home



  bio



  works



  cv



  software






  technology       >> pointers



  protecting your  >> hearing
Dr. Christopher J. Keyes - software

IMPORTANT: Except for the standalones, none of this software will run unless you install the language in which it was written. So go to the good folks at Cycling74.com and download the Free Max 6 Runtime for your operating system. To run the real-time graphics programs, Windows users will also need a full install of Apple's Quicktime, which is good to have anyway.
FREE Max 6 Runtime
Pedagogical software
Tell me, and I may forget. Show me, and I will remember. Involve me, and then, I will understand.. -Confucius

 - Acoustics Playground
This little program is intended to help students understand the principles of sound and acoustics by them hearing and seeing (via a real-time sonogram) different sounds, their spectra, and the results of filtration on their spectra. Sound sources include:
  - a sweepable sine tone
 - pink noise
 - a buildable harmonic series (complete with musical  notation!) and
 - a sound player for uncompressed audio.
Although it comes with some sounds, there is a 'open soundfile folder' button that will then populate a menu so that you can go back and forth between different sounds without always having to 'read' and choose.
Filters include
 - a time-domain 2-pole filter with all the standard curves and
 - a frequency-domain 256 band FFT filter.
For Mac OS 10.4 and higher you can download a standalone application here

 - Decibels4U

For many musicians, understanding decibels, and the logarithmic curve on which they (and our hearing) is based can be a "head-scratcher". This especially the case considering decibels are always a comparison of one thing to another and that comparison relies on a 'reference' that changes (dramatically) when you compare different things. Thus 0 dB SPL (sound pressure levels) is very, very quiet, yet 0 dB FS (digital) is as loud as the system can possibly get. So this little utility attempts to show this graphically, and allows you to see just what a 12 dB increase in voltage really means, in volts.


Intermedia software
- Intermedia Digital Arts HyperInstrument (IDAH)

This software turns motion into music and images in real-time. Here's a shot of IDAH in action at the 2007 Innovation Expo Hong Kong:
For Mac OS 10.4 and higher you can download a standalone application here
Both Mac (using Quicktime) and PC (using DirectX) versions are
included in the same folder - throw away the one you don't need.
- ArtsSync

Featured in Electronic Musician Magazine (August 2008) ArtsSync is software for correlating stereo audio and 2D visual elements. It contains some rather sophisticated elements for image creation and processing, whose level of musical control is, according to one reviewer, “mind boggling” . ArtsSync employs several audio analysis methods, the results of which are normalized and applied to an elaborate bus system, which can be called upon to control virtually any aspect of image creation and manipulation.





- SIHyper-I
like IDAH (above) but adds sonification capabilities For Mac OS 10.4 and higher you can download a standalone application here

Digital Audio Signal Processing software
For the time being, please visit the following link for all (free) DSP software:
http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~lamer/download.html

 - Granulizer

Performs granulization on sound from the a-to-d converters or to a soundfile that you load in. The transposition window allows you to transpose each of the 8 grains to different levels, independent of time.