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I came across Asa-Chang & Junray on one of my favourite blogs - Momus’ Click Opera. The group seems to consist of three people: Asa-Chang, ex-hairdresser and make-up artist, ex-member of the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, and percussionist; guitarist and programmer Hidehiko Urayama; and tabla player U-Zhaan. They formed in 1998 and appear to be still going, although it’s difficult to say for sure: they have a MySpace page but it hasn’t been updated since February, and the link to the ‘band website‘ goes nowhere of the sort…

Here’s the video of their best known track, Hana, which dates from 2001:

The video is technically very simple, and yet remains enigmatic, elegiac, and mysterious. There’s a marvellous use of colour and an exquisite economy of means which serves to heighten the implied drama. The emotional impact of the relationship—apparently unravelling backwards in time—is counterpointed by the metronome ticking relentlessly across the bottom of the screen…

The music itself is based around a string sequence which sounds on first listening as though it’s a recording of a real strings: having listened to it more closely I’d say they used either a good orchestral sample library with some synth backdrops, or solo violins/violas dubbed over a synthetic backing. Either way, it changes subtly all the time and this organic quality means it doesn’t get boring despite playing the same chord sequence for over 6 minutes. Nicely done!

The vocal/tabla pairing is one of those things where you think “Why hasn’t anyone thought of that before?” Presumably the idea originated in the tabla bols, onomatopoeic oral patterns that tabla players use to learn specific rhythm/sound combinations. Whatever, it somehow creates the effect that there has been a fundamental shift in the internal organization of the music that leaves the cut up voices and tablas free to create explosive bursts of kinetic energy and meaning across the poignant ground of the strings.

All in all, then, absolutely superb. I then went looking for more and found Tuginepu To Ittemita (2003):

I love this video: it’s so simple and yet so effective. The use of colour is exquisite. I also found Senaka (2004):

Again, the economy of means is just mindblowing. The music and visuals are both soft, sensual, organic, flowing, and undemonstrative, and show up the vast majority of contemporary ‘pop videos’ as being boorish, moronic, brutish, crass, dumb, and about as sexy as a blow-up doll.

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I think what particularly impresses me about Asa-Chang & Junray is that they seem to have some kind of overall vision, and that everything they do adheres to that vision. The word ‘compromise’ doesn’t seem to be in their vocabulary.

At Post Everything I had a good listen to most of stuff off their two albums, and to be fair those featured here represent their best work. Nonetheless, these three tracks and their videos resonate with me emotionally in a way that no other new music has done for… I dunno, years and years.

They seem to be able to effortlessly synthesize whole worlds of opposing musical force: the organic and technological, the modern and ancient, the tonal and dissonant, the rhythmic and the floating. They are somehow able to integrate classical Japanese and classical Indian musics with Western pop, bebop, Stockhausen, and laptop glitch electronica in a completely natural and seamless manner. Their music is fabulous, exotic, and avante-garde, but remains totally satisfying emotionally. No mean achievement.

And no, I don’t have any idea what the songs are ‘about’.

Around this time every year I organize a set of recording sessions for the final year students on the BSc Music Technology course at Swansea Metropolitan University. The idea behind these sessions is to record a band ‘live in the studio’ in full 24-bit/96kHz surround. The past couple of years I’ve booked Gypsy Jazz but they weren’t available this year, and so on the advice of my colleague Pete Williams I booked Roots & Galoots, a Bluegrass band based in South-West Wales.

I have to say that initially I was a little dubious because, with three vocalists, I felt that it might be difficult to achieve any decent recordings in the time allotted—each group of 3 or 4 students gets 3 hours to do the recording—without recourse to setting up a PA etc.. The whole idea of it is that it’s basically an acoustic session. Anyway, it turned out very well. Roots & Galoots were highly skilled musicians and very professional in their approach, and you can see from the following video how they managed to balance themselves up:

Brilliant! Like a ‘real’ recording session from the 1950s (or earlier). No overdubbing, no drop-ins, no MIDI, no samplers, no editing, and no place to hide for either musicians or engineers. Just good musicians recorded straight with good equipment. Deep, deep, joy.

[Note: the video was recorded with my Nokia N70. No post-production apart from trimming the start and finish.]

I have previously posted several items about multi-touch interfaces: Jefferson Han’s work here and here, and the Microsoft Surface here. I was therefore quite excited to come across Reactable, described by its developers at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona as a “musical instrument with a tangible user interface”.

