

Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller than MP3  - edw519
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3136

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pc
_Two of Bocko's doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, worked
with Bocko to measure every aspect of a clarinet that affects its sound—from
the backpressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way
sound radiates from the instrument. They then built a computer model of the
clarinet, and the result is a virtual instrument built entirely from the real-
world acoustical measurements._

It's really just MIDI with more variables.

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sah
Exactly. Don't look for this to reduce the size of your music collection until
we can reverse-engineer physical models of entire bands and recording studios
from the sounds they make.

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Hexstream
Well, there was a submitted story some time ago that showed new technology
that can recognize the individual notes of instruments (at some degree of
accuracy) and they could then make adjustments... So, it doesn't sound
completely impossible.

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aston
Still haven't seen that software in action. I'm more than a bit skeptical that
it can do what it claims in the general case.

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pmorici
This is cool in it's own right but can they really call what they are doing
"compression"? It seems more like synthesis to me.

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derefr
Synthesis is basically just a form of lossy compression (or lossless, if the
original was synthesized as well, with a lesser or equivalent amount of
entropy.) For one practical example, think of fractal compression of images--a
series of mathematical equations are synthesized that just happen to best
approximate the original image.

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tel
"Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in
theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a
second like we do on a CD."

This seems widely flawed. Changes in play are limited by the dexterity of the
player (and upper bounded by the dexterity of a body), but choices and timings
aren't so mechanical.

The exact timing (feel, even) of, say, a swung eighth requires quite a lot of
resolution before it's done right. I'd love to see them, even after they get
tonguing "down", do a double blind study in Jazz.

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dhimes
I'm thinking, April Fools! (it's a 1 April release)

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dhimes
I stand corrected. They have now posted that it's _not_ an April Fool's joke.

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redorb
The fact that mp3's are the default means that adoption of any new technology
(no matter how good) will take longer than it should

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henning
Wouldn't the computer have to solve the cocktail party problem and have models
for each identified channel for this to work for normal music? And, whooptee
doo, it'll still probably sound like shit underwater in a plastic bag.

