The sound of {Music} Computing – free schools event @QMUL Wed 14 Dec 5.30pm

Tags

Andrew McPherson, computer music, Computer Science, People's Palace, QMEECS, QMUL

Save the date – Wednesday 14 December 2016 – because Andrew McPherson will be giving a talk on music and computing and demonstrating his Magnetic Resonance Piano at this free festive talk at Queen Mary University of London. It’s aimed at secondary school pupils but all are welcome, it’s family-friendly and free 🙂

The sound of {Music} Computing
Wednesday 14 December – 5.30-6.30pm FREE
The People’s Palace, Queen Mary University of London
Hosted by the IET and QMUL
(doors at 5pm, talk at 5.30pm, mince pies at 6.30pm, carriages at 7.30pm)
Download an event flyer (PDF)

The design of the acoustic piano has scarcely changed in more than a century. Now, computers are being used to transform the sounds and techniques of this
familiar instrument. 

The magnetic resonator piano (MRP) is an augmented instrument which places electromagnets inside an acoustic grand piano. The electromagnets cause the strings to vibrate without being struck with the hammers, creating notes that can sustain indefinitely, grow out of silence, or change in pitch or timbre. All sound is completely acoustic, with no speakers.

The MRP is played from the piano keyboard using a combination of familiar and new techniques. The instrument uses a computer to translate key motion into signals for the electromagnets, but playing it, you wouldn’t know that a computer is involved: pressing the keys causes the strings to sound, just like on a normal piano. But unlike a normal piano, you can continuously shape the sound of each note, adding vibrato, pitch bends, harmonics and other novel effects. The result sounds like a combination of a piano, an organ and a glass harmonica.

There will be a live demo of the MRP during the presentation, and it will be available after the talk for attendees to try for themselves.

Your host
Andrew McPherson is a Reader in Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London. He is a member of the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), a research group in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science which explores the overlap between music and computing. Andrew completed a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD in music composition from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining QMUL in 2011, he was a postdoc in the Music Entertainment Technology Laboratory at Drexel University. His research covers digital and augmented instruments, embedded computing systems, and the study of performer instrument interaction.

Within C4DM, he leads the Augmented Instruments Laboratory, a team whose projects have been featured in two successful Kickstarter campaigns, concerts in high-profile venues including the Barbican Centre and Cadogan Hall, and over two dozen media articles. More information on Andrew’s work can be found at:
https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~andrewm

Text above is taken from this event flyer (PDF)

Skype on Helium – amusing buffering error on conversation with my dad

Tags

chipmunks, dad, pinky and perky, Skype

This recording was made a few years ago while I was in a hotel using iffy wifi to ‘phone’ my dad via Skype. I’d never heard Skype turn someone’s voice like this before and didn’t really know what to do, and couldn’t stop giggling (as is clear from the recording). Subsequent googling indicated that it had been due to some buffering error, but it always makes me laugh to hear it. My dad died yesterday so I suppose this is a bit ‘in memoriam’-y but let’s not be down in the dumps – he found it quite funny too. In the call he’s saying ‘hang up, hang up’, encouraging me to restart the conversation which we eventually did successfully.

I once tried to recover my dad’s normal speaking voice from this by running the audio through Audacity and slowing it down but it sounded just as hilarious then. Haha  🙂

Enjoy…

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My youngest has had my old phone for a couple of years. Just for games, which I download for her before disconnecting the internet. Still has my old contacts though & it turns out she’s been messaging my dad, who died 5 years ago. I may have something in my eye. pic.twitter.com/RZ5ZTgGbnk

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) February 17, 2018

Added: 17 Feb 2018
Just seen the most amazing tweet from James O’Brien (above) and there were some lovely touching responses about people ringing up the phones of people who’d died to listen to their voices on voicemail. After my dad died (5 Nov 2016) I found a recording of a voicemail message I had from him in June that year. He’d had some periods of ill health and I think making this recording was an insurance for me in case anything happened – I’d failed to think of doing the same for my mum sadly, who died in 2010.

Dad did send further voicemail messages to me in the months before he died though I deleted them. There was one on my landline after he died but I was too miserable to sort anything out in terms of recording that one and sadly with time the messsage also passed beyond the point of recovery. So I’m glad I have this. He’s telling me about the London to Penzance overnight sleeper train – there was a BBC Four programme on about it (he often rang to tell me about things he thought I’d enjoy watching on television or on the radio). I went on the train in 2015, it was lovely.

He sounds Scottish, and curiously a bit more high-pitched than his voice was in real life, he had a fairly deep voice most of the time, but it still sounds like him. He usually called me darling, though he didn’t here. I quite like that the recording sounds a bit ‘grainy’. It’s just me holding my iPhone next to the landline speaker and recording on the voice memo app. I know the m4a file won’t change but I like to think that it will gradually degrade with each listen and eventually fade away (here is a lovely event I went to, where we heard voice recordings from decades and even a century ago – Edison wax cyclinders).