Speaker 1: Pushkin. A few years ago, I was thinking a lot
Speaker 1: about ghosts and music. I was writing a novel called
Speaker 1: White Tears, about two young music producers who fake in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties blues record and put it out on the Internet,
Speaker 1: pretending it's the work of a long forgotten musician. Gradually
Speaker 1: they realized that something horrible that's coming towards them out
Speaker 1: of the past. While I was writing, I'd spend hours
Speaker 1: every day listening to recordings made in the years after
Speaker 1: the First World War. The characters in my novel strained
Speaker 1: to hear the sounds of long dead singers and guitarists
Speaker 1: emerging out of the crack and hiss. When you put
Speaker 1: the needle down on a record or press play on
Speaker 1: a sound file, you're inviting a ghost into your room.
Speaker 1: You're inviting a ghost into your head, into the acoustic
Speaker 1: space between your ears. I'm not speaking to you now
Speaker 1: right here on this podcast. I'm not here at all.
Speaker 1: I'm speaking to you from the past. And what if
Speaker 1: mine now, as I talk into a microphone in my
Speaker 1: rigged up COVID recording studio, isn't just splintered off from
Speaker 1: yours by a few weeks or months what if mine
Speaker 1: now is fifty years into your past, or ninety or
Speaker 1: a hundred. Am I dead? Or am I alive? Maybe
Speaker 1: I'm dead, but am I alive? For you? I would
Speaker 1: sit and think about recording and time as I wrote
Speaker 1: my novel with a pair of big clothes back headphones
Speaker 1: clamped over my ears. Late one night, I ran across this.
Speaker 1: Maybe as you hear it now in your now, it
Speaker 1: sounds familiar. Maybe it sounds like something you ought to recognize.
Speaker 1: It certainly tugged at my memory when I heard it,
Speaker 1: like pulling on a thread. The best way I had
Speaker 1: to think about this music was that it sounded like
Speaker 1: the outside of something, something that wasn't there, like a
Speaker 1: cast on a phantom limb, or an empty mold for
Speaker 1: a statue, a vacancy. I was hearing the absence of something.
Speaker 1: This music reminded me of a record that had scared
Speaker 1: the hell out of me when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: It was what they used to call a flexi disc,
Speaker 1: a sheet of thin plastic that came mounted to the
Speaker 1: cover of a magazine called The Unexplained. On it were
Speaker 1: what were portentously called electronic voice phenomena. Supposedly the sounds
Speaker 1: of dead people picked up by various kinds of modern
Speaker 1: audio equipment. The experimental states that, in his opinion, man
Speaker 1: cannot grasp the events after death with his intellect or
Speaker 1: even with his intuition. A voice replies in German air
Speaker 1: can This is into the Zone, a podcast devoted to
Speaker 1: the opposites that shape our world and how borders are
Speaker 1: never as clearly defined as we think. I'm hurry, Kunzru.
Speaker 1: This episode is about something that's fascinated me since I
Speaker 1: heard those voices on the Flexi disc, the ghosts inside
Speaker 1: technology and how they haunt us through signal and noise.
Speaker 1: He can, and we're going to get to signal and
Speaker 1: noise via a place that at first might not seem
Speaker 1: very promising. A conference in Hanover in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: Hanover Landshah Yes, Hanover, the thirteenth largest city in Germany.
