a blog about music technology, electronic music, and signal processing, ranging from explainers to musical lab notebook experiments.
Steganography is my second album. Eleven tracks, 30 minutes. Fully synthesized. Distributed by 3OP . Digital download on Bandcamp. Vertex Figurine Growing Plums in the Desert Why Becoming Selfish is the Best Thing I Ever Did Unmaker Process Despite Our Best Efforts Warring Factions Irreversible Information Acquisition Things Toxic Friends Say Systematic Instinct Stab Variation Treachery Mastering…
Striations of Grace , a collaborative album on by Lime68k and me, has been announced on EVEL Records, releasing October 3rd on digital, CD, and a 7” vinyl edition. Seven tracks, 53 minutes of cosmic horror synthesis mutations. Lime68k & Nathan Ho - SOLVE Nathan Ho - The Kraken Lime68k - Out to Own Concern Lime68k & Nathan Ho - We Regret the Error I Lime68k - Who’s Out Concerns [vinyl release side…
A while back, I tried recreating the sound of a dialup modem from scratch , which involved a dive into multiple PDFs of telecommunication standards. (I am not the first person to do this .) Very helpful was Windy Tan’s beautiful analysis breaking down a spectrogram of a real dialup handshake. A particularly famous bit is the nasal mid-low “whine” at the end of the handshake, and if you’ve ever…
Synthesizer forums have a long-running joke about “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” that pictures the stereotypical hobbyist with all their Hainbach-endorsed gear, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they’re intended for making music. Trite as the joke is, the culture that reduces synthesizers to boutique furniture deserves all the mockery it gets. I’m a bit annoyed that I don’t remember who said this:…
(original) (processed) I would like to congratulate wavesets (not wavelets ) for entering their 30th year of being largely ignored outside of a very small circle of computer music nerds. Introduced by Trevor Wishart in [Wishart1994] and popularized by Microsound [Roads2002] and the Composers Desktop Project , a waveset is defined as a segment of an audio signal between two consecutive upward zero…
Let’s open this post with music. If you aren’t familiar with the late composer Roland Kayn’s work, listen to one of his Electronic Symphonies , or at least sample a few minutes. The album cover links to his official Bandcamp. I found out about Kayn’s music through a thread on Lines , and it gets only more interesting as I looked into his story. Kayn was an exponent of combining music with…
As 2023 ends, it seems like a good time to reflect and allow myself some vanity. It’s also a few days shy of the 15th anniversary of the first thing I created on the Internet (a certain wiki I have mentioned before ). Amusingly, I’m really doing the same thing as I was back then: publicly writing about niche technical subjects. Back then it was mathematics, now music technology. I set a goal for…
Much like the previously discussed wavelet transforms , the cepstrum is a frequency-domain method that I see talked about a lot in the scientific research literature, but only occasionally applied to the creative arts. The cepstrum is sometimes described as “the FFT of the FFT” (although this is an oversimplification since there are nonlinear operations sandwiched in between those two transforms,…
I have been experimenting a lot with finding ways to get more acoustic sounds out of synthesizers. These sounds don’t need to be perfect recreations of any particular real instrument, but I want a piece of the complexity and depth that those have, and also to investigate “Pinocchio” synth patches that fall short of becoming a real boy in hopefully interesting ways. Computer music types often jump…
Thanks to all who checked out my album Haywire Frontier . Yesterday, I gave a remote talk for the NOTAM SuperCollider meetup on the project. The talk wasn’t recorded, but I decided to rework it into prose. This is partially for the benefit of people that missed the event, but mostly because I’m too lazy to research and write a new post wholly from scratch this month. It’s not necessary to listen…