DUMMYHEAD

Upon the dawning of the new year, British 7-piece math rock band Black Country, New Road came out swinging with their second LP by the name of “Ants From Up There”. This hour long masterpiece is the ultimate gallery of yearning and self destruction from the inner workings of frontman Isaac Woods deeply unwell mind. Littered with bright guitars and crisp, orchestral notes from their saxophone and violinist Lewis Evans and Georgia Ellery respectively, the highs and lows of AFUT are bringing fans to their knees. 

The album begins with a huge instrumental piece, perfectly showcasing the skillset of their 7 members in a triumphant entrance, leaving everyone wondering exactly how they could possibly match the unwavering energy of “Intro”, only to perfectly transition into another dramatically orchestral, almost comedic song. “Chaos space marine” sets the scene for the incoming events of the album, military references lightly seasoned with profound, gut wrenching lyrics at the least expected moment.

Immediately after experiencing the high of “Intro” and “Chaos Space Marine”, the listener is thrown into one of the most tender songs on the album. “Concorde” waltzes through the mourning period of a particularly partisan breakup. Woods delivers lines such as “this staircase it leads only to some old pictures of you” “For less than a moment/we share the same sky” with a slow and controlled inflection, making it all the more painful to hear his voice quiver at “I was made to love you, can’t you tell?” Before regaining his strength for the climax of the song

“Bread song” expands the desperate pull between complacency and growth from two people who can’t seem to help themselves. While not eating in bed is generally a reasonable request, BCNR evoke a very domestic type of pain; a loved one growing tired of bread particles you never even knew were there. The gentle groove paves the way for “Good Will Hunting”, positioned perfectly at the tail of “Bread Song” like a badly timed (but well meaning) joke. There’s an air of sincerity to this track that compliment the Billie Eilish references like sweet cherry jam and sharp cheddar. This song is sonically one of the most enticing, a synth buildup that is immediately attractive and gentle introduction that markets itself similarly to “Concorde”, until the drums blast through for some drama. The beat switch in “Good Will Hunting” is utterly addictive and a perfect palette cleanser before “Haldern”, a sombre yet powerful ballad that really lets the orchestral  elements shine, chipping away the drums, guitar and vocals leaving the remaining sax, violin and piano assaulting the ears with what can only be described as a musical cliff-hanger. 

Listening Blog 2 

The Sabine Solution. - 

In 1895, Wallace Sabine discovered an issue with the Fogg Lecture Hall at Harvard University that greatly impacted his students. The hall had a volume of 2740 m2, resulting in a reverb length of 5.5 seconds, resulting in. The content of his lectures being lost to the reflections of the room.

For context, the recommended 0.5-1 second reverb length that is recommended for speaking, so a room with a RT60 of 5 seconds results in completely unintelligible speech.  

Sabines approached this issue in the beggining with an organ and a stopwatch to record the time it took for the initial sound of the organ to decay completely. Prior to his experiment,  the only acoustic treatment in the building was the. Windows as the walls had an extremely low absorption coefficient. Sabine took 1-inch thick felt and attached squares of it to the walls and ceilings and theatre cushions on all of the seats, as he found the added material increased the absorption of the sound in the room, and translated this information into a graph that aided in him developing the formula for RT60 (the amount of time that the initial sound decayed by 60dBs), as pictured below. 

The success of this experiment lead to the invention of architectural acoustics, as his formula to measure reverberation time was able to apply to all buildings and dubbed him one of the most influential names in acoustics.  

 This  image depicts the speech intelligibility after his findings were applied to. The Fogg Lecturer hall. 

References: 

Katz, B, 2005, ‘Fogg Art Museum Lecture Room, A calibrated recreation of the birthplace of Room Acoustics’, researchgate, viewed 12 Nov 2021,  file:///Users/mac/Downloads/Fogg_Art_Museum_Lecture_Room_A_calibrated_recreati.pdf 

N/A, 2015, ‘RT60 and Acoustic Excellence’,  ThatsMaths, viewed 12 Nov 2021, https://thatsmaths.com/2015/07/16/rt60-and-acoustic-excellence/ 

In 2020 musician Fiona Apple released an album recorded completely in her Venice Beach home, with no professional DAW training, thereby riddling the album with dog barks, passing cars, doorbells among the household sounds. Apple stated that the rooms in which she recorded Fetch The Bolt Cutters had not been treated with acoustics in mind. The sleek wooden floorboards provide natural reverb across the album, found most prominently in the percussion.

