A Day in the Life of The Spectrum



When was the last time you listened to a single pre-programmed radio station for a full day? If you do, any problems with its format will quickly reveal themselves.

My wife and I just returned from our annual August Detroit-to-Minneapolis road trip. Three solid days of driving (in a seven-day excursion), including one blissful day following the Great River Road scenic byway along the Mississippi from Dubuque IA, to Red Wing MN.

Normally SiriusXM's The Spectrum channel competes with Detroit FM station WDET for bandwidth while we're in the car. But for the first day in the wild, we listened to The Spectrum exclusively (12 hours). After that, and after I decided to write this piece, we listened exclusively for two more days. Its "spectrum of rock" format has several problems, for which I offer SiriusXM possible solutions. You're welcome.

Problem: Repitition. The spectrum of rock is neatly packaged into a cycle of artists that is repeated roughly every four hours. We arbitrarily identified the start of the cycle as the song, If I Loved You by Delta Rae. (Co-written by Lindsey Buckingham, IIYL has displaced Bruce Springsteen's Girls in Their Summer Clothes as the saddest song ever. Scroll down to the comments to learn why.) The Spectrum plays a set combination of "new" artists and "heritage" artists during the cycle, and the treatment of each has unique problems.
Solution: There are six cycles in a day. Rather than repeat the same roster of artists in each cycle, venture out to introduce some percentage of different artists in each of the first three cycles, then venture back in the trailing three to come full circle.

Problem: Music Stagnovery. To their credit, SiriusXM includes a healthy percentage of new or emerging artists in The Spectrum programming, addressing the much-discussed music discovery "problem" (a problem that has never plagued me). But they play the one promoted single from any of these artists, reinforced by so-called Spectrum Tastemaker online voting. The discovery process stagnates, leaving the listener in a state of music stagnovery, wanting to hear more from these artists.
Solution: Create a new channel of the so-called Bakers Dozen weekly Spectrum listener favorite artists to showcase additional material.

Problem: Promotion Lockout. So-called heritage artists like Pearl Jam, The Avett Brothers and Elvis Costello are among the tent poles of The Spectrum programming. However, each of these acts has a new album coming out in the next couple months, and the one promoted single from those albums has locked out all other PJ, AB ad EC material (more stagnovery). I've already made my future purchase decision based on the first couple plays (yes, I prefer to own music) — move on.
Solution: Resume regular programming for these artists, and promote the new material as available for free streaming at SiriusXM website. Maybe even free download.

Problem: Stealth Promotion. No matter the time of day or program host, post-play patter for Coldplay included the factoid that the band had recorded a song for the soundtrack of an upcoming movie. And always that Lenny Kravitz extended his acting career with an appearance in the same movie. While sounding folksy and conversational, all the factoids get the convoluted movie title exactly right and include the release date. I know a commercial when I hear one.
Solution: Transparency. "Coldplay programming is made possible by Lionsgate Films, presenting The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, in theatres November 22nd." Works for NPR.

Automakers are already hedging their bets on the long-term viability of satellite radio by including user-customizable internet streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and I Heart Radio in their multimedia infotainment units, as well as content aggregators like Aha Radio by Harman. (The satellite tuner would follow the CD player as the latest one-trick component to be eliminated.) To stay competitive, SiriusXM must either abandon broadcast for internet streaming or find creative ways to add diversity to mass customization.

            Physical-to-Digital Restoration #59            



Artist: Charles Mingus
Title: Mingus Ah Um
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1959






The Penguin Guide to Jazz calls this album "an extended tribute to ancestors" (and awards it one of their rare crowns), and Mingus's musical forebears figure largely throughout. One of my favorite tracks, the oft-covered "Goodbye Porkpie Hat" is a tribute to saxophonist Lester Young, who had died shortly before the album was released. "Self-Portrait in Three Colors" (speaking of the spectrum) was originally written for the John Cassavetes film Shadows about Beat-Era jazz in New York City, but appeared herein for the first time.


© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

What Bell Labs Taught Me About Effective Design

In his book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, Jon Gertner offers a sweeping history of Bell Laboratiories (aka "Bell Labs" or "The Labs") that highlights its role as the birthplace of some of the 20th century's most influential technologies.

(Image credit: sixrevisions.com)

For me, Bell Labs is not an abstract American success story. It's personal. I spent the first decade of my career in the Bell Labs Signal Processor Laboratory in Whippany NJ. I can't really say I used The Labs as a springboard to change the world at large, but Bell Labs changed my world by teaching me that selfish design — designing for myself — is the catalyst for creating works that have meaning for others.

The Labs was a great place to be a young engineer. It offered a unique combination of freedom, responsibility, and access to knowledge and expertise. About 18 months after being hired out of grad school, I got the asssignment that would define my career. I was challenged to, within 30 days, design and demonstrate a prototype program for creating dataflow signal processing systems visually, including code generation.

Teletype 5620, nee Blit.

I immediately grasped in my mind what I wanted gred (as it was called) to be, inspired by months of experimenting with the Blit graphics terminal, which ran Bell Labs research scientist  Rob Pike's landmark ovelapping bitmap layers windowing system. Studying the Blit source code taught me everything I ever needed to learn about guru-class programming.

There are two approaches to design. Either make something so simple there are no obvious defects, or make something so complicated there are no obvious defects. (C.A.R. Hoare) The Blit source — compact, elegant, every element stripped to its essence — showed me that the path of simplicity not only satisfies, but also educates and enlightens.

I also came to realize, from studying designs I admired from other Bell Labs researchers, that establishing your own guiding principles for the success of a design and holding to them — selfish design — is the surest path to "fitness for use," a definition for product quality championed by our Laboratory Director, AT&T Fellow Caryl Pettijohn. If something works perfectly for you, chances are it will work for others; conversely, if something doesn't work well for you, it probably won't do better for anyone else.

Armed with these principles, I got the gred prototype for the Blit done on deadline, and it went on to become a great success with many spin-offs, the project that defined my career at The Labs. I was able to continue working on it at least part-time for the better part of 5 years increasing its capabilities and scope until it was perfect. And I can say gred was perfect because I was its #1 power user. I designed it for me. It had effective symbology, the exact number of features it needed, and I could readily defend why every feature was incorporated into the design, and why others were left out. More importantly, gred never went offline during these design iterations, and at every step it was the best solution available.

Rob Pike is famously quoted regarding his team's motiviation to invent the Blit: "it wasn't that we wanted high-performance graphics on everyone's desk; we just wanted high-performance graphics on our desks." I didn't start what has become In Aurem because I wanted everyone to have high-resolution digital restorations of their analog audio titles; I just wanted high-resolution digital restorations of my titles. And, by again selfishly staying true to my guiding principles for audio restoration, the effort has paid benefits to others as well.

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #26           

Title: Building the Perfect Beast

Artist: Don Henley

Genre: Rock

Year: 1984

The same summer I set out to build the perfect visual editor for signal processing graphs, ex-Eagle Don Henley released his first solo record, a hit-making machine. The Boys of Summer became one of the gred project theme songs, eternally linked through my Bell Labs colleagues' rewrite of a line involving "a Dead head sticker on a Cadillac." I can still hear it in my mind.


© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.