However, that’s actually a pretty daft description of it (in oh so many ways): it’s simply a multi-touch interface to a virtual studio built using PD. It’s constructed in the same way as the Microsoft Surface, with the touchscreen positioned above a camera and projector. Here are the Reactable ‘Basic Demos’ 1 & 2:
 
 
 

Pretty neat. I can see there might be major problems using it—e.g. interfacing, playing a tune, remembering patches or sequences, and it’s not exactly portable—but I would love to see something like this as (part of) an interface to a commercial synth or something like Reason.

It’s the future.

I came across this on YouTube the other day, a video record of an installation created by Nate Harrison and called Can I Get An Amen?:

Some comment. Firstly, what a great idea! Whatever one thinks of it as a piece of art—and I love it—it’s a superb piece of historical research and exposition. OK, the narration is a bit stiff, but the presentation is well-researched, highly organized, and well considered. It’s a simple idea explored in depth and is a fabulous learning resource.

Secondly, it shows up Zero-G to be a bunch of crooks.

Thirdly, the video was not put on YouTube by Nate Harrison: at least two people have posted it there, presumably “sourced” from his own site. Ironic or what?

It’s around this time of year that I start my classes on audio mastering. One of the big issues for me is the abuse of limiting plug-ins, and so it was with some delight that I recently came across this useful little movie on YouTube:

There are places when limiting heavily may be appropriate: mastering tracks for club-bound 12″ vinyl, for example. But most of the time people are being seduced by the most superficial of signifiers—pure volume—when really anyone wanting it louder just has to turn it up for themselves.

This isn’t some esoteric geek issue, either: even The Guardian have written a very good little article about the “loudness wars” here. What’s interesting is that it obviously isn’t the mastering engineers who are doing it—in fact they’re complaining like crazy—but the record companies and, tragically, the artists themselves. Even Paul Simon is at it!!!!

This cult of loudness extends through to the finished product: Thomas Lund at TC Electronics has shown how modern CDs are simply recorded too ‘hot’. His research shows a 2002 Eminem CD generating around 25 instances of “obvious distortion” every 10 seconds! Read the full Distortion To The People paper here.

This is Dan Pearce. He’s just finished doing a BSc (Hons) Music Technology degree at Swansea Metropolitan University. His Major Project was a very high quality piece of work on audio compression codecs.

Perhaps the most interesting part of his project was the listening tests carried out on a set of lossy codecs: MP3, Microsoft WMA, Apple’s AAC, and the open source Ogg Vorbis. Dan conducted a set of tests that compared the subjective quality on each of these based on a set of four criteria: bass response, treble response, clarity, and spaciousness. Each of these in turn was measured against four different types of source material: rock/pop, jazz, classical, and spoken voice. A standard bit rate of 64kbps was used. Here’s a graph showing the compiled results across all the tests:

We have a winner! His results clearly show the superiority of the Ogg Vorbis files in all categories except the classical! WMA and AAC are very closely matched, whilst MP3 consistently performs the worst. Dan puts this down to its age: originally released in 1993 it’s by far the oldest. Here’s a set of samples from Dan’s project which, I think, give a good indication of the relative performances of the codecs:
 
[If you're interested in more detail here's the methodology, results, and references from Dan Pearce's report (5.5MB .pdf). If you want to contact Dan, here's his email address.]

For me, the findings from this report beg a huge question: why are most people satisfied with the quality of MP3? It’s grainy, harsh, and has a poor stereo image. And yet it would seem that many people are now getting rid of their CD collections and switching entirely to MP3. Yes, of course I can understand the whole slew of benefits afforded by the digital files/downloads/iPod thing, but doesn’t anyone care how bad it all sounds?

And it’s not even as if “CD-quality” audio is all that good. 24-bit/96kHz digital audio is just so much better it’s unreal, and these days it’s pretty affordable too. We have this situation where—for music producers—audio quality has recently shot up, whilst music consumers now seem happy to settle for a substantially lower-quality product than they’ve been used to for the last 20-odd years. Odd, to say the least. Maybe, for most people MP3 is just good enough….

[Note: in order to get the audio examples streaming across the 'net without glitching I had to subject all the files to a further level of compression. However, they're all encoded equally at 160kbps stereo, and so the relative differences between them remain the same.]

Hello all,
Welcome to 3282. This is a new blog that will be about things I’m particularly interested in i.e. narrative, interactivity, medium theory, music technology, design, new media literacy, etc.. Hopefully it’ll be pretty eclectic: it’s all grist to the mill, right?

OK, that’s enough of that: let’s get on with it.

I love this little video: it just makes so many things about sound and vibrating objects so clear. And because it’s video it’s not only showing process, but it’s doing it in a multisensory way: information received by eye and ears is assimilated and compared. Books, static text, are good for some things, but this is what multimedia are good for…

BTW: the normally invisible patterns in the vibrating object are called Chladni patterns.