Totally Wired

Well over five years ago, I was having a hard time with wired earbuds. The pair that came with my phone at the time had a sort-of butterfly wing that held each earbud securely in place, but when they slowly deteriorated I found it nearly impossible to find a pair that used the same (or similar mechanism). My ears are a little strange, it seems.

Lo and behold, during my search I came across a display for Bose and their new-ish SoundSport model. They were wireless. They sounded decent enough in the store, and after some thought I picked up a pair. The clincher were the wingtips each earbud had, which made their fit more or less guaranteed. Note: these were not what are now somewhat pedantically called “True Wireless” as there was a flimsy harness wire which connected them (this turned out to be handy, given that if I had to remove an earbud I could let it drop and it would simply hang over my shoulder). They sounded good and were comfortable, which is really all I wanted.

I listen to music a lot; and when I’m not listening to music on my phone I’m listening to streaming radio stations like BBC 6 Music. I’m not an audiophile, but I like decently balanced sound. Whenever I read about “high fidelity wireless earbuds” I struggle with the dissonance that a) Bluetooth (how wireless earbuds connect) is an inherently lossy format to begin with, and b) what exactly are you listening to that requires peerless sound quality? If I’m commuting to work and listening to compressed MP3s of GBV, what exactly am I gaining from a $400 pair of earbuds?

The Bose SoundSport buds simply worked, which is all I wanted. And then they began to fall apart. After 1.5yrs the rubber covering on the selection buttons was disintegrating. It became harder and harder to pause what I was listening to (I had to press with the edge of my fingernail to do this after a while). After stretching it out as long as I could, a total of 2.5yrs, I began to (begrudgingly) look for a replacement. I started looking at “True Wireless” models from various brands, and they were all hideously expensive and/or maintained the same hard-to-fit-in-Matt’s-ear bud shape. In a moment of “what the hell, eh” I decided to order a pair of Google Pixel Buds. They were comparatively inexpensive and I figured it was as good an introduction to “True Wireless” as I was going to get.

Out of the box, the Pixel Buds did their job. They fit about as well as the Bose and came with a sleek egg-like charger case which didn’t take up much space. I also appreciated that I could, especially for client phone calls, optionally only have one bud in my ear (the idea of having both of my ears plugged on a phone call is not attractive as I get a form of claustrophobia from things like that). And then, after a year, they too began to fall apart. The charger case began to crack along the edges, and then each bud’s charging ability began to lessen, up to the point where I couldn’t use them for 50-minute client sessions. It became a bit of a joke, though I didn’t appreciate the cost and inconvenience of having to contemplate replacing them in less time than I was able to stretch out my pair of Bose previously. When I looked up help from Google the answer was either a version of “did you turn it on and off again?” and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I know this is the way things are: disposability. I don’t like it, but I when it comes to what you get for those low prices I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. But goddamnit, can’t something last more than 2 years without falling apart??

Let’s take a moment to made room for my biggest bugbear about wireless earbuds (True and not): radio frequency (RF) interference. The idea that is sold to us about wireless/Bluetooth devices is that we are liberated from our phones etc, but little ink is spilled (don’t get me started on online product reviews) about RF interference. Yes, within the confines of my office, Bluetooth technology presents no immediate shortfalls. However, when I’m walking down an urban sidewalk, whatever I’m listening to begins to cut out, with the sort of maddening infrequency that makes the whole point of listening to music futile. The worst culprit is Spadina Avenue, where my office is, naturally. I can neither listen to music nor conduct phone calls walking on Spadina owing to what I can only imagine are high levels of interruptive wifi signals (Spadina is a tech company ghetto after all).

I finally decided to look for a good-fitting pair of wired earbuds, which made it clear, if it wasn’t already, that True Wireless Earbuds Are Everywhere Now. And here I was, looking for something unintentionally retro. I looked far and wide, even at used products — this is how desperate I was. Eventually, scratching at the bottom of a Google search, I saw a pair of JBL earbuds for sale at Staples. Sleek and black, and made for workouts, they were also on the verge of being a legacy model at this point. They were also $29.

