Theo Verelst Local Diary Page 28
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Mon Oct 21 23:39 2005
Well, so what have I come up with to top of or not disappoint after the
previous diary page ?
Music Fair
Well, I've made my own synthesizer, studio/PA system and portable
biamped powered studio monitors blow air at the biggest dutch musical
instrument fair last week, Mile 2005.
Buildup day:
Second day (the first day barbara had hung up www.theover.org
advertisements, the second day I spend most of the time at the stand
because I was alone, and did more than a bit of (also loud) music
playing):
Zie ook hun site en deelnemerslijst.
Viewing Siggraph
I've joined SIGGRAPH as web
member, and read some 2005 proceedings, and
looked at half the 2004 and 2005 conference presentations videos over
the web
based viewer.
The 2005 keynote was from George "Star Wars" Lucas:
I had (besides the AES...) to become a acm siggraph member to acces
this material, but that also gives acces to the siggraph proceedings in
decent pdf form) so the price performance ratio of the membership is
pretty good.
Audio Engineering Society Lecture
Audio Engineering Society -Netherlands lectures have started
again for the new season, starting with a lecture I visited about
multichannel
recording for instrument sound field simulation, high
bandwidth multichannel high quality internet remote listening and
vibration capturing and all kinds of speaker systems to make audio and
video telepresence work credibly.
The lecture room at the Delft University Physics department, where I
was regularly before for university classes, instruction and later for
PhD level theoretical physics courses, which is a nice room:
A slide from the lecture:
Its about a piano or other instrument being recorded in all kinds of
directions to determine how the sound is radiated in all directions,
and then more then a few loudspeakers in all kinds of directions are
used to reproduce the sound field of the instrument.
Car fixin'
Uhm, the car has been fixed by yours truly with a (cheap, second
source, non-Renault that is) radiator, which went without problems in a
few hours, including de-airing. The machine has taken two persons and a
whole back and trunk full of luggage and equipment to and fro
mid-france again after (2000 km), so it has proven ok again for half
the garage
fee or so, where they were quite helpfull and pointed at the second
source part suppliers.
Work done in France
During my stay in france a few weeks in nature environment I've ported
my reverberation program from Blackfin C for the dual core DSP I've
used to test it on to run also on the PC using windows XP and the
cygwin C environment and gnu C-compiler. Works perfectly neat (about 50
percent CPU use on a fast pc/notebook), its a bit heavy on memory at
the moment, but it sounds great when using the high quality AD/DA
converter. A bit noisy in 16 bits with the noise of the AD converter
though. This will NOT be an
open source but a commercially aimed R&D project though. The synth
can be completely downloaded: hardware programming, DSP source code,
the whole thing, but this will not be. It is clear from the experiments
that this type of reverb benefits from clear, high quality AD/DA and
amplification, that makes the sound experience great, and in fact it
tends then to make the Yamaha S90 built in reverb unit (which is quite
good) a bit pale in comparison (though it doesn't do all the same
effect at the moment).
Also in france, the synth has finally been given an important addition
to its sound algorithm: resonance for its time varying filter, like the
classical resonance control on analog filter. It works well, even over
the whole audio range, though a little less pronounced for the higher
frequencies, which I'll look into, and it certainly oscillates too.
There is no clip control, so near-oscillation is normally the way to go
for maximimum. It sounds clear, cool , strong, penetrating, undistorted
and pretty great. Carving out harmonics from sawtooths with the live
cutoff parameter control works fine and makes wonderfull sounds,
expecially when used polyphonically and with some chorus.
Also, I've added vibrato by using and frequency controlling a sine wave
LFO from the chorus section except depth of the modulation is not
exponential, so works more for lower frequencies. Together with the
notebook based reverb, which I mixed in over the DSP board audio input
, and drove with a seperate synth output to the USB AD/DA converter,
vibrato sounds very nice, for instance with flutey tones (with
resonance). I've made the filter track to an extend with the keyboard,
too, and experimented a bit with (hard-coded) changes of the the
envelope amount to filter cutoff, and made actually better bass sounds
for the song Dolce Vita.
