Music
67 episodes
#6272: Teaching Audio Models to Hear Beyond Words
Speech recognition rewards ignoring background noise, but audio-language models train specifically on environmental sounds and temporal scenes.
#6229: Voice Design: Casting Ogres and Radio Voices
Text-described voices vs. reference audio, and which TTS knobs change who a voice is versus how it sounds.
#6171: AI Audio Restoration: What Actually Ships in 2026
Noise removal and bandwidth extension are shipping products today. Matching a clip to a target EQ is still mostly a research prototype.
#5999: Who Teaches Actors Those Accents?
Dialect coaches break accents into six moves, not forty — and the science says imitation ability is a bell curve, not a gift.
#5865: Four Pocket Players That Won't Sell You a Device Today
Mono, Fonix One, Sudo, and DuRoBo Krono all promise phone-free podcast listening — and not one of them is ready to ship today.
#5847: Why One EQ Curve Can't Fix Two Voices
One static EQ curve can't serve two different voices — here's why, and what actually works instead.
#5846: Who Tells a Star the Show Is a Bad Idea?
Céline Dion's Paris return split critics down the middle — and one review got punished harder than the show itself.
#5815: Special Release: "Herman Poppleberry" by Hilbert Flumingtop
Hilbert Flumingtop wrote a song about Herman Poppleberry. Corn plays it to him. Lyrics and composition by Hilbert, music made with Suno.
#5722: What Balanced Audio Actually Does in a DAC
Balanced isn't about the connector — it's impedance symmetry. Here's when it matters and when it's overkill.
#5720: Active, Passive, and the Speaker That Lied to Daniel
A rented PA speaker turns out to be mislabeled, and untangling why reveals the real difference between active and passive — plus what mic and line ...
#5718: How Far Can You Run RCA, XLR, and 3.5mm Cables?
Published cable-length advice ranges from 3 meters to 200 feet. The physics explains why — and why the cable isn't the variable that matters.
#5688: Can We Normalize Breaking Into Song in Public?
Daniel wants to sing in the sandwich line. Here's what the science says about group singing, embarrassment, and why we don't.
#5681: Why Your Volume Knob Can't Find the Right Spot
Your phone has 15 volume steps. More steps won't fix the real problem — and the math explains why.
#5678: Why Voices Are Harder to Design For Than Music
Every word arrives clearly on a phone speaker — so why is it exhausting? The science of listening effort, and how to design audio that isn't.
#5676: DIY Cable Guide: Barrel Jacks, XLR, and What to Avoid
Soldering your own cables won't save money — it buys exact-length runs. But some connectors hide polarity traps and tooling costs.
#5614: The Master of Drinks Ran the Room
The symposiarch controlled the wine ratio, the room, and the penalties — and poetry was the skill that proved you belonged.
#5537: How Do Cover Artists Legally Exist?
A 1909 fight over player pianos accidentally created the legal shelter that lets every cover artist on YouTube operate in broad daylight.
#5492: 21 Shofar Blasts a Day: The Temple's Lost Soundscape
The shofar wasn't just a Rosh Hashanah thing. In the Temple, horns sounded 21 times a day — marking work, worship, and water.
#5491: The Night the Temple Courtyard Glowed
What the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmud actually say about the Temple's all-night Sukkot celebration — and where the spectacle creeps in.
#5370: The Spotlight Effect and the Heckler's Playbook
Why a waiting room feels scarier than a stage — and how performers handle hostile crowds without losing the room.
#5356: Torch Juggling in the Temple: Inside Sukkot's All-Night Water Festival
Fifteen hours of torch juggling, nonstop music, and a rain ritual the Torah never commanded — inside the Second Temple's wildest celebration.
#5354: Ten Beer Festivals, Ancient to Modern
From Hathor's temple to a Denver convention hall — ten drinking festivals and what actually changed over 3,000 years.
#5353: Egypt's 700,000-Pilgrim Party at Bubastis
Herodotus called it Egypt's biggest festival — a boozy Nile flotilla of 700,000 pilgrims bound for the cat goddess's city.
#4984: Shanghai's Real vs. Romanticized Art Deco
How much of Shanghai's "Paris of the East" glamour is real, and what was lost to redevelopment?