I returned to grad school in music technology after 2 years off. For what it's worth, having been in a "real" work environment (at least in my line of work, at a university) really helped me understand how the whole "school beaurocracy" works.
I think going back to school after working gives you an upper hand on your classmates, especially if you're like me and have a teaching assistantship -- "real world" work gives you a lot of experience managing time and planning on how to get things done. It's very easy in grad school to wait until the last minute just like you did in undergrad, but I've found that since I worked before coming here I'm getting things done early and the quality is higher.
My only advice would be, if you go back to school, treat it like it's a job. Be serious, do your work well, and take time to relax too. If you're doing something you love, it's totally worth it.
not only this, but don't a lot of cell phones use GPS to send location data in the event of a 911 call? my verizon phone has some little splash screen that says aGPS when it starts up, and a friend of mine has a nextel phone with GPS on it. so, in the event of a terrorist attack, lots of people are getting hurt and killed, and in the age of cellphones, the rescue squads can't find them.
Maybe Java is considered so un-cool because it has a crappy name. Of course, we all like our coffee, but "Java" as a name is rather lame. It doesn't have the same ring to it as "C", or "perl".
Seems to me that all the "cool" languages have either really mysterious names, or "shiny" ones. Try this out:
we are indeed talking about the same thing -- my "foldover" happens if frequencies over the nyquist rate get into the system during the sampling or synthesis process -- aliasing seems to be the same phenomenon when you downsample something, i.e. from 88.2 to 44.1khz.
this stuff is really interesting, i think.:) i'd be interested to see spectral analysis of a signal sampled at 44.1 vs. one that was recorded higher and then downsampled.
as for audio formats -- my home protools system can do 16 or 24 bit I/O up to 48khz to the digital busses. the newer one where i go to school is an HD system and will do I/O up to 48-bit 192khz. my understanding is that if you record onto ADAT or a DA-88 multitracker at 16-bit, you should import it into the digital editor at 24 or higher so the processing and editing you do will retain the fidelity of the original recording.
i'm an analog junkie myself, but i agree that these "new" formats are going to take a while to catch on. i think computer-based distribution is the way to go, even though CDs are pretty convenient. with mp3, aac, ogg, etc. you can pretty much choose the fidelity you want to get out of it and encode it as you see fit. i'd love to hear some classical recordings at a high bit depth and sampling rate just to see if there is a difference... but, for listening to stuff in the car it won't matter.
sampling rate. You're thinking bitdepth, and using a floating point bitdepth is uncommon.
floating point audio is actually very common. working in floats in Max/MSP or CSound greatly simplifies the math. many audio programs that can handle multiple bit depths convert the incoming audio to floats first so you don't have to write a bunch of different code that does all the same thing.
tell you that they want more. This is because in order to avoid aliasing artifacts, you need to filter everything above BW. Unfortunately, brick wall filters are not implementable in realtime
aliasing is not really an issue unless you have a bad dithering algorithm -- i think what you mean is signal foldover. if you're recording and (say) a cymbal hit has a partial at a freq of 26000hz. obviously a 44.1khz system can't sample that frequency, and it will end up showing up in your recording "folded over" -- i.e. it will sound like 18100hz. (subtraction, basically, because the system can't sample that fast.) in a 44100 system try telling a plug-in oscillator to make a 40000hz tone -- you'll get a very low frequency out of it.
we want higher sampling rates so those frequencies don't fold over and can later be filtered out.
I'm with you on the lack of dynamic range in modern music though; load a Britney Spears track into an editor, then load a classic jazz track (I recommend Miles Davis' "So What") and compare the envelopes. Scary.
amen to this. i opened up a barenaked ladies track in protools once and it looked like a picture of a brick. think 24-bit consumer formats will be any different? we don't need that many bits if the amplitudes only change 3-4 bits:)
this is pretty cool, and a technical achievement... but why bother stripping the DRM from your m4p files? just make a functional iTunes clone that doesn't care about the DRM:)
or maybe i'm wrong... is it up to the player software to enforce the DRM? i thought i read somewhere that the iPod just ignores it...
i worked at a university in virginia in the music technology lab, where we had two linux servers that did everything from serve web pages to run netatalk. my boss (also a professor) liked the RPMs too, simply because after i left there was no guarantee he'd get any help from the IT department, and he understood how to use RPM from the command line.
i guess in academia they are used to having funding for some things some of the time -- your professor probably wants to keep those machines running as long as he possibly can, because money has to be used for other things.
and besides, compiling programs is a hard thing for the "sorta unix geek" to get his head around:) for a while i would recompile the kernel and he flipped out -- so i started using those crappy RPMs.
fortunatly, i think this will change when people realize there is an ample supply of knowledgeable folks out there who can do this stuff. it's easier to find a geek now than it was even 5 years ago!