Speaker 1: Hanovers a nineteen eighty eight meeting of the Moving Picture
Speaker 1: Expert screw Up, an organization founded to establish industry wide
Speaker 1: standards for audio and video compression. This is Henover to
Speaker 1: set the scene here in nineteen eighty eight, The coolest
Speaker 1: office technology is the facts. Steve Jobs has been fired
Speaker 1: from Apple for failing to beat IBM in the race
Speaker 1: to develop a personal computer, and Microsoft has released an
Speaker 1: updated version of something called Windows, which is widely considered
Speaker 1: a dud. Your uncle has a new hobby at family parties,
Speaker 1: videotaping everything on his camcorder. The world of music is
Speaker 1: dominated by one futuristic format, the compact disc. Some four
Speaker 1: hundred million CDs will be pressed in nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1: You can even get a CD walkman, though a cassette
Speaker 1: tape walkman is still much better for jogging. CD's skip
Speaker 1: if you move them around too much. The audio engineers
Speaker 1: at the hand of a meeting are there to hammer
Speaker 1: out a standard for digital audio, and they're haunted by
Speaker 1: one recent disaster, the video format Wars, in which two
Speaker 1: versions of the same thing went head to head in
Speaker 1: the marketplace, Betamax versus VHS, both chunky plastic shells around
Speaker 1: spools of magnetic tape. With the Betamax at your command,
Speaker 1: you'll never again be deprived of watching whatever program you
Speaker 1: desire at your convenience. You'll be free of the restrictions
Speaker 1: of time. Its uses are defined only by the limits
Speaker 1: of your imagination. But while you might be free of
Speaker 1: the restrictions of time. The beta max wasn't it could
Speaker 1: only record for one hour, but VHS tapes could record
Speaker 1: two hours, long enough for movies that could be rented
Speaker 1: from video stores, providing employment for slackers, stoners and pornographers
Speaker 1: around the world. So VHS one. But the format wars
Speaker 1: caused both sides to hemorrhage cash. When it came to audio,
Speaker 1: no one wanted to risk a repeat of that way
Speaker 1: too stressful. Far better to work out a standard. Yes,
Speaker 1: whole technical should be. I will stop you if I
Speaker 1: think you're getting too technical. How about that? Standardization almost
Speaker 1: by definition, is not something that attracts mavericks or loaners.
Speaker 1: If you're a cowboy or a romantic, go elsewhere with
Speaker 1: your horses and your melodrama. Standardization is a calling for
Speaker 1: people who want to get along, people who like to
Speaker 1: agree on how to do something. People who like to
Speaker 1: make sure that if a thing is going to be done,
Speaker 1: it's done in the best possible way, exactly the same
Speaker 1: by everyone, with no argument, People like Karl Heinz Brandenburg.
Speaker 1: Psych Acoustics is the science merely off aring and viewing
Speaker 1: or ears and brain subleck box in Hanover in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight, Karl Heinz led one of the fourteen teams
Speaker 1: who had competing proposals for an audio compression standard. All
Speaker 1: sorts of companies were interested in audio compression. TV and
Speaker 1: radio stations, telecoms, manufacturers of consumer electronics, governments. Karl Hines
Speaker 1: had started his career trying to improve the sound of
Speaker 1: telephone conversations. Now he was leading a consortium of companies
Speaker 1: from several countries trying to make their CODEC the Chosen One. CODEC,
Speaker 1: by the way, is short for CODA decoder. These days,
Speaker 1: a CODEC is just a piece of software. Back in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight, most people thought the winning audio compression
Speaker 1: CODEC would end up as some kind of box, a
Speaker 1: piece of electronic equipment that would be bought by labs
Speaker 1: and recording studios. I'm a fan of people like Karl Heinz,
Speaker 1: engineers who can work through problems and build things to
Speaker 1: solve them. This is partly because I'm not one of
Speaker 1: life's standardizers. I like to make things up as I
Speaker 1: go along. When I'm cooking, I'm the kind of cook
Speaker 1: who throws stuff in the pan eyeballing quantities. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, yet without technical standards, most of the
Speaker 1: things I do other than cooking, I couldn't do. I
Speaker 1: couldn't record this podcast. You couldn't download it or stream
Speaker 1: it over the internet. The internet only works. The Internet
Speaker 1: could only work because everyone agrees to do something very
Speaker 1: complicated in exactly the same way as a species. We
Speaker 1: can't agree about anything, and yet we've agreed on that.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. The way humans perceive sound is also very complicated,
Speaker 1: as Karl heines Well knows. Would you explain a little
Speaker 1: about the mechanics of how the ear registers sound and
Speaker 1: transmits it to the brain yep. Of course there are
Speaker 1: short and long versions of set explanations. Maybe a quite
Speaker 1: short version please, okay. So, as you know, sound enters
Speaker 1: the pinner and the ear canal to the ear drum.
