Music Streaming Snapshot
Monthly Users According to Facebook - February 2012 Service Launch Date Monthly Users % Change Spotify Oct 2008 15,800,000 +20% Pandora Jan 2000 9,200,000 +3% SoundCloud Oct 2008 3,100,000 +24% Bandcamp Sep 2008 1,200,000 +21% Grooveshark Jan 2006 1,100,000 0% Slacker Jun 2007 150,000 0% MOG Dec 2009 140,000 -30% Rdio Aug 2010 100,000 +43% [...]
Universal's Audible Watermark
Update, April 8, 2013: Can you hear it? Take a watermark listening test. A while ago I posted about my confusion regarding Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns out the artifacts are not due to compression, but a result of audio watermarks that Universal Music Group embeds in digitally distributed tracks. The artifacts appear on [...]
Mac OS X Speech Synthesis Markup
I put a Sound Blaster 16 in my first computer. It came with a CD-ROM full of goodies like Dr. Sbaitso, the talking psychologist. One app was called TextAssist and it had a special syntax that let you string together phonemes, specifying pitch, duration, even vibrato. I spent hours composing weird robot jingles. Itsy Bitsy [...]
Music Smasher: Streaming Music API Mashup
Music Smasher is a smash up of popular music streaming service APIs. I developed it to simplify the task of searching across Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshark, and other catalogs to find out who has the music you love, giving you more information for choosing a streaming service. Music Smasher is currently hosted at mattmontag.com/smasher. Note that [...]
Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts
Spotify Artifacts Showcase I love Spotify. But I've noticed some weird artifacts on a few albums. It sounds like a fluttery warble noise in the midrange. It's most noticeable during big string or choir sections with broad spectral content. The problem seems limited to certain albums. The worst album I've come across is this Pascal [...]
Multi-Touch for Musical Applications
This semester, I have been working with Stefan Sullivan and Scott Dickey on a multi-touch table for musical applications. My goal was to get latency to an absolute minimum, since even small delays can ruin the experience of performance. We achieved 25-30ms latency from touch to audio output with our camera-based system, compared to 50-60ms [...]
Speech Gender Conversion
Interesting gender conversion results... Barack Obama obama.wav obama_to_female.wav obama_to_child.wav Sarah Palin palin.wav palin_to_male.wav palin_to_female.wav Katie Couric couric.wav couric_to_male.wav Al Gore algore.wav algore_to_female.wav algore_to_child.wav Hip-Hop turnstiles.wav turnstiles_to_child.wav Details on the project page.
Voice to NES Music Converter
This is a weekend project idea. Wouldn't it be cool to sing into a mic and have your voice converted to the sweet sound of a 2A03 pulse-width-modulated square wave? "Yes, Matt, that would be cool! But how can it be done!?" I'll tell you. I've got a VST instrument that does my NES synthesis [...]
PADsynth in MATLAB
PADsynth is a synthesis technique that generates a lush sound with a simple algorithm. The algorithm begins with additive synthesis, where you build a timbre with a sine wave at the fundamental and each overtone. A frequency magnitude plot of this would show several thin spikes. PADsynth adds a twist. You can make the sound [...]
Binauralization
I'm obsessed with getting externalized sounds out of headphones. It turns out this is darn near impossible. Using head-related transfer functions to filter the sound and emulate a "transaural" (loudspeaker) source is only the tip of the iceberg... Read more at binaural audio remixing. I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to reproduce the soundfield created [...]