On this episode of Spark: Music and technology. Click to listen now:
Play audio:
- Pat and Patrick Costello organize The Ukulele Project to make instructional videos for Tom White’s ukulele club Ogoki Post, Ontario
- Jonathan Berger explains why some people prefer the sizzling sound of MP3s (full interview)
- Carl Wilson on how technology influences the aesthetic of pop music (full interview)
- Nora tries out the Emotichair, a chair designed to give deaf people a richer experience of music. To read a full transcript of this item, click on “Continue reading this entry” at the bottom of this post.
- Richard Cytowic studies synaesthesia, a “crossing of the senses”
This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects:
- “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama
- Ukulele clips from Music220_Assignment 1 by DKifer
- “Proliferate” and “Movin’ On Up” by Chad Crouch
- Clip from Soundie – Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens (ca. early 1940s)
- 45 rpm needle off.wav by FreqMan
- “One Big Holiday” by My Morning Jacket from The WIRED CD
- Bach’s “Suite III in Do maggiore – bourree I e II” by Vito Paternoster from Bach Cello Suites
- Samples from New Dimensions in Sound (1957)
- “Nocturne” and “Raccoon Family” by Podington Bear
- “Starry” by General Fuzz
(Special thanks to two very helpful Pro Tools plugins: iZotope Vinyl and Digidesign’s Vari-Fi)
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[Original image by Timothy Lloyd]
[Music up--heavy metal band. Loud and aggressive]
Nora Young: (shouting) That band? It’s not at a club. I was listening to them play in a room at Ryerson University in Toronto, where I was trying out the Emoti-Chair.
[music up and fades and sustains under NY]
NY: It’s a Ryerson research project and the idea is to design a chair that would give deaf people a richer experience of music. The Emoti-Chair looks like a recliner, and as you sit in it, the different instruments are represented by vibrations and pulses that you feel on different parts of your body.
The coolest part was rippling vibrations that came up from the arm rests and stimulated my forearms. It almost felt like a current running up to my shoulders making them wiggle in time to the music. It made me want to dance, more than just standing there listening to the music did. But I could also feel thumping and jerking in my chest and other vibrations in different parts of my body.
[Music ends]
clip Ellen Hibbard: ” So, I’m Ellen Hibbard, I’m a second year phd student.”
NY: Ellen is deaf. She’s signing her answers. The voice you hear is her interpreter, Tala Jalili. Ellen has been trying out the Emoti-chair. Before using the chair…
clip EH: “In terms of listening to music, I could hear vibrations but in terms of touching a speaker. Touching the woofer with my hands, I could just fell one speaker booming. The first time I had the woofers in my back, strapped on, I was astounded! I feel like it opened up a whole new world for me, a whole new world of music, and I very much enjoyed it.”
NY: The way Ellen explains it, the effect of separating the instruments into vibrations on different parts of the body is a revelation:
clip EH: “But it can bring tears to my eyes about how much I can feel music. I can feel the piano. I can distinguish the instruments. I’ve never known that piano and guitar felt different. Growing up, it was quite different, I had hearing aids, they tried to get me to experience music, it was just a mumble jumble of sounds to me. It just was not possible, I’m profoundly deaf. I have never been able to separate sounds.”
clip NY: “What role does music play in deaf culture, generally?”
clip EH: “In the deaf community, let’s say if we host a dance or have a gathering, we typically will do it where we have wooden planks on the floor, so when there are drums, or bass, we’ll take off our shoes and feel it through it vibrations in the floor, so that’s how the deaf community experiences music.”
NY: But what if you could separate the music into its component parts? Maria Karam is a post doc fellow at Ryerson. She works with Human Computer Interactions.
clip Maria Karam: ” Imagine putting your hands on a speaker that’s playing music. You can feel vibrations, but what we can normally feel are the most prominent low level bass and drum type vibrations, and these dominate the other frequencies, such as voice and guitar and some of the higher frenquencies that aren’t accessible.
So, because the body is very capable of processing information, a lot more than we actually use it for, what we’re doing is leveraging this ability and we’re separating the music into multiple signals or channels and we’re presenting each of those individual unique channels along your body, giving your body the chance to process it, strictly bypassing your ears, but tickling your back, or pounding on your lower thigh.”
NY: So in some ways your whole body is a sensory organ. Beyond the cool factor, what impressed me was the way sensing music more deeply is not just an aesthetic experience, but an emotional one, according to Ellen Hibbard
clip NY: did you get that sense from listening to it of what kind of emotions were being communicated by the composer?
clip EH: “Oh certainly, and my mind wonders and goes off into an emotional roller-coaster of experience. For the first time, I realized it was pushing my buttons, pushing my emotions, making me feel emotions that I never knew were associated with music. This was never an experience and I have to say, I like it!”
