the archives

Fixing: Sustain Pedal Fail in Ableton Live – MIDI Synth sends All Notes OFF (CC123)

If you are using an old MIDI synth or keyboard with a MIDI-USB interface or an audio interface, you might have experienced this issue: When you lift the last key of a chord, or a single key, all sound dies … Continue reading

Phones and Microphones – A Piece for Smarthones and Dynamic Microphones or Magnetic Pick-ups. Score and Rollup

Phones and Microphones is a piece for Phones and Microphones in multichannel Diffusion. It also needs at least 2 laptops with ensemblists to play them. The piece was composed in 2015 by Daniel Wolff with the City University Experimental Ensemble … Continue reading

An sd-card logger monitoring 12V car battery voltage and temperature using the Arduino ProMini

More often than convenient I used to find my car battery drained and the car unable to start after a long period of disuse. In order to find out if there was a short circuit or power leak somewhere, if … Continue reading

Charging my camera battery with a smartphone – a dirty risky holiday hack

TL;DR: This small experiment shows how I used a smartphone to charge a camera battery. The method is not safe but It struck me as a great example to highlight the inaparrent compatibility between two seemingly unrelated devices. Most current … Continue reading

Beeps from Below: A late Summer Mystery

I found these sounds in a Catalan park sewer, on a very warm summer evening. The sun has just set and the park becomes quiet. Now this starts at several places. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] There are … Continue reading

Paper(ISMIR2015): Comparative Music Similarity Modelling using Transfer Learning across User Groups

We presented “Comparative Music Similarity Modelling using Transfer Learning across User Groups“, as poster at IMSIR2015 in Malaga, Spain. This paper continues the similarity modelling methods described in my PhD thesis towards their intended use for modelling and comparing user … Continue reading

The DML Project

The Digital Music Lab is an AHRC project that researches and developes an infrastructure – both in methodology as in a technical framework – for musicological research on large datasets. It furthermore provides researchers and users with datasets and computational … Continue reading

Concert: CUEE with Dirty Electronics

We (the City University Experimental Ensemble) did a great Dirty Electronics workshop and concert at City with John Richards. I now call a great small op-amp instrument (Bed of Nails) my own, and will probably be hacking it a bit … Continue reading

Concert: Phones and Microphones at Kammerklang Café Oto

I am proud to announce that the City University Experimental Ensemble (CUEE) will be performing our piece “Phones and Microphones” at Café Oto, as part of the Kammer Klang series. We will be playing with the Exaudi Ensemble, Cevdet Erek … Continue reading

A phone with a microphone

So this is what a phone does when left alone? Looking forward to perform with the City University Experimental Ensemble! [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

PhD Thesis: “Spot the Odd Song Out: Similarity Model Adaptation and Analysis using Relative Human Ratings”

Finally I managed to put almost everything I have done research on together in one volume, and here is the outcome: Authors:Daniel Wolff Music Informatics Group, City University London. download thesis Abstract: Understanding how listeners relate and compare pieces of … Continue reading

Poster(Sysmus2014): Adapting computational music similarity models to geographic user groups

We presented “Adapting computational music similarity models to geographic user groups”, as poster at Sysmus 2014 at Goldsmiths University of London. Authors:Daniel Wolff and Tillman Weyde Music Informatics Group, City UniversityLondon. dowload poster Abstract: We present first results of experiments … Continue reading

First Piezo Recordings

I’ve started building this wonderful piezo amp using the schematics and instructions from this great site . Unfortunately, I still use really bad cables (I thought using a USB cable with cut-off plugs would be a cheap way to get … Continue reading

Talk(DMRN+8): Adapting music similarity models to geographic user groups

We presented first experiments on adapting music similarity models to geographic user groups poster at DMRN+8 at Queen Mary University. Authors:Daniel Wolff, Tillman Weyde and Andrew MacFarlane Music Informatics Group, City UniversityLondon. dowload slides Abstract: We present first results of … Continue reading

Poster(DMRN+7): An online game for collecting music similarity data

We presented, “Spot the Odd Song Out”: an online game for collecting music similarity data poster at DMRN+7 at Queen Mary University. Authors:Daniel Wolff(1), Guillaume Bellec(2) and Tillman Weyde(1) (1) Music Informatics Group, City UniversityLondon. (2)École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques … Continue reading

Magnetic Resonator Guitar

This is a small experiment motivated by the Magnetic Resonator Piano. The audio features harmonics of the E-string. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] I’ve hooked up a more or less random electromagnetic coil to an old cassette player … Continue reading

Audio: Experiment Excerpt 1

Starting jams again, here one some rough excerpt (5 out of 45min) from my experimental music jam with Andrea (see herefor his stuff) and Lorenzo. Hope someone’s enjoying this!

GAME: Spot The Odd Song Out

In a collaboration with Guillaume Bellec at ENSTA Paristech, we have developed “Spot The Odd Song Out”, a music game on Facebook. The fast-paced multi-player game allows users to explore new music, based on their favourite genre. The researchers use … Continue reading

Sounds: Smartphone EM fun

I had fun using my SM57 as an electromagnetic pickup for my smartphone processor. Using the recording as raw material I made just little adjustments and doubled the track into stereo by using the frequency range recorded at 22-44kHz (which … Continue reading