omenti

in search of a line and a circle

Those of you who know me know I've spent quite a bit of time in the past fifteen years worried about climate change - it is one of the few high impact high probability events I know of that can be mitigated, so focus seems appropriate.

 

I've tried a variety of approaches and have largely failed to make any impact.  At first education seemed right as it is something I believe in, but you need a stable and sufficient base on which to build and I was assuming that the scientific literacy of the American public was much higher than it was.  I still work at it and have tried several approaches, but the overall response ranges from crickets to a negative reaction.  Of course this is giving me a strong signal on my abilities relative to the challenge and others who are much better communicators have had also had little or no impact.  

 

I sometimes use this qualitative chart in my talks.  If anything the think tank bump should be much smaller, but you get the idea.  The media does not cover the dominant scientific view and tries to balance opinion - the issue is there isn't any opinion in largely settled science.  Science is about confidence levels and for the likelihood that climate change is taking place,  being influenced by us, and will have a large impact, the confidence levels are high.¹

 

Storytelling is another mechanism that might work.  Several people are trying to exploit that path and some are trying a combination of education and storytelling.  That seems like it might be a viable approach, but one is up against pseudoscience, a natural bias in the media and a very well funded anti-science campaign.  I'm not a good speaker or storyteller, but I've been working a bit to support those who are.

 

The result is my views on what to do are shifting from worrying primarily about mitigation and moving more towards adaptation.  It is ultimately much less efficient and much more expensive than mitigation, but there is a lot of potential optimization and it seems like a rich area to study.  I'll still be thinking about mitigation a lot - particularly conservation and efficiency, but staying focused there may be a fool's errand.

 

Even though the state of the American response to climate change is on the depressing side it is fascinating and poses several interesting questions about everything from our social systems to how our minds work.  In thinking about these sometimes it is useful to step back and think about other historical challenges.  

 

And that brings us to a line and a circle...

 

Take a look at any modern ship.  Down near the waterline you'll see a circle with a line through it.  The line where where the hull of a ship meets the water is the Plimsoll Line and the little circle-line is technically called the International Load Line and indicated the legal limit to which a ship can be loaded.²   An extremely useful graphic - getting on a ship with water above the load line strikes you as something not entirely sane.

 

When you see a name as unusual as Plimsoll, you suspect a story.³

 

In the 19th century transatlantic shipping had become common.  Shipping disasters happened, but the introduction of insurance made them much more likely.  A shipper could load his vessels past their design limits and make quite a bit of extra coin on the voyage.  Should the ship be lost it and its contents were insured - often at more than 100% - and he would also come out ahead as ship building meant he could quickly replace his loss.  The only real loss was one many shippers chose to ignore - perhaps a hundred or so crewmen.  The practice was so common - nearly a thousand were dying each year - that merchant seamen called this overloaded and insured ships "coffin ships".

 

Samuel Plimsoll was a MP who crusaded for the rights of the seamen- often against great odds as the ship owners enjoyed a tight relationship with the government.  He is vilified in the House of Commons, but he became something of a folk hero with popular plays and songs written about him and the coffin ships.⁴  This grass-root support grew to a point where it nearly brought down the Disraeli government.  Finally there were sweeping reforms that probably saved tens of thousands of lives.  One of them - in my mind the most dramatic - was a simple little graphic that allowed you to understand if the ship's load made it unseaworthy.

 

I want - I think we need - a Plimsoll Line for climate change.

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¹ There is a lot of normal scientific dispute on the details of how great the impact will be and how this will play out, but that is like people going over a cliff in a car wondering how many times the car will bounce on the way down and if it will burn when it finally hits.  People tend to confuse the normal debate that takes place in science with the fact that some of the results are extremely likely ... it's just the details we're hazy on.

² There are a few other markings that account for the different water densities.  Sea water density depends on salinity and temperature.

³ I first heard about it in college during a visit to a large ship visiting Manhattan.  Much later I ran into a book on the subject and recommend it - The Plimsoll Sensation by Nicolette Jones.

⁴ John Storey sings a modern version based on some of the ballads

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Recipe Corner

 

This one is very easy to experiment with and surprisingly good.  A really good yogurt and olive oil are key.