It’s been a week with them so far and I have no complaints, aside from navigating the wires occasionally. They sound great (no lossy format), they fit decently, I don’t have to worry about charging them throughout the day, and there’s no need to fear RF interference.

All is well.

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Ambient

I don’t know how or when I got into ambient music. I can tell you there have been a few seminal contributors: classical music, movie soundtracks, minimalist and so-called world music composers, and the more spacious actors in pop/rock music.

Let’s start with a sort-of definition of ambient music, and I will begin by saying that I have no formal education in this realm. Ambient music is typically experimental and tends toward spaciousness and a lack of traditional (Western) song structure; it has its roots in the likes of 20th century composers such as John Cage, as well, during its development, contributions from traditional music from India and Japan, as well as from jazz. It can be a formless and electronic haze, or it could be all about exacting pattern and repetition using traditional instrumentation. There is also often a sense of the tactile. I will include some examples toward the end of this piece to begin to provide some context. At the end of the day, what is and isn’t strictly termed “ambient” is often more a question of the composer’s intent. You will just as likely see genre labels such as “minimalist,” “drone,” and “experimental” instead, as the term “ambient” can be a sort of kludge.

As a primary influence on me, classical music is a no-brainer, and like a lot of kids who grew up at the time I did, we were treated (or as I like to say, inculcated) to classical music through Bugs Bunny and Disney cartoons. As an adult I love the flourish and bombast of Shostakovich and Borodin, and the aching lyricism of Vivaldi and Bach. However, there is something undeniably mesmerizing about a brief section of Act II of Wagner’s opera Siegfried, where, through gorgeous use of instrumentation and dynamics we are surrounded by the quiet stirrings of nature — it surrounds the listener and one has no choice but to surrender to its formlessness. This formlessness is not something we often associate with something so strictly structured as classical* music.

the cover of Twine, an album by Taylor Deupree and Marcus Fischer. This image shows 1/4" audio tape loops hanging from the top of the frame.

As a movie buff, it makes perfect sense, given my exposure to classical music as a child, that movie soundtracks would inspire my appreciation of ambient music. Even in an epic space opera such as The Emperor Strikes Back there are many moments — particularly the suspenseful, quiet bits — where John Williams draws from classical roots, but of course, in order to create mood and retain timbre, sections end up as long stretches of almost abstract-sounding composition. Another perfect example would be the use of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey during the monolith scenes. Funny how sci-fi tends toward this direction.

A movie and a soundtrack that shook my foundations as a teenager was Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. While the imagery was both disturbing and inventive, it was my introduction to Philip Glass’ minimalist composition that entranced me. Its mantric dedication to repetition using an orchestral ensemble and use of church organ and choir during its more climactic parts was catnip to this kid. When, a year or so later after seeing this, I discovered that Glass had collaborated on an album with Ravi Shankar (1990’s Passages) I couldn’t resist picking up a copy at a classical/jazz record shop near where I worked as a photolab technician. It was love at first listen; while some might’ve thought that the two were at odds with each other — one an avant-garde composer, the other an Indian classicist — their collaboration (each took turns orchestrating the other’s compositions) was a major influence on me.

To save space here, I will briefly name three other significant musical influences: David Sylvian, Talk Talk, and Miles Davis. Sylvian’s Japan reunion of-sorts, Rain Tree Crow, only put out one album but it was a low-key combination of rock/jazz/experimental soundscapes with African rhythms that has had a lasting influence on how I decided to listen to music. Talk Talk’s last two albums — Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock — are rightly hailed as experimental masterpieces of pop-meets-improv jazz however a single song deserves mention, from their comparatively more formal pop album The Colour of Spring: April 5th. You can see where they were going with only that one song (and the album is wonderful as it is). Lastly, discovering Miles Davis’ album In A Silent Way was another key piece in my ad hoc self-education: the tactile nature of the instrumentation has been hugely influential on composers of all genres since then (and you can hear a motif from this album used on Taylor Deupree and Marcus Fischer’s Twine).

