335 research outputs found

    Sound from Gramophone Record Groove Surface Orientation

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    ABSTRACT Preserving historic recording on gramophone records is an important task because the traditional record play back system damages/wears out records eventually. We present an optical flow based method to reproduce the sound signal from gramophone records using 3D robust scene reconstruction of the surface orientation of the walls of the grooves. The imaging setup was modified to overcome a shallow depth of field by using a thin glass plate to obtain additional in-focus parts of the image at a second focal length. The sound signal was recovered from the surface orientation and processed further using the industry standard RIAA filter. The overall algorithm has been tested and found to be working correctly using both undamaged and damaged SP records. The algorithm is a "proof of concept" in that it shows sound can be recovered from time-varying 3D orientation of groove walls

    Exploring visual representation of sound in computer music software through programming and composition

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    Presented through contextualisation of the portfolio works are developments of a practice in which the acts of programming and composition are intrinsically connected. This practice-based research (conducted 2009–2013) explores visual representation of sound in computer music software. Towards greater understanding of composing with the software medium, initial questions are taken as stimulus to explore the subject through artistic practice and critical thinking. The project begins by asking: How might the ways in which sound is visually represented influence the choices that are made while those representations are being manipulated and organised as music? Which aspects of sound are represented visually, and how are those aspects shown? Recognising sound as a psychophysical phenomenon, the physical and psychological aspects of aesthetic interest to my work are identified. Technological factors of mediating these aspects for the interactive visual-domain of software are considered, and a techno-aesthetic understanding developed. Through compositional studies of different approaches to the problem of looking at sound in software, on screen, a number of conceptual themes emerge in this work: the idea of software as substance, both as a malleable material (such as in live coding), and in terms of outcome artefacts; the direct mapping between audio data and screen pixels; the use of colour that maintains awareness of its discrete (as opposed to continuous) basis; the need for integrated display of parameter controls with their target data; and the tildegraph concept that began as a conceptual model of a gramophone and which is a spatio-visual sound synthesis technique related to wave terrain synthesis. The spiroid-frequency-space representation is introduced, contextualised, and combined both with those themes and a bespoke geometrical drawing system (named thisis), to create a new modular computer music software environment named sdfsys

    Light path design for optical disk systems

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    Metadata for phonograph records : facilitating new forms of use and access

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    This dissertation presents a new metadata design, as part of a large digitization management system being developed, to assist in the consistent creation of digital libraries of phonograph records. The Metadata provides digital libraries with an effective tool for the description, discovery, management, control, delivery, and sharing of digital objects of phonograph record. The metadata design is the outcome of two pilot projects for the digitization of phonograph records that took place at the Marvin Duchow Music Library at McGill University. The new design offers an approach to maintaining and using digital sound and ensures the long-term viability of digital libraries of phonograph records.The dissertation discusses key areas of preservation and addresses the most common retrieval problems of music in digital libraries. These problems include challenges in the digital context of bibliographic control, cataloging, distribution, and copyright protection. The dissertation revisits traditional cataloging approaches, summarizes historical music cataloging and metadata development, sets up preservation principles and rationales for digitizing phonograph records, and presents state-of-the-art techniques for preserving phonograph records in the digital domain.The dissertation contains three main parts. The first is an introduction to the new metadata design for phonograph records. The second is a metadata dictionary, which assigns precise syntactic and semantic meanings to metadata elements, to guide digitizers working in libraries, archives, museums, and heritage sectors. These will be followed by two case studies of phonograph record digitization projects using the Metadata and the Data Dictionary. The dissertation concludes by examining three challenges that are critical to future development in both the preserving of and access to phonograph records: the issue of interoperability between different metadata standards, the need for usability and quality evaluation of digitization management systems, and the importance of further development in digital library retrieval services and tools

    The turntable as a musical instrument and the emergence of the concert turntablist

