The achievement, announced today at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing held in Las Vegas, is not yet a flawless reproduction of an original performance, but the researchers say it’s getting close.

“This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music,” says Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology. “Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn’t really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music.”

In replaying the music, a computer literally reproduces the original performance based on everything it knows about clarinets and clarinet playing. Two of Bocko’s doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, worked with Bocko to measure every aspect of a clarinet that affects its soundfrom the backpressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way sound radiates from the instrument. They then built a computer model of the clarinet, and the result is a virtual instrument built entirely from the real-world acoustical measurements.

The team then set about creating a virtual player for the virtual clarinet. They modeled how a clarinet player interacts with the instrument including the fingerings, the force of breath, and the pressure of the player’s lips to determine how they would affect the response of the virtual clarinet. Then, says Bocko, it’s a matter of letting the computer “listen” to a real clarinet performance to infer and record the various actions required to create a specific sound. The original sound is then reproduced by feeding the record of the player’s actions back into the computer model.

At present the results are a very close, though not yet a perfect, representation of the original sound.

“We are still working on including ‘tonguing,’ or how the player strikes the reed with the tongue to start notes in staccato passages,” says Bocko. “But in music with more sustained and connected notes the method works quite well and it’s difficult to tell the synthesized sound from the original.”

As the method is refined the researchers imagine that it may give computer musicians more intuitive ways to create expressive music by including the actions of a virtual musician in computer synthesizers. And although the human vocal tract is highly complex, Bocko says the method may in principle be extended to vocals as well.

The current method handles only a single instrument at a time, however in other work in the University’s Music Research Lab with post-doctoral researcher Gordana Velikic and Dave Headlam, professor of music theory at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, the team has produced a method of separating multiple instruments in a mix so the two methods can be combined to produce a very compact recording.

Bocko believes that the quality will continue to improve as the acoustic measurements and the resulting synthesis algorithms become more accurate, and he says this process may represent the maximum possible data compression of music.

“Maybe the future of music recording lies in reproducing performers and not recording them,” says Bocko.

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For about the same price as a high quality DVD player you can get yourself the most complete multimedia entertainment solution. With the ease of use and speed of a DVD player, smaller than and with more features than a Windows Media Center PC, the original Microsoft Xbox, mated with a mod chip, is the complete solution. Not only this, but custom software can be employed; in particular, Xbox Media Center, or XBMC. XMBC is open source software that replaces the standard Microsoft launch menu, and is packed with features that you would pay triple the price for in other products.

An Xbox with Xbox Media Center installed will allow playback of basically any media format you can throw at it. With an adapter you have surround sound support, and HDTV support allowing resolutions up to 1080i.

The experience gets even better when you connect the Xbox to your LAN or to the internet. You may share your media files on your PC and watch them directly from the Xbox. XBMC supports the common streaming media formats from the internet, so you may listen to all of the Shoutcast or similar radio stations on the net. And of course there are also the obligatory visualisations available to make the music look as good as it sounds!

The great thing about this product is the continued development of the XBMC software. That is not to say it is not a complete package, because it is. But as we all know, technology is continually improving, and as such, support for new media technologies is always needed, and will long be provided by the XBMC project.

As I am sure you would agree, the huge amount of powerful features make this an extremely complete multimedia solution for any lounge room. If you also take into account the Xbox’s original purpose of playing games and its affordability, the mod chipped Microsoft Xbox running XBMC is the most complete entertainment solution money can buy.

For more info contact our XBOX Mod Chip Experts

The post XBOX Mods – XBOX modifications and XMBC appeared first on Electronic Music.

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The sound circuit of the C64 (SID) has certainly left it’s print in the history of computer music. Compared to the contenders on the home computer market in the 1980s it totally wiped out all competition. However, when used as a stand alone synthesizer things get in a different perspective. The demands and expectations are now in the same field as the true monster machines of the C64’s era: The MOOGs, Oberheims, Sequential Circuits etc. The most obvious thing degrading the SID 6581 is the poor filter response. Being the most important component in a subtractive synthesis you cannot live with a low performance VCF when tweaking that latest masterpiece..

In the late 80s the trusty SID 6581 was upgraded to the SID 8580. Many people claim the old 6581 sounding better but that is not true. What is true is that inspite many of the 6581’s flaws still being there, the filter had a major upgrade. Not kicking any serious butt at least it finally makes the SID useful as a “real” synthesizer circuit.

When it comes to music, Allansmusic is your quality store for a name brand Piano like Roland, HP, and Kawai pianos.

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Most of synthesizer sounds only oscillate over and over again after a certain period of time. Stop the recording and save the file. (It is generally a good idea to keep the source recording).

Use auto region tool to divide all the sounds in your recording.

You can select various settings to achieve the best results (these presets are: drum beats, music 1, music 2, slow music and speech phrases, but you can create your own and even save it as a preset for later use).

If recorded signals are too close to each other, leave 0.5 to 1 seconds of silence before you switch to the next sound during your next recording.

Now use extract region to extract all your divisions and save them as separate sound files. Set the filename format and the saving path (you don’t want these files to extract on your desktop do you?) then select the regions you wish to extract and press extract.

Your samples are now ready for use. Still hot!

Note: Sometimes you will get a bit of pause before each sample. This can be fixed by applying different settings and re-extraction of the main recording (that is if you’ve kept the original recording) or by manual fixing in Sound Forge or some other sound editor (which can be a rather dull task). Generally a bit of pause before the sample won’t hurt as most of modern samplers and software has a sample start option.

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