Over the last seven or more years, I’ve become deeply involved with ambient/experimental works by composers such as Stephan Mathieu (who not only composes but masters others’ work at his studio) , Deupree (who established the influential ambient label 12K), and France Jobin, as well as those, like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Fennesz, who dip in and out of the ambient genre.

In an age where we are bombarded with divisive and interruptive dialogs encouraging us to be outraged at every turn (not to mention the very real aspects of society that are worth our outrage, if only we had the time and energy to devote to them while being able to support ourselves financially), experimental ambient music allows me — on a good day — to reset my thoughts and tune into a more free-form sonic world. Ambient is not pablum. Ambient is not “new age music.” If anything ambient has been about transcending the boundaries of “instrument” and “technology”, something all genres of music have attempted at one time or another; hip-hop does this particularly well.

Here are some examples that have been influential for me:

Radioland, by Stephan Mathieu: https://schwebung.bandcamp.com/album/radioland-2

Perpetual, by Ruyuichi Sakamoto / Illuha / Taylor Deupree: https://12kmusic.bandcamp.com/album/perpetual

Duo, by France Jobin + Richard Chartier: https://matterlabel.bandcamp.com/album/duo

~~~, anna roxanne: https://anaroxanne.bandcamp.com/album/-

Arrow, by Richard Youngs: https://preservedsound.bandcamp.com/album/arrow

Tracing Back The Radiance, by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: https://jefrecantu-ledesma.bandcamp.com/album/tracing-back-the-radiance

Allister Thompson hosted a blog, Make Your Own Taste, that contains a lot of ambient artists and contextual information on the genre. You would do well to visit if this is your thing.

*note: I use the term “classical” generically; technically I prefer the Baroque and Romantic periods best, truth be told.

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Book Review: The Trouble With Physics, by Lee Smolin

I posted about this book earlier, noting that it was surprisingly hard to get into, particularly for someone such as myself who, while not majoring in physics in high school, has always been curious about science and particularly interested (since a young age) in the concepts surrounding quantum physics. Boy, what a difference the last half of a book can make.

Smolin’s approach to the organization of information in his book might make sense to him, and – if I had an undergraduate in physics – it would to me also. He begins by stating five fundamental unsolved problems with our understanding of the universe, not already explained by Einstein’s theory of relativity (governing big stuff) and quantum physics (governing small stuff). He then goes on to discuss the idea of string theory and how it was posited as a candidate for a unifying theory which might possibly go to explain these unresolved problems (along with the effects of gravity). After laying out the details, he then discusses the Continue reading “Book Review: The Trouble With Physics, by Lee Smolin”

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The Trouble With The Trouble With Physics

I’m on my second attempt reading Lee Smolin’s 2006 book The Trouble With Physics. I am reminded of a similar situation with another book, Joyce’s Ulysses. And, similarly, my second attempt with The Trouble With Physics is not a reappraisal but a confirmation: this is hard to read.

Smolin’s book is making a case for the fact that string theory is a failure; a spectacular failure that its adherents defend with a most byzantine theoretical web; that, because string theory is de rigueur in so many of the top schools, with so many reputations at stake, no one wants to recognize the fact that string theory — an attempt to harmonize the ideas of quantum theory and relativity so that we might understand the foundation of the universe more clearly — is a dead end.

The problem I’m (still) having with the book is that Smolin is writing to an audience that is willing to take a steep (try 90 degrees upward) climb in order to understand the various concepts and theories which not only formed the foundation of string theory, but the issues that weren’t resolved through the original work of Newton, Einstein, etc. Smolin lays out in the beginning various fundamental aspects of how things work that we simply don’t know — instilling early that scientific inquiry is, if anything, about the need for curiosity. However, given Smolin’s densely described approach to get us ready to understand his arguments, and while I don’t doubt the necessity, I think he would need to double the length of his book to do so effectively for interested readers who are not physicists.

What is more successful, and the reason I continue to read it, is how Continue reading “The Trouble With The Trouble With Physics”

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Social Media Hall of Mirrors

Social media is a hall of mirrors. Your every movement, every action, every outburst is echoed and refracted off of hundreds of other movements, actions, and outbursts.

