I am often contacted by prospective and actual users of Factorsynth who are curious about how it works and how it fits into the current (October 2020) landscape of machine learning (ML) technologies. Does it need lots of training data? Can it separate full instruments? Is it a neural network? Is it AI? With this…

Pitch, intensity, timbre and time. These are the four properties that are often cited as compositional parameters of a sound event. There is a fifth element whose mention is much less common, and whose use was anecdotal until well into the 20th century: space. Before the advent of recording and amplification techniques, composers experimented with…

In May 1957, Max Mathews and his research team at Bell Labs in New Jersey loaded the trunk of a car with several boxes containing thousands of punched cards, the prevailing computer storage format at the time. His goal was to take the data to be processed by the powerful IBM 704 computer, which occupied…