I need the best quality in the world to get all the juice out of my 128 kbps torrented mp3 files!

There’s plenty of absurdly ridiculous equipment aimed at audiophiles who ‘feel’ their ears can outpass the natural capacities they have. Most audiophile marketing strategies tap-dance on the line where science and ignorance meet. Hardcore audiophiles get stuck in-between placebo effects, pseudo-science, dubious claims and a lack of understanding of the human body. They also have a fat wallet, so this means a lot of costly useless shit is targeted to them.

One of the biggest enemies of audiophiles are EMI and RFI. Both are pretty much the same: it’s an electromagnetic radiation from an external source that influences how electrical circuits work. It will often affect the good signals from AM radio, to a lesser extent FM radio, and devices like a cellphone. Small effects can be heard in other devices; some guitar pickups will capt the signals from a TV remote being used nearby, although this would depend on the pickups and remote themselves.

Devices with integrated circuits (like computers, TV, monitors, etc.) are more likely to be sources of EMI and RFI than receptors. Real ways to protect one’s device against electromagnetic radiation are usually things like Faraday Cages or shielded cables.

There are other things audiophiles want to block out, like the disgusting solid-state amps, or mostly anything that is not themselves. Let’s just skip through it and get to the cool devices they have to help themselves.

Beating laws of physics at their own game

Some products offered will give this subtitle all its meaning. First, let me show some of them:

The Marigo Labs Signature 3-D Mat
This is a small mat to put on a disk, inside a CD player, for $200. The review claims some major differences in sound quality after application, like changing the reverberation feeling of the songs listened, adding ‘mass and weight’ to the music (better bass and percussions), better sounding triangle (the instrument), better highs and more overall quality to the sound. The site also claims it helps DVDs having a better image.

The claims made about the Mat are about the EMI and RFI, with the pretension that the bits of woven silver within the thing, when spinning fast, act like a shield (possibly some kind of aforementioned Faraday Cage?). Except it would only protect one side of the disc, would act in no way on any other piece of equipment and there’s only doubt to be had about EMI and RFI causing a real interference with the red lasers used in CD players.

The Shakti Hallograph
They’re pieces of wood on a stick used in pairs that are supposed to make your room a better place for music. The manufacturer pretends this makes the bass better, lets the speakers be heard at their full potential and whatnot. And all of this for $999 a pair!

News: They are pieces of wood. Changing the position of a chair or where YOU stand in a room will have a bigger effect on the music. We’re not talking of putting carpet on your walls, which would absorb sound and have some effect, but of putting some kind of fake candlestick in the corners of your room to enhance the sound. There’s not even more explaining needed, and I cry for the people who apparently bought it. But there’s even worse, coming from the same kind of audiophiles:

Acoustic System Resonators
Here’s how it works according to the review:

To recap, the Acoustic System resonators get excited by acoustic waves in the room. They sympathetically resonate at specific frequencies and thus add their output to the sonic event. This adds new direct sound sources to those represented by the loudspeakers and their early reflections[...] The listener’s brain is tricked to experience the room rather differently than without the resonators. These tiny cups with their high pitch trigger our attention in a subtle way. It seems that in place of the resonator, there is something more. More space?

$2380 for the best models. Nothing more to say. The above photo shows a display of many of them. They’re supposed to resonate with the music and add to the overall feeling. I can only scratch my head trying to understand how anyone could want this, especially given the price.

Speaker wires

Speaker wires are an absolute can of worms. Outrageous prices can be asked for a piece of metal which somehow makes electrical current travel better under some conditions, like when they don’t touch the ground: This is where the Cradles of Silence kick in. Apparently, electrical current and sound quality is affected by how the wires are touching the ground and picking up its vibrations. Never mind the fact air also vibrates, the fact that the speakers and the amplifier themselves are touching the ground.

