Howard Wright's Home Page

Hi! Welcome to my site. I hope you find something interesting here about music, guitars, food, speech technology, my research in musical acoustics or the meaning of life. Use the navigation links at the top to jump directly to the bits you're interested in, or read on to find out more.

Music and Guitars

One of my main passions in life is music, and a large part of this website is devoted to music and guitar playing. Here you'll find guitar tablature for a variety of artists, FAQs and articles on guitar playing and chord theory, as well as bits and pieces on some of my favourite groups and artists. Details and links to the main pages below.

Guitar tab and chord transcriptions
Transcriptions for various artists including the Beatles, Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell. Go here to see the list of all my guitar tab and chord files. I have a separate page with all of my Steely Dan guitar tabs.

Steely Dan
This section includes my Steely Dan guitar transcriptions, reviews and information about official Steely Dan songbooks and a detailed explanation of the Steely Dan Mu major chord.

Guitar techniques
Explanations and exercises covering the basic guitar playing techniques such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends and vibrato.

Joni Mitchell piano transcriptions
Piano transcriptions I've done for some Joni Mitchell songs from the album "Blue". The music is transcribed "as Joni played it" (unlike what most songbooks tend to do).

Guitar chord dictionary
A very big list of over 42,000 guitar chords, organised by root note and chord type. Possibly the biggest list of guitar chord shapes available on the web!

Guitar and music theory FAQs
FAQs covering guitar tab notation and chord theory. I also have a reference page that summarises the symbols and theory used to build guitar chords, and another page that lists all keys, major/minor scales and triads.

Research on acoustics and psychoacoustics

My background is in physics, and I spent several years doing research into the acoustics of musical instruments. In particular I was interested in how physical characteristics of an instrument could affect its tone quality (timbre).

PhD thesis on the classical guitar
I did my PhD in Cardiff on The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of the Guitar. I developed a computer model of the classical guitar and was able to synthesise the sound of plucked notes (listen to some of my synthesised guitar sounds). I performed psychoacoustical tests using sounds synthesised from the model to determine which physical properties of the guitar body had the greatest influence on the instrument's tone quality. Follow the link above to read a summary of the work or to download my thesis.

My research on the psychoacoustics of brass instruments
I previously worked at Edinburgh University doing research on the tone quality of brass instruments, and how this is influenced by the properties of the mouthpiece used. Follow the link above to find out more.

List of my scientific publications
A list of my publications in the area of acoustics of musical instruments.

Food

Another of my passions is food and cooking. This page has some ideas on how to enjoy the best of local food in the UK. Includes information about UK farmers markets, rare breeds meat and links to selected UK food and drink producers.

Rants

An area of the site where I let off steam about issues that concern or annoy me. Read my thoughts on the questionable nutritionist Dr Gillian McKeith.

Phonetic audio mining

I have worked for several years in speech technology, doing research into new techniques and also developing speech software and applications. I have worked on phonetic audio mining and recently put together a page which gives an overview of audio mining technology, as well as a page with some information on speech analytics.

Search engine optimisation

Some notes on search engine optimisation techniques, and how to achieve good search engine rankings for your site with Google and other search engines.

Links

Some interesting web pages that I have come across.

Choose from the above or just sit there and ponder the deeper meaning of life.

Last updated: April 2020