Speaker 1: Then we got the so called middle ears, ear drums,
Speaker 1: the arsicles, and then to the inner ear and on.
Speaker 1: In the inner ear we have the so called cochlera,
Speaker 1: which is a little thing. It is actually quite a
Speaker 1: long explanation. Karl Heinz goes on to talk about how
Speaker 1: tiny hairs in the cochlear are connected to neurons, which
Speaker 1: detects sound. Waves and send signals to the brain. This structure,
Speaker 1: which changes sound into electrical energy, goes by the name
Speaker 1: the organ of Corty. This would also be my band name,
Speaker 1: were it not already taken by a trio who describe
Speaker 1: themselves on bandcamp dot com as blues rock with an
Speaker 1: experimental edge. The actual organ of Corti in our heads
Speaker 1: functions as a kind of spectrum analyzer, separating sounds into
Speaker 1: different frequencies and telling the brain how strong each one is.
Speaker 1: So when you're trying to compress audio, when you're trying
Speaker 1: to work out what to keep and what can be removed,
Speaker 1: what you're trying to do is to use these limitations
Speaker 1: of the human ear to work out what parts of
Speaker 1: the signal can be removed. Is that correct? That's correct?
Speaker 1: In fact, a very simple way to phase it is
Speaker 1: that we try to store only that amount of information
Speaker 1: which goes from the inner ear to the brain. Karl
Speaker 1: Heinz explains that the organ of Corti can only handle
Speaker 1: so much information. Not every frequency that comes into the
Speaker 1: ear gets perceived by the brain. If there's an additional
Speaker 1: sound a's the same frequency, it doesn't change the pattern
Speaker 1: of moving hairselfs anymore, it doesn't change as a nurine firing.
Speaker 1: So the other signal, which is fainter, gets masked as
Speaker 1: we call it, right, So this is this is masking
Speaker 1: one of the key things that you're looking for when
Speaker 1: you're you're trying to work out what to keep and
Speaker 1: what to throw away. Exactly what to keep and what
Speaker 1: to throw away? This was the great technical question facing
Speaker 1: the audio engineers in Hanover in nineteen eighty eight. What
Speaker 1: they wanted to build was the very best and most
Speaker 1: efficient way to encode sound, one format used by everyone.
Speaker 1: It had to sound good, obviously, but it also had
Speaker 1: to be small because, just like our brains, phone lines
Speaker 1: or radio waves can only handle so much sound information
Speaker 1: at once. Therefore, it's good to throw away as much
Speaker 1: as possible. If one sound is masked by another, great
Speaker 1: just get rid of it. Being engineers, the engineers in
Speaker 1: Hanover had a very complicated formula for testing the competing proposals.
Speaker 1: The winner would need to be efficient and small, it
Speaker 1: would need to be simple to encode things and play
Speaker 1: them back, and of course it would have to sound good.
Speaker 1: But what does sound good mean? The engineers weren't just
Speaker 1: reading off numbers on a chart to find out what
Speaker 1: sounded best. They compare different compression algorithms by listening souls
Speaker 1: of final judgment was always listening tests. So what were
Speaker 1: the testers listening to? For quite some time as the
Speaker 1: task was to find difficult pieces of music because the
Speaker 1: very first attempts to do music compression already worked quite
Speaker 1: nicely for some signals and sounded horrible for us us.
Speaker 1: I had Glockenspiel as one early example of sounding horrible.
