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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

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

HOW SEAN COUSINS FINDS HUMAN TRUTH IN FILMMAKING

BREAKING THROUGH THE ENTERTAINMENT JOURNALISM INDUSTRY WITH KATE STREADER

CREATING AWARD-WINNING INTERIOR DESIGN WITH CERI FARROKHNIA

SURVIVING SYNTHESISER BOOTCAMP WITH BENJI COLBOURNE

WHY IS EVERYONE OBSESSED WITH MID-CENTURY MODERN DESIGN?

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