umassamherstaudio Google group

Hi all,
In case you did not get the email, we have a Google group now at

http://groups.google.com/group/umassamherstaudio

James, could please add this site to the links on the right?

I have posted my (very) informal notes from the Boston AES meeting last week, and will soon make the group page look a little better than its current default state.

The BAM Audio School

BAM Audio School

Once upon a time, Audio Engineers learned their craft while working for years in studios, observing and learning from experienced Engineers, Producers, Musicians, and Technicians. These days most of the major commercial studios have closed and it is very difficult to get an opportunity to make coffee in a real studio, much less get into sessions. Add today's easy-to-afford software with easy-to-use presets and there is even less reason to actually have to learn anything about Audio Engineering other than avoiding distortion.

The BAM Audio Course is a free online Audio Course intended to save the “art” of Audio Engineering from becoming another victim in a point-and-click world. Preset sounds and settings are convenient and easy but rarely give results beyond “good enough”. Judging from the popular opinion that most of today’s music feels and sounds inferior to older music, perhaps “good enough” simply ISN’T.

The course will include text "lectures", audio files, and video clips from myself and other Engineers, Producers, Musicians and Studio Managers. The material provided here is not intended to take the place of hands-on training at a school or as a studio intern, but I certainly hope that at the very least it will show people something about how the ART of Audio Engineering can improve the ART of music on many levels.

Audio Electronic Kits

Chip Amp - They have a DYI power amp kit. Check it out, it's definitely a good project for the M5 audio heads!

MPJA Online - "Supplier of Industrial Electronics & Educational Electronics for over 30 years." They also have a 1 Watt amplifier kit for $4.69!

Carl's Electronics - Audio kits ranging from an Audio to Light Modulator to a Sound Effects Generator, and plenty more.

HobbyTron - "HobbyTron.com is the worlds largest supplier of the most popular RC Cars, RC Helicopters, RC Planes, RC Boats, Airsoft Guns, Magic Tricks, Science Kits...", they also have some audio kits too.

FishFive.Net DIY - More Pro Audio DYI kits.

oneminutevacation.org

one-minute vacation

Surely you can spare a minute to clean your ears? Take a one-minute vacation from the life you are living.

One-minute vacations are unedited recordings of somewhere, somewhen. Sixty seconds of something else. Sixty seconds to be someone else.

oneminutevacation.org

Direct Note Access

the new Melodyne dimension

Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.

To watch the short promotional video, go to: http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna

Oldest recorded voices sing again

BBC NEWS / TECHNOLOGY
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Friday, 28 March 2008, 10:21 GMT

Oldest recorded voices sing again

The recording was made using a phonautograph
An "ethereal" 10 second clip of a woman singing a French folk song has been played for the first time in 150 years.

The recording of "Au Clair de la Lune", recorded in 1860, is thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice.

A phonograph of Thomas Edison singing a children's song in 1877 was previously thought to be the oldest record.

The new "phonautograph", created by etching soot-covered paper, has now been played by US scientists using a "virtual stylus" to read the lines.

"When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal," audio historian David Giovannoni, who found the recording, told AP.

"The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke."

Sheet music

The short song was captured on April 9, 1860 by a phonautograph, a device created by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.

The device etched representations of sound waves into paper covered in soot from a burning oil lamp.

Lines were scratched into the soot by a needle moved by a diaphragm that responded to sound. The recordings were never intended to be played.

It was retrieved from Paris by Mr Giovanni, working with First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers and sound archivists who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all.

To retrieve the sounds scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California made very high-resolution digital scans of the paper and used a "virtual stylus" to read the scrawls.

However, because the phonautograph recordings were made using a hand-cranked device, the speed varied throughout, changing the pitch.

"If someone's singing at middle C and the crank speeds up and slows down, the waves change shape and are shifting, Earl Cornell, a scientist at LBNL, told AP.

"We had a tuning fork side by side with the recording, so you can correct the sound and speed variations."

Previously, the oldest known recorded voice was thought to be Thomas Edison's recording of Mary had a little lamb. The inventor of the light bulb recorded the stanza to test another of his inventions - the phonograph - in 1877.

"It doesn't take anything away from Thomas Edison, in my opinion," Mr Giovannoni told Reuters.

"But actually, the truth is he was the first person to have recorded [sound] and played it back."

The new recording will be presented on 28 March at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California.

Some nice sites

Here are a few sites definitely worth looking at:

Miller Puckette - The author of 'Max', a graphical development environment for music synthesis named after Max Mathews and 'Pure Data', the open source version of 'Max'. Of importance is the free online book written by Puckette titled 'Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music' (the first link). I've only touched the surface of this book but it's been enough to realize how much information it holds entirely related to electronic music. "This is a book about using electronic techniques to record, synthesize, process, and analyze musical sounds...this book will focus exclusively on what used to be called 'computer music', but which should really now be called 'electronic music using a computer'"-Puckette

Make - You may have heard of the magazine before, well this is the site. All sorts of DIY projects from electronic related to woodworking.

TED: Ideas worth spreading - TED is a conference where people simply spread their ideas. The site hosts some great videos of presentations given covering most topics. It's always nice to see the originality and innovation that takes place within disciplines you normally might not look into by yourself.

AES Educational Directory

Here is a list of institutions that offer audio engineering:
AES Educational Directory

The closest one I found is based out of Springfield, MA:
Generating Tomorrow's Future Today, Inc.

Free E-Books

Audio Courses offers three e-books you can download for free:
Audio Compression
Audio Electronics
MIDI Theory

Online Courses/Programs

Here are some online audio engineering courses and programs:
Audio Courses
Berklee Music Production
The Audio Master Class

Here is a free online resource of technical courses:
TechOnline