Tuning Renaissance and Baroque Instruments: Some Guidelines

The Art of Renaissance and Baroque Eras

Book Reviews: "Musical Instruments: History, Technology, and Performance of Instruments of Western Music." by Murray Campbell, Clive Greated and Arnold Myers, and "From Renaissance to Baroque: Change in Instruments and Instrumental Music in the Seventeent

Book Reviews: "Musical Instruments: History, Technology, and Performance of Instruments of Western Music." by Murray Campbell, Clive Greated and Arnold Myers, and "From Renaissance to Baroque: Change in Instruments and Instrumental Music in the Seventeenth Century: Proceedings of the National Early Music Association Conference held, in association with the Department of Music, University of Yor...

Some Interactive Tools for Examining Renaissance Ciphers

This paper describes interactive tools for exploring the ciphers in Johannes Trithemius’ Steganographia (1500). These tools have been implemented on the website Trithemius Redivivus (http://trithemius.com) and provide capabilities to (1) apply Trithemius’ cryptographic techniques on any text, (2) display letter-frequency histograms of the output, and (3) rank the outputs according to their rela...

Fine Tuning Multi-Channel Compression Hearing Instruments

instruments are devices that provide independent non-linear signal processing in many discrete frequency regions. Multichannel capability allows wearers to understand speech better in certain noisy environments. For example, in pediatric fittings, it helps them to monitor their own voice and assists in their speech production. For the dispensing professional, the capabilities of multi-channel i...

Entropy-based Tuning of Musical Instruments

The human sense of hearing perceives a combination of sounds ‘in tune’ if the corresponding harmonic spectra are correlated, meaning that the neuronal excitation pattern in the inner ear exhibits some kind of order. Based on this observation it is suggested that musical instruments such as pianos can be tuned by minimizing the Shannon entropy of suitably preprocessed Fourier spectra. This metho...