Thus far I didn't have a serial link with the blackfin DSP, but I
changed a cable now to make that work fine with a notebook at 100kbps,
and I even gave a running synthesizer program (with sound interrupt) an
added serial link, together with the midi input, except not yet
simultaneous with the display of the synth, but I could send strings to
the display which then show immedeately for testin purposes. So thats
good for a communication link with a pc at 10 kilotbyes per second, and
could make me use the midi of the synth to also drive a PC program,
like the string simulator, also on linux!
WWW.THEOVER.ORG
I'm a dot ORG now! I've been given the url http://theover.org
(some
nameservers prefer www.theover.org),
which redirects to the local
server, hopefully reliably. Also, I can receive mail from the simple
address theover@theover.org .
The short Theo (my first name) and then
Ver (the first three letters of my surname) come from when I borrowed
books from amsterdam university library, where they constructed ID's
that way, its just easy to remember, and I've used it all over the
place already and is nice and neutral. So remember: there is now
amnestyinterational.org, greenpeace.org, wildlifepreservation.org and
theover.org !
And I may well be running the web server and more on Linux in the near
future! With another modem on the machine I can use it doesn't require
the USB ADSL modem anymore but can happily internet over an 100baseT
ethernet link which works fine from linux (dual OS disc). I've
immediately installed Red Hat Fedora core4 on some space, which goes
pretty fast with 5megabit/sec download, and used apache (to begin with)
and a ntfs acces core module to serve the original webpage directory
tree in no-time from Linux, which works great, except for special
pages. The modem also acts as etherswitch/router which works fine and
also acts a firewall, which together with linux should be about as safe
against attacks, virusses and unauthorized access as would ever
normally be needed. Without downloading programs and disallowing
external account access it would almost be boringly safe... And then I
could still add external fpga/microcontroller based unchangable
intelligence/system watchkeeping and an electronic noise source for
generating random numbers, and web serving can be done be either of two
machines, so the whole thing could be sold to the FBI I guess.
Usb Disk
I've been playing with a 60 GB Usb diskdrive I made from some
relatively cheap parts, it's a 2.5 inch replacement notebook drive,
whichis cool, and the usb2 works quite fast: 20 megabytes per second or
so, a CD copy takes maybe a minute. I've put a number of audio CD's
(from the libray) on it in the form of a wav file (44.1kS/s, 16 bit
stereo, uncompressed) per song on it, which can be played back with for
instance the winamp media player, also more songs than 1 at once, which
is great.
Printing Digitial Pictures
A t-shirt and printed pictures look good from a store with internet
upload, I have made some pretty good nature pictures in france
which were printed.
The above was high quality printed on a t shirt which I wore one day at
the fair.
Walking on the Moon
I was given a preview ticked to "Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the
Moon" a 3D movie, where special glasses make a real 3 dimensional
picture possible, including strong directional sound, which was great
to see, though maybe throug my glasses the actors looked a bit like
dwarfs, even though they seemed to be really near. Maybe the theater
screen wasn't big enough, but it wasn't small: the arena cinema in
Amsterdam.
Great subject, I love looking at the movies at Nasa TV's (see
www.nasa.gov for the 300 kbps link take the yahoo feed, that looks
quite good, comparisonwise) about the gemini and Apollo travels.
Fundamental Science, my field?
Of cource, naturally I'd say, though I had more interests, but I scored
high in physics already at highschool: overall graduation exam there
(that's at 18 or so) I scored 9.4 out of 10, while I was still missing
classes for the mian stageplay technical committee which I led, and
while I did not much work for it (in fact I;d have scored a 10 rounded
if my teacher wouldn't have limited a certain test to get everybody at
most an 8 for perfect score, grr). Also at university I was good at
physics, I've assisted in electronics a hundred physics students a year
younger (with good success of course), I scored a 10 (A+) for a second
or third year physics exam about electromagnetics as part of the EE
curriculum without working all too hard for it, which was considered
very hard material.
