randformblog on math, physics, art, and design |
Mixing musical styles can have interesting results. Here is a classic rock song with traditional japanese instruments and a little help of a classical (western european style) orthestra: we will rock you. (And there is smoke on the water as well.)
via japan probe.
Sideremark: We once performed Bizets Habanera from the Carmen opera on three chinese Shengs a cello and a clarinet.
Albino Cipriani a friend of my sister Anuschka and me put his new architecture website online. By the image one can see that he likes even, homogenous, light and open architectural spaces.
The instantreality-framework is a high-performance Mixed-Reality (MR) system, which combines various components to provide a single and consistent interface for AR/VR developers. Those components have been developed at the Fraunhofer IGD and ZGDV in close cooperation with industrial partners.
In theory it should be impossible to separate the notes in a chord. If you play a sine wave and add say a perfect 5th one perceives this either as a single note (now with a different timbre than the single sine wave) or as an interval – namely the perfect 5th. what one hears depends on several things. If for example both sine waves are given a slight vibrato of the same phase and rate one is more likely to hear this a one note. However in general it should be impossible to tell (algorithmically) whether the audiosignal is a chord or a timbre. Theoretically. In practice chords are allmost never tuned perfectly, the notes in a chord are likely to start with tiny (or even big) offsets, the instruments / strings / sources usually have their own characteristics. So it might be possible in practice to separate the notes in a chord. Still it should be a difficult task.
Now celemony – the company that makes the incredible Melodyne – anounced that they have takled the problem.
Here is a promo video that shows the possibilities (they use the slightly overused DNA acronym for their technology (this time as “direct note access”)) .
Impressive and somewhat scary.
Just an update on the pioneer effect and a similar sofar unexplained effect called fly-by anomaly. The fly-by anomaly occurs sometimes in socalled gravitational slingshots . A gravitational slingshot manoeuvre means to choose a spacecraft trajectory, which passes in such a way by a planet or a sun that the spacecraft experiences acceleration or deceleration. (Here a nice animation).
The fly-by anomaly says that in certain slingshot manoeuvres around the earth the corresponding space craft experienced an acceleration, which could not be accounted for by standard computations. The deviaton is small, but persistent. However the computations are quite complicated and it is already astonishing how precise researchers can nowadays predict spacecraft trajectories. And there better be no error in the computations! Just imagine if someone would for example confuse the various meridians…then in such a case a poor spacecraft could of course be burned by the sun before it ever reaches it. :)
Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer John Anderson gave an interview to space.com:
“I am feeling both humble and perplexed by this,” said Anderson, who is now working as a retiree. “There is something very strange going on with spacecraft motions. We have no convincing explanation for either the Pioneer anomaly or the flyby anomaly.”
and to the planetary society he said:
“It was time,” he said, “to tell people that there was a problem with earth flybys.” If the engineers at JPl couldn’t’ explain the effect, perhaps the broader scientific community could come up with an explanation.”
->article by Anderson in Physical Review letters
->talk on pioneer anomaly and fly-by effect at the Physikalisches Kolloquium, OvG–Universit¨t Magdeburg, 17.1.2007
As I received no protests – the article “On the need for a global academic internet platform” is now in the arxiv at : http://arxiv.org/pdf/0803.1360v1
To be precise: I only received NO comments at all.
But I see that xkcd already started an experts database on kilobytes :)
Any suggestions on where I could send the article to (without any extra costs) are welcome.
The below link contains an article in which I explain why I think that there is a necessity for a global academic internet platform. Most parts of the paper were already presented here on the blog. I now included the economy part to the earlier
version and made some additions. In particular I added a physics related remark concerning the constancy of natural constants and some thoughts on the diamond water paradox and on the price of digital items.
I put this here on the blog in order to enable people to add last-minute remarks, so it is still a draft but I envisage it as a final version and i will try to submit it somewhere.
We will be soon at Kyushu University in Fukuoka Japan, so blogging will be in the beginning of our stay probably down to zero. I just bought me a book on japanese writing. Above you can see how I try to work out my name with Katakana.
->Looks quite helpful, but Kanji takes too much energy at the moment: the Kanji-website.
Yesterday I was at pianist Soheil Nasseri’s debut in the Berlin Philharmonie. I saw an earlier concert of him lately and thus I was curious how his performance would be this time.
