Nic Collins, after 20 or so years

Yesterday evening I was at Steim, in Amsterdam, to attend a book presentation (well, actually the second edition book presentation) of [ "Handmade Electronic Music" ] by Nic Collins. I knew Collins when he was director of Steim in the 1980s. We corresponded and met a few times and I organized a concert in my hometown. Since then I went my way and he went his. So yesterday was a really fine re-encounter which was celebrated with a fair amount of humor (of which he has an abundancy), discussions about improvised music and 'handmade electronic music' and more alcohol than I am used to absorp (no accidents happened, though).

The book (which comes with a DVD) was immediately sold out (before I arrived, actually) but I got a glance at the contents. It's a really detailed manual for those who dare to open up the devices that we use in our daily lives and start tampering them. It also has many, many advices about how to construct sound producing circuits from scratch. I have always been very clumsy with soldering equipment, but it is actually quite fun to do and rewarding to build up your own 'synth'. It gets me away from my computer and vst's and such. I´m sure that I will get down to it, once I have this guide.

Collins, in the mean time, is a Professor of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. What a wonderful position: Professor of SOUND, wow!!

Read more about [ Nic Collins ]
Read more about [ STEIM ]

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Dithering and noise shaping

Always by the end of a compositional project I am in doubt how to transfer all my material from 32 to 16bits. I understand that if I want to chop 16bits off my samples this will/may lead to 'damage'. This is what Reaper tells me to help making a choice: "In (very) brief, when you render from a higher bit depth to a lower one, you lose some resolution, and the lost resolution leaves low-level artifacts in the resulting signal. Dither is a way of blanketing the artifacts with more natural-sounding low-level hiss. Noise shaping is a way of filtering the artifacts into parts of the frequency spectrum that are harder for human ears to (psychoacoustically) perceive.

Some people think you should always dither when rendering to a lower fixed-point bit depth. Other people think that dither doesn't exist. The first people and the second people like to argue with each other. (*shrug*) There are lots of discussions out there on the internet about whether or not to dither and when to do it and why. This post isn't meant to do that -- it's just to explain technically what Reaper does if you click the buttons.

• The dither and noise shaping are independent (you can use either with or without the other).
  
• The dither is 1.5 bits which is somewhat on the light/do-no-harm side. With noise shaping off, the dither PDF is triangular; with noise shaping on, the dither is high-pass filtered.
  
• The noise shaping is a 9th order filter, which is similar to pow-R type 3.
  
• Unlike pow-R (or almost any other method), the noise shaping coefficients are calculated on the fly for any sample rate analytically, based on a very smooth equal loudness contour.
  
• The render dialog should only give you the option to dither when the target bit depth and format is appropriate. The calculation is done post-master-fader, so you don't need to do anything special except click the buttons.
• There are a few JS dither plugins included with Reaper. These are for technical use or backwards compatibility. You don't need to use them. Definitely don't use any dither plugin if you're using the native dither options when rendering.

The dither and noise shaping options in Reaper are of very high quality."

But I've decided to take a listen myself, before going ahead. I have rendered three different parts of the composition, each with a different setting (dither, noise shaping and D & NS combined). I mean, it's all about what you actually hear, isn't it? The Reaper people themselves are more rock-oriented, which makes things a little easier for them.

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bLOGtemplate FUCKED UP

Trying to spice up the layout template and add a link to twitter (and other social media sites) I tore apart the template settings. Somehow. Can't get it back to its original state.... Will have to figure out what went wrong....

I'll get back to you, soon with a new template. I guess. Stay tuned.

edit: GOT A NEW TEMPLATE. WILL BE USING THIS ONE FOR THE TIME BEING. IT'S ACCEPTABLE, ISN'T IT?

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Over to the final mix

Yesterday I went over to a first session of collating the various parts for K146. I got to a satisfactory structure quite quickly but of course the various connective parts needed adjustment.

Overhaul
I did a complete overhaul of one part. It's the part that precedes the part that I published a few days earlier. Initially it consisted of recordings of the river which I placed one after the other, while shortening the parts on the way. So for instance, the first block was 20 seconds, the second one 15 secs, then 10, 8, 5, etc. The end result would be a tension that collapsed and then falls apart in the next part (that I published on April 15, 2009). The result was not good enough, though.

New approach
I have split some 12 recordings into 9 slices (0-75hz, 75-150hz, etc) and used the slices to built up a new, imaginary river. The build up structure is again going with an increasing speed, so the tension also builds up. Because the material is more detailed it is also more flexible for my use and the new result is much better.

Next step is looking at the right volume balance, the crossovers of the several parts and taking care of phase problems (which I can handle quite well with a VST plug called[ Flux, Stereo Tool ]). Then finally a mixdown from 32bit to 16bit and we're done.

Next weekend the cat will be in the bag. Below is a snapshot of my Reaper mix session (click on it to enlarge). The part that is overhauled is the first 1 minute of "T.wav".

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Water run

Constructed a part that will precede the bird dissolves into water part (see post of February 20, 2009). It's rather noisy, I;m afraid. That's actually because I was skipping through all the sound files with recordings of fast moving water. The idea was to create my own noisily running water by mixing very short snippets of the originals. What I have now is 45 seconds consisting of 0.2 second samples of water, connected randomly (so there are in total 225 snippets, that's right).
The second stage was to construct a head and a tail to that piece. Well, I'll leave that in the dark for the moment, but here's the provisional result of my labourings of today (while recovering from my kidney ailings).

Listen to [ sample ].

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Hospitalized

I've been taken to the hospital more than a week ago with terribly kidney stone troubles. Have been operated on two days ago. Still recovering. Music work is null. Sorry. Done some 'field' recording at the ward when I felt better but it's not much.

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Social Media Comments by Disqus: Public Release Today!

Social Media Comments by Disqus: Public Release Today!\I thought I might start entering interesting news that I stumble upon and that i digg. :). So this is a first try out to see how this works or not......

Posted using ShareThis

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