Re: Pi Forums

This is to about 6 people. Many thanks for your efforts on my behalf and your replies. I'm feeling rather weary as I haven't had my after lunch nap and will be getting ready for bed after this. I'll read your replies more carefully tomorrow and hope to get the RPi connected up again. It's not easy as SWMBO gets very concerned when she sees me doing anything that requires mental or physical effort, so I try to do it very early in the morning. (I had a slight stroke recently.)

I'm a bit of a nit-picker, so I like John's comment about the spelling of "complement".

Frank

I can never aspire to be as good a writer as Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, W. C. Fields or any number of worthy gentlefolk who despised spellling. Although the actual provenance of the genre of quotes that contain the meme "I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word only one way" is unknown, I take it as a truism. At best it demonstrates a lack of imagination.  I do believe that it is a skill [?] which will go the way of the buggywhip industry as spell checkers continue to encompass an ever increasing share of the written word.

Me too - but after it's been mp3-ed it sounds hideous^2.

My other pet hate is excessive use of compression and limiting or even clipping followed by filtering - all done to make things sound louder and thus get attention when played on the radio.

http://bbs.espguitars.com/showthread.php?t=26263

for discussion of that subject but it's got worse since then.

MK

selsinork wrote:

 

I find a lot of what's passed off as music these days sounds hideous even when it's not encoded to mp3

Smily superfluous, it's a widely held view.

Part of the problem is that "music" has to some extent disappeared from pop culture as an independent element.  Instead it has been replaced by a composite of music + video + youth girating suggestively while not wearing much + ruthless professional image making + media as product.

Musicianship hasn't  disappeared to any large extent since bands can still play live perfectly fine, but it has become de-emphasized, and any old atonal screeching and thumping sells well when the other elements of this composite are sufficiently compelling.  Music is hugely subjective so it can be hard to separate out simple personal likes and dislikes from musically barren content, but even so, there's no doubt that there's a lot of atonal screeching and thumping around these days.

For a start, voice used to be a melodious instrument.  In some pop genres, it could now be considered percussion.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Music is hugely subjective so it can be hard to separate out simple personal likes and dislikes from musically barren content,

Very true, but I find it helps when there's something recognisably human singing some words you can understand in some semblance of a tune that doesn't cause you to grimace in pain when you hear it generally helps.

I'm reasonably sure my parents didn't think what I listened to when I was younger was music either, so perhaps I'm just getting old

selsinork wrote:

 

I find it helps when there's something recognisably human singing

Now you're just getting picky!!

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

Me too - but after it's been mp3-ed it sounds hideous^2.

Depends on the material and who or what encoded it and from what source. As Morgaine says it's all very subjective.

I find that subjectively I like ogg better than mp3, but I've also had wav, mp3 and ogg files of the same song that are all horribly different sounding, to the point that at least one really did sound like you had your head in a bucket of water while listening to it.  Yet if I encode a song from CD to both ogg and mp3 myself I find it much harder to tell the difference. From that I have to think that all of the commercially produced mp3's are just crappily encoded, probably largely for the sorts of reasons given in your link.

And yes, I'd also noticed things getting louder over the past however many years, but had never consciously put it together until reading that article.

You also wonder how many of these things that sound bad have been passed through multiple different codecs - i.e. wav->ogg->mp3->whatever without the understanding that you lose another different piece every time you do it.

I suppose it's also difficult sometimes to know what instruments should sound like, since so much is with electronic, and unless you're watching the instruments being played (which is hard because music videos often don't feature the instruments so much) you may not easily identify. It was really easy to hear how awful MP3 was anytime instruments like tambourines were being played as soon as another instrument was played at the same time. The tambourine sound just went crazy, but it is a lot harder to recognise sometimes, so maybe the encoders are getting better.

Wow, we really are making this thread drift.

 

Morgaine.

This is the best thread - I'm learning so much, from what literature is out there, to music! And all Engineering-related too.

shabaz wrote:

 

This is the best thread - I'm learning so much, from what literature is out there, to music! And all Engineering-related too.

It's a foundling thread, taken away in infancy from its parent discussion.  Perhaps that's why it veers so much from topic to topic, as it never quite had one to begin with.  I am amused to be its adoptive parent.

selsinork wrote:

 

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

The problem is that mp3 encoded material sounds so hideous

I find a lot of what's passed off as music these days sounds hideous even when it's not encoded to mp3

Here's what Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote to Thomas Edison after first experiencing the phonograph:

Dear Mr. Edison:

 

I am astonished and somewhat terrified at this evening's experiment: astonished at the wonderful power you have developed and terrified at the thought that so much bad music will be put on record forever.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

Now you're just getting picky!!

I'm remembering the line from MIB3 where Agent J says he had to find out the hard way that all models were aliens.

Oh, and I'm contributing to thread drift

selsinork wrote:

 

Oh, and I'm contributing to thread drift

As long as it's not about Pi forums, anything goes.

selsinork wrote:

 

Oh, and I'm contributing to thread drift

As long as it's not about Pi forums, anything goes.