Pitch correction in Music

It is long known that popular singer's vocals are pitch corrected through software. I mean off-key notes are adjusted. Yes technology can do wonders!

Computer Software is changing the way musicians create, record, and manipulate music. Software called Music Objects Recognition (MOR) can dynamically adjust music elements like harmony, tempo, melody, etc. and can even emulate human performance on the piano..!

Dr. Andy Hildebrand, Inventor of Autotune

Loudness war: over-compression in music

Ten minutes after you start listening to your favourite music album, you feel that something isn't right. Even though you love this album, you can't listen to it anymore. You shut it off, tired, puzzled, and confused.

This always seems to happen when you switch from a classic album to a modern one. What you've just experienced is something called over-compression of the dynamic range. Welcome to the loudness war.

Deciphering Indus Valley Civilization

Indus Valley is the largest among all the ancient civilizations that existed around 4500 years ago, spread in region of what is now the modern day Pakistan, Afghanistan, and northern parts of India. Interestingly, Indus Valley Script is the world's oldest script that still remains undeciphered. Recently, I came across this awesome TED talk on "Computing a Rosetta stone for Indus Valley Script". Here is the link: 

Determining the distance to a star cluster

How to determine the distance to a star cluster using its H-R diagram?

Background and Need

Having covered the background on Star Clusters, H-R diagram, Main sequence and the need to study star clusters in our previous article on estimating the age of a cluster, we will discuss about ZAMS. Zero-Age Main Sequence (ZAMS) is the locus of all newly formed stars main sequence (MS) stars on the H-R diagram of a cluster – forming a boundary to the lower left of the main sequence.

Idea

Ideas and Mathematical tools

IEEE Medal of Honor for the year 2007 goes to Prof. Thomas Kailath for "exceptional development of powerful algorithms in the fields of communications, computing, control and signal processing".

How can one work and contribute at highest level in so many varied fields? What is his recipe for success?

Estimating age of a star cluster

How can we determine the age of a star cluster using its H-R diagram.

Solving Sudoku - Tactics part 2

Continuing with the tactics for solving Sudoku from my earlier post, here is the second part of the post. Here we will discuss tactics referring to level 2 and 3. For legend and terminologies please refer the earlier post.

Superb Moon

All of us heard about the recent super moon phenomenon that took place on March 19 2011. Yes, I too witnessed the event late in the might and here is one of my pic.

Solving Sudoku - tactics

Sudoku, the puzzle of this decade,  is quite a fun to solve.!
But if you find it boring and think it is fun only as long as one can solve it.. then do take my word..

"Sudoku is lot more fun to solve when it gets harder, but only if you have the right tactics and solving strategies."

Over the next few weeks we will discuss solving tactics of varying levels and difficulties starting from the easiest to the difficult ones. We will only discuss the tactics for 3x3 sudoku ppuzzle..But before we start on that, I have a few points to make:

Calculate the day of any date

Do you want to know How to calculate the day of any given date off hand?

Then read on..

For any given date, there is a simple workable formula to calculate the corresponding day. Since for most of the times we would work with dates in 20th and 21st century, So let me just limit myself to explain a simple formula that would work for these 200 years!

Naming the days of the week

How are Days of the week named?

Continuing with the last post of why there are 7 days in a week, here I will try to elucidate the idea behind the naming and the order of the days in a week. This was the method used in the olden times (Babylonian civilization) to arrive at the names for the days and their order.

7 days in a week

Many civilizations and religions have the concept of 7 days making a week. Is there any astronomical significance for this (7 days in a week)? How come all civilizations chose exactly to have 7 days in a week?

I had asked the very same question to Dr.S.Balachandra Rao of the Gandhi Center at the M.P.Birla Research Foundation. (Some of you might know him as the mathematics professor & HOD and former principal of National College).

He is an exponent in the subject of calendars and has authored many books. Link to all his books (both math and astronomy) is provided here.

Age of the universe

How do they calculate the age of the universe

Hubble constant (Ho) is used to estimate the age of the universe..

How Do They Do It..

This is how...