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That strange phenomenon where air molecules bounce against each other in a way that somehow comforts you, makes you cry, or makes you dance all night: music. Since the advent of recorded audio, a musician doesn't even need to be present anymore for this to happen (which makes putting "I will always love you" on repeat a little less awkward). Musicians and sound engineers have found many ways of creating music, and making it sound good. Some of their methods have become industry staples used on every recording released today. Let's look at what they do and reproduce some of their methods in Ruby!
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In his presentation at RubyConf 2022, Thijs Cadier explores the intricate relationship between music and programming by demonstrating how sound can be understood and manipulated through Ruby. The talk emphasizes how technology has fundamentally changed music, particularly with the evolution from live performances to recorded audio. Cadier outlines several key components that define music and highlights how Ruby can replicate industry-standard audio processing techniques. **Key Points Discussed:** - **Understanding Music:** - Music as audio involves sound waves traveling through air, interpreted by our brain to create musical experiences. Cadier introduces fundamental musical concepts: - **Pitch:** Frequency of sound waves; lower pitches (like bass) and higher pitches (like violins). - **Timbre:** The unique quality of sound, illustrated by instrument varieties that contribute to musical depth. - **Tempo:** The rhythm created from silence and sound interspersing. - **Historical Context:** - Cadier provides a brief timeline leading to modern digital audio, starting with Edison’s wax cylinders, Berliner’s discs, and the transition to magnetic tapes; ultimately culminating in digital music with CDs and computer technology. - **Using Ruby for Audio Processing:** - He introduces the wave file gem, a Ruby library for reading and writing WAVE files, serving as a tool for sound manipulation. - **Audio Amplification:** Demonstrates amplifying sound samples and warns about clipping, which creates harsh distortion when signal peaks exceed allowed levels. - **Mixing:** Merging audio tracks to enrich soundscapes, illustrated with an example combining two tracks. - **Compression:** Reducing sound peaks for a balanced audio mix, common in radio and popular music. - **Sound Synthesis:** - Cadier discusses synthesizer sounds and the generation of noise, square waves, sine waves, and their combinations to create complex auditory textures and chords. - **Fourier Transforms:** Encouraged for recognizing sound patterns, proving valuable for understanding complex sounds. - **Final Remarks:** Cadier concludes with an example showcasing how basic waveforms can result in intricate musical pieces, and shares that he has created a cover of a song using samples generated during the talk. Overall, the presentation effectively merges music theory with programming, empowering participants to grasp sound production techniques using Ruby.
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