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PC Speaker To Eleven

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Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#41

Post by jacquesm »

dekhn wrote: post #39
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, and he has perfect pitch. Can tune stringed instruments without a reference, was employed to do so for some summers. It was something he could do, from a very young age. Not apparently learned. Not learned by most of his cohort at music school, so I'm guessing most likely something born with. If there is a distribution, then we have to task to explain that. Reasonable to call it genetic? Why not?

I don't know what you mean by "not apparently learned". Even with genetically inherited perfect pitch, the skill has to be "learned" (IE, presented with note labels). Nobody has the ability- without training- to tell you the frequency of a note. Genetic (in this case) doesn't mean "born with the ability", it means "predisposed towards greater ability after training"). Personally, I'd start with the strong observation…

That is really not an OK answer.

The idea that there is an 'absolute' involved indicates a reference of sorts, that is what makes it absolute. Labelling notes will distribute them along a bell curve and the dead center of that bell curve may or may not be the exact note. People with absolute pitch are able to do this exactly and that is what makes it interesting, that implies a reference to some standard, presumably one that they have internally. A tuning fork is such a standard, as are other mechanical oscillators with a high degree of repeatability.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#42

Post by dekhn »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #40
dekhn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you mean by "not apparently learned". Even with genetically inherited perfect pitch, the skill has to be "learned" (IE, presented with note labels). Nobody has the ability- without training- to tell you the frequency of a note. Genetic (in this case) doesn't mean "born with the ability", it means "predisposed towards greater ability after training"). Personally, I'd start with the strong observation…

I guess I'm not making myself clear. The ability to learn this accurately is not the same for everyone. Those that can, are said to have 'perfect pitch'. What makes them different? Not just the learning - as suggested, maybe that's teachable (but probably not, look at all the advanced music students that never learn). But the speed and facility are not teachable - that came with the person. Which is about the same as…

I wish I could answer your question with some level of authority, but nobody knows the answer. The general problem of how people transduce signals into information, why it's efficient for some people, and to what level people can escape genetic determinism is one of the prevailing questions in biological science.

As for appeal to authority: completely appropriate in this case since it's a highly technical issue with a ton of prior knowledge that is both subtle and non-obvious. I don't really understand the idea that appeal to authority in this context is fallacious- as we are not having a formal logic argument, but arguing about extremely complex, messy, wet systems with complex feedback loops that lead to high non-intuitive behavior.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#43

Post by dekhn »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
dekhn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you mean by "not apparently learned". Even with genetically inherited perfect pitch, the skill has to be "learned" (IE, presented with note labels). Nobody has the ability- without training- to tell you the frequency of a note. Genetic (in this case) doesn't mean "born with the ability", it means "predisposed towards greater ability after training"). Personally, I'd start with the strong observation…

That is really not an OK answer. The idea that there is an 'absolute' involved indicates a reference of sorts, that is what makes it absolute. Labelling notes will distribute them along a bell curve and the dead center of that bell curve may or may not be the exact note. People with absolute pitch are able to do this exactly and that is what makes it interesting, that implies a reference to some standard, presumably…

There are numerous problems with your response; I suggest reading up on the actual biophysical experiments done with people with absolute pitch to get a better idea on the details of what absolute pitch means.

It's not exactly; most people with AP can do, at best, note labelling. A much smaller group can identify pitches (frequencies) but then only with 1hz resolution around 440.

I don't mean to imply in these discussions that I'm an expert on absolute pitch- but I have a PhD in biophysics and we covered signal transduction in our classes.

I think sitting around speculating that there's some absolute pitch reference in people's head that works better because of genetic mutations is probably not the right path to go down. Because (almost) everybody has those pitch references (hair cells) and they're almost all equally functional (some mutations probably lead to slightly better or worse response).

