The perfect versus the human
This is about music. But I think it’s about a lot more, too:
When the human element goes out of art, the art suffers greatly. We perceive it, even if we’re not necessarily conscious of why things sound different. I even remember not liking CDs when they first came out. Compared to vinyl they had an artificial and “cold” sound to my ears. Vinyl was scratchy and annoying in many ways, but I clung to it for a while. Now I’ve abandoned it, but I feel its loss.
And before records were invented, people actually used to have to get together in person to hear music played by human hands and mouths. Seems strange, doesn’t it?
I can’t this one out of my head!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_rBBKmDIUtY
My dad grew up on a hard scrabble farm where he was the youngest with two older sisters and the three of them would ride to school on a broken down old one eyed horse that was not good for much else. At least that’s the way my aunt told me about when they were kids and we visited her when she turned 100 in the year 2000. My sister asked her what the most important change she saw in her life time and she said when radios came into their homes and they quit singing.
Dad’s family were dirt poor farm people who plowed with mules, sold eggs in town to buy food yet they could all read music and play music, they had a pump organ in their home because they could not afford a piano and my aunt told us that the family would sing harmony all of the time they were doing chores, (kind of sounds like an old Johnny Cash song), while doing dishes and traveling into town in their farm wagon. All of them, including our dad sang in church choirs most all of their lives and my aunt said bringing strangers into the homes via the radio and later TV destroyed something that was important and wonderful when people had to make their own music.
On her one hundredth birthday our aunt sat down at the piano, opened a hymnal and enjoyed showing off playing old Methodist Hymns.
Absent the human element, ‘art’ is not possible.
neo, many people also perceived CDs to sound harsh. Today with the right, fairly expensive equipment, CDs sound far better than they did initially.
Happily, vinyl records have seen a resurgence in popularity, last year for the first time, vinyl records outsold CDs.
Part of that dynamic however is that streaming is the future. Many listeners who gravitated from vinyl to CDs have now gravitated to streaming.
Which is also facilitated with… computers.
Vinyl has not only made a comeback but is a booming business, with way more sales than cds. Well, relatively booming. The recorded music industry has been gravely wounded by streaming.
Maybe as “collectors” items but there’s no turning back from streaming. It is the future.
OldTexan:
Sheet music was a big seller back then. A great many people entertained themselves that way.
That’s a great story.
People continued to do that long after records were invented. I would suspect in your own family. Didn’t your mother play the piano?
My guess is that many here were playing Christmas carols, or seasonal songs at least, in the living room this past holiday.
Now it’s been a handful of eventful years filled with human loss since we did that, but I was just the other day working on getting up on Rumble a private access posting of that grainy CoolPix camera video of the old timer practice session from 2006 I was remarking on in a previous thread. https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/01/02/walking-and-singing-those-lonely-streets/#comment-2534226
I know there are guitarists here. I am sure that some of them can forgo banging out “Stairway to Heaven” for one day, pull out the acoustic instead and play “Here Come’s Santa Claus” for the kids
DNW:
I obviously didn’t mean that no human beings ever do that now.
But it used to be ubiquitous, and it is most certainly not all that widespread now. Much more common is people listening separately to their own music with headphones and not interacting with each other.
DNW:
My mother absolutely did not play the piano or any other instrument. She didn’t even like to sing, although she liked to dance. What’s more, I never saw anyone else’s mother – or father – play the piano.
My grandmother – my mother’s mother – could play the piano, but she was born almost 140 years ago. We used to sit at the piano and play and sing together.
“there’s no turning back from streaming. It is the future.”
Who in 2000 would have thought that spoken word programs (podcasts) would be the hottest thing in media in 2020? I suspect streaming might not be “the future” when people eventually realize they don’t actually own any of their accumulated media.
There’s also the problem of actually making money. You used to be able to essentially force people to buy an entire record or CD if they wanted just a few songs. That model was a boon to mid-level and lower selling artists and it’s well on its way to extinction.
It’s like this recent article on how Disney+ and HBO Max are facing a real problem of “churn,” people signing up to watch just a few things and then cancelling. It’s a genuine barrier to streaming services making money and if you start demanding people sign longer contracts, you start cutting down on the number of people willing to sign on at all.
I concluded a while ago that I grew up in the Golden Age of Televised Media, starting when we could watch unscrambled channels from across the country with our backyard satellite dish. Then came the internet, which offered even more and for “free.” Now if you pay attention, options are being limited and costs are increasing because the entertainment industry has allowed technology to destroy the business model that made them billions of dollars.
