Migration to Wordpress

Hello folks!

From now on we'll post stuff on the much nicer Wordpress system.
Please bookmark this link: http://firstcask.com/blog

Slaters then!

Psychogeographical attempt

In today's post you'll learn how to rediscover your own neighbourhood for free!

Ingredients needed:

- a piece of paper
- a pen (a pencil will work as well)
- a car, or a motorbike, or a bicycle
- your best mate
- beer

Facultative:

- dice (if you're uninspired)

Now try the following:

Sit down with your mate, open a tin and decide of your directions by choosing lefts and rights in advance (at least 30 or so). Write it down on the sheet of paper. Invent yourself a couple of rules in case you end up in a dead end or something. Now go an follow strictly your planned journey. A surprise awaits you at the end! Satisfied or money back! Reports will be listed here and best rewarded by a Firstcask testpressing of your choice!

Nota: keep at least a couple of beers until the all process is done in case you need to give it to a farmer who gonna get you out of the mud with his tractor. No joke, this is experience speaking.

Magnetic paint stronger than expected

Our first and probably last attempt to acheive a "loudspeaker wall" ended up in an implosion process described by Nikola Tesla at the time.

Implosion is a suctional process that causes matter to move inwards, not outwards as in the case of explosion. This inward (centripetal) motion, however, does not follow a straight (radial) path to the centre, it follows a spiralling whirling path. This is called a vortex and is the secret of nature. Though, in our test we didn't get either a working speaker or a regular vortex. It makes us as dubitative as the guy who lent us his house for the experiment! Any implanation welcome!

LINGVA PRAVORVM PERIBIT - Tong of depraved people will perish!

A behind the scene reported story about cat number FSK007. We cannot guarantee that the following information is either relevant or accurate.

"A friend came to my house and we talked on my roof for ever enjoying wine and sunset, he told me he knew an old geezer living in the mountains of France he was making a film about. The geezer was a leader in the situationist movement (also prominent memeber of post-dadaïsm, surrealism, Cobra, Oulipo, Satrape, Collège de Pataphysique, OU-X-Po, Psychogeography), and has loads of unreleased material about French lettrists. We said lets get some recordings of this if we can, six months of difficult but pleasurable bartering and bargaining later, here is the result, co-produced by agent FSK007 and Videoconference". This is the only info we could collect from the internet...

It has been said and heard around that the two original cassettes have been collected in Brussels, shipped to Berlin, cut by a fantome engineer on an unattended session, shipped again to France? for duplication before being spread around mostly undercover. It is remarkable that all the reference numbers have been scratched out of the vinyl, the cover bringing no additional info. Though some Ubuweb people received a virgin untouched copy... Here is what they say:

Notes

Tracks 1-6:

SITUATIONISTEN
DOUBLE-7"

BOOTLEG

NO LABELS, NO ARTWORK

PERSONELL: GUY DEBORD + ?

DATE: ???

SCRATCHINGS:

A) FSK 007 A.45
B) FSK 007 B.45
C) FSK 007 + VIDEOCONFERENCE C.45
D) FSK 007 D.33

A DISCLAIMER ABOUT SITUATIONISTEN

One of UbuWeb's viewers, an astute Debord scholar who would rather remain anonymous disputes the authenticity of SITUATIONISTEN. We are enclosing his comments. We'll leave the MP3s up and leave it to you to decide for yourself:

"As for the Situationisten double LP, I have to say, I'm pretty sceptical that Debord had anything to do with any of this. It sounds more like the Lettrists, or possibly the Danish/German breakaway faction of the Situationists, but more likely the lettrists because the accents seem to be French. I don't recognize any voice which sounds like Debord's voice, which is pretty distinctive. All of this is to say, it's not impossible, because the world is full of wierd surprises, but my gut reaction is that this is either a bad gag or some repackaged Lettrists recordings and someone has called them "Situationist" for their own purposes, or because they lump the two together and don't know any better. By the time the Situs had formed, I think Debord had totally abandoned working in this mode and I have never seen any evidence that he worked in this mode even when he was part of the Lettrists or the Lettrist International. It's more characteristic of the early work of Gil Wollman and others.

I don't get any links from the FSK things so I'm not sure what they are. I can't hear them and don't know about them. I thought they were some kind of notations for the "Situationisten" lp. If so, then my comments above would apply.

I don't have the Greil Marcus cd, but he seems to have known Debord or at least had some access, so I don't think he'd put stuff out that was too questionable. However, the Hurlements track reads like a bad joke: since actually a 35mm print with optical sound would have lots of clicks and pops however silent. At best, it is a conceptual recreation of Part of the Track of Hurlements. Hurlements, as you probably know, did have plenty of voices as well as a preponderance of silence. Or perhaps the clicks and pops were cut out by whoever mastered the cd, or by whoever created the mp3s.

Critique of separation is possibly authentic, though its source is questionable. For the most part Debord worked with voice over and music separated. Having the music in the background and the short length of the sample suggests to me it may have come from a French Radio show about Debord and the situationists that was produced several years ago. It has copious extracts from the sound tracks of Debord's films and it's sometimes hard to tell where their transitions are superimposed on the original material. The voice however is unmistakeably Debord's, whereever it comes from.

A second follow-up: A friend who saw a screening of Hurlements last year in France reports to me that during the "silent" parts of the film, there were "creaking sounds" and "strange glitches." So, my guess would be that the bit of track on the cd is a hypothetical reconstruction of the "silent" part of the track rather than an actual "quotation" of the track. Silent passages in analog sound films are never effectively "silent" the way a digital track can be and Hurlements almost certainly had a 35mm optical sound track. Other possibilities are extremely remote."

Listen to the stuff on Ubuweb.

Multiple Sidosis 1970 by Sid Laverents

Splitscreens, overdubbing, yukulele, whisteling, ... A great classic amongst us!





Since its release in 1970 (originally screened for the San Diego Amateur Moviemakers Club, but eventually distributed to amateur film societies internationally) the nine minute “technical comedy” has won a wallfull of awards and honors, climaxing in 2000 when the Library of Congress selected it as the only amateur film to be entered into the National Film Registry, ensuring it’s preservation and place in history for as long as America exists.

More on Sid's filmography and discography on this page.

Exceptional Hip House TV footage featuring Rocky Jones, Boogie Man and Fast Eddie

A bit of acid house background here.

Ordinateur XYZ on Ondes Martenot

One of the best library music up to this date has been made by Steve Laurent & Pierre Duclos from France. It seems it was used as a film score for the "La Fayette" film from Jean Dréville in 1961. More info welcome! Anyway, please drop an ear on this fantastic piece of music!

Related info here and go there to download the Sonorop album.

Hang drum

Created in 2000, the Hang (pronounced "hung") is one of the youngest musical instruments. It comes from Bern, Switzerland, and was created by Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer OF THE PANArt Company. It was the result of many years of research on the steel pan and many other resonating percussion instruments from around the world: Gong, Gamelan, Ghatam, drums, cowbells, MUSICAL Saw...



More info at PANArt webby.

Spoon masterclass #1

Luanda 2009 Kuduro rave style!

Worldwide known, thanks to Buraka Som Sistema, Kuduro gets it right when it's about dancing. Actually there is some stories around that this dance style has been originally inspired by Jean-Claude Vandamme... Just browse Youtube for some gems! They appear as fast as they disappear. So be quick. Some cute ones below...

Burakas here!

CALL OUT!!!

"To challenge someone in some way. Or to put someone on blast:
I don't think you've really lost 300 pounds - you just say you have. Produce some Before & After photos. I'm calling you out!"

Hey guys, you're now reading us from all around the globe (yeah, the line is circular and slides along the equator, globally), as well as listening to our music, apart from Antarctica, or really deep into Sahara, or North Korea and China (though we know you're out there m8z!).

So why not submit some stuff you want us to post, so that the other parts of the planet can share the knowledge?

Send us emails guys, or post your intentions in the comments, we're all up to learn some new things!!!

p.s.: we're not suffering of a lack of things to post, at all, there's shitloads more to come, but we're expecting, and would really really, really, love some global participation and common sharing....

Come on the crew!!!! Let's rave!!! And scroll down the page!!!

THE MORE, THE MERRIER!

Original Mellotron demo

Oh my g... You gotta watch this till the end!

Welcome to:

Our new readers from Dominica, Slovakia, and Denmark.

And oops, we forgot to mention Spain in the previous post...

Amazing restoration project...

Between 1938 and 1942, the Hammond Organ Company was selling the Novachord, considered by some as the first real polyphonic synthesizer available on the market.




It's 72 notes polyphonic, amazingly ALL TUBES!!!
It has oscillators, filters, VCAs, envelope generators, and
a frequency divider...





A bit more than a thousand units were build, it was huge, heavy, and very fragile. Imagine yourself getting your hands on one these beast, and having to restore it: 72 notes, all tubes, really old components with toxic stuff in them...

Phil Cirocco at CMS got one, but as he says: "the sheer number of components and it's complexity, make properly restoring a Novachord, a Herculean task..."

Well, he managed to do it!!!

This guy is completely crazy, or a Genius, or probably both...

You'll find some sound samples at the bottom of the page, recorded right after restoration, and they are properly amazing, mind boggling, unbelievable, incredible, whatever you call them.
Scroll down a bit more and you'll find his conclusion about this job, it's truly freaky.

Oh, and Phil Cirocco is considered to be the foremost ARP guy in the world...

A pretty rare cutting lathe

When he was young, Les Paul (the legendary Gibson guy), was cutting acetates in his bedroom on portable devices such as Presto lathes.
There's many different Presto models and cutterheads, but a very interesting one is the portable system designed by the BBC during WWII.

But Les Paul didn't only design guitars and cut records, he also designed a cutting lathe...

It's the Arcturus:



Just click on the pictures for a much better resolution.



Very little is known about this machine, but what we know so far is that the turntable platter is a Cadillac flywheel!!! And that it also has wood bearings... Mounted on this lathe is a very very rare Van Epps cutterhead, extremely little is known on that one too.

Apparently Arcturus Company was (or is?) based in Los Angeles, hard to find info about it...
Could anybody help?

A space beacon called Oscar

Oscar-1

Since the very first OSCAR satellites (OSCAR stands for Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) were launched in the early 1960s, AMSAT's international volunteers, often working quite literally in their basements and garages, have pioneered a wide variety of new communications technologies that are now taken for granted in the world's satellite marketplace. These breakthroughs have included some of the very first satellite voice transponders as well as highly advanced digital "store-and-forward" messaging transponder techniques.



Beacons. Early amateur satellites carried only one-way radio beacons which sent down telemetry information about conditions of satellite equipment and the space environment to anybody interested in receiving the data. Hamsats of the 21st century still have such beacon transmitters, alongside their high-tech two-way communications transponders.



However, the thought of a "repeater in space" developed and launched by a group of "know-nothing Hams" working in their basements and garages wasn't always looked upon with favor. While details of the incident are sketchy, it's reported that the builders of TELSTAR I, the first commercial telecommunications satellite, were quite upset to learn that a "rag-tag" group of Hams were also working on a telecommunications satellite called OSCAR III as TELSTAR was nearing completion. For a while, it appeared that OSCAR III might possibly upstage their multi-million dollar TELSTAR effort by beating them to orbit! In fact, it's also reported that TELSTAR's builders did eventually change their public relations approach to include the word "commercial" in subsequent references to TELSTAR I as the "world's first telecommunications satellite".



History of amateur satellite site.
List of amateur satellites.
More at project Oscar page.

Selected references taken from the Amsat website:

Davidoff,  Martin,  The Satellite Experimenter's
       Handbook  Newington, CT: The American
       Radio Relay League,  1984.

Jansson,  Richard,  Spacecraft Technology Trends
        in the Amateur Satellite Service,  Ogden, UT:
        Proceedings of the 1st Annual USU Conference
        on Small Satellites,  1987.

You are reading us:

From 30 different countries so far, and that’s well cool…
Here’s the list, arranged by decreasing amount of readers by country:

Belgium, United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Finland, Canada, Lithuania, Sweden, Japan, Netherlands, France, Austria, Portugal, Australia, Greece, Hungary, India, Argentina, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, Chile, Poland, Bangladesh, South Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Norway, and last but not least: Romania.

U.S. gained the third place about a week ago, did anything happen over there recently? And we’re still missing some readers from Gaza, Baghdad, Cuba and Pyongyang. Come on guys, spread the word !!!

Ceephax "Exidy Tours" first artwork

Back in 2003 we released Andy's "Exidy Tours". Well this drawings he made before he finally choosed the cover you know. Actually, "Exidy Tours" was first called "The Last Ferry" as a tribute to the numerous fast drives on the E40 motorway in order to get the last ferry to England from Ostend. There is also some artwork for the "Last Ferry" album but can't get hold on it right now. It was some typewriting a bit like on the released album but black and white made on a mechanical machine. A typewriting wallet sort of thing. I remember Andy typing a huge amount of characters almost everywhere possible. Wayfaring writer...

Superheterodyne principles

The superheterodyne method found applications in early electronic musical instruments, in radio or even in the brand new Hypersonic (HSS) speakers. So we think some basics here may be appropriate!

The principles of beat frequency or heterodyning oscillators were discovered by chance during the first decades of the twentieth century by radio engineers experimenting with radio vacuum tubes. Heterodyning effect is created by two high radio frequency sound waves of similar but varying frequency combining and creating a lower audible frequency, equal to the difference between the two radio frequencies (approximately 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz). the musical potential of the effect was noted by several engineers and designers including Maurice Martenot, Nikolay Obukhov, Armand Givelet and Leon (or Lev) Sergeivitch Termen the Russian Cellist and electronic engineer.



What Superheterodyning is

When you use the lower side-band (the difference between the two frequencies), you are superheterodyning. Strictly speaking, the term superheterodyne refers to creating a beat frequency that is lower than the original signal. Although we have used the example of amplitude modulation side-bands as an example, we are not talking about encoding information for transmission. What superheterodying does is to purposely mix in another frequency in the receiver, so as to reduce the signal frequency prior to processing. Why and how this is done will be discussed below.

We have discussed that superheterodyning is simply reducing the incoming signal is frequency by mixing. In a radio application we are reducing the AM or FM signal which is centered on the carrier frequency to some intermediate value, called the IF (intermediate frequency). For practical purposes, the superheterodyne receiver always reduces to the same value of IF. To accomplish this requires that we be able to continuously vary the frequency being mixed into the signal so as to keep the difference the same. Here's what the superheterodyne receiver looks like:

This is essentially the conventional receiver with the addition of a mixer and local oscillator. The local oscillator is linked to the tuner because they both must vary with the carrier frequency. For example, suppose you want to tune in a TV station at 235 MHz. The band-pass filter (which only permits signals in a small range about the center frequency to pass) must be centered at 235 MHz (or slightly higher in SSB). The local oscillator must be set to a frequency that will heterodyne the 235 MHz to the desired IF of 452 kHz (typical). This means the local oscillator must be set to 234.448 MHz (or alternatively to 235.452 MHz) so that the difference frequency will be exactly 452 kHz. The local oscillator must be capable of varying the frequency over the same range as the tuner; in fact, they vary the same amount. Therefore, the tuner and the local oscillator are linked so they operate together.

Advantages of Using Superheterodyning

Now, we easily see that this type of receiver can be constructed, but for what purpose? All we have accomplished is to reduce the frequency to the IF value. We still must process the signal as before. So why are so many receivers using the superheterodyne method? There are three main advantages, depending on the application used for:

• It reduces the signal from very high frequency sources where ordinary components wouldn't work (like in a radar receiver).
• It allows many components to operate at a fixed frequency (IF section) and therefore they can be optimized or made more inexpensively.
• It can be used to improve signal isolation by arithmetic selectivity

Reduction in frequency

AT very extremely high frequencies, many ordinary components cease to function. Although we see many computer systems that work at previously unattainable frequencies like 166 MHz, you certainly never see any system that works at radar frequencies like 10 GHz (try that Intel!). There are many physical reasons for this, but suffice it to say, it can't be done (yet). So the designer of a radar interceptor (fuzz-buster, et al.) is faced with a daunting circumstance unless he/she can use a superheterodyne receiver to knock down the frequency to an IF value. It is in fact, the local oscillator (a operating at radar frequencies) of the superheterodyne radar receiver that makes your radar detector detectable by the police (in VA for example, where the use of radar detectors are illegal).

Optimization of Components

It is a typical engineering dilemma: how to make components that have outstanding performance, but can also cover a wide range of frequencies. Again, the details aren't important, but the problem is very real. A possible solution to this, is to make as much of the receiver as possible always work at the same frequency (the IF). This is accomplished by using the superheterodyne method. The majority of components can be optimized to work at the IF without any requirements to cover a wide range of frequencies.

