FuzzMeasure Pro 2.02 by Chris Liscio
Runner-up: Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution
Curves Ahead. The blue and red curves represent the left and right speakers, and the black curve is the subwoofer. By comparing these curves and examining the point of intersection, a sound engineer can work to optimize a room’s acoustics.
When Chris Liscio moved into a new home in 2003, he discovered that thriftiness could be the mother of invention. “I didn’t have the money to buy my dream home theater system,” he explains, “so I thought I’d see what I could do by building my own.” This do-it-yourself determination resulted in the development of FuzzMeasure Pro, Liscio’s award-winning Mac-based application for measuring and analyzing room acoustics.
In those days, Liscio was in his last term as a computer science student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He knew he could buy software for setting up and fine-tuning home theater acoustics, but it was only available for Windows. “I realized nobody did this on the Mac,” he says. “So I thought, this would be a really a really cool project for me.”
“The beautiful thing is, I haven’t spent the last two years trying to figure out, ‘How do I write a Mac application?’ That part came easy. It was really just, ‘How do I solve this particular problem?’”
”I’ll grab an iBook and see how it goes”
Liscio was relatively new to the Mac at the time, having switched earlier in the year after being impressed by what his lab partner was creating on the Mac OS X platform. “He was the typical hard-core hacker type, writing tons of code and playing with ideas,” he recalls. “We shared a lot of the same technical interests, and both enjoyed developing and exploring our ideas. Except he was doing all this on a Mac with freely available tools, and that pushed me over the edge. So I said, ‘I’ll grab an iBook and see how it goes.’”
“I’d been on Windows my entire life,” he adds. “But what I noticed immediately about Mac was that it lets you focus more on what it is that you want to do and not focus on the computer. The beautiful thing is, I haven’t spent the last two years trying to figure out, ‘How do I write a Mac application?’ That part came easy. It was really just, ‘How do I solve this particular problem?’”
A Visual Sound Man. Chris Liscio finds that the visually oriented engineers in the music industry are responding to FuzzMeasure because it’s based on understanding graphical cues.
Visualizing Sound by Shooting the Room
By June, 2004, Liscio had used the free development tools bundled with Mac OS X to complete his first version of FuzzMeasure. Designed for use by professionals or enthusiasts who work in acoustics, live sound, or in the recording industries, FuzzMeasure lets anyone capture and visualize the behavior of sound moving through a room. Simply stated, it lets people see what they hear, so they can make whatever physical or electronic changes are necessary to improve the sound.
“Engineers call it ‘shooting the room,’” says Liscio. “Say you’re setting up a studio for a client,” he explains. “You show up, crack your laptop open, plug a microphone into it, plug it into their system and just go. They don’t have think about how it works — you just hit the ‘measure’ button, and read the graphs. From there, you make changes in the room and repeat the process until you reach your desired result.”
Invested Development
These days, Liscio works full-time as a software engineer, but continues to develop FuzzMeasure Pro with the intenting of making it more useable and available to a wider audience. He says that one possible way it might be used in the future is for setting up the acoustics in home recording studios — something that would benefit users of applications such as Logic Pro or GarageBand. “I obviously want to add more features,” he says. “I think there are a lot of graphical techniques that might help see things that weren’t able to be seen before — like the ability to drill down to features that are hard to pick out by eye and have the software point those out automatically.”
Because developing on the Mac was so easy and intuitive for him, Liscio was able to spend much of the two years of development time researching the subjects of signal processing and measuring acoustics, which he’d never studied in a formal way. Because FuzzMeasure Pro provides a valuable service to save engineers time, Liscio feels that they will also be able to focus more on what they really want to do instead of how it’s done. “I think it’s very attractive for what I would call a scientific community — for anyone who has to do something that involves research and thinking about a specific problem — to spend time thinking about their problem and not about their computer.”
