omenti

a shot echoed in the dark

   Our guide, the Director of Development for The Cleveland Orchestra, noted how difficult it was to find matching marble for the lavatories.   There were only two of us and we wanted to set up in the main hall, but impressions must be made and little was being spared in the big three year remodeling job. 

 

Cleveland's Severance Hall is a remarkable place.  A odd mash-up of Art Deco and Egyptian Revival architecture, it was finished during the Great Depression and became home to The Cleveland Orchestra.  Like many symphony halls the acoustics were bad boarding on terrible.  Remodeling a few decades later partly fixed the problem, but in addition to rendering the pipe organ unusable,  was architecturally "wrong."  The work underway when we visited would address all of those issues and make the space one of the best concert halls in the world. 

 

Our company was doing quite a bit with digital music at the time.  There was a relationship with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and another with the Oberlin Conservatory.  Two of us who were doing much of the Oberlin work developed a relationship with The Cleveland Orchestra and Telarc Records on the side.¹  At the same time work on sound field reproduction was a serious research topic.

 

The idea behind sound field reproduction sounds simple enough. If you've ever been around live music - or even in a recording studio - you've probably noticed your home equipment can't begin to reproduce the acoustic experience.  The problem stems from the fact that the wavelengths of the sounds we hear range over three orders of magnitude and much of it is similar in size to musicians, audience members, seats, curtains, the room itself, etc etc.  These sounds are reflected, refracted and absorbed.  Moving anything causes a change.  It's a difficult problem that the music industry and Hollywood would love to see solved.  Plus it's an interesting problem!

 

The approach we were using had a microphone array on a tripod.  One up, one down and an odd number between them in the same plane as the floor.  Severance was undergoing acoustic tuning and we were going to set up the array to record some music to compare it with other techniques.

 

We were left alone in the open hall. It was very quiet so I did the obvious thing and clapped my hands once.  There was a lovely echo coming from everywhere at slightly different times.   If we recorded an even better "clap" - an impulse function - we could mathematically play with it and create a signature of the room.²  Armed with this we could have some fun.  We needed to create a good enough impulse.

 

Severance Hall is on the grounds of Case Western Reserve University - a lovely area with good restaurants and a lot of art and music.  (if you ever stay in the area get a room in Glidden House - fantastic little hotel).  I figured the school probably had an athletic department and quickly found a track coach.  I was able to talk him into lending me a starter's pistol.

 

Later that night in the darkened hall a shot rang out - only to be captured digitally.  Then a few more just to make sure there was enough.

 

Back at the Labs we had a special acoustically isolated room - an acoustically neutral room (these are rare and not cheap!)   Using the same microphone array that was used in Severance Hall we recorded some live music with musicians in the area.  The music was convolved with Severance Hall's signature and then mixed down to six channels for playback in the room.  

 

It was fairly convincing..  close your eyes and it really felt like the place the shot rang out in the great hall.   Of course you can do better, but it was a great excuse to have a bit of fun.

 

__________

¹ Over the years I’d spent some time worrying about image and sound quality. At one point I thought better was - well - better. My epiphany came in the a perfectly restored 66 red Mustang. It was near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory. We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it *was* an authentically restoration). The volume came up and the two of them were singing along to the music in pure delight. There is something transcendent about the music - even with awful reproduction in that noisy environment. Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough for most. As long as there's a personal touchstone.

²  take its Fourier Transform.

a thread of music

Today is Beethoven's 250^th birthday.  

 

When I was fifteen my big Christmas present was a Norelco cassette tape player.  Pre-recorded tapes were too expensive for me back then so I used its not so great microphone to record music from the family record player.   My Dad had developed a taste for Italian opera along with Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and a few other late 19^th century composers.  He wasn't  a fan of the classical or earlier periods, but his collection had a smattering from those periods too.  I placed an LP of Beethoven's 6^th Symphony and started recording.  

 

The tape that came with the recorder could record thirty minutes and had to be turned over halfway through, but that didn't matter.  I found myself listening carefully ... much more carefully than usual.  The recorder didn't do a good job on music, so I went back to the LP and listened again.  And again.  Aside from eating M&Ms that's probably all I did that afternoon. 

 

I'm not very good at playing musical instruments but have a history of concert-going.  My first year of college was in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah.   The Utah Symphony had a special offer for college students - the full concert season for fourteen dollars.  The performances were in the Mormon Tabernacle - an acoustically "bright" ellipsoid and perhaps the worst acoustics of any major concert hall.  My regular seat was a focal point for one of the bassoons.  Around the same time I managed to invite myself to a professor friend's Friday evening chamber music evenings.  The hook was set. 

 

The next school was in Pasadena.  Southern California had a lot of great music, but it was impossible without a car and money.  My lifeline was an FM radio.  Grad school turned out to be more interesting.   Stony Brook's  music department was home to The Beaux Arts Trio - one of the world's great piano trios.   Somehow I managed to find my way to more than a few master classes of a good friend who was a cello major.  In my third year things got a bit out of hand. Another grad student and I decided to start a concert series.   In retrospect being naive was a feature.  Somehow we found half of what we needed from the President's office.  It occurred to us the Graduate Student Association could help out, but they had other ideas.  We took matters into our own hands by running for the student senate.  As senators we  pushed for funding again and to our delight managed to get it on a narrow vote.  These things only happen to beginners and fools.    The auditorium we had for the first concert was directly over a bowling alley.   The second concert went more smoothly and by the third it was almost easy.  We even managed to turn a small profit selling out our last eight concerts. Others took over when we left and, excluding this year, the series is still going strong.

 

I need to listen to music carefully and find background music distracting.   The presence of live music is important and, although I'm missing physical presence, live performances during the pandemic manage to give some of it.  My home audio equipment isn't very good, but I've learned performances are deeper than their reproduction.  Books with stained pages are often just fine.

