Rapt/Wrapped Listening: The Aesthetics of “Surround Sound”

This essay is prompted by “surround sound,” the sonic results of which have been evident in cinemas since the late 1970s and the encoding for which, in the form of Dolby 5.1 on the soundtracks of DVDs, since the turn of the century has been fairly ubiquitous. By way of background, the essay deals in turn with the physical nature of three-dimensional listening and with the history of stereophonic sound as manifest both in the cinema and on LP recordings. More to the point, the essay deals with the aesthetic differences (not just perceptual but also affective) between listening to three-dimensional sounds in real life situations and listening to re-creations of those sounds, via a Dolby system or otherwise, in the privacy and comfort of one’s home. Playing on the homophonic adjectives in its title, the essay reflects on why sometimes we give more rapt attention to artificial versions of “surround sound” than to the genuine stereophonic sound in which we are literally wrapped almost on a daily basis

The Imagined Sounds of Outer Space

This essay explores how the idea of the ‘sounds of space’ has been articulated in popular culture since the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Space Age. The primary focus is on sound and music in science-fiction films from Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the United States, and the four main topic areas are the sounds of signals from space, the sounds of outer-space technology, the sounds of ‘heavenly bodies,’ and the sounds/music associated with space travel. Framing this central portion of the essay, however, is a discussion of ‘space music’ by various composers for whom writing for the cinema was perhaps one of the furthest things from their minds. The essay argues that, in terms of depictions of weightlessness, perhaps certain works by composers Arnold Schoenberg and Edgard Varèse, and by the rock groups Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream, have something in common with the music of sci-fi cinema

Weird Vibrations: How the Theremin Gave Musical Voice to Hollywood’s Extraterrestrial "Others"

The theremin played a unique role in 1950s science fiction films. In Rocketship X-M, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another Planet, and It Came from Outer Space, the instrument was not just a component of the studio orchestra but, in effect, the diegetic “voice” of the alien entities

The Hollywood Career of Gershwin's "Second Rhapsody"

George Gershwin's "Second Rhapsody" for Piano and Orchestra, which premiered in January 1932, was initially described as an "expanded" version of music that had been written for a 1931 Fox film titled "Delicious." In truth, Gershwin had finished the piece months before the movie went into production. His sketch for the complete work was made when the screenplay was still in its beginning stages. Evidence including manuscripts, various drafts of the screenplay, the conductor's score used for the film's recording sessions, and the restored film itself are used to clarify both the chronological and substantive relationship between the 15-minute "Second Rhapsody" and the soundtrack's seven-minute "New York Rhapsody." The first detailed account of the musico-narrative content of the picture's "New York Rhapsody" sequence is offered, and it is shown that the "New York Rhapsody" is a truncation of the "Second Rhapsody" engineered most probably by Fox Studios employee Hugo Friedhofer

The Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) for TMT: multi-tiered wavefront measurements and novel mechanical design

The InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) will be the first light adaptive optics instrument on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). IRIS is being built by a collaboration between Caltech, the University of California, NAOJ and NRC Herzberg. In this paper we present novel aspects of the Support Structure, Rotator and On-Instrument Wavefront Sensor systems being developed at NRC Herzberg. IRIS is suspended from the bottom port of the Narrow Field Infrared Adaptive Optics System (NFIRAOS), and provides its own image de-rotation to compensate for sidereal rotation of the focal plane. This arrangement is a challenge because NFIRAOS is designed to host two other science instruments, which imposes strict mass requirements on IRIS. As the mechanical design of all elements has progressed, we have been tasked with keeping the instrument mass under seven tonnes. This requirement has resulted in a mass reduction of 30 percent for the support structure and rotator compared to the most recent IRIS designs. To accomplish this goal, while still being able to withstand earthquakes, we developed a new design with composite materials. As IRIS is a client instrument of NFIRAOS, it benefits from NFIRAOS’s superior AO correction. IRIS plays an important role in providing this correction by sensing low-order aberrations with three On-Instrument Wavefront Sensors (OIWFS). The OIWFS consists of three independently positioned natural guide star wavefront sensor probe arms that patrol a 2-arcminute field of view. We expect tip-tilt measurements from faint stars within the IRIS imager focal plane will further stabilize the delivered image quality. We describe how the use of On-Detector Guide Windows (ODGWs) in the IRIS imaging detector can be incorporated into the AO correction. In this paper, we present our strategies for acquiring and tracking sources with this complex AO system, and for mitigating and measuring the various potential sources of image blur and misalignment due to properties of the mechanical structure and interfaces

The Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) for TMT: multi-tiered wavefront measurements and novel mechanical design

The InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) will be the first light adaptive optics instrument on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). IRIS is being built by a collaboration between Caltech, the University of California, NAOJ and NRC Herzberg. In this paper we present novel aspects of the Support Structure, Rotator and On-Instrument Wavefront Sensor systems being developed at NRC Herzberg. IRIS is suspended from the bottom port of the Narrow Field Infrared Adaptive Optics System (NFIRAOS), and provides its own image de-rotation to compensate for sidereal rotation of the focal plane. This arrangement is a challenge because NFIRAOS is designed to host two other science instruments, which imposes strict mass requirements on IRIS. As the mechanical design of all elements has progressed, we have been tasked with keeping the instrument mass under seven tonnes. This requirement has resulted in a mass reduction of 30 percent for the support structure and rotator compared to the most recent IRIS designs. To accomplish this goal, while still being able to withstand earthquakes, we developed a new design with composite materials. As IRIS is a client instrument of NFIRAOS, it benefits from NFIRAOS’s superior AO correction. IRIS plays an important role in providing this correction by sensing low-order aberrations with three On-Instrument Wavefront Sensors (OIWFS). The OIWFS consists of three independently positioned natural guide star wavefront sensor probe arms that patrol a 2-arcminute field of view. We expect tip-tilt measurements from faint stars within the IRIS imager focal plane will further stabilize the delivered image quality. We describe how the use of On-Detector Guide Windows (ODGWs) in the IRIS imaging detector can be incorporated into the AO correction. In this paper, we present our strategies for acquiring and tracking sources with this complex AO system, and for mitigating and measuring the various potential sources of image blur and misalignment due to properties of the mechanical structure and interfaces