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Being a musician and audio engineer right now for 30 years, I see all this and I simply shake my head. I've long given up the hopes of monetary success for my m

Being a musician and audio engineer right now for 30 years, I see all this and I simply shake my head. I've long given up the hopes of monetary success for my music. One thing that remains is the energy exchange between an artist and the audience in a live setting. If you love music and you are not an emotional robot you know what I am talking about. Software can't replicate that and the artistry in the performer knows how to heighten and transmit content in that moment. This act of creating and adapting to the feedback and pushing energy back and forth is the only reason I'm still playing music. Computers don't do that. Tik tok doesn't do that in 30 seconds. Pop music has been reduced to the equivalent of taking a shit and a lot of people don't know it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
swayvil 4y ago
- dannyw 4y ago
  High fidelity digital is nearly indistinguishable from analog.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- croon 4y ago
  I'm not sure what this means. There is an incredible amount of music created digitally and transmitted digitally that is anything but cold and thin, whatever that means. If my ear can't tell the difference, there is no emotional or practical difference as a listener. (I've been playing acoustic guitar for 30 years and enjoy almost all genres of music if relevant)
  - cultartawayyyi 4y ago
    Probably someone who really likes tube amps. Many audiophiles scoff at "digital" music, i.e. audio that is amplified with silicon transistors. Modern transistors are very fast, so noise that gets through the filters typically sounded like sharp pops and hisses. With older (and slower to respond) analog technologies, unwanted noise gets smoothed into more pleasing hums and modulations. These days, there are excellent affordable digital options like the O2 amp. But it would be a boring world if we were all the same.
    - swayvil 4y ago
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  A record player or tape deck can have the same level of audience-artist interaction as TikTok unless you're DJ'ing. The fast forward function is simply a lot slower.
- infinityio 4y ago
  If modern music is mastered digitally (and assuming I want to listen to modern music), what advantages do analog technologies bring?
  - BVCommander 4y ago
    If you're not passing your scratched to shit vinyl through a $20,000 tube amp and a Denon AKDL1 link cable you're not hearing the sound as the artist intended it.
    - oblio 4y ago
      Hey, don't make fun of my gold plated Toslink cable!
  - wvh 4y ago
    Pleasant imperfection. High-end roll-off. Natural compression. (Speaking as a musician, not an audiophile.) Of course, all of that can be emulated quite faithfully now.
- BVCommander 4y ago
  >Digital is cold and thin compared to analog. Claude Shannon emphatically disagrees. When sampling at twice the highest audible frequency they are mathematically equivalent.
  - ChrisLomont 4y ago
    Not quite - Nyquist-Shannon's theorem states the original signal can be reconstructed, but it usually isn't in reproduction. Digital playback does not reproduce the full original signal - it plays it back on whatever output device it has, which does not generally recreate the original waveform. That theorem also has some technical constraints that actual noise does not match, such as band limited and Fourier transforms that are zero outside some bound. Actual music does not match those. It can be approximated with those. For example, suppose you have a pure sine wave, sample it with enough density to make it mathematically reproducible, then play back those quantized samples on a piezo making square waves - it sounds pretty good (and can be indistinguishable to most ears), but it is not the same waveform.
    - BVCommander 4y ago
      Nothing reproduces the original signal, it's distorted by the inertia and impedance of the microphone and amplifier that recorded it. As you know it's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave, cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value.
      - ChrisLomont 4y ago
        Agreed - and after quantization nothing reproduces the signal before quantization. So claiming Nyquist-Shannon proves the OP wrong is incorrect. >It's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave. After an ADC it is not stored as a sine wave. It's stored as quantized values, thus the 'D' in Analog-to-Digital-Converter. >cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value Pretty much all audio processing is now done digitally, which is the same as square waves - each jump in discrete digital value is a step function. When you push it through properly engineered output devices the squareness is smoothed somewhat, but still has frequency ringing because it is square edged. Take a good speaker, take something that can grab audio spectrum far beyond audible, and look at the output. There is stuff far outside human hearing coming from the speaker because of these square waves. Naively, this is because the Fourier transform of the square waves have high frequency ringing, and this is because the playback has sharp edges. (See this [1] for