 

In the eight grade we had to take an occupational aptitude test.  My results predicted a poor match for any of the areas, so they had me take it over again.  The results were the same.  Next we had to write an "occupational monograph" on two types of work we were interested in.  The ones I picked weren't on the list, but turned out to predict what I eventually went into.

 

Several of the long journeys I've been on began in my teens. . That tape recorder on a Christmas day set me on one of those journeys What's fascinating is they've turned out to develop in way I couldn't have imagined.   Other threads developed later, but I wonder how many major ones develop then.

 

Today I'll pull out Dad's old LP with  Beethoven 6^th Symphony encoded in its spiral grove.  An RCA Red Seal re-issue of Toscanni and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it takes me back to that first listen, to it's performance years before and even to Beethoven's writings.    It's amazing how you seem to always find something new every time when you really listen.   Celebrate the day by picking one of your older paths and doing it deeply - Beethoven won't mind if it isn't music. 

 

there were always roads

I had the pleasure of chatting with and, more importantly, listening to Rhinnon Giddens.  She's become well known for tracing the importance of African Americans in music and, at the same time pointing out origins are complex and probably too complex to disentangle.

 

She's a singer, composer, and a fine claw hammer banjo player.¹  These days the banjo is most associated with the white South.  It turns out it came from the Caribbean with slavery and was almost exclusively a black instrument until the 1830s and 40s when white America started to absorb it. From there you can follow it back to Africa and from there to the middle East.  

 

Here she plays an Appalachian piece with Francesco Turrisi accompanying on  a middle Eastern frame drum.

Oddly enough the Irish bodhrán is a very recent instrument based on frame drums from the Middle East - so it fits.  

 

Many - probably most - of our musical styles have has roots elsewhere.  These ancestors also have roots and interconnections.  Trade created a cultural connection machine that made its presence known to people who had no idea where the influences were coming from.  It doesn't take too many people to show up on another shore something new - what can seem like straight-up magic.   Then culture takes and modifies what it finds as it grows.

 

There is no unique source or single direction.  

 

There were always roads...

__________

¹ She's also a MacArthur fellow.  Her music is powerful.  You need to listen.

 

finding the right position for the slider between education and vocation

William Rowan Hamilton had become obsessed with the idea of a three dimensional number system - sort of analogous to complex numbers being a two dimensional system.  The story he later told was every morning his son would say 'papa, can you multiply triples?' to which Hamilton would sadly shake his head and say 'no, I can only add and take away'.   Then, on a walk on the 16^th of October, 1843, he  crossed the Broom Bridge in Dublin and suddenly knew how to do it.  Rather than adding a single dimension to the complex plane, he'd add two giving three imaginary dimensions and one real dimension perpendicular to them.  In his excitement he carved it into the bridge with his knife:  i² =  j² = k² = ijk = -1

 

He called them quaternions.  They had some use in the day, but when people invented linear algebra, the technique fell by the wayside ... that is until quantum mechanics  came along about eighty years later.  And then computer graphics further down the road.

 

It turns out they're a lovely way to think about quantum mechanics and perform real calculations. Erwin Schrödinger knew enough about forgotten math to realize it was a beautiful gem.  Decades later, trying to improve the speed of computer graphics, a physicist realized they could be a key to quickly calculating rotations in space -- and Tomb Raider became the first computer game with smooth graphics on using relatively primitive personal computers.

 

Hamilton had other accomplishments that deeply impacted physics and math, but the quaternion story has a certain romantic element. To this day physicists gather at the Broom Bridge on the 16^th of October to celebrate.

 

The story of physics is that it's extremely important to think broadly and to keep expanding your learning.  It is also is relevant to education and work across many fields today.  That's what I want to get to, but first this wonderful parody of a certain song..  perhaps the best math song ever.

 

What prompted all of this was an email with a link describing the most contrarian college in America.  It's laser focused on a vision of an education seemingly without much a nod to vocation ...  seemingly..   I'd argue that it's too focused on a narrow piece of education, but have no doubt its graduates have learned how to learn..  they have the beginnings of a real education.  Mark Roosevelt, its President, sums it up:

Education should prepare you for all of your life. It should make you a more thoughtful, reflective, self-possessed and authentic citizen, lover, partner, parent and member of the global economy.

It  takes a special kind of student to thrive in a school like that.  I wouldn't have survived - my interests, those that I was motivated to dive into, lay elsewhere.  I'm happy it exists and that there is spectrum of schools for those who look.

 

My belief is a deep education with at least a few focuses creates the second type of person Claude Shannon describes:

“There are some people if you shoot one idea into the brain, you will get a half an idea out. There are other people who are beyond this point at which they produce two ideas for each idea sent in.”

The ability to get multiple ideas is core to serious play and creativity.   I'd claim focusing on education rather than finding the minimally easy path helps create the neural connections that make this possible.

 

A worry is that many, if not most, schools and students tend more towards vocation.  Focus on what is important to get a degree that will get you employed to pay off that mountain of debt.  Many (not all) businesses, on the other hand, would do well to have broader employees who are still learning and growing - those who can think creatively.  There is a disconnect. 

 

I hope this focus on vocation changes.  The rate of real change is great and people will keep up better if they are broader and more adaptable.  When recommending colleges I tend to focus on education ..  often to the consternation of those asking.  Of course I may be a poor example.  My education was far too narrow, but I've been lucky and curious enough to have been able to expand it a bit.  The other note is you can get a wickedly broad experience at many more places than you might imagine.

 

 Finally there's this odd emphasis on over-scheduling many pre-college kids, but I've probably written on how it kills creativity enough.

 

the next step in home audio?

