Better than Real at Lightwave

I went to Beau lotto's presentation "Better than Real" yesterday at the Lightwave Exhibition at the Science Gallery.

It was interesting...to a degree. In a nutshell, Dr. Lotto discussed how human's perceive colour, and how perception is dependent, on context and, our brain's historical experience making meaning out of present context. lottolab's latest work is based on the notion of sensory substitution - replacing one sense with another. The example provided is how blind people can perceive their world through their ears, i.e. hearing your visual world. Beau provides the example from nature of how Dolphin's use sonar for navigation.

A thought that came to mind was that I'd come across previous work in this area. The work at vOICe, "Vision technology for the totally blind" is a fascinating project and well worth a read. Also, the book "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins has some extremely interesting writings on the evolution of bats and 'echolocation'.

WOW - the wonders of modern tech

Can somebody please tell me how I'm gonna identify this musical instrument?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfrONZjakRY

The Ocarina! More details here:
http://www.dancemusicblog.com/software/first-iphone-musical-instrument-the-ocarina/#more-183

I do a bit of DJing myself. I came across this amazing new digital controller; the EKS otus. Looks simply amazing. Controls two decks in one, via a select switch. I've been looking through some forums, for instance, Native Instruments. Mixed responses from the Tractor user community. All in all though, on a personal level, I'd seriously consider purchasing one of these given the amount of storage required for my current setup and my interest in digital music. I can see myself veering down the road of the laptop, digital DJ and this offers a nice solution. Just have to get the finances together to purchase a new MAC!!

Came across a good blog on Dance music too: dancemusicblog.com

Some interesting Pattern Recognition toolboxes...

Just a short note on some interesting Pattern Recognition toolboxes I've come across recently:

DD_Tools
"...data description toolbox wants to provide tools, classifiers and evaluation functions for the research of one-class classification (or data description)."

The toolbox is an extension of the PRTools toolbox.

PRSD Studio
I've applied for a trial licence with prsysdesign. This looks like a very interesting Matlab toolbox.

Paper accepted for 126 AES Convention!

My paper entitled "Evaluating Ground Truth for ADRess as a Preprocess for Automatic Musical Instrument Identification" has been accepted.

Happy Days.

So I'm off to the 126th AES Convention in Munich second week in May.

Understanding the Fundamentals of Music

I came across a fantastic course entitled "Understanding the Fundamentals of Music" by Robert Greenberg.

I've listened to the first 4 lectures. I must say that Robert Greenberg gets his ideas across very well. The focus has been on Western Orchestral music, and offers excellent insight into many of the instruments I've encountered on my own research.

On a personal note; an example provided by Greenberg in the discussion on 'Dynamics' surprised me greatly. Does Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 8 in C Minor, op. 13 (Pathétique, 1798) not sound uncannily like Linda Ronstadt & James Ingram's, "Some Where Out There"? You can't believe how disappointed I was (am) by this blatant rip-off. I loved this song as a child.

A short list of some of the books which I 'hope' to read shortly:

• The Physics of Musical Instruments, by Neville H. Fletcher and Thomas D. Rossin.
• Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics, by Arthur H. Benade
• The Musician's Guide to Acoustics, by Murray Campbell and Clive Greated
• Science and Music, by Sir James Jeans
• The Math Behind the Music, by Leon Harkleroad
• The Acoustical Foundations of Music, by J Backus

The onset of discoveries

I came across some excellent resources for onset detection - I will add to this list (from an offline compilation) in time but for now, this site has proved valuable:

http://old.lam.jussieu.fr/src/Membres/Leveau/SOL/SOL.htm

This in conjunction with the work of Mikel Gainza (within the ARG - thanks for the code) and Juan Pablo Bello (http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jb2843/Home.html), should prove a worthy springboard.

It's never too late...

They say it's never too late. With 11 months remaining, today is a momentous day. For today, I plant my well seasoned PhD tree into the digital soil of inter-web land. I step back to admire the many branches which have grown, some bare, brown and rotten to the core, others with blossoming leaves, providing nourishment to crawling ideas (insects!) which have in-turn multiplied and evolved. All that remains, is for the roots to settle in their new found plot (blog!) as I hope they come to terms with a more stable foundation having been quite unsettled to-date with numerous homes (including an old notepad, which to my dismay took a run and jump and still remains 'somewhere out there', or lost in the oblivion).

So where am I in terms of my research?

Onset detection. Yes. Indeed. Why? I need to segment all the notes from the IOWA samples. So where's my horse? We must ride forth, and conquer without any further adieu, remembering to pause at energy bursts, consider their authenticity as an onset, validate, take note, and ride the sustain...

By the way: AMII = Automatic Musical Instrument Identification (in case you thought it was AM I Insane)