Peter Neubäcker

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Peter Neubäcker in his apartment in Munich in 2008

Peter Neubäcker (* 26. June 1953 in Buer in Melle , Lower Saxony ) is a German music software - programmers , musicians and instrument makers . He lives in Munich .

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Peter Neubäcker became internationally known for his computer program Melodyne , which was presented on a small stand at the Frankfurt Music Fair in 2001 , with which recorded, unisonous sound material could be subsequently manipulated in terms of time and pitch without losing the sound character. To market Melodyne, Peter Neubäcker founded Celemony together with his wife Hildegard Sourgens and Carsten Gehle , to which 20 employees belonged in April 2008.

At Musikmesse 2008, the company presented the prototype of Neubäcker's “Direct Note Access” (DNA) technology for Melodyne, with which individual notes in chords and polyphonic sound material can be changed independently of one another. At the same time as the competing product Prosoniq sonicWORX Pro , Melodyne was one of the first programs to make this possible. The way the technology works is described in a software patent that Neubäcker has registered.

Life

Peter Neubäcker's parents Rudolf and Eva owned a radio and television business in Buer. Peter is the eldest of her three sons. In 1967 the family moved to the Black Forest. There Peter Neubäcker attended grammar school, later a business grammar school and graduated from high school in 1973.

After contacts with the Freiburg hippie scene and as a musician in the Freiburg “Release Music Band”, Neubäcker decided not to study but to go on a wandering tour. In 1974 he entered a Christian-oriented spiritual community in Switzerland and learned to make musical instruments from a violin maker on Lake Constance in 1977. During this time, Neubäcker began correspondence with Rudolf Haase in Vienna. Haase headed the world's only chair for harmony at the music college there . From then on, harmony - not in the strict sense of musical harmony, but rather in the tradition of great mathematicians - determined Peter Neubäcker's life. In 1978 he was called up for civil service as a conscientious objector. When he refused to do so one month after the start, a court sentence followed in 1979 to 6 months in prison on probation. The total denial , said Peter Neubäcker in retrospect, "was not a pacifist or political act - it arose simply my general inability to do something, I do not determine themselves."

In Switzerland, Peter Neubäcker met his first wife - Katharina. In 1979 their son Daniel was born. In the same year he left the family and moved to Munich in a shared apartment. He earned his living building lutes and Renaissance fiddles and began training as a naturopath in 1981, which he completed three years later. During his training he dealt with classical homeopathy, alchemy and astrology, where he was interested in the aesthetics of the celestial movements and not the setting up of horoscopes for life counseling. Working with astrology resulted in various tools for astrologers, which Neubäcker published in his own publishing house, such as a schematic celestial globe (armillary sphere) and a turntable for calculating and visualizing the heavenly positions (astrolabe). Neubäcker also gave courses on celestial studies, gave lectures and published in astrological journals. After 20 years, in 2007, he handed the publishing house over to a friend.

From 1984 Peter Neubäcker worked with the Free Music Center in Munich. There he organized series of events on harmony.

In 1987 he started programming with an Atari ST , later NeXT computer. In 1989 he met his current wife, Hildegard Sourgens , who was a doctor and pharmacologist by profession. In 1990 Neubäcker set up the “Forum for experimental music and computers” at the Free Music Center. He wrote programs exclusively for himself, mainly to translate mathematical and astrological relationships into music. 1992–1999 he was a member of the work group music and art of the Chaos Group at the Technical University of Munich; under his leadership the musical magnetic pendulum was created there.

In 1997, in a conversation with a friend, Peter Neubäcker formulated the question: "How does a stone sound?" The idea behind this was to free a sound from its dependence on pitch and time. Melodyne's core algorithm was born from this idea. The concept went far beyond the technique of stretching or compressing a given sound in time (time stretching and pitch shifting), which was then available in studios. Melodyne is a combination of “melodies” and “dynamic”. The software companies Neubäcker talked to about the idea and its algorithm didn't understand him. So it came about that he and his wife and friend Carsten Gehle founded the Celemony company in 2000 and presented Melodyne for the first time at the 2001 Frankfurt Music Fair. The words “Celestial” and “Harmony” - heavenly harmony - are part of the word “Celemony”. For Neubäcker just another name for "harmonics". The question of the sounding stone and the understanding of music as a phenomenon detached from hearing is at the center of a film portrait by Peter Neubäcker published in 2011.

Publications

  • Oral positions and aspects of the mouth. In: Meridian. Astrological journal 2/86, Ebertin Verlag, Freiburg 1986.
  • The calcium process. In: Naturheilpraxis. 11/87, Pflaum Verlag, Munich 1987.
  • The Game - Thoughts on Free Will. In: Neptune. Astrological journal 9/87, Kaltenecker, Munich 1987.
  • Pictures of harmony . Free Music Center, Munich 1988.
  • Rudolf Stössel - the harmonist. In: Rudolf Stossel: Insights - retrospectives - bright spots . Verlag E. Löpfe-Benz, Rorschach 1989.
  • Heaven music. In: Connection Special Astrology. Connection Verlag, Munich 1989.
  • Symbolic content of the mathematical-musical relationships in Pythagorean harmony. In: Brixener Initiative Musik und Kirche, Symposion 1989, Verlag A. Weger, Brixen 1990.
  • Number mandalas . Free Music Center, Munich 1991.
  • Mirror points. In: Meridian. Astrological journal 5/91, Ebertin Verlag, Freiburg 1991.
  • Rhythms of the solar. In: Meridian. Astrological journal 4/91, Ebertin Verlag, Freiburg 1991.
  • What is harmony? In: The Return of the Muses. University Press Konstanz, Konstanz 1992.
  • Thoughts on setting the horoscope. In: Meridian. Astrological journal 3/92, Ebertin Verlag, Freiburg 1992.
  • Location astrology. In: Meridian. Astrological journal 3/94, Ebertin Verlag, Freiburg 1994.
  • Harmony and glass bead game. In: Harmonik and Glasperlenspiel. Contributions 1993, Free Music Center, Munich 1994.
  • What does "pure mood" mean? In: Harmonik and Glasperlenspiel. Contributions 1993, Free Music Center, Munich 1994.
  • The houses north of the Arctic Circle. In: Meridian. Astrological journal 2/98, Ebertin Verlag, Freiburg 1998.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sensation at the Musikmesse: Changing wave data such as MIDI . heise.de
  2. ↑ Method for acoustic object-oriented analysis and note object-oriented processing of polyphonic sound recordings , EP2099024
  3. ↑ Sound-object oriented analysis and note-object oriented processing of polyphonic sound recordings , US patent no. 8022286
  4. ↑ Musical magnetic pendulum
  5. ^ Film portrait of Peter Neubäcker. Created for his company Celemony, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Neubäcker, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German programmer
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Buer near Melle