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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.'"
This is probably no different than older people who prefer the sound of a phonograph over modern high quality digital recorded mediums like the CD. Warmness of sound on phonographs may be the equivilent to the mp3 sizzle that he talks about. People are used to hearing music over lower quality mediums like FM radio, streaming internet connections and real player. Its good that he is doing this research though because its time dependent and you won't be able to do it later.
I think the Jonas Brothers already proved this.
Annoy the hell out of me personally. Both audio and video.
Bring back analog, the real thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
this sounds like a peference for high treble... probably related to hearing loss.
This is not surprising at all. Talk with anyone who grew up listening to records and you'll hear a tale of music with character and soul. That "character" and "soul" is the pop and crack of dust, scratches, and whatnot that the record needle picked up - all the imperfections in the record player and record that we could hear. It's a comforting and familiar noise in the sound. The digital generation has its own pop and crackle and it should come as a surprise to nobody that their reaction to it is the same as the record generation's reaction to the sound of a record playing.
Dick Cavett said "As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it." Little did he know that if all people know is crap they actually begin to prefer it.
Haiku for you!
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.
Every generation has their favorite audio artifacts. Vinyl lovers like the warm sound despite the hiss and pops, im sure back in the day someone thought that wax phonograph cylinders sounded better than those new fangled gramaphone disks. Each generation gets accustomed to the sound they are most familiar with. I remember as a kid arguing with my dad who thought 8-track was much better than casette tapes.
I encountered the same feeling when I walked into a Best Buy the other day. I don't generally go into places like that, so when I did and I saw all of the flat-scren TV's, my GF and I couldn't get over how BAD we thought they all looked. The looked too sharp and too bright. I need another TV but I'm having trouble finding anyone that sells good CRT's any more!
Little did he know that if all people know is crap they actually begin to prefer it.
And that's why 2009 will not be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
Pops of the 70's phonograph
Hiss of the 80's magnetic tape
Sizzle of the 00's MP3s.
Sounds like we had a perfect format in the optical disc - now we just need audio engineers that don't fuck up the mastering with everything cranked to 11.
This is probably why the previous generation preferred tube amps to transistor ones - and gave you all kinds of arguments just why one was "better" than the other one, most of which were meaningless.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I suspect that when you miss some details things appear better. People tend to look better at a distance before you get detail. Lowered senses probably contribute to "beer goggles" as well, though there are other factors.
Stripping detail does not make art but it may make pop.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
No time to RTFA, but were any of the kids polled members of high school bands, or musicians on their own? As a drummer for 25+ years, I know the first thing I noticed about poorly encoded MP3s was how crappy the cymbals sounded. And I knew that primarily on account of knowing exactly how a real, live cymbal really sounds, in person, with the naked ear. Having been in a high school band, I know that the experience changed my own understanding of how all the instruments should really sound, as contrasted starkly against how they sound on many recordings, even pre-MP3 era.
I can't help thinking that this isn't representative of "young people". Though it probably is typical of the average "young person".
Were the to pool the opinions of students of Julliard rather than Stamford he'd likely get a completely different result.
If the young person in question is fond of mass produced music -- as most are I guess -- then the sound quality probably isn't important to them, just as tonal nuances wasn't important to the original musicians. For kids that are musicians themselves, and especially jazz or classical musicians, the sound quality matters a great deal.
Basically this is just a badly designed study, skewed in favor of the modal average.
There is no accuracy in coffee that expensive coffee is closer to than Sanka is.
Who says 'accuracy' is a desirable quality of a musical recording?
Certainly not the musicians who "punched in" re-takes of passages where they were unhappy with their first performance, or the producer who demanded that the singer's performance be processed with autotune, or the engineers who applied reverb, compression, and EQ to each recorded part individually, made volume adjustments to everything during mixdown, and then applied more compression and EQ to the finished product, or the CD duplicator that took the 48kHz/24-bit master DAT and transcoded it down to a 44.1kHz,16-bit master...
My brother-in-law is a bit of an audiophile. He's not totally neurotic about it, but he's much more obsessive than me. We're talkin' low-middlish-end B&W speakers (I would've bought a car for that kind of money, personally), DVD players to play CDs, NAD amp, shielded, expensive cabling, and those pointy things that you put under your speakers to poke through the carpeting to get to the hard floor below.
