Nothing to see here
Home for Thanksgiving. Move along.
Posted by ned at 08:14 PM
It turns out that not everyone who buys Sandra Collins CDs wears clean underwear, as this interview reveals.
Read on jill/txt: "eek, heffers.com now redirects to Blackwells! How sad...." Eek, indeed. (Heffers is the legendary Cambridge, UK bookstore.)
I still have a Heffers bookmark around here somewhere. I used to treasure it until a (sort of) friend scratched it up with a quarter looking for a prize: the two dots of the colon in the Heffers logotype were large and gold, and he thought it was a scratch-off card. Pfft!
I received permission to post a copy of "What Is It Like To Be A Bat Listening to Santana?" There are two things you might want to keep in mind: first, this is a late draft Steven Johnson found on his hard drive, not the edited copy as appeared in FEED on or about 13 April 2001; second, I'm sure Mr. Johnson holds the copyright on this piece, so don't run around claiming you wrote it or anything.
Thanks to Steven Johnson for his generosity.
What Is It Like To Be A Bat Listening to Santana?
Andy O'Meara is currently qualifying as a submarine officer aboard the attack sub USS Jefferson City. A 24-year-old Cornell grad, O'Meara has an unlikely part-time gig on the side: he's the author of G-Force and WhiteCap, two of the most popular visual plug-ins for MP3 players like WinAmp and iTunes. While most of his life consists of training aboard the home-ported Jefferson City, the rest unleashing psychedelic eye-candy on millions of computer screens across the world.
And if O'Meara's day job isn't surprising enough, consider the fact that he is also a devout Christian. O'Meara's fascinating and confessional site -- where you can also download his software for free -- talks openly about the religious inspiration behind his coding. (G-Force is short for "Godforce.") Before you even start thinking about the software itself, there's something perplexing about the mix of sensibilities you encounter in the guy. Consider these four statements, culled his "About Andy" page:
Retired admiral Stockdale is impressive man with some impressive credentials. Someone who spent 7 years in a not-so-humane Hanoi war prison may have something to say about leadership under fire.
"So indescribable--when a certain pattern of electronica plays on parts of you so deep it's impossible to describe in words. It's mainly dance/trance/techno that does this to me (Paul Van Dyk, Sash!, Cafe Del Mar, Delirium, Kai Tracid, Moby, Dune, and a zillion others)."
I'm Christian: I believe in Jesus, that He died and rose again, and that if you follow His teachings and acknowledge Christ (as the Bible describes) then God will grant you eternal life.
Characters and artists whom with I identify most are: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, the main character in Gladiator, the character Roy in Blade Runner, Emily Dickinson and her works…
Maybe I'm out of touch with what the kids are doing these days, but I confess that this psychographic niche -- the Christian, free-software-writing, Stephen-Dedalus-identifying raver on the attack sub -- was new to me. Perhaps he is a sign of the future. A few days after I began corresponding with O'Meara, I happened to be at a party in downtown Manhattan that featured a performance by DJ Spooky -- and sure enough he was using G-Force for the visuals during his set. Seeing those spirals and fractals churning on the oversized screens, as the bass thundered through my chest, I couldn't help laughing at the thought that these ecstatic images had originated on the USS Jefferson City. Not since a certain Beatles film of the late sixties has the world of audio/visual experimentation collided so forcefully with the world of submarines.
Six millions times someone has opted to download one of Andy O'Meara's applications since he first released WhiteCap in 1999. (TK) And while it sometimes seems as though there are almost as many visual plug-ins on the market, G-Force in particular has established itself as one of the leading "visual enhancers" for the MP3-listening public. (Apple recently bundled it as the default plug-in for their acclaimed iTunes product.) Spend a few minutes with the software running alongside a favorite disk and you'll instantly see why: while many plug-ins cycle through repetitive patterns, in G--Force the screen morphs almost seamlessly from one radically different configuration (called "configs") to another, shifting from organic, pulsing blobs to spinning wireframes to effects that defy classification. (Imagine triggering the Star Wars "light speed" effect while navigating through a galaxy of exploding fireworks.)
The most intriguing thing about software like G-Force is that the images it produces are in a real sense set to the music. They are not random slide shows -- many of the configs that come with G-Force (and all that come with WhiteCap TK) alter their behavior in response to the changing waveforms of the audio signal. The conjunction is immediately apparent to first-time viewers: a sudden shift in dynamics might release a swarm of pixels, while the rest of the visuals pulse in lockstep with the percussion section. Years ago the philosopher of consciousness Thomas Nagel published a now-classic essay called "What is it like to be a bat?" I think software like G-Force gives us a clue: sound patterns translated into spatial information. You're listening to a song, and not flying through a cave, of course, but it's hard to think of another media experience where sound and image are more organically intertwined. Music videos have been wrapping themselves around pop songs since the days of so-so's top videos, but that wrapping was an extra layer that required sentient humans to individually "interpret" each song. G-Force does its interpretations on the fly. The images you see are just another way of looking at the sound data.
