Cassette 'Fad'?

[ashley BORG]

Tapes are à la mode. Unfortunately, most of the latest records i wanted to buy have been released on tapes, and i prefer having something physical rather than a less personal mp3. So i finally brought back my old walkman from my parents'. It has its charm.
However, I don't understand the trend. A local recordshop owner even told me he didn't want to distribute my split Cd because nobody buy Cd's anymore, but that if I had released it on a tape, he would........

Seriously? WTF?

I'm still happy enough to buy CD. I can play it in the car, and in a club via CDJs.

How does one play a tape release in a club?

Commercially (on a global scale) I can see CDs will die out, but there's no reason like vinyl that it can't be retained as a medium for playing club music.

[Críoch]

Doubledecks Ashley! Thats how you do it. How do you think the cavemen used to rave? FFS

Half press the play button down to get it in sync. Set a cue using pause for choppier transitions. Mix it up!!

[Lost to the Void]

How does one play a tape release in a club?

You know nothing John Snow


youtu.be/088AWsTtTFU

[ashley BORG]

How does one play a tape release in a club?

You know nothing John Snow


youtu.be/088AWsTtTFU

Hahaha (get's coat and goes home)

[quest]

Tape hiss and vinyl crackle are different types of noise, and the bias is t quite White noise either. both can be added back in to any recording.
So if you added tape noise to a digital recording would that work?

I do find noise of any type quite relaxing myself.
My preference is the sound of a hair dryer for some reason. I find it hypnotic and relaxing.

But anyway, I think we've talked on this before.
I think there are way too many variables to even begin to deal with this unless in extremely controlled situations.
Eliminating all variables not conducive to the test.

Type of music, familiarity to the music,order of play, expectation bias,mthe re are a shit load of variables to eliminate to lock down any half decent science on this.

What if you tell someone they are listening to an analog recording when it isn't at all, placebo effect etc? Most people can't even differentiate between MP3 and uncompressed.

Emotional grip! How can you even test that with any degree of accuracy at all? That's completely subjective and again you would really really need extremely tightly controlled conditions eliminating a ton of variables to any even a pseudo scientifically relevant result.

Last point is observational, no intention to involve it in any studies. But we will definitely have placebos.

I definitely care a bit less about attempting to prove this or that than I am trying to extract value from observations.

My main interest is in calling the whole field of sound therapy "tip of the iceberg" and going deeper to develop new approaches.

I want to merge approaches that involve auditory, visual and tactile signals to yield the biggest differences in biofeedback sensor readings.

Developing advanced methods for achieving highly relaxed states is one of them, hence my interest in why noise produces this effect.

But I think there is a way to extend the session from the initial point of relaxing the subject to go on to put them into the flow state we discussed earlier.

Synchronizing stimuli in terms of periodic waveform multipliers and divides is the basic approach, with experimentation in phase alignment to follow.

Phase aligning a sound to its corresponding color (multiplying the Hz or kHz range signal up to the Terrahertz band the visual spectrum is in) would be extremely difficult, but simply letting them run without phase alignment is not too difficult (I have already written code that does this).

Back to the original topic, I'm not going to attempt to publish anything I think is so loosely controlled that it falls into the domain of pseudo science.

On the other hand, if the observations remain consistent, I might be tempted to play back from a cassette deck whose output is split to be also fed into a DSP which then feeds an FFT that controls a pixel matrix (Oculus Rift works great for this) and set of tactile transducers coupled to wood frame chair or bed, rather than play back from a digital audio file.

In other words, whether it's easy to prove or not, analog playback devices might be more than a fad.

[Thumper]

I've still got mine twin deck tape player, and I still occasionally play tapes on it. I've about half a dozen mix tapes from the 90's I want to digitally archive, but once that's done I can't see myself having much use for the deck again aside from nostalgia reasons.

We'll see how long the current fad lasts. I'm guessing it'll be until some Hipster's vintage Walkman eats the oh so limited edition tape he's just bought. Mind you, if they're so cool and popular now, how come pencil sales haven't increased?