Mike
Gee. My mother could not play the piano either; but she did. LOL
I’d list the link to the private video I put up for the nieces and nephews, but, you know … I explained my reasons for not doing so in the other thread.
I have your e-mail. Maybe I’ll send the link to you strictly for purposes of perspective. You personally will almost certainly find what they are doing strange and alien in sensibility, and perhaps even tiresomely crude and unpolished.
But what you will see, is a pale and hesitating retracing in their old age of the experiences we youngsters took for granted back when these men were in their prime and we were children.
The underground comix artist, R. Crumb, hung out with Janis Joplin in her heyday (that’s Crumb’s artwork on the “Cheap Thrills” album), but he despised rock’n’roll from the 60s on.
Crumb lived for the thousands of old 78s he had collected because he felt the sound was more human and natural, from a culture which had mostly been lost even then.
Vinyl, CDs, and streaming. The major difference between these media is in dynamic range and frequency range. Vinyl and streaming are compressed, streaming especially so.
The so-called “warmth” of vinyl is due to an emphasis of the midrange. And it is necessarily dynamic compressed so that the grooves would not bleed into each other. Streaming is very compressed to get so much data pushed through the digital pipeline; same for storing 1000s of songs on an iPod. Of course if it is listened to by those cheap plastic earbuds…who cares?
CDs offer the best dynamic range and tonal range. They were bad at first as engineers were applying same techniques as they had used with vinyl. I’ll take my CDs played over my audiophile system with very good B&W speakers (7.1 surround) any day.
I do not miss the pops, clicks, and noise from dust and dirt on vinyl records and the inordinate care you had to take of them. The expensive and delicate turntables, tonearms, cartridges, needles. All that is not missed, but acute hearing is one those things that age steals little by little … But I’ve grown much wiser as I grow older (or not). 😉
When I was a child in the 60’s a friend had a player piano in his home. So someone had figured out how to remove the human element as far back as 1910 or thereabouts. My friend would thread in the perforated paper roll, and we’d both pump the foot pedals to make the thing play.
We had a piano in our home but none of us kids were significantly interested in it. My siblings and I all played wind instruments in our youth and I stuck with it until my studies got the best of me in my junior year of college. Fond memories.
My mother trained seriously as a classical pianist. She also enjoyed pulling us kids together for sing-a-longs from “Songs to Grow On” and “More Songs to Grow On” — some of my happiest memories.
When I was growing up it seemed about half the family homes I visited had a piano in the living room. Maybe nobody played, but it was there. A fair number of adults could play though. That has changed since.
It’s a great era to buy a piano if one wishes. Yamaha sells a wonderful 88-key digital keyboard with a fine touch for $800. I wasn’t sure I would use it much when I bought it — my practice still isn’t solid — but I felt it would be good to have a piano in the house as part of that older tradition.
Sounds reasonable. No pun intended.
What I had noticed in the early days of CDs at least, was a distinct loss of emphasis in the backing track or accompaniment in some performances; a sense of acoustic flattening.
I suppose this could be the result of the way the media happened to be processed in the lab that day. I have noticed distinct differences in the same media.
As an example we are all familiar with, I have several cassette tape editions of the universally known and heard Bing Crosby Christmas album. I’d temporarily misplace one, and just pick up another in a bin by a cash register, or buy one for the folks or whatever … you know the drill having done it yourself.
Collecting them together one day I noticed that the first one I must have bought had to have been an early release in that format … earlier date, more attention to artwork, even a seemingly heavier or denser feel to the plastic. It also sounded as if it were recorded in a concert hall or cathedral as far as the traditional carols went. All the other tapes, four or so, had a flattish more intimate if not quite muted sound by way of comparison.
It must have been the mastering or something …
Streaming isn’t all bad. Lossless FLAC is what? 10MB/minute — that’s nothing that’s going to stress anything in first world infrastructure set up for streaming HD or 4K video. Hook that up to a good DAC and headphones and it’s Jazz at the Pawnshop Happy Time. No problem to record at much higher bitrates than 44kHz these days — it is a and it is not about Nyquist Freqency for human hearing which peters out by ~22kHz — more that it shifts sampling and DSP *artifacts* further to the RHS.
There’s pretty much no reason to listen to compressed digital audio these days — and I agree that especially MP3s sound awful.
Commenter made a good point about awfulness of early CDs from mid 80s to early 90s. Took a while for recording engineers to get a full grasp of the new medium.
I have a fondness for good digitizations of 50s/60s classical / jazz master tapes – before mixing desks got too cute.