At first glance, those images might remind you of the last time you took peyote and spent a long evening with "Piper At The Gates Of Dawn." But it's possible that the plug-in diaspora might be bad news for the hallucinogen providers. "I believe video to music acts as a multiplier to an otherwise purely audio experience like the way say, heroin, brings a new dimension to otherwise normal perception," O'Meara explained to me, in an e-mail correspondence. "In this way, we do experience a new form of content from visualized music because the end product is a *compound* of music and video, not just a mixture." If part of the quest of psychedelia is trying to experience a synesthetic blurring of aural and visual information, then G-Force's pulsing waveforms give you a significant head start. Indeed, the first thing I thought when I saw G-Force is that the software was the greatest thing that ever happened to college-dorm-room stoners. But after a few minutes, I found myself thinking: why even bother with the drugs? G-Force does acid better than acid.
Or at least it comes close. While G-Force is remarkably free of repetition -- partially because of the huge number of configs available, and partially because configs and color schemes can be combined to form new patterns -- the software's engagement with the sound information is relatively limited. For the most part, it simply translates the digital information from your MP3 file, and paints a waveform on the screen -- and then transforms that wave according to the rules of the current config. The result is an image that does an adequate job of translating changes in amplitude into visual data. On the most elemental level, when you listen to a song, your brain is doing something similar: translating the waves that reverberate in your ears into the sounds of music. But those sounds are obviously far more resonant than G-Force's simple waveforms: you hear changes in amplitude, of course, but you also hear a thousand other things -- chord changes, noise, different instruments, voice timbres, room tones, and so on. Under the influence of mind-altering drugs, the visual information conjured up by your brain is potentially responding to all that information in real-time: the arrival of the chorus in a song might trigger a new visual palette, while a striking correlation between the lyrics and the melody might push your "eyelid movies" in a new direction. But software like G-Force doesn't know anything about lyrics or song-structure, because that information is far more difficult to mathematically model.
Could a visual plug-in do a more faithful job of representing musical information? "To do that job right," O'Meara says, "requires a landslide of smart software. Our higher brain fucntions do a *lot* to decode such information." O'Meara himself reveals that he's "looking into a closely related project," though he declines to go into detail about it. But a more sophisticated visual interface to music is certainly conceivable. You could start by training the software to detect more subtle patterns in the datastream. The sound the human voice lies in a relatively narrow part of the frequency spectrum, which is why you can use an equalizer to make the vocals louder or softer in a mix. Theoretically, you could train software like G-Force to "listen" for a sudden change in that part of the spectrum, and trigger a new config when the lead vocals start or stop in a song. You'd listen to the all-instrumental song intro with one config playing on the screen, and the second the vocals arrives, the screen would transform itself into a new landscape.
Another alternative would be to use smart people, rather than smart software, and attach metadata to specific points in a song file. If users have already collectively built a database of CD titles and track information at CDDB, they could potentially start annotating sub-sections of songs as well. Call it HMML -- hypertext musical markup language. You'd take a given song and break it into the relevant categories: the first verse starts 32 seconds in; the chorus starts at 1:21; guitar solo from 2:15 to 2:45, etc. With a standardized set of tags, you could program G-Force to trigger a certain type of config anytime it encountered a drum solo or a french horn. The software wouldn't be any more sophisticated at parsing the musical data on its own, but the tags would give it a cheat sheet.
There's one other alternative, and it's the most radical one of all: teach the software about music by teaching it to listen to our brains. A number of technology startups have been experimenting with neurofeedback devices that measure brain waves themselves, and translates them into computer-generated images and sounds, the way G-Force translates MP3 data. Certain brain wave patterns appear in moments of intense concentration; others in states of meditative calm; others in states of distraction, or fear. A series of EEG sensors applied to your skull register changes in the patterns of your brain waves, and transform them in to a medium that you can perceive directly, often in the form of shifting colors and textures on a computer screen. As your brain drifts from one state to another, the image changes accordingly, giving you real-time feedback about your brain's EEG activity. Presumably, those data points could be integrated into the G-Force application alongside the soundwave data: if the launch into the chorus of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" triggers a surge of adrenaline through your body, the EEG might detect a change in your brain's overall state and send that information back to the screen; if listening to Ravi Shankar lulls you into a trance, G-Force could automatically supply an onscreen Mandela to accompany your meditations.
