Jagannathan Sampath: The War on Sines!
Date: Wednesday, 30th of April at 7pm

Jagannathan Sampath is a software writing nomad. In the beginning, he wrote software for computer games and film special effects. Then, about 8 years ago, he learnt to program computers to make sounds and started writing DIN Is Noise, a musical instrument for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. Now, he is on tour giving talks, demonstrations and workshops on DIN Is Noise and also teaches how to make your own software musical instruments using C++. During this tour, if you host him anywhere in the world, he will offer you a free, lifetime license of DIN Is Noise.

Jag talks about sound as perception of vibrations in the air, no vibrations = no sound, need for a vibrator, loudspeaker as a vibrator, sending numbers to make the loudspeaker vibrate at different rates and amounts to make musical pitches & volumes, computer sound making as a problem of going from one number to another very fast, eg., 0 to 1 to -1 to 0 and so on; computer animation too is a similar problem, can we use Bezier curves to go smoothly from one number to another and send them to the sound card? Yes! Bezier waveforms are born. Can Bezier curves model a sine waveform? Do they sound the same? Yes! Can Bezier curve waveforms replace sine waveforms on carriers and modulators in frequency and amplitude modulation? Yes! How about Bezier curves for free form sound envelopes and get rid of the ADSR meme from the analog world? Yes! Jag will also discuss using just the computer mouse and keyboard to make high quality music, central Asian bowed string instruments, Indian classical music, masses of droned tones and and finally, wonder if a closed, continuous and connected shape can become a waveform. Jag will use DIN Is Noise to illustrate the talk.