Have a look at John Darko’s YouTube channel for cheap and expensive ways to get good streaming audio.
Classical Music aficionados get driven insane by stupido ‘song’-based user experience of common software music players. Also no program notes and little or sampled irrelevant information about performers. Idagio was set up to do this better. So far no complaints from me.
Random aside:
We live in a world increasingly set up for streaming HD and soon 4K video everywhere. We carry around wireless devices which do this whilst barely breaking out a sweat.
Given that the bitrate for audio is orders of magnitude lower, why *wouldn’t* they dump everything we say and hear to a data center somewhere. If I were evil genius in charge and this wasn’t already done, folks would be going into my shark tank.
huxley –
My mom had a bachelors degree as a music teacher in the mid 1920s, graduated before she turned 20 years old, She wore out a Campbell Baby Grand and our dad bought her a Yamaha in the late 1960’s to replace it. They had to remove windows and replace it in the front of the house to bring it in the house they had built in the mid 1930’s. She taught music lessons on her pianos six days a week for over fifty years. Music was a lot of our lives.
“CDs offer the best dynamic range and tonal range.” physicsguy
Compared to Spotify, yes. Compared to Qobuz? Maybe, depending on the recording engineer’s technique. Rock and Pop is typically more compressed than Classical and audiophile engineered recorded material.
Compared to Hi-Res PCM and DSD downloads? I think not. Yes? No?
… why *wouldn’t* they dump everything we say and hear to a data center somewhere. — Zaphod
Several years ago I noticed that one could buy a 4 TB hard disk at Costco for $99.95. Roughly ten years ago the new NSA data center in Utah was a topic of discussion. The editors of the WSJ said they probably had 160 exabytes of storage as a minimum estimate. Just the disk space on the server blades. (An exabyte is 10^18 bytes.) A few years ago I helped my neighbor set up a new Samsung TV. In order to turn on the Smart features one has to agree to Samsung corp. incidentally picking sounds and info from your home. Some of those TVs have web cams.
Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
Oh, by the way, the FBI and the execs of the major tech corps. know exactly who you are when you “anonymously” comment on TheNewNeo.com. That tech was developed, in part, by Facebook because it is a major component of their advertising monetization. The fantasy is reality; get used to it.
Do you have tape placed over your webcams and microphones? Mark Zuckerberg does. (Picked up in a photo.) OTOH, people buy Echos and talk to Alexa because it is convenient.
@TommyJay:
Given that the latest coming thing in cellphones is going to be *invisible* front video chat / selfie cameras embedded in the displays themselves rather than in visible camera notch / holes, it’s only a matter of time before that comes to a display near us on TVs, laptops, tablets, as well. No need for it to be an advertised feature either and could well still be a prominent video chat camera with a lovely sliding cover :P.
It’s not for nothing that the paranoid computer privacy guys won’t use anything more modern than a Corebooted X230 Thinkpad running some very locked down BSD or Linux variant.
@OldTexan:
If you catch the Nozomi or Hikari grade Tokaido Shinkansen from Tokyo to Nagoya/Kyoto/Osaka and Further Points South, then a few sips of coffee and turns of the page after pulling out of Shin Yokohama Station and tootling smoothly along at x hundred km/h you’ll notice this blur of pretty nondescript urbanization out the left window. Whoosh… it’s gone.
Well that was the city of Hamamatsu. Whence came your Mother’s piano… and all those made by K. Kawai as well.
Headquarters of Yamaha Corporation. And Suzuki. Plus a bunch of other boring firms which make stuff which makes the fiber optic backbones of our world hang together.
They still manufacture their concert grands in Hammamatsu today. Cheaper models are made in China and Indonesia.
Hamamatsu City alone must have a GDP larger than some small African countries.
Poor stupid Japanese lacked the superior education provided by Ivy League business schools and forgot to utterly hollow out their domestic production and turn entire cities and regions into rust bucket hellscapes of fentanyl addicts. Only did it as much as was absolutely necessary in prevailing conditions. Troglodytes!
Zaphod,
That comment of yours on FLAC was interesting. I have not kept up with any of the high quality end of digital audio. MP3 began as a type of bootleg standard stripped off of the MPEG video standards, so maybe a “free” standard like FLAC will have staying power. I saw they have a FLAC codec for WinAmp? I used to use that way back when.
I like to jam about 10 hours of higher quality (such as it is) WMA compressed music on to a standard burned CD-Rom and play it in the car. I guess I have an unnatural repulsion towards smart phones and music pods etc. That will likely cause problems in the near future and maybe I’ll relent.
