Thursday

02009-04-16 | Uncategorized

I listened to a sound collage I made a couple of years ago, from sounds I recorded in April of 2007 in Germany and Austria. It sounds amazing and I thought about making it available in the form of a .aif file (CD quality: 16/44.1). You can travel without moving!

It was only 28ºF this morning and I discussed transportation with myself. Arguments for and against using my bicycle were exchanged, but in the end I bundled up and took off on the Mariachi Bullitt to meet Jon for breakfast. We discussed that there seems to be more interest in audiophile sound these days. Good!

Gizmodo had these two items this week:

Vietnamese Audiophile Turns a Room Into One Giant Speaker

Why We Need Audiophiles

The second one is particularly interesting as it compares SACD to great vinyl. Then I found this piece, which compares SACS and DVD-Audio and prefers DVD-A. I also noticed that Logic 8 allows the burning of DVD-A. DVD-A does sound very promising. When I was still with Epic Records I spoke to an executive there, it must have been around 1999, who had one of only seven DVD-A players in the country, and he raved about the sound quality! I myself have never heard it. (((however I have heard 24/96 in my studio, because One Guitar and Up Close were recorded like that…)))

While we are staying in Manhattan in May (((five nights at the Blue Note))) Jon and I will try to locate an audiophile dealer there. We want to listen to DVD-A players and see what the fuss is about. I don’t think DVD-A will be a commercial option and we’ll have to wait until high quality 24/96 or 24/192 files can be losslessly compressed and downloaded.

I was glad I decided to ride my bike and ended up riding for about an hour today. I enjoy the easy communication with pedestrians. How can a pedestrian communicate with a car or SUV, especially when the windows are tinted and inpenetrable!! Like talking to a tank.

Amazing Race

02009-02-24 | Recording

Seed: The Amazing Race
The Linguists depicts a round-the-world race to make audio recordings of dying languages, giving us a glimpse of how technology can promote language diversity.

For M.C.

Scent of Tragedy

02009-02-14 | Uncategorized

Scent of tragedy lingers in a 650-year-old perfume bottle buried by pogrom victim
When the tiny stopper is delicately eased free, a mere wisp of scent imprisoned for over 650 years is released.

In a unique experiment, scientists at the L’Oreal perfume institute in Paris tried to analyse the ingredients of a perfume whose precious container survived the Black Death, which annihilated a third of the population of Europe.
(Via Guardian Unlimited Science)

Y wrote:

I started thinking how rare scented oils were, compared to now. To carry a scent in a piece of cotton, place it in a bottle in order to carry it around your waist. How beautiful the thought of that.

Scent is such an industry and no longer special. The elite aspect is not welcomed, either. But, the beauty of it…trying to capture the scent of grass or damp wood after a rainfall…flowers, the sheerness of air.

Scent parallels music.
Music used to be special. Performed only by musicians (whether amateurs or professionals) in real time. There were no recordings until 100 years ago. Now you can hear music at every gas station, fast-food chain etc.
We gained something, but we also lost something. That surprise, even shock of smelling something new, or hearing a different music. Only a person traveling would smell and hear these scents and sounds…