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Re: [microsound] the great depression of experimental music? (OT)



Michal Seta <mis@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


It's strange how the times have changed.  For (insert your favourite
timespan intelligent life has been in existence) years music has been
a social activity, often engaging both performers and the audience and
mostly done with bodies and/or physical objects.  Today, we 'attach'
it to objects.  And only the past 30 or so years influenced such
blasphemy.

why blasphemy? must we accept the received wisdom of eastern mysticism that all physical objects are bad? look at it as a piece of visual art. a painting or sculpture. just perhaps mass-produced. or not. what's wrong with associating these things together?



 > furthermore, as a consumer, i prefer the sound of CDs over mp3s,

as a non-consumer I prefer going to a live performance
However, if mp3 isn't enough, there are other codecs that output much
better quality: ogg - lossy but better than mp3 , flac - lossless, and
many many more.

are these better formats on offer from download services?


> i prefer being able to hold and look at a printed object instead of
scrolling artwork or liner notes on a screen, and i just like having
music centered on something *other* the the goddamn computer.

Well, those CDs you're buying came stright from the goddamn puter.

yeah, i did sound kind of reactionary luddite there, but i'm really not. computers are wonderful and so is the internet. my point is that i'm sick of spending my life centered around a home computer setup. i don't like songs associated with files sitting on a hard drive in a folder, accessed in a list that i play at once or put on random shuffle.



Just because you can buy a CD full of 44100hz 16bit data does not mean
that the music is in some higher form at this time.  Do you really
prefer a CD than sitting in the concert hall (or whatver venue of
preference) and listening to the music?  The glossy crap paper of CD
inserts, the mass production of 16bit audio data is what I would call
truncated, diminished form.

i was only talking about recorded music. sure, if the live experience is possible with the type of music on offer, i would love to enjoy it in that setting. however, sometimes it doesn't work in that way, and the CD format works a lot better, whether i'm sitting at home or traveling, and i can pull out the insert and look at it and integrate it into my environment but also get something of what the artist was getting at.


if 16bit 44.1 CDs are so horridly diminished, they sound pretty damn good for being so. i'm sure technology can do better now, but i see many of these lossy compression formats as going in the opposite direction.


d.

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