 

Quinoa, yogurt, fruit and nuts

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl cleaned dry quinoa - red quinoa is particularly good

° a dozen shelled and chopped pistachios  (raw or salted and raw)

° a dozen chopped almonds (I used unblanched, but blanched would probably work)

° 350 - 400 grams of whole plain Greek yogurt (I use Fage)

° 4 medjool dates, chopped and pitted.  I've also tried other dried fruit, so experiment.

° some lemon zest

° uniodized sea salt - a finishing salt like Maldon is best

° a tbl or more of your best extra virgin olive oil

 

Technique

 

° Start the oven heating to 350°F

° Put the quinoa in a small pan over medium heat and toast it until it starts to pop.  Then pour it into a bowl and cool.

° Spread the pistachio and almond chunks onto a baking pan and toast for five minutes in the oven.  Then remove and cool.  Alternatively you can do this in a pan over  burner, but you need to be *very* careful to not burn them. 

° Spread equal amounts of yogurt onto two plates and sprinkle on the dates, nuts, and quinoa.  Sprinkle on a bit of lemon zest and salt and finally drizzle on a bit of olive oil

 

yumm!!

happy holidays!

OK - here is the 18th year of the card I first put up around now in 1994 ...  the last host went out of business and my free hosting doesn't support auto streaming, so you'll have to click on the player to listen..

The drawing came together in about a minute. The music was done in midi editing with a keyboard looking at a score and happened to take considerably longer.  I put it on a server I was running on a computer under my desk and sent the link to readers of The Crandall Surf Report - an early pre-blog I wrote in the Mosaic era.

I didn't think much of it until the second year when people started bothering me to re-post it.  Dozens of people.  One thing led after another and now it is celebrating its  18^th year.  The current server no longer supports midi and I was forced to convert it to mp3 - so much for authenticity.

anyway ... whatever your holiday, have a good one!

 

 

 

 

on thanksgiving

I have so much to be thankful for that it is good we celebrate this day several times a year.  Some great family members and a few astoundingly wonderful friends who I consider family.  Too many of them are at a distance, so for a few we put on a Thanksgiving celebration when they visit.

 

I'm also thankful for the wide span of interests I'm regularly exposed to.  Connecting the dots and uncovering brand new ignorance is aided by this approach and I'm lucky enough to know some very different and very brilliant minds.  It certainly adds to the quality of my own work (except writing - I doubt I'll ever sort that out properly).

 

Music and art are very important to me.  I'm not very good at music and maybe a bit better at art, but they impact me deeply and are part of how I think and solve problems.¹ Last night I heard a NPR All Things Considered report on Max Richter's recomposition of the first four concerti of Vivaldi's Il Cimento dell' Armenia e dell'invenzione - otherwise known as The Four Seasons.

 

First some background is in order...

 

I'm something of a musical omnivore these days.  The range of music that interests me has grown with time - as an undergrad it was mostly western classical music, folk songs and some emerging electronic music.  When I went to grad school on Long Island I bought a VW Rabbit and wanted a vanity license plate.  

 

At the time I was deeply into the late baroque and early classical period and decided on VIVALDI on my Montana plates (I was still a resident).²   Having them generated more than a few stories, but my favorite took place at a Mobil gas station in Rocky Point, LI.

 

I had just filled it and gave the attendant my credit card - full service was still standard in New York in those days.  She went to the back of the car to write down the license plate.  Watching in my rearview mirror (she was about 18 or 20 and a pretty blonde), I noticed a look of confusion spread over her face.  She slowly walked back to the station, completed the transaction and started walking back...   Halfway from me her gait suddenly changed and her countenance switched into that smile of delight that comes with an "aha!" moment.  She handed the card and receipt to me and said with a knowing confidence

 

"Vivaldi - that's the vampire, right?!"

 

How could you possibly ruin such a perfect moment...   I gave her a knowing and impressed look and said - "you nailed it.  You wouldn't imagine how few people come up with that..."

 

Such a delightful moment - one is thankful for them whenever and wherever they appear.

 

I add the music is wonderful and something of a revelation if you know the Vivaldi work well.  It is very different, but added to my appreciation and understanding of the original - I've already listened to it three times.  Available on iTunes and probably elsewhere. Essential  stuff!

 

I'm also thankful for delightful little hacks that private citizens come up with.  Jheri points out this delightful bit of social hackery to help non-Danes pronounce street names in Copenhagen.

 

 

WTPh? - What the Phonics from Andrew Spitz on Vimeo.

