Musformation | The Daily DIY Guide To The New Music Landscape Technology feature: Noise annoys! - PSNEurope Dr Annie Jamieson (pictured, below) is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds, whose research into hearing risk and its history focuses specifically on the live music industry. She also conducts regular seminars on the subject, the latest of which was part of the educational programme at PLASA Focus Leeds. Do you feel that the level of awareness of potential for hearing damage is better in pro-audio now than, say, ten years ago? Certainly, in terms of press and social media coverage it seems to have increased in the last year or two following some highly-publicised concerns about MIHD (Music-Induced Hearing Damage) in young people through sustained headphone use. In late 2014 I carried out an online survey of 230 audio professionals; the vast majority (some 98%) are aware of the risk, though almost 20% still never use hearing protection. What should their first action be if they do suspect hearing loss or damage?
New Music Strategies Will Prentice: We need £40m to preserve our unique recorded collection, which, as these five clips show, represents an irreplaceable part of our national heritage Sound recordings have long been an underappreciated part of our national heritage, probably because you can’t see them like a painting or a manuscript. To appreciate their value and meaning you have to play them back and listen to them. But collecting sounds is important. The experience of listening to them is as close to time travel as we’ve ever come. From the rare or iconic to the ephemeral and everyday, recordings give a living picture of the world changing around us. This is urgent: these recordings go back to the late-19th century, and many of the formats on which the sounds were originally captured – such as reel-to-reel, wax cylinders and cassette tapes – are disappearing from production, while some of the older materials themselves are decaying. We estimate that we have just 15 years before substantial parts of this heritage become unlistenable and are lost for all time. If we were to continue digitising the collection at the current rate, it would take 48 years to complete.
Music of Sound Incase you missed the news yesterday VCV Rack has launched – when I read their URL I grok it as CV Crack.. and as per the image below, it felt confirmed after my first jam with it last night… Think of it as virtual Eurorack modular, with the initial free release providing basic modules plus a set of Mutable Instruments modules based on the same code as their great Eurorack modules.. At present it is a freestanding app, but there is a plan to provide a VST bridge and I can easily predict this future: there will be a similar explosion of new modules as per what has happened IRL over the last many years. Will this detract from real modular ie IRL? Modules I was most reaching for but could not find: an interesting LFO capable of very slow speeds, a clock divider and a stereo mixer. This patch got up to about 45% of my CPU (iMac 5K iMac w 4GHz i7 & 64GB of RAM) and that CPU button is handy as it shows what % of CPU each module is consuming. Congrats to the developers
Moulton Laboratories :: From Stereo to Mono and Back The View from 2005: This is less of a problem now, because there aren’t very many mono radios out there any more, and comparatively few mono TVs. However, good studio craft requires that you at least CHECK to see if you’ve created any truly unacceptable sounds. And, unfortunately, this still happens all too often in live television broadcasts, particularly of sports events. But, why worry? The problem is broadcasting, as manifested by two common items: your basic table radio and your basic television. However, assuming you do want to worry, the mono compatibility problem arises because stereo is an illusion, and the components of that illusion don’t necessarily mix together very well into a single signal. Early Techno-Nerds discussed stereo in terms of A and B instead of Left and Right (don’t ask me why), and I’ve gotten in the habit of using these terms too. So just what is an A-B component? But there’s more. So, A-B and A,-B have some interesting characteristics. Wow. Ben
wire to the ear Is it really "just audio?" Matt North reacts to a recent controversial comment regarding TV and radio production, and ponders how sound work is perceived outside the industry. Producer Matt North reacts to a recent controversial comment regarding TV and radio production in Scotland, and ponders how professional sound work is perceived outside the industry. Last month, you may have stumbled upon the online furore caused by an interview with journalist David Torrance, relating to the ongoing debate over the potential production of a BBC ‘Scottish Six’ news programme that would be edited and broadcast from Scotland to its audiences. When asked why a similar service to the one that is currently broadcast on radio cannot be delivered in parallel on TV, Torrance stated that it is because “radio is much easier to deliver because it’s just audio. I firmly believe it wasn’t Torrance’s intention to cause offence or indeed imply what many have taken from the interview. Easier said than done