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    The turntable played a significant role in the evolution of 20th century Western music, both as a recording/playback device, and as a musical instrument in its own right. The focus of this thesis is my original compositions that feature the turntable and the history of the turntable as a musical instrument. The 20th century delivered significant progress in turntable technology, but produced limited innovation for the turntable in new music composition. Except for a few outliers, the same techniques for the turntable have been recycled among experimental composers, sound artists and pop music producers since the 1930’s. This thesis embraces those techniques from the past, and moves forward to explore new potential for the turntable. My original folio of work featuring the turntable is informed by my research into: (1) conceptual barriers to understanding the turntable as an instrument (2) turntable notation (3) amplification options (4) public opinion of the turntable in the concert hall (5) original turntable techniques as well as my adaptation of existing techniques (6) composers who embraced the turntable-as-instrument

    The turntable as a musical instrument and the emergence of the concert turntablist

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    The turntable played a significant role in the evolution of 20th century Western music, both as a recording/playback device, and as a musical instrument in its own right. The focus of this thesis is my original compositions that feature the turntable and the history of the turntable as a musical instrument. The 20th century delivered significant progress in turntable technology, but produced limited innovation for the turntable in new music composition. Except for a few outliers, the same techniques for the turntable have been recycled among experimental composers, sound artists and pop music producers since the 1930’s. This thesis embraces those techniques from the past, and moves forward to explore new potential for the turntable. My original folio of work featuring the turntable is informed by my research into: (1) conceptual barriers to understanding the turntable as an instrument (2) turntable notation (3) amplification options (4) public opinion of the turntable in the concert hall (5) original turntable techniques as well as my adaptation of existing techniques (6) composers who embraced the turntable-as-instrument

    Vox Machinae: Phonographs and the Birth of Sonic Modernity, 1870-1930

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    In late 1877 Thomas Edison cobbled together a crude mechanism of metal and wood he called the “phonograph,” a device capable of mechanically reproducing sounds as varied as speech and birdsong. The scientific community and the general public hailed Edison’s invention as a wonder of the age and speculated endlessly on the practical applications to which it would soon be put. But as Edison and his financial backers discovered, making money from sound recording was no easy task. “Vox Machinae” draws on business records, newspapers, trade journals and advertisements to detail the first five decades of the business of sound recording. It begins with the technology’s origins as a staged spectacle in the 1870s before detailing its application to office work in the 1880s and 1890s. Following an examination of the nickel-in-slot phonograph parlors of the 1890s it explores the technology’s evolution as a form of “home entertainment” in the twentieth century. “Vox Machinae” argues, first, that each of these business models was an historical artifact produced by a give-and-take between phonograph entrepreneurs, the public and sometimes-intransigent material things. The story of twentieth century music is not only one of race, class, gender, taste, capitalism and consumption. It is also one of motors, batteries and hand-cranks and it involves production and distribution no less than consumption and meaning- making. Secondly, this dissertation argues that the search for a profitable business model also enlisted phonograph entrepreneurs and the public in a project of determining exactly what kind of things phonographs and recorded sounds were. Did the phonograph represent a “talking machine” in the European and American tradition of the speaking automaton? Was it a “sound writer,” inscribing spoken messages on sheets of foil and then reading these scripts aloud? Or did one’s phonographs and records serve as frictionless conduits, channeling the actual singing, playing, preaching, and joking of distant (or even deceased) subjects? Sound recording technology was not a stable entity to be packaged and sold to the public. Rather it represented an ontologically-fluid cluster of material, cultural and social relations requiring that those who wished to sell it must first determine what it was. “Vox Machinae” complicates the existing historiography of recorded sound in two ways. First, it draws insights from Science, Technology and Society as well as the “new materialism” to show how the materiality of sound recording technology shaped its commercial evolution. Rather than a blank slate on which to project commercial ambitions, the phonograph presented would-be entrepreneurs with a tightly entangled set of commercial, material, social and cultural “problems” to solve. Secondly, it seeks to bring together the nuance of recent cultural histories with an older interpretive rubric—that of the “culture industry.” In so doing, it lays bare the tight relationship between production and consumption, without succumbing to the totalizing, historically “flat” conception of the recording industry offered by Theodor Adorno and other mass culture critics.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146079/1/jacquesb_1.pd
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