Speaker 1: What was easy easy was dance music, like if you
Speaker 1: had a full symphony orchestra or pop group which lots
Speaker 1: of sounds, that was easier. So it's when sounds are
Speaker 1: very distinct that it's easy to hear the limits of
Speaker 1: the compression. Is that correct? Correct? And one of the
Speaker 1: most difficult was Susan Vega's voice in her Solitude Standing
Speaker 1: appena piece Tom's Diner. It's a track on Suzanne vegas
Speaker 1: album Solitude Standing. Back in nineteen eighty seven. When the
Speaker 1: album was released, it became the epitome of a certain
Speaker 1: sort of unthreatening, good taste, yuppie dinner party music. Solitude
Speaker 1: Standing was the kind of record that people with new
Speaker 1: CD players would buy to showcase the performance of their
Speaker 1: high fire systems. This album went platinum in the US,
Speaker 1: and it was even more popular in Europe, so it's
Speaker 1: not surprising that a CD of Solitude Standing was floating
Speaker 1: around in some European lab where engineers were obsessing over
Speaker 1: digital audio standards. So Carl Hines and his colleagues compressed
Speaker 1: and listened to a lot of Suzanne Vega. They also
Speaker 1: listened to Tracy Chapman, Haydn, and Ornette Coleman. He might
Speaker 1: ask why they didn't test their system on even more
Speaker 1: varieties of music. Well, because it took eight hours to
Speaker 1: digitize just twenty seconds of sound. The song Tom's Diner
Speaker 1: alone is two minutes and nine seconds long. That would
Speaker 1: take more than two days of processing. So they used
Speaker 1: tiny snippets twenty seconds long and played them again and
Speaker 1: again and again. We tried it and it sounded horrible,
Speaker 1: really horrible. I am sitting in the morning at the
Speaker 1: diner on the corner, and this simple sound of a
Speaker 1: woman's voice turned out to be one of the hardest
Speaker 1: to get right. The problem was worst with Vega's vowels.
Speaker 1: When she sang, she distributed sound energy all across the
Speaker 1: audio spectrum. The algorithm was designed to make a kind
Speaker 1: of trade off. It could get one aspect of the
Speaker 1: sound perfect, but another would be sketchy. Finally they worked
Speaker 1: out a fix and those Doo doodoo started to sound
Speaker 1: pretty good. I am sitting in the morning at the
Speaker 1: diner on the corner, I am waiting at the counter.
Speaker 1: The problem was when the scores came in at a
Speaker 1: later meeting, no one could actually decide which of the
Speaker 1: fourteen competitors sounded best. The story of how it exactly
Speaker 1: went down is byzantine and technical. All you really need
Speaker 1: to know is that the process got bad tempered, and
Speaker 1: finally there was a compromise. At the hand of a conference,
Speaker 1: it had been decided the audio standard would have three
Speaker 1: different layers. Not three different standards, Oh no, not three
Speaker 1: different things. Layers like a cake, a nice tasty cake.
Speaker 1: And one of the three winners was the version developed
Speaker 1: by Karl Heinz. Its official name was Motion Picture Expert
Speaker 1: Group one Audio Layer Number three, or as it came
Speaker 1: to be known, the MP three, and the music industry
Speaker 1: would never be the same as Karl Heinz Brandenburg shook
Speaker 1: ends and was congratulated for his work on audio compression
Speaker 1: he had no idea what he had unleashed. He and
Speaker 1: his employer, a research lab called Fraunhofer, just wanted to
Speaker 1: sell some boxes of high end electronics to recording studios.
Speaker 1: We sought physical boxes and we licensed to companies how
Speaker 1: to build these physical boxes. But this was for professional use.
Speaker 1: We had software out there. And then some young guy
Speaker 1: from Australia used a Stone credit card number to buy
Speaker 1: one of these professional encoders. So he just built his
Speaker 1: own user interface, put our encoding library into it, put
Speaker 1: everything to GASA, and he told everybody to take off
Speaker 1: the software off their FTP sides. But of course knows
Speaker 1: this has been the same until now. In the Internet,
Speaker 1: you can't get things removed. It's still somewhere by now.
