What is Timbre?
special guest: William Brent
We were lucky to have
William Brent
stop by towards the end of the class to show the work and software he
has developed for using timbral descriptors. William was in town
to do the tech (along with our current happy post-doc
Jaime Oliver)
for the big production of
James Dillon's Nine Rivers.
I was describing our plan for this seminar to Jaime, and he said that
William had done a lot of work for his UCSD PhD relating to timbre.
It turned out that William did exactly the things that Bryan and I planned
to cover this and next week, so we asked if he (William) could come in briefly
to talk with us. And he did!
Links
Before William arrived, we had a good discussion about the 'slipperiness'
of timbre. One of the fun things I showed was the "Sine Wave Speech"
research pioneered by Barnard psychology prof
Robert Remez:
Next we did the Big Fourier Transform Tour. Here are links to the books
I mentioned:
- Who Is Fourier
-- the Transnational College of LEX (I'm not kidding, that
really is the listed author)
this is the best explanation of the Fourier transform
I have read. I based a lot of my lecture on the examples
they use. Check the Amazon reviews, it's quite a book.
Very goofy, but very good.
- Calculus for Cats
-- Ken Amdahl and Jim Loats
good coverage of basic calculus if you want to learn or
review. Again, kind of goofy but the info is solid.
- Musical Applications of Microprocessors
-- Hal Chamberlin
this is the book I mentioned with an excellent discussion
of how the Fast Fourier Transform actually works. It does
look like it's out-of-print, and the prices I see for
"new" books are truly insane. I'm not sure how useful this
really is; I read it almost 30 years ago.
Also check the "FFT" links in the
Resources
page.
And these links from William:
- williambrent.conflations.com
-- William Brent's home page
- timbre objects, etc.
-- there are some individual objects here, and also Brent's library for
doing the live/interactive tracking he showed, but scroll down to
the "timbreID" section for most of what he discussed relating
to timbre classification.