Quote of the Week: Audio Infidelity

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Not so much a defense of audiophiles, who pursue audio-fidelity at financial expense that many would consider excessive, but an interesting distinction:

Perhaps audiophilia and musicophilia are two different things that are sometimes, but not always, present in the same brain.

So there’s music and then there’s sound. A lot of people like both, but maybe some who like sound don’t much care for music…

That’s from a response by Matt Corwine (at lineout.thestranger.com) to an excoriation of audiophiles by Clive Thompson (at collisiondetection.net), who was himself responding to an article by Robert Levine (the pop music critic, not the classical music critic) about the “death” of high fidelity (at rollingstone.com).

The distinction between audiophilia and musicophilia isn’t as clear as Corwine’s post might suggest. For one thing, the jazz fusion, warhorse classical favorites, and overproduced classic rock often favored by audiophiles has plenty of fans with mid-fidelity iPods and low-fidelity AM radios.

Also, in our current moment of “field recordings as art” (and as raw material for art), many people are more than happy to listen carefully and casually to un-composed sound (bird calls, traffic, the wind), regardless of bit rates and speaker quality. Not all phonographers — that is, active producers of field-recordings — are audiophiles. And many phonographers would be comfortable using the term “music” to describe their found sounds.

Still, Corwine has posited an interesting hypothesis. The pursuit of sound as an end unto itself — and thus the idea that the optimal stereo system is less a machine intended to play music than it is a machine fine-tuned to replicate the real world — is certainly supported by the popularity in the past of records, such as those on the Command label, that served as sound-system tests. (The Command album pictured here was “arranged for dynamic stereo performances,” according to the cover blurb, and the op-art image below that blurb presents a stylish visualization of the stereo experience.)

Of course, audiophiles may be enthusiasts of neither sound nor music, however those two words are defined. Audiophiles may simply be fixated on technology.

Terry Riley Interview MP3 (1969)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

To close the week out, a recently uploaded interview with softspoken minimalist composer Terry Riley, dating from 1969. The interview is by Charles Amirkhanian, founder of Other Minds, the catalog of which (at archive.org) houses the file. Also interviewed are Robert Ashley and William Maraldo, then co-directors of the Mills Center for Contemporary Music in Oakland, California. Riley talks about, among other things, the positive influence rock musicians might have on classical musicians (MP3).

Slo-mo Steam Whistle MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are certain real-world references that often serve as descriptors when it comes to electronically mediated music. There’s the robotic cycling of the cicada, the semi-sentient hum of an aging refrigerator, the proto-minimal-techno rumble of the subway, the piercing cry of the tea kettle.

As the poster at santafesound.blogspot.com reminds us, those overly familiar sounds mask hidden and mysterious depth. He’s taken a recording of a tea kettle as it reaches the boiling point, for instance, and slowed it to one quarter its original speed. The result is an at times harrowing, and at times warm, series of noises and undulating drones, the complexity of which suggest that more than a single sound source is involved (MP3).

In fact, a car does reportedly pass by at one point, adding “a cool little something,” as the poster puts it. But the core of the 12-minute track is just water being brought to a boil. As a result of his little experiment in process-music, he’s made us slow down and smell the coffee — or, more to the point, he’s slowed down the tea kettle and made us listen.

This same website was the origin of the dying Buddha Machine of last December (disquiet.com).

Archival Gamer-Music MP3 EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great netlabel Monotonik (mono211.com) closed out 2007 not with another in its ongoing free new electronic releases — but with a tasty archival entry. Back in 2000, on his own Systorm Technologies label, Aaron Rutledge released an EP titled Musical Endeavor under the name Pliant. According to the recent Monotonik entry, the EP was intended to be the sound of a fictional video game, an intention supported by such track names as the vigorously bleepy “Title” (MP3), the sedately synthy “Options” (MP3), and the vaguely porn-score-ish “Boss” (MP3), not to mention “Credit” (MP3), which sounds like several arcade faves being played side by side. And those are just four of the nine tracks. What’s interesting, in retrospect, is that though Pliant’s tracks suggest video-game background scores, they aren’t stuck in the 8-bit mimicry or nostalgia that fuels so much of today’s retro-gamer music.

More info on the release at mono211.com. The old systorm.com URL now redirects to Rutledge’s own aaronrutledge.com.

Taylor Deupree “Auld Lang Syne”-wave MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just as 2007 was quickly coming to a close, Taylor Deupree posted a quiet, two-minute paean to time that was almost immediately past. He explained his process on his website, 12kblog.wordpress.com, as follows:

today, on the last day of 2007, i decided to spend no more than one hour creating a short piece of music, as a final farewell to the year. the piece, “untitled_1231″ was created with a small wooden xylophone, given to me as a christmas present from Keiichi Sugimoto (Fourcolor) and Sanae Yamasaki (Moskitoo), a small tone bell, and a single synthesizer patch. it was created and recorded live in about 15 minutes and i spent another 40 minutes or so on the mixing and production. it was a spontaneous piece, a simple thought, dedicated to a close friend of mine whose very difficult 2007 will be a very positive 2008”¦

The ticking clock and other creative constraints yielded a tender gesture of a recording: a slight sound, not unlike the simplest of glass-harmonica maneuvers, milked for all its exquisite detail (MP3).