Fast & Wide’s Tim Goodyer reports on TC Electronics new findings on transfer levels to mobile devices, the latest battle in the great loudness wars of the early 21st. century.

TC Electronics’ CTO for Broadcast & Production, Thomas Lund assembled a number of the current favourite smartphones and tablet devices on his test bench (he may have even sneaked a couple of phablets in there, who knows), and set about testing them. He emerged from the other side believing that -16 LUFS/LKFS is the recommended level when making the transition from HD audio to mobile platforms. He reasons that it is better to integrate a process of three simple steps to simulcast HD Audio to mobile that doesn’t wash out the distinction between foreground and background sound rather than push the level up further.

He also thinks it is unwise to set the audio level on mobile devices as low as on a regular TV, because the ambient noise floor will work against a listener on the move. Lund also expresses his views on perception, clarity and speech intelligibility before concluding that the 400ms sliding window of Momentary Loudness in EBU and ITU standards is a well-indicated choice.

The paper was originally written for the Broadcast Engineering Conference at the 2013 NAB Show, where the research results were presented for the first time. The full paper and test results can be downloaded as a pdf file from the TC Electronic website.

This Saturday Calrec is flinging open its doors to a local hackerspace group called Bridge Rectifier to host a free electronic engineering workshop.

Hackerspaces are community-operated spaces for people with an interest in technology, electronics, computers, open source and much more. At this Calrec-sponsored workshop, participants will build a small portable audio amplifier that runs from a single 9v battery, suitable for use with an MP3 player, laptop or mobile phone.

This is the fifth hackerspace event in as many months, with previous events covering Howduino, 3D printing, wearable computing and amateur radio. Andrew Back of Bridge Rectifier says:

Hackerspaces are all about people coming together to work on their own or collaborative projects. People who attend these events are often from very different backgrounds and have different motivations, but they all share an interest in learning and developing new skills. These events are mostly technology-related, but activities also incorporate science, craft and art. These events are about engaging people to connect with technology.

The amplifier has been designed by Calrec exclusively for this workshop, and the printed circuit board (PCB) is being manufactured by P&M Services in nearby Todmorden. Plans for the Calrec Audio amplifier will be published under a creative commons license and made public after the event for other people to copy, use and develop the design. It’s a particularly brilliant project to get involved in as Calrec started in exactly the same way – in fact, it was started in the 1950′s by a group of local people who shared an interest in DIY hifi equipment.

It should be a busy day in Hebden this Saturday, as the workshop coincides with the annual Handmade Parade, a vibrant and colourful parade through the streets of Hebden Bridge. Last year it was to a backdrop of floods and wet weather, and was still an absolute triumph.

If you can get to Hebden, why not squeeze in both?

To find out more and to register for the workshop visit: http://braudioamp.eventbrite.co.uk/

The Man of Steel soundtrack simulates the 11.1 surround sound of Hans’s personal studio; DTS engineers created a binaural spatial map, a sonic photograph, which included a sonic image of Hans’s own head, to replicate how the music sounds to the composer in his own studio.

image credit: WaterTower Music

The illusion of surround sound is especially apparent on tracks featuring the score’s grand, explosive drums, which Zimmer recorded in an unconventional way: Instead of simply hiring a couple drummers to play timpani, he created a “drum circle” with 10 drum kits (as seen in the photo below). Among the drummers was Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. With DTS Headphone:X, it sounds like the listener is surrounded by these drums.

The soundtrack’s producer Peter Asher admits:

“I was blown away by how great it sounded [at a Recording Academy events just before the 2013 Grammy] There have been lots of attempts historically to actually reproduce a proper surround listening experience out of two channels, but this was so much more effective than any of the ones I’d heard before.”

Journalists, including Entertainment Weekly’s Emily Rome, were recently invited to attend a demo at the Eastwood Scoring Stage on the Warner Bros lot, where the Man Of Steel soundtrack was recorded.

The demo began with a recording of Hans saying, “center,” “left rear,” “right rear,” etc., with each phrase emanating from the corresponding speaker in the room’s 11.1 surround sound system. Then the reporters donned headphones to listen again and many (most? Emily, certainly) thought they were still listening through quality speakers not bog standards headphones. But they were. During a third listening, Emily removed her headphones just to double-check. Yep, the sound was definitely no longer coming from the speakers. DTS spent the rest of the demo time pulling surround stunts and impressing industry hacks, with some degree of success.

Hans is clearly a fan of the new technology, which, for him, is long overdue.

“When I write, I write in surround. My life is in surround. Why would I settle for less? … I’ve been waiting for this moment where I can actually go and listen to one of my soundtracks [on headphones] without going, ‘Oh dear, it’s only stereo.’”

There is every chance that the surround illusion could be taken further than the sound track too, thinks Peter:

“Is the idea exciting to me that at some point somebody can watch this movie on an iPad, plug their headphones in, and hear it in 5.1? Absolutely yes”.

A free download of an app called Z+, which is part of the deluxe edition, launches the DTS Headphones:X version of the soundtrack and works with both Android and iOS devices — and with any type of headphones.

Perhaps you are having difficulty choosing where to go on holiday this year?

Cheap air travel has opened up the world to us, and the options are as limitless as your imagination. Beach holidays, city breaks, camping, backpacking in Nepal, swimming with dolphins in Puerto Vallarta, noodle weaving in Rim Tan, bird watching with Bill Oddie, they’ve all got their benefits.

But what do they sound like?

This is a question which Trever Cox from the University of Salford asked about three years ago when he created this online guide to Sound Tourism, and with summer just around the corner now is the time to start reading up.

At this time of year, many people are pouring over guide books and travel articles to find a destination for their summer holiday. Open the average travel guide and you’ll read descriptions of beautiful vistas and iconic architecture to look at, along with accounts of amazing experiences readers could enjoy. But what about wonderful sounds or striking acoustics you might travel to hear? The average travel guide contains precious little about places that sound interesting. They also rarely describe the soundscapes of popular destinations. And yet there are plenty of tourist sites where what you hear is essential to the experience, sometimes to the point of being more important than what you see. In an effort to redress the balance, I have established a website, www.sonicwonders.org, which is an on-line guide to sound tourism: a ‘rough guide’ to sound.

There are several stand out entries – the singing ringing tree as featured in the video above is actually only a few miles from Calrec, and is an extremely eerie experience – we wouldn’t recommend you go up on your own at nightfall. But our favourites are the melody roads, sadly not unlockable levels on MarioKart, but bonkers roads which play tunes when you drive on them. Trevor puts is better than we ever could:

Want to listen to a poor quality, out-of-tune rendition of a famous melody when driving your car? No need for an expensive car stereo, a singing road can do this using wheel vibrations!

If you drift off the side of a road and hit a rumble strip, you’ll get a distinctive sound intended to alert you and prevent an accident. The pitch of the sound you get depends on the spacing between the bumps or ridges. So if you make lots of ridges like a rumble strip and vary the spacing between the ridges correctly, then different musical notes can be made. Close together ridges (say 6mm apart) give high notes, and far apart ridges (say 12mm apart) give low notes. Make the right pattern of ridges then as a car drives over them, a tune is played.

This video of a road in Lancaster, California (45 miles from the Calrec America HQ in Santa Clarita, CA) was designed to play the William Tell Overture, but due to some fairly basic mathematical errors doesn’t sound like any version of the tune that we have ever heard.

It is still very cool though, and coincidentally the location of my next holiday. Bon Voyage!

When Luigi Russolo, the Italian Futurist painter and composer, performed in front of a live audience in 1914, the performance inspired widespread audience unrest, riots, violence and a massive amount of general harumphing. The legend reads that Luigi wasn’t at all surprised by this reaction, the minx.

Exactly 100 years ago he invented a series of mechanical synthesizers, called Intonarumori (pictured above) as well as writing “The Art of Noises” which recognised six families of noises. Luigi’s assertion was modern industrial life had introduced a wider pallete of sounds, and that traditional musical structure was stifling and somewhat dull.

Many people who attended his concerts clearly disagreed, leading to the aforementioned harumphing, but by this point a line had already been drawn. Next month, the University of York marks this centenary of his theory by hosting a free, one-day symposium called “Perspectives on Sound Design
”, which references The Art of Noises at the beginning of Sound Design.

Nowadays the term Sound Design is used in many domains: academic research, university courses, commercial websites, film credits, job descriptions, etc.
But what does it mean to ‘design sound’? How does it differ from music? What are the disciplines and skills involved?
This symposium brings together leading international academics, researchers and practitioners to discuss the definition and boundaries of the emergent field of sound design.
This is a unique opportunity to delve into the interdisciplinarity of the field and to gain an appreciation of the interconnections between different perspectives on sound design.