Arithmetic Selectivity

The ability to isolate signals, or reject unwanted ones, is a function of the receiver bandwidth. For example, the band-pass filter in the tuner is what isolates the desired signal from the adjacent ones. In real life, there are frequently sources that can interfere with your signal. The FCC makes frequency assignments that generally prevent this. Depending on the application, you might have a need for very narrow signal isolation. If the performance of your band-pass filter isn't sufficient to accomplish this, the performance can be improve by superheterodyning.

Frequently, the receiver bandwidth is some fraction of the carrier frequency. If your receiver has a bandwidth of 2 % and you are tuned to 850 kHz, then only signals within the range from 2 % above and below are passed. In this case, that would be from 833 to 867 kHz.

Arithmetic selectivity takes that fraction and applies it to the reduced frequency (the IF). For the fixed IF of 452 kHz, that means signals which are superheterodyned to the range of 443 to 461 kHz will pass. Taking this range back up into the carrier band, only carrier frequencies in the range of 841 to 859 kHz will pass. If this is confusing, recall that the local oscillator is set to reduce the 850 kHz to 452 kHz (i.e. must be set at 398 kHz). Thus, the 850 kHz is superheterodyned to 452 kHz. Any adjacent signals are also superheterodyned but remain the same above or below the original signal. An example might clear this up:

Suppose there is an interfering signal at 863 kHz while you are tuned to 850 kHz. A conventional 2 % receiver will pass 833 to 867 kHz and so the interfering signal also passes. The superheterodyne receiver mixes both signals with 398 kHz to produce the desired signal at 452 kHz and the interference at 465 kHz. At 2 %, the IF section only passes 443 to 461 kHz, and therefore the interference is now suppressed. We say that the superheterodyne receiver is more selective. With a little thought, the reason is simple: it operates at a smaller frequency, so the 2 % actually involves a smaller range. That is why it is called arithmetic selectivity. Bandwidths that are expressed as a percentage are smaller when the center frequency is smaller (the same way that 2 % of $10 is less than 2 % of $10,000,000 ).

Whether or not, you need to take advantage of arithmetic selectivity depends on the application. If you have no problems with interference at your current bandwidth and/or it is not difficult or expensive to reduce the bandwidth of your receiver, then you don't need it. However, in cases where selectivity is important or the frequency is very high (like radar) then superheterodyning can greatly improve performance.

Summary

• Superheterodyne receivers reduce the signal frequency be mixing in a signal from a local oscillator to produce the intermediate frequency (IF).
• Superheterodyne receivers have better performance because the components can be optimized to work a single intermediate frequency, and can take advantage of arithmetic selectivity.

For an introduction on Amplitude Modulation please visit this link.

THE geezer, the utimate. (yeah, next one's for Bob).

Oooow man, we all owe him soooo much...







Cheerz Ikutaro.

A very nice, and essential story here.

CTRL+ALT+DELETE

This short line of code was written by David Bradley when he was working for IBM, it was "just a five minutes job". He got tired of restarting his machine all the time, when he was working on the development of the PC, testing new softwares and pieces of hardware that would "hang up all the time". So he just invented a shortcut that would involve both hands, so you wouldn't type it by mistake just with one hand...

He made this famous quote: "I may be invented it, but i think Bill made it famous!"

Just watch Bill's face when Dave drops it...

FTIR multi-touch display how-to guide by Harry van der Veen

This is what Harry says about his guide:

My name is Harry van der Veen, callsign Gravano. I’m writing this FTIR multi-touch display how-to guide, because I want to make it easier for other people to build their own multi-touch display. My intensions are to make this guide understandable for people, in the age of approximately twelve to about seventy years. I would like to point out, that in this guide, I describe “a way” to build a multi-touch display. I’m not saying it’s THE way. There are numerous of ways to build screens, this is just one of them.



There’s nothing you should know about any difficult technologies. I’ll try to explain everything as simple and thorough as possible. Only thing you must be able to is, actually buy or own the materials and have some basic handyman’s work skills like drilling, sanding, sawing, polish. If have two left hands myself and even I succeeded, so you should be fine.



Full PDF to be downloaded here.

Schumann resonances

This global electromagnetic resonance phenomenon is named after physicist Winfried Otto Schumann who predicted it mathematically in 1952. Schumann resonance occurs because the space between the surface of the Earth and the conductive ionosphere acts as a waveguide. The limited dimensions of the Earth cause this waveguide to act as a resonant cavity for electromagnetic waves in the ELF band. The cavity is naturally excited by energy from lightning strikes. Schumann resonance modes are observed in the power spectra of the natural electromagnetic background noise, as separate peaks at extremely low frequencies (ELF) around 7.8, 14.3, 20.8, 27.3 and 33.8 Hz.

The fundamental mode of the Schumann resonance is a standing wave in the Earth-ionosphere cavity with a wavelength equal to the circumference of the Earth. This lowest-frequency (and highest-intensity) mode of the Schumann resonance occurs at a frequency of approximately 7.8 Hz. Further resonance modes appear at approximately 6.5 Hz intervals, a characteristic attributed to the atmosphere's spherical geometry. The peaks exhibit a spectral width of approximately 20% on account of the damping of the respective modes in the dissipative cavity. The eighth overtone lies at approximately 59.9 Hz.

More from Wikipedia.

And here how to capture “exotic” signals in the range of ELF – SLF – ULF – VLF frequencies. Connecting an antenna to a PC with a Sound Card and Software like CiaoRadio, it is possible to receive, analyze, and demodulate any ELF – SLF – ULF – VLF signal up to 24 kHz.

Or intercept submarines communications! USA and Russia transmit in the ELF band generating a slow binary code. Frequencies are 76 Hz for the U.S. system and 82 Hz in the Russian system; the E.R.P. (Effective Radiated Power) is small, probably a few Watts, but signals are receivable around the world. This special kind of reception requires low-pass filters to avoid overloading the input with spherics. All spectrograms in this section are received with the Marconi T antenna and horizontal loop (2100 sq.m).

The Electromagnetic Telegraph

A technical history of the 19th-century electromagnetic telegraph, with special reference to the origin and variey of the alphabets, or codes, that were used.

In an Atlantic Magazine article in 1858, Reverend Hale explains how "dots and lines" are used for communication, describing many ways of sending and receiving them. James Swain of Philadelphia had described what he called a Mural Diagraph in 1829, using knocks and scratches to communicate through walls (obviously not brick walls), that were like dots and dashes. The reverend says his friend Langenzunge (a joke?) cut the wires beside the Baltimore and Ohio during a delay in a trip on a freight train, put them in his mouth, and tasted the sad message that his friend Old Rough and Ready (President Taylor) had died. A blind girl had smelled a message received on the Bain electrochemical telegraph, and another blind person had read the message recorded by a Morse embossing register (a predecessor of the Braille code?). He says the dots and line have been seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt (using all five senses). You can believe as much of this as you want.

Full article here.

Huge list of service manuals in PDF.

For ARP, AKAI, BOSS, CASIO, CRUMAR, EML, FAIRLIGHT, KORG, MOOG, ROLAND, YAMAHA synths. To be downloaded here.

Some more here including BUCHLA, OBERHEIM and SEQUENTIAL.

Back in the days... UK rave in 1989.

Pine trees as loudspeakers or how to listen to Electrophonic Meteors

Leonid meteor breakup.

NINETY MINUTES before sunrise on 7 April 1978, an extraterrestrial guest arrived over Eastern Australia. For about 20 seconds it streaked across the sky leaving a bright trail that turned night into day, before finally exploding into glowing fragments that vanished into the sea. This meteor was just one of thousands that enter our atmosphere every year, yet dozens of witnesses in Newcastle and Sydney reported something particularly strange about this visitor. Just before it blew apart, it produced an unearthly soundtrack of hisses, crackles and pops.

Reports of noisy meteors appear in the Bible, yet the cause of their bizarre sounds has always been a mystery. One person might hear the popping and whooshing clearly while another, standing just a few metres away, hears nothing. Explaining this oddity is especially tricky since there is almost no hard scientific data to go on: even if you spent two hours every night looking for them, you might have to wait fifty years to hear one.

Yet researchers believe they are finally closing in on the origins of these strange sounds. All they need now are some meteors on which to test their theories. But rather than waiting around for one to show up, they're hoping that artificial meteors--redundant satellites brought down from orbit to burn up in the atmosphere--will give them the vital data they need to settle it once and for all. At the same time, there's a good chance that they will solve another age-old mystery--the ghostly, rustling songs sometimes heard by observers of the northern and southern lights.

One of the pioneers of these studies is Colin Keay, a physicist at the University of Newcastle in Australia. The day after the New South Wales fireball fell to Earth, Keay was phoned by a colleague at the Australia Museum in Sydney who asked him if he would search for any fragments of the meteorite that might have landed on dry ground. During this hunt, he discovered something about the fireball that would change the course of his work forever.

The meteorite, Keay calculated, had streaked across the sky at almost 20 kilometres per second, 30 kilometres up, yet he met dozens of reliable witnesses who claimed to have heard it produce strange noises as it flew overhead--anything from "a low moaning" to "an express train travelling at high speed". If these sounds had come directly from the meteorite, people on the ground below shouldn't have heard them until almost a minute after it exploded. It would be like seeing a distant flash of lightning and hearing the thunderclap at the same instant.

What finally clinched it for Keay was meeting two witnesses who claimed the sounds first alerted them to the meteorite trail. "When two people reported hearing the sounds before seeing the light of the fireball, I knew it couldn't be psychological," says Keay. "There had to be something to it." Intrigued, he set to work to uncover the mechanism behind these noises. He spent months creating and discarding one physical model after another. Finally, he settled on one that he suspected was the only way to explain how an observer could hear a meteor's fiery entry at the same time as seeing it. It all comes down to electromagnetic radiation.

Keay suspected that the light given off by a meteor's trail must be accompanied by invisible electromagnetic radiation in the form of very low frequency (VLF) radio waves at frequencies from 10 hertz to 30 kilohertz. Travelling at exactly the same speed as visible light, these waves would reach the observer as soon as the meteorite itself came into view. The problem is that you can't hear radio waves. The only way you might hear them is with the help of a suitable "transducer"- an object that acts rather like a loudspeaker, converting electromagnetic signals into audible vibrations.

After some experiments in a soundproof chamber, Keay found that all kinds of things can act as transducers. Aluminium foil, thin wires, pine needles or dry, frizzy hair all respond to a VLF field. The radio waves induce small charges in such objects, and these charges force the object to vibrate in time with the oscillating waves, effectively making them act like the diaphragm in a loudspeaker. Even a pair of glasses, he discovered, will vibrate slightly. And since they rest against the bones of the skull, glasses could increase an observer's chances of hearing VLF waves.

Pine speakers

The transducer effect would explain why some people heard noises from the Australian meteor while others close by heard nothing. Those who heard sounds were simply nearer to the "speakers"--transducers such as pine trees, for example. It would even explain why attempts to record these sounds have always failed. Scientists go out of their way to place their microphones well away from any possible sources of interference such as trees or electric cables. But without any transducers nearby, the meteors would appear silent.

So the transducer effect seems a plausible source of the strange noises, but how do meteors generate VLF waves? "I was getting nowhere until I got the idea to look at turbulence," Keay says. He remembered a theory put forward by physicist Fred Hoyle which used turbulent plasmas to explain sunspots. Perhaps, thought Keay, interactions between the Earth's magnetic field and the plasma in a meteor's trail could somehow create VLF waves.

When a meteor crashes into the Earth's dense atmosphere, it ionises the air around it, leaving a blazing trail of plasma. For a few metres behind the meteor, this trail flows smoothly, but a little further back it becomes turbulent. Since a plasma is a mixture of ions and electrons, it can trap and hold the Earth's magnetic field. "The plasma is swirling so fast that the magnetic field is trapped and scrambled up like magnetic spaghetti," explains Keay. But as the meteor races across the sky, the plasma left behind cools, and the electrons and ions in it recombine almost immediately. Without the electrical charges to keep the magnetic field lines tangled, they suddenly pop free and vibrate like a plucked violin string. It is these vibrations, Keay believes, that broadcast VLF electromagnetic waves over a range of several hundred kilometres.

Full article here at Meteorobs.
Originally from New Scientist magazine, 06 January 2001.

And here for a Leonid Meteor Sounds Witness Accounts.

Laser microphones DIY

A laser microphone is a surveillance device that uses a laser beam to detect sound vibrations in a distant object. The object is typically inside a room where a conversation is taking place, and can be anything that can vibrate (for example, a picture on a wall) in response to the pressure waves created by noises present in the room. The object preferably has a smooth surface. The laser beam is directed into the room through a window, reflects off the object and returns to a receiver that converts the beam to an audio signal. The beam may also be bounced off the window itself. The minute differences in the distance traveled by the light as it reflects from the vibrating object are detected interferometrically. The interferometer converts the variations to intensity variations, and electronics are used to convert these variations to signals that can be converted back to sound.

More here and here.

Hypersonic sound speaker (HSS speakers)

The principle underlying HSS technology was first described by 18th century Italian composer, Tartini, who found that if one plays two different tones loudly at the same time, a third tone is produced which has a frequency that is the exact difference of the frequencies of the other two.

HSS systems apply the 'Tartini principle' electronically and use ultrasonic sounds that are beyond the range of human or animal hearing. HSS sounds are actually a combination of two sound waves: a 'carrier' wave with a frequency of 200,000-hz, and a second wave in the 200,020 to 220,000 hz range. Subtract the latter from the former and you get sound in the 20 to 20,000 hz range - which is the actual audal range of human beings: deep bass notes (20-hz) to shrill, 'high notes' at 20,000-hz.

The sound waves emitted by HSS systems are tightly focused. Since they are at a range that is not audible to humans, they are not heard until the waves encounter an obstacle - a wall, vase, door, or person. At this point, the carrier wave 'drops out' and only the audal sound is heard.

The technology is winning believers from Wal-Mart to McDonald's, Fox television, the Los Angeles Police Department, Procter & Gamble, the U.S. Navy and Cirque de Soleil. It is looking into whether HSS could be used to communicate instructions, midact, from the ground to a trapeze artist without the audience hearing. Companies are experimenting with HSS in TVs, rock concerts, museums, war and airport gates. Imagine hearing only your flight's announcements. In 2002, Popular Science magazine awarded HSS the grand prize for inventions. The Segway personal transporter took second.

"It offers huge benefits over your standard speaker systems," says Sony executive Simon Beesley, who is working on HSS in commercial settings, such as stores or restaurants. "The technology is in its infancy, but I am sure it will very quickly expand."

As it does, HSS will probably rattle the speaker industry, which has been selling a variation of the same technology for nearly 80 years. The impact could be like that of the jet engine on propeller planes or the PC on the mainframe — a major shift that ushers in an era.

- Is it fairly easy to set up a portable fm pirate radio station? Contest results

Chelmsford radar

Here are the finalists of the "Drive Time Contest", cheers for your cool answers, unfortunately we would have love to send out some more copies, but the Drive Time Vinyl is already almost deleted...

And the winners are:

Chris, from Dronfield, UK
Warren, from South Bend, USA
Eddie, from Mexico City.

Guys, you've been randomly chosen from the answers below.

Items will be sent shortly, thanks to WEME records who helps taking care of our catalogue. Hope you'll enjoy the music!
Massive thanks to all people who participated, we'll remember you.
Here are some other cool answers we received:

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Chris, from Dronfield, UK

A: Yes if you don't mind being arrested.

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Jack Tullip, from X, X

A: yes my friends it's very easy to start a pirate station.
the hard part is to keep it goin'.

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Alessio, from Helsinki, Finland

A: Actually, nowadays it's quite easy.
What you need is:
- an antenna
- a laptop
- vinyls
- a vinyl player
x- a cat
The antenna, the laptop, the vinyls and the vinyl player can be stored in the same bag. The cat need its own when carried around. When you arrive on the next place, be the train station, the train, your room or an internet cafe' downtown, just switch on your Linux laptop, and power the antenna and the vinyl player. The antenna will permit you a short range coverage for your pirate radio station, internet connection and Linunx programs will broadcast to the rest of the world. Once those few step are done, start playing the first vinyl, and let the cat scratch it around, clockwise or anticlockwise, as it feels like. Then move to the next vinyl. And then to the next, until you have to move to the next place.
Last but not least, remember to feed the cat.
********
Hope you enjoy it,

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Warren, from South Bend, USA

A: It's really not that easy to set up a FM Portable Pirate station. First off you'd have to have a wheelbarrow full of Jean Michel Jarre live concert bootlegs. Because the only real Pirate station worth having, is one dealing strictly in JMJ concert recordings. If you were so lucky to have 500 audience recorded bootlegs of JMJ, you'd have to spend the time transferring the cassette audio to vinyl. One knows that the only way to listen to JMJ is on vinyl transfered from shoddy cassette bootlegs. Can you imagine the instant satisfaction of tuning into an FM station and hearing the beaming transmissions of the JMJ light synthesizer melting your face off?!
If only it were so easy....

