Tetherd Cow Ahead

This morning at dawn in the city of Sydney, before the espresso machines of Leichhardt had sputtered into life, Violet Towne, HeWhoHears, Kezza and The Reverend headed off towards the Western Suburbs to witness the launch of the 2007 Festival of Sydney with a performance of Luke Jerram‘s beautiful Sky Orchestra.

Yes, we really did get up at 5am.

Words simply don’t meet the task of describing the wonder of seeing and hearing these seven hot-air balloons rise into the light of the rising sun, and drift off across suburbia singing their haunting songs.

All I can say is that if you ever get a chance to see this inspiring work, make every effort to do so. You won’t be disappointed. Luke Jerram is a genius. I’ve said as much before, and I see no reason to change my opinion.

A recently reported ‘fault’ in Apple MacBooks is described thus:

“The machine makes faint bovine-like ‘mooing’ noise after moderate to heavy use”

Apple diagnoses this as a firmware problem, but here at The Cow, the only comment we feel at liberty to make is ‘Mwahahahahahahahaha!’

OK. Now I’ve found something that tops even the Steorn bozos’ concepts for sheer technical daftness. Or downright thievery – you decide.

Over at Creative we find this offering for those who don’t have two brain cells to rub together (but plenty of excess cash, I guess) – the ‘Xmod X-Fi Module’ for your PC that actually ‘improves’ your lousy computer sound to an ‘experience beyond studio quality’.

Let me just rephrase that for the slow learners: you stick this gadget in between your mp3s and your speakers and the sound comes out better than the studio recording of the original track!

Shit, I’m going to buy twenty of these and give them to all my Pro Sound buddies. If it can make mp3 sound better than studio recording, then it follows that it can make studio recordings sound better than angels singing the glories of God and His Creation!*

Consider this assertion on the website:

•Restore the details and vibrance that your music lost during MP3 compression

Disregarding first of all that ‘vibrance’ is not actually a real word, let’s examine this claim. First of all, a simplified technical lesson: mp3, or MPEG Audio Layer 3, is a format which is known in the business as a ‘lossy’ form of compression. What this means is that some clever technical hocus-pocus is used to take an audio file and compress it in such a way that some of the less important original data can be thrown away to make the file smaller but (hopefully) without a listener being able to notice too much of a reduction in fidelity.

The key term here is thrown away. To get an audio file (say a CD quality file) down to a much smaller sized mp3, savage and ugly chopping has to be done and the unwanted data is irretrievably blitzed. Chucked. Trashed. Flushed. Things from the original audio file no longer exist in the mp3 file.

Our friends from Creative are claiming that they can somehow reconstitute this no-longer-extant data – raise it from the dead, so to speak – and set it walking among the living once more. Not only that, they are saying that the mp3 will not only sound as good as the CD you ripped it from, but better than that.

There’s a highly technical term for this kind of thing, and that term is CRAP!

In order that they might convince you of their highly dubious hyperbole, Creative offer you the chance to actually hear X-Fi in action. Going on the provided example I might make the suggestion that they should abandon the waffly try-hard ‘X-Fi’ moniker and go for the much more accurate ExcrementSoundâ„¢ label. Using a breathtakingly cliched Flash presentation, the Creative people show us how their X-Fi system can take a perfectly ordinary and dull piece of music and sound like a perfectly ordinary, dull, and sibilant piece of music. Huzzah! They’ve discovered the treble control. Now instead of that fuzzy futzing aliasing of the high frequencies in an mp3 you can have nicely fizzy, ear-scouring futzing aliasing. Wow. Better than studio sound! I know – I try every day to get my sound to be this unpleasant, but fail comprehensively.

Oh, I just can’t go on. The only thing that’s creative about Creative is their ability to effectively recycle that old saw: Never give a sucker an even break.

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*This is a colourful image for comic effect. I do not believe in Creation, angels or God.

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Shameless Self Promotion

I’ve just released a new recording, the first in my Morphium Collection. It’s called ‘Rain’ and is a careful montage of recordings of rain on an iron roof. It’s minimalism at its most profound.

I originally made this recording to help me sleep, and for that purpose I can vouch that it’s very effective. Coming up in the series are ‘Ocean’ and ‘Pine’. I like to think of each as a kind of aural perfume.

Read more about ‘Rain’ on the Perpetual Ocean site.

Even though that last story was told as an amusing anecdote, it points, as some of you quickly realized, to some fundamental and important ideas about sound and the way we perceive it.

The question “What if we could have the sound of nothing, rather than silence?” is not a question about sound. It is a question about psychology. Many questions about sound are.

My director continued:

“What I mean is that sound, you know, when you’re out in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing there… You know, not silence, but an absence of sound.”

And, although there’s a complete logical stump-jump here, I do in fact know exactly what he means.

Of course there is no such thing in the natural world as ‘an absence of sound’.

The quietest natural environment in which I’ve ever been was a cave in Jenolan in Eastern Australia. I was helping some friends complete a geographical survey. They were also divers, and needed to survey a section of the cave that was underwater. I couldn’t help much with that part of the exercise so I sat in the cavern as they disappeared into the inky black water and listened as their scuba bubbles trailed off into… silence.

There was no sound. No water lap, no dripping, no wind, no airconditioner, no next-door tv, no conversation down the hall, no computer drives, no distant traffic. Nothing. After a while, if I moved, any little noise I made sounded unnaturally loud. It was dead, dead quiet. Silence. Well, no actually. Not silence. I could hear my breathing. I could hear my blood moving. I could hear my heart beating. Wow, after a while it was actually noisy. I knew at that moment that human beings never, ever know true silence.

But we nearly all have some experience of that deep contemplative quietness of nature, or the dark black hush of the early morning hours, or the unbearable silent weight of gaps between speech at a funeral.

The question my director is really asking, then, is a different one: “Is it possible for us to have our audience feel that kind of mental silence within the bounds of what we are doing?”

And the answer, in my educated opinion, is that in this particular excercise we will achieve that effect. Because it’s not about the sound we put there, in that place where silence is, but rather, how we get there and what we have encouraged people to be thinking at that time.

Listening is only partially about hearing.

OK. I’m working (for free) on a small but very tasteful commercial for a major world charity. The sound is subtle but significant. At the very end of the ad, the pictures fade to black, and a simple piece of explanatory text appears.

This morning I’m playing what I’ve done to the director, an awfully nice but very intense chap.

“So, what do you think for the end when we fade out, then?” he asks.

“Oh, I dunno. Silence I guess. I thought that worked pretty well. Unless you want some other kind of thing there…”

He looks deeply thoughtful, and runs his hands through his hair.

“I was thinking, rather than silence, maybe we could just have, you know, the sound of nothing.”

“Uh-huh,” says I. “And that would be different to silence in exactly what way?”