some related info for example). Also Nyquist-Shannon is about frequencies, not about amplitudes, which are also quantized. Physical devices making sound have a (up to quantum level) continuum of possible amplitudes. Quantization necessarily loses this forever. For example, take A0, the lowest standard piano note, freq ~27.5. Sample a pure sine wave at 60 hz, in 8 bit audio. Now record this tone going from no sound up to very loud, very smoothly, over some time. The 8-bit audio will necessarily have less smoothness to it, since it is 8 bit audio. It perfectly matched your Nyquist-Shannon claim, yet it fails to reproduce what you hear. Take 16 bit audio - better. Take 32-bit or floating point audio, better again. And so on. I agree that really well engineered systems can push the errors outside human hearing, but to claim they reproduce the same signals is incorrect. The gist of this is: to get the most accurate reproduction of the original, merely sampling at 2x the top human freq is no where near state of the art. An counter-intuitive example: to get the best quality and most accurate output, one needs to add noise to the input. The reason is that due to quantization, if some input signal is between possible quantized output values, adding noise (usually Gaussian, of std dev ~sqrt(step size)) makes that signal trigger both high and low quantized values in proportion to the intermediate value, making the output playback the step square waves as close to approximating the original as possible. The entire field is full of stuff like this. For reference, I've worked on stuff like this on and off for decades, having written libraries used by others, designed high end audio simulation software (think raytracer for audio in physical settings to help design stadiums), written articles, and produced hardware in a company I own. I am quite familiar with all sorts of audio processing. [1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/156197/can-computer-speakers-emit-ultrasound/156203#156203 https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/156197/can-c...
- bell-cot 4y ago
  If you have decent tech for both (digital & analog), it depends more on how much folding, spindling, and mutilating...er, um, I mean mixing & equalizing & processing & optimizing & shit...is inflicted upon the actual sound before it's actually recorded. Last I heard (been some years now), record companies have preferred to do lots of inflicting upon the sound, before letting it near any digital format that ordinary folks can buy.
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
  What kind of music do you like? I'm asking in terms of genre.
  - swayvil 4y ago
    I like to sit behind Walmart and listen to the power transformer hum.
    - sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
oneoff786 4y ago
Pop music’s doing great. Just not the mainstream stuff, as usual.
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  What is "pop" if it's not popular?
  - cal85 4y ago
    It’s a musical genre, a sound, it has many definitions depending on context. It isn’t just a literal abbreviation of the word “popular”, not since about the 1950s anyway.
    - thereddaikon 4y ago
      No that's exactly what it is. It used to be if it was on the radio, it was pop. Now I guess it would be if it goes viral on Tiktok or trending on streaming platforms. But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone succeed. Because pop isn't a genre.
      - wutbrodo 4y ago
        It's not a traditional genre as much as a characterization, but it definitely has hallmarks that you can identify without reference to its popularity. From Wikipedia: > Identifying factors usually include repeated choruses and hooks, short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), and rhythms or tempos that can be easily danced to. BTW, Wikipedia also draws a distinction between "pop music" and "popular music", where the latter is defined as you describe.
        thereddaikon 4y ago
        That definition is so broad as to include almost all modern western music. Such a loose definition doesn't serve much a purpose as a genre.
popcorncowboy 4y ago
> Pop music has been reduced to the equivalent of taking a shit and a lot of people don't know it. This made me laugh pretty hard for a few minutes, I had tears in my eyes. Thank you. Your humour is of course all the more pithy for exactly capturing the situation. Further, it applies everywhere that industrial-scale (internet-scale?) culture exists. Music, art, film, tv-shows, news, writing. We min-max everything at the altar of the algorithm, because... "reach". Or something. Money. I don't know. Whatever. It's hard to care about taking a shit.
G4E 4y ago
I love music and as far as I know, I'm not a robot. However, I really dislike live events. Of courses, there are a lot if different set up, but we're talking small gigs in a local place. I can't describe it other than "sensors overloads" (maybe I am a robot...). Too loud (the sound, but also the crowd). Too many peoples, too crowded. The smell of cheap beer, sweat, smoke... It's simply too much for me. I feel the urge to go far from that place, as quickly as possible. I know your point was more about "a simple thing to support and enjoy your local artists", but live events are'nt for everybody sadly.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