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

Two items this time.  A quick improvement (at least for me) on Thanksgiving cranberry sauce followed by a good side dish for this time of the year.  The ratios probably aren't that important - particularly the sugar .. more if you like it sweeter, less for a tarter sauce.

 

 

Cranberry and Blueberry Sauce

Ingredients

° 350g  cranberries (thawed if frozen)

° 175g water

° 200g white cane sugar

° 225g blueberries (thawed if frozen)

° 2 tsp vanilla extract (I use a good homemade extract)

Technique

° cook cranberries in the water over medium-high heat until the cranberries begin to pop (about 3 minutes)

° add sugar and blueberries and cook until mixture comes to a full boil.  Continue on boil until the mixture thickens a bit - maybe 3 minutes

° remove from heat and add vanilla -> refrigerate

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I love celeriac.  Cutting them is much easier than you might think, but be sure and wash out all of the dirt.  You need a good vegetable stock for this one.  Store-bought sock will not cut it.

Celeriac Gratin

Ingredients

° 1 large onion finely sliced

° 2 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° 750 g vegetable stock (I made a really rich one based on mushrooms)

° 1 tsp cider vinegar

° 1 largish garlic clove, smashed

° 3 sprigs thyme

° a large celeriac (mine was 600g after peeling)

° 180g eating class apple

° 50g hazelnuts, lightly toasted, skinned and roughly chopped

° a sea salt (I like Maldon) and fresh ground black pepper

Technique

° preheat oven to 400°F

° heat the oil over medium heat in a pan and gently fry the onion until soft and translucent.  Add the stock vinegar, garlic and thyme; crank the heat to medium high and bring to a boil.

° quarter the celeriac and thinly slice.  Add the celeriac to the pan; reduce heat to simmer, cover and let cook for about 15 minutes.  Season to taste..

° move half the celeriac and onions to a shallow ovenproof dish with a slotted spoon.  Peel and thinly slice the apple and arrange slices on top of the celeriac.  Pour about 200g of the liquid over the pile, scatter  the hazelnuts over the top and back 45 minutes.

 

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¹ Two of my senses, hearing and vision,  are non-orthogonal. Having crisply orthogonal senses makes a lot of sense if you are a hunter and potential prey, but the specialization that comes with civilization has allowed some of us with this condition to survive.  I find it a great aid in doing physics and math, although I would love to experience crisply orthogonal sight and sound for awhile.

² The plates were stolen four times.  In New Jersey I used to have the plates WEASL 1 (we have ferrets) everyone who asked assumed I was a lawyer ... go figure...

 

 

the delight of playful creativity

At five thirty this morning I made my way to the basement for the morning rowing.  I sat on the machine, cued up the WBUR OnPoint podcast (I usually listen to whatever is current on Thursdays) on the iPod, pushed play and pulled backwards.  Little did I know...

 

Forty seven minutes flew by and I was ready for the next podcast to begin.  I knew I had something to blog about, that was different from what I was thinking about at five twenty five as I started to the basement, and I knew an apology would be necessary.  I rowed on in silence lost in thought and stopped about forty minutes later.  My ergometer said I had delivered 202.4 watt-hours to the flywheel.  Better than 150 watts on average - not bad for me.  

 

Before getting into what I was thinking and why I saw the need for an apology you need to listen to the show. (mp3)

 

Trust me - it is worth the time.

 

An interview and some samples from beatbox cellist Kevin Olusola.  While he's not technically a great cellist, he did get Yo-Yo Ma's attention.  Kevin's playfulness and experimentation and curiosity inform his creativity.  In creativity and playfulness he reminds me of musicians cellist Zöe Keating, Björk, and Reggie Watts and more than a few scientists.¹

 

When you are exposed to something like this you want to find more and let your friends know.  That made me think of one of you - Jheri.  

 

Jheri is this amazing person - creatitive, funny and kind.  The sort of person who amazes you by being a friend.   She knows exactly what I mean when I say play is a fundamental component of creativity and she is off-scale playful.  She also happens to have a hearing impairment.  I want to share this with you Jheri, but I know it won't work so I must apologize... 

 

or maybe not...

 

This is an opportunity.  Jheri is amazingly perceptive visually.  She is aware of the nuances of out-of-band communications that take place in face to face communications that most of us tend to miss.  She sees much more deeply than the rest of us and is a natural empath.  So while people like Niki, Lorraine, Linda and a few others will probably love listening to Kevin, I began to wonder about the part of the world Jheri sees that I am visually deaf to...

