Jens Johansson's Phase Vocoder Page (2001)

panix.com

3 points·kazinator··2 comments

Jens Johansson is the keyboard player from Stratovarius. In the 1980s he was in Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force together with his brother Anders on drums.

I found his home page some 18-19 years ago, including this sub-page on phase vocoders. I actually played with the software and used it to slow down the tempo of some music while retaining its pitch and timbre, plus read the referenced materials.

I thought it was cool that he was into computing, and tinkering with getting some C code to work, and understanding the underlying signal processing.

Worth looking at is Jens' 14 page scan of the 1986 article/tutorial by Mark Dolson on the phase vocoder technique.

The solo electric guitar sample that is demonstrated slowed down with various numbers of phase vocoder bins is the opening riff of Yngwie Malmsteen's "Trilogy Suite, Op. 5" from the Trilogy album.

I kind of just remembered all this suddenly.

Jens' page was one of those "ain't the internet great" moments I had in the late 90s (or early oughts). There you just browse the web and suddenly you find out that the keyboard player of this silly metal band you like doesn't just have his own web presence, but actually wrote it in a templating system of his own devise (written in Perl, as was tradition[1]). Including a diatribe about the sad state of HTML ("HTML 2.0 was pretty OK — couldn't they just have left well enough alone?").

After I found this, I altavistad quite a lot of musicians, but I don't think I ever got to repeat this epiphany. These days it's all instagram pages and twitter accounts anyway, and the biggest nerd jolt I get is when you find out that musician XYZ played D&D in the past.

[1]: http://www.panix.com/~jens/parse-cgi-about.par

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