A Body at Rest Tends to Stay at Rest. Then the Asteroid Hits.

An asteroid just hit my house.

I am, of course, speaking metaphorically. Nothing has crashed from space. My house is undergoing a long-planned renovation, the first step of which is to demolish the existing den.

Emptying the room of its contents, as well as emptying shelves in an adjacent room along a shared wall, revealed how much custom cabinet space was unnecessarily allocated to the bodies of physical media that have been at rest for years, surviving only because there was nothing to threaten them.

Now the cataclysm has come. Which physical media species will go extinct and which will emerge to re-populate the new living spaces?

• Extinct: Hardback Fiction. Read them all. Enjoyed them to varying degrees. Unlikely to read again. Now mere decoration, and I've held enough garage sales and visited enough estate sales to see how uninterested buyers are in fiction titles, even at deep discount. Resolution: donated to local library.
• Emerge: Physical Music. All the CDs have been ripped to 16-bit WAV and nearly all of the LPs have been dubbed to 24-bit WAV. (Still working on the fringe titles.) Despite the fact that our library listening is exclusively weightless digital, these backup copies need a home. Resolution: rack them out of sight in the electronics hub (or "wiring closet,") planned for the new basement, alongside the wireless router, multi-zone audio distribution system, etc.
• Extinct: Theater-Related Books. My interest in theater started at the University of Michigan and continued through my early career at Bell Laboratories, living adjacent to New York City. Now living in Detroit, my interest has waned and these books, having been shelved when I moved into this house, have rarely been disturbed beyond looking up character names for crossword puzzle answers. Resolution: donated to local high school drama department.
• Emerge: Shakespeare. No home should be without a good set.
• Extinct: Paperback Fiction. Most purchased as vacation and airplane reading, digestible in a few hours. Resolution: given to my sister to refresh the beach-reading collection at her cottage.
• Emerge: Art, Design and Humor Books. These are the books that I often return to, that inspire me, amuse me, that guests at parties and family gatherings might idly thumb through. Resolution: devote reclaimed shelf space to them.

Scientists say that occasional cataclysmic events are necessary to foster future growth. That didn't work out so well for the dinosaurs. My new living spaces, on the other hand, will thrive.

             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #67             

Artist: Was (Not Was)
Title: Born to Laugh at Tornadoes
Genre: Dance
Year: 1983





Before he was a Grammy-winning producer and President of Blue Note Records, Don Was (with collaborator David Was) put out offbeat, eclectic dance records under the name Was (Not Was). Among the many pleasures of these productions were the guest stars the duo could lure into the studio. Born to Laugh at Tornadoes features Mel Torme, fellow Detroiter Doug Feiger (of The Knack), and Ozzy Osbourne. Mr. Torme is particularly pleasurable, playing it straight, crooning the ridiculous "Zaz Turned Blue" in his signature style. Give a listen.

© 2014 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

Mere Adequacy is Never Adequate

There are five fundamentals of high-quality digital sound archiving and preservation for analog source material: accuracy, appropriateness, adequacy, consistency, and explicitness.

Previously we examined accuracy (with regard to the source).Today we tackle the next two fundamentals, appropriateness and adequacy (with regard to your processes).

[Image Credit: Sarah Tehan, Aporia, 2013.]

The process of sound archiving and preservation is like scholarly editing. Just as the scholarly edition's basic task is to present a reliable text, the sound preservationist's basic task is to present a reliable digital record of an analog source. In both pursuits, decisions have to be made concerning (re-)construction and representation of the original material to achieve reliability.

Reliability in digital construction and representation of analog sound is a direct result of:

1. Appropriateness: the extent to which a particular process (step) advances accurate sound representation, and the extent which the listener is satisfied with the sound produced.
2. Adequacy: the extent to which a particular process (step) can be shown to be as good as necessary for its purpose or requirement.

