April 3, 2008
Eine Kleine File Musik
Researchers at the University of Rochester have found a way to digitally reproduce music in files that are 1,000 times smaller than an MP3 file.
The music, a 20-second clarinet solo encoded in less than a single kilobyte, is not a recording but a reproduction. Researchers led by Mark Bocko, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, recreated via computer “both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player,” according to a school press release.
The computer uses everything it knows about how clarinet music is produced—fingerings, force of breath, and pressure of the player’s lips—to recreate the sounds.
The sound quality is not yet identical to that of a real performance, though. Download the sound clips and compare for yourself: click here for the human-made music and here for the computer-made reproduction.—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Thursday April 3, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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It just sounds like a synthesizer playing the notes. What’s the big deal?
— Lee Apr 4, 10:26 AM #
Yes, there is an obvious difference, but we overlooked the 1000 to 1 space reduction over an MP3. Maybe if the reduction was 100 to 1 then the quality would be better.
— Patricia Turpin Apr 4, 11:01 AM #
The quality certainly is different, but before we trash the output as just something a synthesizer could do, note the following:
You can also get a huge reduction in bandwidth for piano music by just transmitting the bits that would appear on a piano roll, but the problem is that all the reproducing mechanism (the player piano) can play is something that sounds like piano music. Similarly, you can get a bandwidth reduction if we send instructions to a synthesizer, but then all that can come out at the other end is the limited repertoire a synthesizer can manage with a low-information signal, and I understand that this is not much. (Can one take a general-purpose synthesizer, capable of recreating a very wide range of sounds but left in a base state without preparation and program it to reproduce this clarinet solo with less than a kilobyte of instructions?) Getting output that’s not such a terrible simulation of the original with such a small amount of information is really amazing.
And if we gripe about this first step, perhaps we’re also the ones who would stand at Kitty Hawk and say, “What’s the big deal, Wilbur and Orville? It only went 120 feet. I can walk that in half a minute!”
— Bob M. Apr 5, 06:08 PM #