Trevor Agus

Hearing, musical geekery, podcasts.

[BBC News NI @BBCNewsNI]

A car has been "completely destroyed" after it was set alight outside a family home, in what police are treating as a race-motivated arson attack.

https://t.co/nQac54rTnp

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

@Translink_NI, are you going to start posting updates on BlueSky too? You're literally the only reason X is on my phone!

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

@neuralreckoning ...and if science were nothing but a binary search tree through all possibilities, wouldn't that be pretty powerful? You could rule out half the possible realities with every experiment. [I don't think science is like that. My brain has broken trying to picture it.]

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

@neuralreckoning Ooh, or can't you get more than one bit of information from a single bit if the probabilities aren't even? If hypotheses were well chosen non-randomly (eg informed by pilots, experience or perhaps even models) this could be the case.

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

@neuralreckoning What if 1 bit is science on a good day? If you aim for more (with a complex design) you might get closer to 0 bits.

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

This MRI video of Charlie Wiltshire talking is really impressive! (It is overdubbed, because MRI scanners are noisy.) https://t.co/B2pEhcS0UX

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

Graph du jour

[QMUL_IntelSoundEng @IntelSoundEng]

https://t.co/2tZQ4QSf2r

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

We rarely hear one sound at a time, but we can often separate out the sounds we want to hear (and sometimes can't). Join us at SARC (Belfast) on Sat. 24th Feb. to make sense of the patterns. https://t.co/xkF1QUOtn4 @QUBMusicteam @UlsterOrchestra @RNID @ukacoustic @NIOpera

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

Can you think of singable songs with a nature theme? Tenuous links are welcomed. (We may have organised nature-themed karaoke in a hi-spec 48-loudspeaker set-up without stopping to think how many decent nature-themed karaoke numbers there are...) https://t.co/oJEGujDCSF

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

My Dad singing "O Holy Night" 50 years ago: https://t.co/tYs4fR6sfm (and my Mum is in the choir!)

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

Ooh, I like the sound of the Sound of the Year awards: https://t.co/Ylw1KLITVb

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

I find this weirdly mesmerising—it seems to be all the non-verbal sounds Steven Pinker made in a speech. https://t.co/IJRu7nxr4j

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

Here's a ghostly sound for Hallowe'en. It sounds like it goes up, but (if you can bear to re-listen) it ends up lower than it started. I'm calling it an Escher tone—a variant on the classic Shepard tone. (The topic of this morning's class was pitch perception!) @QUBMusicteam

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

It seems that we're not talking about waveforms as much as we used to. I wonder is it because we can now manipulate sounds in a computer without getting bogged down in low-level details. We see waveforms, but don't need to talk about them as much.

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

Congratulations to Krista, the EA Music Service and @UlsterOrchestra for being the Best Music Learning initiative with their minibassoons and other endangered orchestral instruments! @QUBMusicteam https://t.co/OucUYt1fZl

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

Here's a fun music memory game: https://t.co/iHV5BRf1M0 220 to beat... Note that for half of the boards, you have to match original snippets with their distorted versions.

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

@IntelSoundEng Congratulations Dr Angeliki Mourgela!

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

I just heard a transport expert refer to a non-electric bike as an "acoustic bike". I think I like it...

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

@neuralreckoning I vaguely remember reading of experiments where people tested whether you get consistent measures of sensitivity across different paradigms, and you don't! But a yes/no task and 4-alternative-forced-choice differ in ways that could affect performance.

[Trevor Agus @earcatching]

@neuralreckoning To expand a little, signal-detection theory (incl. d-prime) is all about measuring the underlying sensitivity despite the foibles of yes/no, forced-choice designs, etc.