Yep -- there is SACD, which is kind of like DVD audio with the 5.1 encoding, but if you put a hybrid SACD disc in a regular CD player, you get the front stereo pair. It's been around for a while but isn't incredibly hot right now. Sometimes you can find SACD discs at Best Buy and such.
lilypond looks nice for many things, and i think it's a step in the right direction. the problem is, there's always a rift between what the musicians want to notate and what the software is able to do.
can lilypond notate beams across barlines? can you hide rests? can you make invisible barlines? all this stuff is important to me, since that's the kind of music i write. sibelius does them wonderfully, and i've heard rumors that sibelius' base engine is written in ASM and could be easily ported to linux from OS X.
on the other hand, i have a big problem in that i wrote a lot of stuff in Finale, and then I switched to sibelius, and even the file convertor doesn't work right a lot of the time. if lilypond can offer a good long-term storage format that is easy to read by both humans and computers, it could have a big niche in digital preservation, and be a common point between notation programs.
anyone want to write a finale->lilypond convertor?:)
i think you mean the amount of bullshit in a sentence divided by the volume of the entire sentence would be the Olfactory Density. Cos you can smell the shiate.
You definetly make a lot of excellent points here -- and it is a matter of personal perspective.
I guess a big part of this for me is that people who have the innovative instincts required to write the elegant code we're talking about sometimes confuse that with creativity in its most narrow definition -- fostering the creation of something new. Solving problems on the computer can lead to creative ends through innovation.
The code that I write on my signal processing software is ultimately used as a tool for the creation of electroacoustic music. Lots of this kind of music is all about the process used to create it, similar to what you talk about above. I take issue with that a lot of times, I don't think art should be about the process, especially when "normal" people (i.e. non EA-musicians, non-programmers, etc) find your music completely foreign... this is a huge problem for us.
I think the folks at the Media Lab, while they are smart, are primarily innovators -- they do work on things which will get them media attention. The things they come up with barely touch upon the issues that affect me as a computer geek and composer. I'm sure Dr. Hawley is an interesting person, but a lot of the stuff mentioned above is completely unrelated to what I do every day -- and his compositions probably have little to do with what's going on on the contemporary music scene. It just has a nice "wow" factor.
The futurists also upset a lot of traditional academic musicians, but that's a whole other story:)
I have to disagree with you on this -- as both a composer and programmer in several languages - coding is not the same as creating artworks. In order for computer code to be useful, it has to make sense and operate logically. Art is in direct opposition to this -- it exists on the border (and sometimes across the border) of interpretation and the abstract. Computer code is not open to interpretation - it runs the way it was written to run. It doesn't match the same way a performer can offer a different interpretation of a work.
What you are talking about is "Craft" -- and yes, art involves craft too, that's why we study the technical aspects of piano, how the overtone series works, etc. And coding can be done "artfully" -- but the final product is not "Art".
A side note, I really don't want to get into a flame war over this, I'm just respectfully disagreeing, because I know we can argue about this for the next century:)
"History of Western Music" 5th edition by Donald J. Grout page 363:
"The title J.S. Bach gave to his... Well-Tempered Clavier suggests that he had equal temperament in mind. On the other hand, it has been pointed out that 'well-tempered' can mean good or nearly equal temperament as well as truly equal temperament."
For almost anything baroque or later, you want to use a tempered scale, so 99.99999% of the pianos out there are tuned to a tempered scale and left there.
Funny how the piano wasn't invented until about 1720, 120 years or so into the Baroque era. Equal temperament was showing up as early as the 1500s, by the way - they may not have known how to build pianos but they knew how to build organs.