The appropriateness and adequacy of the major function groups in the audio archiving and restoration pipeline can be characterized as follows:

• Digital Recording
  Appropriate: Critical first step in the archiving process
  Adequate: 48 KHz minimum sampling rate; 24-bit minimum encoding depth
• Audio Import/Export
  Appropriate: Advances sound data through the processing pipeline
  Adequate: No information lost in transfer
• Format Conversion
  Appropriate: Ultimate sound output in format desired by listener or required by tools
  Adequate: No information lost in conversion; minimal information loss in compression
• Automated Clean/Repair
  Appropriate: Algorithmic processing of common audio artifacts
  Adequate: No artifacts introduced 
• Manual Clean/Repair
  Appropriate: Processing of artifacts unique to a given recording
  Adequate: Minimal audio loss; clipping eliminated; no artifacts introduced
• Track Isolation
  Appropriate: Facilitates playback of individual songs/chapters/passages, etc.
  Adequate: Envelope of silence before and after track
• Volume Normalization
  Appropriate: Addresses volume differences on playlists incorporating multiple titles
  Adequate: Target sound level -0.1 dB for all titles
• Metadata Editing
  Appropriate: Captures relevant information about the original recording
  Adequate: Accurate, and without typographical errors

Another way of characterizing appropriateness and adequacy is that every step in your process must be necessary and your process as a whole must be sufficient. For a step to be necessary, eliminating that step would produce a less-reliable result. A process is sufficient if it is not a failure for having omitted other steps. All magic formulas for success break down on one or both of these criteria. Don't let it happen to you.

             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #65            

Artist: Miles Davis
Title: Porgy and Bess
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1958





To quote Dan Epstein: "Take George Gershwin's Porgy & Bess, add Miles Davis and arranger Gil Evans, and what do you get? A classic jazz album that--despite the fact that the material has been rendered almost overly familiar due to countless interpretations--still sounds remarkably fresh four decades after its initial release. Miles' soft yet piercing trumpet style is perfectly suited [TGD: appropriate] to Gershwin's melancholy melodies, Evans' musical direction of his 18-piece orchestra is impeccable [TGD: adequate], and their version of 'Summertime' may well be the finest ever waxed."

© 2014 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

If You Don't Answer, I'll Just Ring It Off the Wall

[Image credit: "Hanging on the Telephone" by Aitch]

It occurred to me that I have been devoting all of my recent blog bandwidth to opinionizin' and have neglected one of my core missions, to offer advice on maximizing the value of your weightless digital music library. So let's talk ringtones.

Just as custom Walk-Up music in Major League Baseball parks herald a particular player's plate or bullpen appearance, custom ringtones allow you to announce the arrival of a call from a specific contact with a unique sound effect. All modern phones come with a standard ringtone library; most will allow you to upload sound files to create new ones. And for-purchase ringtones based on hit songs is big business.

But you know all this. What you may not know is that you can harvest music from your legally-purchased weightless digital library to create unlimited free custom ringtones, without having to worry about copyright or ownership rights.

What makes a good ringtone?

• It should be personalized, an artist or a song that reminds you of the caller.
• It should have energy. The caller is important to you.
• It should be an instrumental passage, preferably the introductory or bridge bars of the song sometimes called a vamp. Vocals just complicate editing.

My preference is for a ringtone to be short — 10-15 seconds — so that it repeats, like a conventional phone ringing. Thus a "good" ringtone is judged on how it sounds played in loop mode. To achieve seamless looping, there need to be compatible zero crossings (ascending or descending) at the beginning and end of the selected passage, so that there is no sound hiccup when it repeats. The editing process to extract a ringtone from a longer work is exactly the same as the steps taken to remove a scratch or pop, only you save what you extract instead of what you join. [Instructions here.] Finally, I like to choose the endpoint to be a transition where you as a listener expect the musical pattern to change but instead it loops back to the beginning.

Some examples I recently created (click links for sound):

• My ringtone for my wife. We like Moby and Ellen likes the Bourne movies. (Let's not kid ourselves, she likes Matt Damon.) So a natural fit would be a passage from the Bourne theme, Extreme Ways.
• Ellen's ringtone for me. No-brainer. David Byrne is one of my musical heroes, so we picked a passage from I Zimbra by Talking Heads.
• My ringtone for my mother. No one knows Mom's musical tastes better than I, having made high-res digital transfers of all her cassettes to fill her iPod. But not a lot of her music meets the criteria above. I settled on the opening of Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary, as played by The Canadian Brass.
• Ellen's ringtone for her father. Had to be jazz. Many choices, including "Harvard Blues" by Duke Ellington (Tony is an alum). But, in the end we settled on the iconic piano vamp from Take Five by The Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Be creative. Have fun.

