The Art of Sound

The Art Of Sound Vol. 3: The Medium Is The Message

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Mark in Article Series, The Art of Sound | 5 Comments

Toronto – Over the last 10 years, CD sales have been on steady decline. To no surprise, the online music marketplace has been growing rapidly during that same time. As more and more people jump into the internet age, we move farther and farther away from music physically tied to any one medium. This can make sense from both an environmental perspective and a convenience factor. But this MTV is not for free, so what price are we paying for the advantages of a world ruled by the iTunes store? And why has vinyl, after being dethroned by the compact disc of the 80’s, been on a slow and steady comeback?

Although we may not care to admit it, the medium we use for music vastly colours how we listen, experience, and discover it. Whether it’s hidden somewhere inside the grooves of a pressed piece of wax, or digitally encoded in a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, the format affects how we listen to music.

Explain how.

Sound Quality

Sound quality seems to be where most of the pitched battles are fought in the digital vs. analog arena. In the digital camp, you have talk of sampling rates, encoding formats, and the pristine sound of digital. In the analog world, you hear talk about the warmth of the record player, the nostalgic pops, and its uncompressed natural sound. So who is right?

After listening to vinyl and CD versions of some my favourite albums, both old and new, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s basically a toss-up. I’ve found old jazz albums that sound better on CD, and new albums that sound better on wax. Feist’s The Reminder sounds downright spooky on vinyl. On the other hand, the wax version of Postal Service sounds thin and tinny compared to its CD counterpart. Is that because of its electronic roots? Not necessarily. Daft Punk sounds pretty effing wicked on vinyl.

To add more fuel to the fire, it’s difficult to take the dedicated fanboys of the analog and digital world at face value. No two pairs of ears are constructed the same. I’ve done a lot of blind listening tests with friends alternating between CD and mp3. Mp3’s are compressed, which means audio data is essentially thrown away for space savings. They should theoretically sound inferior. I had one friend who could always consistently tell the difference between mp3 and CD. Thing is, he always preferred the mp3. Some people will simply prefer how one medium or format colours the sound.

… sometimes it feels like in this world if you don’t have ADHD, you don’t belong. The iPod is our Ritalin. Now gimme.

The Format

Hate it or love it, there is a ritual involved with listening to vinyl. You browse through your library looking for something that strikes your fancy. You take out that big piece of wax and toss it on the platter; all the while admiring the big cover art that can fit on a real album. Vinyl invites you to critically listen to music. After 20 minutes, you’re going to have to get up and flip sides. It forces you to be involved and connected to your music in a way that a CD or an iPod never can.

The CD on the other hand, can boast a whopping 74 minutes of audio. That’s nearly twice what you get on a long-playing record. Is this always a good thing? We all know that any good writer needs a good editor; but any good musician also needs a talented producer. Someone has to keep the killer and lose the filler. Sometimes less is more, and the limitations that vinyl imposes on both musician and listener alike may weirdly enough be its biggest asset.

The Convenience

But who wants to cart around a heavy box of vinyl to their friends place when they can store a thousand albums on a USB key worth no more than a compact disc? I sure as hell don’t. On the convenience front, digital rules. We live in a fast-paced world, and it’s sometimes nice to walk around that fast-paced world listening to whatever the hell we want. Ipods make for great insulation. They give us permission to act like insiders on the outside, and sometimes there’s nothing quite like losing yourself in the familar folds of your own music amidst the chaos of the city.

Fortunately the perceived legitimacy of wax resonates something fierce with the hipster crowds

Sure, we erratically hop from single to single like a fly at a nudist camp. Sure, the concept of listening to an entire album seems all but dead. But sometimes it feels like in this world if you don’t have ADHD, you don’t belong. The iPod is our Ritalin. Now gimme.