Some modern works might call for alternate tuning, I'll leave it to music critics to argue over whether that's being done as a cheap gimmick or not
As a composer, I believe that people can tell the difference between tuning systems even if they don't know they are listening to a different tuning system. The brain responds different ways to different things -- if i write a piece for equal-tempered piano, and you tune that piano to mean-tone temperament (where the thirds are perfect) it will sound completely different. if you are an expressive composer, and want to use such things for the purposes of expression, "cheap gimmick" is about as far from the intent as you can get.
but otherwise just about all non-tempered keyboard music comes from an era before pianos. If you are enough of a purist to play a re-tuned piano when playing a pre-Bach work, you are probably enough of a purist to play it on a period instrument.
Yeah, like a harpsichord or organ. The instrument it's supposed to be played on - both of which probably would have been tuned to the same tuning system we use in pianos.
Besides, modern listeners have grown acustomed to the tempered scale. Playing in a "pure" tuning will only impress a handful of snobs.
Try playing 14th Century English music in our tuning system and it will sound like crap -- because they were using a different tuning system. As for today's audiences -- I think they appreciate accuracy and truth in performance, and creativity.
If you're going to poo-poo the classical and contemporary music scenes, you can stick to the commercialized, crappy pop music! And buy yourself one of these auto-guitar-tuners!:)
This is a good point. The problem of instrument tuning has been around for centuries. Try tuning your guitar to perfect intervals using the open strings, then play a note on the 5th or 6th fret and you will notice it's a few cents off the same note on a newly-tuned piano.
As for the note "B" -- it's not that we have a problem with it - it's no different from any other note, and in fact, nobody called it "B" until at least the 15th Century if i remember my music history correctly.
The trouble is that in our tuning system we base everything around one interval being perfect, and everything else has to fall in line. That third between the 2nd and 3rd strings on the guitar screws up the ratios - that's why we want to tune it slightly sharp to tighten up the G chord.
Anyway, Wikipedia has a great entry on musical tuning, and if you want to read more about it, check out Temperament by Stuart Isacoff -- great read on the evolution of such things.
"d00d, joo found leahy's stash of bo0bie flicks and carl levin's mp3 collection! you voilated the patriot act while doing it, but at least we caught some DMCA breakers! all in a day's work. let's go beat up some poor people now."
it's easy to do fourier analysis and find commonalities between a bunch of songs that all sound the SAME.
and i agree with the person who posted above... the "tracking scene" ? techno is great and all, but somebody needs to give the trackers a copy of digital performer and a microphone.
who cares about OS X vs. linux? all we should care about is everybody else vs. microsoft. we should all have a nice beige linux box and a nice grey sleek mac on our desks.
if there's one thing the mac world and the linux world share it's fanatical users. we need a marvel comics team-up to start converting the unwashed masses!
i can't say i disagree with this entirely... i actually like finding full albums that are really good. i think if the song has been released as a single and is played on the radio by itself, you should be able to buy it by itself.
same deal with classical music -- as a music student, it is infinetly helpful for me to be able to download one movement or a set of movements for study purposes. i bet per-song classical downloads would even raise the amount of classical music sold online!
granted, there are a lot of records where the album sucks but 1 or 2 songs are good. i just try to stay away from those albums. if i accidentally buy one, it gets put into the "sell back to the record store" pile.
incidentally -- records that are good as a whole (in addition to a lot of great ones posted here already):
Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator) and Soul Journey
The Bad Plus - These are the Vistas
Joe Jackson Band - Volume IV
Alejandro Escovedo - A Man Under the Influence
Del Amitri - Change Everything, Twisted
Slashdot Mirror
This is a great Ask Slashdot...
I returned to grad school in music technology after 2 years off. For what it's worth, having been in a "real" work environment (at least in my line of work, at a university) really helped me understand how the whole "school beaurocracy" works.
I think going back to school after working gives you an upper hand on your classmates, especially if you're like me and have a teaching assistantship -- "real world" work gives you a lot of experience managing time and planning on how to get things done. It's very easy in grad school to wait until the last minute just like you did in undergrad, but I've found that since I worked before coming here I'm getting things done early and the quality is higher.
My only advice would be, if you go back to school, treat it like it's a job. Be serious, do your work well, and take time to relax too. If you're doing something you love, it's totally worth it.
not only this, but don't a lot of cell phones use GPS to send location data in the event of a 911 call? my verizon phone has some little splash screen that says aGPS when it starts up, and a friend of mine has a nextel phone with GPS on it. so, in the event of a terrorist attack, lots of people are getting hurt and killed, and in the age of cellphones, the rescue squads can't find them.
great!