As I wrote, I also joined a class in theoretical physics at some point,
where I co-lectured the members, which content-wise was cool, and where
I also without help made some non-trivial assignment solution work
mathematically (3.3 in negele/orland qmps).
Also, my graduate grades (well, lets say the last years of the academic
engineering degree in Electrical Engineering, Network Theory Section)
were not exactly devoid of 9s (A(-?)s):
* my laboratory task (same subject as
graduation "The feasibility of a chip design for ray-tracing bicubic
rational Bezier Patches") was rewarded with a 9,
* Computer Aided Circuit Design (a chip design practicum, I heard the
design later on actually worked) a 9,
* CACD special subjects (I did work on chip boundary scan) a 9,
* digital design course (forgot the name and the exact grade) 8 or 9,
* Computer Graphics a 9,
* electronics III advanced course in chip related subjects (with
practicum too IIRC) a 9,
* and in my first years I scored at least a 9 for a network theory and
physics exams,
and some more which I forgot, some of which (according to the
examinators) could have been higher grades if I'd have done the exams
earlier or the practicum would have been handed in faster (but I had
lots of activities, including starting a software and computer courses
company, and advanced musical bands and such).
This same man, in that same period of time, was flunked ("failed") 3
(THREE!!!) times for a course in digital signal processing, by a guy
that later of course had to mess up my work life as a project leader
(while it was started by me as a project, but then again, top fellow
students ripping content off for papers was also accepted). Remarkable,
isn't it. I NEVER failed any other course which I started as graduate,
all others I eventually passed. Some power, it would seem... (Because
there is no question about it I mastered the material MORE than enough).
Well, and of course I also did less fundamental/hard core beta science
courses like a heavy courses in business economy, formal logic,
philosophy of science, both advanced datacommunication courses (A and B
IIRC), which of course I passed. I followed (when I'd graduated, so no
need for exams) also a information theory doc course about
multidimensional information theory, and another physics (doc?) course.
So, if I now want some fundamental science on my track, that should be
possible at the highest levels officially! But I don't need to do exams
I'm a fully qualified Electrical Engineer already (1991), in fact in a
half year moderate work I could easily have been a PhD in EE (which is
often not considered much of an advantage), too. And when I graduated,
the section Network Theory was the considered the highest ranking in
the university, still, though a bit later on the level dropped, also of
the whole university: it has turned a bit provincial, and certainly not
up the high standards I got used to in my forming years there, with EE
consisting of 3/4 of the time fundamental mathematics.
But I'm convinced that its a good idea not to lose sight of the
hard-core fundamental sides of my branches of science, for which I'm
luckily qualified, and quite capable of following and learning in, so I
thought I'd read up on:
Engineering electromagnetics / by Umran S. Inan
and Aziz S. Inan (CB EMC199)
The first is a book I found an a Stanford Electromagnetics course, and
the second happened to be in the open searchable new Delft University
library about the subject, probably I'll want to see some contentwise
books about gravity and cosmology, like from Stephan Hawking.
Who's Got The Praise?
"We've got the praise" singing bands at least for sure not, I'd think.
I guess somebody must have read or known about my pages and though an
offensive would be the best defence against my rejection of the God
channel music as anything worth noting. Well, that hasn't done them
good, and with such statements, I presume in de spirit of "we've got
the funk" nobody is going to find them sympathetic.
Some time ago I made these screen pictures:
Europe: the Final Countdown?
Well, the smoke and burning of the final countdown for the Apollos and
geminis and what was the russion spacecraft called again, has already
taken place, till the point of touchdown on the moon repeatedly...
I don't believe in Europe. I hope soon via the US the 70's, which I'm
sure were originating from there mostly too, will return to europe, to
forget all the freemason sh*t, number of the beast non-sense, and
captivitiy in all kinds of delusions and oppressiveness and unfreedom.
Along the way to my old car park spot, there are (free ?) chickens
amoung the pigeons....
Three
hundred years of gravitation