Welcoming [The Doug] back to the lab, Stuart demonstrates his latest research in music information processing. He's managed to represent structural musical information using the medium of taste. Remember, you saw it here first. Just another ground-breaking first for the Glasgow CMT team.

Late news really, but on the blog in time for Christmas.

[Graham Hair], Composer, formally Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow has become Professor Emeritus and accepted a position as senior research fellow in my group in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. Not many people can make that kind of jump! As you can see from the video below, he's settled in to the Electronics Department ethos immediately, and is surrounded by computers of diverse vintage.

Click the play button to hear Graham telling us about the famous Italian Tenor, Luciano Pavarotti.

Our friend John is a fine chef, and a great physicist. Anybody who has amongst his published papers one entitled "Is the electron a photon with a toroidal topology?" has my respect. The undergraduates have obviously read it, because he's affectionately known as "Dr Who" at work. Or perhaps it's the hair style. His other nickname is "Captain Electron"! Anyway, on 5th October, Rosi, my sister-in-law, ran the Great North Run and raised over £1600 for [Bobath Scotland] (see her [Running for Rufus] page). Kate went to stay with Steve and Spider in Durham, and I stayed at home to look after the kids.

Steve is a very generous fellow, and he gave me a pack of Kopi Luwack. This is coffee which has passed through the digestive tract of a civet. When we showed up at JW's house, we tried a cup before dinner.

(this was recorded on my 'phone which dropped a few frames, but you get the idea).

This is my little range finder camera. It was produced in limited quantities by Minolta as a candidate new model for Leica. It was introduced in 1980 but Leica dragged their feet and didn't do much about electronic cameras (i.e. electronic shutter release and metering, this isn't a digital camera) until the introduction of the M7 in 2001. There is a interesting article about its history [here]. Since the M7 is well out of my price range, it's a great opportunity to obtain a truly outstanding quality little 35mm range finder.

As you can tell from the photograph, it's a very small, and the reason for that is it doesn't have a mirror and pentaprism needed to make the viewfinder see through the lens. Instead, the viewfinder is at the top left of the camera and works just like cardboard point-and-shoot disposable cameras which are rapidly becoming harder to obtain (not that anybody should care). There is also a second, smaller viewport above the lens which is combined with a small part of the main view to produce a "split image" focusing aid.

The small rectangle in the centre appears two have two superimposed images. A cam causes the mirror in the small viewfinder window to move as the lens is focused, resulting in the superimposed images coinciding when the focus is set correctly. When in aperture priority mode, an LED illuminates next to the shutter speed which will be used with the selected aperture. The viewfinder covers the area appropriate for the 28mm lens, and of course this doesn't change when the standard or telephoto lens is fitted. Instead the white framing lines appear showing the appropriate field of view. Most SLRs show less than 100% of the field of view, and I must say, it's very interesting having more than 100% through the viewfinder. Anybody who has tried to do video will know that if you stare at the LCD the whole time, it's quite easy to miss what's going on out of shot. I can quite see how the extra margin is a real boon for photojournalism.

In use the camera's very quiet. Most of the noise from a modern SLR comes from the aperture closing down, the mirror shooting up and the motor advance. None of these happen on this little Minolta. Although technology is always improving, SLRs make a kick when the mirror operates, and of course that doesn't happen with this camera. I don't know if this is the reason I managed to hold it so still. The photographs in the next story were taken at 1/8s or longer, f/2 in a dimly lit university hall (you can see Greg's hands moving). I took some even longer exposures inside The Crown Bar in Belfast which was still lit by gas light.

Although low light situations are where even I admit digital still has the upper hand over film, not least because you can wind the sensitivity up to ISO1600 or more on a per-frame basis, I'm very impressed by what this little camera can do with next to no light, even hand-held. Here's a picture of the pub ceiling, showing the original and still operating gas lights. No active image stabilisation And with good light, the results are pin sharp. Think I'm going to enjoy this one...

The International Computer Music Conference this year was at Queen's University, Belfast, and it was good to see the usual suspects again! Greg Scheimer was there with his piece for mobile telephones. The phones are placed in a bag...

...and swung around while they emit tones...

In a nice, reverberant acoustic, the result is mesmeric. In fact, we've been lucky enough to hear the piece at Glasgow. Here we are performing it in the University Chapel:

The phones communicate with each other to synchronise their performances, but they aren't the last word in stability when it comes to running Java programs. Poor old Dougie's phone crashed, and he had to stand there waiting for something to happen like a Damian Hurst installation.