The cradles of silence are wrong on so many levels. Walking on a floor will create more sound to your ear than what any wire will pick up. There is also the fact that vibration may as well propagate better in a suspended wire than when it’s just laying flat on the ground. The saddest thing is that, according to the website, they’re sold out.

In fact, there’s still worst than that. Misconceptions about wires are so bad some people manage to sell wires for $7250, or even $43000. Welcome the Anjou speaker cables and the Opus MM SC. The picture on the lower right is the Transparent Cables Opus MM SC price list taken from the .pdf file on their website.

What these cables can try to do can be done as efficiently for way lower prices: insulation is covered by the shielded cables mentioned earlier, and then the different factors that influence sound quality are not really relevant to the price.

The main physical aspect helping a wire sending a good signal is the resistance. To make things simple, the lower the resistance, the better the signal from the amplifier. The shorter the cable, the lower the resistance. The bigger the gauge, the lower the resistance (and the loss of signal over distance). Speakers are low-impedance devices. The lower the impedance, the more important the resistance is. Simple enough? You need low resistance for better sound, and the other factors are mostly unimportant in comparison, and usually only take effect under unusual lengths or conditions.

Normal cheap speaker cables are good for that. This is where most audiophiles will argue. What THEY hear is not what science says.

That’s the beauty of double-blind tests: the idea is to take a bunch of people, have them sitting in a room, and make them listen to the same song twice, but with different equipment (or lying about the equipment used), without them knowing. You then ask them to say if there’s any difference and if they can spot which is the hi-tech audiophile equipment and which one is the normal wire. Usually, double-blind tests reveal roughly 50-50 ratios. This means people can not make the difference.

To prove this point, The Consumerist reported a home experiment where 12 audiophiles could not make the difference between high-end Monster cables and a coat hanger in terms of audio quality.

More reading

Back in 1999, the New York Times published an article about how high-end speaker wires are bullshit:

Mr. Dunlavy has often gathered audio critics in his Colorado Springs lab for a demonstration.

“What we do is kind of dirty and stinky,” he said. ”We say we are starting with a 12 WAG zip cord, and we position a technician behind each speaker to change the cables out.”

The technicians hold up fancy-looking cables before they disappear behind the speakers. The critics debate the sound characteristics of each wire.

“They describe huge changes and they say, ‘Oh my God, John, tell me you can hear that difference,’ ” Mr. Dunlavy said. The trick is the technicians never actually change the cables, he said, adding, “It’s the placebo effect.”

If you really feel like investing in audio equipment, by God, do it on real hardware, like the amplifier and the speakers themselves rather than tweaks and investing on non-essential equipment.

Avril Lavigne’s mouth is full of cheating and trickery as her voice gets remastered way too much sometimes.

I found a really neat article about auto-tuning abuse in pop music.

If you’re unfamiliar with Auto-tune, and especially if you listen to much pop and rock, you might not hear it initially. When overdone, the effect yields an unnatural yodel or warble in a singer’s voice. But the sound is so commonplace in modern mainstream music that your ears may have tuned out the auto-tune!

The auto-tune effect, to help you out, is often called the ‘Cher effect’. If you listen to ween, the song spirit walker (you can hear a preview here) is also a good example of over the top abuse.

As a rule of thumb, auto-tune can be a good way to fix one or two notes, but in the recent years, producers started using it more and more as a way to either save time, or to just use it as style. All in all, it can sometimes give pretty bad results. Hope you enjoy the above linked post.

Here’s the link again if your attention span is really bad.

This article is not meant to be serious. Please Phil Collins, do not come here and try to burn my house the way you burnt down the Genesis House :(

The Idea

A few months ago, I began reading This is your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin, and I got interested by a few facts about music, how the brain works and whatnot. Here’s a snippet from the book that I found interesting:

All the available evidence is that music can’t be merely auditory cheesecake; it has been around a very long time in our species. Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. The Slovenian bone flute, dated at fifty thousand years ago, which was made from the femur of a now-extinct European bear, is a prime example. Music predates agriculture in the history of our species. We can say conservatively, that there is no tangible evidence that language preceded music. In fact, the physical evidence suggests the contrary.