Speaker 1: It was nineteen ninety seven. The hacker eventually got arrested
Speaker 1: and the MP three eight the music industry. Within a
Speaker 1: few years, it had almost destroyed the compact disc. It
Speaker 1: cannibalized record company profits and made it harder for musicians
Speaker 1: to earn a living. In nineteen ninety nine, MP three
Speaker 1: surpassed sex as the most searched word on the Internet.
Speaker 1: By the late nineties, music was being pumped into our
Speaker 1: brains like a fire hose. Music fans like me could
Speaker 1: collect more than we could ever listen to. So much music.
Speaker 1: Of course, the technology was not without its critics. Do
Speaker 1: you know who you are? Metallica? I love and everything
Speaker 1: you do, except for that bad show your host of.
Speaker 1: You know what, maybe I wouldn't have to horn myself
Speaker 1: out if your kids didn't steal my music. So that's
Speaker 1: Marlon Wayne's and Lars Ulric doing a skit at the
Speaker 1: MTV Video Music Awards in two thousand. To me, the
Speaker 1: most interesting thing about the creation of the MP three
Speaker 1: isn't the story of Napster or the iPod or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's about what got kept and what got thrown away.
Speaker 1: If you're compressing a song down to ten percent of
Speaker 1: its original size, then what do you get rid of?
Speaker 1: Karl Heinz's MP three algorithm separates sound into two parts,
Speaker 1: the wheat and the chaff. The idea that such a
Speaker 1: decision could be subjective is displeasing to him, But I
Speaker 1: wonder can it really be objective? How do you tell
Speaker 1: information from noise? And what exactly is information? Is there
Speaker 1: like a living room or somewhere a little bit more
Speaker 1: away from drill we could probably do with the marking,
Speaker 1: and I'm really sorry about Let's try. There's a room.
Speaker 1: Yeah down here, let's see if that's the sound of me,
Speaker 1: My producers Hunter and Rider, and the science writer James Glick,
Speaker 1: trying to find somewhere quiet to talk in his apartment slightly.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty seven, James wrote a book called Chaos,
Speaker 1: all about the mathematical discovery of so called chaos theory.
Speaker 1: Oddly for a book about math, Chaos was something of
Speaker 1: a countercultural classic in nineties Britain. People skinned up joints
Speaker 1: on its cover, sitting under psychedelic posters of Mandelbrot sets
Speaker 1: and talking about the butterfly effect before their pills came
Speaker 1: on and they headed out into the fields to make
Speaker 1: crop circles. I don't know if James knows about his
Speaker 1: impact on the rave Ea and anyway, it's not really
Speaker 1: what I've come to talk to him about. It's louder here,
Speaker 1: it feels happy. Yeah, let's just go back to the
Speaker 1: kitchen table and we'll work with what we got. Someone
Speaker 1: somewhere in James's building is renovating. He says it could
Speaker 1: be several flaws away, but because of the acoustics. The
Speaker 1: sound of power tools is audible wherever we go. It
Speaker 1: is I suppose a sort of cosmic joke that we
Speaker 1: can't talk without noise getting onto the recording, because I've
Speaker 1: come to talk to him about noise, or rather about
Speaker 1: the difference between signal a noise. This binary opposition is
Speaker 1: at the core of the modern idea of information, and
Speaker 1: James has written a book about it, called The Information
Speaker 1: A History a Theory Flood. It's obviously an old word information,
Speaker 1: and you can look it up in the OED and
Speaker 1: it goes back many centuries, but it wasn't the kind
Speaker 1: of word it is now. It wasn't a common word,
Speaker 1: and it didn't refer to the stuff that we think
Speaker 1: of as information, the whole collection of sounds, words, images,
Speaker 1: types of knowledge that are encoded biologically. We understand information
Speaker 1: as a gigantic and extremely important category of stuff for us,
Speaker 1: and that began, I argue at a very specific moment
Speaker 1: of time. On the notes I wrote to prepare for
Speaker 1: this interview, one name appears again and again. Claude Shannon.
