Music – Page 22 – David Bradley

Air Guitar

Imagine the hoards of adoring fans, sellout arenas, the groupies, these are now virtually within the grasp of anyone who can play a searing solo on the air guitar, thanks to researchers at Helsinki University of Technology.

The Virtual Air Guitar uses a computer to monitor the hand movements of an air guitarist and adds genuine guitar sounds to match the player’s fret work. The innovative application combines gesture recognition with musical interpretation software and could be a boon to all those who aspire for rock stardom, but really cannot be bothered to actually learn the instrument.

The idea emerged at HUT’s Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory and progressed to the Otaniemi International Innovation Centre (OIIC). It was further developed through the Tekes’ TULI programme to Technopolis Ventures Oy incubator services. The idea was processed into a business plan with the aim of establishing a significant international business.

A Virtual Air Guitar company was set up in February 2006, and in March 2006 it received an award in the second stage of the Venture Cup Business Plan Competition. At the moment, the founders of the company are in the process of negotiating funding and publishing contracts with various parties.

‘The company’s first product will be a console game which will be on the market in time for Christmas 2007, and later on other games applications will be added to the product family. We are working on completely new and unprecedented applications,’ explains Virtual Air Guitar MD Aki Kanerva.

Loud Music Makes Ecstasy Worse

Ecstasy pills

People taking ecstasy at noisy nightclubs could be doing themselves more harm than those who imbibe 3,4 -methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or ecstasy) at quieter locations.

Research published on February 16, in the journal BMC Neuroscience, shows that brain activity in MDMA-taking rats due to the drug lasts up to five days if the animals are listening to loud music, says a press release from BMC, when they ingest the drug. The drug’s effects wear off within a day when no music is played.

Actually, Michelangelo Iannone from the Institute of Neurological Science, Italy, and colleagues from University Magna Graecia in Catanzaro, Italy, do not report this at all. That’s just what the press release claims. In fact, the rats were exposed to white noise, random acoustic stimulation at 95 db. The press release explains that white noise is sound at a stable frequency that is used in many types of electronic music. Well, it is, usually to simulate the rythmic, “hissy”, bursts of the hi-hat cymbals in a drumkit, but it’s not usually a continuous sound.

Anyway, Iannone’s results show that low-dose MDMA did not modify the brain activity of the rats compared with saline, as long as no music was played. However, the total spectrum of the rats given a low dose of MDMA significantly decreased once loud music was played. The spectrum of rats in the control group was not modified by loud music. High-dose MDMA induced a reduction in brain activity, compared with both saline and low-dose MDMA. This reduction was enhanced once the loud music was turned on and lasted for up to five days after administration of the drug. In rats that had been given a high dose of MDMA but had not been exposed to music, brain activity returned to normal one day after administration of the drug.

The Music of the Spheres

The Pandora project, is an applet that emerged from the Music Genome Project, which analyses and categorises music and styles. It solves the eternal question facing every iPod user once they’ve worked through their old CD collection – “I’ve downloaded all my favourite bands, what do I download now?” Are you brave enough to lift the lid on Pandora’s Box and play some new mp3s?

Happy Birthday mp3

On July 14th, 1995, the mp3 was born!

Its the tenth anniversary since the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS researchers who came up with the mp3 sound compression format decided mp3 was a much easier name to remember than “ISO standard IS 11172-3 MPEG Audio Layer 3”.

Thank goodness they did. Can you imagine the anchor guys trying to get their collective tongues around that mouthful every time they reported on the advent of music file sharing and the emergence of the portable digital music player over the last decade.

With a great lack of foresight, however, the Fraunhofer team suggested that their audio codec, first developed in 1992, would be far “too complex for practical application”. This less than famous proclamation won’t go down in history like Bill Gates’ alleged questioning of the need for a PC to have more 640 kilobytes of RAM. But, no one living in this century could fail to appreciate the omnipresence of ISO standard IS 11172-3 MPEG Audio Layer 3 today. Unless they’ve only ever heard of iTunes and bypassed Napster, WinMX, Gnutella, Kazaa, Grokster, eDonkey, Torrents, etc etc…

Of course, in defence of the Fraunhofer guys it has to be mentioned that they moved on a long while ago and came up with mpeg4…

By the way, if you’re one of the many readers who hit this page looking for the kids party song, try this link to search Google for the happy birthday mp3.

Plastic Guitars Strike a Chord

The plastic guitars I originally wrote about in Reactive Reports the chemistry webzine years ago are almost ready for market according to the SciScoop Science News Forum: Plastic guitars strike a chord

The inventors of the plastic guitar, based at Loughbourough University, are showcasing a range of innovative, high-quality acoustic and electric guitars made almost entirely from polymers. The three models, a hybrid wood/polymer acoustic, an all-polymer acoustic and a semi-hollow electric, feature patented foamed polymer technology that gives outstanding sound quality, apparently. Personally, I’m holding out for an Alex Lifeson signature Gibson ES355 in white (of Rush Natural Science fame).

Olivia Newton John “Born again”

I’m in shock! Cambridge-born singer with the Aussie accent, Olivia Newton John, star of Grease (the movie) and Xanadu, is the granddaughter of Nobel physicist Max Born.

However, another site cites her maternal grandfather as being Welshman Max Born, allegedly a professor of German at Cambridge and Melbourne.

I plucked up the courage to visit her “official” site, where it is confirmed that it’s Max the physicist and not Max the Welshman. Thank goodness for that, otherwise there would have been no credence to the nickname she received among pre-teens during the 1970s of Olivia Neutron Bomb.

Science and Stuff


Songs	Snaps	Science	Book

I posted my first web page in December 1995, it was the online version of my first chemistry news roundup, a column I dubbed Elemental Discoveries, the RSC younger chemist magazine formerly known as Gas Jar, which I’d renamed along with Dr Mac as “New Elements”. That column persisted on various free servers until I got patronage from a well-known chemistry software company who began hosting it thereafter until I registered the domain name Sciencebase.com in July 1999. This post is just holding page to give visitors a bit of history. Thank you very much. Come again.