Classical Convert

My mp3 Player and Stereo Should Chat to Each Other

Today I was listening to (one of my utmost, blab on about favorites) Shostakovich 15, as I walked back in the depressingly early twilight. The first Sunday in November is way too soon away. That particular symphony has a huge mother of a build-up and climax in the last movement. It’s a kind of dreary passacaglia based on the invasion theme from the seventh symphony lasting something like five minutes, before screeches in the woodwinds push it over into an even more morose conclusion.

It started on the far side of the bridge, and so by the time I pranced up the road to my front door (well, prancing really isn’t so appropriate here, what’s a bit more apt… dragged, limped, something droopy and miserable) the music was almost peaking… and then I’m home. Bad timing. Closing the door should coincide with a natural stopping point in the music, not the middle of a crescendo. I don’t like keeping my headphones on indoors as I can’t hear any flatmates or assassins.

However, this time it wasn’t a problem. As I reached my room my mp3 player vibrated to let me know that it’s successfully made contact with the stereo over wifi, and now they both know which piece I am listening to and where in the piece I am currently at. I just have to press a button, and bam - the stereo starts playing at exactly the same point as the mp3 player is up to. It’s a seamless handover of music.

Well, actually of course that isn’t what happened at all, because neither of my music systems are that sophisticated. However, it would be pretty trivial to set up something like that with the newer stereos and mps. In a few years when you have your friends over, you’ll all be able to take turns ordering the stereo around with your iPods, picking and mixing across all the playlists floating in waves through the room.

Repeatability: the biggest benefit of a recording

There’s been a recent furore regarding whether MP3 based music competes with actually sitting in the concert hall. Over at Sounds and Fury, A. C. Douglas is quite insistent on the superiority of the real thing. A recent follow-up to his original article has someone pointing out that with all the sweet-wrapper crackling, coughing, snoring, muttering, etc. in the concert hall, one might well get a more enjoyable and immediate acoustic experience sitting in front of the stereo. The chairs are comfier at home, too. And you can have a nice cup of tea while listening. Try doing that in Carnegie Hall.

However, I think the biggest advantage of recorded music is one of it’s most obvious and intrinsic characteristics: you can play it many, many times. This is massively important with classical, since it takes so long to get the hang of a piece. If I had had to understand Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2 (for example) by relying purely on orchestral performances… well it’s never played so I wouldn’t have heard it… but if it were, I would have had to see it about fifty times before it made any kind of sense. That’s a lot of concert.

Generally it seems hugely preferable for me not to hear a real live piece until I’ve listened to it a bunch of times in the comfort of my apartment. I want to understand the piece first, instead of trying to piece together the themes in the concert hall. I want to be able to twine along the melodies while the orchestra is playing, to make newer and deeper bridges and uncoverings and connections. Things spring out and bite you when the music is on the stage, instead of stuck in the stereo - but it’s so much more potent when the latter has already built a bed from which the former can ascend.

My MP3 player is a perfect foundation builder. It knows it isn’t the real thing, that it’s an imitation - but it’s an imitation which lets me isolate myself from the outside and dive and delve into a greater and greater understanding of whatever it’s currently holding onto. It’s portability is perfect for letting one slip off into a bit of a listening session whenever someones opus number something starts slithering around your head.

The more I listen to a piece and understand the ins and outs and backs and twists and fronts, the more I want to hear a real, true, orchestra playing it. No matter how much I’ll fall in love with a particular recording, the ultimate goal is always to hear a great, real-life performance.

But without that build-up, without all of those not-quite-real versions of a piece, for me the reality isn’t nearly as rewarding.

More Classical MP3ness - What ACD Actually Meant

Ah-ha! Now I understand more fully what ACD at Sounds and Fury intended in his recent post about bloggers and iPod playlists. What he really didn’t like was the emphasis of the MP3 player as a means to listen to classical music, because he feels it is way down at the low end of the fidelity-of-experience spectrum. The primary point is that any recording of a piece - whether it’s as high-range as studio DAT tapes played back on a $100,000 stereo, or as low as a VHS recording of a concert - is an inherently different and imperfect experience than is being there while the music is actually performed, live and in your face.

The way I initially read it (and I read it about five times - it wasn’t nearly as much of a knee-jerk reaction as the one he is suspicious of, honest!) was: since iPods are basically pretty crappy at reproducing music, people shouldn’t post iPod playlists, as this might encourage people to use them to listen to classical music. I then defended this by arguing it was not necessarily such an awful experience as he thought it was. Besides, anything which encourages people to listen to classical is (almost certainly probably) a good thing.

I still don’t think that putting up a specifically iPod playlist is really a big deal; but maybe that’s because my eyes kind of blank out the iPod in the sentence. I spend so much time listening to music in-ear that it seems completely natural to bias a weekly selection of pieces toward that particular listening method, instead of just calling it a neutral “playlist.”  If I didn’t spend so much time with my earbuds plugged in I guess all the ipodification could well get irritating. I suspect that most iPod playlist-putter-uppers who specify the “iPod” bit are thinking in a similar way - they aren’t putting that particular noun in there deliberately, it just comes out like that.

Maybe the most important thing is simply for people to be aware of the limitations of the method which they are using to listen to their music. As JonJ pointed out in a comment, basically what it comes down to is that one needs to be satisfied with the quality of the stuff you’re pumping into your ears, but it’s also important to be aware of that quality. I suspect quite a few (for example, someone who gets almost everything off of iTunes instead of ripping from CDs) people haven’t had the benefit of experiencing just how bad a piece sounds on a low quality system when compared to a high quality one, and how poor both are when compared to the real thing.

MP3s, Classical Music, Quality

ACD at Sounds and Fury is pissed about compression, and bloggers putting up iPod playlists. I think he’s being way too much of an audiophile.

While over-compressed music sounds pretty horrid - especially classical with all it’s acoustic variations and nuances - my MP3s at 192Kbps sound rather good on my non-iPod, iPod (if you see what I mean). When there’s a crazily big tutti going on it can occasionally get a bit hairy, but in general I can actually hear way more subtleties compared to listening to the original CD on the stereo. Of course, this is using a replacement to the piece-of-crap earphones included with the player.

And if you really can’t stand MP3s, you can always encode in FLAC, which is lossless.

What I genuinely do not understand the animosity toward bloggers who put up their current playlists. I seriously don’t think it’s being done in a effort to look cool, but actually because they like to share their listening preferences. If I didn’t have my portable audio capabilities (what a very futuristic robot I am) I’d be listening to two or three hours less classical music a day, and that would make me sad.

The 1970’s 8-track iPod

The latest issue of Fortune has a really beautifully designed pullout showing blow-ups of four iconic personal music players. I’d scan it in if I (a) wasn’t worried about copyright issues (b) had a scanner. The coolest one of the lot was easily the Panasonic “Dynamite 8″, which was a portable 8-track player designed to look like a detonator. You pushed down the plunger on the top to change tracks, instead of blow things up.

Just like the iPod, the Dynamite 8 came in a variety of colors. There are a tonne of nice pictures over at 8-track heaven, including a white one which you can almost convince yourself Apple could’ve made. If you squint a lot and don’t concentrate too hard.

Although 8-tracks sound like a huge pain the arse to use, the player itself is pretty damn, well, pretty. If you’re interested they can still be picked up on eBay for less than an iPod.

Sadly there isn’t much information on the net about these little beauties. This guy has some fond(ish, the fading between tracks doesn’t sound like so much fun) memories of them, and there’s a kinda funky coffee mug version for sale.