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audio posts

Fourier's Finches: A Primer on Digital Audio

As far as I know, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier never took an interest in birds, but he was a legendary mathematician who’s work enabled our modern techniques for digital audio. Fourier discovered a mathematical transformation that converts a time signal into a frequency signal. This would let us, for example, record a finch’s birdsong and decompose it to find the major frequencies. This would be useful for compressing the audio file. By studying the anatomy of the ear, you can throw away all the frequencies that the ear wouldn’t hear anyway.

Piano ♪

To start the decade off right, I decided to learn the piano. I am paying for lessons from Ethan Maier, he’s excellent, I’ve been enjoying learning from him and practicing. Since I only have a piano at home, I wanted to make one that I could use on the go. Here is the simplest way I could think of to make a portable piano program: There is an standard for simple web graphics called SVG, which lets you define custom shapes that show up in any web browser.