[HN Gopher] Etude in C minor (2020)
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       Etude in C minor (2020)
        
       Author : etrvic
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2025-11-04 23:18 UTC (6 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (zserge.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (zserge.com)
        
       | macintux wrote:
       | (2020)
        
       | aappleby wrote:
       | no audio sample on the webpage?
        
       | ta2112 wrote:
       | > that's why CD music had a sample rate of 22000 Hz. Modern sound
       | cards however tend to use sampling rates twice as high - 44100 Hz
       | or 48000 Hz or even 96000 Hz.
       | 
       | Not exactly the point of the article, but this is all sort of
       | wrong. CDs use a sample rate of 44.1 kHz per channel, not 22 kHz.
       | I'd hazard this cuts down on rounding errors from having only one
       | sample per 22kHz range. DAT used 48 kHz I believe to align evenly
       | with film's 24 frames per second. 96 kHz is commonly used for
       | audio today, and the additional accuracy is useful when editing
       | samples without producing dithering artifacts within human
       | hearing range.
        
         | NobodyNada wrote:
         | CDs use 44.1kHz because your sample rate needs to be double the
         | highest frequency you want to encode to avoid aliasing
         | artifacts:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
         | 
         | 20kHz is the top of the human hearing range, and picking
         | something a little bit higher than 40kHz gives you room to
         | smoothly roll off frequencies above the audible range without
         | needing an extremely steep filter that would create a large
         | phase shift.
        
         | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
         | 44.1 was selected because it was a viable rate for recording on
         | both PAL and NTSC video recorders gently modified to capture
         | digital audio on tapes that were sent out to the mastering
         | plants. There is nothing otherwise special about it.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Discussed at the time:
       | 
       |  _How to create minimal music with code in any programming
       | language_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24940624 - Oct
       | 2020 (78 comments)
        
       | bovermyer wrote:
       | If you tell me about sound, and describe sound, and speculate
       | about sound... give me sound.
       | 
       | It's a small thing. But if you're going to say you have something
       | to say about sound, give me some sound to demonstrate your point.
        
       | p0w3n3d wrote:
       | I got this knowledge really too late, but recently I've learned
       | how the music is (was?) made on old computers like Atari 65XE or
       | NES (the same processor 6502). The amount of work specified in
       | the article above, is increased by the calculation of vsync of
       | the monitor used, and correlating it with the sound frequency.
       | This leads for example to the same game playing in different
       | tonation on PAL and NTSC. Today it's already obsolete, but the
       | emulator still has to be emulating the one or the other standard,
       | to comply with the code. Today we have great privilege to
       | abstract the sound from the monitor sync (by OS) but this is not
       | the case in some embedded devices.
        
       | ofalkaed wrote:
       | Back around the turn of the century my wifi card died when I was
       | reinstalling my system and I had no money for a new wifi card, no
       | internet at home so I ended up with a very a basic console only
       | Arch install, only audio software I had installed was SoX. I
       | started out using SoX and Bash to make music, explored Lame's
       | ability to encode anything as an mp3 and eventually discovered
       | what TFA talks about. I never made anything I would call good, it
       | just is not a method all that compatible with my interests but it
       | has stuck with me all these years and has left me feeling that
       | much of computer music has stagnated (in method, not output) and
       | we have a great deal of room to explore yet.
       | 
       | Stagnated is not quite the right word, I think what computer
       | music has been doing in the last couple decades is establish its
       | primary instruments and techniques, the various audio DSLs, which
       | is a fairly important thing musically speaking, it builds the
       | culture and repertoire. Computer music is strongly rooted in how
       | the musician interacts with the code, it is the strings of their
       | guitar and I think we have barely touched on exploring that
       | relationship yet. What is the prepared piano of computer music?
       | how do I stick a matchbook between the strings of the code or
       | weave a piece of yarn through it?
       | 
       | I hope more go back to exploring these very basic and simple ways
       | of generating sound with computers and start experimenting with
       | it, there is more out there than just ugens.
        
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       (page generated 2025-11-11 23:00 UTC)