i can no longer hear what i want to hear
+ something i’ve been noticing a lot more lately while listening to mp3s is the compression. it’s not too apparent with simple beat-heavy productions like bmore, but moreso live instrumentation – whether drums or trumpets or guitars – i’ll start to notice that tingy, flat, kshh shh shhh sound in the mp3 more and more. i know it’s expected when i’m listening to a shitty 128kbps bitrate mp3, but i’m more concerned on what it can do to our ears over time. i’m sure nothing good. an interesting bitrate comparison accompanied with audio aid might make you go crazy trying to differentiate the 320 and 128 version.
what it has definitely done is change the way we treat and listen to music, in social terms. we listen to music casually while doing something else, like driving, or working, or exercising – it’s not very common to just listen to music for the sake of listening to music. mp3 players have also helped in furthering the advent of compression and background listening. i’m not taking a holier than thou position either, i’m definitely very guilty. to quote a 2006 article by nick farrell(no diss on apple but i’m just directly copypasting):
It seems that Apple convinced a generation that the best way to listen to music was through tiny ear plugs and compressed to enable your record collection to fit into a small box. Recently it made matters worse by saying that by sticking your small box into another small box you will get hi-fi.
however after trying to do some more research about the subject, i ran into this interesting point of view regarding mp3s – that not only have they changed our listening trends(in regards to environment and methods of listening), they’ve also changed the way producers make music. quoting from a 2008 article by rhori marsden:
faced with our increasingly uncritical listening techniques, producers and engineers are creating music that has very little variation in dynamic range. He might be right. When I’m out and about, I listen to MP3 files on a mobile phone with an old pair of headphones. At home, I play MP3 files from an old laptop with its lid shut.
i wonder if that’s why i’m so disillusioned by things that are popular on the radio now? or am i just being all hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn about music?
+ more on the subject of compression, and loudness. although i must say, i do enjoy recordings that are already loud.. i’m a hypocrite!
+ maybe buying a pair of beats headphones will help offset any shittiness in my mp3s. although for three hundred bucks i could just buy a bunch of the originals on cd and feel a little better about myself.
+ dwele on dilla’s workonit. i really like dwele.
+ heard about this everywhere already, but daft punk doing the tron 2 soundtrack. i didn’t really like their latest album, but still. epique.
+ the dude ryan is slangin tees. peep em.
+ prolly the best twitter ever, aside from shaq and nick nolte. also, there was a really hilarious twitter bit on the daily show earlier this week. it made me feel ashamed that i twit. tweet. twat. tweren’t.