The Trends

Twenty years ago, the music world was a playground for the vinyl collector. People were dumping their records en masse. With the surge in popularity of records, collectors nowadays long for a time when it was relatively easy to score that amazing find. Record stores are increasingly picked over, but the market is finally responding. I knew the movement was serious the moment the flagship HMW in downtown Toronto started carrying a vinyl section. Want the latest Vampire Weekend or Arcade Fire on wax? It’s all there for the taking, but new vinyl can cost $40 a pop. That’s a tough sell when you can buy five songs online for the cost of a latte. Fortunately the perceived legitimacy of wax resonates something fierce with the hipster crowds; and they hold a lot more sway over the marketplace than their thrift shop clothes will have you believe.

So which is better then? The compact disc, the mp3, or the venerable turntable? That’s a personal choice, and it depends a lot on your relationship with music. Interestingly enough, I’d argue that the way we appreciate music is coloured more by the format we use than any of those claims about sound quality.

The Art Of Sound Vol 2.: The Heart Is A Drum Machine [Film Review, 2009]

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Mark in Movies, The Art of Sound | Leave a comment


Toronto – Listening to music is so easy, a baby could do it. A stupid baby. However, understanding the process of what’s going on in our brains, and why we love music so much, is anything but. The Heart Is A Drum Machine is a documentary film that asks some basic, but nevertheless profound questions about music. The answers come from actors, popular musicians, and scientists. The result is a journey from the vapid to the scientific with more than a few stops in between.

Being a successful musician, or any entertainer for that matter, can be a surreal experience. The going is tough at first, but to the victor go the spoils. If you’ve got that perfect blend of talent, effort, and timing, then hitting the big time means a lifestyle that kings would envy. With fame and fortune comes a soap box and a megaphone. We as a society tend to place our celebrities and musicians on golden pedestals. They’re suddenly thrust into an elite class. Surely we can look to them for guidance on anything from fashion (sure, fine) to politics (Danger, Will Robinson).

I heard this really cheesy thing once, it’s “music is the house that sound lives in.” But I don’t really agree with that. I don’t know. Music is culture. – Sean Grifin (composer)

This is where we fall prey to the fallacy of general competence. We see a person excel at one thing (singing, acting), and we reckon they must be equally competent everywhere else. Combine this with the worship we heap on a commercially successful artist, and the result is a narcissism of man-eating proportions. We don’t need to ask scientists to help us clean up a polluted lake, Madonna will fix it with her magic Kaballah fluid! Why look to political scientists or economists for a nuanced view of how the world works? Surely, Bono will do.

Sex is at the heart of it, of all that. You think anyone learned to play guitar because they thought like that was going to be really like fulfilling for their soul? You know? Like no, they wanted to get laid. – Mickey Avalon, Rapper

So how does this all relate to The Heart Is A Drum Machine? This documentary begins by interviewing mostly musicians about music. Their answers range from incisive (e.g. Mickey Avalon’s quote) to the downright vapid (Emily Kokal’s definition). Listening to musicians talk about their craft does underlines a very important point. Having the talent and diligence to make great music does not translate into the ability to talk lucidly about it. The first 20 minutes of this doc is a hippies delight. I suggest mind-altering drugs.

I think of everything as music, like talking, and like the sound of your lips when you’re talking or just the, even the subtlest sound you can hear, it’s gotta, it can’t, it could be music, it is music. – Emily Kokal, Warpaint

As the film progresses, the baton is passed from the artists to the scientists, and here we get to some interesting insights. Psychologist Dr. Orli Peter explains to us in her extremely soothing female psychologist voice how you can hook up an EEG to a person’s head and record their unique brain waves. If you take that signal, shift it into the auditory spectrum, and play it back to the recipient, they will be more relaxed and sleep better. Did I mention that Dr. Peter has the most soothing voice I have ever heard? She does. My dream would be to just listen to her talk to me for hours. That would be therapeutic enough, thank you very much.