swayvil 4y ago

dannyw 4y ago
High fidelity digital is nearly indistinguishable from analog.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
croon 4y ago
I'm not sure what this means. There is an incredible amount of music created digitally and transmitted digitally that is anything but cold and thin, whatever that means. If my ear can't tell the difference, there is no emotional or practical difference as a listener. (I've been playing acoustic guitar for 30 years and enjoy almost all genres of music if relevant)
- cultartawayyyi 4y ago
  Probably someone who really likes tube amps. Many audiophiles scoff at "digital" music, i.e. audio that is amplified with silicon transistors. Modern transistors are very fast, so noise that gets through the filters typically sounded like sharp pops and hisses. With older (and slower to respond) analog technologies, unwanted noise gets smoothed into more pleasing hums and modulations. These days, there are excellent affordable digital options like the O2 amp. But it would be a boring world if we were all the same.
  - swayvil 4y ago
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
A record player or tape deck can have the same level of audience-artist interaction as TikTok unless you're DJ'ing. The fast forward function is simply a lot slower.
infinityio 4y ago
If modern music is mastered digitally (and assuming I want to listen to modern music), what advantages do analog technologies bring?
- BVCommander 4y ago
  If you're not passing your scratched to shit vinyl through a $20,000 tube amp and a Denon AKDL1 link cable you're not hearing the sound as the artist intended it.
  - oblio 4y ago
    Hey, don't make fun of my gold plated Toslink cable!
- wvh 4y ago
  Pleasant imperfection. High-end roll-off. Natural compression. (Speaking as a musician, not an audiophile.) Of course, all of that can be emulated quite faithfully now.
BVCommander 4y ago
>Digital is cold and thin compared to analog. Claude Shannon emphatically disagrees. When sampling at twice the highest audible frequency they are mathematically equivalent.
- ChrisLomont 4y ago
  Not quite - Nyquist-Shannon's theorem states the original signal can be reconstructed, but it usually isn't in reproduction. Digital playback does not reproduce the full original signal - it plays it back on whatever output device it has, which does not generally recreate the original waveform. That theorem also has some technical constraints that actual noise does not match, such as band limited and Fourier transforms that are zero outside some bound. Actual music does not match those. It can be approximated with those. For example, suppose you have a pure sine wave, sample it with enough density to make it mathematically reproducible, then play back those quantized samples on a piezo making square waves - it sounds pretty good (and can be indistinguishable to most ears), but it is not the same waveform.
  - BVCommander 4y ago
    Nothing reproduces the original signal, it's distorted by the inertia and impedance of the microphone and amplifier that recorded it. As you know it's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave, cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value.
    - ChrisLomont 4y ago
      Agreed - and after quantization nothing reproduces the signal before quantization. So claiming Nyquist-Shannon proves the OP wrong is incorrect. >It's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave. After an ADC it is not stored as a sine wave. It's stored as quantized values, thus the 'D' in Analog-to-Digital-Converter. >cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value Pretty much all audio processing is now done digitally, which is the same as square waves - each jump in discrete digital value is a step function. When you push it through properly engineered output devices the squareness is smoothed somewhat, but still has frequency ringing because it is square edged. Take a good speaker, take something that can grab audio spectrum far beyond audible, and look at the output. There is stuff far outside human hearing coming from the speaker because of these square waves. Naively, this is because the Fourier transform of the square waves have high frequency ringing, and this is because the playback has sharp edges. (See this [1] for some related info for example). Also Nyquist-Shannon is about frequencies, not about amplitudes, which are also quantized. Physical devices making sound have a (up to quantum level) continuum of possible amplitudes. Quantization necessarily loses this forever. For example, take A0, the lowest standard piano note, freq ~27.5. Sample a pure sine wave at 60 hz, in 8 bit audio. Now record this tone going from no sound up to very loud, very smoothly, over some time. The 8-bit audio will necessarily have less smoothness to it, since it is 8 bit audio. It perfectly matched your Nyquist-Shannon claim, yet it fails to reproduce what you hear. Take 16 bit audio - better. Take 32-bit or floating point audio, better again. And so on. I agree that really well engineered systems can push the errors outside human hearing, but to claim they reproduce the same signals is incorrect. The gist of this is: to get the most accurate reproduction of the original, merely sampling at 2x the top human freq is no where near state of the art. An counter-intuitive example: to get the best quality and most accurate output, one needs to add noise to the input. The reason is that due to quantization, if some input signal is between possible quantized output values, adding noise (usually Gaussian, of std dev ~sqrt(step size)) makes that signal trigger both high and low quantized values in proportion to the intermediate value, making the output playback the step square waves as close to approximating the original as possible. The entire field is full of stuff like this. For reference, I've worked on stuff like this on and off for decades, having written libraries used by others, designed high end audio simulation software (think raytracer for audio in physical settings to help design stadiums), written articles, and produced hardware in a company I own. I am quite familiar with all sorts of audio processing. [1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/156197/can-computer-speakers-emit-ultrasound/156203#156203 https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/156197/can-c...
bell-cot 4y ago
If you have decent tech for both (digital & analog), it depends more on how much folding, spindling, and mutilating...er, um, I mean mixing & equalizing & processing & optimizing & shit...is inflicted upon the actual sound before it's actually recorded. Last I heard (been some years now), record companies have preferred to do lots of inflicting upon the sound, before letting it near any digital format that ordinary folks can buy.
sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
What kind of music do you like? I'm asking in terms of genre.
- swayvil 4y ago
  I like to sit behind Walmart and listen to the power transformer hum.
  - sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago

oneoff786 4y ago

Pop music’s doing great. Just not the mainstream stuff, as usual.

chrisweekly 4y ago
What is "pop" if it's not popular?
- cal85 4y ago
  It’s a musical genre, a sound, it has many definitions depending on context. It isn’t just a literal abbreviation of the word “popular”, not since about the 1950s anyway.
  - thereddaikon 4y ago
    No that's exactly what it is. It used to be if it was on the radio, it was pop. Now I guess it would be if it goes viral on Tiktok or trending on streaming platforms. But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone succeed. Because pop isn't a genre.
    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      It's not a traditional genre as much as a characterization, but it definitely has hallmarks that you can identify without reference to its popularity. From Wikipedia: > Identifying factors usually include repeated choruses and hooks, short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), and rhythms or tempos that can be easily danced to. BTW, Wikipedia also draws a distinction between "pop music" and "popular music", where the latter is defined as you describe.
      - thereddaikon 4y ago
        That definition is so broad as to include almost all modern western music. Such a loose definition doesn't serve much a purpose as a genre.

popcorncowboy 4y ago

> Pop music has been reduced to the equivalent of taking a shit and a lot of people don't know it. This made me laugh pretty hard for a few minutes, I had tears in my eyes. Thank you. Your humour is of course all the more pithy for exactly capturing the situation. Further, it applies everywhere that industrial-scale (internet-scale?) culture exists. Music, art, film, tv-shows, news, writing. We min-max everything at the altar of the algorithm, because... "reach". Or something. Money. I don't know. Whatever. It's hard to care about taking a shit.

G4E 4y ago

I love music and as far as I know, I'm not a robot. However, I really dislike live events. Of courses, there are a lot if different set up, but we're talking small gigs in a local place. I can't describe it other than "sensors overloads" (maybe I am a robot...). Too loud (the sound, but also the crowd). Too many peoples, too crowded. The smell of cheap beer, sweat, smoke... It's simply too much for me. I feel the urge to go far from that place, as quickly as possible. I know your point was more about "a simple thing to support and enjoy your local artists", but live events are'nt for everybody sadly.