Theo Verelst Local Diary Page 115

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Oct 5, 16:16, 2013

This "reporting" page isn't finished yet)

http://www.theover.org/Keybdmg/Lexiles

A lot of pictures on this page are processed with Luminance High Dynamic Range software (on Linux).

I like these plants:

A processed orchid picture from th Sony vid cam:

A small bowl on wood panel:

Any great synthesizer news ?

Well, there's the great new Yamaha Stage piano, the CP4, to go where the old S90 keyboard started to fail bad:

For the occasion of having a quality digital piano sounding in this place, and because it was dark under the Kurzweil, I improvised a "beam with led-lights", which gives a bit of a theater organ feel:

Here are some "performances" (Yamaha terminology) I made, to get a less boring sound than the presets:

    2PC.C7A (93kB) ,same contents (in case file type fails to download): 2cp.zip

a little example of the sound (I was just awake on a sunday morning, and still deciding on how the sound would work with rock and Prof Longhair styles, but you get the picture):

   cp4_jinglerock_mindig.mp3

The sound in the above example is Perf nr. 70 "AcouRock TV", you can individually load it from the file.

So are the sounds perfect ? No, but they are playable, and most of all relatively sensitive and neutral, though not all the way yet. And they don't enforce a certain playing pattern, and require accurate Grand PIano Playing, which is new, without the chords and runs/licks getting interpreted before they sound, so that's good.

What's very interesting is that it is possible to make this instrument can play really well with a multicompressor (I mean a narrow band one, like I've described a number of pages back), which normally doesn't work well ever on digital isntruments, except of course the Kurzweil (where it is a mess, however). Also the sometimes very necessary mid-range averaging (with FFT mastering effect and gating), usually works great without effort, and the tune lower mid-range too. That's very important, and means the generators in this machine are very advanced. Really. Also the eq works pro (hard to explain, I'll make a later page on that), the 22 Hz sub can be emphasized to good avail, and high-frequency (expanded) averaging (with FFT) even can work, which is hard to achieve, so that makes the instrument interesting.

Also, the boringness is deceptive: this isn't an old Clavinova, even though it starts out with a slight bit of that sound suggestion: it is accurate, highly responsive and needs to be told with the effects and such what type of piano things it is to do, and then it can do them. And the sound is deep enough to play with for a long time, all things missing on many machines/software (almost all else bores me in minutes).

I didn't check either of that with the above piano sound, and I think it has a limited sampling issue that probably would be served by the mid-range averaging production path. Strangely, the sampling-error sound error appears in the mid range, but playing higher notes is up to quality levels of extremely well, so that's interesting.

Oh, and contrary to fr instance the PC3, it can play excellently well on the Lexicon effects, this is an example I made a while ago (other sound edit):

   silent_hall1.mp3

Oh there's a nag with the MIDI: the USB MIDI doesn't work on Linux, unfortunately, it si great on windows (W* with Stainberg and specific driver installed) but now I have to start a windows machine to MIDI the keyboard to other equipment/software.

Supercomputer going strong ?

Sure. this

Made some of this:

(Ceapest Blurays I could find, a Euro a piece!)

Using for instance this:

Here's the result test movie of the above on youtube .

I tested Sony Vegas Pro, a cheaper Sony package (still pretty nice Bluray quality) and Adobe Premiere, After Effects and motion-related packages from a evaluation "creative cloud" account (which is now over).

it can do nice stuff, but isn't very natural or scientific in nature, and also not that great to use, though I could make stuff with it, and there are brilliant results here and there.

Any rallying going on ?

Nope, but it's still luxurious and fast:

I don't make mileage worthy of much notion, but I like to drive a bit at times, and the Audi 100 is a solid way to go shopping or do something.

Agilent Technologies Spectrum Analyzer

I got to play for a day with one of the serious Agilent machines (at Philips campus, previouly "Natlab"),

It makes me feel good there are still real measurement machines around, instead of the retardationof putting everything through an FFT withou regard for signal self-correlation, and proper Hilbert transforms.

Audio Engineering Society meeting with Audio Precision

Dan Foley showed Audio Pecision measurement equipment (at the Royal Conservatory, The Hague).

This ASE meeting was a while ago at "Polyhymnia"

Audio Engineering Guild

That's right, there are still guilds!

Digital radio sucks let me suffice saying that.

In fact good ol' FM is going strong, Radio 10 (nationwide coverage (gmphh, that sounds funny about Holland)) and to a lesser extend the popular Veronica are sounding very good, neutral and nice, and play great music again.

Interesting math for sampled sound synthesis

From the "music dsp" mailing list (Nov-Dec) I put this up about Robert Bristow's example: