New photo galleries with pics from 2007 are now available at my homepage: http://taivo.net/photogalleries_eng.html
Tag - Art
Sunday 16 December 2007
Book: Musimathics, Vol 1, by Gareth Loy
By Taivo Lints on Sunday 16 December 2007, 16:31
A book, published in 2006, about the mathematical and physical foundations of music. It covers musical representation, scales, tuning, intonation, physical basis of sound, geometrical basis of sound, psychophysical basis of sound, introduction to acoustics, vibrating systems, composition and methodology (including a glimpse of less usual approaches like using artificial neural nets).
In general, I really like this kind of book about sound and music that has a solid scientific background. Unfortunately in this specific book the background is not as solid as I was hoping. While reading it, especially the physics section, I quite often had problems like: "Er... am I not getting it or what? No, wait, it can't be like that. Damn, it must be wrong in the book!" And sure enough, there ARE errors in abundance. For a list of errors known to Gareth Loy himself, see: http://www.musimathics.com/Errata.html
The other problem was that occasionally the book was not written very clearly and / or captivatingly for me... (plus the feeling that in order to explain those concepts to somebody with a humanities background (who are clearly included in the target audience), the explanations should be significantly different). Though that was not a major problem for me: I still read through the whole book and got a lot of information out of it.
In conclusion, as much as I would have liked to, I cannot suggest this book as a very good one on this topic. There are other books available about the basis of sound and music, and I suspect some of those may have a more solid science and better explanations in them, but I haven't read any others, so I can't say for sure. Also, there's some hope that Musimathics itself will be revised in future editions.
More info at the book's homepage: http://www.musimathics.com/
and at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262122820/
Sunday 14 October 2007
Estonian sunset
By Taivo Lints on Sunday 14 October 2007, 20:37
(click on pic to see full size)
A digital painting I made recently. It is supposed to show how nice are Estonian (or Nordic, in general) sunsets and how good a place it is for a scientist to sit in fresh air and think about the research without being disturbed by anybody, but still having a wireless internet connection (almost all of Estonia is covered).
If you wonder why the heck I would make such a picture, it was actually for an Estonian computer drawing contest "Draw me a scientist". As I'm not very good at drawing people (yes, I know, I should practice), I decided to minimize the "scientist" part on the picture. Probably not a very good idea from the competition viewpoint -- I didn't get any prize :) But I enjoyed the painting process anyway. Maybe I'll remove the scientist and laptop from the pic, when I have some time for it.
Tools: ArtRage 2.2 Free, Wacom Graphire4 A6, and my almighty self-assembled PC.
Friday 1 December 2006
Water Elephant
By Taivo Lints on Friday 1 December 2006, 19:51
Once I was walking on Roosisaare bridge near lake Tamula (Võru, Estonia) and saw swans, fed by children. I entertained myself with the idea that those are the heads of submerged elephants :D
Later, to avoid forgetting that funny idea, I made a quick image hack. Though, I wasn't particularly aiming at representing the elephantness, but rather just tried to make something interesting, and so the pic ended up being a mix of swan, panda bear, fish, elephant and whatnot.
The original photo is made by Kiss Zoltán and is available at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/239731