I sat in his "listening environment" at a preselected place (he actually had his speakers placed according to a formula to derive the best location for listening) and listened to a CD he put on. Closed my eyes, and I have to say if I didn't know I was sitting in his apartment, I would've sworn I was sitting in a club, six feet from the singer sitting on the piano serenading me. It was stunning how much difference there was between my Pioneer multi-disc Best Buy special and his equipment. I was blown away.
I think the folks in this study just haven't heard stunningly good music and have no idea that it could/should be better.
Good point. Actually, our perception that tone quality should be pure is mostly based on western music. In an ethnomusicology class I took, they noted that the African perception of sound quality is different because they put pieces of metal that rattle or clink together when they play, so the sound should have more of a gritty quality to it to sound "correct".
Where's the generation that loved the tape hiss that could only be provided by a 120 minute cassette tape from K-Mart? Even better if it came from a copy of a friend's copy... don't forget to route it through your seven-band BSR equalizer to boost the hiss and muddy bass.
a) Wrong Story b) What if you miss?
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
The public radio show Radio Lab did an amazing show on similar issues, looking for a neurological explanation to why people react strangely to new and unexpected sounds: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21.
One of the most interesting segments of the show recounted the near-riot that occurred when Stravinsky debuted his "Rites of Spring" in 1913. The music was so discordant to Parisian audiences, that they reacted -- in some cases violently -- to the oddness of the new music.
Check it out -- the entire show is awesome. Entirely consistent with the professor's findings here.
It might also have something to do with the way music is broadcast on FM radio- massively compressed. For the most part I listen to BBC Radio 4, and if I skip to Radio One or Radio Two the level of compression causes a massive leap in volume. An unfortunate side-effect seems to be a tangible loss in a song's dynamics, particularly prevalent in rock music.
This is due to what psychologists call the "mere exposure" effect. People like things more that they have experienced before. It's one of the driving forces behind advertising.
Here's my Skullflower anecdote about MP3s:
Back in the days when I was working for an incarnation of eMusic (several buy-outs ago), I noticed that they had a release from Skullflower in the collection, and I listened to it at work. Skullflower has a pretty seriously noisy sound, but sometimes I like serious noise, and the Skullflower mp3s sounded pretty good to me. That seemed a little funny, because I was pretty sure I'd listened to the CD before down in KZSU's library (I was a DJ at KZSU in those days), and the CD hadn't grabbed me.
But the next time I was on the air, I pulled the Sullflower CD out of the library on impulse, and tried playing a track. It struck me as horribly annoying. Hm, must've picked a bad track. I played around with fading the CD down, fading something else up, and skipping to another Skullflower track. I did that several times, and found them all horribly annoying.
My conclusion: this particular "music" is full of screeching high-frequencies that drive me up the wall, and the mp3 format's compression does a good job of screening them out.
In general I prefer CDs to mp3s, but then, myself I preferred the sound of vinyl to CDs... There's been a trend in the CD era toward a very clean and bright sound that I don't think very much of. Myself, I prefer a sense of "warmth" and "depth", but for that you need some fairly serious speakers, and along with CDs came a fad for minaturization, and people don't listen to music on those major sound systems much any more.
My conclusion: it's impossible to talk about the merits of different sound formats in isolation, because music production practices change as the characteristics of the formats and audio equipment change. If you expect people to be listening on wimpy speakers via a lossy compression format, then you're going to things like lean on the highs to punch through those barriers. And then if someone takes barriers away, you're going to be blasted by the highs.
I can hear the difference in several songs between compressed digitized formats and the CD I have of them at home. Some I like better, others not so much. (Although in my case, it's ogg, not mp3).
For example, The Cars' "Just What I Needed" sounds "cleaner", and I hear musical details in the right-hand guitar track I'd missed before, probably because the fuzz in the electric guitar tracks is simplified, and the stereo separation of the two guitar tracks is exaggerated. So it's probably a less accurate rendering of their original recording, but I like it better.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
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.
Weird how that principle works out again. I always tell people I don't mind mp3s because I remember when AM was the norm, particularly in cars. More than that, 196 kbps and above is better than table top FM and many of the stereos I've listened to in my life. So, no worries.