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Young People Prefer "Sizzle Sounds" of MP3 Format
Hugh Pickens writes "Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, tests his incoming students each year by having them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality, and he reports that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. Berger says that young people seemed to prefer 'sizzle sounds' that MP3s bring to music because it is a sound they are familiar with. 'The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC),' writes Berger. 'To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 — particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.' Dale Dougherty writes that the context of the music changes our perception of the sound, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. 'All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to them.'"
People have really weird internal processes that shape their preferences. Preferring shitty, hissy sounding music is just one of those odd results. I would not equate it with the perceived "warmth" of vinyl when compared to CDs. The warmth is not the snaps and crackles, but a different quality that I can't imagine anyone would think as a loss of quality. Just a change of tone.
The hissy music on the other hand is primarily as a result of poor or excessive compression that reflects a lost of information, not just a change in tone. And it just so happens that like in every other arena of human opinion most people prefer crap. :)
P.S. I am not an audiophile but I love clear, full range sound when it comes to music. I prefer digital over vinyl because I can't stand all the defects that come with vinyl, even though I grew up with them.
CD quality is already overkill: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14195
I am continually fascinated by the number of "pedals" and "effects" that electronic guitar players apply to the output of their instrument. Why would people prefer that distorted sound?
There are different levels of distortion. There are different kinds. The ability to detect distortion is a skill, in many cases, and in many cases 'distortion' is part of the desired sound. (Why do trombone players stuff a cone in the bell of their instrument, it's DISTORTION!?)
I prefer the uncompressed FLAC or CD because it's as close to live as one can get.
When I first read that, I assumed you meant the "made smaller" meaning of compressed, since you were talking about MP3's and a major factor in MP3 production is the "make smaller" compression. I was going to point out that very few CDs come without the "remove level excursions" kind of compression, and that this compression is hardly as close to live as you can get.
Even so, many CDs don't come out without multi-track mastering and postprocessing to include reverb and flanging and all kinds of other "effects" being added to the sound. None of those effects are what you would hear live, and some of them are digital attempts at making a studio recording sound more like live.
I can only conclude the college students are nuts to prefer the "buzz" of digital artifacts. I can tolerate digital artifacts, but I definitely do Not like them.
Many people don't hear them (either because they aren't trained to hear them or are using less-than-gold equipment like ear-buds). They don't spend hours listening to live music in sonically pure environments so they could learn what a pure sound is. (Hearing a guitar amplified to 120dB is NOT hearing a pure sound, it's hearing your eardrums, and every loose object in the room, rattle.) What they hear on the MP3 is what they learn to expect, and if the sound is "odd" then it's a distraction.
French press preparation is actually one of the least expensive and least time-consuming brewing methods. Compare the cost of a French press to a pump-driven espresso machine or even quality drip-coffee.
For French press, all you need is the plunger pot itself ($20-30), plus a good blade grinder (~$50). You can use a burr grinder to get somewhat more consistent results, but it's not really necessary at all, especially if your blade grinder has a timer.
Now for espresso, the absolute cheapest cost of entry is $75-$100 for a cheap thermoblock pump machine and $100-$150 for the cheapest Chinese conical burr grinders on the market (Breville and Capresso). (Forget pods, they suck. Steam machines and blade grinders simply won't do the job)
That means $175-$250 is about the least amount of money you can get away with. And that's only been in the last couple of years or so with the advent of really cheap equipment. Before that, you needed $200 for the grinder and about $250-300 for a pump-driven espresso machine.
Even a good quality drip pot will cost over $100.
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The Stravinsky segment of the show is nonsense. When "The Rite of Spring" (not "Rites") debuted, there was a riot. That is true. However, there is a lot of evidence that this riot had less to do with the music than with all sorts of other factors -- there was a group of people (somewhat politically motivated) who already planned to stage a riot, the choreography was perceived as complete nonsense, and besides, most accounts say that people had already started shouting so much when the curtain went up that no one could hear any music after the very beginning.
Notably, the were a half dozen more performances in the initial run without further disruption.
The myth that the novel music was the cause of the riot was something propagated by Stravinsky starting about a decade later, when he actively started trying to shape his public persona. His autobiographical information is notoriously suspect among 20th century composers, further shaped through the supposed "conversations" he had with Robert Craft, who ghostwrote most of his later books.
Richard Taruskin (perhaps the world's foremost expert on Stravinsky) has detailed the reasons why this myth came to be, and this information has been around for at least a couple decades, though it was effectively summarized in his article: "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'The Music Itself'" (Modernism/modernity - Volume 2, Number 1, January 1995, pp. 1-26).
Anyhow, I love Radio Lab in general. But that particular show had a lot of bogus claims, and this was probably the biggest.