Little Pi's Tech Music Tips

This February, French electronic music pioneer Éliane Radigue (1932–2026) passed away at 94, and Little Pi dedicates this episode to her. From studying with musique concrète founder Pierre Schaeffer in 1955 and assisting Pierre Henry, to falling in love with the feedback everyone else tried to avoid; from Adnos I in 1974, when she began 25 years with a single ARP 2500 synthesizer, shaping slow, breathing drones; to the three-hour Trilogie de la Mort, inspired by Tibetan Buddhism; the 2006 Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica for L'Île re-sonante; and, from 2001 on, writing for live performers, including the Occam series that began with Occam I for harp in 2011. Plus Little Pi's tip for listening slowly.

References:

Éliane Radigue - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89liane_Radigue

Éliane Radigue, pioneering electronic composer, dies aged 94 (DJ Mag): https://djmag.com/news/eliane-radigue-pioneering-french-electronic-musician-and-composer-dies-aged-94

Legendary synth composer Éliane Radigue has died aged 94 (Mixmag): https://mixmag.net/read/legendary-synth-composer-éliane-radigue-died-aged-94-news

ARP 2500 - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP_2500

Prix Ars Electronica - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prix_Ars_Electronica

Why do you sound like a star when you sing in the shower? The answer is reverb. In this audio tip, Little Pi explains the difference between reverb and echo; how Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine rescued a lecture hall where words lingered for 5.5 seconds in 1895, defined reverberation time (RT60), and helped design Boston Symphony Hall, which opened in 1900; Bill Putnam turning a women's restroom into an echo chamber in 1947; the roughly 270-kilogram EMT 140 plate reverb of 1957; the EMT 250, the first commercial digital reverb, in 1976; and convolution reverb, which captures a real space with an impulse response. Plus a mixing tip: more reverb isn't always better!

References:

Reverberation - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverberation

Wallace Clement Sabine - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Clement_Sabine

Bill Putnam - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Putnam

The Origins of EMT Reverb (Universal Audio): https://www.uaudio.com/blogs/ua/emt-reverb-history

Convolution reverb - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb

Who is SEAMUS? It's actually the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. In this episode, Little Pi covers its founding in 1984 by composer Barry Schrader at CalArts, its annual national conference (2027 at Louisiana State University, with AI among the themes), the SEAMUS Award given since 1987 to John Chowning, Max Mathews, Laurie Spiegel, Suzanne Ciani, Bebe and Louis Barron and more, and the ASCAP/SEAMUS student commission competition. Plus, Teacher Lin Na-Wei's eight-channel immersive electroacoustic soundscape Lava's Roaring Dance was performed at the 2025 SEAMUS national conference at Purdue University.

References:

SEAMUS official website: https://seamusonline.org/

SEAMUS - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Electro-Acoustic_Music_in_the_United_States

SEAMUS Award recipients: https://seamusonline.org/seamus-award/

SEAMUS Student Commissioning Program: https://seamusonline.org/studentawards/

The 1956 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet has a score with no traditional orchestra at all, only electronic sounds, created by the married couple Bebe and Louis Barron. In this episode, Little Pi tells their story: a tape recorder received as a wedding gift, a studio in Greenwich Village that may have been the first electronic music studio in the United States, engineering John Cage's Williams Mix, and building circuits inspired by Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics that they deliberately overloaded to make sound. Because of a union issue, the film credits could only say Electronic Tonalities.

References:

Louis and Bebe Barron - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_and_Bebe_Barron

Forbidden Planet - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet

Williams Mix - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_Mix

SEAMUS - Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States: https://seamusonline.org/

Home stereos make music sound nicer, but studio monitors let you hear the sound as it really is. In this episode, Little Pi explains why monitors aim for a flat frequency response, the difference between active and passive monitors, why woofer size should match your room, and why placement matters more than price: an equilateral triangle, tweeters at ear height, and some distance from the back wall. Finally, meet the famously unflattering Yamaha NS-10 and learn the habit of checking your mix on several different devices.

References:

Studio monitor - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_monitor

Yamaha NS-10 - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_NS-10

There's an electronic instrument you can play without touching it at all: the theremin. In this episode, Little Pi introduces Clara Rockmore, queen of the theremin. A violin prodigy admitted to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory at age four, she gave up the violin after developing tendinitis as a teenager. After meeting inventor Leon Theremin in America, she became the instrument's best known player and developed her own aerial fingering technique. Her 1977 album The Art of the Theremin was produced by Robert and Shirleigh Moog, with her sister Nadia Reisenberg on piano.

References:

Clara Rockmore - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Rockmore

Theremin - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin

Leon Theremin - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin

Why do songs on streaming platforms all sound about equally loud, one after another? Little Pi starts with the loudness war, then introduces LUFS, the loudness unit defined by the ITU-R BS.1770 standard that imitates how human ears hear. LUFS numbers are usually negative, and closer to zero means louder: the EBU R128 broadcast recommendation targets minus 23 LUFS, while Spotify plays back at around minus 14 LUFS by default. Finally, learn how loudness normalization works, why over-squashed masters lose out, and why you should leave headroom for peaks in your own music.

References:

LUFS - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUFS

EBU R 128 - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBU_R_128

Spotify for Artists - Loudness normalization: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/loudness-normalization/

Loudness war - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Turn a knob, push a fader, or press a pedal on a MIDI keyboard, and the sound in your computer changes. The hero behind it is MIDI CC (Control Change). In this episode, Little Pi explains what's inside a CC message: a controller number plus a value, both ranging from 0 to 127. Meet the most common numbers: 1 for the modulation wheel, 7 for volume, 10 for pan, 11 for expression, and 64 for the sustain pedal. Finally, learn how drawing CC curves in your music software creates automation.

References:

MIDI Association - Expanded MIDI 1.0 Messages List: https://midi.org/expanded-midi-1-0-messages-list

MIDI - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI

Sustain pedal - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustain_pedal

The same song can sound noticeably different depending on which Bluetooth headphones you use, and the reason is hiding in the audio codec. In this episode, Little Pi breaks down SBC, AAC, aptX, and LDAC: SBC is the baseline every Bluetooth device must support, AAC is the codec favored by the Apple ecosystem, aptX focuses on low latency, LDAC focuses on high resolution, and finally, how to tell which codec to look for depending on whether you use an iPhone or an Android device.

References:

Bluetooth audio codec compatibility table - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_stack

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

aptX - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AptX

LDAC - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDAC_(codec)

In 1977 the Voyager spacecraft carried a golden record out of the solar system, and one of the pieces opening its "Sounds of Earth" section was by computer composer Laurie Spiegel. In this episode, Little Pi introduces her: from self-taught folk guitar to making music on early computer systems at Bell Labs and helping develop computer graphics systems, her 1980 album "The Expanding Universe" hailed as a landmark of ambient music, and "Music Mouse" (1986), software that let anyone play with algorithmic composition.

References:

Laurie Spiegel - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Spiegel

Music Mouse - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Mouse

Voyager Golden Record - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record