Author Archives: Kevinernste

Here, for students of 6421, is the article I mentioned in class. This speech was given to a room full of people who know Lansky’s work well, so it makes some assumptions (you may need to listen to his music first: the pieces on our list as well as Mild Und Lise, which he mentions several times).

Lansky keynote, ICMC 2009

More than being an auto-biographical sketch or a reminiscence, the speech seeks to illuminate his changing relationship with computer music but also his observations about the changing landscape of technology and music making generally.

(In the introduction, Lansky refers to a important interview where he formally bid farewell to computer music. This was very public and, at the time, controversial. I will leave it to you to unearth it…)

Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis
for MacOS X, MacOS 9 and Windows

Downloads (free) here.

Be sure to read the “help” page for SPEAR containing keystrokes, hints, and solutions to common problems in SPEAR and analysis/resynthesis generally.

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.

Something which closely resembles the original input sound (a resynthesis) can be generated by computing and adding all of the individual time varying sinusoidal waves together. In almost all cases the resynthesis will not be exactly identical to the original sound (although it is possible to get very close).

Aside from offering a very detailed analysis of the time varying frequency content of a sound, a sinusoidal model offers a great deal of flexibility for editing and manipulation. SPEAR supports flexible selection and immediate manipulation of analysis data, cut and paste, and unlimited undo/redo. Hundreds of simultaneous partials can be synthesized in real-time and documents may contain thousands of individual partials dispersed in time. SPEAR also supports a variety of standard file formats for the import and export of analysis data.

Read more in the ICMC paper “Software for Spectral Analysis, Editing, and Synthesis.” (pdf) or in the dissertation paper Spectral Analysis, Editing, and Resynthesis: Methods and Applications (dissertation).

— Michael Klingbeil, author of SPEAR

Concert order for tomorrow’s 3pm performance in Lincoln Hall B20 performance is below with available rehearsal times in parenthesis.

[table]Computer C (Left), Own Laptop (Center), Computer D (Right)
Shelby Hankee (10am), Laura Furman (10:10am), Henry Chuang (10:20am)
James Winebrake(2:10pm), , Yundi Gao (10:40am)
Michelle Gostic(10:50am), Aarohee Fulay (11am), Skyler Gray (11:10am)

“”, INTERMISSION ONE, “”

Adam Beckwith  (11:30am), “”, Benjamin Hwang  (11:40am)
Chad Lazar (11:50pm), “” , Kwang Lee  (12:00pm)
Jennifer Lim  (12:10pm), Riley Owens (12:20pm) , Nicholas Livezey  (12:30pm)
Mary Millard (12:40pm), “” , Cassidy Molina (12:50pm)
Cameron Niazi (1pm), “” ,

“”, INTERMISSION TWO,

Brendan Sanok (1:10pm), “” , Hanbyul Seo (1:20pm)
William Seward (1:30pm), Marcus Wetlaufer (1:40pm), Suk Sung (1:50pm)
Matthew Williams (2pm), “”, Jasmine Edison (10:30am)
Christopher Yu (2:20pm), Luka Maisuradze (2:30pm), Lisa Zhu (2:40pm)
[/table]

Earlier today, a student reported issues in the library lab and studios, including 1) Live 9 licensing problems, 2) Reason network licensing (library lab), and 3) Rewire sharing between Live 9 and Reason.

All issues have now been resolved. All studios are repaired, the library lab license server is back online, and Rewire has been confirmed to work, once again, in all three studios.

– Please be sure to use Live 9 for the remainder of the semester, particularly if you are using Rewire.

– If and when issues of this kind (issues affecting the usability of the labs for any user) come up I certainly appreciate hearing about them so they can be resolved immediately. The more detailed your input the more quickly we can resolve the concern.

— Professor Ernste

P.S. While solving an issue in the lab, someone asked about the Network Drive being unavailable. Please see the FAQ on that issue if that happens again.

A Sneak Preview of the New Documentary

Elektro Moskva

Introduced by Trevor Pinch (Science & Technology Studies, Cornell)

Wednesday, September 24 at 7:15pm

Willard Straight Theatre

The film features rare archival footage, including the last 1993 interview with famed inventor Leon Theremin.

Watch a trailer at: elektromoskva.com

Directed by Dominik Spritzendorfer & Elena Tikhonova

Welcome to the weird and definitely wired world of avant garde rock musicians, DIY circuit benders, vodka-swilling dealers and urban archaeologists/collectors, all fascinated with obsolete Soviet-era electronic synthesizers that were the by-product of the KGB and Soviet military, created in the off-hours by scientist/inventors cobbling together spare transistors and wires. In Russian and English with English subtitles. Cosponsored with Science & Technology Studies and The History Center of Tompkins County.

1 hr 29 min

More at cinema.cornell.edu

This assignment is, as announced in lecture, in two parts.

1. Choose a song or piece of music you know (or think you know!) well. Analyze the song in terms of its form and progression in time,  listening carefully to how its inner details might aid in this progression. What do you think makes the music tick? What makes it move forward? What are the instruments and/or sounds and how do they develop? Are there small details, momentary or otherwise unnoticed, that you thing are important?

The result should be a diagram, in letters or symbols, of the form of the music plus a brief verbal description. This need not be any more than a few paragraphs to a full page, describing what you perceive to be the driving factors in the music.

2. A short re-mix using the materials provided below, taken from CCMixter.com. This should not be a time-consuming exercise as many of the raw materials will work nicely with one another without effort, but consider the relationships not only of simultaneity but also in time. Think about the form as a compositional strategy: how could/should the music unfold?

Turn in the resulting WAV or AIFF audio file along with a brief description of your re-mix. Did you follow or attempt to follow a particular form? Or was the result serendipitous? If so, can you make some brief observations about the result?

Here are the links to download content:

– Instrumental tracks

– Vocal tracks

The original artist page on CCMixter is here.

These materials are available under a Creative Commons “Attribution / Non-commercial” license, meaning:

You are free to: “share”—-copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and “adapt”–remix, transform, and build upon the material. You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.