Monday, 17 September 2007
Friday, 31 August 2007
Welcome to the 2nd Dark Age
My wife and I are off next week to spend a week in Luxor. (That's Egypt for the geographically challenged!)
And I have been thinking about the incredible amount we know about a civilisation that was building huge and complex architecture when the average Brit was living in a mud hut.
And I thought... What will future generations make of our society?
And my answer is: Pretty much nothing! We are currently living through what future generations will call a dark age.
The dark ages of our history were not as commonly held an age where nothing of note actually happened. They were dark because very little of what happened actually survives today in written record.
Ah, but, I hear you say, we record everything we have all kinds of recorded media.
Yes, we do. But in our case we just don't plan for longevity. Who now has the ability to read 8" floppy disks? Who can get data back from big Winchester drives? Does anyone really think that CD drives and DVD drives will be anywhere, other than as exhibits in the science museum in a few short decades? (This of course assumes that the disks are still readable and the dyes commonly used in recordable optical media today haven't all just faded to nothing)
As a musician, I was doing multi-track projects back in the 80s. I used to use Steinberg Pro24 using an Atari ST computer. Project files that I created on my Atari, are recorded on 3.5" floppies which were formatted in a slightly different way to the way DOS formats and I have absolutely no way of getting those projects back. That data is almost lost already.
And we've all read, I'm sure of of the 24 track projects from the 70s that are all but unplayable; when the 25th anniversary remaster projects of a number of famous bands and artists went and got the 2" tapes from the vault the tapes had degraded almost to the point of ruin. Another few short years and they would have been truly lost!
Most of our literature is printed on paper that contains so much acid it will eat itself to dust in less than a generation. I have books from the late 70s that are yellowed and fragile, and yet my wife recently got an 1820s pocket edition of Byron that was still in beautiful condition.
Now that everyone takes photos in digital format, and the vast majority only store them on their home PC, and never print them (and never back up their PC data!) all those boxes of photos stored in people's attics, and are routinely discovered and used to document the social history of the 20th century just don't exist.
Because we only think in the now, our children most likely just won't know what granny looked like when she was young.
No more collections of records from the early 21st century will be waiting to be found. They were all encoded as MP3s and were lost along with the digital photos that were on the PC nobody backed up.
What about letters and diaries? Much of our knowledge of days gone by comes not from the great events of history, but from the letter sent home from the front, or the letter sent to a loved one or an entry in a diary. Lets face it, who hasn't heard of Samuel Pepys? Much our knowledge of court intrigue of Elizabethan England comes actually from letters.
And nobody writes a letter any more. It's all email. And, lets be honest... Who keeps email? Even this blog - which I guess is a modern day diary will be subject to the transient nature of it's storage medium.
I know that archivists think about this seriously and are spending an inordinate amount of time and effort copying stuff to the NEXT format. That is fine. However the task is growing almost exponentially and it does not include the kind of personal data that we rely on in historical research today.
And it does all rely on a continuity of history. Any major social upheaval, (you know war, disaster, etc) that stops the archivists working, will mean that , due to the really transient nature of pretty much all the media we use today, almost everything we know will be gone in a few short years.
The late 20th Century? The early 21st? No mate. Nothing happened then.
And I have been thinking about the incredible amount we know about a civilisation that was building huge and complex architecture when the average Brit was living in a mud hut.
And I thought... What will future generations make of our society?
And my answer is: Pretty much nothing! We are currently living through what future generations will call a dark age.
The dark ages of our history were not as commonly held an age where nothing of note actually happened. They were dark because very little of what happened actually survives today in written record.
Ah, but, I hear you say, we record everything we have all kinds of recorded media.
Yes, we do. But in our case we just don't plan for longevity. Who now has the ability to read 8" floppy disks? Who can get data back from big Winchester drives? Does anyone really think that CD drives and DVD drives will be anywhere, other than as exhibits in the science museum in a few short decades? (This of course assumes that the disks are still readable and the dyes commonly used in recordable optical media today haven't all just faded to nothing)
As a musician, I was doing multi-track projects back in the 80s. I used to use Steinberg Pro24 using an Atari ST computer. Project files that I created on my Atari, are recorded on 3.5" floppies which were formatted in a slightly different way to the way DOS formats and I have absolutely no way of getting those projects back. That data is almost lost already.
And we've all read, I'm sure of of the 24 track projects from the 70s that are all but unplayable; when the 25th anniversary remaster projects of a number of famous bands and artists went and got the 2" tapes from the vault the tapes had degraded almost to the point of ruin. Another few short years and they would have been truly lost!
Most of our literature is printed on paper that contains so much acid it will eat itself to dust in less than a generation. I have books from the late 70s that are yellowed and fragile, and yet my wife recently got an 1820s pocket edition of Byron that was still in beautiful condition.
Now that everyone takes photos in digital format, and the vast majority only store them on their home PC, and never print them (and never back up their PC data!) all those boxes of photos stored in people's attics, and are routinely discovered and used to document the social history of the 20th century just don't exist.
Because we only think in the now, our children most likely just won't know what granny looked like when she was young.
No more collections of records from the early 21st century will be waiting to be found. They were all encoded as MP3s and were lost along with the digital photos that were on the PC nobody backed up.
What about letters and diaries? Much of our knowledge of days gone by comes not from the great events of history, but from the letter sent home from the front, or the letter sent to a loved one or an entry in a diary. Lets face it, who hasn't heard of Samuel Pepys? Much our knowledge of court intrigue of Elizabethan England comes actually from letters.
And nobody writes a letter any more. It's all email. And, lets be honest... Who keeps email? Even this blog - which I guess is a modern day diary will be subject to the transient nature of it's storage medium.
I know that archivists think about this seriously and are spending an inordinate amount of time and effort copying stuff to the NEXT format. That is fine. However the task is growing almost exponentially and it does not include the kind of personal data that we rely on in historical research today.
And it does all rely on a continuity of history. Any major social upheaval, (you know war, disaster, etc) that stops the archivists working, will mean that , due to the really transient nature of pretty much all the media we use today, almost everything we know will be gone in a few short years.
The late 20th Century? The early 21st? No mate. Nothing happened then.
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
When more becomes less (random thoughts on loudness)
This has been interesting.
A little adventure in psycho-acoustics.
Over the weekend during my CD buying session, I picked up a copy of Octavarium by Dream Theater. On the whole I quite like Dream Theater. I understand a lot of the criticism of their widdleywiddleywiddley solo excesses, but I'm a sucker for odd time signatures and experimentation in general.
Overall they are probably a little too heavy for my tastes, and though I would never slavishly consume everything they do, I am a big admirer of Mike Portnoy's drumming and I think Jordan Rudess is an extremely talented keyboard player.
Anyway, I digress, and I haven't even started yet. So due to the fact that I have little time to sit down and put CDs on during the week, my first audition of this disk was in the car. This isn't as bad as it sounds because my new car has a very nice Bose sound system, complete with a reasonably restrained subwooffer (I.e. the whole car doesn't honk with the bass like I see so often with many car audio systems).
I don't know the album well enough yet and as I wasn't checking the liner notes while driving (not a great idea on the whole), I can't tell you which track it was that was playing, all I can say was it contained one of those "wall-of-sound" moments with an infinite amount of distorted guitars panned uniformly across the sound-field building to a crescendo.
Except it didn't.
And this is the strange thing. I don't know how far the mastering engineer has pushed this particular release (quite a lot I suspect, as it is significantly louder than Radio 4 - for you Non UK people BBC Radio 4 is mostly speech and isn't particularly compressed, and it is actually a good benchmark of relative loudness. A moderately loud mastering job just sounds loud compared to Radio 4. A really hot mix has you reaching very quickly for the volume control when you pop a CD on!)
So, back to this wall of sound crescendo. Actually in the car environment on the motorway at around 70mph (possibly a bit more) with the volume cranked pretty loud, it actually appeared to get quieter! In the context of the mastering job, there was really nowhere for the music to go dynamically. And it had already reached the RMS limit the mastering house had set... So the crescendo just wasn't there. BUT, because contextually you could hear that it was supposed to , my brain actually interpreted the lack of increase as a decrease.
I'm not sure this is repeatable perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my car is not extremely quiet - 2 litres of Italian sportiness , but I'll certainly have another go, but nonetheless, it's an interesting exercise in psycho-acoustics.
Monday, 20 August 2007
Prog Rock Recommendation. Part 1
Spocks Beard. In what may become a semi-regular series, here is an album I bought over the weekend. It is the 9th studio album from US prog rockers Spocks Beard, titled, simply Spock's Beard.
I have been a fan of their music for some years, but after the departure of lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Neal Morse, I was a little disappointed by the first post Morse album Feel Euphoria, so I didn't buy their next album Octane or indeed this one until this weekend, when I happened to see it in the local HMV and picked it up on a whim. However, I have to say this is a great album. I can thoroughly recommend it. The Beard are back on form. Everyone is playing very well and there are some great tunes in there too. (I have to say that SB always have had the edge over a lot of "New Prog" because while many bands in the Genre are undoubtedly technically proficient, there are not that many memorable tunes). So if you like your prog rock to be melodic and challenging, here is one album worth checking out.
Thursday, 16 August 2007
The power of a full stop.
I'm having one of those days.
I've just spent the last 30 minutes, half of my lunch-break sounding off about the lack of people interested in science fiction here on blogger.com.
You see I had discovered the profile page, and further, the fact that all of my interests had been turned into hyper-links.
I found lots of other bloggers with similar interests. But when I clicked on "Science Fiction." I got "No Profiles Found" and thought WHAT?
I couldn't believe that out of the hundreds of thousands of fellow bloggers none were SF aficionados.
Of course, it was me. Well actually, it was the underlying programming here that searches for those hyperlinks. You see, I had typed "Science Fiction." and there are no other people with that interest. However if I had typed: "Science Fiction" I would have discovered 7,600 bloggers. Spotted the difference?
Yes, that little "." (The full stop/period, the ., the 0x2EH) That was all it took.
So there we go. Waste of a lunch-break, going on and on about the lack of SF bloggers, and there are 7600 of 'em.
Wonderful.
Of course the server could have been a little more intelligent. Perhaps it could be. Perhaps one day it will. Perhaps, one day it will stop me typing complete rubbish and point out the error of my train of thought.
But I guess if it gets that intelligent, it may have other things on it's mind.
Ho Hum!
I've just spent the last 30 minutes, half of my lunch-break sounding off about the lack of people interested in science fiction here on blogger.com.
You see I had discovered the profile page, and further, the fact that all of my interests had been turned into hyper-links.
I found lots of other bloggers with similar interests. But when I clicked on "Science Fiction." I got "No Profiles Found" and thought WHAT?
I couldn't believe that out of the hundreds of thousands of fellow bloggers none were SF aficionados.
Of course, it was me. Well actually, it was the underlying programming here that searches for those hyperlinks. You see, I had typed "Science Fiction." and there are no other people with that interest. However if I had typed: "Science Fiction" I would have discovered 7,600 bloggers. Spotted the difference?
Yes, that little "." (The full stop/period, the ., the 0x2EH) That was all it took.
So there we go. Waste of a lunch-break, going on and on about the lack of SF bloggers, and there are 7600 of 'em.
Wonderful.
Of course the server could have been a little more intelligent. Perhaps it could be. Perhaps one day it will. Perhaps, one day it will stop me typing complete rubbish and point out the error of my train of thought.
But I guess if it gets that intelligent, it may have other things on it's mind.
Ho Hum!
Wednesday, 15 August 2007
Nostalgia for a forgotton age!
I was reading through some past posts from fellow blogger and Alesis Fusion sound developer Roberto and came across this touching little story:(http://failedmuso.blogspot.com/2007/07/are-friends-electric-in-ukelele-stylee.html)
The thing that prompted this post was his quote about listening to records:
Anyway, reading that I was reminded of my own youth. obviously, being a Techno-geek and lifelong audiophile, we didn't sit around any mono record players, oh no, we sat around HI FI SYSTEMS that we had spent all of our disposable incomes scraping together and actually building from old parts or kits from the likes of Sinclair!
But I digress. That will be the subject, I am sure of another post down the line. The thing is my friends and I, we shared our music. I don't mean we taped each other's records (the precursor to file sharing), but listening to music was a sociable activity.
Defining moments in my teenage years can be measured by the releases of my favorite records. I can remember actually which shop I bought many of my records. I can remember the day it happened. Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Yes's Relayer, Genesis' Wind and Wuthering, to name but a few
Actually putting the record on was elevated to the status of ritual. Taking the LP out of it's cover, and then sliding it gently out of the inner-sleeve so that the edge rested on the skin between outstretched thumb and forefinger, the middle finger supporting the record on the label. (Absolutely no touching the playing surface! That would after all have been some kind of heresy). Then transferring from this one handed balancing act to one where the record was held between the middle fingers of each hand and the pad of each thumb, again only making contact with the edges of the record...
Wait. You have no idea what I'm talking about do you? In fact I'd lay bets most of you haven't even touched a vinyl record in your lives.
OK... Look. You hold it like this.
OK?
So... Back to the ritual. Holding the LP like in the picture, you place it on the already revolving platter, and then placed the arm over the start of the record and pushed the lever down to gently lower the stylus into the groove. (If you were a true aficionado, you would eschew the damped lever and manually lower the stylus to the groove)
And then we would proceed to listen to our music.
I'll repeat that. And then we would listen to our music. It wasn't on in the background, it wasn't the accompaniment to some other activity. It was the activity.
So life has moved on. The LP has largely been superseded by the CD and that in itself has given way, more or less to the digital download (watch this space for a rant about that by the way!). These days, MP3s are the medium, and if there is any listening to be done, it's a solitary activity. And nearly always its just the soundtrack to some other thing.
Perhaps I'm hopelessly out of touch, but somehow I can't help but feel that we've lost something. Perhaps the music business is in terminal decline not because the music is any worse (there is always good and bad music), but because music in of itself has become an add-on optional extra in the lives of today's young consumer generation.
I can remember that it wasn't that unusual to have to queue up on the release day of your favorite band's latest album. It was a special moment rushing home with a gate-fold 12" sleeve containing your hero's latest masterpiece. Now it's there at a click on iTunes, there is no real sense of ownership and anyway, chances are, you aren't going to listen to it.
You might hear it in the background while something else takes your attention. But for a great many, the defining moments in their lives simply don't equate to the release of an album.
And that's just a little sad. Isn't it?
The thing that prompted this post was his quote about listening to records:
We sat around the record player with a stack of records. Kids today have no idea about this ritual. Nowadays it's all MP3's and playlists. Back in 1979, we had a mono record player and 7" vinyl.
Anyway, reading that I was reminded of my own youth. obviously, being a Techno-geek and lifelong audiophile, we didn't sit around any mono record players, oh no, we sat around HI FI SYSTEMS that we had spent all of our disposable incomes scraping together and actually building from old parts or kits from the likes of Sinclair!
But I digress. That will be the subject, I am sure of another post down the line. The thing is my friends and I, we shared our music. I don't mean we taped each other's records (the precursor to file sharing), but listening to music was a sociable activity.
Defining moments in my teenage years can be measured by the releases of my favorite records. I can remember actually which shop I bought many of my records. I can remember the day it happened. Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Yes's Relayer, Genesis' Wind and Wuthering, to name but a few
Actually putting the record on was elevated to the status of ritual. Taking the LP out of it's cover, and then sliding it gently out of the inner-sleeve so that the edge rested on the skin between outstretched thumb and forefinger, the middle finger supporting the record on the label. (Absolutely no touching the playing surface! That would after all have been some kind of heresy). Then transferring from this one handed balancing act to one where the record was held between the middle fingers of each hand and the pad of each thumb, again only making contact with the edges of the record...
Wait. You have no idea what I'm talking about do you? In fact I'd lay bets most of you haven't even touched a vinyl record in your lives.
OK... Look. You hold it like this.
OK?
So... Back to the ritual. Holding the LP like in the picture, you place it on the already revolving platter, and then placed the arm over the start of the record and pushed the lever down to gently lower the stylus into the groove. (If you were a true aficionado, you would eschew the damped lever and manually lower the stylus to the groove)
And then we would proceed to listen to our music.
I'll repeat that. And then we would listen to our music. It wasn't on in the background, it wasn't the accompaniment to some other activity. It was the activity.
So life has moved on. The LP has largely been superseded by the CD and that in itself has given way, more or less to the digital download (watch this space for a rant about that by the way!). These days, MP3s are the medium, and if there is any listening to be done, it's a solitary activity. And nearly always its just the soundtrack to some other thing.
Perhaps I'm hopelessly out of touch, but somehow I can't help but feel that we've lost something. Perhaps the music business is in terminal decline not because the music is any worse (there is always good and bad music), but because music in of itself has become an add-on optional extra in the lives of today's young consumer generation.
I can remember that it wasn't that unusual to have to queue up on the release day of your favorite band's latest album. It was a special moment rushing home with a gate-fold 12" sleeve containing your hero's latest masterpiece. Now it's there at a click on iTunes, there is no real sense of ownership and anyway, chances are, you aren't going to listen to it.
You might hear it in the background while something else takes your attention. But for a great many, the defining moments in their lives simply don't equate to the release of an album.
And that's just a little sad. Isn't it?
Monday, 13 August 2007
Technoeffectitis!
I have, it appears, sometime this year picked up a nasty virus. It manifests itself in some kind of aura or field that I radiate, which effects technology. Given that I am a Gadgeteer of the first order, this is actually quite alarming.
I know this self diagnosis, of a hitherto unheard of disease that causes the person infected to destroy technology seems unlikely, and I can already imagine the look of skepticism passing across you face right now, but lets look at the evidence.
My rather up-market DVD player and Sky+ PVR stopped working on the same day. The former upset me, because it is a very nice DVD player indeed. The latter less so because it gave me the opportunity to upgrade to a newer one with a bigger hard-drive. Every cloud, as the saying goes.
I would happily have put this down to coincidence, but the repaired DVD player no sooner it was re-installed developed a new fault whereby video would intermittently freeze. Not wishing to throw good money after bad, we decided that now was the time for a new shiny rather up-market DVD player, one that would do all manner of high resolution up-scaling and was equally at home playing DVDA and SACD discs too.
In short order my technoeffectitis had worked its magic on this device too and it found itself incapable of navigating to chapters, and often struggled to get to the end of a movie. Oh dear.
Ah, I hear you cry, you have some kind of power fault on your hi-fi system. Well none is to be found, but the virus has started to effect other items too. My DV camcorder started to randomly turn itself on and off, threading and unthreading the tape. Even removing the tape doesn't help. It still sometimes sits there not attached to anything turning off and on.
My 16 channel audio mixer in the studio stopped working just 6 months after it was installed. I had it repaired and when it returned it manifested another problem, requiring another repair.
And now my stills camera has succumbed. The CCD showing what I can only describe as a "melting" version of reality. Like Dali on acid.
And don't even talk about my work laptop. Sorry, that's laptops... Plural. I have had 5 this year. Yes five times some strange instability, random bluescreening, whatever, batteries that last 15 minutes, something has happened that has rendered the laptop useless. Nightmare!
All these devices are various ages from a few weeks to several years. They are all on different wear-out curves, and yet they all in a short space of time have failed or exhibited strange or aberrant behaviour. And the only common denominator?
That would be me.
