sampling

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.

Nate Harrison's 2004 video history of the Amen Break, a six-second drum sample from a 1969 b-side that became the basis of hip-hop sampling, jungle and drum and bass. It is also a meditation on cultural ownership and creativity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

John Rauser's Strata 2014 keynote argues that programmers can learn statistics quickly by simulating random processes and shuffling data. He explains p-values through resampling rather than formulas.

Michael Betancourt's lecture at MLSS Iceland 2014 on efficient Bayesian inference with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. It covers MCMC concepts and motivation and the problems of sampling in high-dimensional distributions.

Jake Vanderplas's PyCon 2016 talk shows how sampling-based methods such as simulation, shuffling and bootstrapping make statistics intuitive. His pitch is that if you can write a for-loop, you can do statistics.

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.

Numberphile interviews Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown about Bertrand's paradox, where different reasonable ways of picking a random chord of a circle give different probabilities.

AlphaPhoenix shows off a new camera that films at two billion frames per second and uses it to film a laser pointer pulse. He investigates a strange quirk in how the speed of light appears on camera.

3Blue1Brown's animated visual introduction to the Fourier Transform, showing how a signal breaks into frequency components.

Reducible's visual walkthrough of the Fast Fourier Transform, motivated by polynomial multiplication. It shows how the FFT's key ideas can be discovered by asking the right questions.

The first of four short videos from Bill Hammack (engineerguy) introducing and giving the history of a 100-year-old mechanical computer, Michelson's harmonic analyzer. The series goes on to explain Fourier synthesis, analysis and operation of the machine.

3Blue1Brown shows how the uncertainty principle arises from Fourier transforms. A wave packet cannot be narrow in both position and frequency, so the principle is a property of waves rather than of measurement.

Mike Pound explains the discrete cosine transform and how it underpins JPEG compression. It is part two of Computerphile's JPEG series.

David Kriesel's 31C3 talk, in German, on the discovery that Xerox scanner-copiers silently replace digits and letters in scanned documents. He explains how the bug stayed unnoticed in the wild for years.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

3Blue1Brown introduces Fourier series, from the heat equation to drawing arbitrary shapes with rotating circles. It builds a visual intuition for decomposing functions into sine waves.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

3Blue1Brown's discovery-oriented introduction to error correction codes, building up Hamming codes from the puzzle of locating a flipped bit. It explains the parity-check idea and why it is so efficient.

Veritasium tells the story of the Fast Fourier Transform, from its use in detecting nuclear tests to Cold War politics, and how it could have changed the arms race. It includes a short, intuitive explanation of what the Fourier transform does.

Technology Connections explains why the superheterodyne radio has its name and how mixing frequencies lets it tune stations well. It walks through the underlying wave phenomena and algebra and why the design solved a hard tuning problem.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

The first lecture of David MacKay's Cambridge course on information theory, pattern recognition and neural networks. It introduces the core ideas of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.

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.

Course outline for Stanford's online GNSS course, introducing how GPS works and the many uses of satellite navigation. The series pairs short lectures with backyard experiments using smartphones.

Onslaught's Bad Apple 64 is a Commodore 64 demo that streams over 2000 frames of the Bad Apple animation from a single disk side at 12fps, with each frame packed to around 70 bytes.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how floating point numbers work, why moving the binary point is fast, and why it handles money badly.

David Kriesel's FrOSCon talk on how Xerox scancopiers, due to JBIG2 compression, silently replaced digits in scanned documents. He walks through how he discovered the bug and why it is so dangerous.

3Blue1Brown uses Wordle as an excuse to teach information theory and entropy, building a solver that picks guesses by expected information and incorporating word frequencies.

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.

Edward Kmett's 2013 talk at Prezi in Budapest on succinct data structures, which store data in close to the information-theoretic minimum space while supporting fast queries. It ties together the research and walks through his Haskell succinct library.