 

This is a chance for serendipty. Jheri - perhaps we can  investigate the parts of the world that are beautiful to you that are mostly invisible to people who hear well...   I know they exist - would you like to collaborate and sort a bit of this out?  Thinking about that excites me much more than listening to Kevin's wonderful music.  It is much more fun playing and learning than sitting back - even if what you are witnessing is as wonderful. 

 

Kevin is having wonderful fun and is bringing pleasure.  He started with a simple set of questions.  There is no reason why you can't have the fun in your domains.

 

Let's play Jheri

 

In the meantime I strongly recommend listening to the interview!

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¹ Reggie performed just before my TED^x talk and his performance completely captivated me.  Look him up - he's amazing.  We were talking immediately after TED and it turned out he is from Great Falls, Montana - he lived about 500 feet from our house.

the paganini strad...

I have a great fondness for artists and musicians.  For me their approach to work is very similar to some of the most enjoyable aspects of science.  Engineering and the natural sciences may be tied by a common mathematical language, but the approaches to the two sports are quite different - again for me, but I know others who share this view.  It is neither here nor there and variety in approaches to disciplines is important.  Others may find different kindred spirits and approaches - it is a fun area to ponder...

 

It turns out I’m a terrible musician.  The cello is my favorite instrument, so my gift to the world is refraining from playing.  I content myself with a bit of theremin building and fooling around with a strumstick - one is obscure enough that no one cares and the other simple enough that even I can achieve a bit of music.

 

But I love being around real musicians - from serious students to the masters.  Stony Brook, where I did my Ph.D., had a good music program.  They were particularly strong in the stringed instruments and the flute.  The Beaux Arts Trio was resident there creating some wonderful concerts and it was possible to find good music several times a week.  

 

There are  lot of fond memories from the music at that place.  As a grad student I co-founded a classical music series at Stony Brook that still exists to this day.  We were able to book the Beaux Arts Trio.  They offered a good price (I think it was about $4,000) as the trio was in residence at the school.  I had a friend who was a cello grad student and Professor  Greenhouse used to let me sit in on classes and master classes - he said it was critically important to connect with the audience, so why not.  

 

The D Major Suite

 

There was an amazing night when he was showing something to Amy (my friend) - something out of the Bach 6^th suite.¹  He played it a few ways, had her play it, play it another way and sighed - "this won't do" ..  then he performed the entire suite from beginning to end.  Sublime is not an adequate description.  Time simply ceased to exist for me and I think everyone else in the room.

 

He was still performing at the highest levels and teaching well into his 90s and only stopped playing about three weeks before he died.

 

Such an amazing person.

 

His favorite cello was the Paganini Cello - more properly known as the Countess of Stainlein Cello.  One of the few Stradivarius cellos and considered the best example of the breed.²  He started playing and time stopped until the last note had faded and we were all jarred back to Earth.

 

He was not a young man at the time.  He died last year at 95 - still playing almost until the end.  I have been lucky enough to have broken bread with Yo-Yo Ma a few times and he maintained a good cellist lacks the chops to do a really great job on the Bach Suites until he has the perspective of age.  He said he felt he could seriously attempt them for real when he is about 70.  Bernard was probably near the height of his powers when I heard him play. 

 

I know this cello well.  It surprised me to see an article in about it appear in this week's NY Times Magazine.   A great instrument is looking for a great caretaker for several more generations before it will be passed down through time.

 

Greenhouse died at 95 early last May - here is the NPR remembrance.  I feel lucky to have known him.  Such an incredible sense of humor and playfulness.  Cellists tell me he was a natural teacher - he was certainly a natural performer.  

 

sigh ..

 

Time is such a funny thing.  My world line has wandered through time and space and somehow managed to intersect with his world line on several occasions.  Those intersections became wonderfully colorful bits of thread for me.  You live for those colorful and lyrical threads that make up your path and they can even bring life to the fabric of spacetime.   I often feel my life is charmed and special.

 

Imagine the 305 year old world line of that cello as it embarks upon yet another segment.