 Still cold from the UPS truck the Apple HomePod woke up when I plugged it in and asked my iPhone for a dance.  They spun about and chatted in their local network for a minute or two before Siri introduced herself.  It was completely unexpected surprise from a great friend who  shares the love of music.  A day into the journey I have a few thoughts.

 

I'm a poor musician, but find it an important part of my life.  Grad school was at Stony Brook.  Besides an excellent physics department one of my reasons for doing grad school at Stony Brook was its proximity to music in  New York City..  That wasn't quite enough, so two of us founded a concert series at the university that thrives to this day.  At Bell Labs it became apparent that music might be a significant driver for Internet use and I found myself walking several paths.  One was sound field reconstruction.

 

Sound field reconstruction is just the fancy way of  recreating the sound where it was recorded or engineered in your home.  In theory you record the acoustic signatures of the recording studio and your living room and create a mathematical operation that makes your living room sound like the recording space.  In practice it's approximately hard.  Sound waves are fairly large and get reflected, absorbed and transmitted by and through everything in your room.  Making matters worse the sound field at different spots in the room is usually very different and things in the room move between and during listening sessions.  We made serious progress, but it took exotic microphone and speaker arrays as well as state of the art (for the time) computing to make it sort of work.,

 

One detail is centrally important.  Imagine sitting before a simple speaker cone.  Most of the sound comes straight at you with the volume falling off as you get away from the speaker's central axis.  Speakers have very characteristic patterns showing how loud they are depending on the angle you're sitting at as well as the frequency of the sound they're producing.  If you have two stereo speakers there is usually a sweet spot where the sound reproduction is optimal.  In this area the sound field can be fairly good and you can close your eyes and visualize where the musicians are.

 

Imagine an array of speakers, each with its own amplifier, all controlled by a computer, you can control the phase and amplitude (loudness) of each speaker.  The waves they send out interfere with each other as they expand outwards.   By controlling the phase and loudness (amplitude) of each speaker you can make them interfere in such a way that they create a new wave that can be aimed.  The little animation shows an array of four speakers in a row, but it can be any number and they don't have to be in a line.  The HomePod uses seven small speakers arranged in a ring.  

(you may have to click on the animation to start it)

 

The HomePod also has a ring shaped array of six microphones.  They listen to the room (sample it) at a fairly high rate and decide what parts of the music, from its stereo signature, need to go where and how it needs be modified to interact with the room and everything in it.  An Apple A8 processor, the same two billion transistor processor used in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, handles the computational chores.  This is much more power than we had back in the day.  Although I don't know exactly what they're working on, several people I know who are real experts at this have been at Apple for years.

 

 

The HomePod also has a computer controlled single woofer with its own amplifier mounted vertically to handle the low notes.  

 

I'll leave the specsmanship, mechanical and most of the UX discussion to others and just talk about what it sounded like.  I'm not golden eared, but rather a serious listener.   I focus on the music and let it take me where it pleases. 

 

I listened to works across several genres with the HomePod placed at about ear height in a small acoustically complex room.¹   For very small groups - soloists and piano quartets for example - the sound stage was excellent ..  about as good as my stereo pair of conventional speakers (about $3,000 in speakers).  The HomePod didn't match the reference speakers when I was sitting at the sweet spot, but was better when I moved around the room.  That is astounding. 

 

It was creating stereo -a  term has nothing to do with a pair of anything, but rather three dimensional.  Moving  beams of audio around it was painting a sound field in my living room. 

 

As I listened to larger ensembles I found a less accurate sound field.  That said it was still comparable to my reference pair when I was away from  my very small sweet spot - its effective sweet spot was larger.   Note for some pieces of music a good $500 pair of speakers would do a better job if properly installed, but  would love to see what a pair of HomePods placed about two meters apart would do.  Apple has promised the feature will be available later this year.  I've already earmarked the funds for immediately buying a second unit then.  I suspect a pair of HomePods will blow my reference pair away when it comes to sound stage placement.   That will be even more true for those who haven't carefully adjusted their current speakers with test recordings and a spectrum analyzer. 

 

You can control it from an iPhone, iPad or Mac, but Siri is the intended interface.  I've had poor luck with Siri on my iPhone, but here it works much better.  It's also much more robust to interference.  Microphones beamform too and it's clearly listening to you doing its own cocktail party trick.   That said it, and every other interface I've seen are just wrong when it comes to classical music.

 

Comparing it to the networked speakers from Amazon and Google is silly.  Their speakers are terrible and useful only as acoustic wallpaper you listen to in the background.  They're really microphones in your home listening to you assuming you agree to Google's  or Amazon's value proposition (I don't).  Privacy is vastly different - I'll go with Apple's differential privacy rather than Google's "you are the product" flavor.   But if music is secondary and you want a digital assistant with a speech interface, Google and Amazon are the ticket.  Apple is going after the other audio companies along with making its platform stickier in the process

 

I suspect the speaker will be like the Apple TV - fairly stable hardware with the bulk of improvements coming through software updates.   My list of UI and UX issues is growing, but I suspect this will become part of my life. 

 

And a final caveat - speakers involve personal taste.  YMMV

 __________

¹ I'm very familiar with these pieces.  With one exception  I've heard them live and I've even been involved in the recording process on two. 

