Hello David,

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

You have to give us a blog about NAMM.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>I supposed I should have been doing that each evening.

Notation Software has never had a booth a NAMM, but this was my 5th or 6th visit to it, and Celeste's (my wife's) third visit with me. We walked down every isle of NAMM, as crazy as that sounds. We like to keep our eyes and ears open.

Our favorite booth at NAMM was definitely Gary Garritan's. It had a big comfy 3-person couch facing a home-like fireplace. We only got to sit and relax in it for a while because there were so many other magazine reviewers and deal makers waiting in line.

The most nostalgic booth or exhibit was Honer's 150th year anniversary museum of their harmonicas since the late 1800s. I spotted the Military Band harmonica I played as a kid and still have, dated from the 40s to 60s. Other attendees of the conference would have cited any of at least a 100 booths that had baby boomer themes such as vintage motorcycles.

For me personally, the most interesting new technology I ran into was the Synful Orchestra. It is sort of like an orchestral sample library (such as GPO) but constructed radically differently from the sample libraries have been designed over the years. Eric Lindemann starts with sound samples of various instruments. But instead of sampling individual pitches, he samples various pairwise combinations of notes, that is, note intervals. But he doesn't sample all possible combinations, because that would be a huge number. Instead, he takes samples of just some of all of these possibilities. These interval samples are "phrases". (I'm not sure whether the original samples include more than two notes.) After doing these samples, Eric highly condenses the wave information for all of these phrases into an amazingly small 32Mb. I can hardly imagine how that is possible. Then, for playback, the Synful Orchestra "reconstructs phrases" for the specific sequences of notes in the score. It does this with an amazing degree of realism. I didn't hear the examples long enough to form any personal opinion about how well this phrase reconstruction approach compares to the traditional sampling approach. Intuitively, in seems that 32Mb of sound library information couldn't possibly produce the same quality sound as sample libraries that are 10, 100, or 1000 times as large. Yet, the fact that this phrase reconstruction approach takes into account note intervals, not just isolated note samples, suggests to me that it might offer musical expression that might even be lacking in single note sampling. I was quite fascinated by this.

Well, that is such a tiny glimpse of NAMM. I could write a couple hundred paragraphs like these, but you all might rather have me hurry home and write a couple hundred more pages of programming code.

Cheers
-- Mark