[atom_output]

i like the idea of releasing tapes for your own purposes. it's beyond stupid to waste your resources just to start a cassette label, nobody is going to buy that shit expect for some random hipsters.

but, i think it's kinda cool to use it as a marketing tool. a guerrilla one.

for instance, do some cool design, make those cassettes and them place them strategically in places (clubs, mental hospitals etc). on the cover design, print some subtle message where to find your music on the internet.

[Lost to the Void]

Tape hiss and vinyl crackle are different types of noise, and the bias is t quite White noise either. both can be added back in to any recording.
So if you added tape noise to a digital recording would that work?

I do find noise of any type quite relaxing myself.
My preference is the sound of a hair dryer for some reason. I find it hypnotic and relaxing.

But anyway, I think we've talked on this before.
I think there are way too many variables to even begin to deal with this unless in extremely controlled situations.
Eliminating all variables not conducive to the test.

Type of music, familiarity to the music,order of play, expectation bias,mthe re are a shit load of variables to eliminate to lock down any half decent science on this.

What if you tell someone they are listening to an analog recording when it isn't at all, placebo effect etc? Most people can't even differentiate between MP3 and uncompressed.

Emotional grip! How can you even test that with any degree of accuracy at all? That's completely subjective and again you would really really need extremely tightly controlled conditions eliminating a ton of variables to any even a pseudo scientifically relevant result.

Last point is observational, no intention to involve it in any studies. But we will definitely have placebos.

I definitely care a bit less about attempting to prove this or that than I am trying to extract value from observations.

My main interest is in calling the whole field of sound therapy "tip of the iceberg" and going deeper to develop new approaches.

I want to merge approaches that involve auditory, visual and tactile signals to yield the biggest differences in biofeedback sensor readings.

Developing advanced methods for achieving highly relaxed states is one of them, hence my interest in why noise produces this effect.

But I think there is a way to extend the session from the initial point of relaxing the subject to go on to put them into the flow state we discussed earlier.

Synchronizing stimuli in terms of periodic waveform multipliers and divides is the basic approach, with experimentation in phase alignment to follow.

Phase aligning a sound to its corresponding color (multiplying the Hz or kHz range signal up to the Terrahertz band the visual spectrum is in) would be extremely difficult, but simply letting them run without phase alignment is not too difficult (I have already written code that does this).

Back to the original topic, I'm not going to attempt to publish anything I think is so loosely controlled that it falls into the domain of pseudo science.

On the other hand, if the observations remain consistent, I might be tempted to play back from a cassette deck whose output is split to be also fed into a DSP which then feeds an FFT that controls a pixel matrix (Oculus Rift works great for this) and set of tactile transducers coupled to wood frame chair or bed, rather than play back from a digital audio file.

In other words, whether it's easy to prove or not, analog playback devices might be more than a fad.

Well, I still think you are blanketing "analog" as one thing, and not fully eliminating variables, but rather looking for results to match your expectations.

I have an example here.

For the last 2 years I`ve been researching, training, attending seminars, ghosting with engineers, to basically get my vinyl mastering skills locked down. To the point now where, once we move, I am looking to invest in a cutting lathe.

around 50% of my mastering work is now for vinyl.

I used to, for labels who were dealing in both formats, provide masters for digital release as well as their vinyl cut.
However after time as my skill and knowledge improved I found I could get my vinyl masters to a competitive level to digital masters, almost without the need for any limiting at all.
Also people tended to prefer the sound of a vinyl master.
So I decided to just master everything as if it were going on to vinyl, unless requested otherwise by my clients.

Now allow me a little divergence before I get back to where this is going.
The "sound" of vinyl doesn`t really come from the vinyl itself, but it comes from the processes you carry out on the audio material to meet the requirements of the vinyl medium. Cutting (and playback) needles don`t like a lot of things, and the cutting medium also is picky about what it will receive. Essentially I am talking about the limitations of the medium, to do with EQ, dynamics, transients, I won`t go in to all the processes.
Essentially it involves softening the overall attack, solidifying the lows (but removing the very low frequencies) and softening down both the attack and amount of high frequencies. These things combine to make the vinyl "warmth" that people like, and not the actual medium itself so much.