Could be wrong. :)
:)
it might be cooler if the java community started calling themselves something cool and exclusive, like maybe "The Javanese Gamelan".
Maybe Java is considered so un-cool because it has a crappy name. Of course, we all like our coffee, but "Java" as a name is rather lame. It doesn't have the same ring to it as "C", or "perl".
:)
Seems to me that all the "cool" languages have either really mysterious names, or "shiny" ones. Try this out:
"I'm a C programmer" (add ++, even cooler)
"I'm a perl programmer"
"I do Ruby."
"Python is my language of choice"
then, in a squeaky voice...
"Java is the coolest!"
doesn't work for me, man.
i checked up on it, and it looks like we're both right:
:) i'd be interested to see spectral analysis of a signal sampled at 44.1 vs. one that was recorded higher and then downsampled.
there's a nice section with diagrams about foldover and aliasing on dartmouth's ea music site.
we are indeed talking about the same thing -- my "foldover" happens if frequencies over the nyquist rate get into the system during the sampling or synthesis process -- aliasing seems to be the same phenomenon when you downsample something, i.e. from 88.2 to 44.1khz.
this stuff is really interesting, i think.
as for audio formats -- my home protools system can do 16 or 24 bit I/O up to 48khz to the digital busses. the newer one where i go to school is an HD system and will do I/O up to 48-bit 192khz. my understanding is that if you record onto ADAT or a DA-88 multitracker at 16-bit, you should import it into the digital editor at 24 or higher so the processing and editing you do will retain the fidelity of the original recording.
i'm an analog junkie myself, but i agree that these "new" formats are going to take a while to catch on. i think computer-based distribution is the way to go, even though CDs are pretty convenient. with mp3, aac, ogg, etc. you can pretty much choose the fidelity you want to get out of it and encode it as you see fit. i'd love to hear some classical recordings at a high bit depth and sampling rate just to see if there is a difference... but, for listening to stuff in the car it won't matter.
-matt
sampling rate. You're thinking bitdepth, and using a floating point bitdepth is uncommon.
:)
floating point audio is actually very common. working in floats in Max/MSP or CSound greatly simplifies the math. many audio programs that can handle multiple bit depths convert the incoming audio to floats first so you don't have to write a bunch of different code that does all the same thing.
tell you that they want more. This is because in order to avoid aliasing artifacts, you need to filter everything above BW. Unfortunately, brick wall filters are not implementable in realtime
aliasing is not really an issue unless you have a bad dithering algorithm -- i think what you mean is signal foldover. if you're recording and (say) a cymbal hit has a partial at a freq of 26000hz. obviously a 44.1khz system can't sample that frequency, and it will end up showing up in your recording "folded over" -- i.e. it will sound like 18100hz. (subtraction, basically, because the system can't sample that fast.) in a 44100 system try telling a plug-in oscillator to make a 40000hz tone -- you'll get a very low frequency out of it.
we want higher sampling rates so those frequencies don't fold over and can later be filtered out.
I'm with you on the lack of dynamic range in modern music though; load a Britney Spears track into an editor, then load a classic jazz track (I recommend Miles Davis' "So What") and compare the envelopes. Scary.
amen to this. i opened up a barenaked ladies track in protools once and it looked like a picture of a brick. think 24-bit consumer formats will be any different? we don't need that many bits if the amplitudes only change 3-4 bits
-matt
this is pretty cool, and a technical achievement... but why bother stripping the DRM from your m4p files? just make a functional iTunes clone that doesn't care about the DRM :)
or maybe i'm wrong... is it up to the player software to enforce the DRM? i thought i read somewhere that the iPod just ignores it...
i worked at a university in virginia in the music technology lab, where we had two linux servers that did everything from serve web pages to run netatalk. my boss (also a professor) liked the RPMs too, simply because after i left there was no guarantee he'd get any help from the IT department, and he understood how to use RPM from the command line.