            Physical-to-Digital Restoration #61            



Artist: Talking Heads
Title: Fear of Music
Genre: Alternative
Year: 1979





Fear of Music is the third studio album by Talking Heads. The album reached number 21 on the Billboard 200 in the United States and peaked at number 33 on the UK Albums Chart. Three songs were released as singles between 1979 and 1980: "Life During Wartime," "I Zimbra," and "Cities." I loved the original radio promo for the album, a robotic monotone voice repeating "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music," over and over. It would be worth violating my "instrumental" rule to have this as a ringtone.

© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

The Secret of DNA's Success is That It Carries Information

It has been said that, as humans, music is in our DNA. According to promising results published in the journal Nature by researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute, practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthetic DNA may be feasible. What is the implication for music?

[Image credit: Janusz Kapusta. Title quote: Jonathan Wells.]

High-resolution digital audio (24-bit samples at 96KHz or higher) is big data. The transition of music from physical media to weightless high-resolution digital form is contributing to the forecasted 50-fold increase in global data by 2020, while hard drive capacity may only grow 15-fold in the same period [David Epstein]. There is a growing storage gap.

Enter DNA. Just as digital information can be encoded as arbitrarily long sequences of 1's and 0's, (bits) it is also possible to imagine the same information as arbitrarily long sequences of other characters, including 0's, 1's, and 2's (trits). EBI scientists Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney have devised a mapping from a string of trits to a DNA string with no repeated nucleotides {A, C, G, T}, as well as scheme for organizing arbitarily long DNA strings into overlapping fixed-lengths runs for sequencing with robust error-correction. The result is a method for encoding digital information in synthetic DNA, a volumetric (rather than planar) storage medium that requires no power and can last indefinitely.

 

Here's how it works (slightly simplified):

1. Digital music is encoded as a String S0 of 24-bit samples.
2. S0 is converted from binary to String S1 in base-3, transforming each 24-bit sample to a sequence of 18 trits.
3. Add length information (20 trits) and zero-padding to produce a string S2 whose length N is a multiple of 25.
4. Convert S3 to a DNA string S3 of nucleotide (nt) characters {A, C, G, T} according to a mapping based on the last character written and the next trit in the sequence, such that there are no repeated nt.
5. Split S3 into overlapping segments of 100 nt, each offset from the previous by 25 nt. This step provides decoding redundancy for error correction. Each nt is contained in up to four segments. For a string S3 of length N, N/25 − 3 segments are produced.

Encoding high-resolution digital audio as a DNA string.

According to this method, 1 second of 24/96 digital audio comprising 576K bytes would generate a DNA string of more than 16 Million nt, a 28x size expansion that seems inefficient. (Digital aduio is typically compressed for storage, not expanded.) But DNA is incredibly dense. Even with the data size expansion, DNA encoding achieves a data density of 2.2 Million GB/gram, which translates to more than 1200 hours of high-definition digital stored in a single gram of DNA barely visible to the human eye. (That's twice the size of my entire library.)

 

Goldman and Birney proved the viability of their method by encoding digital files of all the Shakespearean sonnets into synthetic DNA, then using standard DNA sequencing software to recover the string for decoding to the original texts.

 

A media player based on DNA playback is not in our immediate future. The current price of DNA storage is estimated at $7.5 Million per GB, as opposed to $0.05 ("five cents") per GB for magnetic disc space. Furthermore, the speed of DNA sequencing and subsequent decoding to audio does not support real-time playback. The technology is on a 50-year horizon.

 

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #53            

Artist: Dan Fogelberg & Tim Weisberg

Title: Twin Sons of Different Mothers
Genre: Rock
Year: 1978





You wouldn't have thought to put the late folk singer/songwriter Dan Fogelberg with jazz flutist Tim Weisberg, but the collaboration worked well, even producing the hit "Power of Gold." A fitting title for our discussion of DNA. 70's hair aside, the two musicians don't really look like twins, a fact they conceded on their followup 1995 release, No Resemblance Whatsoever.


© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.