Audio! Magazine+

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Issue 3

Some people listen to music, some want to play music, others - 'musicologists' - study it too. They are interested in all sorts of questions. What makes good music and why? What is the history of music? How does it vary across cultures? One branch of musicology is about analysing music, and that is where technology can help...and even spin off whole new industries.

If the audio engineers can come up with programs that make it easy to analyse music, to search in new ways, to visualise it, then professional musicologists, hobby musicians and music lovers alike can benefit. That is what Queen Mary's 'Musicology for the masses' project is exploring.

In this issue of Audio! we explore research that is applying musicology to help the masses: technology that will help bands make better recordings; how to create new formats for storing music; how analysing the acoustics of music venues has led to tools for recreating the sounds of any building; a new way to visualise music collections; and how musicologists are even studying what goes on in schools...

Read on to find out more online or download the pdf

Issue 2

Audio engineers are interested in doing more than just playing music. They want to create new sounds and even new instruments to make them. It is audio engineers who are responsible for writing systems that, for example, allow out-of-tune pop prima donnas to actually sound great, and allow inventive musicians to create new sounds. Mere musicians might strive to compose new music but audio engineers aim higher - they might aim to write programs that can compose for them!

Audio is about more than just music though. Once sound has gone electronic it opens up new ways for creating video game soundtracks, creating bubbles of sound in which your secret conversations are safe, and quickly spotting ill animals (and maybe ill people too). Even the team trying to beat the land speed record need to know about the physics of sound if their driver is to survive the experience. Audio engineering is an exciting place to be right now. Read on to find out more online or download the pdf

Issue 1 (pdf)

Fed up with all that feedback as your guitarist goes near the speaker? Would you twiddle with the knobs, or would you write some audio software to balance the speakers automatically for you? Do you still manually create playlists for your iPod? The audio engineers got fed up of doing that too so they've been coming up with ways your computer can do it for you, whether by analysing your music or working out your moods. Don't accept that music has to be made and played the way it's done now. Invent a new way. Read on.