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On Noise In Electronic Music
New blog Harmonia Prohibitorum has published an interesting discussion of analog vs digital and the role of noise in electronic music:
My main problem with digital music applications is the silence that is there to start with.
If you record nothing at all onto analogue tape and play it back there’s still something there. I always needed some noise to begin the working process with, a tone or some hiss seeping through the faders of a beat up old Alan and Heath and then take it from there.
However now digital music applications are becoming more of a tool for creating noise, sometimes at the most micro of levels. What we’re hearing now in music is that the sounds have become more and more complex. You can tell by listening to underground electronic music these days which is incorporating a higher bandwidth of hi frequencies and sub bass as well as contemporary notated music which had been leaning further to incorporating prepared instruments, electronic sounds and extended techniques. Both genres overall just incorporating a wider spectrum of noise, harmonics, overtones, beating tones etc.
What is happening is people are yearning for more noise and it’s becoming more and more acceptable to hear it, so we are actually improving our ears by being able to hear sound in a different way.
There are all sorts of reasons that analog, at its best, sounds so good, ranging from the sense of reality that a little background noise establishes, to nostalgia, to the ear-pleasing nature of analog distortion.
When you listen to a digital recording with headphones, something that’s extremely common today, you’re hearing a new type of silence in the music.
Do you think that pristine digital recordings are making musicians yearn for new types of noise and new types of sounds?
Image: cameralucida
Here’s Why You Hate Pop Music
Waxy’s Andy Baio has taken a statistical look at how the record industry has changed in the last fifty years, and it looks like there’s a good reason why you hate so much mainstream pop music: the variety of pop music is less than half of what it was in the sixties:
According to Billboard, the late 1960s were the peak of musical diversity in popular music, with 743 different songs appearing on the 1966 Billboard Top 100 chart. It’s fallen consistently since, hitting an all-time low in 2002 with only 295 songs.
Since 2002, it’s improved only slightly, with 351 unique songs appearing on last year’s Top 100.
Is it any wonder that people are listening to less radio, buying less music and, instead, turning to blogs and podcasts to find new music?
Vinyl Sales Up By 36%
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, shipments of vinyl LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007, growing to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period, to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats
Nearly 450 million CDs were sold last year, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on the first three months of this year, Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million in 2008.
“I don’t think vinyl is for everyone; it’s for the die-hard music consumer,” said Jay Millar, director of marketing at United Record Pressing, a Nashville based company that is the nation’s largest record pressing plant.
An avid music fan himself, Millar says he has moved to vinyl in recent years.
“Once I got my first iPod … I’m looking at my wall of CDs and trying to justify it,” Millar said. “The things I like — the artwork, the liner notes, the sound quality — it dawns on me, those are things I like better on vinyl.” He welcomed back the pops and clicks, even some of the scratches.
“I like that fact that it’s imperfect in a lot of ways, live music is imperfect too,” Millar said.
Image: Tilton Lane
Apple has released a video introduction to using the iPhone, below.
Based on what I’ve seen, it looks seriously droolworthy.
This is what cell phones are going to look like in five years, intelligently combining mobile features with music and Internet services. It’s too bad we’ll have to wait five years for something like this to be affordable, though.
Apple iPhone Debuts June 29th
Apple has announced June 29th as the debut date for its iPhone.
The iPhone combines three products — a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a cutting-edge Internet communications device. Based on what we’ve seen so far, it looks like it will redefine the state of the art of both mobile phones and MP3 players.
While the iPhone’s price ($499 plus a 2-year contract) may put it out of the reach of many musicians, it’s clear that the technology is something that musicians will have to face. Digital music is becoming more important than ever, as is mobile technology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the technology in the iPhone is copied by other manufacturers within a few years.
The iPhone has been one of the most hyped new product introductions in recent years, but, in this case, it looks like the technology really is revolutionary.
Here’s Apple’s ad introducing the iPhone:
