Oh, it happens. Unless you built the entire system to be fault tolerant to a medical spec, you're not getting anywhere. Digital Audio is still damn tricky.

More info here:

http://www.ircam.fr/pr oduits/logiciels/log-forum/jmax-e.html