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Dieter, from Brakel, Belgium

A: I think it is fairly easy to set up a portable fm pirate radio station, if you build this simple transmitter which can be found here: http://www.aaroncake.net/circuits/phonebug.asp.
Of course it also depends on how handy you are with building electronic circuits, I know I'm not that handy :-) The frequency can be tuned from 88 to about 94Mhz so not the whole FM band is covered. I really enjoyed reading this blog, very interesting stuff! It's really interesting to see how inventive those pioneers usually were. I visited the Marconi Villa in Bologna this summer where some of Marconi's experiments are demonstrated.
Thanks for the interesting blog,

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Ed, from Worthing, UK

A: Yes (ish)
1) get rum
2) parrot nb. NOT dead (just sleeping)
2)a)i) get hook
3) get radio
or
if you have the right equipment, you can relay the signal to a remote/unexpected location and have you station untraceable or at least harder to find ie the sussex downs or a towerblock
then just publicise.
as for DAB - im clueless

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Joe, from Kidderminster, UK

A: Of course but only with the help of Scatman John & Uncle John from Jamaica!

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Chris, from Falmouth, UK

A: How easy it is depends on how badly you want/need to spread horrible acid music up & down the country.

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Michael, from Cumbria, UK

A: hey caskers
i'd say it is easy to set up a pirate radio station, if you could shrink down like Rick Moronis (Anis? Anus?) and make the whole studio out of tin cans and copper wire from the disembowled stomachs of forgotten ancient talking barbie dolls. A macabre thought I know but once Barbie is dead, should we not harvest her organs?

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Leo, from Stuttgart, Germany

A: Hi there!
> - Is it fairly easy to set up a portable fm pirate radio station?
technically it's really easy - i think the biggest problem is to fill all the broadcasting time.
a while ago we had the plan to build dozens of cheap little fm transmitters, all on different frequencies, and hide them all over the city. but we didn't realise this cuz all the cassette players needed would have been too expensive. at the current 2nd hand walkman prices it's probably worth doing though.
on the other hand we're already running the _hyperground radio shows on our local noncommercial radio station (http://www.freies-radio.de). the station doesn't really have rules regarding content or musical choices, so setting up a pirate radio station here in stuttgart is a bit redundant (except for the street credibility)
all the best,
leo (and the _hyperground team)
ps:
i only got a pair of socks for christmas and would be super-happy to play andy's drive time tape on the show ;)
--
http://www.roglok.net
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Eddie, from Mexico City, Mexico

A: Of course it is, with the right set of tools (a correct tape player, preamp, transmitter, band pass filter,a powerful antena and of course some fairy dust everythings possible. And well if youre looking for portable just take your mind with you and sing them tunes in your head, with luck someone capable of telepathy will cath your signal!!!
Cheers

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X, from X, X

A: Yes, it's a piece of piss. There's an episode of the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles where Krang does it to control everyone so that might help if you're interested in getting involved. An actual easy way of doing it is with one of those Itrip things or something similar, but then you'll only be able to play your show to people in your car or those in range of your speakers.

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Wayne, from Parkville, USA

A: My answer to the pirate radio station question follows?
It is not too difficult. First you get an eye patch, peg leg, parrot, ship and crew. Find the buried treasure chest filled with a preamplifier, transmitter, bandpass filter, power supply, mast, antenna and cables. Then set up the broadcasting site in international waters. Lastly, in order to keep rocking have your crew use the ship's canons to protect the broadcasting site.

-------------------------------------------

And a late answer from New York City which didn't count for the contest but a nice one though:

A: It is indeed fairly easy to set up a portable FM Pirate radio station. If by easy you mean fashionable, FM you mean Fairly Mature, Pirate you mean 40-something single mother, radio station you mean Pina Colada, then yes its incredibly easy. The soundtrack to this email is Lovers Acid for your information in case you would like to better understand my reasoning.

1. Go to Flash Dancers at 57th and Broadway in central mid town Manhattan.
2. Ask for Elizabeth. She is russian, 5'10" blonde and ridiculously fake looking.
i. Drop my name if you wish, It may bring you to the front of the queue.
3. Once seated, ask her to demonstrate, rather indulge you in a lap-dance.
i. Keep your hands to yourself. Try sitting on them to keep yourself from getting escorted out of the venue. It helps.
4. At 4 am the show stops. Men stumble to the street covered in glitter from the breasts of the dancers. This is always really weird and awkward.
5. Go home, think about your life, make a tune.
6. Wake up invigorated. Look outside, the sun is shinning. Its 2 pm for Christ sake.
7. Make a pirate radio station.

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ACID VARSITY LET ME HEAR YOU!

That's for sure!

“Computer games dont affect us as kids, i mean if pacman did, we’d all be running around darkend rooms, munching on magic pills and listening to repetetive electronic music” Kristina Wilson, Nintendo, 1989

"I am electrical by nature", Ludwig von Beethoven

Recording Angels
The Electromagnetic Imaginary

Originally appeared in The Wire, January 1999; reprinted in Undercurrents (Continuum)

Though sound and music are essentially incorporeal aspects of human experience, they are dependent on the latent potentials of matter: bamboo tubes, stretched animal skin, throat-flesh. Even more fundamentally, sound rests upon vibration, the analog fluctuations of that vaporous fluid we call air. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that ocean of vibration became electrified. Just as traditional instruments can be seen as alchemical transformations of earth and air, woods and metals, so can the revolutionary sonic media that followed in the wake of the telegraph -- telephone, phonograph, and radio, not to mention theremins, moogs, and Roland 303s -- be seen as creative transmutations of the new "elements" that would come to undergird the twentieth century's cultural consciousness: electricity and electromagnetism.

"I am electrical by nature," wrote Ludwig von Beethoven. "Music is the electric soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents." The old man's curious quip introduces us to what I like to call "the electromagnetic imaginary:" the mythic, animistic, and just plain weird cultural dimensions of electricity and electromagnetism, those cosmic forces which carry an imaginative load as powerful for us as air, earth, water and fire were for the ancients. The word electricity first entered the English tongue in a 1650 translation of a treatise on the healing properties of magnets by Jan Baptist van Helmont, a Flemish physician and Rosicrucian who worked, significantly, on the borderline between natural magic and modern chemistry. Indeed, many of the earliest books on electricity described the force in distinctly alchemical terms, dubbing it the "ethereal fire," the "quintessential fire," or the "desideratum," the long-sought universal panacea. Emerging from the gap between biology and physics, matter and the unseen ether, electricity is a liminal force that inevitably carries a powerful imaginative load.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, electricity also catalyzed the kind of heady enthusiasm that data devices do today. One of these electrogeeks, a failed painter named Samuel Morse, was blessed with a formidable insight in the 1830s: if electric current could be squeezed through a wire, then "intelligence might...be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance." After convincing Congress to plow $30,000 into his project, Morse strung up a wire between Baltimore and Washington D.C. The first official message to careen along the line, in 1844, was a strangely oracular pronouncement: "What hath God wrought!" This message reads as much like an anxious question as a cry of glee, and today we know the answer: what God wrought, or rather, what men wrought in their god-aping mode, was the information age.

Morse's system was not just electrical (and hence, effectively instantaneous); it was digital. The electric current that ran along telegraph wires was an analog medium, flowing in the undulating waves that everywhere weave the world. But by regularly breaking and reestablishing this flow with a simple switch, and by establishing a code to interpret the resulting patterns of pulses, Morse chopped the analog dance into discrete digital signs. But these signs were also electro-metallic beats, a rat-a-tat that foreshadowed the frenetic rhythms of the coming machine age. With Morse code in hand, railroads improved their ability to move goods over America's vast distances, newspapermen sped up the perceived pace of historical events, businessmen upped their managerial control (and their stress), and stock markets started pulsing in synch. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables, the character Clifford asks a question at once ironic and prophetic of all the electromania to come: "Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?"

Writing about the telegraph in Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan also argued that "whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself) had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself." For McLuhan, Morse's electric ganglion was only the first in a series of media that served to dissolve the logical and individualistic mindframe hammered out by alphanumeric characters, the printing press, and Renaissance perspective drawing. The telegraph sparked the "electric retribalization of the West," a long slide into an immersive electronic sea of mythic participation and collective resonance. But McLuhan also saw this "outering" as the technological roots of the age of anxiety. "To put one's nerves outside," he wrote, "is to initiate a situation -- if not a concept -- of dread."

Because the self is partly a product of its communications, new media technologies remold the boundaries of being. As they do so, the shadows, doppelgangers, and dark intuitions that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well -- and some of them take up residence in the emerging virtual spaces suggested by the new technologies. Spiritualism, for example, was bound up from the get-go with the telegraph: the knocks and rappings that passed back and forth between the Fox sisters and the dead peddler in their Hydesdale cottage in 1848 were spectral echoes of the dots and dashes then hurtling through wires across the land. During the 1850s, the movement's most popular newspaper was called The Spiritual Telegraph, and Spiritualists like Allan Kardec and scientists like Michael Faraday both looked to electricity to explain the raps, creaks, and table-hops that occurred during seances. By the 1860s and 70s, mediums had become the professional pop stars of the Victorian era, and attendees were treated to occult sideshows, as tables rapped and danced across the room, and gooey ectoplasm materialized out of thin air, and musical instruments played creepy jigs in the dark -- apparently all by themselves.

Sound clearly plays a privileged role in both manifesting and mystifying electricity. According to one contemporary account, the "Finale" of a Boston lecture given by representatives of the Edison Company in 1887 was nothing less than a seance: "Bells rung, drums beat, noises natural and unnatural were heard, a cabinet revolved and flashed fire, and a row of departed skulls came into view." And when Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson gave demonstration lectures for the telephone, the two men also conjured up tricks that delivered all the thrills and chills of a magic show.

The telephone always possessed a kind of shadow side. Though Bell came up with the notion of translating the vibrating pressures of the human voice into an electrical signal that could pass along a wire, Watson actually built most of the man's early devices. Like a lot of the electrical hackers of the time, Watson combined loads of practical know-how with weak and frequently wacky theories about the mysterious fluid itself -- electricity is an experience before it is a fact, a dream before it is a science. In Watson's case, electrical theories were mixed up with Spiritualist notions. Watson treated Spiritualism as a non-mystical science, and he initially concluded that, just as "a telegraph instrument transforms pulsations of electricity into the taps of the Morse code," so too did mediums transform energetic radiation into raps and knockings. He also believed spirits from the other side were helping the telephone along. And why not? We associate sentient life with what communicates, and here was an inert thing full of voices. As the emperor of Brazil exclaimed when he first heard the gadget: "My God, it talks!"

A similar shock, impossible for us to reconstruct, awaited folks first confronted with the phonograph. The telephone had already transformed sound waves into the fluctuations of an electric current, but Thomas Edison discovered that changing an electric current in a stylus changed the amount of friction the stylus exerted on a rotating cylinder -- which could therefore become a medium of sonic inscription. Though Edison himself was a most practical man, he was also something of a techno-spiritualist, and later attempted to build a radio device capable of capturing the voices of the dead. Such desires would persist, sublimated and not, throughout the twentieth century. The Swedish researcher Konstantin Raudive claimed that magnetic tape recordings of silence often turn out, on repeated listening, to contain distinct voices, and contemporary devotees of Electronic Voice Phenomenon have tuned into similar murmurs on non-broadcast radio frequencies, some of which are interpreted as messages from beyond the veil.

These dreams and sonic phantasms are not just kookery; they are what Kodwo Eshun would call "sonic fictions," arising in the virtual spaces carved out by electrical media. By siphoning a bit of the soul into an externalized device, such technologies triggered the ancient dread of the doppelgänger, that psychic simulacrum of the self that moves through the world of its own eerie accord. Freud dubbed the dread produced by the doppelgänger "the uncanny," which he connected to the queer feelings one gets from dolls and automata. It seems important to note that when Edison was imagining possible applications for his new device, one of his first notions, alongside producing platters of music, was to make dolls "speak sing cry & make various sounds."

Electricity had still other tricks up its sleeve. In the 183Os, the great British experimental scientist Michael Faraday discovered that changing the electrical current in a wire coil somehow induced an energetic fluctuation in a nearby coil. This decidedly bizarre action-at-a-distance, which came to be called electromagnetic induction, is the driving force behind electrical power plants to this day. For his part, Faraday explained the rather mysterious force connecting the two coils as a "wave of electricity." Pointing to the strange patterns that iron filings create around the end of a magnet, Faraday also suggested that electromagnetic "fields" consisted of "lines of force," vibrating patterns that spread throughout space. Though Faraday initially considered these undulating images of fields and lines of force as nothing more than useful fictions, he gradually accepted them as a basic description of reality.

In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell translated Faraday's experimental findings into the language of mathematics, synthesizing optical, magnetic, and electrical phenomena into four magnificent equations that governed the whole of electromagnetic reality. In doing so, Maxwell predicted the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum whose waves we now exploit for everything from broadcasting Puff Daddy to reheating meat loaf to analyzing the chemical composition of Alpha Centauri. Einstein later called Faraday and Maxwell's work the "greatest alteration in the axiomatic basis of physics -- in our conception of the structure of reality." Their electromagnetic universe set the stage for the final deconstruction of atomic materialism: the dissolution of the ether, the emergence of Einsteinian space-time, and ultimately the arrival of quantum mechanics and its colossal oddities. The corporeal cosmos melted into an immense sea of vibrations and insubstantial forces.

Metaphorically speaking, Faraday and Maxwell's model was also intensely musical, though its music was very different from the tonal structures of Western music -- structures which, perhaps not coincidentally, began to dissolve just as the new model of the universe entered popular consciousness. Towards the end of the century, wireless hackers like Marconi and Tesla make direct technological contact with the invisible radio waves theoretically limned by Maxwell. In 1899, after five years of fiddling around with induction coils, batteries and primitive aerials (some of which he hung from balloons), Guglielmo Marconi equipped two ships with radio gear that issued speedily telegraphed reports on the yacht race for the America's Cup. This little sports thrill captured the world's imagination, and the twentieth century can be said to have started on a wireless note. As Simon Reynolds notes, wireless telegraphy also served as a kind of sonic prophecy: those monotone Morse beep-beep-beeps that once signified news now sound like dance music.

Marconi's wireless flowered into radio, which in its first few decades reproduced a pattern of intense technical development and prophecies about world peace and democratic communication that sound eerily familiar in the Internet 90s. Moreover, early radio attracted legions of hackers, teenage and otherwise, who endowed their homebrewed crystal sets with an undeniable charge of experiment and anarchic play. For the first few decades of radio's life, hobbyist weenies across the globe chatted up a storm while making important discoveries about the spectrum, especially on the short-wave side of things. By the 1920s, federal and commercial interests began stringing barbed wire across the many-to-many spectrum, professionalizing and segmenting the formerly free-range medium.

Even as the airwaves were filling up with ads for laundry soap, radio freaks continued to hear some seriously otherworldly stuff in their primitive headphones. Thomas Watson got an early taste of these unearthly transmissions late at night in Bell's lab, when he would listen to the snaps, bird chirps, and ghostly grinding noises that popped up on a telephone circuit: "My theory at this time was that the currents causing these sounds came from explosions on the sun or that they were signals from another planet. They were mystic enough to suggest the latter explanation but I never detected any regularity in them that might indicate they were intelligent signals." As Avital Ronell points out that, Watson may have been the first person to listen to noise. Though the sounds he heard may well have had terrestrial origins, Watson made the crucial recognition that human ears could now directly register cosmic vibrations.

Watson was by no means the only electrohead to believe he was picking up play-by-plays from other planets. During the summer of 1899, when Nikola Tesla manufactured lightning and dreamed of broadcasting wireless power across the globe, the inventor also started picking up regular signals on his 200 foot radio tower in Colorado, and tentatively concluded that he was "the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another." For decades, many early radio operators continued to pick up powerful, persistent and seemingly unexplainable signals, some of which were reported to be rather Pynchonesque repetitions of the Morse code for v. Marconi himself claimed to have received such signals on the low end of the longwave spectrum, and in 1921 flatly declared that he believed they originated from other civilizations in space. On August 24, 1924, when Mars passed unusually close to the earth, civilian and military transmitters voluntarily shut down in order to leave the airwaves open for the Martians; radio hackers were treated to a symphony of freak signals.