 

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Recipe time.  Several people have encouraged me to continue with recipes.  This is something I have been doing for breakfasts for the past few weeks.  Basically whole wheat with scallions and a bit of olive oil and soy sauce.  It is really excellent and holds me well until lunch.  Use whatever ratios you like - I prepared a batch and measured for a guide.  I also like to use khorasan wheat which has a large kernel.  Kamut is the variety I like - mine is from Montana although it also grows in Alberta.  You can use any good olive oil, but I find rosemary infused oils add quite a bit - you can make your own, but start with a good olive oil.  I like Sciabica’s as I know where it is coming from in California and it is excellent - as good as any fine oil I’ve tried.  You pay a lot for good olive oils, but they are worth it is you care about your food.  Here is their rosemary evoo.  We've been using them for about 15 years now and find them to be very friendly with great service.

 

° 150 grams of whole wheat kernels

° 4 scallions - chopped

° 25 grams of rosemary infused olive oil 

° 30 grams pecans - chopped

° soy sauce to taste

° a finishing salt like Maldon (optional)

 

° Simmer the whole wheat for about 90 minutes in “enough” water.  I use a crock pot and enough water is something like 350 grams.  It should still have some texture when finished. 

 ° Drain the wheat and mix in the pecans and scallions. Mix in the olive oil and add soy sauce to taste.  I like to get it almost salty enough and then add a bit of Maldon salt at the end.

 

This makes about two servings.  Scale it as you like 

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¹ I can't make a recommendation for a single best set of Bach Cello Suites.  I just did the survey and find I have seven on vinyl, one reel to reel tape and four CDs ....  It is important, when you really love a piece of music like this, to hear as many great interpretations as you can.

² Yes - I realize that new great instruments may be as good as the old greats even to the performer - although I was not terribly impressed by the methodology of the paper.  Even if it is true,  there is a real magic of sorts being in the presence of musical history.

 

 

on the death of the high fidelity industry

One of the more curious learnings I’ve repeatedly had over the decades is that audio and video quality isn’t terribly important to people.  Some jumps have been important, but at some point quality seems to be “good enough” and people become interested in other metrics like price, mobility, convenience and selection.

 

We did a lot of work on audio compression and there was a drive to make our codec (AAC) the best of its class.  This involved a large amount of human testing and the reference music was mostly compact disc class.  Higher qualities existed, but it was felt compressed music to CD like quality was necessary.  

 

We did it.  By 2000 AAC was recognized as the best of its breed and it was statistically undetectable to most listeners at 128 kilobits per second.¹  A CD is 1440 kbps, so this shrinks the data file for a music track to about 9% of its original size - really useful if your network connection isn’t terribly fast. 

 

Audiophiles had been hoping one of several standards would take off by about that time taking us beyond CD quality, but it never really happened.  Internet delivered music and the iPod fundamentally changed how we listened to music.  A few years ago I came across an article that pointed out the aftermarket for iPod accessories was larger than the entire market for stereo equipment.  Good enough sound quality in our pockets and a large and easy to use library was all we needed - onventional HiFi was dying and some would say it is dead.² 

 

The little white earbuds you see everywhere are not exactly high quality.  For $40 or $50 you can dramatically improve your listening experience and for $150 or so the quality can be fantastic.  But almost no one does it.  The quality issue just doesn’t impact most of us.

 

There are other directions music quality could do - trying to create the sound field - the audio experience - of a concert.  But there is this little problem - outside of multichannel sound for television, no one is spending money on audio equipment and very few people spend serious money on good audio equipment for their televisions.  

 

It just doesn’t matter.

 

mostly³

 

A few years ago some of us revisited the issue of speech quality on telephones.  The frequency range of a normal telephone is small compared with normal human hearing and voices, particularly female voices, are altered.  Mobile phones introduce even more issues with low quality audio compression.  The notion was that expanding the frequency range from about 3 kHz to 7 kHz would make a big difference that people might pay buy.  We did some careful studies on 3 vs 7 vs 20 and came to the conclusion that it isn’t a big deal for most people.   In fact people under 30 had a slight bias to the lower quality sound.

 

I speculate that for music or video there is a point at which the underlying performance is more important.  If we don’t reach that point the performance is merely wallpaper and we don’t pay a lot of attention to it.  As we cross some threshold what is being the performance becomes so engrossing that inferior reproduction isn’t a huge issue to most of us.  I’ve seen this repeated over and over ...  In an earlier post  I noted on an epiphanal moment I had:

 

A good example is that the enjoyment of music often is decoupled with the quality of reproduction.  I was in a classic restored Mustang near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory.  We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it was an authentically restored Mustang).  The volume came up and the two of them were soon singing along to the music in pure delight.  There is something transcendent about the music - even with the awful reproduction in that noisy environment.  This taught me home stereos might die if we could only give people good enough music that was always with them.  Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough.

