A podcast all about panning

One of the plugins that I've written as part of this fellowship is a tool which allows two different panning methods to be explored: FranPan. I've just finished a 15 minute podcast which explains these two different panning methods and how they work.

Please help yourselves and share with other people you think might be interested.

Your comments, as ever, are welcome.

New improved versions of Science in the Studio plugins

I've just posted new versions of FranPan and FlexDelay which fix the annoying noise that you may have heard when stopping and then going back into play in your host application. This was an oversight on my part - for a hardware delay working genuinely in real time, then the samples that are stored in memory are constantly being updated and so old audio is constantly being replaced with new, even when audio isn't playing back. But for a VST plugin delay when 'stop' is pressed in the host application, time itself stops for the plugin too. This means that when it's restarted anything that was stored in the delay now gets spat out when it starts working again because it wasn't replaced with silence when the host was stopped.

Any plug-in that has memory (i.e. stores previous sounds for future playback) must deal with this and, I must admit, I forgot. This is a poor example of software engineering, because this kind of behaviour should have been stated in the requirements specification against which the plug-in would have been tested, and found to fail, the first time around. Ah well, I guess this episode does highlight the need for good engineering in many different aspects of audio!

(For those of you who are interested in VST programming, I've fixed the problem by flushing the buffers within suspend resume methods - a pretty basic step I should have taken first time around).

The new versions can be downloaded via the old links, which are here.

ISEE how recording fits into engineering and how engineering fits into recording

Sorry, the title is a terrible pun on ISEE: the International Symposium on Engineering Education which I spoke at today. This is a bi-annual event where academics in engineering get together (this year at the University of Sheffield) to share ideas about teaching practice.

There were lots of really interesting and controversial presentations (the title of one of this afternoon's talks was Is attending lectures relevant anymore in engineering education?). I was presenting my thoughts on where in the recording studio engineering can (or does) take place. The paper that I wrote to accompany this presentation will soon be posted on the ISEE 2012 web site and I'll also put it on the dedicated web resource that will one of the legacies of this project. I focused on three areas of recording/processing: time-domain effects, dynamic-range control (particularly for mastering) and microphone array design.

The presentation was really well received (or maybe they just applauded at the end because I was the last to go on before lunch and their hunger - mine too, to be honest - was getting the better of them). I had lots of interesting questions and comments during lunch. Although sound recording is not something they usually cover at ISEE, it seemed to pique people's interest and I'm really grateful to all the delegates for their warm response and useful comments.

The paper writing doesn't finish there: I'm currently finishing off an interview for the Journal on the Art of Record Production and will then be starting on an article for an engineering journal. Before that I'm back at ISEE tomorrow to hear some more opinions and ideas on engineering and engineering education.

The final month!

Well, my eleven months on this fellowship are nearly up and, now that the teaching year has finished, the work rate for this project has now stepped up a gear from 'busy' to 'very busy'! Dave Beer and I are both writing up research outputs and I've been carrying on with interviews (most recently with four hugely influential figures in recording, see here), public engagement (most recently at the Big Bang Fair in York) and speaking at conferences about the project.

We've acquired many hours of interview and focus group data from well over two hundred people and this will live on after the fellowship in the form of an archive of transcriptions, papers and articles.

Right, better get back to work. I'll be back on here soon with details of how to access the archive and the latest news as the fellowship draws to a close.

Another free VST plugin for you...

Hi all

Another month, another plugin. As part of the Fellowship I'm releasing some free VST plugins that enable users to explore important areas of sound processing theory and practice. Last month it was panning, this month it's delay - an effect which recording engineers need to thoroughly understand if they are to be able to develop their own time domain processing tools (such as chorus and flanging units) from scratch. You can find the plugin (yes, it's free!) and the documentation here. Help yourself and let me know what you think!

There's more than one way to pan a source.....

One of the ways I want to engage people with the engineering that happens in recording studios is to provide free audio processing software that offers insight into commonly used tools that we might take for granted. For those who have any experience with recording, the pan control (short for 'panoramic potentiometer', believe it or not) seems a pretty much 'bread and butter' tool - it performs a basic, yet essential task for anyone not working in mono (i.e. the vast majority of us). It's one of those things that we don't usually think much about, but there is more than one way in which they can work and this has an effect on the quality of the 'spatialisation' that we do.

I've just finished a free VST plug-in (Windows only at present I'm afraid) which offers combined level and time based panning  (most, although not all, panners only offer level based control of source position). It's ready for use as a studio tool but also intended to be used for educational/experimental investigations into how panning actually works and the psychoacoustics behind it. In the accompanying documentation for the plugin there's some of the scientific background to the (apparently simple, you might have thought) task of moving a sound between two loudspeakers, along with some ideas for experiments and tests. You can download it from here.

Please give it try and let others know about it - whether they are teaching, learning or doing sound engineering. Feedback, as always, is welcome.

Things I'm learning

Last Friday I visited LIPA (Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts) to run a focus group with 3rd year Sound and Music Technology students. It was a fascinating session with lots of insights and ideas that haven't cropped up before. I learned a lot from these guys - which is the whole point of these sessions, so I'm really grateful to them and to LIPA for giving me the opportunity to chat to them.

This week I'm in Bristol for a four day course run by the Science Communication Unit at UWE, hopefully the embodiment of the adage that you're never too old to learn new things. Communicating via new media tools and podcasting techniques are amongst the things on the menu.