The track “Ladies” exemplifies how these conditions affect the drums. They sound thin and distant which would traditionally be frowned upon from a mixing perspective, however, Apple used this to create a rich and complex stereo image by pairing the room reflections with the closely miked vocals. In “For Her”, the stereo field is instantly expanded by sporadic clapping and there is audibly more space in the vocals. This can be heard quite specifically at 0:22 seconds; the size of the room can be heard in the subtle reverberance of the lower harmony.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ewavfe-mMQ

Apple took a risk with her project, as the highly reflective surfaces could have easily buried the inflexions of her musical score and absorbed the bass which as a female vocalist with a lower register would flatten her performance and make the shrill accents far too abrasive to listen to. Despite these hypothetical ailments of an untreated home studio, Apple embraced her lack of knowledge to produce an album that felt disobedient and clumsy and intimate that I don’t believe she could have completed had she not pushed the boundaries of acoustics.

References: 

C Battman, 2020, “The homemade insight of Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters”, The New Yorker,  viewed 14th Oct 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-homemade-insight-of-fetch-the-bolt-cutters

E Nussbaum, 2020, “Fiona Apple’s art of radical sensitivity”, The New Yorker, viewed 14th Oct 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/fiona-apples-art-of-radical-sensitivity

E  Sokol, 2021, “Does Wood Absorb or Reflect Sound?” , Better Soundproofing, viewed 14 Oct 2021 https://bettersoundproofing.com/does-wood-absorb-or-reflect-sound/#Does_Wood_Absorb_or_Reflect_Sound_-_Acoustic_Properties_of_Wood

Claire Cotrill rose to fame under the name Clairo after releasing an entirely bedroom produced single “Pretty Girl” in 2017. Since the release Cotrill was launched into an arena level career, meaning that the soft bedroom pop sounds needed to be successfully projectors to listeners by the thousands. Cotrill’s  engineers Chris Dwight and Thomas Wolfe favor SE Electronics microphones in order to translate the singers soft vocal tone. Being the “quietest” vocalist Wolfe had worked with, they needed to ensure no excess noise was being picked up in the peripherals of the microphone. For this reason, her team choses the V7 small diaphragm dynamic microphone in particular for its super cardioid polar pattern in order to prevent bleed during live performances as it is renowned for its ability to reject noise from the rear of the capsule. Another benefit of the V7 is the aluminum voice coil; due to its low mass is able to withstand higher gain levels in comparison to the same make with a copper coil, as well as a gold XLR output to better conduct the signal. This is vital to capturing the integrity of a performance such as Clairo, as her gentle vocal style and higher pitched voice requires more gain and a higher frequency response in comparison to artists in different genres. All of these factors of the V7 make for an easier mix whilst on the road. Additionally the nature of dynamic microphones mean that they transport well as part of a touring ensemble.

References:

 sE Engineering 2021, SE V7 Dynamic Microphone, viewed 16 July 2021, https://www.seelectronics.com/se-v7-dynamic-microphone 

sE Electronics 2019, sE On Tour - Clairo, online video, viewed 16 July 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1al66VJ8KyM 

Waves Audio, 2020, Studio Sound on Stage: Mixing Clairo with Waves eMotion LV1, online video, viewed 16 July 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHmM0wCRxE8&t=51s 

In order to be as accessible to the general public of smartphone users on platforms such as Spotify, songs must go through some type of processing, whether it be WAV, AIIF or MP3. The first song ever to be converted into MP3 format was Susanne Vega’s “Toms Diner” by Karlheinz Brandenburg, as the intricacies of her a-cappella vocal performance was imperative to capturing the essence of the performance, however made it “nearly impossible to compress” (Brandenburg, 2000).  It is speculated that the recording of Tom’s Diner took place on a high-quality condenser microphone in order to pick up on Vega’s vocal inflections.

However, the current state of the MP3 conversion algorithm was not developed enough to match the quality of the microphone.

In the act of MP3 conversion, certain frequencies are lost as a means to decrease the size of the file by excluding frequencies that would be perceived as one tone by the human brain, imitating the psychoacoustic process called “auditory masking”. Frequencies that the brain cannot identify as seperate from each other become subject to auditory masking, and therefore only the louder frequency is perceived. These distinctions vary from person to person, and are the result of the cochlea filters in the ear and dependant on the extent of the basilar membrane placements of the individual. Brandeburg took advantage of this filtering this to aid in refining the process so it would discard any unnecessary frequencies that would be masked so that they would not be encoded in the MP3, thus perfecting the formula.

The uncompressed files have since been made accessible to the public, and in 2014 artist Ryan McGuire compiled the lost mp3 compression material to create the song “moDernisT”. . McGuire converted the original uncompressed WAV file to an 320kbps MP3 file and then “[taking] the difference” (McGuire, 2014) between the uncompressed and compressed audio files by comparing them and removing the frequencies that were included in the final version of the song. This left McGuire with an eerie rendition of Toms Diner comprised of the leftover artefacts and lost audio.

References