You cannot be an individual online. We move as one, or so it seems. It is a disjointed unison.

If I share someone else’s viewpoint, I am intentionally or unintentionally giving that viewpoint power and substituting my voice for someone else’s. I am, in effect, voting for attention to be placed on the viewpoint I’m sharing in lieu of my own. I am choosing not to develop my own idea of something but rather to vote for something which seems close enough to what I think I might want to have an idea about.

I vote for x. So should you (otherwise why would I be sharing it). That voice, promoted, its potential popularity – a signal boosted – shaped by my endorsement. Reflected across mirrors so that it’s effectively origin-less. Bright ideas like lights bouncing. A light show in a nightclub.

(You cannot be alone on social media. It requires a priori dependence on signal boosting – recognition – through others. A Facebook user with no friends still requires a Facebook account, which implicitly petitions belonging and external connection.)

 

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Connectedness, Social Media, and Syntheticism

If there’s something to be said about going on a vacation – whether that means renting a car and driving two hours away from your town, or buying a plane ticket and flying six hours away from your country – it’s that it provides something crucial: distance. Physical (and, one should hope, subsequently mental) distance.

When I go away I take that idea of “distance” seriously. I don’t check Facebook, I don’t check Twitter. I don’t even check voicemail (unless it looks important). My only transgression is occasionally checking newspaper headlines to make sure that the world isn’t on the brink of collapse (which it often seems to be).

Upon returning, I find myself staring at my computer (or, more often, my BlackBerry) and wondering: what’s the point? Sure, I’ll go back to checking email, scheduling things, occasionally making sure the world isn’t on the brink of collapse, but re-entering the world of social media is another question. A daunting one, to be honest. I respect social media, yet, against its purpose, I often find it paradoxically alienating.

It started with Facebook, which began as a unique way to stay in touch with friends without relying upon email – a communal sandbox with multimedia extensions. With time (and popularity) came the inevitable mediocrity of a lot of people (along with the watering-down of “friend”-ship) without a lot of ideas posting a lot of crap that I found myself more often than not skipping. Continue reading “Connectedness, Social Media, and Syntheticism”

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Chaos Cinema

I posted this for my Humber College students on their blog. I posted this on Facebook and Twitter. As such, I should probably post it here.

If you are a film lover who feels increasingly unable to understand or orientate yourself watching action movies made in the last decade, I implore you to watch this video essay about what the author calls chaos cinema.

Bad Boys 2It describes quite succinctly what has frustrated me as a film viewer: action sequences (or entire films) are becoming little more than jagged-edged stimulation devices and not the shared experiences that they should be (see: chase scene in Batman: The Dark Knight)

Essential viewing.

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We Seek To Remain Unscathed

The more I read about mutuality – the art of affecting and being affected by another, particularly within the context of a therapeutic environment – the more I realize that the online world is a place (or a thing) which appears to function this way, yet in practice is typically abstinent and unilateral.

With the Internet (as much as I hate using that word so generally) we have a vast infrastructure – insert plumbing/transit/Tower of Babel metaphors – whose sole purpose is the nearly instantaneous transmission of information. Yet, the ways and methods that we — its users, managers, and architects — have managed to communicate with each other have not evolved in-step with the technological state-of-the-art.

This is not to say that we cannot experience mutuality via internet communication, but rather a) current technological interfaces do a better job of anonymizing the personalities of its users rather than accentuating them, and b) the interpersonal efficacy of this technology has not progressed past what was available in 1996, since the advent of full-duplex sound cards. Continue reading “We Seek To Remain Unscathed”

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The Skinny on Stereoscopic Films, or, What’s Up With 3D?

This is one of those moments where I find myself on the inside of a phenomena which (increasingly) arouses strong opinions from members of the public. In this case, stereoscopic filmmaking – or 3D, for short (even though it’s not really 3D and tramples on a term which is used in animation for both stereoscopic and non-stereoscopic work).

I’m currently working on a 3D film in an age (or, more precisely, over the course of a year, starting with James Cameron’s Avatar) where 3D technology is being pushed as the next in-thing. And yet there are many detractors, some of whom have some good ammunition for their opinions.

