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more thoughts about headphones…

Perhaps it is not a good idea to stuff things into our ears that hermetically seal them and thereby increase the humidity and temperature in them. I imagine sealing our ears must be a big friendly invitation to bacteria and other organisms to multiply and potentially create infections. 

This creates an obvious technological problem: if we can’t seal the ear off, how can we eliminate noise? This will remain an issue for IEMs as well as for over the ear headphones and will also impact the wearability of AR or VR goggles. 

Another question to be researched is this: are there precedents from factory workers who labor in a very loud environment and have to wear ear protectors for long stretches of time. Do they get inflamed ears from the seal?

Perhaps this post is related after all? People might be listening without headphones because we can only wear them for so long… 

Also see this post from 2019, especially the comments people left. This is not an isolated issue. 

The album Andante took a little longer to appear on Apple Music – a week longer than Spotify or Tidal, actually. When I checked the tracks I discovered to my horror that the second and fifth track played the wrong music… The second track, 2 Alone / On an Island, from the album vision 2020, was playing the music that was supposed to be on the fifth track, Dreamy Afternoon, and vice versa. Using Shazam I discovered that both were uploaded with identical ISRC (the digital code that identifies every song… that’s how Shazam works and that’s how publishing royalties are figured out) – because both pieces show up as 2 Alone / On an Island.

I never made this kind of mistake before but the process is largely automatic now and I can’t see how this mixup could have happened without me making the mistake. Unless it was a glitch in the software… that’s quite possible, too. What to do? The next morning I sent an email to UnitedMasters support. I was told that the smoothest way to fix the situation would be to create a new and correct upload of the album and when that was published on the services I should issue a takedown order for the older version that had the mistake. That made sense to me and I proceeded to upload the music and album cover again. I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked the music files against the titles, compared the ISRC codes and so on. 

Several hours later I was informed that so-called fingerprinting software had flagged three tracks as not being mine to release… I knew that those three songs would be the three tracks from Fete. I had the same problem when I uploaded the July 2nd version but at the time a senior support team member had quickly overridden the flags when I explained that the flags were outdated. The album Fete used to be distributed by The Orchard until last Spring, when I decided to remove the album from that distributor and release it through UnitedMasters, where all my other HuHeartDrive albums were distributed. The Orchard simply hadn’t updated their data base and the software was still fingerprint-hunting for my music even though it wasn’t theirs any longer. 24 hours later, the new corrected version of the album is still in limbo and I have come to the decision that if UnitedMasters is creating more problems I will cancel my account with them. Perhaps it’s a sign that none of my music from the past five years should be distributed to streaming services, not even this one compilation. It’s cleaner this way.

Update:

This morning I decided to issue a takedown for the album Andante. As of a few days from now, none of my music since 2018 will stream. My apologies to those who were enjoying Andante on a streaming service. The album remains available on Bandcamp, of course. I am working on CD release of the album. We haven’t had any merch on tour since Covid and this album would be a nice release to offer. 

Ha! I broke the system… now Shazam recognizes Dreamy Afternoon as 2 Alone / On an Island even though the ISRC is different. I have decided this is hilarious and the ghost in the machine is having some fun.  :-)

“Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption but also a disruption of thought,” he (Arthur Schopenhauer) wrote. “Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful.” 

Nice burn… “Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful.”  

When it comes to the subject of eschewing headphones, “maybe we’re not more rude than ever,” M. Zachary Rosenthal, the director of the Center for Misophonia and Emotion Regulation at Duke University, said to the Times. “We just have new ways of being rude.” 

Why is nobody using headphones in public anymore? | The Week

Perhaps it is actually very simple. It has become difficult to take noise seriously when everything around us makes so much noise… gas stations play ads and music and news right at the pump (another reason to go electric!)… supermarkets play music, some restaurants play music at such a volume that people have to speak loudly to have a conversation… etc.

Zen students are usually told to sit and count their breaths from one to ten or one to twenty. I have often wondered about this, in particular whether there was an error in translation. Counting the duration of the inhalations and exhalations, also known as paced breathing, would be something Taoists do (1). Paced breathing is known to calm the nervous system. Counting the number of inhalations or exhalations only serves to concentrate and thereby activate the mind. Counting the length of each breath, rather than the number of breaths… it makes a big difference and yet when we say count the breath we could literally mean either of the two options.

I usually don’t do any counting, preferring just to sit (to quote Dogen) but when I feel the need to calm down I count the duration of my breaths. Six seconds for each inhalation (2), six seconds for each exhalation, five breaths per minute. That works for me, but adjust to your lung volume and what feels good. 

