Bay Area Maker Faire is this weekend: May 18th and 19th!

While it is melancholy not  to be rushing to polish details of a booth about now  (we were hoping to have something to demo using the exciting, progressing, but still non-available, Parallela $100 64-Core/FPGA ‘Supercomputer’) I am looking forward to visiting as civilian.

Please contact me if you would like to meet up at the fair!

They feel that people are more willing to have their eye sight tested than their hearing so they masquerade a hearing test as an eye test.

Am I getting old? I am disappointed I didn’t hear the embedded high frequency tone.

At first I blamed it on my laptop filtering the supposed noise. But then I ran the baudline spectrum analyzer using my laptop’s open mic. Sure enough there is a signal at 14250Hz (drat):

Now I am blaming it on my cold!

But in case I am wrong read up on how age effects the upper range of the accepted human 20-20kHz hearing response via the wikipedia Fletcher-Munson Equal-loudness Curve article, and in more depth in Audio Anecdotes Volume 1.

Share your experience (and include the device used)!

Adendun: I can hear the tone on my iPhone especially with headphones but I do seem to be losing the frequency.  Maybe it is just the cold…

Parallella Architecture

A close friend just emailed me regarding Parallela, a “Worthy Kickstarter Project“. For a $100 contribution you receive (if they are successful) a Xilinx Zynq-7000 (Dual Core ARM + Programmable Logic) based single board computer with an Epiphany Multicore accelerator (16 or 64 core).

The Zynq-7000 contains a Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 with NEON vectorization, and a block of Xilinx Programmable Logic.

Depending on the chip selected Epiphany accelerator contains 16 or 64 RISC cores with over 32 GFLOP theoretical peak performance.

I am very excited by the possibilities enabled by combining a powerful mobile CPU with a block of programmable logic (with access to dev tools) and an array of parallel RISC cores to perform some serious Audio/Video Signal Processing, Cryptography, or other challenging application.

I am in for $100, and suggest you take a quick look since Funding ends Soon: Saturday October 27th!

Regretfully it seems as if AudioAnecdotes won’t have a booth at Maker Faire this year.  We had planned fun audio (and even ultra-sonic!) projects involving the hot but unobtainable Raspberry Pi but alas Maker Faire registration has come and gone and we have yet to even receive a ship date on our boards.

Disappointing but will be fun to wander the Faire as a civilian-maker for a change.

Please be sure to contact us if you are planning on attending and want to hook up while in the Bay Area.

DigiPen will be offering two new degrees in Sound Design for Fall 2012. A Bachelor of Arts in Music and Sound Design, and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Sound Design. It sounds as if they have some great people associated with the program “Dr. Richard Karpen, Director of the University of Washington’s School of Music, Guy Whitmore, Audio Director at PopCap Games, Inc., and Martin O’Donnell, Audio Lead at Bungie“.

However I still wonder if they will use my classes or books (it has been a long time since I left Redmond for Cupertino).  I really miss teaching my Audio Synthesis and Data Compression classes at DigiPen.  I had a wonderful experience with the talented students.

These new programs should improve the already rich curriculum.

I am an early adopted and fan of Jawbone’s Jambox and find myself using it much more than I hoped I would (surprising for a tech gizmo).

I was intrigued by an email promising a 2.0 Jambox firmware update containing LIVEAUDIO, a feature hyped as increasing “depth, detail, and unprecedented spatial realism” to this tiny speaker. (reminded me of old friends at CRE proposing turning stereo boom-boxes into virtual surround sound systems via the magic of crosstalk cancelation and the HRTF)

While they talk about binaural audio I doubt they are attempting the nearfield cross cancelation and the resulting tiny sweet spot needed to deliver the goods.  Or maybe not?

More likely they are performing classic phase delay tricks?

Listening to classical music and some test content LIVEAUDIO definitely dramatically widens the apparent soundstage, but this is not saying much compared to the previously boomy mono-experience (did I usually use the Jambox to listen to Podcasts while working on the house?)

Listening to Bo Gehring’s binaural content (from AAV3) I again hear am impressive sound stage, but I don’t get the true 3D binaural experience (elevation and front/back positioning) that I experience through headphones, and have also experienced with near field monitors employing crosstalk cancelation.  Perhaps I haven’t located the sweet spot?

Please leave a comment or email if you have more information or experiences to share.

If  you are in the Bay Area please visit us at the Bay Area Maker Faire today and tomorrow (5/21 – 5/22/11) for our exhibit: Homebrew Audio Synthesizers in a mint can.

We are located in the Fiesta Hall Digital Sound Space (that is the hall with the Tesla Coils, but we are in a side-gallery next to our friends from Stanford CCRMA)

Robert Quattlebaum will be demoing high performance audio synthesis on his mint can sized ybox2 board running the popular 8-core Parallax Propeller micro-controller. He will also be demoing a 10 oscillator modal synthesizer (from AAv3) using a homebrew Atmel AVR based slider box based on Ashley surplus Eq boards created for us by Rob Scott.

Erik Olson will be helping to visual the synthesizer output (as well as analyzing vibration modes of real-world-objects) via his Baudline spectrum analyzer.

Of course we will have all three AudioAnecdotes books available to leaf through, too.  Please drop by to say hello.

Unfortunately it seems as if I may have to sit Maker Faire out this year not quite recuperated yet so please be sure to email me if you stopped by the booth and have any questions!

All source code will be made available on github (more announcements to follow)

This is a snapshot of a baudline spectagram of our first test signal.

Notice anything unusual? Why is there a missing harmonic?

The Audio Programming Book from MIT Press by Richard Boulanger (editor of The CSound Book), and Victor Lazzarini. Forward by the esteemed Max Mathews.

A fantastic resource for all C/C++ audio developers. Have heard anecdotally that this book was ~10 years in the making.