[PD] Waveform Analysis?

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2004, Ian Smith-Heisters wrote:

> I'm afraid my humor may have been lost somewhere in its translation to
> the bitstream. I am the first to agree that aesthetics are not only
> difficult to formalize and judge, but also that aesthetics are very
> often not the primary interest of art.

Well, I think even when the whole concept of æsthetic gets considered
cheesy (maybe because connoted by former, cheesy conceptions of
æsthetics), then there is a covert system of æsthetics called by other
names. A piece can be judged by the æsthetics of the concept itself, or
the æsthetics of the social relevance, and so on (many criteria), but
usually not using the æsthetic and especially not the b-word ("beauty").

Art is in denial.

> Doing all that in realtime through PD is not only technically
> impossible, but undesired.

Makes me think that maybe it gets more complicated than « covert æsthetics
» nowadays. It may even be « covert judgement ». That's the wave of
politically correct, touchyfeely, « i'm ok, you're ok », where people
refrain from judgement, I mean refrain from admitting to it, and still do
it inside of themselves because they can't help it.

> Instead, you can compress the music using any old compression scheme
> (there has been quite a bit of research into which ones work best for
> what). Then you compare the compressed music to another piece of
> compressed music. Since the compression is looking for similarities,
> just like Markov Chain modeling does, the difference in the two
> filesizes is directly porportional to the amount of difference in the
> two songs.

No it's certainly not, because old compression schemes do not look at the
whole file all of the time; they are highly local, as a way to save
effort. E.g. maybe with Lempel-Ziv you'd use a 4k or 32k or 256k window.
With dynamic Huffman, there is a lot of locality as well, as the coding
system morphs quite gradually from one thing to the other depending on
what kind of data has been seen lately.

>> Actually that looks more like a
>> audio/video track database description/querying method. The question
>> was more about how to get analysis information from an audio stream.
> we've gotten off topic. On my part this digression sprouted from
> wondering what to do with all the waveform analysis data once you have
> it.

I'm not sure how discussing of a high-level musical description for a
database differs from a high-level musical description for a stream.
Actually I thought that to actually put such a thing in a db you'd
actually first analyse a stream. So I'm really puzzled, as to what is the
distinction that is being made here, and why.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju