IEEE Spectrum: Build Your Own Google Neural Synthesizer. “NSynth uses a deep neural network to distill musical notes from various instruments down to their essentials. Google’s developers first created a digital archive of some 300,000 notes, including up to 88 examples from about 1,000 different instruments, all sampled at 16 kilohertz. They then input those data into a deep-learning model that can represent all those wildly different sounds far more compactly using what they call ’embeddings.’ That exercise supposedly took about 10 days running on thirty-two K40 graphics [PDF] processing units. Why do that? Well, with those results, you can now answer a question like ‘What do you get when you cross a piano with a flute?’ (Musicians: Insert joke here.)”
audio
Recording Academy: Grammy Museum® Grant Program Awards $200,000 For Music Research And Sound Preservation
Recording Academy: Grammy Museum® Grant Program Awards $200,000 For Music Research And Sound Preservation. “The GRAMMY Museum® Grant Program announced today that $200,000 in grants will be awarded to 14 recipients in the United States and Canada to help facilitate a range of research on a variety of subjects, as well as support a number of archiving and preservation programs. Research projects include a study that will examine how rhythmic cues can improve movement for older adults and people with Parkinson’s disease, and a study that will examine how neural integration through music enhances long-term memory, among others. Preservation and archiving initiatives will rescue and organize 400 hours of at-risk reel-to-reel tapes of Native Radio—Bay Area:1973–1978; preserve, digitize, and ensure public access to 316 rare interviews with performers, songwriters, and music executives from the Country Music Hall of Fame; and digitally restore rare kinescopes of the 1950s television series “Stars Of Jazz” (KABC-TV, 1956-58); among others.”
Cities and Memory: Sri Lanka sound project launches today
Cities and Memory: Sri Lanka sound project launches today. “We’re happy to launch a new project today – Sri Lanka Sounds is a collaboration with field recordist Stephane Marin of Espaces Sonores, who provided us with this excellent collection of recordings from the country, covering everything from early morning dawn chorus soundscapes to hydrophone recordings of underwater shrimp.”
New York Times: While You Were Gawking at Snapchat Posts, One Artist Was Listening to Them
New York Times: While You Were Gawking at Snapchat Posts, One Artist Was Listening to Them. “While Snapchat is primarily used as a visual application, an unusual collaboration between its engineers and an artist, Christian Marclay, has produced an exhibition based on the sounds in posts created by the app’s users. ‘Sound Stories’ is to run June 18 to June 22 at La Malmaison in Cannes, France, as part of this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.”
All about that bass: exploring auditory perception using a meme (Facebook Research)
Facebook Research: All about that bass: exploring auditory perception using a meme. “We de-identified and aggregated public comment threads from people in English speaking countries from May 15th to the 18th that mentioned both ‘Laurel’ and ‘Yanny.’ The assumption is that if a thread includes both words, it’s probably discussing that audio file. We then looked at the percent of comments mentioning either ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny,’ but not both. Overall, most comments mention “Laurel” (which turns out to be the original word in that clip). But the story gets even more interesting when we segment by age and gender.”
New York University: NYU Fales Library Releases Flaherty Seminar Recordings, Unveiling Fifty Years of Cinematic History
New York University: NYU Fales Library Releases Flaherty Seminar Recordings, Unveiling Fifty Years of Cinematic History. “New York University’s Division of Libraries today announced the public release of more than 700 audio recordings from the Flaherty Seminar, the longest continuously running film event in North America, named in honor of seminal filmmaker and ‘father of documentary film’ Robert Flaherty. The annual event’s fifty-year history is captured through recordings of various activities and discussions, joining collections in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives and the University Archives chronicling the evolution of the moving image in the 20th century. The Flaherty Seminar recordings are held within the special collections of NYU’s Fales Library.”
Lion’s Roar: Tsadra Foundation launches online library of translation and transmission conference recordings
Lion’s Roar: Tsadra Foundation launches online library of translation and transmission conference recordings. “The Tsadra Foundation has launched a new website that offers free access to video and audio recordings of conferences, workshops, speeches, meetings, and other events related to the translation and transmission of Tibetan Buddhism.”