 

I think live performances are still very important - there is a communication between the performers and the audience and the overall sound field seems to make a difference.  The one way music and video we listen to at home or on the go is a different animal and needs to be considered separately. 

 

This notion of good enough quality is important.  You have to consider the entire user experience and not just some component like audio quality as defined by some engineering metrics that are measured with the listener out of the loop.  

 

It is something to watch for in many other industries.  Most people could care less, and don’t even know what gigahertz, gigabytes and other terms used to sell Wintel based PCs mean.  The same for horsepower and torque.  They are used as sales tools and people might think larger is better, but there is only a vague coupling to the final experience in most cases.  Even non-technical  enthusiasts have trouble with the definitions.

 

Perhaps industries where differentiations are made based on technical terms that are not understood by the customer based are  a good first order cut as those where disruption is possible.

 

Video and theater experiences are another rich and interesting area.  A lot of money is being bet that 3D will cause people to upgrade home TVs as well as go to movies, but there are some good arguments that won't happen.  There are other things that are probably more important in the theater and I tend to doubt the 3D revolution - at least as something that is a sustainable differentiator that will cause people will pay higher ticket prices.  

 

In the meantime I love going to live performances!  In the meantime don't bet on quality metrics unless you understand the complete user experience.

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¹  In fact if you increase the rate to 160 kbps statistically no one can tell the difference on normal music.  The guy who was really obsessed with tuning the codec went to Apple and their version of AAC has made great improvements over the years.

We found that some training is necessary to listen closely enough to music to detect artifacts.  It turns out that hearing ability decreases and anyone over about 35 is useless no matter how good their training.   Audiophiles tend to be males over 40 (and more often over 50) who spend tens of thousands on equipment.   

² Apple recently released their Apple Lossless Codec (ALAC) to open source.  Lossless codecs like Apple's and FLAC tend to offer compressions around three to one.  The file that is compressed can be turned into a file idential to the original so they are "perfect".  A few audiophiles use them and some companies even offer music, but this is a very small business.  

ALAC has some advantages over the other lossless codecs as it works with iTunes and iPods.  It can also work with music recorded at much higher than CD quality.  Now that it is an open standard perhaps it will gain some popularity among the enthusiast set.  The fact that Apple is releasing it shows they don't see any commercial value.  

³ At home I still use my 15 year old amplifier and once fine speakers to connect with my MacBook or iPhone or iPad wirelessly.  My 20,000 or so tracks worth of music is completely portable and distributed where I fancy on listening at the moment.

But I see no need to upgrade the system and the CDs just sit - I converted them (at 256 kbps AAC) a long time ago...

 

elegant interfaces and insight

Ten years ago today I found myself at the new Tice's Corner Applestore in Woodcliff Lake, NJ first in a line of about 20 people queued up to buy the original iPod.  A call from the store's manager to a wait list told me they would open their doors at 8 am.  I was there before 7 am and we were let in at 7 sharp.  It is possible I had one of the first sold in the US.  There was even a tshirt that is now long gone and I remember someone had brought in a pile of freshly based chocolate chip cookies.

 

I'm not the type who waits in line to be first with a new piece of tech.  Why was I there?

 

A few weeks before Steve Jobs had introduced to a very skeptical press.  The speculation of Apple's special event was basically anything but an mp3 player.   $399 for a 5 GB, Mac only, firewire connected mp3 player.  

 

I knew I had to have one.  

 

Fortunately my wife and I have "fun money" accounts.  Sums of money that each of us has complete control over that the other person can't touch or criticize.  It isn't a lot, but let's me do things like score an original iPod.

 

Since 1998 or so it was clear that small hard disk based mp3 players would be practical sometime in 2001 or possibly 2002.  My HCI department had been working on music at many levels collaborating with other departments at AT&T Research.  Sound field reconstruction, streaming, interface work, music business work, codec tuning, and the anthropology and sociology of music.  We even had a little flanker brand digital music label - perhaps the second or third strangest thing I did at the Labs.