Ecstacy  Anonymous 4 and Mike Marshall

Us  Regina Spektor 

Seven Swans Al Petteway

The Heart Asks for Pleasure First  Ahn Trio

Black Horse and the Cherry Tree   K.T. Turnstall

The Littlest Birds  The Be Good Tanyas

Submarines The Lumineers

Pipeline (electric and acoustic versions) The Duo Tones

An Spailpin Fanach Connie Dover

The Heroic Conditions of the Universe Pt 7 After the Storm Alexandre Desplat

Turn it Around Lucius

Jolene Mindy Smith's version

Vespro della Beate Vergine: Domine ad Adiuvandum a 6 Monteverdi

Shchedrik Kitka

Our Town Iris DeMent

Sun Will Set Zöe Keating

Don Giovanni Madamina, IL Catalogo and Questo Mozart  (sort of a sign of politics)

Canon a due Violincelli in D Major Gabrielli

Cello Sonata in D Major Op 69 Beethoven

Suite No 6 in D Major  JS Bach (Yo-Yo Ma)

   

a most remarkable instrument

minipost

Let your spectrum analyzer listen to  middle C on a piano and take a look at what comes out. (guess what?  your smartphone can do it)   Most of the acoustic energy, assuming the piano is tuned to a 440 A is concentrated at a tad below 262 hertz (cycles per second), but other things are going on.  Bursts of energy at multiples of the 262 Hz fundamental  frequency paint the spectrum along with a few other bursts.  The integer multiples of the fundamental frequency are called partial harmonics and the others are inharmonic partials.  Together they form a large part of why a piano sounds like a piano - in fact why a specific piano sounds like that particular instrument - it's timbre.

The time development of a note can be very complex with the distribution of energy in the various harmonics changing as the note decays.   A really nice way to study this is with Fourier analysis.  I gave a crude non-mathematical introduction earlier, but I just came across another beautiful illustration. 

Enter Anna-Maria Hefele .  She's  a remarkable singer who has mastered the art of overtone singing.  Thanks to Richard Feynman's life-long fascination with Tuva you're probably aware of Tuvan throat singing.   Her singing is much richer.  Let's start with her voice as an instrument in this lovely version of H.I.F. Biber's Rosary Sonata 1.

 

and now a graphical look into the flexibility she has ..  simply wonderful!  Such a fine way to show off the overtones.

drawing lines of sound

Sound is an ornery beast.  Even serious people use different definitions.  To a physical scientist it's a vibration that moves through a solid, liquid or gas as a mechanical compression ..  moving regions of alternation compression and expansion.  To a psychologist or neurologist it's the result of processing the brain does after it detects the mechanical compressions - what you hear in your mind and neatly answering the question about trees falling in the woods without anyone around.

 

What we hear covers a range of wavelengths ranging from about 15 meters to 1.5 centimeters -  a factor of a thousand.  Visible light's range is less than two.  Sound waves are relatively slow in the air - about 340 meters per second.  The speed depends on temperature and, to a lessor extent, pressure and humidity.  Sound waves to be unfocused, bouncing off some things and getting absorbed and attenuated by others.  Our brains have evolved to make sense of all of this although sometimes we want better control.

 

If you're listening to live music the positions of the instruments and design of the hall can make enormous differences.  Even where you sit.  Acoustic engineers attempt to make the experience good over as much of the hall as they can, but have to deal with different audience sizes, the dynamics of the music and size of the ensemble, and even the clothes worn by the audience.  Some halls are better suited for certain types of music and some regions just sound better.

 

Movie theaters are a problem.  The same problem you have with music plus it has to synchronize with the film everywhere.  Not easy as the difference in distance to different speakers can sensed.  Some people can detect sounds that aren't synchronized to within ten milliseconds ...  a wave traveling ten feet more or less than one from another speaker for example.  Blockbuster movies - the ones that tend to make the most money - often have sudden percussive blasts of sound.  We are very sensitive to slight differences in timing for such sounds.  It would be great to be able to provide a good experience at every seat.  Wouldn't it be great if you could aim sound?

 

It turns out you can... and it started with a Canadian inventor around 1900.

 

Reginald Fesseden is one of those names you keep running into during the early days of radio. He noticed that if you take two slightly different frequencies and run them through something called a mixer they "beat" ..  You get a new frequency that is equal to the difference of the original frequencies.¹  He discovered this in electrical circuits, but the same thing happens in sound waves in the air.  You may have heard this beating if you've tune a musical instrument against a mechanical or electronic tuning fork.  Fessenden's discovery revolutionized radio and is still used.   In the sixties people realized you might be able use it to aim some types of sound.

 

Very high frequency sounds don't spread as much lower frequencies.  Even speech requires a wide range of frequencies.  Depending on the frequency of the sound how much the sound waves spread varies.  Generally the higher the frequency, the lower the spread.

 

The trick is to use ultrahigh frequencies - sound waves that would disturb bats and dogs. You use frequencies that differ by a frequency that you want to create.   Say your desired sound is a 440 A (440 Hertz or cycles per second)  and one of your ultrasonic frequencies is 100,000 Hz you beat the 100,000 Hz signal against one at 100,440.  In practice there is an array of ultrasonic transducers - the fancypants term for speakers - and with a few tricks you can create a "beam" that you can point.  If the beam strikes someone's ear, they'll  hear the 440 A, but someone just outside the path will hear nothing.   Generally you can get a beam about two feet wide at twenty feet.  

 

Clever, but there are a few problems that have kept it confined to very specialized uses - art installations for example.²  So I was curious when I heard about the Impossible Run:

 

It's encouraging and even heartwarming - send a couple of "lines" of sound down a track as a guideway.  The video is slick - a design company that did the work - but the idea isn't terribly flexible.  On the other hand it makes you to think a bit about what navigation for the partly sighted and fully blind could be like.

 

The sound beam approach is similar to the early days of aviation where directional radio stations spread out like a grid across the country beaming a pair signals in four directions.  The signal pair are at a slight angle.  One was the A in Morse Code  - dit dah, and the other N - dah dit.  The pilot tuned a radio receiver and, if you were flying directly towards the tower,  you'd hear a blur .. a more or less constant tone.  Veer to one side or the other and an A or a N would begin to appear.   This later became something much more flexible (VOR) that allowed you to use 360 different directions and then the shift to inertial guidance and finally GPS systems.  