These popular passions may seem corny in retrospect, but that is because the sublime and visionary edge of technology is always changing, opening up new virtualities that then become integrated into business as usual. For eons, the hardwired side of human perception has been limited to our own unique sensory apparatus, an apparatus that partly determines the apparent nature of the world. New technologies of perception unfold new worlds of sublimity and threat, worlds which challenge us to reconfigure the limits of ourselves and to shape the meaning of the new spaces we find ourselves in. When ocular instruments extended human sight into Galileo's heavens and Robert Hooke's microscopic cellular regimes, they installed new explanatory spaces for the universe, spaces which reorganized the meaning of the cosmos and the actors in it.

But what kind of "space" does our expanded encounter with electricity and the electromagnetic spectrum lead us into? Though the spectrum includes the wavelengths of visible light, and X-rays, ultrasound, and radio astronomy can all be used to illuminate new dimensions of the universe, the essence of electromagnetism is invisible. In one of his more suggestive intuitions, Marshall McLuhan argued that electronic technologies were installing an "acoustic space" in the place of an earlier "visual space" -- the linear, logical and sequential conception of the world that had dominated Western consciousness for many centuries. McLuhan believed that electronic media eroded this crisp and objective grid of facts, dissolving it into a psychic, social and perceptual environment that resembles the kind of space we hear: multi-dimensional, resonant, invisibly tactile, "a total and simultaneous field of relations." Though McLuhan used "acoustic space" as an analogy for a psycho-social process that did not necessarily tickle the bones of the inner ear, his oceanic vision of acoustics does foreground the central role that music -- and its electromagnification -- would play in mapping and constructing pleasure and perception in the first fully technological century.

This secret sympathy between music and the electromagnetic imaginary was first intuited in the 1600s by the Jesuit alchemist Athanasius Kircher, who identified certain vibrating musical tones as "magnetic." Kircher also invented the glass harmonica, an instrument that exploited the resonant tones produced by rubbing glass tumblers filled with water. Kircher's researches were carried on by the animal magnetist Franz Anton Mesmer, known today either as the king of charlatans or the man whose healing journeys into the netherworlds of the mind inadvertently spawned psychoanalysis. Mesmer believed that animal magnetism was "communicated, propagated and intensified by sound," and, as the liner notes to Ash's 1995 compilation Mesmer Variations point out, used to improvise on a version of Kircher's glass harmonica in order to set the mood in his healing salons. One visiting Viennese doctor described the "shiver through my nerves caused by the instrument," and suggested that "many of the phenomena of magnetism must have been brought out by the extremely penetrating tones of this music."

For us, Mesmer might serve as a utopian figure -- half comic, half cosmic, experimental and underground -- for the continued promise of electroacoustic phenomena in a world ravaged by technologies with far more violent and banal issue. Along with cinema, twentieth-century music has become one of the principle esthetic zones where humans have used innovative gadgetry to make sense -- and nonsense -- of their own increasingly technologized souls. Musicians and composers both highbrow and pop have twiddled and tweaked electronic and electrical instruments, as well as electromagnetic recording and broadcasting technologies, in order to tune into new sonic, compositional, and expressive possibilities. In so doing, they have also gone a long way toward reimagining the scrambled boundaries of subjectivity as it makes its way through the invisible landscapes -- both dreadful and sublime -- that make up the acoustic space of electronic media.

From techgnosis.com

The Death of Dynamic Range A Chronology of the Compact Disc Loudness Wars

From www.261.gr

Here is the most simplified and revealing article with proofing images
for nowadays nasty “trendy” techniques? :( For mastering CD’s which they call it “Hyper Compressed” or "Radio Like" or whatever else, U may call it "rubbish".

Master minds of music industry think to apply that way of “hyper compressed” processing for all of they CD’s releases with their “new talents?” making it more louder or “radio like” just to impress the music customers especially young peoples with only one traget, just to“sell” as much as possible copies, or maybe they think “Bring back on life” an already “dead” music market. They have wrong, the only they do is to “kill the music” if there is any remains :)

Of course the trick of "louder is better" is not new on music media, all radio stations apply “hyper compressed & clipping” techniques on his broadcasting sound with dedicated expensive processing units, but on analogue radio which is an medium with limited and narrow dynamics max of 40db that “hyper compressed & clipping” way is a must to keep radio stations under the legally of 75khz max, the CD don’t have such limitations, so why they continuous to apply that damn “hyper compressed & clipping” ?

Personally only one reasonable answer I can find “they try to adapt younger peoples to a feckless “deaf and blind” customers” :( Isn’t a sad ascertainment? Yes it is, so do something. Stop now that awfully situation.

Before years they pass on youth people mp3 as the most High Quality source of today make in it a trendy a must to have, I pod etc, now they strikes again with the domination of that loud & distorted sound as a status of High Quality abuses the well known unique benefits of Compact Disc medium :(

That horribly distorted processing method is not applying it only on current CD releases but and older CD’s as well, u must be very suspicious on every old CD which notice it as “Remastered”, an bad example is the “Rumors” by Fleetwood Mac, Is full hyper compressed plus severe clipped, the voice of Steve Nicks on “Dreams” sounds like “donkey's bray :(”.

Fortunately there are some honest audio engineers which refuse on that trend and apply processing with much respect on classic albums without any clipping. Two excellent examples which is real “remastered” and is a reference for audiophile passionate best for sound check of home Hi End sets and for fine tune of any Radio processing unit. That two excellent “remastered” CD’s are “Aja” released at 1999 and “Gaucho” released at 2000 by Steely Dan both are produced by MCA.

People must be aware/inform for that major catastrophic situation, from artists to CD customers or music lovers, to radio program directors, people must learn how music company’s abuses the product just to “sell” more, customers must stop buying any of today CD releases all are mastered with “hyper compressed” way is no matter the format from Jazz to rNb all sounds “distorted” NOT loud, Radio Stations must refuse to play at his on air any “hyper compressed” CD, valuable expensive high tech radio sound processing units sounds “scrap” when play that damn horribly “hyper compressed” CD’s.

The original article has presented at "http://rvcc2.raritanval.edu/ktek9053/cdpage" but is no longer available there (really I wonder why? Guess what! :) is re-presented intact from www.mindspring.com/~mrichter

1983
Bryan Adams - Cuts Like a Knife (A&M CD-3288)
This represents the earliest stage of CD audio mastering techniques. One of the big attractions of the CD format was its very wide dynamic range and absence of surface noise, so the first generation of CDs that were released made full use of this.
The CD's digital audio format is inherently limited to a peak audio amplitude that is referenced as "0 dB" or "100%". Unlike the variability of analog recording techniques, this limit cannot be exceeded. If you try to, you end up with a waveform that is horribly distorted, due to the top and/or bottom of the wave being harshly limited to the maximum level -- or "clipped." Early CDs were mastered with full respect to this loudness limit and did not use any clipping.
In this case, Bryan Adams' breakthrough album -- although full of stereotypically "loud" rock & roll music -- was mastered with a great amount of "headroom"; the highest peak level on the entire disc is only 74.8%, or -2.52 dB. This peak level only occurs a single time on the disc, in Track 9, whose waveform graph is shown here (with the stereo Left channel on top, and Right channel on bottom):



Obviously this peak (which occurs at around 2:16 in the song) is not even close to being clipped, and in fact the loudness of the whole CD could be increased by 2.5 dB without sacrificing any quality or harming the content of the recordings in any way. That single peak would simply be raised up to just below the 100% limit. You can think of this as a short person raising up the height-adjustable driver's seat in their car. They would sit at a higher level, with their head just below the ceiling, but not touching it -- in this case, literal "headroom".

1988
Willie Nelson - What a Wonderful World (Columbia CK 44331)
This is an example of what I was just talking about. With this CD, there is a single peak on the entire disc which does reach the 100% limit, but yet is still not "clipped", and every other track on the album has a lower peak level. Here is the waveform of Track 6, showing the single 100% (0 dB) peak near the beginning:



And here is a highly "zoomed in" view of this peak, to prove that it is not clipped:



This represents the extreme of the most conservative form of CD mastering; where only a single peak, occuring only in a single track, reaches the maximum level, and everything else on the disc is below it. However, as we shall see, as the years went by and CDs became more and more popular, this pristine form of CD audio production became more and more rare!

1987
George Michael - Faith (Columbia CK 40867)
Yes, we are stepping back a year, in this case to show a more contemporary pop music CD. On this particular CD, most of the tracks contain multiple peaks which reach the 100% limit, but are still not clipped. Here is the waveform of the title track "Faith":



So, there are multiple instances in the song where the 100% / 0 dB peak level is reached. But are these peaks clipped? I looked at all of them to check, and none of them were. Here is an example of a few of these 100% peaks in the song, and as you can see, the shape of the waveform is still fully preserved:







By zooming in on one of these peaks, I can illustrate just what I have been talking about:



In this instance, seven samples (or "digital snapshots" of the sound) in a row are shoved up against the limit, and they have nowhere to go, so they just form a flat line -- hence, our old friend known as "clipping". A perfectly flat line like this never occurs in audio recording unless the audio is purposely clipped. What it is doing is generating a very unnatural "square wave", and when you play back this square wave, you get a burst of distorted sound. CD digital audio runs at 44,100 samples per second. In this case, seven of these samples formed a square wave. That's 7/44100th of a second -- far too quick to be directly heard. But when you add many of these clipped samples in each second of the song, the effect becomes more and more noticeable as "clipping distortion" -- a harsh, crackly sound that is very unpleasant to the ear -- as we shall see below.

1995
The Rembrandts - L.P. (EastWest/Atlantic 61752-2)
Everybody loves "I'll Be There For You", the theme song from the TV show "Friends", right? Well, have you ever looked at its waveform graph? Yikes!



Although this particular track only reaches a peak level of 96.2% -- which is below the 100% limit and theoretically should be free from "clipping" -- when you zoom in, you'll see that many of the MANY peaks that are strictly limited to this level (causing the "solid block of sound" effect) are clipped, like this one:



The sad part is that when these peaks are clipped, or "hacked off" as I like to call it, the original content and quality of the sound is lost forever. Although there are techniques to "guess" at the missing part of the waveform and "re-draw" a curved wave out of the part that was formerly a flat line, this is not accurate to the original sound; it is merely an "artist's reconstruction", so to speak. Thus, when aggressive peak clipping is used, the record company is DESTROYINGpart of the music. And if you thought this song was bad enough, hold on and be prepared for a very sickening sight below...

1999
Ricky Martin (C2/Columbia CK 69891)
By now I don't think I have to explain what you see below. And in this case, it probably will help explain why your ears start to hurt after listening to "Livin' La Vida Loca" even for just a short time!



And as we zoom in, the audio carnage is apparent:



The Radio Loudness Fallacy
Okay, so the end result of all this stuff shown above is that CDs have gotten louder and louder over the years. But that also makes them sound louder when played on the radio, right?
WRONG! Every radio station uses "audio processing" to accomodate a wide variety of audio programming and deliver a consistent volume level, so that you're not always reaching for the volume control to turn up quiet songs and turn down loud songs. The goal of this is to make every song come out of your radio at a fairly equal volume level. The station's audio processing does this by carefully compressing, limiting, and yes, even clipping the audio. It also equalizes the bass and treble levels so one song doesn't sound bassy and muffled and the next doesn't sound tinny and shrill.
When properly adjusted, this audio processing can work wonders, and gives radio stations just the type of sound they're looking to provide their listeners with, be it a soft and relaxing Classical music station, or a loud and brash Heavy Metal rock station. But... this audio processing relies on the peaks and valleys of the incoming audio; it raises up the quiet spots and limits down the loud spots.
BUT WHEN EVERYTHING IS CONSISTENTLY LOUD ALL THE TIME, LIKE THIS SENTENCE, the radio station's audio processor has nothing to do but to limit down the volume level, and since the incoming music contains virtually no variations in loudness, then it stays consistently quiet when played on the air. It's like walking along a street and passing a construction zone where they have a jack-hammer going. Due to the consistently loud noise, you have no choice but to cover your ears until it stops.
Compare that example to a fireworks display. You may cover you ears during the explosions, but otherwise, things are much quieter and you could actually amplify the sounds around you and not damage your hearing. This is like the CDs of the 1980s shown above. The high peaks get limited down so that the radio station doesn't exceed the signal level which it can transmit, but otherwise the rest of the audio actually gets raised in level, so that it comes out louder on the air.
And you can get this same effect at home by simply TURNING UP YOUR STEREO'S VOLUME CONTROL. You want your music to be loud? You can make it loud yourself -- and the full quality and dynamic range of the music is preserved. Yes, even the Bryan Adams CD from 1983 can be played louder than Ricky Martin's horribly produced CD -- the choice is up to you. But when all of your CDs are recoreded to be loud right on the discs themselves, you don't have this choice anymore; you no longer have a variety of "loud" music and "quiet" music to choose from and to play at a volume level that suits your musical taste. The record companies are not only filling your CDs with distorted, corrupted audio, they are forcing you to listen to your music in a certain manner -- do you really want that?

Meanwhile, in Europe...
At least for some record companies "across the pond", it took a lot longer for the "loudness wars" to catch up with them than it did in the USA. Take, for example, the original April 1999 CD single release "Swear It Again" by Westlife (RCA/BMG 74321 66206 2) -- which was the first of a record-breaking string of #1 U.K. hits for this Irish pop group:



This is just like the 1988 Willie Nelson CD shown far above on this page. Only a single peak during the entire song reaches maximum level -- in this case, 97.1%, and it is not clipped:



But a funny thing happened to this very same song when it ended up on Westlife's first full album (RCA/BMG 74321 713212) later in the year:



That may look like a drastic increase in loudness, and it is, but notice that as compared to American pop music of the 1990s, it still has a decent amount of "wiggle room" for the peaks and valleys of the sound to occur. And if we zoom in, only five peaks during the entire song occur at the maximum level, and NONE OF THEM ARE CLIPPED, as you can see from these two:



This is pretty much what I would consider to be the limit of RESPONSIBLE CD PRODUCTION. It allows the music to sound "loud" without DESTROYING the audio through the use of peak clipping.
But, alas, the influence of American pop music became too great, and the U.K. record companies felt they had to respond by also resorting to the same tricks for their music. Here is an example from 2000, the first track from Westlife's second album "Coast To Coast" (RCA/BMG 74321 824302):



What I don't get is that this song has its peak level set unnaturally low, to only 88.1% out of the 100% possible -- and yet, even with over 1 dB of "headroom" to work with, the audio is still clipped in numerous places during the song:



You might just write this off as somebody setting the recording level a bit low, but it is interesting to compare it to the same song on the Asian release of this album (RCA/BMG 74321 803772):



The peak level is now much closer to the CD's maximum limit -- in this case 99.3% -- and at least some of the peaks and valleys can still be seen amongst the highly compressed audio. But, unfortunately, when zoomed in, even this dynamically superior Asian release also used clipping on some of the peaks:



Note that in each case above, when clipping is present, I have picked the most clipped example out of the entire song; that is, the instance which has the highest number of "flat-topped" samples. So, while this Asian version still contains clipping, it is less drastically clipped than the U.K. release, while it actually has a higher peak level. Are Asian ears more sensitive to clipping distortion than British ears? Maybe the record company knows something we don't....

Acid Hose

Click on the picture...

Khoomei (Tuvan Throat Singing) DIY

The partials (fundamental and overtones) of a sound wave made by the human voice can be selectively amplified by changing the shape of the resonant cavities of the mouth, larynx and pharynx. This resonant tuning allows the singer to create apparently more than one pitch at the same time (the fundamental and a selected overtone), while in effect still generating a single fundamental frequency with his/her vocal folds.



Khoomei, basic - begin by producing a long, steady note with an open, relaxed mouth and throat. by altering lip and tongue positions to say vowels, ``oooo... ohhh.... ayyy.... ahhh..... eeee....'', you will hear different overtones in ascending pitch. Cupping a hand to your ear may help you to identify these initially. Maintain one tone as you tighten your throat and stomach muscles slightly. If you choke, try a lower fundamental. If you begin coughing, go into this tightening over a period of time to avoid damage to your voice. Hard coughing is punishing to vocal cords.

You should now be making ``electronic'' sounding vowels. If any of these are extended with subtle changes to the tongue, lips, or jaw (changing one element at a time as in any controlled experiment), separate overtones will gain definition. The sounds you create are feedback leading to finer mouth control.



It may be difficult to sort out the overtones created by each position. Discover them as you work out a scale above one steady fundamental. Eventually simple melodies will emerge within a limited range. As you consciously create melody, avoid the temptation to alter the fundamental. This is basic khoomei...

Search for: Khoomei, Tuva, Throat singing or Overtone singing.
Links:
http://www.fotuva.org/music/emory.html
http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/tuva/tuva.html

"Music is frozen architecture", Goethe

The Philips Pavillon, Brussels, Expo 1958.

