Research

Came across the web page of Frank A. Russo, and found a very interesting paper on Hearing Aids and Music discussing the auditory design of hearing aids: Whether the hearing aid wearer is a musician or merely someone who likes to listen to music, the electronic and electro-acoustic parameters described can be optimized for music as well as for speech. That is, a hearing aid optimally set for music can be optimally set for speech, even though the converse is not necessarily true....

Steve Lawrence discusses the importance of online research papers in the paper Online or Invisible?: The results are dramatic. There is a clear correlation between the number of times an article is cited, and the probability that the article is online. More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are significantly more likely to be online. […] Free online availability of scientific literature offers substantial benefits to science and society. To maximize impact, minimize redundancy, and speed scientific progress, author and publishers should aim to make research easy to access....

{#image164}We are currently working with the Phantom Omni haptic devices at McGill, but unfortunately they are rather expensive. I have been looking forward to test the Novint Falcon which is supposed to sell for around $100, but after being in touch with the company it seems like they will not start shipping devices before next year. I really think such devices will change the way we work with computers. The computer experience has been 2-dimensional way too long, and from my initial testing of 3D haptic devices shows how much potential is lying in this type of human computer interaction....

I had to brush up on my trigonometry to solve some mapping issues, and found this nice overview. Strange how much I have forgotten about these things, I really need to get back to my linear algebra books! I never really understood the point of learning those vector transformation things back when I studied maths, but now as I have to implement some 3d gesture models I see that it is actually very useful....

Just went to a lecture by Sidney Fels from the Human Communication Technologies lab and MAGIC[]{#mce_editor_0_parent} at the University of British Columbia (interestingly enough located in the Forest Sciences Centre…). He was talking on the topic of intimate control of musical instruments, and presented some different projects: GloveTalkII: “a system that translates hand gestures to speech through an adaptive interface.” Iamascope: a caleidoscope like thing, where users would see themselves on a big screen, as well as controlling a simple sound synthesis....

My post over at the Open Sound Control forum: I guess we are all trying to get rid of MIDI, but as long as we have tons of gear around, it would be good to have a generic way of describing MIDI information in OSC. Perhaps I am missing something obvious, but I have looked around and haven’t found any suggestions for a full implementation of MIDI messages as an OSC address space....

Edward Tufte has an interesting Wired article entitled PowerPoint Is Evil. The main point is that PowerPoint forces people to create presentations in a certain way, and he especially comments on the problems of bullet points. I have made quite a lot of PowerPoint presentations over the years, and I clearly see his point. It is, indeed, easy to fall into the habit of creating lots of bullet points covering everything you want to say....

Today I went to a guest lecture by Marije Baalman on WaveFieldSynthesis (a spatial sound reproduction principle based on the Huygens principle) over at Concordia. I heard a demonstration of WFS at IRCAM a couple of years back, and it was good to (finally) get a good theoretical introduction to the field. They are usually testing it with 24 speakers, but they are now going to make a permanent 900 speaker setup at the Technical University in Berlin for creating a surround WFS setup....

LibriVox is a voluntary project set up to record all books in the public domain and make them available, for free, in audio format on the internet. Besides the joy of having audio books, this is also very interesting from a speech/voice research perspective. Another source for open-source text files is the French Incipit blog. Interestingly enough, I found a French version of Nicholas Cook’s introduction to music!

{.imagelink}SPEAR is an application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis. The analysis procedure (which is based on the traditional McAulay-Quatieri technique) attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude. It offers some great features, and I particularly like the possibility to easily select single partials and edit them directly. Most controls also work in realtime....