Living in the PE side of software, with its EBITDA and other metrics, poorly researched product initiatives, senseless firefighting, and toxic bro cultures, it's nice to be reminded some of the reasons I got into this. Thank you.
“As it is, the new computational model is the first to generate realistic sound based on the laws of physics and acoustics.”
Ouch: this is completely inaccurate. Physical modeling has its roots in the 80s and Stefan Bilbao has been doing FDM based methods for over 20 years. I think he discusses fem in numerical sound sysnthesis
That's also not the case. There have been some really accurate physically-modeled instruments for at least 20 years.
Also, aschkually, a violin is on the "easier" end of making it sound realistic. It's one of the "tutorial" models you go through when you start learning about this (resonators + reverb get you 80% there). Much harder to do any plucking sound (guitar, piano), and much much harder to model percussions accurately (cymbals, drums) and in such a way that the sound doesn't come out dry and very evidently synthetic.
Source: I was very invested into this in the 2000s, although as a hobby, not professionally.
Do you know if there has been any progress on conical-bore brass? From what I recall (I did some graduate work in instrument modeling in the late 2000s) reed instruments could be modeled convincingly, but the feedback oscillator with the lip buzzing was very difficult to model.
There's eg https://summit.sfu.ca/item/11130 from a Tamara Smyth and Frederick Scott; Google scholar shows some citations but not necessarily conical brass in particular. That link is about trombones, so also not conical. (I read that and tried to implement some stuff in it, see https://nuchi.github.io/trombone/ for a browser-based playable version.)
Conical and cylindrical bores definitely differ but I don't see why they'd be different specifically with respect to the lip interaction, can you say more about that part?
It has reignited my passion for coding by making it so I don't have to use my coding muscle as much during the day to improve our technologically boring product.
As a musician, I find there are a lot of obsessions one can succumb to that can lead to mastery. There are those who are obsessed with the body and it’s perfect positioning and movement those who indulge in extensive experimentation (trying everything), those who listen to absolutely everything, those who meditatively repeat and repeat (sometimes at glacial tempi), and then there are those who collect every musical idea they can and gift listeners with only the best treasures they encounter. AI musicianship, if it is something that can be mastered, probably would rely on some combination of the above. It’s going to suck for a while, certainly, as there hasn’t been time for someone to put in their 10000 hours
I like the idea of reimagining the whole stack so as to make AI more productive, but why stop at languages (as x86 asm is still a language)? Why not the operating system? Why not the hardware layer? Why not LLM optimized verilog, or an AI tuned HDL?
Probably because then it wouldn't be software anymore. That is because you will be required to do a physical process (print an integrated circuit) in order to use the functionality you created. It can definitely be done, but it takes it too far away from the idea the author expressed.
But I don't see a reason why the LLM shouldn't be writing binary CPU instructions directly. Or programming some FPGA directly. Why have the assembly language/compiler/linked in between? There is really no need.
We humans write some instructions in English. The LLM generates a working executable for us to use repeatedly in the future.
I also think it wouldn't be so hard to train such a model. We have plenty of executables with their source code in some other language available to us. We can annotate the original source code with a model that understands that language, get its descriptions in English, and train another model to use these descriptions for understanding the executable directly. With enough such samples we will be able to write executables by prompting.
If AI is really likely to cause a mass extinction event, then non-proliferation becomes critical as it was in the case with nuclear weapons. Otherwise, what does it really mean for AI to "replace people" outside of people needing to retool or socially awkward people having to learn to talk to people better? AI surely will change a lot, but I don't understand the steps needed to get to the highly existential threat that has become a cliché in every "Learn CLAUDE/MCP" ad I see. A period of serious unemployment, sure, but this article is talking about population collapse, as if we are all only being kept alive and fed to increase shareholder value for people several orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, and with more opposable thumbs. Do people think 1.2B people are going to die because of AI? What is the economy but people?
Capitalism gives, capitalism takes. Regulation will be critical so it doesn’t take too much, but tech is moving so fast even technologists, enthusiasts and domain researchers don’t know what to expect.
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