Wednesday 15 January 2014

The Samson Box and other stuff

The latest issue of Computer Music Journal is devoted to CCRMA's Samson Box real-time digital synthesizer, which was used in over 100 works from the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of them was the soundtrack to NASA's Mars in 3D film, which has been restored and released on Blu-ray recently. The score was composed by Michael McNabb and Bill Schottstaedt. There's an article on the restoration process, and the emulator used to recreate the Samson Box for the project is on GitHub. The film is available on Youtube.

I've written an article in Swedish on the archives related to EAM available at Statens musikverk (Music Development and Heritage Sweden). One can find it in Dokumenterat, no. 45. (There's also an older related blog post in English.)

Swedish composer Ragnar Grippe talks about his music from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and the 2010s.

Another Sten Hanson obituary by Kristoffer Westin (in Swedish).

The proceedings of SMC2013 (The Sound and Music Computing Conference, Stockholm 2013).

A 380-page report from the EU project COST (Cooperation of Science and Technical Research) Action TD0804 Soundscape of European Cities and Landscapes. The COST Soundscape project involves cultural, social and psychological as well as scientific aspects. In the report's abstract, the researchers conclude:
Reducing sound level, the focus of EU environmental noise policy, does not necessarily lead to improved quality of life in urban/rural areas, and a new multidisciplinary approach is essential. Soundscape research represents this paradigm shift as it involves not only physical measurements but also the cooperation of human/social sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, architecture, anthropology, medicine), to account for the diversity of soundscapes across countries and cultures; and it considers environmental sounds as a 'resource' rather than a 'waste'.
Musicainformatica, a computer music blog by Alex Di Nunzio.

The Big MAT Book by Steve Travis Pope, courseware for multimedia engineering and audio software and hardware.

A tutorial in deep learning in music informatics.