:) for a while i would recompile the kernel and he flipped out -- so i started using those crappy RPMs.
i guess in academia they are used to having funding for some things some of the time -- your professor probably wants to keep those machines running as long as he possibly can, because money has to be used for other things.
and besides, compiling programs is a hard thing for the "sorta unix geek" to get his head around
fortunatly, i think this will change when people realize there is an ample supply of knowledgeable folks out there who can do this stuff. it's easier to find a geek now than it was even 5 years ago!
amen brotha.
Yep -- there is SACD, which is kind of like DVD audio with the 5.1 encoding, but if you put a hybrid SACD disc in a regular CD player, you get the front stereo pair. It's been around for a while but isn't incredibly hot right now. Sometimes you can find SACD discs at Best Buy and such.
lilypond looks nice for many things, and i think it's a step in the right direction. the problem is, there's always a rift between what the musicians want to notate and what the software is able to do.
:)
can lilypond notate beams across barlines? can you hide rests? can you make invisible barlines? all this stuff is important to me, since that's the kind of music i write. sibelius does them wonderfully, and i've heard rumors that sibelius' base engine is written in ASM and could be easily ported to linux from OS X.
on the other hand, i have a big problem in that i wrote a lot of stuff in Finale, and then I switched to sibelius, and even the file convertor doesn't work right a lot of the time. if lilypond can offer a good long-term storage format that is easy to read by both humans and computers, it could have a big niche in digital preservation, and be a common point between notation programs.
anyone want to write a finale->lilypond convertor?
i think you mean the amount of bullshit in a sentence divided by the volume of the entire sentence would be the Olfactory Density. Cos you can smell the shiate.
You definetly make a lot of excellent points here -- and it is a matter of personal perspective.
:)
I guess a big part of this for me is that people who have the innovative instincts required to write the elegant code we're talking about sometimes confuse that with creativity in its most narrow definition -- fostering the creation of something new. Solving problems on the computer can lead to creative ends through innovation.
The code that I write on my signal processing software is ultimately used as a tool for the creation of electroacoustic music. Lots of this kind of music is all about the process used to create it, similar to what you talk about above. I take issue with that a lot of times, I don't think art should be about the process, especially when "normal" people (i.e. non EA-musicians, non-programmers, etc) find your music completely foreign... this is a huge problem for us.
I think the folks at the Media Lab, while they are smart, are primarily innovators -- they do work on things which will get them media attention. The things they come up with barely touch upon the issues that affect me as a computer geek and composer. I'm sure Dr. Hawley is an interesting person, but a lot of the stuff mentioned above is completely unrelated to what I do every day -- and his compositions probably have little to do with what's going on on the contemporary music scene. It just has a nice "wow" factor.
The futurists also upset a lot of traditional academic musicians, but that's a whole other story
I have to disagree with you on this -- as both a composer and programmer in several languages - coding is not the same as creating artworks. In order for computer code to be useful, it has to make sense and operate logically. Art is in direct opposition to this -- it exists on the border (and sometimes across the border) of interpretation and the abstract. Computer code is not open to interpretation - it runs the way it was written to run. It doesn't match the same way a performer can offer a different interpretation of a work.
:)
What you are talking about is "Craft" -- and yes, art involves craft too, that's why we study the technical aspects of piano, how the overtone series works, etc. And coding can be done "artfully" -- but the final product is not "Art".
A side note, I really don't want to get into a flame war over this, I'm just respectfully disagreeing, because I know we can argue about this for the next century
i'm a grad student at BGSU in the music department -- let me know if you need help with this.
hahah... true, true. grout is a scar on the face of many people's existence...
i had it out because i'm currently going through the class again having failed the music history entrance exam for grad school.
"History of Western Music" 5th edition by Donald J. Grout page 363:
... Well-Tempered Clavier suggests that he had equal temperament in mind. On the other hand, it has been pointed out that 'well-tempered' can mean good or nearly equal temperament as well as truly equal temperament."
"The title J.S. Bach gave to his
For almost anything baroque or later, you want to use a tempered scale, so 99.99999% of the pianos out there are tuned to a tempered scale and left there.
:)
Funny how the piano wasn't invented until about 1720, 120 years or so into the Baroque era. Equal temperament was showing up as early as the 1500s, by the way - they may not have known how to build pianos but they knew how to build organs.
