Book Review: Music, Sound, and Multimedia, From the Live to the Virtual

A 3000 word review of a series of ten academic papers on Music Sound and Multimedia, compiled into a single edited volum

Musical applications of physical computing

This paper presents a music technology portfolio consisting of 5 distinct projects, which are each concerned with the concept of physicality in digital music. The work seeks to address acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer’s concept of schizophonia by imbuing digital music systems with signatures from the analog world through the use of emerging technologies of physical computing. Physical control methods were developed and explored for this purpose as well as the use of computer controlled mechanical actuators operating on acoustic objects. The resultant projects vary in form - encompassing aspects of automated musical performance, installation and interactive art as well as design and programming - but in all the link between sound and source is in some way given physical tangibility

Efficient Synthesis of Room Acoustics via Scattering Delay Networks

An acoustic reverberator consisting of a network of delay lines connected via scattering junctions is proposed. All parameters of the reverberator are derived from physical properties of the enclosure it simulates. It allows for simulation of unequal and frequency-dependent wall absorption, as well as directional sources and microphones. The reverberator renders the first-order reflections exactly, while making progressively coarser approximations of higher-order reflections. The rate of energy decay is close to that obtained with the image method (IM) and consistent with the predictions of Sabine and Eyring equations. The time evolution of the normalized echo density, which was previously shown to be correlated with the perceived texture of reverberation, is also close to that of IM. However, its computational complexity is one to two orders of magnitude lower, comparable to the computational complexity of a feedback delay network (FDN), and its memory requirements are negligible