18 Oct 2003
Experimenting with iTunes

Well, Kris is picking up sheep in Iowa, so Willie and I are "baching" it, if that's the correct spelling of that made up word. And I just noticed something very strange about dance music...

I have really been playing around alot with audio software lately - at work I'm writing a custom mixer program, and all of my CD collection has been ripped into iTunes. And the more I play with iTunes, the more impressed I am.

For example, iTunes will let you assign an equalizer preset to an individual song, so that the equalizer will automatically use the correct settings. Boy, does folk music sound better with the 'acoustic' preset! It's a pretty nice equalizer, too. Full control without being forced to descend into bit twiddling.

So I got to messing around. I set Blondie's Heart of Glass track to use the 'Dance' equalizer preset, and presto: a much improved sound. Ditto for Safety Dance by Men Without Hats.

The I got to looking around for other "dance" music that might be floating about on my hard drive. Well, there's a few tunes from Kraftwerk that might be dance music, but that's be a real strech - it's electronic music, really.

It's pretty weird in this day and age for a middle aged guy to have an affinity for polka tunes, but, well, I guess I'll have to confess to being weird. I have a real weakness for polka music. Maybe because as a former woodwind player I have some empathy with what the poor bastards who play The Clarinet Polka are putting themselves through. At any rate, I played some polka music, and set the equalizer to 'acoustic' - no real improvement over a flat setting at all, in fact, somewhat more hollow sounding.

OK, so how about 'classical' as the equalizer preset? Nope, that sounded weird, too. Well, a perverse sense of curiousity come over me, and I set it up the same way I'd setup Blondie - the 'Dance; preset. It was dance music after all, maybe it'd sound better.

And it did.

I can think of no two pieces of music that sound more radically different than Heart of Glass and Lawrence Welk's Champagne Polka. But both sound radically better on my Mac with the equalizer preset on 'Dance'. Why?

I'm no musician, but I do know a bit about audio, so I'm going to investigate this. I'm going to approach it as a programmer, and do an analysis of the raw data stream(s), looking for patterns. Of course I'll use my ears, too, but I wonder what I'll pick up.

It's not the beat itself - that's certainly different, but perhaps there are underlying patterns within the beat that make music 'danceable'. That would show up here. I'll keep this forum posted as to the progress and results of these experiments.

In the meantime, if there is anybody reading this who has an explanation, I'm all ears!

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Sell the 'Net

Well, well, well - Verisign thinks the Internet should just be sold off piecemeal! I'm shocked!

If our government allows this publicly developed resource to be auctioned off a la the radio spectrum in the 1920's it will be a great tragedy. I love the sarcastic quote from the Slashdot poster:

Because, after all, taking the root servers away from bright, educated comp-sci longbeards who have nothing better to do than to make them run well, and putting them in the hands of MBA bean-counters who don't know what TCP/IP is, is a sure-fire way to improve reliability.

VeriSign CEO on Commercializing the Internet [Slashdot]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Diebold and Electronic Voting Systems

Let's see - our company's electronic voting system is fatally flawed - it allows folks to modify election results after the fact, and has no real audit trail. Of course, our engineering team knows this, and has been trying to warn management for months. But we know who pays the bills, and we've got to have those system sales to make next quarter's projections! So we tell the engineers to shut up....

One (or more) of them then leaks a series of memos or emails documenting this internal debate. What to do!?! Soon the public will know we're selling shoddy merchandise, and well, our name is nearly a synonym for security! We must protect it!

Wait! I've got it! Let's sue the bastards on the Internet distributing this stuff! After all, anything written by our staff, on our time, is copyrighted by us. And the DMCA makes it easy to shut down sites for copyright infringement ....

"What topic could be more important to our democracy than discussions about the mechanics and legitimacy of electronic voting systems now being introduced nationwide?" said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "EFF won't stand by as corporations like Diebold chill important online debate by churning out legal notices to ISPs that usually just take down legitimate content rather than face the legal risk."

Diebold Issues Cease and Desist to Indymedia [Slashdot]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Wille Sings for Perkunas

I'm not sure what this means .... but it's both funny and interesting (from a musical standpoint).

Kulgrinda:Perkuno Giesmes

A good friend of mine, Janine, follows the ancient Lithuanian faith of Romuva: it's a heathen path. She visited Lithuania this past summer, and last weekend at our Hof Dedication she presented me with a gift, an album of Lithuanian hymms to Perkunas, the Thunder God (Kulgrinda:Perkuno Giesmes).

Wonderful stuff! I like it alot. And yesterday, when my father-in-law was over helping to put up ceiling tile in the mud porch, I mentioned it to him - he's a bit of a fan of chants and general classical and folk music. He said he'd give it a listen - so when we went inside for a break, I brought it downstairs and put it in our Bose home theater stereo system - I'd had it upstairs in the library where I'd put it into iTunes on my Mac, and had only ever listened to it on headphones.

Dick liked it: but Willie loved it! Willie On the second track, he sat in front of the stereo and howled, but only with the choral parts! It's a "call and response" type of song, and he'd let the lead singer make the call, and then howl in response!

I've only seen him react this way once before, and that was to a German military march from the movie The Battle of the Bulge. And that was really more of a "getting excited" reaction than it was a "sing along".

Very strange indeed.... especially since that's the only song on the album that he goes nuts over! Maybe he's just a "Thor's dog"!

Here's the lyrics to Willies favorite(in English - on the album it's sung in Lithuanian):

Our greatest, our God
Our greatest, our Thunder
With your power
    with your might
Unite us, strengthen us!

Our greatest, our God
Our greatest, our Thunder
The powers of the Oak-tree,
    the might of the Oak-tree.
Unite us, strengthen us!

Our greatest, our God
Our greatest, our Thunder
The brightness of the Fire,
    the power of the Fire
Unite us, strengthen us!

00:00 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

digitus infamis

From rougeclassicism comes this tale of the digitus infamis

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link