Cybotron5000

…yes, related to ‘crosstalk’: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosstalk

There’s been some wonderful recordings that were designed solely/primarily for mono playback (early Motown/rock n roll/blues for example) that IMHO actually kind of benefit somehow from lack of stereo separation. If mixed well, the instruments can blend really well and work as one unit and there’s kind of an energy and punch to the speaker/s working as one... Early stereo records often had rather drastic left/right panning (eg. some Beatles stuff) or had to hedge their bets in case they were played back through eg. mono radios/badly set-up stereos and so on… Something similar is still the case when engineers think about what their track might sound like coming through a crappy mono phone speaker with no bass at 128kbps/what have you… The advice I’ve always heard is that you should make sure that your mix would ‘fold down’, so to speak, to mono anyhow… So you should never rely on the listener being in the sweet spot (if you think about eg. a club where an audience member could be stood directly in front of one speaker, but barely hear another, or some listeners weird home setups with one speaker balanced on a bookcase and the other on a table or something). In most environments you get complicated reflections and build ups/absorptions of various frequencies due to the acoustics anyhow… Although with single-sided deafness you won’t get the effect of directionality from the delay between the sound hitting one ear before the other, I imagine you would still experience the attenuation of certain frequencies as the sound moves around your head, the height dependent effects and so on …I suppose it’s not a million miles away from if you were to close one eye - monoscopic as opposed to stereoscopic? Bass frequencies are mostly experienced more or less monophonically, so you’re not missing out there... I wonder if reverb effects/using impulse responses of different environments and volume adjustments might also help give some of the impression?

This page is really helpful: https://professional.dolby.com/music/support-faq/

Indeed - depends on the material/scope/playback quality of the track/characteristics of the compression method I guess… On the other hand, if you were to record/encode each member of a symphony orchestra separately and place them in a soundfield playing back with lossless quality? …but then you could mix them in sections, or even by rougher positional areas and have far fewer individual tracks… If it’s just one man and his knee/spoon accompaniment then… This article is informative: https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/30/apple-spatial-audio-indie-art... …also: https://professional.dolby.com/create-in-dolby-atmos-music/ from: https://professional.dolby.com/music/support-faq/ “The Renderer can operate at 48 or 96 kHz. Master files can be created at these rates and stored for archive purposes, and are then sample-rate converted to 48 kHz for encoding purposes. Keep in mind that when working at 48 kHz, the Renderer supports 128 input channels (ten bed only and 118 object/bed), whereas at 96 kHz, 64 input channels are available (ten bed only and 54 object/bed). …If you work with audio in an 88.2, 176.4, or 192 kHz session, you need to create a 48 or 96 kHz version of the session for use with the Renderer. …For music use cases, we recommend setting trim controls to zero so that your mix is preserved when played back as a 5.1 or 7.1 re-render. Additionally, to hear how encoding your Dolby Atmos mix will sound, set the spatial coding emulation element count to 16… …Objects can be mono or stereo. The sonic content of the source material and creative considerations about how that content will be reproduced in a 3D soundfield will influence the number of objects used in any given mix.”

Stockhausen would have been like: ‘Yo dawg…’ :)

This article does an okay job of explaining the idea: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/18/apples-spatial-au... Apparently the sound source positions will be calculated relative to the position of the iphone/ipad/mac… ..Yes, I’m guessing it will potentially greatly increase the size of audio data downloaded/streamed to the listener, as the spec. for Atmos can have up to 128 different tracks + metadata: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos

If you can remember any further info. about this I’d be very interested.

You’re absolutely right that the most effective simulation would use a custom HRTF for each person, as the shape of the head, shoulders, pinnae of the ear etc etc. all play some part... There are some headphones that attempt to go some way towards this by taking pictures of/otherwise ‘scanning’ the users ear (eg. https://electronics.sony.com/360-reality-audio https://mysofa.audio/ …paper on the subject: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=19855 …interestingly, for Apple’s future plans perhaps, ear canal used for biometric validation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351239 ) The strongest ‘cue’ is probably the ‘interaural time delay’, which is easy enough to fake, but as you say, without fixed sources (imagine the calibration/setup of a VR headset) and subsequently taking into account that people actually turn/tilt their heads to better appreciate the direction a sound is coming from, as apparently Apple does relative to the device the tracks are playing from: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/18/apples-spatial-au... (in order to take best advantage of what you experienced where we can better locate left/right than forward/back...), the efficacy is reduced. Generally we are also much better at localizing sounds in the lateral plane than the vertical one (…evolutionarily perhaps this was more important in order to avoid being eaten by sabre-toothed tigers or something? :) There are other cues deriving from ‘head-shadow’ (somewhat like an eq.), reflection from shoulders and even reflections from the acoustic environment and so on that are subtler/more complicated… Traditionally dummy heads with anatomically ‘average’ characteristics and binaural microphones in the ‘ears’ have been used to make binaural recordings, but if you were to venture out with binaural microphones in your ears and then later play back the recordings the effect can be startlingly effective… [as an aside, when I posted the above comment in this thread a couple of days ago when it was first on HN, the title of the post was ‘Spatial Audio is a Scam’ :) ]

