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AES meeting in London Tuesday evening 12th July

Started by dragonser, June 07, 2011, 05:13:16 PM

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dragonser

Hi,
the next AES meeting is on Tuesday the 12th July.
Who decided that RT >1.5 sec is best for good choral tone?
copy of the details
"William McVicker, organ curator at the Royal Festival Hall and an organ consultant, will provide an overview of the relationship between the acoustician and the architect, with special reference to the Royal Festival Hall.

The question of room acoustics and music will be explored, along with the ways in which our appreciation and understanding of live music has changed, as have the views of architects and acousticians."

just to clarify,
you don't need to be a member to attend the lectures and they do provide tea, coffee and biscuits before the event.


" London lectures are held at The Royal Academy of Engineering, 3 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5DG, just off Pall Mall. Meetings start at 7.00pm with refreshments from 6.30pm."

regards Peter B

revtonynewnham

Hi

Perhaps not directly related - but could be interesting.  To get the thread on topic, donesn't the AES convention (or whatever it's called) include an organ recital - I'm sure I've seen a note that the UK one this year is by Graham Blythe.

Every Blessing

Tony

dragonser

Hi,
I think the Organ recital  was at previous event, possibly in the Usa ?
this year there was a banquet at the Musical museum in Kew,
[ which I didn't get to unfortunately ].
I hope to make a second visit to the Musical Museum sometime, when I went before they had only just moved in the their new building.
A later AES lecture in London [ in July ] is entitled " Who decided that RT >1.5 sec is best for good choral tone?  by William McVicker"
if you can't get to the meeting I think some of the meetings may be available as a recording from the AES website.

regards Peter B

twanguitar

Graham Blyth does indeed often give a recital at the AES meetings.  He is CEO of Veritas, a company which sells digital organs mainly or exclusively to the US market.  He still uses Musicom additive synthesis technology if his website is up to date, which is perhaps unsurprising as he was at one time a director of Copeman Hart who also use it (presumably they still do even though they have now been acquired by Makin).  He has a large instrument installed in his own concert hall attached to his house near Didcot, and this is quite well known in the area to organists' groups, music societies, etc.  Graham is a pretty good player as well as being technically astute - as well as his career with digital organs he was a co-founder of the Soundcraft company which is still famous for its mixing desks and similar studio equipment.

As for the Eigen Harp, it describes itself as "the most expressive electronic instrument ever made".  The German word 'eigen' means 'own', but I am not sure what can be concluded from that.  One of the more interesting aspects is that it uses SoundFont technology.  This has been around for well over a decade, and it confirms its enduring appeal to musicians and its sound design, though some might consider it rather dated in a field where the latest gizmos are expected to be all-new.  However it seems that the Eigen Harp uses the SF 2.1 format rather than 2.4, which limits the precision of its sound samples to 16 bits rather than 24.  The instrument also appears to be limited to 40 note polyphony, which seems rather constrained considering that cheap Creative Labs sound cards such as the SoundBlaster Live were offering 64 notes as long ago as the 1990's.  Also, one of the shortcomings of SF technology is that it does not cater very well for release transients.

None of this is intended to be dismissive or unduly critical, and I will be happy to modify it if anyone considers otherwise.

TG

Colin Pykett

Just a small point about SoundFonts (and hoping that the forum won't mind us talking about electronic music for a very short time - I feel a slapped wrist coming on), they do support release transients.  However I agree the way they do it isn't the most flexible implementation, and it also depends to some extent what rendering engine the fonts are hosted on.  This is because SoundFonts are not implementation-specific - you can use SF sample sets on just about anything from soft synths to sound cards such as the X-fi with lots of other options in between!  However there are also ways to get round the release transient limitations if the built-in system isn't good enough for a particular application.

The bigger problem with release transients with any sampled sound synthesiser (not just SoundFont-based ones) is polyphony.  If the reverb tails are long, as they might be with a 'wet' sample set recorded in a reverberant ambience such as a cathedral, notes which have just been released will still tie up polyphony until the reverb dies away.  By that time you will in all probability have keyed another bunch of notes, again consuming more polyphony.  This is one of the things you have to watch with any sampled sound organ using wet samples.

With SoundFonts you get round this simply by increasing the polyphony, to state the obvious.  For example, if using sound cards, you just stick in enough of them to solve the problem.

Colin Pykett

organforumadmin

Quote from: Colin Pykett on June 08, 2011, 03:51:30 PM(and hoping that the forum won't mind us talking about electronic music for a very short time - I feel a slapped wrist coming on)


Dear Colin


Far from it. This posting regarding a demonstration of a new electronic musical instrument at a meeting of the Acoustic Engineering Society and a response in the nature of discussion of electronic sound creation appears to be wholly appropriate.


Best wishes


Forum Admin

KB7DQH

The objective is to reach human immortality—that is, to create things which are necessary to mankind, necessary to the purpose of the existence of mankind, and which have become the fruit that drives the creation of a higher state of mankind than ever existed before."

dragonser

Hi,
I've hopefully added this event to the Calendar, so have edited my previous post.

regards Peter B