Philips approached Le Corbusier who replied:
"I will not make a pavilion for you but an Electronic Poem and a vessel containing the poem; light, color image, rhythm and sound joined together in an organic synthesis."



At initial meetings, Le Corbusier gave a rough outline of the look and function of the event.

* The interior was to be shaped in a manner similar to the stomach of a cow, with the concept that audience members would enter in groups of 500 at ten-minute intervals.
* For two minutes, as the audience filed in through a curved passageway, they would hear a short transition piece. Then the room would go into darkness, and spectators, who remained standing, would then be subject to the interior music and lights for eight minutes.
* Colored lights, images, and film would be shown all around them. Music (organized sound) would be played over a huge array of speakers, surrounding and traversing the audience. At the close of the eight-minute piece, the spectators would exit, "digested," through another exit while the next group filed in.
* In this way, 20,000 visitors a day would be able to visit the pavilion over the five months of the fair. The project was to be managed by Le Corbusier's protege designer Iannis Xenakis, who would also create the transition music.
* Le Corbusier would provide the images to be projected during a 480 second multi-media event.
* No attempt would be made to synchronize the visuals with the music. Any correspondences that did occur would happy accidents, except for a specified moment of silence six minutes into the work.

More here.

Cinatas?

The Beatles were involved in the spread of backmasking both as a recording technique and as the center of a controversy. The latter has its roots in an event in 1969, when WKNR-FM DJ Russ Gibb received a phone call from a student at Eastern Michigan University who identified himself as "Tom". The caller asked Gibb about a rumor that Beatle Paul McCartney had died, and claimed that the Beatles song "Revolution 9" contained a backward message confirming the rumor. Gibb played the song backwards on his turntable, and heard "Turn me on, dead man … turn me on, dead man … turn me on, dead man…"

Backmasking has also been used to record statements perhaps too critical or explicit to be used forwards. Frank Zappa used backmasking to avoid censorship of the track "Hot Poop", from We're only in it for the Money (1968). The released version contains at the end of its side "A" the backmasked message "Better look around before you say you don't care. / Shut your f...ing mouth 'bout the length of my hair. / How would you survive / If you were alive / shitty little person?" . This profanity-laced verse, originally from the song "Mother People", was censored by Verve Records, so Zappa edited the verse out, reversed it, and inserted it elsewhere in the album as "Hot Poop" (though even in the backward message the word "fucking" is censored). More.
And a backmasking tsil here.

It's not about music

But this is clearly one of the most incredible vehicle ever built... And it's Russian.

Théo Jansen, The Hague, Netherlands, Born 1948.

"The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."



Inspiring, innovative, mindblowing...





http://www.strandbeest.com
http://www.strandbeestmovie.com/
http://www.cove.org/ape/demo2.htm

Drive Time history

During the last years, we received many emails about the re-releasing of Drive Time, an early root of Firstcask. By then we replied "take it easy you'll get your hands on it for sure". Though we didn't know when that would happen to be honest. As you may know, Drive Time has been first released as a bonus cassette for the "FSK005" album back in the year 2000. Considering the great enthousiasm that raised for both the album and the cassette we wanted to press this one on vinyl and having another bonus cassette next to it. Just to continue offering free stuff with our sales to have the pleasure to give pleasure or something... How comes it didn't happen straight away? Sure we messed up a bit on the schedule. But you know the score with belgian latin boys... You don't? Good! Then when we finally were ready, Andy came up with the second cassette, but distributors told us it wasn't that wise because cassette players disappeared from the market! I heard there is still that flee market round the corner though! You sure? Not handy and expensive to ship but there is some kind of poetry in this. Ok, fair enough, I'm also slave of a banker who has my balls in his palm and squeeze it from time to time a bit like how Chuck Norris does when strengthening his hands. Tough I recall that by the time we shipped our catalogue through lorries carrying vegetables across Europe. We even reached the japanese shore with the diplomatic wallet, and other remote areas thanks to backpackers or friends traveling around with a bunch of records in their bags. They simply were meeting people, having a shared meal while listening to the music and then selling the records. That brought us much satisfaction as we acheived to bring the music straight from the musician's fingers to the ears of any unknown happy ravers. It worked quite well at the time but was more than exhausting to maintain. Especially to collect money. Can you blame one of these wayfarers spending the benefits just made on buying that boat ticket to get out of Taiwan? Or for that slideshow for kids in Senegal were there is no screen but well a white horse to project on to "for not that much". Quite poetic indeed but the financial results remained at sea level. Still it is. And water is rising! But Weme records is there to give a hand. Cheers mate! Then together we are proud to bring you the brew which stayed for 10 years in the cask. This is half an image as the metalworks stayed untouched since 2003 at the pressingplant. We called them every two years to make sure they wouldn't chuck it in the bin. That would have been a shame because it took us multiple sessions and a few lacquers to cut this piece onto acetate. Nearly tirty minutes per side from sparkling water to deep bass. How to describe Drive Time other than being a wayfarer's anthem? First Cask wayfaring arose early 2000 when we first traveled together with Andy and Joy (Andy's girlfriend of the time who appears on the cover) from Hull to the North East of England. We went up to Whitby, where Dracula's coffin ashored. Not that far away from Robin Hood's bay if you're familiar with that beautiful region. We drove for hours by bus and taxi with litterally hundreds of Ceephax unreleased tracks (earliests from 1997 I think) while staring at tortured trees, windy landscapes, ruined abbays, english seagulls and english carpets... TBC

Optophonic piano, Wladimir Baranoff Rossiné, 1916, "L'avant-garde russe"

"Imagine that every key of an organ’s keyboard immobilises in a specific position, or moves a determined element, more or less rapidly, in a group of transparent filters which a beam of white light pierces, and this will give you an idea of the instrument Baranoff-Rossiné invented.

There are various kinds of luminous filters: simply coloured ones optical elements such as prisms, lenses or mirrors; filters containing graphic elements and, finally, filters with coloured shapes and defined outlines. If on the top of this, you can modify the projector’s position, the screen frame, the symmetry or asymmetry of the compositions and their movements and intensity; then, you will be able to reconstitute this optical piano that will play an infinite number of musical compositions. The key word here is interpret, because, for the time being, the aim is not to find a unique rendering of an existing musical composition for which the author did not foresee a version expressed by light. In music, as in any other artistic interpretation, one has to take into account elements such as the talent and sensitivity of the musician in order to fully understand the author’s mind-frame. The day when a composer will compose music using notes that remain to be determined in terms of music and light, the interpreter’s liberty will be curtailed, and that day, the artistic unity we were talking about will probably be closer to perfection..."

More at the Wladimir Baranoff Rossiné's website.

Seventy Years of Broadcasting in Belgium

By Richard E. Wood
This article was originally published in the August 1984 edition of FRENDX, now The Journal of the North American Shortwave Association. It appears here without permission of NASWA.

"Un, deux, trois, quatre .... díx. Allo, allo. Poste radiotélegraphique et radioteléphonique, pres de Bruxelles. Messieurs les amateurs de télégraphie sans fil, nous allons vous faire entendre un concert dédié á Sa Majesté la Reine Elisabeth... " The first selection was the aria from "Tosca" sung by a vocalist whose name is unintelligible in the primitive recording which survives.

More here.

Raymond Scott, New York, 1908-1994

"What can you say about a man who inspired cartoon melodies and bebop, invented Frank Zappa and electronic music, and still found time to work for-Motown?"
- Andy Partridge, songwriter & leader of XTC

"Raymond Scott was like an audio version of Andy Warhol; he preceded Pop-Art sensibilities, and he played with that line between commercial art and fine art, mixing elements of both worlds together. I love and respect Raymond Scott's work, and it influenced me a lot. I'm a big fan.''
- Mark Mothersbaugh, DEVO

"Raymond Scott's music gets better as it gets older. When it first appeared, it was so bizarre it could not be categorized. Now, it is no less innovative and comic, but it begins to occupy a serious role in our total music-appreciation."
- Dick Hyman, musician

In 1946 Raymond scott founded the Manhattan research inc., one of the very first studios of electronic music in the world.

He also created The Talking Alarm Clock and fascinating musical instruments like The Orchestra Machine, The Karloff, The Bassline Generator, The Circle Machine, The Clavivox , The Videola, The Rhythm Synthesizer, The Pitch Sequencer, The Juxtaposition Matrix, The Synthesized Gong, The Melody Maker, The Rhythm Guitar Simulator or The Electronium-Scott plus a large number of patents used by the musical industry. That's a boy!

There is numerous websites referencing his work and audio simples are fairly easy to find as well. Just take a plunge!

RCA record manufacturing process 1942 part 1

Direct cut with a Scully lathe, straight onto wax... Beautiful...

RCA record manufacturing process 1942 part 2

The Nature Of Sound - 1948

A must read...

About unusual types of gramophone recordings. Beautiful.

Lee De Forest, 1873-1961

American scientist,

Invents the Audion grid-triode vacuum tube in 1906 used as a detector of radio signals, an audio amplifier and an oscillator for transmitting.

De Forest is credited with the Birth of public radio broadcasting when on January 12, 1910, he conducted experimental broadcast of part of the live performance of Tosca and, the next day, a performance with the participation of the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso from the stage of Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.



Caruso, breaks hearts and glass with his voice, also haunting Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

I remember reading in that excellent book from Suzan J. Douglas that De Forest was a meloman but couldn't afford a seat at the opera. He was relentlessly placed behind a column. He then promised himself to use his telegraph apparatus to bring music in people's houses. By doing this, he changed the way wireless telecommunication was used, originally from point to point (eg warship to military base) to omnidirectional broadcast. Fairly good intentions there. Thank you sir!

Here is the book reference:
Suzan J. Douglas,
Inventing american broadcasting 1899 - 1922,
The John Hopkins University Press,
Paperback, Baltimore and London, 1987, 365p.
ISBN 0-8018-3832-0

Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, 1866-1932

American physicist, inventor,

Transmits human voice on radiowaves via high-frequency oscillator, December 23rd ,1900.

"One-two-three-four, is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?"

Mr. Thiessen, one mile distant, confirmed. Such a luck it was snowing. Radio broadcasting was born.

More on the hammond museum of radio website.

Rahul Dev Burman

Last summer, Jamie turned up in Ostend as he was invited to participate to some flemish tv show. After some beers in town, we started to feel starvation then we went at mine with his agent and promoter for some night cooking action. Probably we talked crap for a bit but I remember we talked about India and Jamie said he was totally amazed by a couple of people playing on the roof of his hotel in order to welcome him and his band. It brought him much inspiration that he went to a music store down the street and asked for the craziest indian composer. He came back with R D Burman. We downwloaded some straight away and had a good laugh. It stayed in my player for weeks and I reckon mister Burman deserves to be known by everyone. It sounds like a curry of cha cha, country, exotica, espionage with a touch of musical comedy. All in once. How serious is that! You'll have to find your way in the thousands tracks he made though... Good luck!

Following a heart attack in 1988, R D Burman underwent a bypass surgery abroad the next year. While recuperating he is said to have composed over 2,000 tunes which he kept in his memory bank. He often said that his best tunes came to him in his dreams and that he had to be in happy frame of mind even while composing sad tunes. "When I am down, I end up making a mess of things," he is reported to have said.

Much much more on the interweb...

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 began in the late 1980’s as an attempt to have it both ways: to build a system that was centrally administered and cost-effective using cheap modern microcomputers as its computing elements. The idea was to build a time-sharing system out of workstations, but in a novel way. Different computers would handle different tasks: small, cheap machines in people’s offices would serve as terminals providing access to large, central, shared resources such as computing servers and file servers. For the central machines, the coming wave of shared-memory multiprocessors seemed obvious candidates. The philosophy is much like that of the Cambridge Distributed System [NeHe82]. The early catch phrase was to build a UNIX out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little UNIXes.

Full info and download here.

Peter Zinovieff & EMS

It may be difficult for a generation brought up with 32-bit computers and digital signal processors as consumer items to appreciate just how revolutionary Peter Zinovieff's projects were. In the 1960s to have access to a 12-bit computer with 1K of memory outside the academic or military establishment, let alone have two personal ones and then use them for music, was completely unheard of. To have a video screen as well when most people programmed with punched cards was beyond belief. Today there is a huge worldwide market for electronic music equipment, but there is little that was not envisioned by the EMS team before 1970 ten to twenty years ahead of their time.

Full article here.

The Unit Delta Plus Studio

Unit Delta Plus was an organisation set up in 1966 by Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff to create electronic music and also promote its use in television, film and advertising. The Unit Delta Plus studio was based in Peter Zinovieff's townhouse in Deodar Road, Putney, London.

More at: http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/unitdeltaplus.php

H. F. OLSON's MULTI-GROOVE STEREOPHONIC SOUND RECORDING AND REPRODUCING SYSTEM, 1964

Have a look at the patent here.

Bhutan Record stamps

These are postage stamps:
Some kind of a promotional thing… Maybe… Maybe not! You couldn't really play them as they were too small. From one and a half to three inch or so, any automatic turntable would lift up the arm… They are one sided and have five different recordings, some of them are musical.

Never heard of Bhutan before seeing this. Their promotion action must have been working in some way! If you have any audio link for this please let us know. We'll make sure to spin it on the next rave!

Anyway, here is where to get them: http://www.bhutanstamp.com

X-Ray Sound Recordings

In the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 1950s underground night spots would play music pirated from the west.

The only media they had were recorders etched into discarded X-ray film, the method became so widespread in Hungary that not only amateurs, but the Hungarian Radio made sound recordings on such recycled X-ray films.
from kevin kelly's: street use archives

Black noise and population persistence

Biological populations are susceptible to random variation in environmental influences such as temperature and moisture. This variability (or noise) can determine population size and, ultimately, cause extinctions. Extinction risk depends on noise colour or the amount of short- and long-term variation. Most environmental noise is reddened: the variation is dominated by long-term £uctuations. Recent modelling has shown that moderately reddened noise affects populations differently from the white noise used in earlier studies. However, some geophysical phenomena, such as temperature and river height, can have deeply reddened `brown' or even `black' spectra. We find that, compared to environments characterized by red noise, very long population persistence times are more likely for black noise. Unlike previous work incorporating a simple autoregressive model of reddened noise, our model suggests that the large variation associated with persistence in a red-noise environment limits our ability to predict the fate of particular populations subject to this noise colour. Thus, we identify the colour of noise experienced by a population - red or black - as a crucial factor in any attempt to manage or conserve that population.

Full article here.

From AC power hum to synesthesia

100/100: colored noise:
Name: Mark Thompson #9
Date: 1:00 pm Wed Dec 27, 1989

I work with colored noise occasionally, and recently made several tapes utilizing psychoacoustic noise effects.

Here's a rundown of some interesting varieties of "noise":

White Noise: This kind of noise has equal energy (loudness, or volume) over frequency -- that is, if you measure the amplitude of the sound from 100 to 200 Hz (Hz means "Hertz" or "cycles per second") that chunk of the frequency spectrum will have the same sound amplitude as a chunk from 3000 to 3100 Hz or even 20,000 to 20,100 Hz. White noise is kind of "bright" and not terribly relaxing, but is very effective for masking other sounds, and has been shown to promote auditory hallucinations under certain circumstances.

Pink Noise: This noise has equal energy PER OCTAVE. This means that the volume decreases logarithmically with frequency. Usually pink noise is made by low-pass filtering white noise. For comparison, pink noise will have the same sound amplitude
from 100-200Hz that it does from 200-400Hz or 10,000-20,000Hz. Pink noise sounds more natural than white noise (it sounds like rushing water or ocean surf) and is quite relaxing. It's often used for ambience in electronic music, and as a test signal for "tuning" sound reenforcement systems (many equalizers and audio spectrum analyzers have built-in pink noise generators).

Red Noise: A very bassy (heavily low-pass filtered) kind of noise. This sounds like a low rumble - a subway train going by or a noisy air-conditioning system. The definition of red noise is not as precise as that of white and pink noise, and the term mostly refers to low-pitched noises used for electonic music.

Brown Noise: This is a special kind of noise that has a 1/f amplitude distribution - the volume is inversely proportional to pitch. It has the special property of being a "fractal" or statistically self-similar waveform. No matter how far you zoom in on the wave with an oscilloscope, the waveform has the same "texture". Brown noise is also the sound made by a "random walk" which makes the amplitude of a waveform travel up and down at random. The pitch motion of most musical melodies have a 1/f distribution, which is more a measure of melodic texture than a commentary on the musical experience.

Blue Noise: This is just high-pass filtered white noise. It sounds really screechy and artificial. Like "Red Noise" this is not a precise term, and just refers to noises with a lot of treble tones.