Spatial audio per se is not a scam, but its effective simulation is actually potentially rather complicated and I too worry about its successful implementation by Apple… Funnily enough, I had plans for a system to implement spatial audio using smartphones/headphones originally back in 2006 and more recently wrote an app for iOS trying to implement it (…prototype/demo. that I made worked pretty well - used what I learnt working on games/interactive audio design…) I had toyed with starting a business myself over the years but life got in the way sort of… Before all this was announced I even (naively) wrote to Apple sort of roundabout-ly trying for a job in order to improve their spatial audio offering, believe it or not, but only got a polite sort of: ‘don’t call us we’ll call you’ kind of reply, which was understandable… (…don’t be thinking differently! :) Some students I taught/supervised/wrote a brief for a project of’s up at the university here subsequently started a company making a 3D binaural audio plugin thing - the business was bought by Facebook, whete they were afterwards employed implementing spatial audio into some of their offerings also… Anyhow, don’t want to bore anyone, but happy to answer any questions about it (do actually know what I’m talking about more or less in this area, as opposed to most stuff I read on HN.! :) P.S. Jens Blauert wrote (what used to be, at least) the standard reference on this: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/spatial-hearing-revised-editi...

Thanks cgio! The history of languages is fascinating: how they evolve, adapt and borrow from/influence each other… You’ve sent me down a rabbit-hole now reading about Byzantine/Koine Greek: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek

My greek relatives would say eg. ‘heh-re-tiz-moose/chairetizmoos apo teen yaya soo’ (…trying to spell it there as it sounds, sort of…), meaning roughly: ‘(sending my) respects/greetings to your grandmother’, I’m wondering if it’s the same root? …If it is, I guess it could be interpreted as an extremely respectful way to say ‘hello’, or an archaic one I guess! :) …unless they were worried that your sleeve-dagger thing was about to make an appearance heheh… (‘hark! …hail to your grace, prithee salutations and felicitations to thou!/‘mistress, what cheer?’ or even ‘wes hail?’ :) In my experience, Greek people are usually quite chuffed if you go to the trouble of learning a bit of the language, even if you muck it up a bit, as not many people do… (…also there is the custom of ‘philoxenia’, which dates from ancient times, but still echoes today…)

Not at all! I’m obviously not qualified to say, but it seems to me to be a great overview of a very complicated topic - clear, concise, comprehensive and not patronising. Stuff I don’t understand off the bat I can always look up, but it gives me a framework to begin to hang stuff on/explore from. Even if you had written several tome-like textbooks you couldn’t have compensated for my ignorance of the basic principles of computer science/informatics/programming etc.! :)

Agile workspace (for cats):

https://www.iizcat.com/uploads/2017/08/94gwt-cat-jungle-gym-...

I’m only about half way through, but I’m finding it extremely helpful, clear and well-written (some of the terminology/ideas I’m not familiar with/are over my head, but I plan on going back over it again later and looking stuff up :) - Thanks so much!