Tinfoil Hat Off for a moment:
Here’s an example of a *very* technically imperfect but wonderful recording:
Dick Hyman: An Evening at the Cookery June 17, 1973.
Recorded on a cassette recorder sitting on top of a poorly-tuned piano with various venue noises in the background. But the playing.
Zapped
Thank you, I thought my dad was nuts buying my mom a motorcycle piano. When he went to the store to purchase the piano he tried to bargain with the man and it left my mom in tears when they left because she never wanted to bargain about music. She was surprised when it arrived on her birthday, exactly the piano she wanted to buy and it lasted her the rest of her life time.
Thank you, this Japs made wonderful pianos and now my younger sister who has a music degree has it in her home.
Neo,
Do you have any idea why episode 88 of What Makes a Song Great was blocked?
Did “Ramble On” become a QAnon anthem? (joke)
@TommyJay:
Yep.. spinning rust high capacity drives are very cheap and in industrial scale bulk lots even cheaper. Very mature technology and robot assembly and clean room technology is far downstream of that needed for semiconductor fabs, so it’s a nice amortized legacy industry for the established players.
At Google / NSA scale, it’s all hyper redundant and you have worker drones and doubtless in some cases robots wandering around vast server farms with shopping trolleys of fresh drives swapping out ones which have been auto reported as faulty…. of course this is entirely hot-pluggable and effortless… no data ever lost due to multiple redundancies.
In the consumer space, I think the only people still buying spinning disk hard drives are gamers and video enthusiasts who need lots of backup storage. Up to 2 or 4TB, I’d always pay the solid state premium. So market for the spinning stuff has to be largely supported these days by Big Tech and the various agencies around the world.
Still it’s nice to know that my bloviations here in HK made a physical head track across a physical spinning disk somewhere in Utah… Faint reflection of the romance of the old days of Big Iron.
OldTexan:
Well they made Pianos long before they made motorcycles. And Reed Organs before that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torakusu_Yamaha
Meiji Japan was one of the most rare and amazing cases in human history of an entire nation waking the #%^& up and realizing that stuff had been going on while it had been asleep. Perhaps there’s some hope for the USA and the West here.
But in effect the Meiji Restoration was a successful revolt of some Southern Daimyos against the Shogunate. It wasn’t a spontaneous national awakening. Ambitious men had to reach for the Brass Ring.
I suspect that deep in the bowels of the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic planning apparatus there is an inner cadre who have extensively studied Meiji Japan (went from nobodies to Crossing the Russian Navy’s T at Tsushima in 50 years) and how Late Qing China flubbed a similar opportunity —> the last 40 years of Rise of China. They’d never admit it publicly, of course.
Zapped
I had a world history professor, Dr. Percy Buchanan at the U. of Oklahoma in the fall of 1964 who had been a missionary in the Asian countries before WWII and he explained to us how naive we were about world history and how the Asian thought about things. It was a tiny eye opening. There is so much complication that we don’t understand and of course the Asian are probably playing the long patient game, not tomorrows news little bit. My old prof told us to be very careful about folk who thought in generations rather than years and days. Then I spent the last four year in the US Army doing intel work in Europe looking at the last war and no idea of the future.
And the The Three Tuning Forks define great musicale instruments.
Bookmark this one for Michelle Obama’s coronation in January 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AJMrub11Lk
Sorry that’s low… I shouldn’t sully such wonderful performers by association.
@OldTexan:
You make a very good point. A good deal of our institutional understanding of the wider world came via missionaries back in the day. These were mostly not the bible thumping ignoramuses of popular caricature, but highly educated, literate polyglots.. often with a regular profession as well; plenty were medical doctors, for example.
Certainly did a much better job at grokking countries and cultures and passing on that knowledge than desk-bound or fly-in / fly-out analysts. As for the modern cancer of Academic Country X Studies, less said the better.
Sullying is just wrong.
Sulla, however. Now there was a Man.
My prof Percy Buchanan at OU also spoke Korean so he was part of MacArthur’s group when he had his hearing messed up with a shell that hit a tank near his head. He was one of the old timers who had worked all over the the world including traveling on camel caravans in the middle East, he said he might have eaten a bit of long pig one time with a group and he did not want to eat balut which he had been served one time. My goodness I had now idea what a person I should have talked to more. I used to see him in the 1060’s on TV when he was warning us about the Viet Nam war and what might happen.