Some modern works might call for alternate tuning, I'll leave it to music critics to argue over whether that's being done as a cheap gimmick or not
As a composer, I believe that people can tell the difference between tuning systems even if they don't know they are listening to a different tuning system. The brain responds different ways to different things -- if i write a piece for equal-tempered piano, and you tune that piano to mean-tone temperament (where the thirds are perfect) it will sound completely different. if you are an expressive composer, and want to use such things for the purposes of expression, "cheap gimmick" is about as far from the intent as you can get.
but otherwise just about all non-tempered keyboard music comes from an era before pianos. If you are enough of a purist to play a re-tuned piano when playing a pre-Bach work, you are probably enough of a purist to play it on a period instrument.
Yeah, like a harpsichord or organ. The instrument it's supposed to be played on - both of which probably would have been tuned to the same tuning system we use in pianos.
Besides, modern listeners have grown acustomed to the tempered scale. Playing in a "pure" tuning will only impress a handful of snobs.
Try playing 14th Century English music in our tuning system and it will sound like crap -- because they were using a different tuning system. As for today's audiences -- I think they appreciate accuracy and truth in performance, and creativity.
If you're going to poo-poo the classical and contemporary music scenes, you can stick to the commercialized, crappy pop music! And buy yourself one of these auto-guitar-tuners!
This is a good point. The problem of instrument tuning has been around for centuries. Try tuning your guitar to perfect intervals using the open strings, then play a note on the 5th or 6th fret and you will notice it's a few cents off the same note on a newly-tuned piano.
As for the note "B" -- it's not that we have a problem with it - it's no different from any other note, and in fact, nobody called it "B" until at least the 15th Century if i remember my music history correctly.
The trouble is that in our tuning system we base everything around one interval being perfect, and everything else has to fall in line. That third between the 2nd and 3rd strings on the guitar screws up the ratios - that's why we want to tune it slightly sharp to tighten up the G chord.
Anyway, Wikipedia has a great entry on musical tuning, and if you want to read more about it, check out Temperament by Stuart Isacoff -- great read on the evolution of such things.
jpl:~ sokeefe$ ssh spirit
/tmp/ramdisk0 /dev/ram0 /dev/ram0 /tmp/ramdisk0
sokeefe@spirit's password:
Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 24th day of Chaos in the YOLD 3170
Welcome to Spirit!
spirit:~ sokeefe$ mkdir
spirit:~ sokeefe$ mke2fs
spirit:~ sokeefe$ mount
spirit:~ sokeefe$ dd if=/dev/flash1 of=/tmp/ramdisk0
spirit:~ sokeefe$ reboot
Connection to host lost.
sokeefe@jpl:~ sokeefe$
"d00d, joo found leahy's stash of bo0bie flicks and carl levin's mp3 collection! you voilated the patriot act while doing it, but at least we caught some DMCA breakers! all in a day's work. let's go beat up some poor people now."
it's easy to do fourier analysis and find commonalities between a bunch of songs that all sound the SAME.
and i agree with the person who posted above... the "tracking scene" ? techno is great and all, but somebody needs to give the trackers a copy of digital performer and a microphone.
What do Apple's programmers and designers have the Linux/GNOME programmers do not? How about a nice paycheck and benefits, to start?
There's a difference between a labor of love and being able to make your car payments. The true samurai balances both.
who cares about OS X vs. linux? all we should care about is everybody else vs. microsoft. we should all have a nice beige linux box and a nice grey sleek mac on our desks.
if there's one thing the mac world and the linux world share it's fanatical users. we need a marvel comics team-up to start converting the unwashed masses!
i can't say i disagree with this entirely... i actually like finding full albums that are really good. i think if the song has been released as a single and is played on the radio by itself, you should be able to buy it by itself.
same deal with classical music -- as a music student, it is infinetly helpful for me to be able to download one movement or a set of movements for study purposes. i bet per-song classical downloads would even raise the amount of classical music sold online!
granted, there are a lot of records where the album sucks but 1 or 2 songs are good. i just try to stay away from those albums. if i accidentally buy one, it gets put into the "sell back to the record store" pile.
incidentally -- records that are good as a whole (in addition to a lot of great ones posted here already):
Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator) and Soul Journey
The Bad Plus - These are the Vistas
Joe Jackson Band - Volume IV
Alejandro Escovedo - A Man Under the Influence
Del Amitri - Change Everything, Twisted