Eamonn Bell

(This post originates from 2020, when it appeared in an email newsletter I was writing during my postdoc) The limits on auditory perception mean that we tend not to hear interruptions in recorded sounds if the signal is complex enough: e.g. speech or musi…

The following pages are extracted from a book by Abraham Moles, Art et ordinateur, which will be published before the end of the year [1970].

Just a short update to say that earlier this month, I visited Luxembourg to attend the 2025 annual conference of the Society for History of Technology (SHOT), which was held at the University of Luxembourg in Belval.

The MP3 moment is well understood as a decisive episode in the history of music industry (Sterne 2012), as it engendered radical changes in how music was distributed and consumed, and ultimately precipitated music streaming, which consigns listeners to the

Elsewhere, I have described how interleaving in the CD system makes those marks corresponding to events which are contiguous in the real (i.e. the sound originating in the studio) discontiguous in the symbolic (i.e. the alternating pits and lands as they…

These notes were developed in April 2022, in dialogue with Nikita Braguinski “Artificial intelligence” (AI) is the catchphrase for a variety of automatic techniques for the manipulation of computational representations.

The US-based Voyager Company realised the creative and commercial potential of optical media formats—Laserdiscs and mixed-mode CD-ROMs—for early-1990s interactive multimedia.

Notes on a section of Adorno’s long essay on “Radio Physiognomics” from his time at Princeton.

When the digital audio CD format was launched in 1982, it introduced a new paradigm for sound reproduction to the consumer market.

Around 1960, Walter Reitman of the Complex Information Processing group at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) made tape recordings with his co-investigator Marta Sánchez ‘thinking aloud’, as an unnamed experimetnal subje…

In this talk, I focus on the second movement of Nicolas Collins Broken Light, a piece for modified Discman and string quartet composed in 1991 and revised in 1992.

The potential for the systematic analysis of YouTube comments has been recognised by many researchers in fields including music information retrieval (MIR), sociology, and musical ethnography (Yadati et al. 2014; Thelwall 2018; Born and Haworth 2017).

The Voyager Company realised the creative and commercial potential of mixed-mode CD-ROMs as the platform par excellence for interactive multimedia.

I’m delighted to announce that I have been awarded an Irish Research Council (IRC) New Foundations grant for the project “Uses, reuses and abuses of the compact disc at 40: an obsolete format and/or a new opportunity for critical digital media literacy?”.

This is a response to a prompt over at the TAXIS blog, where we read the first chapter of the classic Geoffrey C.

Doing some reading for my current project (a history of the CD Audio format), I stumbled across a physical phenomenon that does not often crop up in discussions of the history of gramophone recording: the Buchmann-Meyer effect.

Short post tonight.

Update: I recently learned that box.com plans to deprecate WebDAV support in October 2019, a decision which renderse part of the workflow described here unsustainable beyond October.

This is a little helper that can be used in Python 3 to generate a set of dictionaries from a schema that specifies iterators that provide the values of the generated dictionaries.

Follows exposition in Jason Yust, “Schubert’s Harmonic Language and Fourier Phase Space.”

J is an APL-like array programming language.

A post on the Google Research blog today announced the open-sourcing of Embedding Projector, a web application for interactive visualization and analysis of high-dimensional data Over the summer, I presented work (co-authored with Jaan Altosaar) on the ap…

For a project I am currently working on using the Processing programming language, I use the provided Table class to read in data from a flat CSV file.

This post is timely given RTE’s recent publication of their analysis of social media usage during the 2016 general election in Ireland, available here.

Today I was working on getting as many YouTube comments out of the internets as was possible.

Last night, at the suggestion of a friend, I took a midi performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s Op. 2, No. 1 (a piano sonata in F minor) and squashed it all into the one octave.

It’s been while, again, since I’ve blogged.

See the GitHub repo here I suck at Python.

Download this version (R2012b a.k.a. v80) of the Matlab Compiler Runtime.

Allow me a little rant.

As a preface, I think this merits the label hack not because it’s particularly clever or well-implemented; simply it was the fastest way for me to arrive at an optimal solution for a well-defined problem.

This blog is hosted on GitHub pages.

I’m a sometime listener of John Schaefer’s New Sounds podcast.

You have to go to come back, I suppose.

A couple of nights ago I had the dubious pleasure of a musical performance at 4 a.m. in the morning, awake when ought to have been sleeping, roused precisely by the auditory phenomenon that captured my attention.

I am shamelessly quoting Daniel Dennett at length here, in his formulation of Rapoport’s Rules.

A simple way to write about modulations and the pivot chords which can help effect them using nothing but ASCII.

Reading Justin London in class this week.

I’ve kept it no secret from myself that the time is ripe to buy a new laptop.

Motivation I am, as of late, frequently in receipt of PDFs containing scanned images of text from diverse sources.

It has been a great privilege of mine to have been offered a place on an integrated masters’-doctorate programme awarded by the graduate school in the arts at Columbia University in the City of New York.

I would like to investigate the usefulness of an ‘agile’ methodology for producing academic work.

This week I’ve decided to revisit first and second year undergraduate harmony, this time through the lens of Walter Piston’s Harmony, a canonical “American” harmony textbook.

Here’s a script that brute-forces its way through the 24 operations on PLR space for sucessive pairs of chords in the reduction of a Bach chorale.

I spent some time this morning transcribing the motives that make up Terry Riley’s In C into TinyNotation so that I could use them in the creation of a script which creates scores instances of hypothetical performances of the work.

I use the vim extension vimwiki to manage a local wiki which I keep scrappy notes in, especially one-line ideas that I am liable to forget.

One of my personal goals for this year was to learn enough LaTeX to be able to typeset my undergraduate dissertation, such that it conforms with the fairly strict and idiosyncratic style guide that our department enforces for submitted work.

I have, regrettably, two Spotify accounts.

Today was spent in a typically traditional manner, home with the family and a full turkey and ham.

You know the one; as if a hundred thousand tiny pins are undulating under your skin, from the tips to the base of your spine?