Music is no doubt older than the fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute, because flutes were unlikely the first instruments. Various percussion instruments, including drums, shakers, and rattles were likely to have been in use for thousand of years before flutes [...]. The archaeological record shows an uninterrupted record of music making everywhere we find humans, and in every era. And, of course, singing most probably predates flutes as well.

I re-read this bit yesterday and thought that drums didn’t evolve that much in concept all in all, especially not when compared to instruments like the Piano (or the synthesizer) or the the electric guitar. Well, it did try to evolve in the 80’s, but it then turned to a murderous MIDI monster. If anything else from the percussive world had to be the target of slow evolution, it was Phil Collins.

Prehistoric men were awesome, Phil Collins sucks

• Studies have proven that women at their peak of fertility during their menstrual cycle tend to rate poor, but creative men as their best mate choice for a short-term relationship, while this couldn’t be said of other times during the cycles. This is a sign of musicianship being a useful skill in survival of one’s genes through times.
• Phil Collins managed to have kids so maybe this means something.

• Most savage music is crude and to us disagreeable, and anyone could do it, in any society.
• Phil Collins can play and sing at the same time, it’s not anyone who can do it. The rest is still true.

• Primitive percussionists used a stretched head of skin over a hollow bowl or box.
• Phil Collins’ used percussionist head is stretched skin over a hollow bowl or box.

• Some believers think cavemen didn’t really exist and would rather trust the good old Genesis.
• Some believers think Collins shouldn’t really exist and would rather listen to the good old Genesis.

• Prehistoric men were bad ass, and would hunt and kill animals to eat them around a fire while playing their drums.
• Phil Collins donated autographed drumsticks to fight against KFC.

• In every past society that we are aware of, music and dance are inseparable.
• Phil Collins can’t dance, he can’t talk, he can’t sing, only thing about him is the way he walks.

• Through history, music was used in courtship as a way to prove one’s wealth, intelligence, stamina and overall good health.
• Phil Collins has used music in courtship as a way to prove his own wealth, stamina and overall good health.

Do you hate Phil Collins too?

I usually hate this crap, but this one lends itself pretty well for the article: shitty quiz. For the kick of it, here were the results:

Congratulations! You hate Phil Collins. You blame him for every mishap that occurs during your everyday life, and with good reason! Pat yourself on the back, you’re a good person.

68% of people had this result.

Can’t say I’m surprised.

The most important parts of Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine are their clothes with tiger patterns. Shame they must quit this year, due to Cheese’s voice problems.

Bumblefoot

Our first Artist, Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, is an entertaining man. His ‘bumblefoot’ name comes from a bird infection he learned about while helping his wife studying for her veterinary exams. There’s nothing too impressive there, but the guy creates a neat gimmick when he plays his guitar: a giant foot, painted to the colors of a bumblebee, with wings that move when he uses the tremolo.

His gimmick is kind of ambiguous and closer to a concept, but the guy is relatively not serious, using shredding lines as the bases of songs like ‘Guitars suck’ or laughing at metal guitarists in ‘I can’t play the blues’ while he is a very proficient metal guitarist himself, which makes me say the balance tips in favor of small gimmicks at times.

He plays other interesting instruments, including a fretless guitar and a swiss cheese guitar. He’s played as Ron Thal for about 2-3 years, and then in 1998, he took the name ‘Bumblefoot’, which he still has today (he is supposedly releasing a new album in 2008). He is also playing with Guns N’ Roses, since the great Buckethead in left 2006. And guess who is our next musician?

Buckethead

Buckethead is another surprising artist. He released not less than 27 albums only in 2007 (source), is currently playing with 7 bands, has played with about 19 bands in total, and also leads a solo career. One of his best known songs is Jordan for those interested.