The event is chaired by the University’s Dr Sandra Pauletto and has attracted an impressive array of speakers including (amongst others) Dr Patrick Susini (Head of the Sound Perception and Design team, IRCAM, Paris), Prof. Davide Rocchesso (Chair of the EU project on Sonic Interaction Design, IUAV University of Venice) and Neil Hillman (film and television sound designer, ADR mixer and location recordist).

The Symposium, on Friday 5th July, is completely free, but in order to register you will need to email a registration request to sound.design.york, including a short definition of sound design and an example of sound design. This can be from film, tv, products, games, sonic art, etc., but must be either a description or a link – do not attach any files!

Visit the University’s website for the full line up of speakers and for more details.

The different types of capture systems, techniques and microphone arrays for channel-, scene- and object-based audio. The elevation of audio metadata capture and then processing in TV or the set-top box. The accommodation of 22.2 surround systems, their derivatives, and their successors, including – and I hope ‘the technology police’ are not on patrol – more sophisticated object-based multi-speaker systems in domestic environments.

All of these issues were mentioned, some on more than one occasion during the morning sessions. We had to wait until nearly the end of the afternoon sessions, and Andy Quested’s quirky and insightful presentation, for a further mention of audio. It’s difficult to do justice to Andy’s words by paraphrasing them here – really, you had to be there – so I’ll let three of his slides do the talking for him:

If you have any experiences of recording, processing and delivering high quality audio for 4K and UtlraHD productions you can tell us about, we’re all ears.

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With the support of DJ and producer DJ Fresh (pictured, above), three musicians, Mark Rowland (drums), Jo Portois (synths) and Andy Walker (white noise effects), all of whom are paralysed, confined to wheelchairs and unable to play regular instruments, have composed “Mindtunes’ using electroencephalographic headset devices developed by Julien Castet, a cognitive interface specialist who works for Immersion SAS.

The device reads electronic activity across the scalp and detects signals that can be identified as the user thinking about a certain musical event. The signals are mapped and then translated into sounds.

Disabled musicians can use the headset like a real instrument to improvise and create layered compositions. Facial movements can be used to create certain effects. For example, maintaining the same thought or smiling might produce an echo.

The initiative is supported by the Queen Elizabeth Foundation for Disabled People (QEF) and Smirnoff,

Their dual-microphone system detects volume levels inside the headphone, as well as approaching noises, as evidenced at the press demo. Journalists felt 85 decibels of New York City under their feet, but none of it leaked into their ears, thanks to the Bose StayHear+ technology, which uses an extra seal in the ear to keep outside noises where they belong, and adds extra stability with a little fin that hooks under the ridge of your ear.

In “Aware Mode”, a small white button on the Y-remote of the headphones switches from total noise-cancelation to a setting where you can hear the music clearly and still hear the station announcer tell you your train’s running late. Or, as has happened to me on more than one occasion, that it will be leaving from a different platform.

Due to a rare eye condition, achromatopsia, Belfast-born artist and musician Neil Harbisson, who now resides in Catalonia, is only able to see the world in black and white.

However, using a device called an “eyeborg”, a cybernetic third eye that has been strapped to his head since 2004, he is able to detect 360 different hues – poor by normal standards, but a big improvement on monochrome.

How does this amazing device work? Sally Davies of Nautil.us explains:

“[The eyeborg] transposes color into a continuous electronic beep, exploiting the fact that both light and sound are made up of waves of various frequencies. Red, at the bottom of the visual spectrum and with the lowest frequency, sounds the lowest, and violet, at the top, sounds highest. A chip at the back of Harbisson’s head performs the necessary computations, and a pressure-pad allows color-related sound to be conducted to Harbisson’s inner ear through the vibration of his skull, leaving his outer ears free for normal noise”

Using his eyeborg, Neil has captured images of well-known public figures and celebrities, including Al Gore, Prince Charles, Nicole Kidman and Gabriel Byrne (pictured, above, with Neil), to whom he sent a sound file he had created using snaps of parts of the actor’s anatomy.

Neil never takes the eyeborg off. He even experiences ‘sound-colours’ while is dreaming. Later this year he hopes to have his third eye “osteointegrated”, inserted into the bone in his skull, which will make him pretty much … yes … a real-life cyborg!