Which brings us back to Andy O'Meara, and his unusual mix of techno-Christianity. Certain brainwave states are associated with feelings of powerful spiritual calm -- some neurofeedback practicioners use the tools to help "drive" their brains towards those states. "Music is my life in that it's air that I need to breathe," O'Meara writes on his web site. "Trace/techno/electronica, dance/house, ambient/tribal, acoustic/folk, and alternative all have the ability to operate switches, knobs, and levers deep inside me I will never understand." Anyone passionate about music will recognize that feeling in a heartbeat. The question is: can software learn to recognize it too?
Steven (Berlin) Johnson of FEED fame is blogging as you can see here. I always enjoyed reading his perambulatory articles on computer/human interaction but still have not gotten around to reading either of his books. I'd point in particular to his excellent article on music visualization save for my inability to find any cached copies of it (FEED's been dead for quite some time now).
Update: Johnson graciously sent me a copy of the article in question, titled "What Is It Like To Be A Bat Listening to Santana?" I'll see if it's possible for me to post a copy on this site.
Another of my recent CD purchases is Prophesy by Nitin Sawhney, supposedly one of the movers and shakers on the global fusion circuit. The set is very well produced but the frequent service announcements warning of imminent global meltdown caused by capitalist tendencies get on my nerves. Fortunately, the first track ("Sunset") is a shimmering jewel: a descending syncopated vocal line in the Dorian mode layered over drums and middle-Eastern singing. It's very possible that this, Sawhney's first US release, will entice me to look at some of his previous works, as of yet only available as imports here in the States.
Lest I lead anyone to think I condone every action of our fine film industry, I wanted to elaborate on the trials required to watch a DVD on my computer this afternoon. I finally received my copies of the first two seasons of Futurama today. As they are only available in the UK, they are of course region 2 discs. I was neither hot nor bothered by this, as I expected to be able to use trusty copy of DVD Extractor to copy a disc at a time to my hard drive sans region code and simply watch it from there. Needless to say, that didn't work. I tried a total of three different programs from both Mac OS 9 and X and found that none of them were able to rip from the first disc I wanted to watch. My hypothesis is that even though all of these programs are able to remove the region code from the saved disc image, none of them are able to circumvent the restrictions posed by the drive's firmware itself, as evidenced by my various attempts to duplicate the folder structure of the disc itself using one of these programs, an operation which consistently failed at the same point during the process. After more investigation, I was able to find the tools necessary to reprogram my DVD-ROM drive with RPC-1 (non-region locked) firmware. After several hours of effort, I can finally watch the DVDs I legally purchased.
It's important to note that I do not support efforts to illegally distribute content of any kind but that current copy protection methods make no effort to distinguish me from those who would freely redistribute copyrighted media. I should additionally point out that region coding was not designed for copy protection per se (that is the job of CSS), but to customers it is indistinguishable from pure copy protection. It's very conceivable that avid fans of a particular series or whatever might buy recordings of that series in multiple forms, merely to run into artificial restrictions which limit them from enjoying their purchases, as happened in this case. I don't mind going to certain lengths to enjoy one of my favorite series; what troubles me is that in the eyes of the MPAA I am a criminal.
I've been trying to buy music in discrete clumps rather than buying continuously, mostly in hopes that this new strategy will result in greater restraint. I realized it isn't working, as a shipment from Amazon.com arrived earlier this week and I made an emergency trip to Tower before choir practice on Thursday. In any event, here are some of the highlights.
The second of U2's decade retrospectives is out (The Best of 1990-2000). As with the previous collection there are two versions of a new song (this time around it's "Electrical Storm"). While I don't enjoy all of the remixes on the first disc, there's an awful lot of music there, almost all of it in its original form. The second disc is worth having, too, especially if you hadn't been collecting singles along the way. I already had all of the material on the second disc, but "North and South of the River" alone is worth getting the second disc for. Oh, and it comes with a DVD with some music videos and stuff. All in all, this is a value-packed set.
The Wallflowers, one of my favorite bands from the late 1990s, have a new album out, Red Letter Days. I've been enjoying this album for a few days now. Jakob Dylan and his cohorts continue to craft hook- and tuneful songs even in the breach left by guitarist Michael Ward. "If You Never Got Sick" is one of the nicest lovestruck songs I've heard since R.E.M.'s quiet, beautiful "At My Most Beautiful" (off the underappreciated Up). A review in Sound and Vision dinged the album for being too monotonic, but I find it to be a lot more variegated than Pearl Jam's latest, Riot Act. As Sonya put it, Riot Act has two halves, each of which sounds pretty much the same. Pearl Jam has three guitarists by now and I'm glad they can still rock, but I could have gone for a bit more texture. Okay, a lot more texture. (Which reminds me: I need to get my copy of No Code back from Andy.)
Britt steered me towards Spoon's Kill the Moonlight and I now do unto others. Sometimes goofy but never silly, this is indeed some of the best rock I've heard this year. This is rock with passion, humor, and verve.
