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I already have a phormynx and some other instruments from Sonokinetic's Delphi, and 8dio's ancient Greek lyre, but this seems to be the most extensive collection of ancient Greek strings. Soundiron is generally excellent.
'features a Barbiton, Cithara, Lyre, Goat Horn Lyre, Pandura, Phorminx and Trigonon.'
A Cithara! Maybe not the same as the Roman Cithara that Nero (might have) played as Rome burned, but still...
'Why Are Cats on TikTok Getting Really Into Mid-2000s Ambient Music?
[...] When a fan told Jimmy Lavalle that a song he wrote about 18 years ago had become really popular with cats on TikTok, he was shocked. He wrote the track in Reykjavík, Iceland, gazing at the Esjan mountains across Kollafjörður bay — now, cats were prancing across their living rooms to the tune.
[...] Music for Cats, which came out of a study he did with researchers at the University of Wisconsin. Teie was already interested in how music affects human emotion, and he carried some of his theories over to other animals, first working with cotton-top tamarin monkeys, then house cats. Teie's work was rooted in the notion of "species-specific music" — essentially taking sounds that certain species would be innately familiar with and turning them into music.
"The theory certainly holds for humans, Teie explains. For instance, it's no surprise that after gestating in the womb for nine months, hearing nothing but a mother's heartbeat, humans seem preternaturally attracted to music that falls within the same 60 to 100 beats-per-minute pulse range as an adult heart. Because cats have a shorter gestation period, Teie focused instead on other sounds kittens would hear, such as suckling and purring. But rather than just set recordings of purrs to music, Teie crafted purr-like sounds using production software; should the sound be too recognizable, he figured, a cat would just habituate to it and ignore it.
"When we create musical instruments that have a rough approximation of the emotions that it's designed to trigger, but it's not the real thing, we don't habituate to it," he says. "We can't really identify it, so the mystery of the sound is something that keeps it affecting us."
Teie thinks that mix of mystery and familiarity is at the heart of what some cats are responding to when they hear Album Leaf's "Window." The key sound is that dual synth tone that arrives about 16 seconds into the song: [...] mice are capable of biphonation, so they can create two pitches at the same time. And they basically have that signature — the lower one is a vocal sound, and the upper one is a very pure whistle sound, and they are about that far apart, about a tenth apart. So it does have the signature, in the sense, of a mouse singing."
[...]
Teie is quick to add that he doesn't think cats responding to "Window" think there's a mouse in the room. Rather, he compares it to the way a violin sounds like a female singing voice or an electric guitar with some gain on it sounds like a human scream. "It's not as if we're thinking, 'Oh, that's the human scream. I need to respond with an adrenal rush,'" he says. "It's just a feeling, and I think that would be the same with the cats. It's like, 'I feel like going toward that sound.'"
This also helps explain the variety of responses among cats to, not just "Window," but also Teie's Music for Cats. Cats, like humans, are individuals, and like humans, they can have different tastes in music. To that end, when Galaxy tried playing "Window" for his cats, he said he got just one taker: "Three slept through it, one left the room, one poked his head up and one came toward the sound."
Still, sound and music can have practical purposes when working with cats. A softer, higher human voice can make a cat more trusting of a human, Galaxy says. And last year, Louisiana State University researchers found that cat-specific music like Teie's could be used to calm cats down during otherwise stressful vet visits.'
Why Cats Are Reacting to the Album Leaf's 'Window' on TikTok - Rolling Stone
'I'm a Musician, and Here's Why I'm Learning Quantum Computing
[...] I learned that IBM had released a quantum processor available on the cloud, I started studying quantum computing more seriously, and decided to make it a core component of my research. Today, I'm a Ph.D at the University of California, Irvine, doing research on quantum computing and music composition, while developing composition tools that use quantum computing in some way.
My first experiments with quantum music composition began in early 2019, and then later that year at the Qiskit Camp Europe, where I created the quantum synthesizer. There, I used a quantum computer to generate waveforms. The innate noise of quantum computation changed the shape of the waveforms, making them more complex. I also often work in the improvisational and interactive space; for one live-performed piece, I use a small quantum program, almost like a random number generator, to control audio effects or generate new sequences of notes based on certain rules or conditions.
[...] I learned that IBM had released a quantum processor available on the cloud, I started studying quantum computing more seriously, and decided to make it a core component of my research. Today, I'm a Ph.D at the University of California, Irvine, doing research on quantum computing and music composition, while developing composition tools that use quantum computing in some way.
My first experiments with quantum music composition began in early 2019, and then later that year at the Qiskit Camp Europe, where I created the quantum synthesizer. There, I used a quantum computer to generate waveforms. The innate noise of quantum computation changed the shape of the waveforms, making them more complex. I also often work in the improvisational and interactive space; for one live-performed piece, I use a small quantum program, almost like a random number generator, to control audio effects or generate new sequences of notes based on certain rules or conditions.
As a musician, learning quantum computing was challenging mostly because I had to go back to study the required mathematics, like linear algebra. Even today it's challenging, but I'm still learning, and will continue learning for a long time. But I feel like it's a great privilege to be doing this research at a moment in time where something so new is happening. I'm motivated to produce work that will serve as a contribution to allow researchers across different fields to converse and make this technology useful for everyone.
So, how can quantum computers be useful for music composition? Well, perhaps one day, a more powerful computational system will make certain computational processes faster — but we're not there yet. [Quantum machine learning maybe.] Today, I often think about how to recreate the processes I do classically, but now with very different tools. This different way of thinking about the act of composition is like the difference between writing down notes on a sheet of paper versus using a computer program to compose; the final result might be a printed sheet of music either way, but the process of getting there is different; in this difference, an emerging compositional paradigm might lead to new and different-sounding music (e.g. the way that today's electronic music sounds different from baroque-era orchestral music).'
https://medium.com/q...ng-db28c2aba7ac
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 09 February 2021 - 05:51 PM
