[NewMusic] World's tiniest clarinet solo

[Michael Zelner]

>Researchers Compress Music Files 1000 Times Smaller Than MP3s
>
>Scientists with the University of Rochester demonstrated their 
>methods by encoding a 20-second clarinet solo in less than a single 
>kilobyte.
>
>By Thomas Claburn
>InformationWeek
>April 1, 2008 06:20 PM
>
>University of Rochester researchers on Tuesday said they have come 
>up with a way to reproduce music into a computer file that's 1,000 
>times smaller than a comparable high-quality MP3 file.
>
>The researchers demonstrated their methods by encoding a 20-second 
>clarinet solo in less than a single kilobyte.
>
>The technique involved isn't an audio recording technology; rather, 
>it re-creates the clarinet solo in the same way that a player piano 
>re-creates a piano piece from a roll of punched paper. But in 
>addition to re-creating the notes, it also re-creates the way in 
>which the player played the notes.
>
>Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and 
>co-creator of the technology, suggests that perhaps the future of 
>music performance lies in reproducing performers rather than 
>recording them.
>
>Bocko and doctoral students Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling 
>programmed a computer to model clarinet fingering, breath pressure, 
>and lip pressure and to use that information to affect the sound 
>described by their model of a virtual clarinet. Postdoctoral 
>researcher Gordana Velikic and Dave Headlam, a professor of music 
>theory at the University of Rochester, also contributed to the 
>research.
>
>By using its programmed knowledge of clarinets and clarinet players, 
>Bocko's approach avoids having to sample music thousands of times a 
>second, which generates a lot of data and makes music files large.
>
>Bocko expects that his team's work will lead to more expressive 
>electronic and computer-generated music. He also anticipates that 
>the technology could be extended to generate vocals and voices more 
>naturally.
>
>The technique isn't perfect yet, but Bocko expects his music 
>synthesis algorithms will become more accurate.


<http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207001130>