You don’t have to say that you are meditating… just sit for five minutes and count the duration of each breath. You will feel differently. And I won’t tell anyone.  :-)

(1) Sengcan, the third patriarch of Zen, wrote the inspired poem Trusting the Mind. I think Laozi might have nodded along with most of the points Sengcan made in that great poem. Sengcan lived on a Taoist mountain and his friends were Taoists. In fact there weren’t many Chan/Zen people yet and Sengcan only had one single student. Red Pine made a new translation of Trusting the Mind that is wonderful. You can find it on its own from Empty Bowl, or in the collection Zen Roots: the First Thousand Years. 

(2) I find it so strange that in English we have the word INhalation and the word EXhalation but the word HALATION means something altogether different and unrelated. Hello, where was quality control when someone in the 19th century decided to use HALATION for “the spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries” as in photos or on a TV screen. 

In a world first, scientists have discovered that painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui) have used favorable winds and a strategy of active flying and autopilot to fly across the world without stops, covering at least 4,200 km (2,600 miles). They believe the trip took five to eight days, potentially half the butterflies’ adult lifespan.

What’s more, these adventurous animals may actually be flying even longer distances – 7,000 km (4,350 miles) or more – from western Europe to Africa and on to South America. It upends what we know about butterfly migration and behavior.

Butterfly takes epic 2,600-mile transatlantic flight, stuns scientists

The mind is like tofu. It tastes like whatever you marinate it in.
– Sylvia Boorstein

The album will be on all streaming services on Tuesday, 2. July.

It will also become available from Bandcamp on that day. 

We are finding out that EVERYTHING has to do with our gut. It’s all about how to play well with the alien things that are embedded in us, that we evolved with, without which all kinds of problems surface. 

Looking closer, they observed that while noise exposure significantly negatively altered the composition of the gut microbiome, SPIOCA corrected it. The increase in ‘bad’ bacteria caused by noise exposure, which are associated with inflammation and infection, was reduced “remarkably” by the treatment.

and

One of the species of beneficial gut bacteria that SPIOCA increased was Bacteroides. These bacteria produce a class of lipids called sphingolipids, which play a crucial role in cell structure and functioning. The researchers found that noise exposure suppressed the expression of a particular sphingolipid receptor in cochlear hair cells, S1PR2, which protects against hearing loss. SPIOCA treatment, however, reversed that inhibited expression.

Noise-induced hearing loss prevented by novel gut treatment

I hope that stuff soon comes to a drugstore nearby…

Our pilot study provided clear evidence that airborne sound can have a direct impact on canvas paintings, causing not only the canvas but also the stretcher and frame (if present) to vibrate; as such, airborne transmission routes must be considered alongside structure-borne routes when assessing the impact of sound on artworks. As has been observed before, the vibration levels measured within the canvases were higher than those measured in the stretchers or frames. These observations are important, both in trying to define criteria for sound levels in the vicinity of artworks, along with its character (time and/or frequency specific), and in thinking about how to approach sound-induced vibration mitigation.

This Week in Sound: Listening to Dry Paint – Disquiet

It’s done: I removed from digital distribution all of the albums (4) and singles (12) that were released through the HuHeartDrive label since 2019. My work since 2019 is the only work where I control the distribution 100% or I would remove more! :-) 

These albums and singles will continue to be available on Bandcamp. In their place I added the new compilation Andante, which should be available from the usual streaming outlets in about a week. I am working on a CD version of Andante, but don’t have a release date for that yet.

What I hope to achieve with this new compilation is to introduce listeners to the music that is available on Bandcamp or on Backstage. I don’t expect to have a lot of impact, in part because I am not on social media, but feel it is what I must do. It’s a Don Quixote kind of move on my part but maybe we should have more Don Quixotes! I have already written enough about streaming services, and won’t get into that now, but feel free to ask questions in the comment section.

Andante is a common tempo marking and means at a walking pace – generally between 56 and 108 bpm.

In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for ‘time’; plural ‘tempos’, or tempi from the Italian plural), also known as beats per minute, is the speed or pace of a given composition. In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the start of a piece (often using conventional Italian terms). – Wikipedia

Here is the track list:
01 raven blue – from Rain Poems
02 2 Alone / On an Island – from vision 2020
03 guitar + pipe – from my video for a Dallas Museum of Art exhibit
04 Nice Bubble – from Fete
05 dreamy afternoon (Lo Fi Flam) – from Rain Poems
06 Saudade – from Bare Wood 2
07 Master Zhuang’s Butterfly Dream – from vision 2020
08 bam boo  – from Rain Poems
09 Indigo Two – from Fete
10 elephantear – from Rain Poems
11 Where the River Flows – from Fete
12 Bossa de Petricor – from Rain Poems
13 Uma Dança – from Bare Wood 2
14 Bittersweet – from vision 2020
15 Big Vale – from Fete

Next month Andante will be available from Bandcamp. It will also be distributed to all streaming services, and eventually there will be a CD. 

