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Hello Raspberry Boom!

Last week I finally received my Raspberry Boom I backed at kickstarter a few months ago. The Raspberry Boom is an infrasound measurement device for measuring inaudible low-frequencies in atmospheric and man-made events such as rocket launches, explosions, volcanic eruptions, storms, tornadoes, lightning, etc. The journal Physics Today just had an article on that topic.

I hooked up the boom circuit to a Raspberry Pi Zero W which is doing data collection and transmission to the global citizen science network for further analysis and data fusion, such as for earthquake detections. You can check out my station’s real-time data here.

At the moment the boom sits inside its housing on the window of my home office. I still need to find a permanent place to minimize the likelihood of it falling down and the influence of low-frequency wind turbulences.

 

 

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New Paper on Parallel Computing and Network Audio

The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (JAES) just released a special issue on network audio. It features collaborative research work on low-latency audio processing by UC Berkeley’s Parallel Computing Laboratory entitled “A Multicore Operating System with QoS Guarantees for Network Audio Applications” :

While network-based mechanisms are important to enable deterministic transport of audio data from transmitter to receiver, there is an equally important role played by the operating systems that reside in audio devices of all sizes. The applications that receive and transmit audio are dependent on these operating systems to allocate processor and input/output resources. Authors Colmenares, Peters, Eads, Saxton, Jacquez, Kubiatowitz, and Wessel have presented Tessellation, an experimental operating system tailored to multicore processors, and have demonstrated how it enables network applications to meet their stringent time requirements.

The article can be found here. It will also appear in an upcoming textbook on parallel computing.

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New Paper on SpatDIF

The latest issue of the Computer Music Journal (MIT Press) includes an article on the Spatial Sound Description Interchange Format (SpatDIF) by Trond Lossius, Jan Schacher, and myself, entitled “The Spatial Sound Description Interchange Format: Principles, Specification, and Examples”.

SpatDIF_CMJ2013

SpatDIF, the Spatial Sound Description Interchange Format, is an ongoing collaborative effort offering a semantic and syntactic specification for storing and transmitting spatial audio scene descriptions. The SpatDIF core is a lightweight minimal solution providing the most essential set of descriptors for spatial sound scenes. Additional descriptors are introduced as extensions, expanding the namespace and scope with respect to authoring, scene description, rendering, and reproduction of spatial sound. A general overview presents the principles informing the specification, as well as the structure and the terminology of the SpatDIF syntax. Two use cases exemplify SpatDIF’s potential for pre-composed pieces as well as interactive installations, and several prototype implementations that have been developed show its real-life utility.