I don't really follow all the parts about the bell curve other than to say most physical phenomena like this exhibit distributions that resemble gaussians, but that isn't really an indicator of the mechanism.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#44

Post by JoeAltmaier »

dekhn wrote: post #42
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm not making myself clear. The ability to learn this accurately is not the same for everyone. Those that can, are said to have 'perfect pitch'. What makes them different? Not just the learning - as suggested, maybe that's teachable (but probably not, look at all the advanced music students that never learn). But the speed and facility are not teachable - that came with the person. Which is about the same as…

I wish I could answer your question with some level of authority, but nobody knows the answer. The general problem of how people transduce signals into information, why it's efficient for some people, and to what level people can escape genetic determinism is one of the prevailing questions in biological science. As for appeal to authority: completely appropriate in this case since it's a highly technical issue with…

The trouble with appeal-to-authority is when its used to shut down discussion, e.g. 'before you say any more you have to be as smart as me' which isn't educational, helpful or honest.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#45

Post by morkfromork »

mrunkel wrote: post #10

Ahh the good old days. I remember writing a program in 6502 assembler that could record and playback a digital sample, all using the speaker on the Apple ][+. I'm not sure if I also connected a microphone or if I just yelled at the speaker. I believe the max I could record was about 7 seconds before I ran out of memory. But it worked and I was happy and proud. :) I remember being amazed how i'd spent so many hours co…

There was an Apple ][ program in an issue of Nibble Magazine that could sample audio from the cassette port, save to disk and play.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#46

Post by vvillena »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #26
ajmurmann wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"[...]a built in boot sound on your machine which felt so good on Macs[...]" Ever since I got my first iBook in college I've had mainly negative associations with that sound. Too frequently you'd open the thing in the middle of a lecture with 100+ people in the room and the sound starts blasting. The only solution I found was plugging in headphones so that the sound would go there instead.

As I recall, if you muted the sound before shutting down it would stay muted and not play the startup sound. My Mac experience starts at the white iBook G3 running OSX 10.2 though, so it could be that this behaviour is a new thing. I now have a 13" TouchBar MacBook Pro and it makes a sound when I plug the charger in no matter what I do to the volume settings. When I have it muted and open I can actually see it unmute…

You could also press a certain button on the keyboard (I don't remember which) to ensure no boot sound is played. I'm not sure if this feature is still there.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#47

Post by dekhn »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #44
dekhn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could answer your question with some level of authority, but nobody knows the answer. The general problem of how people transduce signals into information, why it's efficient for some people, and to what level people can escape genetic determinism is one of the prevailing questions in biological science. As for appeal to authority: completely appropriate in this case since it's a highly technical issue with…

The trouble with appeal-to-authority is when its used to shut down discussion, e.g. 'before you say any more you have to be as smart as me' which isn't educational, helpful or honest.

I understand why some people don't like it. I don't mean it to shut down discussion but once I reach the pooint where hackers are presupposing a mechanism that isn't consistent with the modern understanding, I'm going to encourage people to learn to do the research on their own.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#48

Post by AstralStorm »

fhood wrote: post #28
userbinator wrote: post #8

The most amazing thing I've heard done with a PC speaker is in the last part of this equally amazing demo (starts at 6:37 --- the parts before have more "normal" beeper music): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y Explanation here: https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how...

Holy shit. I've never heard anything even remotely like that from a pc speaker. How the hell did they accomplish that on a 1981 pc?!?!

Disabling interrupts and eating all available CPU in handcoded assembly.

386 can do it with no tricks. And you even have some spare horsepower to dither for improved quality.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#49

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

vvillena wrote: post #46
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall, if you muted the sound before shutting down it would stay muted and not play the startup sound. My Mac experience starts at the white iBook G3 running OSX 10.2 though, so it could be that this behaviour is a new thing. I now have a 13" TouchBar MacBook Pro and it makes a sound when I plug the charger in no matter what I do to the volume settings. When I have it muted and open I can actually see it unmute…

You could also press a certain button on the keyboard (I don't remember which) to ensure no boot sound is played. I'm not sure if this feature is still there.

I believe you could hold the mute button to do this. I don't think the feature is there on mine, the TouchBar probably comes on way too late in the boot process.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#50

Post by AstralStorm »

diydsp wrote: post #7

There is a niche of 1-bit music using such creative techniques. See also: 1. Mister Beep, from Poland. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mister_Beep/ 2. Tristan Perich, from NYC. https://www.1bitsymphony.com/ 3. Noah Vawter, 1-bit Groovebox: https://web.archive.org/web/20090212172253/http://web.media....

Just like with hit points, one is all you need. Just enough lives. ;) Or in this case, high enough and stable enough frequency.
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