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Peter Neubäcker

Doesn’t this guy just look like the kind of guy that would invent something crazy and completely game-changing?

This man is the creator of Melodyne, which has been one of the most creative and amazing pieces of music production software since it came out years ago.  I remember seeing a demo of it way back in… what was it, 2004?  I was at the Taxi convention (on behalf of Focusin) and the Melodyne demonstration simply blew me away.  Melodyne basically lets you treat audio signals like MIDI– that is, you can take a preexisting recording and it will separate musical and spoken events into, say, syllables, and you can manipulate them to  your heart’s content by changing their pitches, timings, and durations.

A number of other pieces of software let you do this (that’s why every piece of pop music on the radio has every single bit of imperfection sucked out of it- pitch and timing correction, baby- but that’s a story for another day).  However, while you could, say, cut up a guitar performance chord by chord, you couldn’t take each of those chords and look inside them and change their constituent notes.  And that’s exactly what Melodyne 2 and its ‘Direct Note Access’ (DNA) ability claims to do.

This is amazing stuff, kids.  Many, many very smart nerds have been trying to do this for a while (I met many of them while getting my Master’s) but as far as I know, none have come up with as successful an implementation as Melodyne’s.  Peter does say that you will probably have limited success in splitting a full recording back into its constituent  tracks (like if you wanted to pull out just the drums from your favorite Blink-182 recording… not that I’d want to do that) but… well, I know quite a few people that are salivating to see just how far this software can be pushed– I am one of them!

The picture of Peter links to a 14-minute video in which he describes what he’s been cooking up and how he’s done it (to some extent).  Enjoy.

what better time to rekindle this blog that never was kindled when i’m sitting in a bar near my hostel in amsterdam, drinking a microbrew, and deciding when to take the tram back to the convention center for some more AES 124 action?

2008 is not only Israel’s 60th anniversary, ya know… this AES convention marks the 60th year of AES, as well. So, needless to say, I was extra excited about this convention when I found out that my paper got accepted (my poster presentation’s Tuesday!).

I got into town yesterday (Saturday) after working till 3 on Friday than making my way to Newark for the direct flight… I roll up in style to my hostel (the same one vice stevens camped out at when we played amsterdam in ‘06; it was by far the cheapest option for staying here short of opening up my own stall in the red light district) at around 11am and was informed I couldn’t check in to my dorm room of 10 people until 2pm. crap. so i found a couch that didn’t have a passed-out backpacker on it and did my best to try to pass out (with limited success). i finally get in, take a shower in flip-flops like I was in college, and make my way to the RAI center to see a friend/colleague speak about Semantic Audio Analysis. after the speech I got a chance to check out the show floor, which, judging by my last two visits to the AES convention when it made its way through New York in ‘05 and ‘07, is the bustling epicenter of the show, filled with top-name audio companies all showing off their latest and greatest products (the show was often used as a place to announce major versions of new gadgets and toys, actually).

There is one little problem: the show is L-to-the-A-ME. i had a bad feeling when i walked in to the space and not only was there hardly a crowd of people there, but the only sound was a gentle murmur of (mostly) men speaking (AES New York, on the other hand, bombarded you at every turn with each booth playing sound as loudly as possible to show off whatever sound-related product they were hawking… most often with a booth babe or two to cheer them on.). A quick walk around the paltry show’s floor confirmed my suspicions– there was merely a handful of booths, and 90% of them were either microphone manufacturers (which are exciting and all) or people who make parts (like triodes or capacitors) and / or test equipment for studios and studio equipment. No Line 6, MoTU, Apple… not even the German / Swedish software manufacturers, that I was sure would be there, were to be found.

What the hell’s going on? Don’t they know I’m here?

Well… apparently not. I ran into a very nice older British man on the tram who does something along the lines of make transistors or triodes or something that begins with ‘tr’* as part of some component of an audio system, and he was telling me that the European convention as well as AES in Europe in general has become the bastard stepchild of the organization. Why? He said there was very little focus or organization in the… organization, and that the AES show is simple superseded by bigger convention shows like Musikmesse and the European equivalent of NAB whose name I forget now.

So… oh well. I’ll make do. There are quite a few interesting-looking presentations and meetings laced throughout the convention, and, while I guess I won’t be presenting my paper to anyone from the major software manufacturers**, I just got published. And that’s good enough for me, for now.

*tryptophan? troglodytes?
**Steve Jobs was unavailable for comment.