Tag: music

Sentience is Physical, Part 3: Now with Flaming Birds

Mark Davis1 Comment

Moving to Portland brings all the positives and negatives of urban living. A notable positive is access to the arts and I’m looking forward to catching Stravinsky’s The Firebird this weekend with the Oregon Symphony. Part of the program is a new work by composer Vijay Iyer who has a history of incorporating concepts derived from African rhythms, hip hop, and jazz into his compositional efforts. I took the opportunity this morning to read his 1998 dissertation from Berkeley that capped off his interdisciplinary program in the cognitive science of music. I’ll just say up front that I’m not sure it rises to the level of a dissertation since it does not really provide any significant new results. He notes the development of a microtiming programming environment coded in MAX but doesn’t give significant results or novel experimental testing of the system or of human perceptions of microtiming. What the dissertation does do, however, is give a lucid overview and some new insights about how cognition and music interact, as well as point towards ways to test the theories that Iyer develops during the course of his work. A too-long master’s thesis might be a better category for it, but I’ve never been exposed to musicology dissertations so perhaps this level of work is normal.

Iyer’s core thesis is that musical cognition and expression arise from a physical engagement with our environments combined with cultural situatedness. That is, rhythm is tied to a basic “tactus” or spontaneously perceived regular pulse or beat of music that is physically associated with walking, heartbeats, tapping, chewing, and so forth. Similarly, the culture of musical production as well as the history that informs a given piece all combine to influence how music is produced and experienced.… Read the rest

The Retiring Mind, Part V: Listening and Ground Truth

Mark Davis2 Comments

Human hearing is limited in the range of frequencies that we can discern. Generally, at the high end, that limit is around 20kHz, which is a very high pitch indeed. But, as we age, our high frequency perception reduces as well, until we may very well have difficulty hearing 8kHz or understanding human utterances in old age. You can test your own approximate limits with a simple YouTube video that raises pitches quickly up through the spectrum. I’m capping out at just north of 13.5kHz using a cheap speaker attached to my monitor, and with normal but quiet ambient background noise.

The original design of the Compact Disc by Phillips and Sony used the 20kHz limit as guidance for the encoding of the digital information on the disks. Specifically, the input analog waveform was sampled at a resolution of 16 bits 44.1kHz, which gives a maximum volume range of 2^16 (96dB) and supports the Nyquist sampling theorem that requires double the maximum frequency of the input stream in order to reconstruct that stream.

And CDs were very good, exceeding the capabilities of vinyl or cassettes, and approaching the best magnetic tape capabilities of the time. They also had some interesting side-effects in terms of mastering by freeing bass frequencies that had to be shifted towards the central channel on vinyl in order to avoid shortening recordings unduly because of the larger groove sizes needed to render low frequencies.

But now, with streaming, we can increase our resolution still further. Qobuz and Tidal offer Hi-Res audio formats that can range up to 24 bit resolution at 192kHz sample rates. Tidal also promotes MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) format that may use lossy compression but preserves aspects of the original master recording.… Read the rest

Artsy Women

Mark Davis1 Comment

Victoire LemoineA pervasive commitment to ambiguity. That’s the most compelling sentence I can think of to describe the best epistemological stance concerning the modern world. We have, at best, some fairly well-established local systems that are reliable. We have consistency that may, admittedly, only pertain to some local system that is relatively smooth or has a modicum of support for the most general hypotheses that we can generate.

It’s not nihilistic to believe these things. It’s prudent and, when carefully managed, it’s productive.

And with such prudence we can tear down the semantic drapery that commands attention at every turn, from the grotesqueries of the political sphere that seek to command us through emotive hyperbole to the witchdoctors of religious canons who want us to immanentize some silly Middle Eastern eschaton or shoot up a family-planning clinic.

It is all nonsense. We are perpetuating and inventing constructs that cling to our contingent neurologies like mold, impervious to the broadest implications and best thinking we can muster. That’s normal, I suppose, for that is the sub rosa history of our species. But only beneath the firmament, while there is hope above and inventiveness and the creation of a new honor that derives from fairness and not from reactive disgust.

In opposition to the structures that we know and live with—that we tolerate—there is both clarity in this cocksure target and a certainty that, at least, we can deconstruct the self-righteousness and build a new sensibility to (at least) equality if not some more grand vision.

I picked up Laura Marling’s Short Movie last week and propagated it to various cars. It is only OK, but it joins a rather large collection of recent female musicians in my music archive.… Read the rest