Hear hear. I don’t begrudge clever hardworking people having the opportunity to make money as an incentive, in the implementation of some sort of Adam Smith-like idea of a genuinely free and sensibly regulated market …especially when it comes to non-essential goods and services… (proportionate to their wealth/jobs creation perhaps, as they never tire of reminding us…) …even better if this was awarded somehow based on their capacity to genuinely innovate and bring to market (as opposed to rip off and monopolise I suppose), but when you live in a country/world where people, kids even, are not eating properly, people are dying prematurely because the infrastructure/services are crumbling etc etc …as a priority before we even start to think about other ways to alleviate inequality of opportunity… and yet a tiny proportion are spending what to others would be a lifetime’s fortune every year on wealth fiddlers/obfuscation services to enable ‘tax avoidance’, even spending vast sums to finance lobbyists and entire media organisations because it is cheaper than actually paying another 1% of tax/whatever… (if I ‘evade’ something thrown at me is it really all that different from ‘avoiding’ it? …and yes, I understand that in financial terms one word denotes a crime and the other is supposed to merely be admired as ‘creative’ accountancy…). Warren Buffett himself suggests he should be taxed higher (…his famous anecdote about his secetary…). Idiosyncratic philanthropy is a poor substitute, no matter the inefficiencies of the state (…Anand Giridharadas writes well about this: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/winners-take... …Even the 0.1%/whatever might find the world a brighter place to live in with the improvement of public services and a reasonably educated, healthy populace flourishing on a non-dying planet, at least before the robot overlord takeover/orbital/interplanetary escape plan is completed ! :) For me it comes down to a question of what we value as a society. Is a nurse/carer for example, who literally preserves someone’s life, day in day out, worth less or working less hard than a hedge fund CEO/tech. entrepreneur? Both are doubtless very important and valuable to society, but is one a thousand/whatever times more valuable as a human being or possessing of a thousandfold more rarefied qualities of thought/action? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/24/the-trouble-wit...

I’ve definitely noticed this teaching the guitar. If students first have a really good run at learning something, particularly something mechanical when you’re working on a piece/exercise, if you stop at some point and chat about/distract them with something briefly, subsequently when they start playing it again it’s sometimes as if ‘magically’ what they were working on previous to the break has been ‘digested’ on a more sub-conscious level or something, and afterwards they play it much better… I wondered if it was because initially the conscious mind was over-thinking and grappling with mapping a task from individual pieces (bit like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant ) …or even self-sabotaging, and the break helped somehow to reach a more ‘flow-y’, confident state where the brain has a starting point to work from - some sort of pre-prepared mental ‘map’…

The oracle at Delphi would beg to differ! ;) I take your point though, sort of… It’s maybe worth pointing out that we only know about Socrates from secondary sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing You could maybe think of him as playing devil’s advocate, or employing ‘reductio ad absurdum’ methods (even moving towards a precursor to some sort of scientific method perhaps?) …or maybe as employing sometimes useful methods of liberating people from irrational superstitions/unexamined beliefs, which eventually helped in some way to lead us to more modern ways of thinking? Have a read of this if you fancy, see what you think: https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/texts...

I agree - it’s kind of lazily framed/worded. A.I. is a vast field after all?

It seems to me somewhat similar to an argument put forward by Jaron Lanier: that what is termed artificial intelligence’s (or ‘deep learning’’s etc.) current successes, at least as far as something like the translation services of the big corporations for example, is actually built by leveraging corpuses that are the fruits of a huge amount of individual human effort. Sometimes, say with the ‘Mechanical Turk’ thing that Amazon has, or CAPTCHAs or something, this is a more explicit connection (…bit Wizard of Oz! :) As I understand it, he proposes that an alternative to UBI etc. might be micro-compensations (or transactions) in return for providing this data. This might be a prelude/transition to a stage where our basic needs (on a sort of Mazlow’s hierarchy) were met by A.I., or that there might be increasingly creative or interesting ways to complete some tasks that we could go on refining forever.

Articles like this really drive home to me how much I appreciate this site and all it’s contributors and commenters. Thank you all!

They pay a hefty license if they choose to use third party middleware/engines. Perhaps CD Projekt Red are in danger of having features cloned etc.

I’ve recently been trying to translate a book my dad wrote from modern (‘demotic’) Greek into English. It’s a very slow process for me, as English is my first language and my Greek is very poor. I have to constantly look up a lot of words and puzzle over some sentences repeatedly. I did notice though that Greek (or my dad at least) seems able to communicate ideas in very few words that when translated into English, as directly as I can manage, I find require longer and more ‘flowery’ sentences to achieve the same effect, at least with any degree of elegance or conventional tone. I’m not sure how much of that is due to his writing style (or mine! :) and surely it is a very qualitative, subjective impression, but it does seem to me that Greek is quite an ‘efficient’ language. I’m a terrible, entirely self-taught programmer/copy’n’paste script kiddy, but I would imagine that learning any new language helps with programming on some level (and perhaps maths/logic even more so?): dealing with different symbolic representations, grammars, alphabets, logographs etc. Here’s an article I found on the subject of formal grammars/Chomsky and their influence on computing: https://exaud.com/noam-chomsky-computer-science/

Too right. What’s the alternative? Living in a stagnant dictatorship governed by caprice and bllsht? Making sure your citizens remain ignorant and downtrodden? Jefferson is undeniably problematic by our standards and judged by the standards of his time, but he had a way with words (and was pretty handy at some other stuff too!). He tried to do some good in the world from his position of privilege, through the lens of the world as he saw it… There are many ideas and actions of his that I disagree strongly with, but I can allow that he got some stuff very right and expressed his thoughts and ideas extremely eloquently.

