Posts by «koshik»

Winter wake up plan

Morning time-bomb

This setup was on my mind since I was a kid. But it was recently when I found the missing device to make it happen. Couldn’t believe when I saw it on the shelf at my usual shopping market: THE POWER STRIP TIMER.

So here it is: my geek’s dream wake-up scenario!

1. Evening

   • Set-up the turntable with an LP to be played in the morning
     Can be classical Vivaldi’s Four seasons, jazzy Amy Winehouse, Sabaton‘s battle-metal, chilled out Air, Fink Flooyd‘s psychedelia, dark vibes of Black Sabbath or what have you…
   .­
   • Start a quiet playlist from the laptop for good night via surrounding 5.1 speaker system
     Before falling asleep I usually have some wine & read a book in bed for a while. It’s nice to have something playing in the background. Happened few times that a song was able to ‘incept’ a cool dream :)

2. When sleeping

   The scheduled task on the laptop stops the lullaby music around 1.30 – 2 o’clock. REM sleep phase is better with as little outside stimulus as possible.

3. Morning

   7.30 – power cord timer kicks in

   • Sun-imitating lamp gently warms up
   • Vinyl gets a spin – for an extra kick the turntable is connected directly to amplifier =:]
   • After soaking up the music for a couple of minutes ain’t nothing gonna break my stride!

The LP usually finish about the time I leave. Automatic timer turns-off the lamp & turntable few minutes after.

How cool is that! :D

Sound Of the Month Edition

Music of the prime numbers

Each harmonic corresponds to one prime number. A note is played on its beat-multiplication

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Zipped project

This idea was on my mind long before starting the whole Falasol project. What kind of cacophony would it be if each note is assigned a prime number and played only on the number’s multiplication beats. Total chaos? Or would the mind be able to recognize some hidden patterns?

It’s both. The brain can grasp 2 & 3-beat notes and arrange them into 6-beat tact ( 2 * 3 = 6 ). Next 5-beat harmonic creates a 30 beat verse (consisting of 5 described tacts). That’s the rhythmical clocking in the background. Next prime harmonics (7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37) add nothing more than chaotic wind-bells effect. The resulting patterns are way too long to be digested by the regular brain, but who knows, maybe some savant would do. Anyway, quite a good accompaniment to get insane :)

Come get SoME!

Sound Of the Month Edition

Message right to your brain

Understanding sound impact on human mind

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Before reading further, please listen to the above sample. …read more >>

On darkest of evenings
I’m staying alone
Searching past events
I know you won’t come

For life within objects
I’m speaking the code
Dreaming of structures
Building dead world

Through darkness of evening
I’m praying alone
Oh please come and teach me
The syntax of love

(codename: in your phase)

Falasol 1.2 is out. After UI revolution finally there is time for new features to shine. And there is performance improvement as well :)

Side-by-side UI comparison (click for full sizes):

Falasol 1.1

Falasol 1.2

…read more >>

Sound Of the Month Edition

Falasol’s new features are popping up like crazy!

Popcorn effect spectrogram

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Falasol 1.2 is in beta phase! Let’s have a sneak peek into what’s coming. …read more >>

Sound Of the Month Edition

She’s low-budget. She’s mobile. She’s a perfect companion!

My Harmonica

Yes, that’s my recent fascination. Makes a clear and gentle sound. Can get rough when needed.
Of course I couldn’t resist to record myself and analyze it with my geeky tools. Let’s get the show started. …read more >>

Sound Of the Month Edition

Accelerating Vibrato makes a Sine wave explode into multiple harmonics

One sine wave + high speed frequency modulation

440 Hz harmonic modulated with speed: 0 -> 220 -> 0 [Hz] and amplitude: 0 -> 3 -> 0 [octave]

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Zipped Falasol project.

Looks like UFO and sounds like one :)

Come get SoME!

As promised last week I’m going to compare three methods of optimizing 2 ^ x calculation:

• Cache table – described in my previous post
• Polynomial approximation – suggested by Gregory, implemented here celt_exp2(…) and described here
• Compact IEEE-754 – 3 lines of code(!) described here and here

…read more >>

Signal processing often requires moving between logarithmic & linear domains. In audio area we can talk about Octaves (logarithmic representation) and Frequencies (linear representation). Octave -> Frequency conversion corresponds to transformation x = 2 ^ x.

Most programming languages provide support for such calculation, for example Pow(a, b) in C#.
Those functions however tend to be time consuming. We can take advantage of the fact that in our case a = const = 2 and optimize the calculation.
Let’s start with equation:

a ^ ( b + c ) = a ^ b * a ^ c

…read more >>