1960’s
@OldTexan:
He lives on here:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Percy-Buchanan/108240171
And in the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs Percy Buchanan Graduate Prize.
Given current state of Academia I have refrained from looking up recent winning entries.
Zaphod
Oh my goodness, he was such a kind wonderful professor with lot of stories and great insight, he was one of those teachers who made a difference in my life. Thank you for the links to Percy, he was a friend of mine.
@OldTexan:
You’re more than welcome. Thank you for the reminiscences.
Thank you and I have no idea how Perfect Music brought us here, yet here we are Yamaha Piano and all. Thank You. Zaphod
…good deal of our institutional understanding of the wider world came via missionaries back in the day. These were mostly not the bible thumping ignoramuses of popular caricature, but highly educated, literate polyglots..
Zaphod:
Following up on the linguistics discussion here a month or so ago, I read Tom Wolfe’s final book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” the centerpiece of which was the story of a young Evangelical missionary, Dan Everett, who went deep into the Amazon to work with the Piraha, a native group who have stubbornly resisted civilization beyond wearing T-shirts.
They also have one of the most mysterious languages on the planet. Entirely present tense, no words for numbers or colors, can be spoken, hummed or sung, plus — of crucial importance to linguistics — no recursion. Which is the hill Chomsky has chosen to die on with his Universal Grammar theory.
Our missionary friend, Dan Everett, was unable to evangelize the Piraha at all. As soon as they understood that Everett didn’t know Jesus and didn’t know anyone who knew Jesus, they lost interest entirely. Everett ended up losing his faith but finding his vocation. He’s now a prominent linguist and part of the anti-Chomsky brigade working to break Chomsky’s stranglehold on the field.
So, “The Kingdom of Speech” is another fascinating Tom Wolfean glimpse into a world one hadn’t thought about and a sly dagger aimed at Chomsky’s back.
Well done!
Here’s a New Yorker article on the business, which Chomsky must have hated:
–“The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2
Maybe as “collectors” items but there’s no turning back from streaming. It is the future.
Until the streaming service you use decides that your a wrong thinker.
@huxley:
Thanks for that and it’s now in my cart good to go with the next order. I know I’m supposed to boycott Amazon and not feed the beast, but as Saint Augustine said, “Lord, make me chaste and celibate, but not yet.”
Wasn’t aware that the Late Lamented Well Dressed One had put out any further works after Back to Blood. If anything like From Bauhaus to Our House, or The Painted Word, I just know I’m going to love it.
Music that isn’t perfect, but is very human.
H/t to whoever first linked this blog sometime last week.
https://howlinginfinite.com/2020/12/23/a-cowboy-key-how-the-west-was-sung/
Good way to spend a few hours before we burn with our pitchforks and torches to burn YouTube to the ground.
Mitsuko Uchida Masterclass – Comparing Beethoven No 4 in G Major and Mozart’s K. 503
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mBzp5_yR18
Mitsuko Uchida – Beethoven – Piano Concerto No 4 in G major, Op 58
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvBQJjxw4c
Mitsuko Uchida – Mozart – Piano Concerto No 25 in C major K 503
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIjAGbyQO9M
(The Piraha could not be reached for comment.)
https://t.me/ymarsakar
You can find me on telegram. This is like old school gamer days, IQ speak and Teamspeak.
UTube is pretty much burned already. I can’t even find any useful content there recently. The algorithms are borked.
Led Zeps first album. One day recording time. You can hear a song and hear a faint song in the background. Different song. They “erased” the tapes and recorded over, but you can still hear it. Part of the charm. Its virtually a live album.
A lot of early bands first albums were “live” albums. I know Sabbath is another.
ZZ-top, loved the early stuff, then they got all clean sound and it made them money, but it wasn’t the same. Did like the videos though.
I guess if you do a Fourier analysis on the waveform of the finest vinyl recordings, you find more total bits of information than you have in a digital CD or DVD. Analog is supposed to sound a little richer to the human ear too.
No, CDs have more bandwidth and dynamic range. physicsguy has it right, also pointing out recording techniques had to change for digital as well as mastering.
So, I just listened to the Beato upload shown here as well as two others. The last one being, “Why do boomers hate pop music?”
Poor Beato. While enumerating the 10 or so reasons that Boomers hate current pop music, he was also valiantly trying to preserve a case for that pop “music” and its 4 chord, monotonic, electronically ritualized and canned repetition. But try as he might to put the situation in the most contextualized and hedged manner possible, he revealed a situation far worse than even the Thoughty2 videos – presented here as well – revealed.