Diotic Noise: This refers to the stereophonic or binaural properties of a noise signal. Diotic noise is the same noise signal presented to both ears - monaural noise. Diotic noise can be either in-phase or phase-reversed. In-phase noise sounds like it is coming from inside one's head when heard through headphones. 180-degree phase-reversed noise sounds like it is coming from "all around" one's head when heard through headphones.

Dichotic Noise: This is two separate, unrelated noise signals presented to each ear. It's much more stimulating and refreshing (subjectively) than monaural or diotic noise. Where monaural noise sounds like radio hiss, dichotic noise sounds like being outdoors in a rainstorm.

Taken from: http://mv.lycaeum.org/M2/noise_ahf.html

Others

There are also many "less official" colors, usually with multiple definitions

Red noise

1. A synonym for Brownian noise, as above
2. A synonym for pink noise, as above

Orange noise

"Orange noise is quasi-stationary noise with a finite power spectrum with a finite number of small bands of zero energy dispersed throughout a continuous spectrum. These bands of zero energy are centered about the frequencies of musical notes in whatever scale is of interest. Since all in-tune musical notes are eliminated, the remaining spectrum could be said to consist of sour, citrus, or "orange" notes."

Green noise

1. "Green noise is supposedly the background noise of the world. A really long term power spectrum averaged over several outdoor sites. Rather like pink noise with a hump added around 500 Hz."
2. The mid-frequency component of white noise, used in halftone dithering[12]
3. Bounded Brownian noise

Black noise

Black noise, or silent noise, has several different definitions:

1. Silence
2. Noise with a 1/fβ spectrum, where β > 2 (Manfred Schroeder, "Fractals, chaos, power laws"). Used in modeling various environmental processes. Is said to be a haracteristic of "natural and unnatural catastrophes like floods, droughts, bear markets, and various outrageous outages, such as those of electrical power." Further, "because of their black spectra, such disasters often come in clusters."
3. Noise that has a frequency spectrum of predominantly zero power level over all frequencies except for a few narrow bands or spikes. Note: An example of black noise in a facsimile transmission system is the spectrum that might be obtained when scanning a black area in which there are a few random white spots. Thus, in the time domain, a few random pulses occur while scanning.
4. "The output of an active noise control system which cancels an existing noise, leaving the local environment noise free. The comic book character Iron Man used to have a "black light beam" that could darken a room like this, and popular science fiction has a tendency to portray active noise control in this light."[11] The Batman Beyond supervillian Shriek also had a weapon like this, which effectively blocked out all noise.
5. "As seen in the sales literature for an ultrasonic vermin repeller, black noise with a power density that is constant for a finite frequency range above 20 kHz. More accurately, ultrasonic white noise. This black noise is like the so-called black light with frequencies too high to be sensed, but still capable of affecting the environment."

Noisy white

In telecommunication, the term noisy white has the following meanings:

1. In facsimile or display systems, such as television, a nonuniformity in the white area of the image, i.e., document or picture, caused by the presence of noise in the received signal.
2. A signal or signal level that is supposed to represent a white area on the object, but has a noise content sufficient to cause the creation of noticeable black spots on the display surface or record medium.

Noisy black

In telecommunication, the term noisy black has the following meanings:

1. In facsimile or display systems, such as television, a nonuniformity in the black area of the image, i.e., document or picture, caused by the presence of noise in the received signal.
2. A signal or signal level that is supposed to represent a black area on the object, but has a noise content sufficient to cause the creation of noticeable white spots on the display surface or record medium.

5 Places To Get Started With Chipmusic

The HVSC (as posted below) is only a tiny part of the surprisingly big network of genius musicians making tracks on lo-fi hardware and redundant soundchips - the modern 'chipscene' features some rocking trax, which if you dig techno/acid/electro/etc you're sure to like! Here are some places to get you started (a lot of it is free too, which is great!):

8bitpeoples - Best chipmusic label, all the greatest artists associated with chipmusic have released EPs here. Check out 'Power Supply' by Anamanaguchi for some hypermelodic NES-punk trax or 'Molen' by Gijs Gieskes for some glitchy Game Boy funk!

Retinascan - If you want to check out some great physical releases, Retinascan sell the output of plenty of ace labels and also some killer stuff of their own (check 'Atari Solo' by Stu for the most face-meltingly slamming piece of electro you'll ever hear being made on an Atari, released on a 3'' CD!).

Kittenrock - the UK's first chipmusic netlabel, everything from weird pop songs to their legendary 'Pornochip' release (has to be experienced to be believed), also check out Steve Nosurname's own release there...

8BitCollective - an overwhelming library of chipmusic and pictures, and the best forum for chipmusic on the web.

Micromusic - Some brilliant singles from just about everyone (including Cylob and EDMX!), and loads of info about making chipmusic (not to mention some very handy pages with links to freeware/etc). Once you've made some good chipmusic yourself, upload it here for the possibility of it being released on this hugely influential netlabel!

So...Check!!!

The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) Links Page

Commodore 64 music for the masses



One of the most accurate and complete resource page for SID files can be found here.

XY interactive textile

The XY interactive textile is a large tactile interface for playing electronic music. The performer plays it simply by the movement of his/her hand on it's surface. This textile interface allows users to compose and interpret electronic music by choreographic movements. By its size, its texture, its flexibility and its transparency, this textile interface involves the whole body in the musical interpretation. Like a music score, the sound elements are graphically represented on the fabric, giving to the composer the ability to locate and play (with) them. Thus, for each piece of music, a graphic partition is carried out. The idea behind this project is also to develop an opposite approach to a classical process (from graphic towards the sound). Created in collaboration with graphic designers and composers, these hybrid textiles offer spaces to be explored by look, touch and gesture.

More info here.

Singing Arcs or Musical Tesla Coils

A few words about safety:

1. Burning steel produces some really nasty fumes. When mixed with Ozone and NO2 they will surely do you harm. Therefore ensure adequate ventillation and don't breath the fumes.
2. The plasma is hot ! If it starts steel burning in seconds, it will damage skin in milliseconds. Do not take an arc to the skin or any held object.
3. Hot metal particles are showered everywhere, and the screwdriver remains hot for some time after the power is cut. There is a real risk of setting fire to nearby objects or burning your skin. Give things plenty of time to cool before touching.

The hardware store where I got my screwdriver wouldn't honour the "lifetime guarantee" either ;-)

There are many ways of modulating a SSTC (solid state tesla coil), the 2 most popular being AM (amplitude modulation) and what i will call "PRF Modulation". PRF stands for pulse repitition frequency. The reason these 2 modulations exist, is because there are 2 (actually more) distinct types of SSTC. Those that can produce a continuous spark output (that is, a flame like plasma that exists at 100% duty cycle) and those that make what appear to be a continuous spark, but are rather producing sparks at several hundred times per second with a rest between each spark event. The first (continuous) type of SSTC lends itself to audio modulation. Normally the output spark is a silent plasma flame. By modulating the amount of power put into the plasma flame, we can modulate the physical volume of the plasma. Modulating the size of the plasma will cause the expansion/relaxation of air surrounding the plasma, thus producing sound waves.

Now go for it here!
Or go for Ward and Larson's twin Tesla coils!

Gladdening (being glad and that)

while floating around LA...



Here is where to get the balloons:

Make yourself familiar with knots and parachute design for a full enjoyment!!!

If everything goes wrong stretch your arms on the side and get ready for the burst.

Record on a wire DIY

To do this project, you should do research that enables you to understand the following terms and concepts:

* transducer,
* Ohm's Law,
* magnetic coil,
* Faraday's Law.

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_ideas/Elec_p015.shtml

Introduction to magnetic wire recording

The technology of magnetic recording dates back to 1878, when Oberlin Smith proposed the idea of recording telephone signals onto a length of steel piano wire...

More at:
http://www.videointerchange.com/wire_recorder1.htm
http://depts.washington.edu/ethmusic/wire1.html

Acoustic radars

Acoustic mirrors, english south coast, 1920s

http://www.doramusic.com/soundmirrors.htm
http://www.ajg41.clara.co.uk/mirrors/dungeness.html
http://www.castlekas.freeserve.co.uk/sound_mirrors.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/01/29/namp29.xml

Some more...



http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/ear/ear.htm

Oskar Sala, 1910-2002, Germany

"For the first time in music history, it was possible to execute sounds which had been known in theory since the Middle Ages but weren't playable on classical instruments."

More here.

John G. Kemeny: BASIC and DTSS: Everyone a Programmer

Kemeny and Kurtz realized that a new computer language was needed that could be easily learned and accessible to typical college students. Kemeny noted, "We at Dartmouth envisaged the possibility of millions of people writing their own computer programs." (Man and the Computer, p. 30) They designed their language with plain English and high school algebra like commands and so that the lay user could learn a very few commands and then be able to write interesting programs. Kemeny started to work on a draft version in September, 1963. The result was BASIC, Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The first BASIC program ran on May 1, 1964 at 4:00 am. Kemeny and Kurtz made an effort to get as many students as possible using BASIC and they were available to hear about problems and bugs and to come up with bug fixes. Kemeny and Kurtz wanted BASIC to be in the public domain. Dartmouth copyrighted BASIC but made it available without charge.

***

Kemeny had a very broad vision of the role computers would play in society. He foresaw a man-machine symbiosis that would help both to evolve rapidly. In the early 1970's he predicted that within 20 years there would be a national computer network with erminals in millions of homes, so every home would be a mini university. He also predicted there would be a National Automated Reference Library, a national ersonalized computer delivered news service, and, especially, greatly enhanced education via time sharing and simple programming languages. Kemeny worked hard to implement his visions and felt by the late 1980's great disappointment in the slow progress. He died just as the great computer networking structures that have developed in some large measure because of his pioneering work and vision have begun to fulfill more of his expectations but also just as a fight is being waged by those who want to commercialize theses networking
structures and those who want to keep them in the public domain.

Full text here.

A Short Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Here are some links of interest about speech synthesis.

Text to speech interactive demo in us and uk english, spanish, german and french http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html

The Smithsonian Speech Synthesis History Project,
a Division of Information Technology and Society of The NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY
http://www.mindspring.com/~ssshp/ssshp_cd/ss_btl1.htm

A brief introduction to voice synthesis (in german)
http://www.msc175.de/projekte/vocoder/sprachsynthese.htm

Understand Audio Synthesis via Vacuum Tubes
http://www.cgs.synth.net/tube/index.html

Key figures:

Werner Meyer Eppler, 1913-1960,


http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/introtts_old.html

mathematician , physicist, and director of Phonetics at Bonn University
http://www.kgw.tu-berlin.de/Studio/Meyer-Eppler/Meyer-Eppler.html
http://www.music.columbia.edu/masterpieces/notes/stockhausen/GesangHistoryandAnalysis.pdf

Homer Dudley,



researcher at bell laboratories, inventor of the vocoder in 1939
http://www.bell-labs.com/org/1133/Heritage/Vocoder/
http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/machines/vocoder/

The Bell-Bettini-Marconi-Neuman "Brutus" 5ft Cylinder

In late 1901 or perhaps early 1902 Everlasting sought to create the ultimate record...

To that end, Everlasting secured four industry greats - Alexander Graham Bell, Gianni Bettini, Guglielmo Marconi, and Alfred Neuman – to develop the record with a goal to unveil the new format at the grand opening of the Flatiron Building in New York City. Aiming for playback volume rather than convenience, and revolving at a daring 160-RPM, the development team created this, the world's largest cylinder record, nicknaming it the "Brutus" cylinder.

With its unprecedented surface speed and spacious 13 grooves per inch (yielding a maximum recording of just over two minutes), the Brutus produced by far the loudest sound recordings of its time.

Unfortunately, the ambitious experiment was doomed to failure. Centrifugal forces caused chunks of the wax recording surface to fly off the record on its maiden showing.

The cylinder caused several minor injuries and considerable property damage before it could be stopped.

The resulting lawsuits eventually led to the dissolution of Everlasting, making it the only company shut down by a legal battle not brought on by Victor, Edison or Columbia.

More info at: http://www.tinfoil.com/brutus.htm

The Nordskog

A small Santa Monica, CA, company operated this Nordskog phonograph-record cutting lathe during the 1920s. This machine was used to record Ted Ofry's Sunshine Band, an African American jazz band from New Orleans. The recording was the first ever made of jazz artists from the music's birthplace.

The recording procedures were as follows:

STEP 1: Casting of the molten wax and the basic shape of the wax disc which was approximately 11/4" thick. It was with this wax that the actual vibrating needle cut the grooves into the wax,

STEP 2: The recording with the vibrating needle in the wax.

STEP 3: Copper plating the wax through electric conductivity in an agitating suspension-system; this would move the wax back and forth to keep the copper molecules suspended in the solution to give even distribution and in-depth penetration of the copper into the waxed grooves.

STEP 4: Reversing the previous plating operation-the copper disc went through a similar agitating electrolithic operation that plated away nickel to the copper.


More info at this address: http://nordskogpublishing.com/nordskog_arne.shtml

A Short History Of Transmission Audio Processing

By
Robert Orban
Chief Engineer. Orban/CRL



In the early days of broadcasting, the primary purpose of transmission audio processing was to protect the AM transmitters of the time from damage due to modulator overload. Simple peak limiters using variable-mu tubes in a push-pull configuration were employed. Because the gain-control signal was, in essence, mixed with the audio signal, these early vacuum-tube devices required careful balancing to cancel "thumps" representing feedthrough of the gain-control signal into the audio. Dynamic range control was effected through careful manual gain-riding -- in classical music broadcasts, the "compressor" was a skilled operator reading the musical score and using it to anticipate the required level adjustments. To this day, no one has invented a more subtle or effective method of compression!

Later, simple compressors were placed upstream from the limiters in situations where the budget did not permit skilled manual gain-riding. These compressors were not gated and could exaggerate noise objectionably.

In the Region 2 countries, 75µs pre-emphasis is used in FM and television sound transmission. This pre-emphasis is up 17dB at 15kHz and can cause severe over-modulation if its effects are not controlled. The obvious solution - placing a wide-band peak limiter after the pre-emphasis filter - proved unsatisfactory because high-frequency overloads would cause severe spectral gain intermodulation: cymbal crashes would cause the sound to literally collapse. The Fairchild "Conax" (originally designed for disk cutting) was often used to ameliorate the problem. This device divided the audio into two bands with a 1kHz crossover and applied pre-emphasis, clipping, and high-pass filtering to the upper band. The high-pass filter reduced the difference-frequency intermodulation caused by the clipper, yielding reasonably acceptable sound.

"Modern audio processing" could be said to derive from the work of the design team at CBS Laboratories in the early 1960s. Their "Audimax" (mispronounced by generations of engineers as "audiomax"!) was a gated wideband compressor that successfully eliminated the noise-breathing problem of earlier compressors. The "Volumax" was a clipper preceded by a limiter with a moderate attack time. The moderate attack time prevented the unit from punching holes in the program, while the clipper controlled the peaks that the preceding limiter did not catch. The "FM Volumax" introduced a high-frequency limiter to control overload due to the pre-emphasis curve. This high-frequency limiter was a program-controlled 6dB/octave shelving filter placed between the limiter and clipper. Once again, a moderate attack time was used and the overshoots were controlled by a final clipper. The "Dynamic Presence Equalizer" measured the ratio of midrange energy to wideband program energy and applied midrange equalization as necessary to correct the midrange spectral balance of the program.

In the early 1970s, Dorrough Electronics introduced the "Discriminate Audio Processor" ("DAP"). There were versions for AM and FM. The DAP divided the audio spectrum into three bands with gentle crossover slopes and compressed each band independently. The bands were recombined and applied to a clipper with a very "soft" transfer characteristic. The DAP greatly reduced spectral gain intermodulation by comparison to its wideband predecessors. Additionally, many engineers adjusted the three bands for different gains, using the device as a dynamic program equalizer as well.

In 1975 Orban Associates introduced "Optimod-FM." This unit combined compressor, limiter, high-frequency limiter, clipper, 15kHz low-pass filters, and stereo multiplex encoder into one box. This greatly reduced the possibility of misadjustment of the processing chain. The unit's 15kHz low-pass filters were non-linear filters without significant overshoot, and therefore permitted higher average modulation by comparison to the linear low-pass filters used in the stand-alone stereo encoders of the time.

In 1977 Orban Associates introduced "Optimod-AM." This unit contained a high-slope receiver equalizer to pre-compensate for the highly rolled-off radios of the time, and also included an 11kHz low-pass filter to ensure that the unit complied with the occupied bandwidth requirements of the 1978 FCC Rules. It also introduced the distortion-canceling clipper, which substantially reduced difference-frequency intermodulation distortion caused by clipping.

