One of the inventors of the MP3 format is back with a new technology that he hopes will revolutionize audio, creating superrealistic sound for theaters, theme parks and eventually even living rooms.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology, along with a team of co-developers, is in Los Angeles this week showing off his new "Iosono" technology to representatives of Hollywood studios and giants including Disney. Brandenburg is credited with much of the work leading to the MP3 format, also developed at Fraunhofer.

He and his team are touting their new product as true "three dimensional" audio, which can give the impression of, for example, a horse galloping through the center aisle of a movie theater, or pinpoint a noise so that it sounds exactly like a person shouting from outside theater walls. The best existing surround sound speakers can approximate this only for a small "sweet spot," perhaps a few feet wide, while the Iosono system would create the same realistic illusion for everyone in the room.

The quest to produce the ultimate realistic virtual grand piano took a big leap today with "Ivory," announced by Synthogy and distributor ILIO at Winter NAMM 2004 in Anaheim.

The secret: Synthogy's proprietary 32-bit sample-playback and digital signal processing (DSP) engine, which was specifically built from the ground up to bring out the resonance, response and character of three of the world's finest concert grands: the German Steinway D 9' Concert Grand, Bösendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, and Yamaha C7 Grand, with 20 Gigabytes (3,500 samples) digitally recorded in the finest studios and concert halls. All 88 keys of each piano were individually sampled in up to 8 dynamic levels, including the extended low octave on the Bösendorfer.

Imagine having a singer with a world-class voice at your disposal, any hour of any day. She's just standing at the ready, game to perform whatever silly song you might make up for her: a ballad about her love for you, a tribute to your best friend's golf game, a stirring rendition of the evening's dinner menu.

Close friends of Madonna or Mariah may already have had that pleasure, but for everyone else a new technology called Vocaloid may offer the next best thing. Developed at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and financed by the Yamaha Corporation, the software, which is due to be released to consumers in January, allows users to cast their own (or anyone else's) songs in a disembodied but exceedingly life-like concert-quality voice.

Just as IBM's Deep Blue showed the world a computer can play chess as well as a human master, Eduardo Reck Miranda, a researcher for the Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc., aims to demonstrate a computer program able to compose original music. So far, neural networks have succeeded in imitating distinct musical styles, but truly original compositions have remained elusive. Miranda is tackling that problem with an orchestra of virtual musicians — called agents — that interact to compose original music.

Mathematician Strives to Teach PCs to Play Accompaniment
— Could a computer ever play music as well as a human musician?

Some would argue that computers already far surpass any human performer when it comes to producing pristine tunes. Music described in the absolute digital code of ones and zeros guarantees that a computer will play a particular score the same way every time.
But for Christopher Raphael, an accomplished oboist, such an unyielding musical performer would hardly be an ideal partner for a human musician to practice and possibly perform with. The human player would always have to conform to the computer's pace of performance, for example, and thus stifling the individual's musical interpretation.