 

So what about the partly sighted person?  The problem strikes home as my wife Sukie is nearly blind in one eye and has no peripheral vision.  She bumps into things and things bump into her.  Unlike a runner on an empty straight track or an airplane in flight, she has to worry about objects, often moving objects, in close proximity.  At least she still has some vision.  The problem is even worse for totally blind people.

 

I've built a few things, but building something smart enough to be trustworthy and making a useful interface is a serious problem.  I was inspired by the few blind people who have taught themselves how to echolocate (no kidding - this really works!).   For Sukie and other partly sighted person  personal LIDAR is probably the best emerging technology.  This is about the level for the amateur experimenter.  For the totally blind person you probably want centimeter accuracy navigation with LIDAR for object avoidance.  Preferably without realtime network connections!

 

Right now some hardware from Nvidia would work .. the problem is it would take several hundred watts of power.³  Expect a lot of progress.

 

I'm particularly curious about what might happen a new iPhone generations down the road with AirPods providing a sonic augmented reality interface.   I've done some thinking and a bit of simple prototyping to work out some ideas, but it is one of those things that will happen in a couple of years as some technology curves cross.   Perhaps hats come back into fashion.

 

Geordi La Forge indeed

 

In the near term I wouldn't be surprised to see movie theaters begin to provide sound through smartphone earbuds, but some sounds are not "heard" through the ears.  Some low frequency and loud sounds are detected as pressures on the skin and mixed in with the other signals in the brain to form the soundscape around us. Then again sophisticated earbuds and computation may add  augmented reality to the movie or home video experience.

__________

¹ Actually you get two.  If the original frequencies are f₁ and f₂ you get f₁ - f₂ and f₁ + f₂.  In practice you only use one. The new frequencies are called heterodynes.

² There is quite a history of trying to solve problems with this approach.  Sometimes it is called a sound laser, but the term is inaccurate and that's something else entirely.  It may be one of those hammers that keeps looking for the right problem.

³ Light Detection and Ranging.  A rotating pulsing laser beam measures range.  These are common on autonomous vehicles. 

 

its a material world

5:25 am - excellent!

 

I brush the last of the snow from my coat and switch on the lights before taking my seat.   A few minutes of silence and then a door opens and closes reverberating for about three seconds.  The clicking of shoes echoes through Warner Hall as she makes her way to the bench.  A minute of preparation and then the Praeludium in G by Bach fills her space and mine.  I sit back and shut all but the Bach from my mind.

 

She is doing an excellent job until - rats.  Bach derails and I sit up in my chair looking around.  A female shout fills the space reverberating for about three seconds

sh*tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt!

She goes back a few bars and dances through the problem smoothly.  Now a piece I don't recognize, but it is still clearly Bach until about 6:55.   Her shoes and coat go on and steps click to the door in the distance.

 

And a little magic as a female voice is softly singing Bach.

 

A door opens and closes.  The reverberation is about three seconds and then silence. Time to switch off the amplifiers and make some hot chocolate before getting to work.

 

She was an organ student in Oberlin and I was in a special room in New Jersey where we were working on the reconstruction sound fields.  A special seven microphone array had been installed in the hall with a computer handling compression mixing and compression in realtime.  The bitstream made traveled Eastward to our room where a reasonably convincing illusion of the Hall's sound space was created.  We had created a virtual acoustic reality.¹

 

Pipe organs - the old mechanical 'tracker action' organs - may have been the most sophisticated technology of the middle ages.  Oberlin's Warner Hall organ is a wonderful Flentrop that is ideally suited for Bach - a fact that partially determined where the array went.  Listen to a performance.²

 

The construction of modern tracker action organs hasn't changed much in a half millennia.  Each make has its own special alloys for pipes and techniques that are specific to each company and even to a master builder.  The sounds from the metals and woods of the pipes have distinctive signatures that come from voicing by golden eared experts who reason with the material in quest of perfection.  

 

I have a habit of taking a few weeks at the beginning of each year to learn a bit about something new.  The idea is to get to the point where I can ask questions that aren't completely foolish.  By the end of the two weeks I always feel I know much less about the subject than when I started, but this is sign of progress.  It is a bit like learning a few phrases  in the language of a country you're visiting.  Even if people speak perfect English they appreciate that you've tried.  That becomes a starting point if you want to learn.  

 

Several of these mini sabbaticals have been guided by designers and craftspeople.  Those who know fabrics, metals and woods at an intimate level.  There are amazing properties that we usually don't think about.  How can you put an edge on a knife, how does concrete work, what happens when you bend metal, how do metals influence flavor?  How do you tune the exhaust note of a sports car?  How do you build flexibility and stretch into denim?  Some of this is well studied. Much of it isn't.

 

There is an effort to move beyond STEM education by adding the arts - STEAM or STE[A]M education.  It often involves sensors, lights and some computing power with a few companies appearing to supply and inspire experimenters.    A few brilliant bits have emerged from people like Iris van Herpen and Björk, but most of it is - well - learning and part of a transition  Design languages will emerge and now is probably an exciting time to get involved.  The beauty is that it encourages people to acquire the skills it takes to make things - something that is missing from most K12 programs.³

 

The Maker community is a starting point if you're interested in the intersection of the physical world and technology (mostly computing).  While a great hobby and even a business opportunity for some, I see a path to something deeper.  Most of us are idiot savants with the technology and stuff that surrounds us.  Perhaps this is a path to an evolution of our education that embraces the past and the future and recognizes art and science as active partners with engineering.   Computing and networks are important, but so is the material world and understanding how we relate to it.

 

A goal is to bring together people with a wide range of expertise and create new classes of materials and designs.  Clothing that adjusts itself to local temperature and humidity while remaining comfortable and perhaps even having a wonderful 'feel' and movement.  New ways to make proteins in during cooking to create entirely new flavors.  Building materials that repair themselves.  Fabrication processes that allow individual expression while being inexpensive enough for average people.  Tools and designs that encourage people to add to the design rather than just  consume.  