Now, since I started doing vinyl mastering as my standard, regardless of final format destination, I have encountered some odd responses.


Older, more experienced producers and labels tend to love/prefer the vinyl masters I do.
But the younger generations tend to not like it at all. They don`t like the softer top end, they prefer the more precise, brighter, detailed sound of digital.
These "kids" generally I get to at least try the vinyl sound, but generally, after listening, they ask for the masters produced for digital format.
Why? It`s what they are familiar with. And we get comfort from what is familiar to us. So for them, it is the "purer" sound that digital formats (that they have grown up with) tend to have, that they prefer.
And so it would be, probably, that they would find it easier to relax to music provided with this type of balancing and dynamic.
It came as a surprise to me because at a younger age your ears are more sensitive to high frequencies, so I would have though that the fuller sound of modern formats would be grating to them, but quite the opposite overall.
As an addition to this, the vinyl "sound" can be done in an analogue or a digital way, either entirely or in combination, and people don`t notice the difference.
I have done vinyl masters entirely digitally both in the box and out the box, entirely analogue, and using all processes combined, it really depends on what is needed for the material I am working on.
But generally due to expectation bias, people always assume that the vinyl masters they have been given were done in analogue, or mostly analogue.
And I have had comments such as "love that analogue sound you have given my material, it`s so warm" when on occasion no analogue has touched the audio.

So my point is that there are far too many variables, or at least you don`t seem to have considered them.

[winston]

that's pretty interesting, but it makes sense. people will be trying to get their own music up to the standard of the music that they like, so you can see that those who were buying vinyl and have their ears trained to vinyl will have a different view of what sounds good than those who have only ever bought from beatport.

And I have had comments such as "love that analogue sound you have given my material, it`s so warm" when on occasion no analogue has touched the audio.

i think the term 'analogue sound' is one of those terms people use when they are unable to really explain or understand what they are hearing and what they want to be saying. it's like a catch all term for something that doesn't sound thin. it also depends on who is saying it.

[quest]

Good points Void. It'll be another year at least before I can attempt to make a coherent explanation for the effects I've noticed. Yes I am basing this currently mostly on speculation stemming from observed results.

Again, I'm not saying "I" like analogue, I'm saying "the data indicates that anyone who is able to respond at all in a significant way (some people seem to be generally unresponsive to stimuli, which I am beginning to suspect is a kind of unhealthy state), respond differently to analogue signals than they do to digital signals.

That statement is loaded without going any further, for all the reasons indicated in your reply. The variables blow up because you can't actually set up an analogue and digital signal source and call them equivalent for comparison purposes.

My most controlled research is working with simple sine waves. If you are willing to agree that a sine wave generated in analogue is equivalent to a sine wave generated digitally, then perhaps I do have a valid basis for an experiment.

I am setting up tests that involve various combinations of sine waves, played across as broad a spectrum as the entire 20Hz to 20kHz range (with appropriate EQ curves for listenability).

When treating these as artificially created harmonics to a fundamental tone in the range brainwaves can entrain to, the difference between analogue and digital is startling, in terms of how well and how quickly entrainment is achieved.

Keep in mind this is totally tangential to listener preference, which indeed includes bias. I like digital for classical music so that sound nuance is not obscured by noise or degradation, but I find ultra-digital modern "EDM" to be abrasive sonically just as much as the vibe seems often pretentious and shallow.

I am zeroing in on the biological effects of signal theory in a way that goes beyond audio. I have noticed similarities in graphics and tactile vibration research (I'd similarly prefer to work with analog video synthesizers and directly drive tactile transducers from my analog polysynth) and each time the only rational explanations can be reduced to a small set of basic principles.

Digital signals seem to be forever limited by finite resolutions of variables involved in digitization, while analogue seems forever limited by our inability to design analogue components in a way that doesn't introduce additional noise, and reductions at ends of the audio spectrum.

Each has their own advantages however, with the advantages of analogue being the least obvious. I don't directly seek to prove analogue's advantages, but doing so may be a byproduct of the work I am really trying to do.