Zombies, man … We’re dealing with Zombies!
Music originates with analog instruments and analog waveform. A perfect mirror has to be analog.
@Dnaxy:
You can’t make a perfect mirror in this imperfect world. The most perfect astronomical mirrors are all corrected today using Devilish Trickery == FFTs, Wavelet Transforms, etc.
I quite like high end analogue audio too. This is highly subjective stuff… There’s an entire field called psychoacoustics for a good reason.
But the notion that digital audio must by definition be worse than analogue audio simply isn’t correct. Without googling, can you define the term Nyquist Freqeuency and riff on it? Do you have any background in the Digital Signal Processing, z-Transforms, blah blah? If not, you’re unqualified to have an objective opinion. Subjective opinion sure… break a leg! But that’s something else.
DNW:
I listened to the Boomers Beato episode. As I recall, he was arguing for the interesting “sonics” in the new music
Which I can believe, what with today’s tools. I’m not sure when “sound designer” became a real job, but it is now.
However, you’re right — Beato was scraping the bottom of the argument barrel. His heart wasn’t in it, other than as a pro appreciating other pros.
It was interesting to read the comments to the Beato YouTube. Quite a lot of “I ain’t no boomer and I hate today’s music too!”
Pingback:Strange Daze
This isn’t perfect, and…it isn’t human either.
https://planetradio.co.uk/planet-rock/news/rock-news/parrot-led-zeppelin-stairway-to-heaven/
I too was reluctant at the CD revolution, but was converted instantly when I heard a CD of a piano concerto in which I could hear the attack of the keystroke — never audible in previous recording methods. But then I also prefer a bright, precise sound in general, so i may have been more persuadable than those who prefer a more lush sound.
Old Texan’s quote about no one singing any more makes me very sad.
As for no one is singing anymore….I watched my granddaughter every Monday for 9 years and from the time she could talk we would sing whenever together in the car. And being that we live in So. Calif. that’s a lot of singing time. When we made a 5 hour trip up north together a couple years ago, I printed out a songbook of our favorites with all the verses. Our all time favorite to sing together is My Favorite Things. She has her Mom’s gift of knowing lyrics I never could quite make out so once again I was learning the actual songs for the first time. Her parents have eclectic music taste so lots of variety. Nothing like hearing a 5 year old sing the Joni Mitchell songs a cappella.
This is a nice diversion.
Every human interaction in which the administrative class is irrelevant or excluded becomes a patriotic act, in addition to being fulfilling.
At any rate, your reference to “My Favorite Things” comports rather well with the just passed holiday season. In particular, it can be glancingly related to Huxley’s reference to Rick Beato. In this instance to Beato’s best Christmas songs list for this year. Some selections I agreed with, some I did not. But one I found particularly interesting, and which is a favorite of mine was John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things”. It’s not really a Christmas song per se, but the minor key famously imparts a slightly otherworldly though not alien feeling. And then, snowflakes.
And though I have never been a fan of the guy and didn’t understand his cocktail revival era popularity in the Starbucks mix CD racks, Tony Bennet’s version has to be reckoned as an interesting holiday listen. Maybe not for a kid though.
I wonder if holograms could somehow be used capture and reproduce acoustic wave forms …
DNW – apparently other people have wondered the same thing.
Top posts on DDG search “hologram acoustic wave”
They are using sound to create holograms, either visual or invisible, but not yet to “make music” so far as these posts are concerned.
Today the waves; tomorrow the bands – all synthetic.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/3d-acoustic-holograms.htm
* * *
https://www.wise-geek.com/what-is-acoustic-holography.
* * *
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/13/hologram-like-device-animates-objects-using-ultrasound-waves
* * *
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5110673
Phase and amplitude modulation with acoustic holograms
(this one is for the hard-core physics guys)
Of course the first thing a smart ass is going to point out is that holograms are conventionally still in some sense stored on conventional media and then projected as an interference pattern. And that what I am idiotically imagining is some kind of wave pattern recorded and then regenerated exactly in thin air without projection from a physical recording media, and that even were it possible to do millisecond by successor millisecond the data storage required …
But with processor speeds and data storage capabilities being what they are nowadays, some clever person might be able to simply pass the wave through a membrane to enable the wave to be visualized analogous to what is done conventionally, and record the data digitally in so dense a form as to make it or something like a pure sonic wave reproduction (insofar as we can tell) possible.
But then I’m the guy who as a kid imagined a jet engine as some kind of magic fan in a tube, after being told it was nothing like a rocket.