From his FAQ, you can also learn that he auditioned for Red Hot Chili Peppers, but was not taken:

One journalist’s account reported that the lead singer picked Buckethead up at the airport and found out that Buckethead had not heard any of their tunes. The audition proceeded anyway, and Buckethead played in his inimitable fashion (i.e., robot dance, hyper-metal licks etc…). When he finished the band applauded raucously. Flea confirmed that they auditioned BH saying that he was “sweet and normal,” but they wanted someone “…who could also kick a groove.” (source)

Despite being interesting for all sorts of achievements, his gimmick is that he is mainly known for wearing a mask and a KFC bucket on is head at nearly all times, and close to no pictures of him have ever been released. The only one I’ve found so far is the one that was featured on his wikipedia entry a few months ago (see the thumbnail below) with his real name: Brian Carroll. Buckethead seems to take his KFC bucket seriously: his artist names obviously derivates from it, but he also uses many chicken-related words in songs and albums he releases: Enter the Chicken, From The Coop, KFC Skin Piles or Secret Recipe, to name a few.

Richard Cheese

Mark Jonathan Davis is Richard Cheese who is a full gimmick. His whole career revolves around a single concept: playing popular rap, rock, metal, and pop songs in a swanky lounge music style. Even the stage name Richard Cheese is a joke, as it can purposedly be shortened to ‘Dick Cheese‘ (possibly NSFW).

He basically takes the same lyrics, same chord progression, but changes the style entirely. There’s no real need to explain when you can see the act itself:

There are some secrets involved in the art of making screen shots of your own posts before publishing them, but I am a man of many secrets and will not say a word.

The painful memories

Music often evolves in the best way possible through years and general pop culture: the bad stuff gets forgotten, the good stuff gets remembered, and then the terribly bad stuff becomes a cult. The 80’s got their fair share of everything, and the worst becomes a cult way too many times.

Today, MatthewT from http://hiddenportal.info sent me a link to a Dancin’ Kim video, teaching you how to do the robot. I believe it’s fake (see the producer’s profile on imdb), and even if it is, it’s certainly a good tribute (if it’s real, I’ll be glad to be proven wrong!). Music and dance get to look at their photo album and blush with shame as these videos picture a scary but true-looking decade:

The Videos

How To Do The Robot

How To Do The Thriller

How To Learn Popping And Locking

How To Do The Cabbage Patch

How To Do The Running Man

I refuse to believe this show ran for 4 years. The 80s’ did last for 10 years, but well, they were not that video.

The tools of the trade for weird performances: guitars, in this case. My heading images for each article should be a puzzle sometime.

What

There are times you’ll just stumble upon an act, a song, or just a way a musician looks when playing a song that will either fascinate you, make you laugh, or just surprise you. In this post, I’m linking to a few of them, in things that range from playing weird instruments (see Michel Lauziere), to playing them in an unusual way.

The Videos

• Giant Flying V guitar solo
• By two bowes [sic] - A man playing the cello with two bows at the same time.
• Mario Bros Theme by singing tesla coils
• Not as silly as others, but Justin King really pushes guitar technic way too far.

The very well known Michel Lauzière has many pieces:

• “The Toreador Song” from “Carmen” using 300 glass bottles.
• Compilation of many things from Mr. Lauzière, going from a one-man band to playing with cups
• Bike Horn pot-pourri

Add yours if you want.

Once again, I wonder if such cropping is good. This is a closeup on a tuba, which plays with a bass clef

The origins

In the restrictive family of ‘clefs’ in musical notation, we usually find the treble clef, the bass clef, and on some occasions, the tenor clef and ripoffs of each of these symbols, like the baritone, subbass, alto or the soprano clefs. There is also the neutral/percussion clef, but it’s like the criminal kid of the family nobody talks about, so we’ll not even consider it. We used to have different clefs though, namely the D-clef and Gamma-clef, which were used to indicate the notes on the first line of the bass clef, but they stopped being used through time.

