bad listeners

An interesting piece by Tom Barnes on how how analogue formats have been scientifically proven to offer a richer cognitive payload than MP3s / streaming

Among the experts called upon are Poppy Crum, senior scientist at Dolby Laboratories and consulting professor at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, who avers that "True love or appreciation for a piece of music ... comes with depth of knowledge of that music," and that three elements crucial to in-depth experience / cathexis with music ("repeated exposure, iterations and intent") get diminished in a "taste and go, streaming environment.... Those sorts of heightened emotional responses of pleasure and enjoyment and satisfaction come in a way that is counter to rapid, quick streaming and constant exposure to a lot of different things,"

That's both a familiar idea and one abundantly supported by many people's personal experience (including my own) when it comes to encountering music via the internet. We know from our own experience what Spotify has show with data analysis ("there's only about a 50% chance we'll actually make it to the end of a song"), ie. we become all too easily skittish, inattentive listeners.

More interesting is the  hard science stuff to do with compression and data-stripping :

"A recent study performed by audio researchers at DTS divided a group of listeners into two groups — one that watched a video accompanied by standard stereo 96-kbps sound (Spotify's default audio setting) and the other group listened in 256-kbps audio format. The responses in the brains of the group listening with the 256-kbps audio were 14% more powerful on metrics measuring memory creation and 66% higher on pleasure responses. And this was just 96 to 256 kbps.
Vinyl records are estimated to play at a whopping 1000 kbps. Music might not just have lost its revenue when it switched to digital; it may have lost its emotional power too."

Still, I must say,  most people have always done the bulk of their listening to in music non-ideal circumstances from the hi-fi point of view....  some of my most intense musical connections came through radio, listening to Peel and evening Radio One on a pretty tinny transistor radio.....  later on with pirate radio, it was a much better hi-fi set up but the signal itself was of variable quality, then recorded and played back on re-used tapes of advances releases ...  and then in the last four years or so, falling in love with a lot of mainstream pop and commercial / street rap through hearing it in the car - less than ideal listening circumstances (we're not rocking a great in-car stereo, believe me) and the radio transmission itself is usually compressed and thin. So far more than the actual audio quality, or analogue being intrinsically superior to digital,  I think it is the listening mode  that is most crucial in terms of receptivity, impact, and cathexis. Listening to the radio while doing your homework, or doing household tasks, seems like an "open" mode of listening  - true, you're not as focused and immersed as the reverent stereo hi  fi listener or person encased in high-end headphones - but it's a lot better than listening to music on your computer or your phone, where it is almost impossible not to engage in other browsing activity - social media, reading stuff on the internet, replying to emails, downloading more music, etc etc.

Listening to the radio in the car, or indeed your ipod or CDs or tapes, seems almost ideal in terms of receptivity - if driving, you're engaged in an activity that demands your attention but involves a lot of automatic processes, and engages different parts of your mind than the aesthetic;  if you're a passenger you're probably in a light trance as the streets and the landscape go by. Music also is entwined with everyday life in that classic way, as opposed to having to jostle for attention while you engage in info-hunter/gatherer activities on the web.

retroTeeVee / "peak pop culture"

"Is Television Sacrificing Its Golden Age to the Closed Loop of Pop Culture?" asks Jason Bailey of Flavorwire

A piece which sets out right up front the journalistic rule of thumb, "two is a coincidence, three's a trend". Or at least a trend -piece.

1. Starz Television has announced a new, ten-episode series titled Ash vs. Evil Dead. Director/producer Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell will reunite for the series, which is a spin-off/continuation of their long-dormant original iteration of the Evil Dead movie series.

2. The Weinstein Company’s Dimension Films will re-team director Peter Berg with his Lone Survivor star Mark Wahlberg for a feature film adaptation of the ‘70s television series The Six Million Dollar Man — retitled The Six Billion Dollar Man, because inflation.

3. Showtime has ordered a nine-episode continuation of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s influential Twin Peaks, a full 25 years after the series finale aired on ABC."

From this Bailey concludes that: 

"Pop culture is a closed loop.

"Movies based on comic books. Movies based on other movies. Movies based on Broadway musicals. Broadway musicals based on movies. Movies based on television shows. Television shows based on movies. Television shows based on other television shows. Popular culture has always, to some extent, existed within its own echo chamber, but in the current climate, it’s hard to find anything that’s genuinely original, that’s not based, to some extent, on some other thing."

