Michael won Emmy nominations and PBS Viewers Choice awards for Best Entertainment Special, for his works of art Wildlife Symphony [formerly Wildlife Fantasia] set to The Magic Flute Overture by Mozart and Nature's Serenade set to Four Seasons by Vivaldi [many ooos and aaahs from the Peanut Gallery] as we watched, mesmerized by music to stir the soul, and cuddly baby animals to bring a smile to everyone, like magic!

Excellent work Michael, two paws up!

Dr. Pellegrino treated us to a marvelous lecture, quoting occasional excerpts from some of his books, including The Electronic Arts of Sound and Light.

Multimedia has origins as far back as painting faces, music, presentation, when people speak of multimedia as a new thing, they are not thinking of cave paintings. This book [Electronic Arts of Sound and Light] describes the history of 60's performance video, capturing video piping through an Amiga [reminding me of the first time I was captivated by that bright, blue baboon face part of their demo, very impressive for Commodore mother company of Amiga].

Overscan: when the black border on a regular monitor, is moved just out of viewing range on a big screen, but then again, so are the toolbars :)

The energy of a tone, comes from the breath, vibrations come from the folds of the vocal cords.

Changes in tonal quality come from physical spaces between the nose, within the chest, etc.

The three components of sound:

Amplitude
Vibration or Frequency
Wave Shift

There is an acoustic signature to every space, and every sound has an acoustic signature.

Sound is analog, continuous media. Creating compression in the air, [as he waved his hand back and forth to demonstrate] a continuous phenomenon.

Digitizing: taking samples of the wave [sampling].

44.1KHz = 44.1 thousand samples per second [average].

Oversampling: 256 times over sampling [as he showed us a graph of sound waves resembling staircases, demonstrating that as the samples are closer, the staircases appeared closer together to the origin of sound].

There was a brief discussion of stereo versus mono.

Stereo: funnels sound through left and right, allowing us to hear distinct sounds to right and left ears.

Mono: throws out half the sound, as it only uses one channel.

Cut 44[KHz] to 22[KHz] and now we are down to 25% of the signal, he exclaimed!

16-bit: 16,535 levels of sound, such as you find on a musical CD.

8-bit: 256 level, the fidelity keeps dropping.

22KHz at 8-bit mono, keeps degrading sound quality, some CD's only use 11KHz, some only 6KHz. The reason we hear something better than just distortion at those levels, he explained, is because the brain makes up the rest of the missing pattern [psycho audio].

Digidesign has 8-bit squeezed algorithm to improve even 8-bit sound, for $200.

That was about 50 hours of University Physics of Music course condensed, he informed us.

The next medium for multimedia, Digital Video Disc [DVD], will be coming in September of 1996.

With 8.5GB [gigabyte] capacity on each side, 17GB capacity coming [wow]. In a year, he proclaimed, the CDROM will be history! He went on to mention video mpeg2, stereo 44.1 or better, and reminded us that he has been working for many years raising consciousness of audio in multimedia.

He recommended a book titled The Science of Sound by Rossing.

A piano ranges from 27.5 cycles at the low end, to 4300 cycles at the high end.

Normal CD distorts all high frequency.

The graphs displayed, showed waves of sound broken down into fundamentals.

Some bozo engineers think we cannot hear high frequencies, but we can hear beyond 20,000 cycles because it beats, folds, and the brain responds. If you do not record the high frequency, it gets lost and is crucial to sound quality.

He went on to explain envelopes for frequencies and their amplitudes.

As the oral cavity changes, it creates a different spectrum by resonances in the cavity, creating resonance curves.

Color: timbre.

Formants: resonant spaces.

Resonances: collection of signatures in space.

The first formant = 300-400

The second formant = 2000-4000

There are more than two resonant spaces in the human voice. You must provide spaces or lose fidelity and quality.

Dr. Pellegrino encouraged us to look for the Quest for Audio Excellence at his web site for more details.

There was some discussion of specific products including:

Sound Designer II [with III coming soon for about $1000]
Session [a $200 package]
Sound Edit [aka squeeze, preprocessing pushes lower sounds up and vice versa]

Some menu items that appeared as the demo flew by:

Disk to Disc
Finder
GIF converter
Movie Player
Simple Text
Sound Designer II

Next we were treated to a sample of Peach Pie [which, if you will forgive my saying so, was a bit flaky] followed by a demo of Joe Sparks' Total Distortion a musical video game, very loud.

From the barely audible, to the painful extreme opposite, most multimedia, he explained, works from small to mid-range, by use of masking. The Total Distortion video, he pointed out, was a good example of masking as we could not hear any hissing during the [relatively few] quiet parts.

Clipping: distortion [an example of masking]

He gave an example of distance miking, complete with improper alignment which does not capture the sound you want.

An 11KHz sample at 8-bit sounded, well, just about as bad to my untrained pointy ears.

Fascinating graphs corresponding to sound, showed how masking could cover background distortion, now masking over the voice.