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!

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