 

Part of this work included some hardware designs including a series of pocket players based on flash memory good for a perhaps a dozen songs.  We had a mule with a "huge" 360 megabyte IBM microdrive that could hold about 100 songs and we quickly discovered the interface that sort of worked with a dozen failed miserably at 100.  Quite a bit of thought went into cracking the problem leading to some other - er - unique interfaces including one that responded to the sound of brushing your fingers together.  But basically nothing worked.

 

I heard about the unveiling of the early iPod in September and saw the scroll wheel.  It instantly hit me they had cracked the problem.  

 

Of course I had to buy one and $399 seemed cheap for a 5 GB player.  I was using a Mac so I was in good shape.  My only wish was that it would use AAC rather than mp3.  AAC was the codec we had been working with and it was vastly superior.  We had several meetings with Apple, including Jobs, showing him that starting in 1999.  He was probably listening to a lot of people.

 

I rushed home - Woodcliff Lake isn't exactly close to Basking Ridge - and started to transfer music.  The interface felt wonderful.  It was beautifully analog and had inertia.  It felt like something worth the money - not the cheap poorly built plastic of everything else on the market.  Although spendy it seemed like a very fair trade for four Franklins.

 

  I still have mine and it still works well.  I take it out for a walk about once a month to remind myself of a watershed in interface design.  It seemed so obvious once I had seen it.  I've read that the scrolling motion created some excitement in Apple and people started looking more deeply into multitouch interfaces- something that had been around in the labs since the late 1980s, but still expensive and researchy.  This is probably about the time they figured they could begin to build insight on a viable tablet - a project that became the iPhone and later the iPad.

 

The early sales were not good and the tech pundits pronounced it another silly Apple failure.  Only Mac users could use it and after the initial small surge there wasn't a big market.    Apple made it work with Windows, added AAC and then came the iTunes music store and a standardization on AAC.  These changes, combined with prices dropping into the $250 to $300 range saw sales begin to boom by 2004.  Back then it was still very popular to talk about the likely failure of Apple, but people interested in music were packing iPods.  A new generation was getting use to Apple products and people were listening to music in different ways.

 

The anthropology of music is fascinating and I think it isn't as investigated to the degree it deserves.  There are many ways to go, but the iPod and iTunes made a fundamental difference.  It also probably saved the music business from a fate worse than what unrolled, but that is a story for another day.  

 

I can think of a lot of things that we haven't seen yet.  Music is still a fundamentally important thing we humans do (it exists in every known culture on the planet) - Steve was right to go after it and his timing was close to perfect.  When I see what Björk and a few others are doing I have a feeling that perhaps the generation coming up now will be much more compositionally literate.  The iPad is the breakthrough device for those efforts and the initial work is - well - very early, but the way composition is approached may take a big leap.  

 

Steve would like that.  Most of the interactions I've had with him have invovled the arts in some way  (odd when you think about it).  A common point he kept coming back to was he would consider what he was doing a success if Apple products became a basis for getting more people doing creative artwork of some kind.  He was fascinated by the notion that music composition may not be as difficult as most of us assume it is.  That gets into the subject of education vs training, but for another day...

 

Once a month is it still nice to plug in the original to a firewire cable and see it come alive.  It is ancient and outmoded, but the leap it made was breathtaking.

 

What a great purchase!

 

There is a curious feature of many disruptive technologies - most of the technical pundits fail to recognize them as disruptive. Many of them have a very different evolutionary path that is rarely foreseen.   I was lucky enough to (a) not have been a technical pundit and (b) have been working on the problem for long enough to recognize the brilliance of the interface.

 

trees falling in the woods and surfer music

If a tree falls in the forrest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

 

It all depends on definitions. 

 

If sound is a mechanical wave that is a periodic compression and rarefaction of pressure that travels through a medium like a solid, liquid, gas or plasma  a sound is indeed made.  An observer is unnecessary.  But most of us restrict sound to a range of frequencies that can be detected (usually by us) and are given meaning in the brain.  We are surrounded by an extremely complex field of these waves of mechanical energy that are interacting with each other and their surroundings.  Our ears turn these pressure waves into electrical impulses that are conducted to our brain which manages to make sense of all of this.  We hear crashing trees, crickets chirping in the evening, the distant bark of a dog and music.  A neuroscientist might use a definition of sound that is information processed by and listened to by our brains.  With this definition we need an observer and a brain.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about music today.  I’m a terrible musician, but that doesn’t diminish my enjoyment and the question of perception is fascinating.  Perception is central to digital music compression¹, but and you find your self wading into territory that is still being explored.