Speaker 1: He was a scientist who first introduced the idea that
Speaker 1: information was something you could measure. He published his Mathematical
Speaker 1: Theory of communication in nineteen forty eight, the first time
Speaker 1: he defines information the way a scientist needs to define
Speaker 1: it as a thing that you can measure. There's a
Speaker 1: unit of measure for information, and we all know what
Speaker 1: that is. It's the bit yes or no, on or off,
Speaker 1: zero or one, a very precise thing. Before that, the
Speaker 1: idea of measuring information didn't make any sense. It was like,
Speaker 1: could you have a scientific unit of measure for happiness
Speaker 1: or for anxiety or for fog? And then once you've
Speaker 1: got them in bits, you have something that applies to
Speaker 1: everything else. You can start to say how many bits
Speaker 1: are there in a book? How many bits of information
Speaker 1: are there in that painting? Does that? Is that a
Speaker 1: question that makes sense? As a writer, I think of
Speaker 1: myself as someone who deals with information that when I
Speaker 1: use that word, I'm not speaking in the mathematical terms
Speaker 1: of Claude Shannon. I'm someone who deals with meaning. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to make this podcast as meaningful as I can.
Speaker 1: When I do that, I think of it as being
Speaker 1: rich in information. But for Claude Shannon, it wasn't like
Speaker 1: that at all. Information had nothing to do with meaning.
Speaker 1: It is counterintuitive. It seems to us that if we
Speaker 1: start to talk about informa nation, apart from meaning you're
Speaker 1: you're talking about noise again. And Shannon's contemporaries also found
Speaker 1: this difficult to grasp, so he had to really emphasize that.
Speaker 1: He had to say again and again that the content
Speaker 1: of a message was irrelevant to the kind of mathematical
Speaker 1: treatment he was creating. He was measuring the bit content
Speaker 1: of a given message, and that bit content didn't depend
Speaker 1: on whether the message was crucially important or whether it
Speaker 1: was just a lot of nonsense. Can you just say
Speaker 1: the thing about this thing? There is my sentence about
Speaker 1: the signal and information again, and there's a bus that
Speaker 1: drove by. Oh, but what was it the signal? Give
Speaker 1: me a little more these interruptions demonstrating what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Is the bus passing outside signal or noise? Could it
Speaker 1: be both? I found myself when I was thinking about
Speaker 1: this question working on the book, thinking about particular pieces
Speaker 1: of music like a Bach prelude. I mean, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: particularly of the first one in C major, yeah, which
Speaker 1: you know is on the Voyager Golden Records that's making
Speaker 1: its way to to other galaxies. Because Carl Sagan and
Speaker 1: his committee thought it would reveal something about us as
Speaker 1: human beings. Well this, you ask yourself, how much information
Speaker 1: is in this bach prelude? You play it, and the
Speaker 1: first thing you notice is it's very repetitious. It's the
Speaker 1: same thing over and over again, except that it keeps
Speaker 1: changing a little bit. And if you were Claude Shannon,
Speaker 1: you would say, well, I could compress this algorithmically, because
Speaker 1: all I really need is the changes. The stuff that
Speaker 1: repeats itself is not new information. And as a listener,
Speaker 1: you also recognize the tension between these two things. You
Speaker 1: recognize that if it's the patterns that you sense that
Speaker 1: make it beautiful, and it's also the fact that the
Speaker 1: patterns do not repeat themselves perfectly that make it exquisitely beautiful.
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon's revelation was that information is a measure of complexity,
Speaker 1: so you can assign it a number. But being complex
Speaker 1: is not the same as being meaningful. Things can be
Speaker 1: complex and meaningless, as anyone alive in twenty twenty can attest.
Speaker 1: When it comes to sounding good, let alone esthetic beauty.
