A file even smaller than an MP3

According to this press release from the University of Rochester, researchers there have discovered how to reproduce music in a format that is close to 1000 times smaller than an mp3. The researchers built a virtual clarinet, making it as accurate as possible by painstakingly researching all the details that make the instrument sound the way it sounds, as well as making a virtual musician to play it, conducting similar tests on how different variables in the musicians such as how hard they blow affect the sound.

Although if you listen to them back to back (and don’t cheat and look at the URLs) it’s fairly easy to tell which is the real and which is the reproduction, it’s still a fairly impressive recreation.

From the press release – “”We are still working on including ‘tonguing,’ or how the player strikes the reed with the tongue to start notes in staccato passages,” says Bocko. “But in music with more sustained and connected notes the method works quite well and it’s difficult to tell the synthesized sound from the original.”

As the method is refined the researchers imagine that it may give computer musicians more intuitive ways to create expressive music by including the actions of a virtual musician in computer synthesizers. And although the human vocal tract is highly complex, Bocko says the method may in principle be extended to vocals as well. “