(Source: b-inary-s-tars)
New Algorithm Captures What Pleases the Human Ear—and May Replace Human Instrument Tuners
As computer hardware and software becomes ever more powerful, they find ways to match and then exceed many human abilities. One point of superiority that humans have stubbornly refused to yield is tuning musical instruments. Pythagoras identified the precise, mathematical relationships between musical tones over 2,000 years ago, and modern machines can beat out any human when it comes to precise math. So why aren’t computers better than people? The professional tuner does have one incontrovertible advantage: a trained human ear.
Imprecision, it turns out, is embedded in our scales, instruments, and tuning system, so pros have to adjust each instrument by ear to make it sound its best. Electronic tuners can’t do this well because there has been no known way to calculate it. Basically, it’s an art, not a science. But now, a new algorithm published in arXiv claims to be just as good as a professional tuner.
» via Discover
Instrumental Architecture by Bjoern Ewers
Created for the chamber orchestra of the Berliner Philharmoniker, this advertisment series depicts various instruments from the inside, viewing the interior as if from the perspective of someone living inside them, with natural light filtering in through the airholes. Seriously, find me a shrink ray, I’ll live inside a cello. I wont even complain about the neighbor’s music keeping me up all night.
I showed this to Dragon and he wasn’t absolutely FLOORED by how amazing this is. It made me sad, but I guess I don’t shit myself when he tells me something about history or plastics or the deformation of certain compositions of steel.
Anyway, if anyone has ever tried to play music with other people, you might know how incredible it is to get an audience to basically improvise WITH you. An AUDIENCE.
Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival.
We love this one.
PLEASE NOTE, all orders placed before December 23rd will be personally autographed by composer Jeremy Soule.
OH I’VE NOTED IT
‘Cause a ring don’t mean nothing if you can’t haul the weight
And some of them won’t even try,
But I won’t leave you high and dry.
This song has been swimming through my mind for a while now. I don’t know what it is, but I believe every word, every note, all the emotion.
Empty Boxes (by kbenton)
The Carpenters - Rainy Days and Mondays
This one goes out to Noel. Rainy day ‘hump-day’ Wednesday
The Sound of Wood: From sapling to violin.
I wish there was a video like this for every musical instrument.
