Noise music

Noise music is a category of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise within a musical context. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect. It can feature acoustically or electronically generated noise, and both traditional and unconventional musical instruments. It may incorporate live machine sounds, non-musical vocal techniques, physically manipulated audio media, processed sound recordings, field recording, computer-generated noise, stochastic process, and other randomly produced electronic signals such as distortion, feedback, static, hiss and hum. There may also be emphasis on high volume levels and lengthy, continuous pieces. More generally noise music may contain aspects such as improvisation, extended technique, cacophony and indeterminacy, and in many instances conventional use of melody, harmony, rhythm and pulse is dispensed with.

Noise (company)

Noise Inc. (株式会社ノイズ) is a video game development company that works in partnership with Nintendo, developing games for the Custom Robo series.

History

Noise was founded with a staff of 10 people on September 2, 1996 for the original purpose of developing games for PCs. A short time after, Noise became a part of Marigul Management, a company created by Nintendo and the Japanese telecommunications company Recruit for the purpose of enlisting smaller developers to make original games for the Nintendo 64.

The company’s first commercially published game, Custom Robo for the Nintendo 64, was released in Japan on December 9, 1999 and became a commercial success in Japan, prompting Nintendo to formally enter a publishing agreement with Noise. In 2006, Custom Robo was released in China for the iQue Player, making it the only Custom Robo title ever to be released there.

Their second released title was Custom Robo V2, which was released on November 10, 2000 and was also met with commercial success in Japan. They also released their first portable video game for the Game Boy Advance, Custom Robo GX, on July 26, 2002.

Noise (audio)

Noise in audio, recording, and broadcast systems refers to the residual low level sound (usually hiss and hum) that is heard in quiet periods of a program.

In audio engineering it can refer either to the acoustic noise from loudspeakers, or to the unwanted residual electronic noise signal that gives rise to acoustic noise heard as 'hiss'. This signal noise is commonly measured using A-weighting or ITU-R 468 weighting

Noise is often generated deliberately and used as a test signal. Two types of deliberately generated noise in common use are referred to as 'white noise', which has a uniform spectral power density at all frequencies, or 'pink noise' which has a power spectral density that falls at 3dB/octave with rising frequency. The latter is often more useful in audio testing because it contains constant energy per octave (and hence per commonly used 1/3rd octave), rather than a prepondance of energy at high frequencies. In other words it contains energy that is distributed geometrically rather than linearly.

Noise (2007 Australian film)

Noise is a 2007 Australian drama-thriller film written and directed by director Matthew Saville. The film stars Brendan Cowell, Henry Nixon, Luke Elliot, Katie Wall, Maia Thomas and Nicholas Bell.

Plot

The film is set up amongst the landscape of two potentially related murders: that of an engaged woman in Sunshine, and that of seven passengers on a train in Melbourne's inner west. From there, the film deals primarily with the experiences of Lavinia Smart, a young woman who boarded the train shortly after the murders, and police Constable Graham McGahan, who is afflicted with increasingly severe tinnitus. When he requests light duty on account of his tinnitus, Constable McGahan is assigned the night shift of a police information van in the inner-western Melbourne suburb of Sunshine, where he encounters the traumatized members of the local community, including Lucky Phil, a mentally handicapped man, and Dean Stouritis, the fiance of the slain woman.

At the same time, the film explores the fear Lavinia experiences after the horrific events she witnessed. Although she escapes with her life, the police are unsatisfied with her statements and accuse her of holding back information. Lavinia is further traumatized when she realizes that the killer has stolen a portrait that can be used to identify her. The police try to reassure her of her safety, but a man she identified in a police lineup easily tracks her down and tries to intimidate her. After Lavinia angrily confronts him and explains her situation, he apologizes and gives her a ride back to her house.

Artò

Artò is a frazione (and parish) of the municipality of Madonna del Sasso, in Piedmont, northern Italy.

Overview

It is a village located some km west from the Lake Orta.

History

Since 1928 Artò was a separate comune (municipality).

References

External links

Media related to Artò at Wikimedia Commons

Artà

Coordinates: 39°42′N 3°21′E / 39.700°N 3.350°E / 39.700; 3.350

Artà is one of the 53 independent municipalities on the Spanish Balearic island of Majorca. The small town of the same name is the administrative seat of this municipality in the region (Comarca) of Llevant.

Population

In 2008 the municipality of Artà had a population of 7,113 recorded residents within an area of 139.63 square kilometres (53.91 sq mi). This equates to 50.9 inhabitants per km². In 2006 the percentage of foreigners was 13.2% (890), of which Germans made up 3.9% (262). In 1991 there were still 136 illiterates in the municipality. 1,292 inhabitants had no education, 1,675 only a primary school certificate and 1,210 had secondary school leaving certificates. The official languages are Catalan and Spanish (Castilian). The Catalan dialect spoken on the island is known as Mallorquí.

Geography

Location

Artà lies in the northeast of the island of Majorca, around 60 km from the island's capital of Palma. The Massís d’Artà, the highest and most compact massif in the eastern mountain chain of the Serres de Llevant, occupies more than half the area of the municipality. The municipality is located on the western part of peninsula of Artà and is bordered in the west by the Bay of Alcúdia (Badia d’Alcúdia), and in the north by the Mediterranean sea where its coast lies opposite the neighbouring island of Minorca. The coast of Artà stretches for 25 kilometres and, so far, has escaped being developed. Particularly noteworthy are the beach and sand dune formations of sa Canova d’Artà, the flat coastal strip near the settlement of Colònia de Sant Pere, the high rocky coves of the Cap de Ferrutx and a large number of smaller bays that extend from s’Arenalet des Verger to Cala Torta.

ART image file format

ART is a proprietary image file format used mostly by the America Online (AOL) service and client software.

Technical details

The ART format (file extension ".art") holds a single still image that has been highly compressed. The format was designed to facilitate the quick downloading of images, among other things. Originally, the compression was developed by the Johnson-Grace Company, which was then acquired by AOL. When an image is converted to the ART format, the image is analyzed and the software decides what compression technique would be best. The ART format has similarities to the progressive JPEG format, and certain attributes of the ART format can lead to image quality being sacrificed for the sake of image compression (for instance, the image's color palette can be limited.)

Usage by AOL

The AOL service used the ART image format for most of the image presentation of the online service. In addition, the AOL client's web browser also automatically served such images in the ART format to achieve faster downloads on the slower dialup connections that were prevalent in those days. This conversion was done in the AOL proxy servers and could be optionally disabled by the user. This image conversion process effectively reduced the download time for image files. This technology was once branded as Turboweb and is now known as AOL TopSpeed.