NY: The rock band wasn’t the only music we heard that day at Ryerson. There was also music composed specifically for use with the Emoti-Chair
[Stéphane Vera's music up. Ambient]
clip Stéphane Vera: “My name is Stéphane Vera and I’m the first composer in the world to be composing for a new tactile medium, which is the Emoti-Chair. ”
“I realized very quickly that I was allowing my senses, specifically my hearing, to influence me because I was hitting notes that would be more related to one another, and I said, this is not the way to proceed. If deaf person is going to get something out of this, then I had better be composing for a deaf person who can’t hear anything, so I pumped tv static into my ears so as to not allow any outside sound and relied entirely on me sitting on the chair with a keyboard on my lap and the vibrations to dictate how I was going to start the composition.”
clip NY: “And how, as a composer, how do you feel when you hear the reactions that we heard in the room today from the people who were using it and what their experience of it is.”
clip SV: “To me it is a more honest reaction than someone who has been listening to music their whole life and just, you know, says they like your piece. To have made such a difference in someone’s life who otherwise was closed off to music completely, and didn’t want it a part of his or her life. To have that person say, wow, you’ve completely changed my mind about music, it’s very very special, it’s very meaningful and I want that to be for everybody.”
[music resolves and fades away--tinkly music.]
Seems to me like the kids today are getting used to the crappy quality of badly encoded mp3, because it's all they're familiar with – they can't hear technical problems like distorted audio.
Same with video, you see a lot of TV stations using youtube quality video (low rez) instead of pulling clips from an archive because people are used to seeing youtube-quality clips.
Mind you, there is a particular timbre of certain audio equipment that can enhance the sound – my Suzi Quatro 8-track sounds better than my CD.
Distorted audio is, in my opinion what makes electric/electronic music interesting. In the early 1950's Link Wray stuck a pencil through the speaker in his guitar amplifier to get a particular type of distortion for his guitar. Elmore James et al. used guitar amp distortion created from overdriving the tube powered amplifiers of the day. These days vacuum tubes are used primarily in instrument amplifiers and high end audiophile playback equipment, for the same reason. Pleasant distortion.
@Ambroke: Oh, I have no qualms with distortion – it can be used as an instrument just as much as silence can. Sonic Youth have made a career out of it.
My issue is more with unintentional distortion, ie: the kind that wasn't meant to be there at the recording stage. Interestingly, Metallica fans are upset that their last album Death Magnetic was "too distorted", in other words badly mastered and sounds like crap. Yes, even the metalheads want genuine distortion. (just google "metallica album too loud")
@Nora: Yes, the HD/Blu ray thing is quite funny – especially when they use stations use low-rez clips upgraded to HD TV looking especially bad.
A friend of mine also can't listen to the Beatles on CD. He grew up (as I did) with them on vinyl and that seems like the only "right" way to listen.
Hey Lee,
I find the video stuff particularly interesting. At the same time as we're supposed to be spending all this money on HD tvs, Blu Ray, etc etc, there's such an interest in low rez.
I think you're totally right that it's what you get used to hearing. Jonathan Berger has some interesting points to make in this regard in the full interview (coming in a few hours) Cheers.
It's interesting that from the first experiments in recording sound, through the various formats up until the LP, there was generally an improvement in sound quality. I went through the 70s when audiophiles spent all kinds of money to get the perfect sound. We all thought that the new digital formats would be the final answer, but that hasn't been the case. Sound quality has declined for the sake of convenience. Don't get me wrong, I love the gadgets, but listening to my music on an MP3 player makes me yearn for the days when you could make your living room sound like a concert hall.
I remember the days when we used to get great audio by recording to CRO2 (chromium-dioxide) based audio cassettes, and even better audio from metal-based audio cassettes. I find that music files stored in the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) actually sound better than files stored in MP3. Ogg Vorbis is slightly better in quality than MP3 also. As for comparing the legacy technologies to digital file formats for audio, I would say that FLAC is similar to Metal cassettes while CRO2 is similar to Ogg Vorbis.
When it comes to recording, I find it easier to work with programs such as Audacity, where I can manipulate the audio in ways that I could not do with a cassette deck.
On my desktop, I have a program called TerminatorX (http://www.terminatorx.org) that allows me to perform "record scratching" techniques on ANY type of audio file (including this show's theme), then record the output to an audio file, for inclusion in a remix created with Audacity.
The concept of "house music" was the result of this type of remixing, which started in New York and in Chicago back in the early 1980s, when DJs wanted something to do with the outmoded disco records that were in their inventories.
I was suprised that there was no mention of Jimi Hendrix and his synaesthesia, I read that 'Purple Haze' was written about it.
Also T. Jefferson Parker wrote a very strange detective novel about a man with synaesthesia that could tell when people where lying by the colours surronding them.
Too bad. I wish I'd known that about Purple Haze when I did the interview. He doesn't mention Hendrix in the book, (unless I missed it) but he's been studying synaesthesia for decades, and I'm sure he'd have some interesting observations if that's in fact the case.
Wasn't every pop song written between 1967-1969 about that?
Ha! Actually, I just got a voicemail from someone pointing out that people often experience synaesthesia during LSD trips (Richard mentioned it too in the unedited version). Coincidence?
Quick request: could you arrange to include the proper length (in (mega)bytes or minutes & seconds) in the post somewhere? My internet connection is sometimes spotty, so I'd like to check & make sure I've gotten the whole thing, especially since I'm not familiar enough with your show to know already how long it's supposed to be….
Hi Jonathon, Thanks for this. Every episode is 27 minutes long, but your point is well taken for our full length interviews. I'll mention it to Dan
tom white is my cousin!
he was talking about this at Christmas
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