audio experiment

A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.

A Google I/O 2013 talk by Android audio engineers on why reliable, low-latency audio is hard on the platform. It covers problem areas across the stack, platform work underway and techniques apps can use.

Timur Doumler's CppCon 2015 talk on how C++ is used in the audio industry. It covers the patterns and tools audio developers rely on, including handling real-time constraints.

A Justin Bieber song slowed down 800% with the PaulStretch program, turning a pop track into a long ambient drone.

A short animated lesson, featuring Dr. Quantum, on the double slit experiment and how observing electrons seems to change their behavior.

Veritasium visits Richard Lenski's lab to explain the decades-long E. coli evolution experiment, which asks how repeatable evolution is and shows bacteria evolving to use a new food source.

Monty Montgomery of Xiph.org gives real-time demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit depth and dither using real audio equipment, including both digital analysis tools and vintage analog bench gear. It shows that sampled audio is not stair-stepped and corrects common misconceptions about digital audio.

Techmoan demonstrates the Tefifon, a vintage German audio player that combines elements of record and tape with a grooved elastic loop. He shows how it works and plays it.

Smarter Every Day shares a binaural audio recording of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch made by Trevor Mahlmann, with explanations of the sounds including the sonic booms of the landing boosters. It is meant to be heard with headphones.

A social experiment in which an 18-year-old woman runs a Tinder profile as a man and sees how differently the dating experience plays out for men.

Adobe's VoCo demo from the MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele, showing software that changes words in a voiceover by typing new ones.

Veritasium revisits Thomas Young's original double slit experiment with light, showing how interference supports the wave nature of light. It uses a pond-wave demonstration to explain the pattern.

Excerpts from W. Edwards Deming's Red Bead Experiment, where workers draw beads from a bowl and are judged on red ones that are largely down to chance. It shows how system variation, not individual effort, drives results.

A short experiment dissolving the aluminum of a Coca-Cola can with drain cleaner to reveal the clear plastic film lining inside.

A Swedish fiber provider's short experiment in which volunteers wear Oculus Rift headsets that add lag to their view of real life. They try to do everyday tasks like making pancakes.

Washington Post video of the experiment in which violinist Joshua Bell played incognito at a D.C. metro station. It asks whether commuters would notice a world-class musician in an ordinary setting.

A two-minute sine tone sweeping exponentially from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, covering the human hearing range at constant acoustic pressure.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

Guitarist Jim Lill methodically tests what in an electric guitar affects its tone, swapping parts on a partscaster and even trying a 2x4 body. He finds that wood and construction matter far less than people assume.

A hidden-camera social experiment in a park where three people try to steal a bike in the open: a white teenager, a black teenager and a young woman. It records how bystanders react to each.

A BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where the same audio sounds like different syllables depending on the mouth movements you see. It shows that people integrate visual speech information into what they hear.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.

GoldenSound publishes music on Tidal to test MQA, a deep dive into the format's claims and problems including its leaky filter. Testing begins around the 5:45 mark.

A Seeker short documentary on a lab where robots run experiments with almost no human intervention, covering automation and active machine learning in drug discovery and synthetic biology.

A roughly one-minute TV clip in which a guest accidentally breaks a rare, one-of-a-kind wax cylinder recording on camera.

AlphaPhoenix builds a scaled-down version of the Veritasium electricity thought experiment using about a kilometer of wire and an oscilloscope. He measures how the signal actually propagates and explains the result.

Sebastien Bubeck presents the Sparks of AGI paper at MIT, showing early experiments with GPT-4 across many domains and asking whether artificial intelligence has arrived. It includes the TikZ unicorn example.

Techmoan's beginner introduction to the compact cassette, testing metal tapes and Dolby S noise reduction on a Sony TC-S1 deck. He checks whether a cassette can sound close to a CD when good tape and equipment are used.

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

Technology Connections experiments with filtering white and colored LEDs to make holiday lights look less garish. He explains why narrowband LED strings look harsh compared with incandescent bulbs.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

The official audio of Leonard Cohen's 'Everybody Knows' from the album I'm Your Man.

Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 spoken-word piece, in an official audio upload. It contrasts the Apollo moon program with poverty and neglect at home.

Guitarist Jim Lill spends a year testing where guitar amplifier tone comes from, swapping tubes, rectifiers and bias types. He finds that much of it can be reproduced with EQ and distortion in different orders.

A 12-minute film in which Erlang's creators demonstrate the language's fault tolerance and live-system features, including phoning each other to show it working. This version has fixed audio.

Shahriar of The Signal Path tears down and experiments with Keysight's UXR real-time oscilloscope, which offers 110GHz bandwidth and 256GS/s sampling, and compares architectures from Keysight, LeCroy and Tektronix.

A BBC Earth clip from Super Powered Owls in which the team uses sensitive sound equipment to compare owl flight with other birds. It shows why owls fly almost silently.

Musician Benn Jordan explains and demonstrates adversarial noise that poison-pills music files against AI training and scraping.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build cheap, high-performance flat-panel speakers using audio exciters on sheet materials such as foam-core board. It explains how distributed-mode speakers work and walks through experiments to find good designs.