 

The sky is the limit.  The problem is finding the right spark with enough constraints that collaborations begin to reverberate.  But that is another story...

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¹ There were a number of other experiments in shared acoustic VRs and sound field reconstruction for conferences.  

² The Oberlin Conservatory site has a link to an organ concert in Warner Hall that was covered by the public radio program Pipe Dreams.  Worth a listen!

³ Make: magazine is a good resource.  They're mostly focused on male-centric STEM (mostly T and E) projects, but Make: Volume 43 Feb/Mar 2015 has sections on clothing and wearables.  Adafruit is very woman friendly with supplies and projects to get someone going.

Making It by Chris Lefteri is a brief but excellent book detailing a few dozen techniques and an introduction to the different technques used at a variety of production scales.  Get the 2^nd edition!

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Recipe Corner

 

What happens when you have a can of plum tomatoes and some coconut milk.  Very easy and a nice area for experimentation

 

Tomato Soup with Coconut Milk

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 tbl olive oil

° 1 large yellow onion - chopped

° 1 celery stalk - chopped

° 1 carrot -chopped

° 2 garlic cloves- minced

° 28 oz can peeled plum tomatoes - real San Marzanos are a bonus!

° 2 cups vegetable broth, unsalted preferred

° coconut milk (the stuff in the cans, not the dairylike drink)

° salt and pepper to taste

 

Technique

 

° heat the oil in a pot to a medium heat

° add onions and reduce the heat a bit. Add some salt and reduce the onions until soft.

° add the carrot and celery stirring every now and again for about five minutes.  Add the garlic and cook for another minute.

° pour in the stock and tomatoes, bring to a boil and then cut to a simmer and cover.  Cook for about a half hour

° salt and pepper to taste

° stir in about a half cup of the coconut milk.  (a full cup may be even better)

° serve

 

 

listening

Not long ago I was in a very dark area on a clear moonless night.  Andromeda was well above the horizon.  I hadn't seen it clearly in awhile and just thinking about it fires your imagination - its light took well over two million years to make it to Earth.  The closest galaxy, but the most distant object you can see unaided.  As I stood just watching that galaxy as well as the rich band of our own galaxy a coyote barked in the distance.  A chill, a good chill, went down my spine.  I miss regularly encountering and appreciated nature.  We have far too much artificial light and noise in our environment.

 

I sometimes escape noise by sealing off the outside world and listening to music that makes me pay attention.  I don't think this is as common as it once was.  Early this morning I had an exchange with Om on our bond with music.  This is the note I sent with a bit of light editing:

 

Our connection with music is an area that couple of us spent puzzled over in our Human Computer Interface department. We were sketching out what it would take to build a framework probing what music meant to people sociologically, anthropologically and neurologically.  Ultimately the On Music to Sontag's On Photography.   Some of the questions are extremely deep and difficult, but we learned a little.

In the past decade progress has been made on the neurological front. We’re clearly musical creatures and that may be rare in the animal world - it may be that music is more of a definition of what makes us human than tool making or certain types of abstract thought (or not - it is an active area of research). We can recognize certain acoustic patters as music, but it takes experience and focus to understand this music thing more deeply. The act of learning to play an instrument or sing causes some neural rewiring and this can be significant in early life. People who follow this path have a tendency to listen to music more closely than those who don’t - even if they’ve given up their instrument later on. At a more extreme level is the act of creating novel music - very few people compose music. The percentage is lower than those who write books, poetry or do art. 

Anthropologists note that music is universal across the thousands of cultures they've studies. Singing is common to all but a handful and percussion appears to be everywhere.   Once we had to make our own music or be in physical proximity with those that did.  Technology made it  extremely easy to obtain and listen to passively. As phonographs and radio became  common, music instruction slid.  Concert going has become more rare and is tending towards a social occasion. Marketers have come to understand the subtle power of music in ads and stores so we have an overabundance of musical wallpaper. The same goes  video and movies. 

When I was a teenager music was a dominant form of both entertainment and communication among the young. I can’t stress the last point strongly enough. Music was how we talked about the important issues of the day - the war, feminism, racism, poverty, pollution, love and dreams. Electronic communication was mostly broadcast media with a limited number of channels. The written word was expensive and not terribly targeted (there were exceptions). Music linked and inspired a generation.

The quality of reproduction wasn’t important. You listen closely enough that the creation in your mind is more important than the quality of the reproduction machinery. People have been moved to tears by wax cylinder recordings - I’ve  soared to ecstasy listening to monophonic 78s. The same with a friend singing to me over an extremely low fidelity cellphone link.

There was a period, mostly beginning in the 50s, when people began to collect records seriously enough that their playback mechanism was worth less than their record collection. Teenagers latched on with cheap 45rpm monophonic players and became a serious market.  At the same time advances were being made in sound reproduction and home hi-fi become seriously better than radio or 45s. By the late 60s teenagers were spending money on their own stereos or were using their parents.  

Move ahead to the present and we have many other ways to spend our time. Teenagers aren’t allowed to have the free interactions with others their parents had, so as danah notes, networked communications while being physically solitary or in small groups has become more common. This has reduced the amount of time focused music listening once occupied. Now we're more driven by novelty and following someone or something else's selections.  Self assembling radio channel equivalents have become important and are replacing radio, but we rarely seriously listen. We value portability and often listen with enough background noise that good reproduction quality or even stereo imaging is not terribly important.

There was a period where audiophiles lead the way - they were buying kit that would become mass market five years later. These folks still exist, but the mass market no longer does. If you don’t listen closely, a smartphone streaming 64 kbps to medium quality earbuds or a bluetooth speaker is overkill. Few take care installing systems into homes and work on sound field reproduction largely came to a halt a decade ago (other than some serious research trying to understand how to do it in movie theaters).