So it seems there is a natural evolutionary process between different clefs within the same family, and only the fittest survive: It seems apparent the bass clef got rid of the other keys, making it a potential ‘badass’ notation mark, causing the end and despairs of its rivals.

But what makes a key superior to another? How does the evolutionary process work? First, let’s see the evolution of the treble and bass clef:

Treble key evolution:

Bass Clef evolution:

From what we can gather here, treble clef evolved in a much smore stylistic way. The swirls all around the place, a continuous curvy line folding over itself in all its grace. On the other hand, you have the bass clef. Short, sturdy, with dots on its right. Let’s draw a list of the evolutionary processes of both.

Treble clef:

1. Really stylistic “G”
2. Even more stylistic “G”
3. Even more stylistic “G” than before, and some accent on superfluous style.
4. We do not need the “G” anymore. The treble clef is a beautiful clef as it is!

Bass Clef:

1. Simple efficient “F”: You know why you’re here.
2. Stylistic F, trying to look better.
3. Fuck style. Style pisses me off, I turn into a frown.
4. Even more accentuated frown. Eyes were so angry they went somewhere else.

But where did they go? Why are they back now? My theory is simple: they went away to kick some ass, possibly those of the potentially really stylistic D-clef and gamma-clef. These clefs disappeared because they got their shit fucked up bad by a really pissed-off bass clef. Then the eyes came back and we have the modern bass clef:

The Evolutionary strategies

Past evolutionary strategies are of course interesting, but what’s even better is guessing what the future will reveal us from these traits. So we have two opponents: The stylish great looking Treble clef, and the useful and pissed off Bass clef. The way things are:

1. The Treble clef is just going to get prettier and prettier with time. This has a few potential effects: The clef looks so great people do not care about the Bass clef anymore and it disappears;
2. The Treble clef looks so good it ends up being hypnotizing, to the point where humanity is at risk. Too much beauty for our tiny human brains to process.

Style has a downside, though: you get more fragile and restricted. This is where the Bass clef stands its chance. It’s overly simplistic and can adapt to lots of situations by its robustness. During the past, bass clefs managed to get out of trouble while using their simple shapes to their advantage by entertaining us:

Link

How cuter can this be? Cute big eyes, a great pompadour haircut, a probably deep charming voice: the Elvis of musical notation. This kind of ruse is what the Bass clef needs and is also a minimalist example of what it can do. This is not just a defense mechanism, it’s also an offense one. Could the Treble clef say as much?

No, it could never. What we see here is a Treble clef where it belongs: fancy clefs go with fancy underwear. While our killer Bass clef can withstand harsh conditions and spend an impressive number of consecutive days in a spinning drier, the Treble clef has to stay immobile with the silk undies while it slowly dries in the sun, caressed by the lovely elements of summer. This is what it can do.

The Outcome

This will bring us to dangerous events. The Treble clef is there, making us say “aaaw” in admiration as it stands there innocently like a musical Bambi. The Bass Clef is a pissed off shape-shifting force of nature that’s coming toward the Treble Clef in a menacing manner, like fire on oil. If you have not watched Bambi and have the same ideal ending to it as I have, the fire is going to kill Bambi. The Bass clef will kill the Treble Clef (and possibly kill its mothers, unless the hunters did that.)

Learning is a crucial thing, and I hope you did learn something while enjoying this piece of history. Building one’s strength on appearances only will apparently take away the existence of the G-clef. We’ve also seen how preserving feelings of anger can bring you to the top, another important lesson. With some perspective, time will tell if we may see how the percussion clef could team up with the bass clef to prepare a coup against the tenor clef.

Why, oh God why?

I wrote this little story after some light-hearted discussions with my girlfriend, exchanging drawings on the subject. I really liked how this could turn and decided to push it far enough. I really hope some people managed to like it even though it’s extremely stupid/childish/absurd. Come on, I even took the time to draw/animate these little things.