Jefferson really did write beautifully. I’m not a US citizen, but I do find his writing to be very uplifting and inspiring.

…and another: Wynton Marsalis on democracy as jazz and The Ever Fonky Lowdown http://share-episode.podcasts.coderocker.de?t=Wynton Marsalis on democracy as jazz and The Ever Fonky Lowdown&el=https://chtbl.com/track/DE4279/cdn.simplecast.com/audio/942a...

…definite MAX/MSP or PureData vibe!

Podcast on the subject: Democracy http://share-episode.podcasts.coderocker.de?t=Democracy&el=h...

As you suggest, ancient Athenian democracy bore little resemblance to modern forms of representative democracy and no doubt appears very limited/odd to modern sensibilities. What you wrote doesn’t make what I stated about the derivation of the word any less true though: https://www.etymonline.com/word/democracy All forms of democracy so far have been hefty compromises in one way or another and so will all be in the future, short of some sort of technological marvel I suppose. Different countries, constitutions etc. rebalance the mechanisms in one way or another, as more or less direct/representative forms of democracy inevitably have consequent drawbacks... Parliamentary democracies, republican democracies etc./all the various voting mechanisms etc., all are compromises designed to try and strike some sort of balance or confer some practical advantage. You can argue that some are antiquated, some unfit for purpose, but most IMHO. are better than the alternative. The fundamental problem with oligarchies/tyrannies/polyarchy/plutarchies/‘pick-your-archy’ is surely that you might (and almost inevitably eventually will) get a bad apple/apples. ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely’ etc. As I understand it, the U.S. is a kind of republic (a ‘federal presidential constitutional republic’ according to Wikipedia :) and Madison/Jefferson/the founding ‘dudes’ tried to strike some, as they viewed it, balance between representative democracy and an appointed/elected executive, as you’re no doubt aware… You can argue it was/is deeply flawed and that their efforts to avoid partisan politics/entrenched political parties have failed/there are many problems with lobbying groups/corruption etc., but I would suggest that there exists at least some opportunity to debate and consequently change representatives/legislate a hopefully better way of doing things? It beats the alternative/being arbitrarily ruled by a bonkers king/some tinpot dictator/absolute/hereditary monarch! Perhaps the democratic process ought to always be a work-in-progress, a compromise that we tweak and balance with other mechanisms to eg. protect minority rights or to provide long-term stability and short-term effective and efficient decision-making through discussion rather than dictat? I would suggest that there are decisions best taken at a very direct/local level and others that are best dealt with globally/even on a more technocratic basis… The voters ideally should be educated enough to be able to thoroughly understand the process and enabled and enfranchised wherever possible to engage with it fully… “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” - from a speech in the Commons by Winston Churchill (a man with many imperfections! :) https://richardlangworth.com/worst-form-of-government

The CIA has certainly done some regrettable/shady stuff historically, as have almost all intelligence organisations that I’m aware of (reading about the history of espionage and covert activities, I often wonder how the people involved manage to preserve any sort of sanity in that mistrustful, cloak and dagger world?). Although politically (and somewhat culturally?) natural allies, being that both entities are largely a collection of democracies/republics, if you view global economics as a zero-sum game you could say that the EU is a direct competitor to the US. Indeed, although politically less-strongly federated/bound together, as far as I’m aware, the EU has greater wealth as a whole than the US does. Various governments, companies and individuals that oppose democratic forms of government and ‘liberal’ values see the economic strength, cooperation and mutual defence/offence promoted by an alignment of these two political organisations as counter to their interests, or potentially a threat to more authoritarian hegemonies. Contrary to what you say, the previous US administration actively supported Brexit. Many authoritarian governments around the world were also cheering it on, as presumably geo-strategically it was/is in their interests to divide and undermine democratic forms of government.

The word democracy derives from the Greek words for ‘People’ - ‘Demos’ and ‘Power’ - ‘-cracy’. So, literally: ‘people power’ or ‘power of/to or government of the people by the people’. Originally, very roughly speaking, it was an alternative form of government to being ruled by tyrants. If you are seriously disparaging one of the many forms in which human beings have tried to implement some form of democracy, arguably all of which have some flaws, and not just shilling for some authoritarian interest or other (or your own, possibly benighted, or imagined self-interest?), then you need to be more specific. (P.S. Churchill had some useful thoughts on the matter :)