:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Sunday, September 30, 2007 ::

BLDG BLOG

BLDG BLOG is a brilliant blog of "architectural conjecture, urban speculation & landscape futures," that I have just discovered thanks to Natali linking to this post about Hot-Mapping. Apparently Haringey Council have been busy flying planes over their district taking thermal images of the area. The council explains it here and full maps of the region are available here. It's interesting to look over. I would genuinely be interested to see how my own house compared to others around it. I'm sure it would be exactly the same as all the others on the estate (it is new build) but I'd really like to know how it compares to houses of different ages and see how age and build vary. The comment on the blog bring up privacy issues, although I'm not sure how much heat loss your house suffers from is a private issue? As long as vigilantes don't start searching out energy loss offenders I think it's pretty harmless from that point of view and I think I'd like to see more councils doing it.



The blog also has two noise related posts from the last week or so. This one following up an interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks about the affects of noise on people. It's interesting although, as with psychology generally, it relies heavily on the exceptional cases rather than the norm. I guess that makes things a lot easier to test and interpret.

This lowest common denominator approach is similar to the way the World Health Organisation Guidelines for Community Noise are based on preventing adverse health affects in the most sensitive population. From conversations with the papers co-editor Birgitta Berglund I know that children in particular are her largest concern. Perhaps by designing to ensure the protection of the most sensitive we can bring down average noise levels over a period of time?

(The Erik Satie anecdote sounds like he failed to do Eno was doing with Music for Airports etc. I imagine these days you could get away with it without anybody flinching. Sometime a space without background music seems odd.)

There is also a post about intentional additions to urban noise to make cities sound more "musical" and to help mask more unpleasant sounds. Soudscaping cities is a bit of a buzz word with architects these days and I've been involved in the soundscaping of some major district developments in the middle-east (without ever actually going there annoying!) I'm interested to see how this study pans out.

Labels: Academic, Acoustics, architecture, Art, Maps, Noise

:: Dan 30.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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The Machine's Got Rhythm: Computers are learning to understand music and join the band
Interesting piece on advances in computer analysis of music [via dev.null]. Not any huge leap really as the same technique has been applied well to speech analysis over the last few years. And in acoustics has been used to design acoustic diffusers too.
Ref:


As someone who has studied this field academically (my dissertation for my degree was on Algorithmic Composition and Synthesis) this is an interesting advance. Predictably the Musicians Union are upset about it. They do have a tendency to get the knickers in a twist about things they perceive as endangering musicians job yet never transpire to do so. Historically they have resisted many advancements in electronic music composition and production on grounds of job losses. (Here's one classic example.)

Although, they may have a point in this case as it is somebody's job to transcribe music to piano for publishing as a record of song writing for copyright reasons. However, these versions are often then transcribed back from piano to their original instruments when you buy books of printed music in shops, and are sometimes miles from what was originally written. If an automated process can help to reduce these errors I'm all for it.

What I'm must interested in is what it may contribute to the composition and production process. It's highly likely it will initially serve to further propagate more and more similar pre-packaged music. Like the music machines that churn out tunes for the proles in Orwell's 1984. You may be forgiven for thinking this happens already if you listen to the charts or most commercial radio stations. And of course it will be most profitably used in those music identification systems that listen to bits of music then sale you ringtones etc.

But what if you taught it to think differently? Introduced mutations to see what happens? Or to try to do something that is as far as possible from the norm? It could be made into just as powerful a tool for experimentation as it could for formulisation. That's what I'd want to hear.

Labels: Academic, Acoustics, Computing, Electronic Music

:: Dan 27.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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Electronic Journal "Technical Acoustics" is a Russian based peer-reviewed scientific journal that unlike most others makes all of its papers freely available online. Being peer-reviewed does give it a degree of trustworthiness that a lot of other online sources lack. It does however charges submission fees to the authors (€150/$180) for publishing the papers. Scroll down to the History links in the 'Free resources in the Internet' section the bottom for useful stuff like the sketchy History of electronic music (highly incomplete but includes some good pointers) and Electronic Musical Instruments (1870 – 1990).

Labels: Academic, Acoustics, Electronic Music

:: Dan 16.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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Andrew Marr's Start of the Week on Radio 4 this morning was particularly interesting. It included discussion with chess master Garry Kasparov about his new book How Life Imitates Chess (added to wishlist), Prof. Jeffrey Sachs giving a hint of some of the subjects he'll be covering in this year's Reith Lectures (starting Wednesday), and Norman Lebrecht on the classical music record industry. Worth a listen. The MP3 download trial [17MB] and the podcast seem to be down at the time of writing but the streaming version is working (see first link, above).

Edit: Download and Podcast now working

Labels: Academic, Chess, Radio4

:: Dan 9.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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