audio production

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.

ILM shows how The Mandalorian season one used a large curved LED wall to display interactive 3D environments in camera. The video covers the virtual production setup replacing location shoots.

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.

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.

Dan Worrall explains when higher sample rates help in recording and mixing, and when they do not. He goes into oversampling versus higher sample rates, and aliasing in distortion plugins.

Floyd Toole's CIRMMT distinguished lecture on the science of sound reproduction, drawing on decades of blind listening research. It covers what listeners prefer in loudspeakers and why measured accuracy and anechoic response matter.

Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.

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

Rick Beato analyzes the music and production of Max Martin through Ariana Grande's Into You, breaking down its layering and songwriting craft.

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

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

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.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

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.

Richard Feldman describes introducing Elm into a mixed React and jQuery front-end in production, and why the result was reliable, clean and fast enough to make the back-end team jealous.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

Mick Gordon's GDC 2017 session on composing the Doom (2016) soundtrack. He details his compositional process, production techniques and the experimental instrument and synth design behind the music.

Jim Pavloff rebuilds the Prodigy track Smack My Bitch Up in Ableton, identifying the samples used and recreating the track by hand.

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 five-minute demonstration of the Shepard tone, an audio illusion made from octave-separated tones that makes pitch seem to rise endlessly without ever getting higher.

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

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 short Tracklib video visualizing the disco sample that Daft Punk's One More Time is built from. It shows how the track is composed from the original material.

Jim Pavloff rebuilds The Prodigy's 'Voodoo People' in Ableton from its listed samples. The video shows how the track is assembled and how close a handmade reconstruction can sound.

A Pitchfork TV documentary following Dan Deacon in Montana as he finishes his album Bromst. It shows the experimentation behind it, including pieces written for MIDI-driven player pianos.

A two-minute demonstration of LucasArts' iMUSE adaptive music system in Monkey Island 2. It shows music layers and transitions changing seamlessly as the player moves.

debuglive makes a 1990-style dance track on an Amiga 500 with a Stereo Master sampler and cheap secondhand records, showing how sampling and trackers worked within tight memory limits.

A Dutch Top 2000 a gogo segment in which Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) explains how The Rockafeller Skank is built, in his studio. The studio shows a long-running Atari ST setup.

Loopop reviews the Polyend Tracker hardware tracker-style sequencer and walks through a tutorial from sampling to finishing a song. It covers most of the device's features.

A tutorial in the GAS Therapy series showing how to recreate the Teenage Engineering OP-1 and OP-1 Field with free software. It argues you do not need to buy expensive gear to make music.

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.

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