Speaker 1: It's not about information. Shannon leaves us cold. He leaves
Speaker 1: us empty for exactly that reason that he tried to
Speaker 1: remove the human element from the equation, he explicitly removed
Speaker 1: meaning from the equation. And meaning is what we want.
Speaker 1: Meaning is what we are desperate for, So how do
Speaker 1: we find it? Meaning is what we're desperate for? And
Speaker 1: James Blick's main question is how do we find it?
Speaker 1: I've always thought of meaning as something you make, for example,
Speaker 1: through words and stories, but maybe meaning is now something
Speaker 1: we have to reclaim from our algorithms. The listening test
Speaker 1: for the MP three were done in Germany, and so
Speaker 1: they were predominantly engineers, and I think mostly white, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of German men, professional, sort of audio professionals. This
Speaker 1: is Ryan McGuire, a composer based in Chicago. It was
Speaker 1: his ghostly music that I found on the Internet a
Speaker 1: few years ago while I was writing my novel White Tears.
Speaker 1: His music is what led me down the rabbit hole
Speaker 1: of audio compression and the MP three. Ryan's obsessed with
Speaker 1: the early listening tests that led to the MP three,
Speaker 1: all those German engineer is with the CDs. I don't
Speaker 1: think it was particularly systematic, but the songs for the
Speaker 1: MP three listening tests, the early MP three listening tests,
Speaker 1: you can tell that they were trying to have a
Speaker 1: sort of breadth of material. So you have Tom Steiner
Speaker 1: by Susan Vega, which you know, solo, unaccompanied a cappella vocal.
Speaker 1: Then you have sort of an acoustic pop song, fast
Speaker 1: Car by Tracy Chapman. You have a trumpet excerpt from
Speaker 1: Hyden's Trumpet Concerto, and you have surprisingly, you have an
Speaker 1: excerpt from Ornette Coleman's in All Languages, so you have
Speaker 1: even some jazz. The remaining songs were sort of test
Speaker 1: audio files. There was one of a cloud and a
Speaker 1: couple of others, so it doesn't sound like there there's
Speaker 1: anything with complicated percussion or a lot of bass. Those
Speaker 1: would both be things that I would I would have
Speaker 1: thought might be quite difficult for a coding system to handle.
Speaker 1: You're exactly right. Obviously, all of those recordings are major
Speaker 1: label recordings done to sort of high fidelity standards. You know,
Speaker 1: they didn't test any punk records. There's no hip hop
Speaker 1: or like dance music or something that has a lot
Speaker 1: of emphasis on base. There's not a lot of the
Speaker 1: grittiness that many listeners value in rock and roll or blues.
Speaker 1: That raw feeling there is sort of a tension there
Speaker 1: between different esthetic value systems. Would it be too much
Speaker 1: to say that their MP three would be different if
Speaker 1: different people had been in the listening tests and different
Speaker 1: music had been chosen to test with. No, I don't
Speaker 1: think that's too much to say. I am sitting in
Speaker 1: the morning at the diner on the corner. I am
Speaker 1: waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee.
Speaker 1: And it's still hard to remember when you're humming along
Speaker 1: to Tom's Diner, enjoying the intimacy of Susanne Vega's voice,
Speaker 1: that it's totally reconstructed. This is an MP three, a
Speaker 1: thing made out of code. It's an artifact produced according
Speaker 1: to a set of technical and esthetic specifications by a
Speaker 1: group of audio engineers. And I look the other way
Speaker 1: as they are kissing their hellos and unpretending not to
Speaker 1: see them, and instead I pour the milk. Audio compression
Speaker 1: exists at the border where objective perception becomes subjective taste.
Speaker 1: It's where the physics of sound shades into what sounds
Speaker 1: good to a particular person with their own likes and
Speaker 1: dislikes and a particular, culturally defined idea of what good sounds,
Speaker 1: sounds like. What gets kept is simple, it becomes the
Speaker 1: MP three of Tom's Diner. But what happens to the
Speaker 1: rest the parts that get thrown away? Ryan wanted to
Speaker 1: hear those parts, so he said about rescuing them from oblivion.