Speaker manufacturers have to deal with a world where the mass market is one of convenience and style. There are a few physics tricks you can use, but the source material isn’t terribly demanding given how people listen. Serious non-audiophile people are most using ok quality convention diaphragm speaker systems or headphones. It is difficult to find a medium quality system these days. I wouldn’t want to be in the component business in the US.

One has to wonder if serious listening and perhaps amateur performance and composition will make a comeback. Will some of us move away from passive uncritical listening? There are some interesting tools you can imagine, but it is impossible to judge if they would be useful without making them real and teaching people how to use them. Steve Jobs misjudged this.

I take great pleasure listening deeply. I don’t really need to have a high quality installation to do do - but I do spend money attending live performances and know composers and serious musicians. I don’t know if we’ll come back to listening and playing. There are a few interesting conjectures that suggest paths, but behavioral change is difficult to arrange.  But there may be a benefit - the neurological benefits of performing music may guard against dementia along with having an impact on what being ‘happy’ means, so these are interesting societal questions.

There is no right or wrong. Music is important to me - it is locally brilliant performing the job that I want it to do.  I may be a dinosaur.

 

a most fascinating area…

 

  Isaac Stern talks about the importance of the space between the notes and how you move among them.  Yo-Yo Ma talks about the material of music - do you express it as wood - if so what kind? Is it steel, light, water.  How are temporal structures created that seed ideas in the listener's mind only to be expanded on later?  How does a musician interpret all of this.  

 

One of the first pieces of music that seized my imagination is Schubert's E flat major Piano Trio.  I've listened to the at least a half dozen performances of the Schubert piece and several have been live.  I'm not a musician and this is not an analysis by any stretch of the imagination - just a few observations.   The most remarkable version was recorded in 1952 by Pablo Casals (cello), Mieczyslaw Horszowski (piano) and Alexander Schneider (violin).   Schubert wrote it soon after he learned about Beethoven's death and shortly before his own.  Beethoven was something of a hero and the second movement (starting around 12:20) is a funeral march with a haunting theme in a minor key.  You've probably heard it in movies even if you haven't listened to the Trio.  The second movement is followed by a happier lighter movement and then a bright allegro for the forth movement.  Somehow the memory of the development of the funeral theme has been maintained - expertly in the hands of these musicians - and near the end of the piece it comes back twice and then almost magically is transformed to a major key.  It doesn't cease to take my breath away - the universe you are in becomes something else in a half step.

 

The old recording I had was monophonic and in poor shape.  It completely blows away any live performance and the best 24 bit 192 kbps recording I listened to at a recording studio in Cleveland using a reference system that cost a good deal more than a luxury car.  The music is closer for me on a low fidelity digital version I made that came from the original scratchy old LP via a cassette,

 

Someone has uploaded it to YouTube.  There are many wonderful types and performances of music.  There are several piano trios I like as much and one even more, but there be deep magic here.

 

 

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Recipe Corner

 

 

I had some extra mango puree (any Indian market will have some - restaurants use canned pulp when mangos are out of season).  This wasn't carefully measured, but came out just fine.  Substitutions would be interesting...  honey rather than sugar, cashews rather than almonds...  cardamom goes so well with mango, that I wouldn't leave it out.

 

Mango Bread

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 cups whole wheat flour

° 1 tsp baking soda

° 1 tsp baking powder

° 1/4 tsp salt

° 1/4 cup vegetable oil

° 2 tsp ground cardamom

° 1/2 cup white cane sugar - use a bit more if the pulp isn't very sweet

° 2 cups mango puree

° 2 tbl flaxseed meal 

° 1/4 cup of slivered almonds 

 

Technique

 

° heat oven to 350° F and grease a 9x5 pan

° in a mixing bowl whisk together everything from flour to salt

° in another bowl blend the remaining ingredients except for the nuts

° Mix in the dry ingredients with the wet and add the 

° pour into the pan and bake about until a toothpick comes clean - about 45 to 50 minutes

° transfer to a wire rack for cooling

 

 

tools and the jobs they do

When I was a teenager consumer grade microwave ovens were beginning to appear.  They were very spendy - much more than a conventional oven - so there was a need to convince people there was a deep need.   They seemed to settle on the microwave as a cook-almost-everything, but do it fast, oven.  A neighbor bought one and ruined expensive cuts of meat and numerous other dishes.  The problem was no one looked into the physics and chemistry of cooking and specifically cooking with one of these beasts.  The worst offense was the fact you couldn't create the conditions for caramelization and the Maillard reaction, but there was a problem that different foods absorbed microwaves differently and they only penetrated an inch or so.  In the end it was a $500 (in 1970 money which works out to about $3,000 today) 700 watt water heater and food defroster.   

 

The trick was realizing what the microwave was good for - reheating food and cooking certain types of frozen food, popping popcorn, and measuring the speed of light - and dropping the price by riding the penetration curve.¹  They're nearly ubiquitous, but no one considers them a chef grade do-it-all tool.  In the end the microwave was just a tool and a very specialized one at that.  Curiously a new food industry was created just to support in and a good deal of food preparation has been outsourced in the name of convenience.   There are times when compromises are made when a tool becomes ubiquitous.  

 

A lot of people are excited by the prospect of 3d printing without much concern of what it is really useful for and how it might move past its present state.  Several articles have appeared comparing it to the sewing machine and suggesting companies should look at what is currently going on in the crafting world.  It probably makes sense to take a quick look at the history of the sewing machine.

 

Apparel and fashion are extremely interesting.  They came of age with the industrial revolution, have rich social and political components, are a huge industry - $240 a year for every person on the planet at this point.  It is also happens to be an industry undergoing enormous change with greater change yet to come.  

