Tag: audio

Linux Audio

Why is it so hard to get basic sound working on Linux? And by basic I mean I want to be able to play iTunes inside a windows VMware VM and hear my mail notifier on my host tell me that one of you has written another asshat comment.

And don’t tell me “it works now!” Because it doesn’t. I just tried it.

The number of moving parts in Linux’s audio stack is just plain inexcusable. OSS, ALSA, dmix, esd, arts, pulseaudio, jack, nas. On top of that you have libraries that that can talk to one or many of these systems: libaio, libasound, phonon, gstreamer. And why have KDE and Gnome for the past 10 years not been able to agree on how to play sound, or configure sound? Linux is about choice right? What if I choose something other than KDE or Gnome? do I lose? Is my only choice to have someone earfuck me so hard that I go deaf and I don’t have to worry about it anymore? Maybe Linux is only ready for my grandma, because she can’t hear anything anyway?

amen. actually, amen to the whole blog and subscribed. See also Linux audio: it’s a mess. another example

PARC Forum

The first PARC Forum was held in September 1977, beginning a tradition that has endured for more than 25 years. Most of these talks are open to the public and there is never any charge to attend. Forum speakers include both our own research members and other leaders in the worlds of the arts, sciences, education and politics. The speakers offer their unique perspective on many facets of the world, entertaining and informing not only members of PARC, but also the Silicon Valley community. Past speakers have included Nobel Prize winner Dr. Arno Penzias, author and TV host James Burke, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren and chocolate maker Dr. Robert Steinberg. The topics range from PARC projects to “The Origin, Diversification, and Dispersal of Language,” “Planetary Mayhem,” and “Physical Simulation in Monsters, Inc.”

Nice. Its no TT, but still pretty good. via rekha

1857 Sound Recording

First Sounds has been in the forefront of finding and playing back the world’s earliest audio recordings. The first recordings of airborne sounds were traced onto lamp blacked paper; they were made to be viewed, not played. Extracting sound from soot is no trivial pursuit, and our approaches continue to evolve as our knowledge increases and new technologies become available. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the inventor of sound recording made the world’s first recordings of airborne sounds in Paris between 1853 and 1860 on a machine he called a phonautograph. Jeune Jouvencelle (August 17, 1857) is the earliest known sound recording. An inscription identifies the content as “song at a distance,” with the words “jeune jouvencelle” (“young little girl”) written at the beginning and “les échos” (“the echoes”) at the end—possibly referring to the lyrics of a song as yet unidentified. Because of the lack of a tuning-fork timecode, the sound file has not been speed-corrected, and the fluctuations in cranking speed were so great during recording that the melody can’t be readily recognized from the uncorrected file.

2023-01-17: Also fairly old, the recordings of Alexander Graham Bell

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has embarked on a new project to recover and restore its collection of 300 experimental audio recordings made by Alexander Graham Bell and his laboratory between 1881 and 1892. These are some of the world’s oldest sound recordings and they have never been heard by living ear.

Gaining Hearing

Michael Chorost became a cyborg on October 1, 2001, the day his new ear was booted up. His hearing was routinely upgraded with new software. A brilliant dispatch from the technological frontier, Rebuilt is also an ode to sound. Whether Chorost is adjusting his software in a desperate attempt to make the world sound “right” again, exploring the neurobiology of the ear, or reflecting on the simple pleasure of his mother’s voice, he invites us to think about what we hear — and how we experience the world — in an altogether new way.