He points out that the "the list of the top ten highest-grossing movies of the year thus far includes one sequel, two new installments of long-running movie series, a film based on a fairy tale, a film based on a toy line, a sequel to a film based on a toy line, a movie based on a comic book, and three sequels to movies based on comic books" and that next year will bring us "sequels to Taken, Hot Tub Time Machine, Divergent, Paranormal Activity, The Fast and the Furious, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, The Avengers, Pitch Perfect, Insidious, The Terminator, Ted, Magic Mike, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Maze Runner, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Hotel Transylvania, The Hunger Games, Sinister, Kung Fu Panda, Mission: Impossible, Bond, and (of course) Star Wars. There will be remake/reboots of The Jungle Book, Frankenstein, The Fantastic Four, Point Break, Poltergeist, Jurassic Park, and Mad Max" and "have big-screen versions of television shows like Entourage, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Jem and the Holograms. But the loop also flows from film back to television, with the surprise success of Fargo, Hannibal,and About a Boy prompting a new rash of movie-based TV shows, including the Ash vs. Evil Dead, 12 Monkeys, Uncle Buck (again),Marley & Me (what?), and Big (noooooo)".

"Everything is based on another thing, in other words, which prompts the pessimist in me to wonder when we’ll reach “peak pop culture,” and simply run out of preexisting things to adapt and remake. I guess we’ll just have to start re-adapting and re-remaking."

empty Space

Guardian's Peter Bradshaw on Christopher Nolan's  Interstellar

"His new picture is his biggest: biggest event, biggest spectacle, biggest pastiche, biggest disappointment. It’s a colossal science-fiction adventure avowedly in the high visionary-futurist style of Kubrick’s 2001, but sugared up with touches of M Night Shyamalan. Nolan takes on the idealism and yearning from 2001, but leaves behind the subversion, the disquiet and Kubrick’s real interest in imagining a post-human future. What interests Nolan more is looping back to a sentimentally reinforced present....

"... [The character] Cooper is furious at the world’s dreary earthbound dullness, and that his kids’ school teaches that the Apollo moon missions were a hoax designed to bankrupt the Soviets. He is rightly disgusted at this nonsense: I would have liked to have heard a more explicit speech attacking it, and incidentally making it clear that space exploration was not what did for the Soviet economy..... His crew....  get the regulation white suits, Nixon-era tech, long-sleep hibernation routines, flickery video messages from home and standard-issue talking robot called Tars, who is quirky but obedient – basically Hal2D2. ...

"....But all the rest is mannerism and starburst portentousness, underscored by Hans Zimmer’s score that toys playfully with Straussian themes but relies on heavy, wheezingly religiose, organ-type chords.

"The appearance of Interstellar is a moment to reflect that Kubrickian sci-fi, like Loachian social-realism of the same 60s period, was once rooted in the real world: social-realist films could change the law, and sci-fi reflected and even inspired a world in which the moon really was about to be conquered, and everyone assumed that manned space exploration would continue onwards at the same rate. Today, this is a lost futurism. What remains is style, and Nolan has got plenty of that. He gives us more of his signature universe-manipulations, in which the ground or sea will turn up 90 degrees, like a surreal cliff-face: huge, dreamlike and wrong. It’s exhilarating. But Interstellar’s deep space turns out to be shallower than we expected."

retroquotes # 2283928

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time

"Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section" - Steve Albini's vision of the music-lover's paradise that is now


The rest of Albini's sunny side up view of the post-Internet music culture is so far from my own perspective it is disorienting....  but then he's not interested in large formations or Events, he's all about micro-scenes and local communities

 I have doubts that DIY-ing it all yourself (not just the music, but the production process, the design, the promotion,  etc) rather than having it done by seasoned professionals with the machinery in place and year upon years experience (ie. record companies) is really that liberating for musicians, who might be great at the creative aspect but lousy at the putting-what-you've-created-across function.... it's a hugely increased work-load and stress-load... offset by the possiblity of an increased profit margin.... but an increased profit margin on not-a-lot might be no better than a smaller share of quite-a-bit-more.  Certainly for an author, DIY-ing is not a good option, unless perhaps you're achieved such superfame (through the old Major Publisher system, of course) that you have a large and loyal constituency / market. But even then you'd have to have employees, or hire the services of experienced hands... in effect reconstituting something rather like a publisher.

retroquotes #203947264628438389

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time 

What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light. Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds — imagistic, sound, or tactile — from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, being everywhere at once in the data bank. Discarnate man is as weightless as an astronaut but can move much faster. He loses his sense of private identity because electronic perceptions are not related to place. Caught up in the hybrid energy released by video technologies, he will be presented with a chimerical “reality” that involves all his senses at a distended pitch, a condition as addictive as any known drug. The mind, as figure, sinks back into ground and drifts somewhere between dream and fantasy. Dreams have some connection to the real world because they have a frame of actual time and place (usually in real time); fantasy has no such commitment.

— Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village, page 97 (via vagabondbohemia)