Backstage has a feature called Ask Ottmar. Here is a question that merited a long-ish answer.

You have talked about the imaginative quality of instrumental music that allows the musician and listener to enter a symbiotic relationship beyond the often fragmentary confines of language. I wonder if epiphanies come to you in your meditative practice, and if they come in the form of language, a rhythm or a melody to you? Does music mean something deeper to you that language cannot convey? To me, music is closer to raw feelings and therefore childhood memories whereas language is more cerebral. Beautiful language written precisely takes me to an interesting place that allows me to see the world in a different perspective. I cannot say whether I enjoy a beautiful song or a beautiful poem more. Apologies for the scattered questions but I guess my main question is: how would you describe your relationship with meditation, language and music and how do they co-relate to you?

I like poetry and perhaps I am a frustrated poet. I have never been good at it and admire people who are. I do think poetry applies to not-words as well. Music can be poetic. Art, photography, a path through a wood, the way a person carries themselves can be poetic.

I find that my favorite poetry leaves space for the reader to insert themselves. To feel, to imagine. Perhaps a poem is a bench that invites us to sit down and experience a moment with the poet?

Many years ago I wrote a little piece about instrumental music for a magazine. You can read it here – in the rant archive. I wrote then, that instrumental music is a book while a song is a movie. (While instrumental music is also a song, in this case I mean song as music that features the singing of words, language, lyrics.)

A book invites participation and requires imagination to come alive, while the movie shows instead what the director imagined. The tree described in a book will have many different shapes… one for each person who reads the words. A movie shows only one tree, the director’s tree… there it is. Perhaps one could also say instrumental music is to songs what poetry is to prose. A suggestion, a signpost pointing at a perception or an emotion, rather than a full description of a landscape or a situation. 

I have played guitar for most of my life… (for about 83% of it). I have meditated almost as long. I know these two practices have influenced each other, but how to tease them apart? They are like two trees that have grown into one another and have become inseparable. And when we look beneath the surface the large and the small and the microscopic roots have all mingled and are intertwined… 

Meditation and playing guitar are food for me. It’s as basic and simple as that. Today I forgot to eat and walking to dinner I realized that all day I had only eaten an apple. But while I can forget food I generally don’t forget to sit. I have written about my beginning with meditation when I was fifteen and how my mother changed from a sceptic, who thought I was engaging in some crazy cultish thing, to a believer, who created space for my meditations and reminded me daily to sit. She made me sit because she saw what meditation did to me. How it tethered me, grounded me. 

I have heard people say that meditation puts a little air between everything. That makes it sound like meditation protects like bubblewrap… the reality is that you don’t feel less, you actually feel more and can allow yourself to feel more. 

Meditation and music are family. They are the river and at the same time the boat that moves in the river. 

You asked how some of the music originates. I have not perceived a pattern. Some music is birthed almost instantly, some needs time. Some music only needs time to sprout and grow and some music requires work and sweat. I woke up from a dream, grabbed my guitar, and played the new piece given to me in the dream. Often I can’t remember how I came up with a piece. It was just suddenly there, standing or reclining in the room, or feeling as if it had always been part of the landscape. Some music begins with a melody, some starts with a rhythm. A feeling becomes words becomes sounds. Or the other way around.

Sometimes I discover music through playing with the guitar. Playing with the guitar is very different from playing the guitar. Playing with the guitar is playing like a child… to forget about harmony and about chords and scales and to put fingers here and there… simply to find out what that sounds like. Not thinking about music theory. Directly experiencing the sound of the strings. I have a lot of fun discovering music that way. Some of the music on Rain Poems came about that way. Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up. – Pablo Picasso

I hope I have given you something, even if it doesn’t seem like a good definitive answer. More like an answer cloud.

The first use of any new technology is to make things even shittier for artists.”

The first use of any new technology… – by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is on Substack. 

I think that “creativity” is vastly overrated and “artistry” is vastly underrated. Creativity is cool. It’s about exploring and it’s about allowing yourself to make mistakes. But artistry is about knowing when a mistake is beautiful, when a mistake has merit, is virtuous, and knowing when to keep it. Artistry and expertise are not getting the day in court that I wish they were, at this particular moment in history. They’re being assailed, are they not? Expertise is critical and artistry is critical. So, when the CEOs of various “friendly” tech-overlord corporations talk about embracing creativity, I know that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Musicians aren’t really after creativity. Such as I’ve experienced it, they’re after artistry. The records I love, regardless of the decade they were made in, are in possession of artistry, and artistry comes from intent.

