Then, says Bocko, it's a matter of letting the computer 'listen' to a real clarinet performance to infer and record the various actions required to create a specific sound. They modeled how a clarinet player interacts with the instrument including the fingerings, the force of breath, and the pressure of the player's lips to determine how they would affect the response of the virtual clarinet. The team then set about creating a virtual player for the virtual clarinet. They then built a computer model of the clarinet, and the result is a virtual instrument built entirely from the real-world acoustical measurements. Two of Bocko's doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, worked with Bocko to measure every aspect of a clarinet that affects its sound-from the backpressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way sound radiates from the instrument. In replaying the music, a computer literally reproduces the original performance based on everything it knows about clarinets and clarinet playing. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music.' 'Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. 'This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music,' says Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology. The achievement, announced today at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing held in Las Vegas, is not yet a flawless reproduction of an original performance, but the researchers say it's getting close. The music, a 20-second clarinet solo, is encoded in less than a single kilobyte, and is made possible by two innovations: recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player. Researchers at the University of Rochester have digitally reproduced music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file. Virtual performance using Bocko's new compression.Human performance recorded using MP3 format.

Mp3 file compressor