sampling

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A short side-by-side demo of a large image loading over a slow connection in JPEG, progressive mozjpeg, JPEG XL and AVIF. It shows how each codec renders partial data.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.

A short clip of Venetian Snares' track 'Look' from Songs About My Cats (2001), shown as a spectrogram. The audio encodes an image in its frequency content.

A King of the Hill clip in which Hank-style character rants about saving images as PNG instead of JPEG after exporting from Windows Paint.

A condensed rendition of a project that re-uploaded one video to YouTube 1000 times, showing the accumulating compression artifacts. It pays homage to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.

A short demonstration of radioteletype (RTTY), a digital communication mode used in amateur radio, showing what the signal sounds like.

The official 1986 music video for Paranoimia by Art of Noise featuring the computer-generated TV personality Max Headroom. It is a synth-pop and sampling-era piece of 80s pop culture.