Of the eight or ten new CDs I purchased this week, two of them came bundled with (free! limited edition!) DVDs. That's not counting the half dozen DVDs that were similarly bundled with CDs I had bought earlier. Let me get this straight: I'm supposed to be thankful for the opportunity to buy a CD for $20 when a DVD with not only sound but moving pictures is cheap enough to produce that it can be included for free? Of the two media empires represented here, recording and film, which one do you think is stagnating and which one is posting record growth: the one that has repeatedly blamed its customers for its reduced earnings or the one offering its customers inexpensive yet high-quality goods?
Allen rightly points out that graying out icons as per my previous entry would violate UI guidelines ten ways from Sunday. I was actually thinking about the little triangle indicators but completely failed to elucidate this. The thought came after noticing how they fade away as an application quits: instead they would fade out extremely slowly, like on the order of minutes. But certainly not the icons themselves. That would just be silly.
There's been some commentary on Matthew Thomas's essay "When good user interfaces go crufty," including this one by John Gruber that seem to miss the point of the essay.
Gruber first argues that the "auto" auto-save feature described in the essay is unwieldy at best and troublesome at worst. I would tend to agree, at least as the feature is described in mpt's essay, but I do agree in principle. As described, the feature is incompatible with the prevalent desktop metaphor used by most computers in that saving a document strongly implies the user's desire to correlate a document's contents with a permanent container. Gruber points out that any automatic association of this nature is a bad idea, to which I agree. What Gruber misses and what mpt was trying to say before getting off on the wrong foot, is that with the exception of a document's container, every other attribute of that container can and should be preserved automatically. mpt's reasoning is clearly based on Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface, so I won't re-explain the wheel here, save to point out the annoyance of not having a document's undo stack saved along with its contents. I should be able to delete a word from a document, close it, open it, and undo my deletion, and I certainly shouldn't have to explicitly save the document.
Gruber (and a bunch of Slashdot weenies, although I am loathe to imply any sort of association) also argues against mpt's claim that quitting a program is unnecessary. To quote the Slashdot gestalt, why would one want to leave a program running when all it would do is suck up valuable CPU and memory? Obviously, an idle program shouldn't do either of those things. If an operating system doesn't allow an idle program to do nothing (most don't, due to timeslicing), a program should be able to dump its execution state to permanent storage, suspend itself, and restore its state upon user interaction. Ideally programs should launch instantaneously and quitting a program should be identical to suspending it. The Aqua interface guidelines for Mac OS X tells developers that an application should not quit when all of its windows are closed, presumably because application launching on OS X is by and large dog slow. As I envision it, the dock could provide some visual indication of application inactivity, slowly graying out a program the longer it is unused. Clicking on a grayed-out application would impose no penalty as severe as re-launching it, but would simply reactivate it and bring it to the fore. With this model, quitting an application would simply force an application to its completely unused state.
I sense a disconnect in that Gruber and other critics' arguments are largely based on implementation details. Computers suck. Let's make them better.
My good friends at Amazon.com have launched their new Apparel Store to rather bizarre effect. Case in point: I was looking at the CD Cream by Sandra Collins just now and Amazon was kind enough to inform me that "Customers who shopped for this item also wear: Clean Underwear from Amazon's Eddie Bauer Store." This has got to be one of the strangest product tie-ins I've seen recently. Granted, people who listen to Sandra Collins wear other items of clothing in addition to clean underwear, but still.
Get thee hence and vote! If you haven't decided whom to vote for, you can find nonpartisan candidate information at the excellent Smart Voter. That is all.
Thursday's trip to the Winchester Mystery House was quite fun. I had forgotten how long the tours last, so we did happen to be in the house at midnight even though our tour didn't start until 10:54. Ours was a laggardly group to say the least: I noticed our guide wasn't able to impart as much detail as the guide on my previous daytime tour, which was disappointing. We did each get to keep our quality (with a capital 'K') flashlights, each adorned with a classy photocopied sticker announcing its heritage as a 'light used for a 2002 Halloween midnight tour. I wonder how one can tour the basements (there are two): does anyone know?
Tonight after my sushi dinner, I and several others met up at Don's house for an evening of music to (further) celebrate All Saints' Day. Don and Gwen played Brahms's four hands piano arrangement of his Deutsches Requiem while Don's wife Jill, Allen, Allen's wife Julia, Alison, Joe, and I sang voice to a part. We formed a semicircle around the Bösendorfer and sang beautifully, each of us having performed the piece with full choir and orchestra at some point in the past. The last time I sung the work was in Carnegie Hall my senior spring term; I think tonight was the more touching of the two performances, but maybe it was the wine breaks we took after every other movement. No matter, it was a fitting tribute to saints departed and a positively lovely evening.