 

Our silvermitt ferret Telemna loved music.  Some how we gave her a little toy piano and found she loved to make sounds by striking its keys.  A week or so saw her progress from random notes to strings that were more musical.  Soon she was only playing what we called music.  We got her an eight key piano and she quickly figured out how to make what we heard as music on it. I would play an unresolved chord and she would run up and play the "right" note.  An astonishing talent.

 

Telemna was fascinated by any music in the house and loved loud Ethel Merman types who could belt Broadway tunes.  She would hear something and later would play up to about eight notes of what she must have liked.  

 

Stephen Pinker of Harvard believes music is an accident of evolution - it serves no purpose, but it is nice to have around.  For him it probably only exists in humans.  A few years ago I read Daniel Levitin’s  delightful This is Your Brain on Music.  (If you haven’t read it take a break and order a copy. While you're at it pick up a copy of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.)  Levitin suggests it is deeper and more important.  I sent this video of Telmena working out a tune (pardon the messy room and the low quality Flip video):

 

his reply:   “In your face Stephen Pinker!”

 

Unlike sound, music is clearly a construct of the brain.  A stereo left playing in the woods sans audience is not producing music.  Some of us can read sheet music and “hear” it in our heads.  Most of us can listen to memories of music and a few can even create new music - starting in our heads, but then translated to something that produces the bits of acoustic energy that make up sound. 

 

The emotional power of music can be enormous.  Today I was reminded of this directly.  On Friday I will be in a high stress situation and have been reaching out to friends.  A very close friend told me she would spend time meditating with some music - specifically some wonderful surf music by the Duo Tones².

 

I give an enthusiastic recommendation to the group.  Two master guitar players and some amazing performances.  She had no way of knowing that I was familiar with them as they are a bit obscure, but she knew enough about me to know what type of music would be appropriate.  The choice of music is important as it covers a terrifically wide emotional range.  The niches filled by recommenders and DJs are important and the gift of a playlist can be rich and important.

 

Music is a component of how I handle stress.  As an undergrad in Pasadena I rarely made it to the beach, but somehow I relaxed with pieces ranging from surfer music to piano trios.  My technique was to spend the day before an intense event (say a major test) by listening to music and taking long walks or bike rides rather than last minute cramming.  The matching of music to the task was important and surfer music  works well for quantum field theory and particle physics and the Duo Tones offer the purest performances I've encountered.  Why they also are perfect for my current issue is a mystery to me, but she sorted it out and recommended them without any knowledge of my history with the genre.  I took a walk in the dark chill of the evening is a sea of swilling colors from performances nearly a decade ago by these masters and as I walked knowing she was doing the same knowing it would support me I was struck by how moving and beautiful this gift of suggestion and action was.  I suspect music is a common glue for many of us as we communicate beyond the limits of speech with others.

 

There is so many things to yet learn about music.  An anthropologist friend and I were looking into this a decade ago. She observed that all known cultures in the world had percussive music and all but a tiny handful had singing.  We thought it would be fascinating to learn enough to compile a book On Music that would be similar in Sontag’s On Photography. Of course we were far to naive on our part.  Even so there were a series of real epiphanies and I'll probably write about a few as time goes on.³

 

So find a nice chair, sit down and carefully listen to a favorite piece or three of music today.  If you are lucky perhaps you will make some new discoveries as I managed with Wipeout tonight.

________

¹ If you are worried about compressing CD quality music using Apple's AAC codec anything over 256 kilobits per second is overkill and if you are over forty anything over 160 is overkill - trust me on that one ...  The subject of what accurate audio reproduction is happens to be a rich subject and CD quality stereo isn't a great match, but is pretty good for most of us.

² Highly recommended is their acoustic album Surf Music.  Their electric work is also amazing, but you also need their purely acoustic music.

³ A good example is that the enjoyment of music often is decoupled with the quality of reproduction.  I was in a classic restored Mustang near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory.  We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it was an authentically restored Mustang).  The volume came up and the two of them were soon singing along to the music in pure delight.  There is something transcendent about the music - even with the awful reproduction in that noisy environment.  This taught me home stereos might die if we could only give people good enough music that was always with them.  Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough.

There were also many cultural learnings.  Music does not exist in a vacuum and there is a rich and fascinating interplay of music and culture.