It's definitely true I find myself constantly clamping down on the high frequencies in my music, and I suspect I am more bothered by what I perceive to be high frequency harshness than the younger generation, whose dubstep etc. seems shrill to me.

But I may be able to prove that regardless of personal preferences, we react categorically to different signal types so long as we are not numb to external signals in general.

[Lost to the Void]

I'm not against or for analog, by the way, I use whatever whenever depending on what I want or need, but I've just been involved with so much testing and done so much work with audio in all its aspect to acknowledge now that subjectivity and "placebo" like effects are more powerful influences than any technical realities.
In my own job there is a constant battle between the objective and subjective.

I can and have gone through so many situations where people, including experts have been utterly utterly wrong entirely about the nature of the source of audio, or influenced by what they have been told.
I've tricked myself enough times by forgetting to switch something back in the audio path thinking it added the extra final cherry on top, only to realise it's not there at all.

Subjectivity, the power of belief is incredible.
In itself it's very interesting, the power of the mind, there are some really interesting medical studies on the power of placebo.

I'm willing to bet you could conduct one of your tests and play them only one audio source several times, and some people will convince themselves of a difference . Especially if you go the opposite of blind and tell them recording a is digital recording b is analogue, when both are digital or whatever.

[quest]

I prefer to tell them nothing at all, simply that I need to calibrate the system to each subject (which is actually true), so they need to hear the same material a couple of times.

I'm not collecting any feedback, just observing data from the EEG, EMG and EKG.

If you think what I've described so far is farfetched, just you wait. After I brought the research out of a university lab and into a private research space that was a more "comfortable" to the subject, results improved. I bet they'd improve even more if I set up a space outside of the city.

In terms of biofeedback, people's receptivity to signal stimuli seems to be almost measurable itself. This is why interviews are needed before the experiment but not after. It's actually important to know what people have been going through, on a bad day they might not react much at all.

In other words, I don't actually care what people think of the sound, as long as it's pleasant enough to not make them more stressed than they already were (practically speaking the audio is produced in a way that makes it extremely relaxing, like Dr. Jeffrey Thompson level ambient), I'm simply interested in capturing the biosignal variations for analysis.

I'm more interested in studying the signal spectrum as a whole than focusing on audio, though audio seems most effecting on people due to the broad spectrum and the way we've developed to respond to sound even more than sight (arguably faster response times).

I'd equally like to prove the unhealthy effects of general signal bombardment of anyone living in a big city as I am proving analogue is better for entrainment, but I do want to try and use the most potent entrainment methods I possibly can.

[Lost to the Void]

Noise is a fucking nightmare.
City noise... Noise pollution is such a good way of describing it.

It's fascinating that noise can be both relaxing and utterly intolerable.

Again, subjectivity, one mans poison is another mans elixir. I used to meditate to tv static.

They used old classical music records to fuck off kids loitering in train stations and stuff.

They used to do it in the village where my mum lives, overnight it stopped the local kids from congregating on the train station at night (they stopped it eventually as local residents complained about the music, ironically) because they can't stand the music.

I used to love sitting on the platform waiting for a train after visiting my mum, it was wonderful, relaxing, a little bit of Debussy or Rachmaninov late at night in an old Victorian station....

[Mslwte]

I used to play white noise through an app on my phone to send my girls asleep when they were babies. It worked a treat lol.

Now I play my music and that seems to be just as effective.

[quest]

Noise is a fucking nightmare.
City noise... Noise pollution is such a good way of describing it.

It's fascinating that noise can be both relaxing and utterly intolerable.

Again, subjectivity, one mans poison is another mans elixir. I used to meditate to tv static.

They used old classical music records to fuck off kids loitering in train stations and stuff.

They used to do it in the village where my mum lives, overnight it stopped the local kids from congregating on the train station at night (they stopped it eventually as local residents complained about the music, ironically) because they can't stand the music.

I used to love sitting on the platform waiting for a train after visiting my mum, it was wonderful, relaxing, a little bit of Debussy or Rachmaninov late at night in an old Victorian station....