Speaker 1: He wanted to hear what kind of music he could
Speaker 1: make from the scraps. If you've ever compressed something made
Speaker 1: an MP three yourself, there are a range of different settings,
Speaker 1: so you can set the bit rate and you can
Speaker 1: decide how their stereo encoding has done. I started by
Speaker 1: just compressing Tom's Diner in as you know, in all
Speaker 1: the different ways that I could, and comparing, you know,
Speaker 1: listening to the differences how they sounded, and then inverting
Speaker 1: them basically measuring them against the original uncompressed audio and
Speaker 1: subtracting and finding the difference, finding you know, what was
Speaker 1: left out when it went down to this compressed form.
Speaker 1: The material that I found most interesting ended up being,
Speaker 1: you know, when you had the highest quality MP three
Speaker 1: compression settings, that lost material was very sort of whispy,
Speaker 1: spectral and just yeah, very evocative. In Ryan's music, we
Speaker 1: hear the shape of something that's not there. It's everything
Speaker 1: we don't hear in the MP three version of the song,
Speaker 1: the version that pops up instantly when we click on
Speaker 1: the track and pipe pit into our organs of Corty.
Speaker 1: So much has been left behind. There's always someone doing
Speaker 1: the listening you on your commute or folding your laundry,
Speaker 1: listening to me speaking in to a microphone, conveying information
Speaker 1: out of the past. I sound good to you or
Speaker 1: I don't. Maybe you feel like something's lost, something just
Speaker 1: out of reach. It is always nice to see you,
Speaker 1: says though man behind the counter to the woman who
Speaker 1: has come in. She is shaking her umbrella, and I
Speaker 1: look the other way as they are kissing their hellos
Speaker 1: and unpretending not to see them, and instead I pour
Speaker 1: the milk. I open up the paper. There's a story
Speaker 1: of an actor who had died while he was drinking.
Speaker 1: It was no one I had heard of. And I'm
Speaker 1: turning to the horoscope and looking for the funnies when
Speaker 1: I'm feeling someone watching me, and so I raised my head.
Speaker 1: There's a woman on the outside looking inside as she
Speaker 1: see me. No, she does not really see me, because
Speaker 1: she sees her own reflection. And I'm trying not to
Speaker 1: notice that she's hitching up her skirt and while she's
Speaker 1: straightening her stockings, her hair has gotten wet. Oh, this rain,
Speaker 1: it will continue through the morning. As I'm listening to
Speaker 1: the bells of the cathedral, I am thinking of your
Speaker 1: voice and of the midnight picnic once upon a time
Speaker 1: before the rain began, and I finished up my coffee
Speaker 1: and it's time to catch the train. Here trapped inside
Speaker 1: my MP three, I find strange memories coming to the
Speaker 1: four and other people's strange memories too. We had live
Speaker 1: animals of all the different plagues, snakes, rats, crickets to
Speaker 1: stand for locusts and toads. Joe had his gear for
Speaker 1: exploding and h and he just was just complete chaos,
Speaker 1: chaos and art and philosophy from the golden age of cyberspace.
Speaker 1: That's next time on Into the Zone. Into the Zone
Speaker 1: is produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer.
Speaker 1: Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for this episode composed
Speaker 1: by Spatial Relations. Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Pedinatti,
Speaker 1: also known as lip Talk Special Thanks to Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Emily Rostick, and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a
Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please
Speaker 1: consider letting others know. The best way to do this
Speaker 1: is by rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even
Speaker 1: write a review and Spotify playlist of songs that inspired
Speaker 1: this episode. You can find me on Twitter at at
Speaker 1: Harry Kunzru. I'm no one I had heard of Harry Kunzru.
Speaker 1: See you next time.