As someone who has been intimately involved with a 3D production, from beginning to end (well, almost – we’ll be in theatres in October) I find myself more and more a spokesperson for the technology, if not for the studios who currently are trying to cram every release into a 3D format, whether or not they were meant to be that way.

Let me begin by saying that I enjoy the notoriety of being the resident expert on 3D technology at parties and barbecues whenever the subject arises. Now that I have that out of the way, allow me to bitch…

Everyone keeps asking me: is 3D here to stay? The answer is a conditional “yes”. The condition being that film studios understand two things: First, that you can’t take a 2D movie and make it 3D using brain-dead rotoscoping software and expect it to be a success; second, that you can’t continue charging more for 3D films and not deliver a product that is both a good example of 3D and a relatively good film to boot.

To elaborate:

1)  Since the release of Avatar, there seem to be just as many films released in theatres boasting 3D which were never shot in 3D, nor even envisioned in 3D prior to production. Some examples would be Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. These films were taken by the studios after completion and put through a 2D-to-3D conversion process, using software to rotoscope the 3D effect, frame-by-frame, a process unsupervised by the director.

This process, while handy for converting short bits from 2D to 3D for films which originate in 3D, ignores a very large consideration for those producers and filmmakers who shoot in 3D from the outset: you have to plan to shoot in 3D from the start. You cannot take a script or a shot list for a 2D film and superimpose it onto a 3D film: your set design, your camera lenses, your blocking, your picture editing…so many things change as a result of switching from 2D to 3D. When you simply take a 2D show and auto-render it in faked-out 3D you get something which most viewers – critics and plebes alike – will say isn’t necessary. At worst, you get Clash Of The Titans – the current poster child for anyone with an axe to grind about 3D in general and post-converted 3D specifically. Not only was it a weak remake of the original (from what I hear), but the 3D post-conversion was done in two weeks. Two weeks. From what I hear, the subsequent “3D” is ridiculous to view.

2)  Considering that theatres charge a premium for 3D films (about $3 more than usual depending upon where you go – sometimes more), when a poorly rendered post-converted 3D film is released it damages the viability of an already vulnerable new technology. It’s one thing if a film is bad, but when it’s bad in two dimensions, bad in a crappily-rendered pseudo-third dimension, followed by the sucker punch of having to pay MORE to see it…you get my point. I hope. Movie audiences can be forgiving, but there comes a point of revolt which I can see happening if there aren’t enough 3D films released which originate on 3D. Furthermore, the studios do no service to themselves if they don’t make a point of clarifying this to audiences: why can’t they say when a film is originally shot in 3D? Isn’t that a selling point? Likewise, why not be honest and say when a film has been post-converted? If it’s a case that no one wants it to be known that their film was post-converted…then why post-convert to 3D in the first place? There’s certainly no audience I know that is clamouring for blocky cut-out shapes which look like they were poorly separated from the background using Photoshop. To summarize this point, content is king: the quality of content, not the volume of illegitimate content.

Up until Avatar (and god knows how I long for the day when another film takes its place as the “gold standard”), the greatest accomplishment in 3D technology was the few seconds of the guy in House of Wax, standing outside a theatre with a ping-pong mallet, knocking the ball directly toward the camera. You could imagine people ducking for cover at the time. That was 1953. From that point onward, 3D technology didn’t change, largely due to the format never winning over audiences: the films were oft-times gimmicky and there were never enough 3D films at any given time to make it feel as if the aesthetic was going anywhere. With the recent advent of digital cinematography, 3D is much easier (logistically and technically) to achieve. And while I would love someone to make “art” (are you reading this, Wong Kar Wai?), I’m happy if, for the time being, the format stakes its territory in the ghetto where its strengths have always been: action/sci-fi/fantasy – hey, if it works, why not? I don’t hear anyone clamouring for a 3D Terms of Endearment

Technicians and filmmakers are doing their part: they are taking a risk and trying to push forward innovatively with something daunting and new. Is 3D here to stay? Again, a conditional “yes”. What we need are studios and theatre chains to be honest with the audience and not do irreparable damage to the very thing they are hoping to profit from.

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