In the late 1970s, Circuit Research Laboratories introduced a processing system for AM whose most important novel features were a phase rotator [the Kahn "Symmetra-Peak" being a fore-runner] prior to processing (to make voice more symmetrical, reducing clipping distortion), and a subsonic equalizer after final peak clipping to pre-distort the output waveform of the processor to compensate for low-frequency tilt in the plate-modulated transmitters of the time. Compensating for this waveform tilt enabled the better transmitters to be substantially louder by eliminating a factor that would otherwise increase the peak-to-average ratio of the modulation. Although intuitively inobvious, using a phase rotator to purposely eliminate the asymmetry in voice proved to be far more effective than the older "polarity follower" [Pacific Recorders AM "Modulimiter"] circuit. The older circuit preserved any natural waveform asymmetry and switched its output polarity such that the side of the waveform with the higher peak level modulates the carrier in the positive direction.

In the late 1970s, a number of manufacturers made "composite clippers" designed to be placed between the output of the stereo encoder and the input of the transmitter. These controlled the peak modulation of the composite stereo signal unambiguously at the expense of introducing harmonic and intermodulation distortion throughout the stereo baseband. Many "hit-format" broadcasters thought that the increased loudness achieved by these devices justified compromising the spectral purity of the baseband. Eventually, the FCC judged these devices to be in violation of the FCC Rules of the time if they caused the instantaneous 19kHz stereo pilot tone injection to be less than 8% modulation. In essence, this meant that the pilot could not be clipped and must be injected after the clipper. In 1982, Modulation Sciences introduced a composite processor that did this, thereby performing to the letter of the FCC Rules.

In 1982, Orban Associates introduced the "Hilbert-Transform Clipper" as part of its Optimod-TV processor for stereo television. The "Hilbert-Transform Clipper" was later adapted for use in shortwave as well.

In general, transmission audio processing in the 1980s refined and built upon the revolutionary developments of the 1970s without introducing any radical novelties. Each manufacturer, for example, has a proprietary technique for producing non-linear overshoot-free low-pass filters for FM and television applications. Several manufacturers (including Inovonics and Circuit Research Laboratories) introduced programmable processors whose subjective setup controls can be changed by remote control to match the programming of the moment.

In the 1990s, the field must be considered "mature." As in every other area of audio, digital signal processing (DSP) is likely to eventually supplant analog circuitry. As of this writing, Orban, CRL, Valley International, Gentner Electronics, and Audio Animation have introduced transmission processors in which all processing is done in the digital domain. [The Valley, Gentner, and Audio Animation units are no longer manufactured.] If properly designed, such a processor can be readily reconfigured in milliseconds to change almost any aspect of its topology, such as the number of bands in its multi-band compressor. Subjective setup control settings can be stored and later recalled by local clock, remote control, or computer to daypart processing. The processor can readily generate test and signalling tones, facilitating tests of the transmission system and the generation of EAS alert tones.

In a digital processor, achieving sound quality equal to or better than its analog counterparts requires a marriage of art and mathematical design more rigorous than anything in the genesis of its analog ancestors. Many common analog processing functions (such as clipping) are much more difficult to do competently in the digital domain. However, digital also presents the opportunity to do things unachievable in analog, and digital's overwhelming advantages will ultimately manifest themselves as clearly here as they have elsewhere in the audio processing arena.

Robert Orban

From www.261.gr

FM Telephone Bug

FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE ONLY! WE ACCEPT NO LIABILITIES FOR WHAT YOU MAY DO WITH THE CONTENT OF THIS ARTICLE.

From: http://www.aaroncake.net/circuits/phonebug.asp

Here is a simple transmitter that when connected to a phone line, will transmit anything on that line (execpt the dial tone) to any FM radio. The frequency can be tuned from 88 to about 94Mhz and the range is about 200 feet. It is extremely easy to build and is therefore a good, useful beginner project.

Schematic



Parts

Part----Total Qty.-Description
R1---------------1----180 Ohm 1/4 W Resistor
R2---------------1----12K 1/4 W Resistor
C1---------------1----330pF Capacitor
C2---------------1----12pF Capacitor
C3---------------1----471pF Capacitor
C4---------------1----22pF Capacitor
Q1---------------1----2SA933 Transistor
D1, D2, D3, D4---4----1SS119 Silicon Diode
D5---------------1----Red LED
S1---------------1----SPDT Switch
L1---------------1----Tuning Coil
MISC-----------1----Wire, Circuit Board

Notes

L1 is 7 turns of 22 AWG wire wound on a 9/64 drill bit. You may need to experiment with the number of turns.

By stretching and compressing the coils of L1, you can change the frequency of the transmitter. The min frequency is about 88 Mhz, while the max frequency is around 94 Mhz.

The green wire from the phone line goes to IN1. The red wire from the phone line goes to IN2. The green wire from OUT1 goes to the phone(s), as well as the red wire from OUT2.

The antenna is a piece of thin (22 AWG) wire about 5 inches long.

All capacitors are rated for 250V or greater.

The transmitter is powered by the phone line and is on only when the phone is in use. S1 can be used to turn the transmitter off if it is not needed.

If you have problems with the LED burning out, then add a 300 ohm 1/4W resistor in series with it.

Electrical playback of cylinders

Since the early days, sound recording has been far superior to sound reproduction. Early apparatus could reproduce only a fraction of the frequencies recorded on the cylinders (from 300 to 3000 Hz with the best ones). Acoustical reproduction systems were so limited in the higher and lower end of the spectrum that they could not even reproduce a female voice correctly - not to mention piano music. Only electrical playback allows us to hear all that has been recorded on a cylinder, and we are often surprised. All cylinders are "hill and dale" vertically cut, like Diamond discs . So we will use a Shure SC35C cartridge wired for vertical response.

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Which phonograph to use

For playing old discs we can use a modern turntable with an electric motor, but unfortunately there is no cylinder player equipped with an electric motor. The first solution would be to build a machine specifically for this use: it is possible, but it is a matter of precision mechanics and high skill in that field is required. Just take a look at the work of a few especially talented amateurs on an extraordinary site dedicated exclusively to modern cylinder phonographs You can find inspiration there if you feel you are capable of getting into such a project. The other solution, the one I have adopted, is to use the works of an old phonograph. For the purist, it is a less satisfactory solution, but it has the advantage of being feasible by a moderately skilled amateur, and for a very modest price too. This is the interest of the "Fradetophone" (unregistered trade mark !)described here.
A bare mechanism without the wood case can still be found easily and cheaply, and with a bit of work it can serve as a base for our electrical player. But do make sure it is a model equipped with a feedscrew that permits the reproducer to track the groove. So you can exclude the Pathé O and Puck types, whose mechanism is too weak anyway for serious use. Another must is that the mandrel be of the standard type, which allows for standard cylinders and Salon (Intermediate Pathé) cylinders with an adaptor. The Pathé Chanteclair will only take Salon cylinders and the Phénix will only take Phénix cylinders (practically impossible to find and with a very special diameter). The Edisons will only take standard cylinders and do not allow for the use of an adaptor. The ideal is to find a Pathé No 1 (a fairly common model) which has a pretty robust mechanism, with a feedscrew and which takes the two common diameters of cylinders. Of course, the large Concert cylinders will not be playable on it, but as there is a very slight chance for you to have any, I just skipped the question.

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Mechanical or electrical motor?

The easy solution is to keep the original mechanical motor... if it works - provided it is not too noisy. Most small models actually produce a terrible noise which is picked up by the cartridge - and amplified! This mechanical noise somtimes spreads over the entire useful spectrum of frequencies and will thus be impossible to eliminate. If the original mechanism does not work, so much the better. Just take it out (but don’t throw it away, there may be parts there to recover to repair a collector’s phonograph). A good starting point is to find a quiet electric motor, which is a lot more convenient. I personally use a DUAL Pick-up motor for 78’s of the 1930’s. Those can still be found easily at flea markets for a modest price. They are very interesting, for they are strong, fairly quiet and above all they have a centrifugal three-weight governor that allows for perfect speed control. We will only remove the turntable spindle and use the helical gear (after soldering a brass sleeve onto it) as the primary pulley. Make a leather belt to connect this pulley to the mandrel pulley. Then put your ingenuity to work and mount the motor giving it some clearance so you can adjust the tension of the belt. I recommend you to spray the inside of the belt with a special compound that will help avoid slippage and power loss. At last check if the mandrel is heavy enough to work as a flywheel that will absorb small speed variations . If it is not so, then open it. It is hollow and the lid can be easily removed. Melt some lead (or tin solder) into it to obtain a thick and even layer, without of course obstructing the hole for the central axle. The mass of lead should be perfectly balanced in order to function as a flywheel.

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How to fix the electrical pick-up arm

The Pathé No 1 phonographs are provided with the"Orpheus" system, which means the reproducer and horn move together along the cylinder. The reproducer should have some vertical and lateral mobility while always staying level. We will keep this excellent "Orpheus" system and simply replace the reproducer-horn unit by a modern arm fitted with a magnetic cartridge. So we must take a complete arm with its pivot and counterweight from a modern turntable. The problem will be to find a straight arm (not an S-shaped one) and fix it on the antique cylinder phonograph. The image above shows the system I use, but it can certainly be improved on. The counterweight permits adjustment of pressure according to the cylinder to be played. Normally 3 grams will be quite enough except if the cylinder is a little excentric, in which case you may increase pressure to 5 grams to keep the stylus from taking off at every revolution.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Which stylus to use

The original "sapphires" were in most cases small glass balls. If you have an original one, you may try and glue it to a used microgroove stylus bar. You will need a watch-maker’s magnifying glass, a pair of very fine tweezers, some cyanolite glue - and the patience of an angel. But it can be done. A Shure cartridge fitted with such a ”sapphire” will perform well, especially with brown wax cylinders. In difficult cases, with cracked or badly worn cylinders, only the glass ball will be able to jump over the cracks and keep tracking the groove. But for black cylinders, which are made of a much harder material, the glass ball should not be used. It is more advisable to use a practically everlasting diamond stylus, which will reproduce more treble. The English manufacturer Expert Stylus makes 7 mil diamond styli for Shure cartridges, especially intended for use with standard 2 minute cylinders.

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Adjusting the speed

Cylinders normally spin at 160 rpm. This is the rule for black moulded cylinders. Brown cylinders do not always respect this speed and many of them run at slower and very different speeds. There is no other option than to set the speed by ear. All mechanical phonographs have a speed adjustment that allows us a wide range of speeds. We are now going to attach a stroboscope for 160 rpm to the end of the mandrel and stick with that speed in most cases. If the sound seems unlikely at that speed, reduce speed until it sounds right. Most certainly very subjective, but there is no other way...

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Electrical connections

The signal produced by the cartridge is very weak and very susceptible to intereference. Therefore good shielded cables are essential. Some "shielded" cables for HiFi are real sieves and so practically useless. Choose only cables with a densely woven braid that surrounds the central conductor completely. This is the only way to avoid undesired hiss, hum and crackle. Connect the two RCA plugs into the phono input of your amplifier, the only input that can be used with this kind of reproducer. Even so we must know one important thing: all phono inputs on all contemporary amplifiers include a filter called RIAA, which raises the low frequencies and lower the high, correcting the frequency curve of the microgroove discs. Older phonograms (discs and cylinders) have not been recorded according to this curve. We must then use a special preamplifier or a graphic equaliser to cancel this RIAA correction. Anyway, when playing cylinders, electric reproduction will give a terrible mechanical noise in the low register, and at the high end a no less terrible surface noise. It is absolutely necessary to filter out all useless frequencies and keep only the useful signal. On a cylinder there is nothing below 300 Hz neither above 4000 Hz, so you can filter drastically without regrets. Then what you have is the signal in all its - relative - clarity. And if you have no filters or equaliser, set the bass and treble to minimum. It is better than nothing and it permits listening to your old cylinders in relative comfort.
But in order to make high quality transfer of cylinders, this is very insufficient, and in that field, computerised sound processing is a must. That will be the subject of the following chapter

Thanks to Christer Hamp from Sweden for translating this page

Last updated January 18 th 2000
Copyright Jean-Luc Fradet / 1998 -2000

An introduction to low power FM transmission (or pirate radio basics...) part 4

How far will my signal go?

In theory, the range of a transmitted electomagnetic wave is infinite regardless of power used,
it continues until it encounters an obstruction. more power helps to overcome any obstructions.

but is limited by how far the transmitting antenna can effectively see!

If there is a clear line of sight between the transmitter and the receiver (nothing in the way)

it should be possible to receive the signal, the curvature of the earth can soon become a limiting factor

Sources of interference or other stations operating on the same frequency.

Basically the same as people shouting over each other in a room,
the loudest one(s) get heard, and its possible to seperate the sounds of the loudest people who
have a different pitch(frequency) voice

and remember: shouting is not polite, especially in public

Transmission power (Effective Radiated Power).

You could expect a 10w station to have around a 20 mile range with a reasonable antenna

http://www.veronica.co.uk/range.htm

As you may have noticed by reading the above, fm broadcasting can mostly be about
having your aerial as high as possible.
Maybe consider using balloons or kites to lift your antenna?
Here is some information on the subject:
Prior safety warnings:

1. Give a wide berth to power lines (unless you want to look like a sausage roll).
2. Be very careful about static (unless you want to cross the rubicon).
3. Pay attention to air traffic (unless you want to pay through the nose).

http://www.hard-core-dx.com/nordicdx/antenna/special/baloon.html
http://www.qsl.net/g4vgo/balloon_antennas.htm
http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/lift.html
http://www.helikites.com/skyhook/aad.html
Want to go higher?
That could be a stratosferic solution: http://www.eoss.org/pubs/faqloon.htm
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3423026
Want to go even higher?
Where blue turns black before it comes back:
http://bordelon.net/freespace/radioflier-1/default.html
When you get so high, you may start thinking satellite

History of AMSAT
AMSAT Documents for New Satellite Users
Sounds from the First AMSAT Satellites
OSCAR project - Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio

Maybe these bakery sponsered guys will help you lauch yours??:
http://www.jpaerospace.com
Give us a slot on your program then?!:)
Don't forget - a good mast will help!

Been away from Mother England for too long? In need of gravy granules, daddies favourite and ash browns?
Well that should be alright! Maybe you miss London's highlights: promiscuity, DLR and pollution. In that case the London Pirate Listening Station may be of temporary salvation: http://scanner.irational.org/

An introduction to low power FM transmission (or pirate radio basics...) part 1

Important notice: this information is for educational purpose only.

We hope to make you conversant with the main principles and methods of fm propagation.
If you intend to "break-in" the fm band, don't read any further!

Beginner's guide to low power broadcasting:

"Before you commit to your first broadcast - it would be advisable to have an attorney
available, who is sympathetic to the cause."

"...It's fairly easy for the DTI to track a transmission back to its source, by triangulating the signal."

"In court dress neatly and be polite to the bastard (magistrate) and the filth"
Before we go any further please have a look at: http://www.c6.org/archive/radio/pirate-fm.htm

In the next articles, we'll have a closer look at:

- What equipment do I need (part2)?

- What frequency should I choose(part3)?

- How far will my signal go (part4)?

- Considerations on dynamics (part 5).

Hope it will be of some inspiration for those interested in FM propagation.

Happy reading!

An introduction to low power FM transmission (or pirate radio basics...) part 3

What frequency should i choose?

Choose a frequency nobody is else is using, simple as that!

Most importantly!

Make sure you dont interfere with other (especially officially valid) radio users

Before you transmit, (days before even!) roam the area you will cover with a good radio, make sure nobody is using your desired frequency.
Find a quiet part of the spectrum, make sure your signal does not break-in(bleed) onto an adjacent used frequency.
Find out how your rig behaves at full power (cold, warm and hot) in an isolated area, is there frequency any drift?
Get an SWR meter (and use it!) http://www.smeter.net/feeding/swrmeter.php

Finally, read all you can about the subject. And note regional differences such as pre-emphasis

http://www.freeradio.org

Radio terms and abbreviations http://www.dxing.com/radioterms.htm
ARRL abreviations http://www2.arrl.org/qst/aguide/Abbrev_AWE.pdf

If your not creating a nuisance - then you may just get away with it!

Happy raving :)

An introduction to low power FM transmission (or pirate radio basics...) part 2

What equipment do I need?

The portable set up:

This is a quick review on what you need. Make sure to browse the internet for further detailed information.

Tape player

We advice you to go for a reliable professional cassette player
with a good rca or xlr output.

like the Sony tcd5 pro2

A Sony Pressman may do the trick as well.

"Townies iPod and MP3 players won't give you any satisfaction!"

Preamp

Assume every portable transmitter you can find is not intended to compete with professional broadcasters, a preamplifier will be handy to strengthen your signal. We are using a Nagra IV.2 for this. The main inconvenient is its weight. Walking in fields to the broadcasting location or climbing up stairs with the bastard on your back will make you consider getting its hard to find but well efficient pocket-sized little sister: the Nagra SN.

the Nagra SN:

You may also skip the Nagras and go for a home made portable console.