Now, I understand the musical and creative types are itching to fire back. “Science? Bah! You think science can explain everything. You linear thinkers are all the same!” Thankfully neuroscientist John Iversen is there to explain to us what science can and can’t do. He humbly admits that there are some pretty big questions where science remains silent. For example, we now understand that music processing happens in anything but a linear fashion. It’s more like an enormous series of loops where even our movements can effect how we perceive sound. But why is music and sound so closely tied to our emotion centers? We can’t really explain that one.

So does the creation and appreciation of music boil down to art, or science? The answer seems to be a bit of both. Both camps give us a deeper insight into this art form that we so obsess about. If we strive to understand the advantages and limitations that both art and science bring to the table, then a more holistic view emerges of the amazing complexity, and simplicity, that is music.

The Art of Sound Vol. 1: This Is Your Brain On Music [Book Review, Plume, 2007]

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Mark in Everything, The Art of Sound | 5 Comments

Toronto – Did you know that with just the tiniest bit of digital trickery, I can make a harp sound like a trumpet? All I have to do is record a trumpet playing a particular note, say an A, and do the same with the harp. Then, in some recording software, I could take the very earliest part of the trumpet’s A, just as the note is beginning and tack on the vast majority of the rest of the harp’s A. That is all. Your ears would be tricked into hearing a trumpet playing an A. That is just the beginning.

We people sure do spend a lot of time on music; whether it’s downloading albums on iTunes, going to shows, or talking to people about their taste in music. Music is an integral part of every culture, and it has been for as long as our anthropologist friends can detect. What’s even more interesting is how rarely we stop to think about why we love music so much.  What is going on in our brains when we listen to or play music anyway?

This article starts a new series I’m calling The Art of Sound, where we’ll be discussing more than the pure content of music, but exploring the periphery as well. Sometimes we’ll be talking about the medium we use to search and listen to music, be it mp3′s, podcasts or vinyl, and how that medium affects the message. We’ll also cover some practical things about how to get the most out of your music collection (e.g. how not to use iPod ear buds, how to store your digital music). However, for the inaugural post, I wanted to start where the rubber hits the tarmac: your brain and how it perceives music.

Daniel Levitin used to be a sound engineer for Steely Dan and the Blue Oyster cult. He was also a gigging musician. With years of experience in the industry, he has developed a from-the-ground-up approach of music and the biz. At some point along the way, he felt the itch to dig deeper into what exactly our brains were doing when they process music. He dropped his career to begin a new one as a cognitive neuroscientist. Not many people drop their career in music to pursue their dreams in science, but this unique background gives professor Levitin a singular perspective that he has used to meld the two fields.

Why do certain people have such a huge tolerance for new and foreign music, while others have a hard time getting away from their shortlist of go to bands? Does that tolerance for the foreign change over the course of your life? (It does) Does the act of listening to music involve the left or right hemisphere of your brain? (Both) What about playing music? (Also both, but even more so) Is musical prowess just another evolutionary signal that flags to potential mates the awesomeness of your genes? Or is it piggy-backing on our language skills and essentially the equivalent of an evolutionary mistake?

All these questions are discussed in This Is Your Brain on Music. It’s an amazing blend of the psychology of music, as well as the neuroscience involved in how our brain juice actually interprets, processes, and stores music. Professor Levitin hooks up functional MRI’s (fMRI’s) to his patients in order to see what parts of the brain light up when people sing from memory, perceive, or play music. The beginning of the book is a bit slow with an explanation of musical terms, but it’s a necessary exercise to give the reader a framework within which to discuss the finer points that follow.

This book is not a science textbook. Nor is it the definitive tome on exactly how music works in your brain. Some anonymous internet citizenry have been unrealistically harsh about some of the technical mistakes contained within; pointing to more accurate, scientific, and thus less accessible material in the field. However, much of these errata are covered directly on the books web-site.

However, we should never allow perfection to be the enemy of the good. More advanced readers can soundboard into more advanced material. Levitin has written an accessible and enjoyable read that gets people thinking about more than just the music; and that’s a good thing.

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