 

The sewing machine is  one of the prime enablers of mass produced apparel and it is the only major component that has resisted automation.² Like many innovations there was a long development period - about six decades - and  multiple inventions. The first practical machines offered dramatic improvements speeding up sewing from ten to one hundred times and making the process much more uniform. It became practical to make clothing in the home rather than just mend it.  Unlike the 3d printer, it arrived on the market with a killer job to be done.  Households realized they needed it.   The early Singers happened to be very expensive, but clever marketing and financing campaigns made them a fixture in American households.  

 

The sewing machine didn't appear in a vacuum.  The cotton gin was developed in the late 1790s making industrial scale cotton production practical. This brought slavery back in a huge way creating an enormous cotton production in the Southern states.  About the same time the English launched into the development and perfection of high quality fabric manufacture using power looms largely driven by water or steam power.  By the time the sewing machine arrived on the scene high quality and inexpensive fabric was within the reach of the people who bought sewing machines.

 

Taking a two dimension piece of fabric, cutting it into appropriate shapes in such a way that it will fit someone after the pieces are sewn together is anything but a trivial exercise.  The traditional process, something still used in the bespoke world, was only for extremely skilled people who taken years to learn the tricks of the trade.  As a result clothing for anyone but the wealthy didn't fit very well and tended to be expensive.   Around the mid 1860s  Ebenezer Butternick started selling cardboard patterns for children's and women's clothing.  The innovation that made his fortune was his use of grading - making the patterns in a variety of sizes that scaled from a base size. Using them average sewing machine users could make clothing that was close enough to fitting and skilled users could tailor the final result.  Several competitors appeared on the scene within a decade and women's fashion magazines with ordering information for the latest patterns began to appear.  By the early 1900s Butternick ran the largest publishing plant in the US.  In the 50s they bought a name you've probably heard of - Vogue.   

 

Three elements had come together - desirable and inexpensive materials, a home fabrication machine that could efficiently produce good results with modest skills, and the rapid growth of inexpensive design that could fit a wide range of human sizes and shapes.   Personalized home fabrication took off like wildfire. 

 

As the US emerged from depression and WWII homemade clothing began to drop in popularity.  Commercial clothing was dropping in price to the point where it usually wasn't worth the effort and marketing was improving.  Sewing as a hobby and home business continued on a reduced scale, but sewing skills were now largely used for mending.  Clothing prices started to drop dramatically in the 80s as shipping containers made it practical for third world production and fast low quality disposable fashion emerged.

 

Home sewing is largely a hobby at this point, but it has been making a modest comeback driven by the slow fashion movement that is appearing mostly among millennials.³  This growth has been cited as a model for 3d printing -- I think that is a mistaken notion.  The home sewing machine is a tool - a tool with a well understood purpose and enormous flexibility. It is becoming desirable in some leading edge parts of popular culture and is inexpensive.  Designs are easy to obtain and modify and advanced amateurs can make their own.  The notion of copyright on apparel in the US allows an enormous amount of unencumbered design flexibility.  Wonderful materials - those with the right sensoaesthetic qualities - are available from around the world.  It is possible for amateurs to make pieces that will delight.  

 

We're a  way's off from the delight level in 3d printing - unless you are into 3d action figures, making prototypes or other items where material quality and cost is not terribly important.  3d printing is a very important tool in some niches, but it is just that - nothing more than tool without a clear sense of a general purpose killer job to be done.

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¹ OK - maybe measuring the speed of light with a microwave is unusual.  I set up a demonstration for my physics for premeds course when I was a grad student.  I put chocolate in a microwave oven and ran it for about a minute to produce standing wave melt marks in the chocolate.  Look at the microwaves frequency on the back of the oven, measure the melt marks and calculate the speed of light:-)  They were happy - I had about two pounds of chocolate for twenty students.

² Automated sewing is fairly close after more than thirty years of development.  It may not be adopted quickly as third world sewing not far removed from slave labor is incredibly inexpensive.  

³ Slow fashion is an interesting development.  It is a complex reaction to the direction of commercial fast fashion largely driven by a desire for quality over quantity, environmental concerns, a rejection of uniform-like style dictated by marketing, and clothing that fits.  Over-Dressed by Elizabeth Cline is the best introduction to the subject I've seen.

An interesting weakness of commercial fashion is poor fit.  There is no such thing as an average person.  While we tend to find clothing that has a 'good enough' fit, studies suggest over 70% of women can't find dresses that fit to their size. (meaning there is some aspect of the clothing that would fit better in another size .. or possibly not in any size).  Some adjustments are made, but mostly people put up with the poor fit rather than visit a tailor or having custom fitted clothing made.  No one has cracked this yet - a glaring problem that will eventually be addressed.

There are several relevant posts in this blog - sort under fashion and skim if you like.  

 

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Music corner

 

I'm still recovering from the flu and making food hasn't been a central part of my life.  But while walking at dawn on a glorious Spring morning I thought about Mendelssohn's Overture to 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' op.20   When people think of Mendelssohn they tend to think of a certain piece of music used in weddings from a piece with a similar title.  It turns out that came nearly 20 years later.  Mendelssohn was 17 when he wrote the Overture.  

 

The quality isn't great with youtube's compression, but you get the idea.  If you like it and don't have a copy there are several excellent versions 

Seventeen - how many people do you know who had were up to their opus 21 with several serious pieces under their belt by then?

 

A bit over a decade ago I spent quite a bit of time at the Oberlin Conservatory.  One of the delights was dropping in on students and watching them play.  One of the all time fun pieces for string players is Mendelssohn's Octet.  

The performance is good here - I Musici is a quality ensemble - but the youtube quality leaves a lot to be desired.  Still - some pure joy lurks.

Oh - Mendelssohn was 16 when he wrote this one.