Classical Convert

Baader-Meinhofing

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: one of the greatest Minnesotan exports. It’s a not so terse (but oh-so poshly arrogant) phrase which labels the effect of, having recently observed or learned something new, then noticing it everywhere. The classic example is, after buying a new car suddenly seeing swarming flocks of cars of a similar make. Another example is seeing the term “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon” crop up all over the place after reading about it. Everybody (yeah, everybody in the entire world) reckons that it’s due to the recency effect.

Well, this seems to happen frequently with blogging. No sooner does one craftily (and sexily) tap out a stunning new post, than one observes stuff related to that topic dripping and draped all over the internet. Or even TV if you’re into that kind of thing.

You want an example? Well I’ll give you an example! The other day I touched on a thought about music and motion, and how intricately linked they are, from the point of view of choosing a soundtrack. Today, up pops an article which describes research recently done into this connection. Specifically researchers at the University of Texas have shown that a sound played simultaneously with a faint flash of light makes the visual section of the brain respond exactly as if it had seen a far brighter light. It seems this could be an evolutionary adaptation which allows animals to respond quickly to threats which are often both in motion and, say, growling.

While this is a fair-ways away from directly applying to music, it’s interesting to note that there is a physical connection — rather than merely a figurative one — between sound and vision. Of course, this isn’t really news to those with synesthesia. The really cool thing about this experiment is that the senses are connected in a deliberate, symbiotic fashion, and not just able to have their wires accidentally (or deliberately, lysergic dymethylamide fans) crossed

Tags: baader-meinhof, music, vision

The Further Demise of Physical Media

Continuing the saga of the slow demise of CDs is this poll of the online readers of Stereophile magazine, indicating that only 45% use CDs or SACDs as their primary method of listening to music, compared to 50% who use either an MP3 server or iPod.

I was previously unaware of Stereophile magazine, but it’s one of those magazines targeted at people with more money than sense audiophiles, which reviews things such as these $2999 interconnects using language like:

Silences and spaces between notes and sonic “images” weren’t even black: They were just dead-empty. Tunefulness, rhythm, and musical flow were all superb.

Although to be fair, the author does blatantly point out that it is a ridiculous price.

Regardless of how prodigal the publication is with their praise for expensive audio, the point is that their readership is well-biased toward the audio snob — not the casual top-40 downloader — and these guys are now more inclined to play via hard-disk than CD. I think with both of these ends of the audio listening spectrum covered, storable-audio is well on the way to completely wiping out physical formats.

In fact, the only time I use CDs these days is in my car stereo… and those are only for storing MP3s on. I kinda miss the collection browsing, but don’t miss the dust and taken up space. How about you? Do you still have a collection of CD jewel boxes cluttering up the shelves?

Tags: cd, mp3, music, server

Timbre!

Timbre is a beautifully dyslexic word. It is also the subject of a recent post over at Black Dogs (one of the rare blogrolled blogs I really regularly read, and not just for the food and gratuitous cleavage) in which R.A.D. Stainforth discusses the topic of orchestras covering rock songs, and vice versa. His particular complaint is that whoever orchestrated Queen for the RPO decided to do it in a fairly mundane fashion. Instead of rearranging the songs in a musically interesting way, they decided to simply let the novelty of the re-instrumentation sell the performance.

The thing that really interested me was the issue of timbre. Stainforth reckons that whoever orchestrated the music failed to recognize that this is a defining feature of much rock/pop music. Or maybe that shouldn’t be rock/pop… perhaps a more appropriate description is music which is primarily heard in a pre-recorded fashion.

It’s probably exactly because the music is pre-recorded as opposed to being performed live that there are such possibilities for a varied sonic palette. Sounds can be layered, altered, edited, without needing to conform to the requirement that live performers with instruments must be able to reproduce the sounds.

As Mr. S points out, this overabundance of timbre in non-classical music means that listeners who come to classical from this direction (like me) can have a hard time adjusting to the relatively limited amount of sounds an orchestra can produce. After a year or so of listening your ears adjust and it’s easier to pick stuff out, but initially everything just sounds kind of “orchestra-ey”.

Is there any particular reason why “classical” music has to be able to be performed live? It seems in a sense that this is a defining feature of the genre, that it must be reproducible. The unit of classical musical creation is the score, not the recording. This reminds me of the process (a bit too close to my heart) of writing science papers, where an experiment (and thus a publication) is totally useless unless it contains enough information for someone else to reproduce it. Classical music is fundamentally open-source.

Can anyone think of examples of music considered “classical” which doesn’t conform to this conception? Or alternatively, examples of music which might be considered classical if only they did conform to it?

Tags: black dogs, classical music, music

A Dose of Self-Doubt

Do you ever write a bunch of paragraphs and then look back and decide that they are quite horrible and should never be seen by anyone ever again, including yourself? Yeah, I did that several times over the weekend. So, instead of trying to be unsuccessfully creative again, here’s a play-it-safe, YouTubey type post. This time it’s a synthesizer which while not sounding terribly fantastic has a sort of cunning input mechanism, which reminds me an awful lot of beaming around lasers in lab:

It’ll be very interesting to see what other pseudo-physical/visual music systems crop up with the immenent take-over of touchscreens.

Tags: music, touchscreen

Lyricalish

I’ve been conditioned to believe that human beings have been conditioned to believe there’s beauty in symmetry…

If anyone knows where that lyric comes from I’ll be very, very surprised (and impressed, but mostly surprised), partly because I can’t remember the exact album location myself. I’m not mentally or physically warmed up enough to go dredging through the acres of archived CDs (long live the MP3) hibernating in the upper aerie of my cupboard to work it out. Buuut… it was either a track by this guy or one of his associates:

This is particularly relevant to the topics on this blog because I hold these people responsible for prepping me into my classical music acceptance phase. This is because I absolutely *hated* one of their albums (the self-titled cLOUDDEAD, if you are interested). Initially anyway. I couldn’t stand it. I only bought it because a lot of the recommendations for new music which suited my taste were extracted from internet reviews that mentioned other groups I already owned — and this being the heady late nineties meant that the reviews frequently did not come with samples of the music, so it was all bought sound unheard.

I credit this with preparing me for classical because after initially dismissing this music, it later became my absolutely favorite album ever. I don’t think there are any blatantly obvious similarities in the musical style, it’s more an attitude issue. It brought right forward to the forefront that I could form an incredibly deep bond with music which not only didn’t make sense on initial listenings, but which actively turned me off.

As it turned out I had to pretty much rerealize this process when coming to classical, but I am pretty positive that this trial run primed certain mental circuits

PS - Ahhh, I remembered where that track came from, it was actually on “In The Shadow Of The Living Room” by Reaching Quiet. Here’s probably my favorite track from that album (in which almost all of the tracks are under 2 minutes):

They mostly used broken instruments to make the album, and apparently their sequencer also could not function for longer than a few minutes, hence the short length of the tracks.

I love it.

Tags: clouddead, music