Blake Morgan in Tape Op Magazine – LINK

The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical. 

Uneasy on the Ear: An Interview with Lola De La Mata

Most musicians have some form of tinnitus. It comes with the job. Accidental feedback, a cable failing… there are many ways to lose hearing and it doesn’t have to be the result of exposure to extreme volume. Accidents happen. Most wood workers cut their fingers at some point. Like I said, part of the job. 

What is interesting about the linked article I quoted is that De La Mata was told she had severe tinnitus but instead of a phantom sound she heard something that could be recorded, therefore a sound somehow created by some part of her ears. 

This demonstrates that we still know very little about the ears. Perhaps what De La Mata suffers from is not actually tinnitus but a different affliction, as yet unnamed. I imagine we will need new ways to measure every person who hears tones, to find out whether they hear phantom tones or real sounds. 

Books are food. For me, finding the right book is a great joy. What is the right book? That’s the book I need now, the one that connects to a bunch of different thought clouds and ties them together, the one that shines  light on another piece of the puzzle. It’s like hunting and gathering for your lunch, only it’s lunch for my head. I feel very lucky because for several years in a row I have found non-fiction books that mean a lot to me and have taught me a lot. 

2022:
Humankind: a Hopeful History – Rutger Bregman
Stolen Focus – Johann Hari

Humankind showed me that many examples we are told about people’s behavior, like Lord of the Flies and The Stanford Prison Experiment and the story of Kitty Genovese were either manipulated or made up entirely. Humans are much kinder than we think but many people profit from us not believing that.

Stolen Focus is all about screen addiction and how it is actively created by the addiction pushers, the social media companies.

2023:
Ways of Being – James Bridle

There are different types of consciousness and we have only begun to understand the complexity of the network. I smile just thinking about this book. I loved every page of it. 

2024:
Breath – James Nestor
Movement Matters – Katy Bowman

Breath was recommended by Jon Gagan and I devoured this book. As a result of reading the book I began doing Wim Hof Method exercises. Breath holds, for example. I thought I would stall out at 3 minutes, but then I was able to reach 3m 10s and now I wonder whether 4 minutes will be possible for me. The record is 11m for men and 9m for women. Wow. It is interesting that age has nothing to do with it…. which means I can keep trying for the 4m mark…  I also do pushups while holding my breath. My breathing has generally improved. I also use an app to do paced breathing. Slow breathing to the rescue! 

Movement Matters contains essays about movement. I found out about this book from Craig Mod, who mentioned Ben Pobjoy. 

A few years ago I realized that the sedentarism I have been writing about for a decade wasn’t only of the body, but of thoughts as well. I don’t mean (only) that people have a hard time moving their thoughts to consider new information, but that “we are unmoving” is the unacknowledged assumption underlying some of the most prevalent problems we are dealing with in areas of public health and safety, environmental science, and social issues. 

Lack of physical movement becomes inability to shift and change perspective. The sedentary society becomes an immovable culture. 

Check out this foreword to the book, written by Ben Pobjoy. The book inspired him to walk and walk he did:

I’ve since trekked 75,000+ kilometres by foot across six continents to document what the world — and its inhabitants — reveal to me. Step by step, word by word, and image by image I’ve completed 850+ freestyle marathons as a means to nurture my curiosities, and — in turn — share my findings with others on social, in written essays, my newsletter, and in photographic books.

What a rich harvest it has been. 

There once were two competing video cassette tape designs, VHS and Betamax. Betamax was developed by Sony and was brought to market in 1975, while VHS was created by JVS and came out in 1976. Betamax had the better quality but the story goes that porn was distributed on VHS, which was the less expensive format. As a result VHS won out and Beta stopped existing more than twenty years ago. 

This morning I was thinking that the same could happen with AI. There are loads of AI companies that are competing. We are told that some AI can already create convincing video from a still image. What if one of the AI systems becomes capable of creating porn on demand, letting a person choose who does what to whom. What does it mean when anybody can have video of anyone doing anything?

Are there executives of AI corporations discussing this nuclear option to get larger market share? It would make for an interesting movie plot. 

PS: a reader alerted me to the possibility that it may have had to do with recording sports and longer movies–the quality of Betamax was higher but the limit was 1-2 hours while VHS could record up to 4-6 hours–rather than the ability to buy porn. I found this article which explains it somewhat… but not really. It doesn’t matter to me either way, because it was a thought experiment.