Hence I have obviously become infected with something that effects technology. Yes folks. I have Technoeffectitis.
I'm just hoping that a, it is not contagious. and b, it is relatively short-lived.
For all our sakes.
I know this self diagnosis, of a hitherto unheard of disease that causes the person infected to destroy technology seems unlikely, and I can already imagine the look of skepticism passing across you face right now, but lets look at the evidence.
My rather up-market DVD player and Sky+ PVR stopped working on the same day. The former upset me, because it is a very nice DVD player indeed. The latter less so because it gave me the opportunity to upgrade to a newer one with a bigger hard-drive. Every cloud, as the saying goes.
I would happily have put this down to coincidence, but the repaired DVD player no sooner it was re-installed developed a new fault whereby video would intermittently freeze. Not wishing to throw good money after bad, we decided that now was the time for a new shiny rather up-market DVD player, one that would do all manner of high resolution up-scaling and was equally at home playing DVDA and SACD discs too.
In short order my technoeffectitis had worked its magic on this device too and it found itself incapable of navigating to chapters, and often struggled to get to the end of a movie. Oh dear.
Ah, I hear you cry, you have some kind of power fault on your hi-fi system. Well none is to be found, but the virus has started to effect other items too. My DV camcorder started to randomly turn itself on and off, threading and unthreading the tape. Even removing the tape doesn't help. It still sometimes sits there not attached to anything turning off and on.
My 16 channel audio mixer in the studio stopped working just 6 months after it was installed. I had it repaired and when it returned it manifested another problem, requiring another repair.
And now my stills camera has succumbed. The CCD showing what I can only describe as a "melting" version of reality. Like Dali on acid.
And don't even talk about my work laptop. Sorry, that's laptops... Plural. I have had 5 this year. Yes five times some strange instability, random bluescreening, whatever, batteries that last 15 minutes, something has happened that has rendered the laptop useless. Nightmare!
All these devices are various ages from a few weeks to several years. They are all on different wear-out curves, and yet they all in a short space of time have failed or exhibited strange or aberrant behaviour. And the only common denominator?
That would be me.
Hence I have obviously become infected with something that effects technology. Yes folks. I have Technoeffectitis.
I'm just hoping that a, it is not contagious. and b, it is relatively short-lived.
For all our sakes.
Friday, 10 August 2007
And welcome to the show!
I guess it just had to happen.
I got a blog.
Well, if you know me (and, if you're reading this, chances are, you probably do!) it was probably inevitable. Techno-nerd that I am!
So this is it. My inaugural entry. (and probably eligible for some kind of award for the most boring first blog posting)
Beginnings are always difficult (ask any author) and this one no less so, even if nobody reads it! There are a whole host of things I could write about here, but none of them are really relevant as a FIRST entry. So maybe it's just the opportunity to muse on THE beginning.
So lets cast our thoughts back around 13 billion years, when everything that was, well wasn't yet. If we accept the ol' big bang theory in a few nanoseconds it all burst into being, and given the tiny size of that early universe then all the bits were really close together then.
And even if those first particles have long gone down the old entropy garbage chute, chances are that bits of you and bits of me were descended from bits that were really close together back then.
I feel like I know you better already!
I got a blog.
Well, if you know me (and, if you're reading this, chances are, you probably do!) it was probably inevitable. Techno-nerd that I am!
So this is it. My inaugural entry. (and probably eligible for some kind of award for the most boring first blog posting)
Beginnings are always difficult (ask any author) and this one no less so, even if nobody reads it! There are a whole host of things I could write about here, but none of them are really relevant as a FIRST entry. So maybe it's just the opportunity to muse on THE beginning.
So lets cast our thoughts back around 13 billion years, when everything that was, well wasn't yet. If we accept the ol' big bang theory in a few nanoseconds it all burst into being, and given the tiny size of that early universe then all the bits were really close together then.
And even if those first particles have long gone down the old entropy garbage chute, chances are that bits of you and bits of me were descended from bits that were really close together back then.
I feel like I know you better already!
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