Here is a starting point then:
These people know the ropes on Telefunken, Siemens, EMT, Neve equipment.

http://www.danalexanderaudio.com/
http://www.marquetteaudiolabs.com/

Transmitter

This is the core of your system. May we suggest you to make a search on the interweb for "portable fm transmitter"?

We don't want to put you on the screw too much ladies but don't make us plough the sands. Does it mean anything??? ... Hahaha (from a book of English idioms)

Look for something you like with similar specifications to a Bext P10.

Bandpass filter

This is all about harmonics (multiples of your tranmissions frequency).

Let's say you're broadcasting on nine-o-nine Mhz, your aerial will send harmonics of this frequency as well. In that case 181.8, 363.6, 727.2, etc… Mhz, which are not inside the 87-108 fm band anymore.

You'll be a pain in the neck for emergency services (police, ambulances, firemen) without even noticing it… which means they'll put the DTI on your case without any delay. You may loose half a dB using it, although the loss of that dB might save somebodies life!
or help somebody get away :)

Power supply

Your power requirements will depend on your rig. 12v is the normal requirement, so a car battery is suitable (without the car running! or use a regulation circuit). Car emergancy starters are good (dont be tempted by the crap strobes on it though). Deep discharge battery will last longer and give better performance, electric wheelchairs use these, so they are easy pickings!:)

The more you spend, the more power you get, also it's easier to carry.
cheaper > more expensive: lead acid, Gel Lead acid, NiCads, Lithium Based batteries.
The more efficient (and expensive) the battery technology is, can also mean it's more difficult (expensive) to charge safely.

If you are going to be located in one place for some time, you may be able to use the forces of nature to keep you powered up i.e., solar or wind can trickle charge your batteries in time for your broadcasts.

Here's some links:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/battery.htm
http://www.vonwentzel.net/Battery/00.Glossary/
http://www.batteryweb.com/
http://www.exideworld.com/
http://www.mdsbattery.co.uk/defaultuk.asp
http://www.homepower.com/
http://www.americansolarchallenge.org/event/asc2005/
http://www.rain.org/~philfear/how2solar.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~fradella/green.htm

Mast

Unless you can find a location atop of a high building, a mast is a must!
Go for an air-operated 10 to 12 meters high mast which is the best value for weight, strenghtness and minimum retracted height.

http://www.alphalink.com.au/~gfs/Clark/clarkp30.htm

You can also go DIY with aluminum tubes and guy wires.

Antenna

The other key part of your radio station. It is similar to a loud speaker in a stereo system.
Again, we advice you to have a deep look on the internet on different models and manufacturers.
http://www.ac6v.com/antprojects.htm

Cable

It brings the signal from your transmitter to the aerial. Keep it as short as possible.
Any unnecessary meter will weaken your signal and then the signal/noise ratio.
To get it, have a quick look at some electricity basics here.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/ohmlaw.html

Quality RG213 cable is a good choice.

Other

Don't go out for a broadcast without appropriate clothing! It's too late to think about your missing top when you're on air. Double check batteries and that you take any tools you need for mast erection, rope, gloves and flashlight. A sweety may be welcome and a glass of Merlot as well! You may be in a rude environment; it doesn't mean you have to get rid of pleasures of life.

Everything you ever wanted to know

about the history of electronic instruments, at this beautiful page.

A belgian semi-automatic pressing machine!!!

How wicked does that look? Fabel means "Fabrique Belge", its other name is "FN", stands for "Fabrique Nationale". They stopped producing that machine a long time ago, but they still make weapons for the belgian army, and that's not so cool...

More on record cutting

On Flo Kaufmann's page, lots of lathes, cutterheads, amplifiers, and pressing machines.

Some record cutting lathes...

The Neumann R20, the very first one, built circa 1932, designed to cut on wax plates... What did they do with the cut afterwards? This one belongs to the Deutsches Rundfunk Museum.






The AM131, the first cutting lathe mass produced by Neumann, that one's got a fixed pitch. Notice how similar it is to the R20, even their last model the VMS82, kept the same shape.






Gotham Audio designed a 3 speeds motor for it:






A Fairchild lathe, note the carriage arm, same as on the Lyrec lathe, quoted by Mr Sean Davies as "very reliable, much more stable, brilliant idea..."







The Lyrec lathe, from Denmark:






A Scully lathe, this one actually belongs to us, but is not functional, yet:






The Neumann VMS 66, was the first cutting with an electronic pitch. It had 4 points of reference, it's accurate, but better could be achieved.






Then came the ultra-famous Neumann VMS 70, basically identical to the VMS 60, but the pitch control and some electronics were improved. As well as the aesthetics...






The Daddy, the Neumann VMS80, you can't do better than this:







Well you actually can... The Neumann VMS82, the very last ever designed, built to cut on copper. Only 34 were made... It's basically a VMS80, modified to make it much more stronger.

Drive Time Advert / FSK014/WEME017 / Ceephax Acid Crew

An introduction to low power FM transmission (or pirate radio basics...) part 5

Considerations on Dynamics or Audio File Standards for the Broadcast Industry

Taken from www.261.gr

24/11/07
by Jeff Schroeder

Most broadcasters work hard to present the cleanest audio possible. However, there is one part of the chain – hard to measure with traditional test gear – that can undo your careful effort at quality. To avoid distortion from “stacked algorithms” Jeff Schroeder suggests we get together as an industry and create standards for incoming audio files.

It began when we got the first CD decks in our on-air studios. “Now in full digital quality, it’s Hey Lewis and the News on KIQY-FM!” I remember saying those exact words at least a dozen times in my “other” life on the air. That was 1985. Fast forward to 2006 – and for the most part we still are saying the same thing: “Broadcasting in full digital quality.” Only now a very high percentage – if not all – of the music, commercials, jingles, and liners are actually of a much lower audio quality than that first Hey Lewis CD I played from a Technics consumer CD deck back in 1985. What happened?

WE PAUSE FOR A WORD ABOUT AUDIO QUALITY
I can hear you saying: “but we are playing the files in linear file format from a $3,000 audio card on a $2,000 computer. Yes, you are. But, where did the original files come from? iTunes? New Music Server? Your friend’s iPod? Or did you actually take the time to rip it from the original CD? And what about the commercials that are running on your air now? When was the last time you actually got a commercial on a CD or Tape? The vast majority of – if not all – commercials are now delivered in file form. Have you really ever taken the time to inspect the properties of the audio files coming into your facility? Looked at the sample rate? Bit rate? RMS levels of the audio? Most people have not. The commercial/ song/liner simply comes in the building, gets converted to the automation system file format and uploaded. When I travel around the country I am amazed at some of the audio that I hear on the air – commercials in particular. The sound is so bad that it is often stressful to them.

WHY QUALITY IS SUFFERING
It is clear to anyone literate in producing clean audio that it is getting harder to find. Far too many of the current CDs are already smashed, crunched, and clipped before they get to you. But then they enter the typical broadcast audio chain where stacked compression algorithms are digital audio’s worst enemy. To illustrate, just look at the typical distribution path used today to get audio on the air:

1. Production happens in full digital multi-track editor and mixed down to a linear wave file.
2. The “send out” copy is made from the file and saved in a minimum “standard” 256 kbps MP3 file (with 5.5:1 compression) to save on upload/download bandwidth (Generation 1)
3. The local production dude (or dudette) downloads the file and opens an editor to put on the local tag. Then he/she saves the file in 128 kbps MP3 format, compressed 11:1. (Generation 2)
4. The file is then sent to the automation system, typically using 4.4:1 compressed MP2. (Generation 3)
5. The file makes it to the air. Audio processors and HD exciters add coding (Generation 4) or (even 5!

Sadly, this is sometimes the best case scenario. Often the process is repeated many times over, creating files that are technically digital audio, but sound so bad they should not be played on a $9 clock radio. At one time or another, we have all been told by the sales manager that we “must play the commercial” that we received from the client because “it’s $(insert dollar figure) per minute – and they pay fast!” Even if the file turns out to be a copy of a 6.3:1 MP2 that a station across town pulled of their automation and emailed to you.

CRUCIAL DECISIONS
I clearly remember the very loud outcry about the 4.4:1 MP2 compressed audio coming from PD’s when we first started playing music from hard drives on automation computers. This was only 7 to 10 years ago. Oh, how things have changed in this very short time! We as an industry (Radio) are at a true turning point. With more and more stations turning on HD signals and the added compression algorithm involved with HD, there must be something done about the quality of audio files that we will accept and actually play on our radio stations. Our listeners now have a vast selection of digital products from which to choose. We have to sound better than those choices in content and sound. Content is another subject which must be addressed by all the programming guru’s. What I am talking about is the quality of the audio sound. The problem is that currently there are no real standards that would improve this. What is the solution?

EDUCATION
We will take the easy one first: Education. It is imperative that the people who are handling the files (Program Directors, Music Directors, Production People, etc.) learn and understand what digital compression is and how it affects the overall quality of the finished product – which is, after all, the on-air sound of your station(s). Your staff does not have to go out and buy their own copy of Audio Files for Dummies. However, if they see a file come into the building that is a 128 kbps MP3, they do need to know enough so that they quickly can identify the file type and “properties” of the file. Then, if necessary, they are able to identify problems and do everything in their power to get that file replaced with a higher quality file. This point is particularly important for music that will go into the library and be there for a long time.

LIFTING THE HOOD ON MP3 FILES
Here is a chart of the compression ratios of MP3 files and the file sizes they generate, compared with a linear file.



You can see that the consumer standard of 128 kbps is at 11.0:1 compression. You can also see that the highest quality bit-rate of any MP3 file is still running 4.4:1 compression. A good visual example comes from a current country song on the charts today. A very simple comparison of the frequency spectrum before and after a file is pulled from a CD will be instructive. This is something every one of your production and air people should be able to grasp in an instant.

Comparing native CD audio to an MP3 dub.

The solid lines at the top reflect the frequency response of the original WAV file ripped directly from the CD. The solid filled-in (blue) part is the exact same section of the song after converting it to 192 kbps MP3. You can see the dramatic and absolute roll-off at 16 kHz. This happens with every file converted to MP3 on the very first generation – it is “by design.” This is just the most graphic example of what happens to an audio file being compressed; there are other, more harmful artifacts that happen, but that is something for a future discussion. You cannot reduce the size of an audio file without removing little “pieces” of the audio itself. These pieces can never be replaced and if the file is compressed more than once the audible quality denigration becomes almost exponential.

DEALING WITH THE URGENT NEEDS
Now, I am a realist. I understand that music now is being sent out on “release day” in compressed file format. In a competitive environment, stations have to play some songs the second they enter the building – and sometimes the only way they can get that file “right now” is downloading a compressed file. The solution: yes – use it. But then replace it as soon as you can get your hands on a CD or linear copy of the song. Never archive original audio in MP3 format! Yet, I see this all the time, all over the country. For any audio that has a chance of making it back on the air from an archive, all work should be done and saved in full linear uncompressed file format. Hard drives are cheap now. Again: archive all original audio in linear wave format. Indeed, why archive bad audio for future use? Too many times an element gets put into the automation system with the best intentions of eventually replacing it. Yet, if you were to go back into the system a couple of years later, the file likely would still be there largely because it does not sound so bad next to all of the other bad files.

SOURCE ISSUES
Another area of education deals with understanding the on-Line download “stores” such as iTunes. Not even taking into account the legality of downloading a song for “personal use” and playing it on the air, the files are compressed – sometimes highly compressed – and that compression will live on forever with that original source file. Please understand, I am not saying not to use all legally available means to get a song or file that you cannot get anywhere else. But if this is going to remain in your library, replace it with a high quality linear wave file as soon as possible.Unfortunately, as bad as such artifacts are now, HD will only make it worse. A badly compressed file will only be amplified by the compression algorithm of HD. It really is “Garbage in, Really Bad Stinky Rotten Garbage Out.” (I am not very opinionated, am I?)

STANDARDS
Now the more difficult issue: Standards. I am of the opinion that we – as an industry – can and should set the bar for what we are going to accept into our buildings from a file format standard. The problems: What should that standard be? Who should set the standard? And of the most importance, who is going to enforce the standard?

WORKING TOGETHER
As you might guess from the tone of this article, a lot of us at Citadel Broadcasting have been seriously discussing this topic at length, But it really does come down to cooperation from the entire industry. If we (Citadel) set a standard for music that we are going to accept and the competition across the street does not have the same standard, are we going to forgo being first with a “Debut” song from a core artist because the file is below our standards? Of course not. That is just not going to happen. I know it, you know it. But there goes the standard! The only way any standard is going to work is if we (Radio) set the bar and tell all of the music labels, production houses, and any other providers what our standards are – and stick by those agreed upon standards. I have had informal discussions with some of the second hand providers already, and for the most part they are as frustrated as we are. They are simply not receiving high quality linear files from the record labels on a consistent basis – and when they do they are limited by drive space and bandwidth just as we are. So, how do we begin? I would be willing to get together with any company, provider, or record label that would be willing to open the subject and possibly come up with some “base-line” standards that we could – over time – implement and eventually get the providers to adhere to. Is this possible? Is this something that we as an industry can get together on and put the power of numbers on our side? I am willing to try. Are you?

Jeff Schroeder is the Corporate Director of Digital Technology for Citadel Broadcasting Company. If you feel strongly about today’s broadcast audioquality, contact Jeff at jeff.schroeder (at) citcomm.com

TR-606 Operation Manual

Here

TB-303 Owner's Manual

Here

The Acid Varsity Story (by Andy Jenkinson)

There once was a Varsity called "Acid Varsity" and it was good and I liked it.
But before that there was a snake with a bazooka for a tongue and it blew a
hole into the centre of the earth and acid came out and melted everyone but
then Doctor Proctor found a cure and everyone had a party at Wimpy and
then Daniel was sick on his burger and then a clown came and everyone started crying but then a robot appeared and vapourized him and turned him into a beer and the robot got drunk and started swearing at Mr. Wimpy and they had a fight and Mr Wimpy did a flying kick and a roundhouse and the robot went into the sea and started rusting and a colony of shrimps started living in his mind safe from being gobbled by naughty fish and crabs and they had a dinner party and they all wore bow ties and one said let's invent a varsity and the leader said let's buy a tb303 and thus the Acid Varsity was born.

The History of Magnetic Recording

That's a pretty cool link...


Begins with Mr Morse (who used to be a painter), goes to the ADAT, and other various multi-track recording procedures.
Lots of other cool links at the bottom of the page, like this one for example.

A discussion about Mastering

Between two kings of the art.

Rashad Becker needs no introduction. He's cut a few of our early releases.

This guy has got microscopes instead of ears, and definitely needs a Firewire plug into his cranium, to back up all his knowledge before he dies...
(and we don't want this to happen, well he's kind of immortal anyway...)

Probably one of the most interesting article ever written on this topic: here

Firstcask Discography

1999:

FSK001-1 (CD) - Matthieu Ha - Bruxelles Parallèle - Fragment





2000:

FSK001-2** (CD) - Matthieu Ha - Bruxelles parallèles / Les Baleines Jaunes Et Les Requins Marteau



FSK003 - (CD) - Uské Orchestra - Uské Orchestra



FSK004 - (10") - Acid Kirk - Childhood memories



FSK005** (12inch+C60)* - Ceephax Acid Crew - FSK005 ( + Bonus Cassette "Drive Time")





2001:

FSK007 (2x7inch) - Various Artists (situationists and "lettrist poetry") - LINGVA PRAVORVM PERIBIT



2003:

FSK001-3 - (CD) - Matthieu Ha - Bruxelles parallèles / Cerf-volant



FSK006 - (internet stream) - Cheikh Imam - Unreleased Classic Old Tapes

Get it here



FSK012LP ( 2xLP / CD) - Ceephax Acid Crew - Exidy Tours




2006:

FSK008 (12") - Ceephax Acid Crew - Hardcore Wick



FSK009EP (12") - Ceephax Acid Crew - Ceerial Port





2007:

FSK010LP (2xLP / CD) - The Ace Of Clubs (Luke Vibert) - Benefist



FSK011EP (12") - The Ace Of Clubs (Luke Vibert) - Rubber Chunks



FSK013EP (12") - Asylum Seekers (Ed DMX) - Hardcore House EP



2008:

FSK014LP (12") - Ceephax - Drive Time




* drive time was the bonus cassette included with the fsk005 record.
** this release is now deleted. and not available for any further order.

This is the first post of the Acid Varsity. Here's the Original First Cask webpage.

Check it out while you can, it will be deleted soon...