I can imagine it would be a pretty ambient experience. I've used a Debussy piano sample in a down tempo track which definitely shows where early 20th and impressionist repertoire explore a lot of the same places musically as electronic music, you know the classic stuff like The Orb, etc.

I'm preparing two piano recitals for next year, in one I'll play all early 20th and impressionist rep (Scriabin, Stanchinsky, Vladigerov, and then Mompou, Debussy and Ravel), the other one will be all minimalism (Ann Southam, John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, LaMonte Young).

I'm really enjoying cross referencing some of the textural palettes, imagining how the impressionist might work with synthesizers.

Getting back to the OT, minimal dubs to cassettes are great because for than genre you really benefit from the added tape hiss, etc.

The offer stands for people who have tapes decks or walkmen, if you want to try a tape my offer stands for finding more participants!

[Críoch]

I remember well the first time as a teenager that I heard a CD. I thought it v.harsh & bright sounding. I'd been used to listening to tapes & vinyl. I'd nearly always buy singles on vinyl.

Seen a news report on the increase of vinyl sales recently. A teenage girl was saying she enjoyed buying vinyl cos it was something she could hold, read the cover etc. I'm sure all here who had tapes & vinyl albums of old remember sitting down & actually listening to the music for its duration without doing anything else. No phones. No distractions. Just absorbing the music & memorising every detail of the cover in your hands.

We've become emotionally detached from music cos of digital. Artefacts are good. Go tape!

[ashley BORG]

It's across the board on all media now John. Films and books have gone the same way, possibly to a lesser extent. A lot of it is now down to us using multimedia and usage devices. We're only one notification away from distraction.

[Lost to the Void]

I remember well the first time as a teenager that I heard a CD. I thought it v.harsh & bright sounding. I'd been used to listening to tapes & vinyl. I'd nearly always buy singles on vinyl.

Seen a news report on the increase of vinyl sales recently. A teenage girl was saying she enjoyed buying vinyl cos it was something she could hold, read the cover etc. I'm sure all here who had tapes & vinyl albums of old remember sitting down & actually listening to the music for its duration without doing anything else. No phones. No distractions. Just absorbing the music & memorising every detail of the cover in your hands.

We've become emotionally detached from music cos of digital. Artefacts are good. Go tape!

I remember the first CD`s I heard, I was blown away by them.
My dad was really big on music, used to play in jazz bands and stuff, so we always had a really good stereo in the house.
My dad got a wonderful Technics A class separates system when he wanted to update and make the house CD compatible, and I remember him going nuts about CD`s (he was a design engineer for the aerospace industry and obsessed with science) and he told me how the music will now be more correctly represented to the source and all the other technical shit that at the time I simply didn`t understand.
He played me a load of Jarre stuff, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, some count basie remasters. It was amazing, so clear and present, especially the bass, blasting out of the technics speakers.
Then my sister got with all her new wave, electropop, goth and so on, with new order, depeche mode etc, on CD.

I pretty much stopped buying vinyl from that point, most of my albums were on vinyl, I tended to transfer them to tape to listen to in my room or on my walkman, and began my rather vast CD collection. I loved that the good artists made nice booklets in the CD`s with artwork and stuff, sometimes telling stories.

I think there is something to be said for having an artefact to hold....

Anyway, I had one of the nieces up to visit at the weekend, we took her out for her 12th birthday, and she is just beginning to get in to music, and took more of an interest in my studio than she has before, and wanted to know what I did.

I showed her my most recent vinyl release and she almost laughed at it. This massive antiquated thing.

I`m ok with change, as long as the music is good and the production is good, I`m ready for holographic 4 dimensional virtual storage mediums.

[PixelKind]

I dont think there will be any new medium for music distribution. We pretty much already are at a technological stage where its not about one album or EP on a medium but a huge collection of albums. And for the physical side there are CDs and vinyl (or tape). There is no reason to make anything new that only holds a few tracks

[msl]

I dont think there will be any new medium for music distribution. We pretty much already are at a technological stage where its not about one album or EP on a medium but a huge collection of albums. And for the physical side there are CDs and vinyl (or tape). There is no reason to make anything new that only holds a few tracks

Direct to brain neural transfer