Innotune - Electronic Music Podcast & Blog The 3.5mm jack is a rare example of technology that has stood the test of time, writes Chris Stokel-Walker. Image copyright iStock After rumours that Apple was going to get rid of the headphone jack in its imminent iPhone 7, more than 200,000 people have signed a petition asking them to reconsider. This humble plug is a rare example of technology that has stood the test of time, writes Chris Stokel-Walker. For what remains an unconfirmed rumour, a lot of people are upset about the new iPhone. It's alleged that Apple will be scrapping the 3.5mm socket, instead leaving headphones to be plugged into the "Lightning" port - the company's own design of socket. Cynics have pointed out that while this might enable iPhones to be slightly thinner, it will render many headphones useless and force manufacturers to pay Apple a fee to use their Lightning plugs on products. The petition says Apple's purported move would "singlehandedly create mountains of electronic waste". It will also be a blow for a piece of technology that has been remarkably resilient. Image copyright Getty Images Image copyright iStock/BBC
Introduction to the MIDI standard - Audiofanzine Due in large part to this need, the MIDI standard was born in 1983, mainly thanks to the support of Oberheim, Sequential Circuits and Roland. Considering how fast technology changes in the computing world, the fact that MIDI is still relevant after 32 years is nothing short of remarkable. General definition MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. This interface has both hardware and software components. MIDI was, thus, conceived to allow for data exchange between electronic musical instruments, effects processors and computers, in order to, for example, control several instruments from a single keyboard, record the played notes in a sequencing software or, more recently, control virtual effects and instruments. However, the MIDI standard goes way beyond strictly audio, it also allows the interconnection to other types of protocols (like SMPTE for syncing video) or even other types of hardware, like lighting systems. The hardware There are three types of MIDI connectors.
ELVIS AT SUN: An Overview of the Audio Restoration With all the well known and some less well known problems of lost master tapes and poor digital mastering it is a relief to find that the result of the 'Elvis at SUN' project is much better and more uniform than really ought to be possible to achieve. This is due to mostly lucky circumstances regarding what actually has been found in recent years, combined with some recent, unusually well calibrated tape transfers by Sony and perhaps most important of all, the huge manual restoration effort carried out by Kevan Budd. For those who care, even the relative amplitude in terms of RMS power distribution has been carefully measured and set by hand for consistency and for a uniform impression of vocal amplitude regardless of source. This is very much the opposite direction of normal mastering of vintage music of today, which seems to be focused on pushing up the level as much as possible over the 0 dB limit. Sadly, the SUN master tape of That's All Right is lost forever. Baby Let's Play House
Dugan questions use of ‘Dugan’ name by Behringer - PSNEurope Dan Dugan, CEO of Dan Dugan Sound Design, Inc., and recognised as the inventor of the acclaimed ‘Automixer’ automatic microphone mixing system (pictured), has issued a statement to clarify his company’s position with regards to Behringer’s use of the ‘Dugan’ name. “It has come to our attention that equipment manufacturer Behringer is using the Dugan name without permission,” said the statement, released on 1 May 2015, the day after Behringer parent Music Group announced it was to acquire TC Group (see Behringer’s Music Group to acquire TC Group). “We are always flattered when other manufacturers use expired Dan Dugan patents. Major names like Calrec, Lawo, SSL, and Studer have implemented ‘gain sharing’ algorithms that are variations on Dugan’s original work. Behringer, however, has been using Dan Dugan’s trademarked name without permission to describe a process that is not licensed. Dugan licensing guarantees the highest quality of transparent automixing.” www.dandugan.com
All hail the boffins: Introducing Genius! by PSNEurope - PSNEurope The brainy ones. The backroom boys. The boffins. Genius! is all about celebrating those clever people whose inventions have transformed the world of professional audio – and the very first issue, the print version of which mails with the February issue of PSNEurope, is now available to read in handy digital-edition form. We’ll be posting excerpts from Genius! To kick things off, then, here’s genius #1 (alphabetically, that is): Tony Andrews, inventor of the mid-range horn. Fascinated by sound generation since the 1960s, Tony Andrews is associated with some of the best point-source PA solutions ever made and, with a team of loyal colleagues, has brought to market several systems to garner the epithet ‘legendary’. PSN: What was the big breakthrough? We’d been very disenchanted with large-format compression drivers in the early ’70s, and we liked the sound of cone drivers a lot more. When did you realise you were onto something? Where did you go from there? What are you working on now?