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Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics
HughPickens.com writes Maria Konnikova writes in The New Yorker that mondegreens are funny but they also give us insight into the underlying nature of linguistic processing, how our minds make meaning out of sound, and how in fractions of seconds, we translate a boundless blur of sound into sense. One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there's a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can't see the musicians' faces. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. Another common cause of mondegreens is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Steven Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O'Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you're not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error.
Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. "There's a bathroom on the right" standing in for "there's a bad moon on the rise" is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.
Finally along with knowledge, we're governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf's law. One of the reasons that "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" substituted for Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.
Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. "There's a bathroom on the right" standing in for "there's a bad moon on the rise" is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.
Finally along with knowledge, we're governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf's law. One of the reasons that "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" substituted for Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.
Stewie
Let's not forget the lawsuits that miseheard song lyrics have generated over the past.
Most famous case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Solution
I got a hell of a good laugh when my wife told me that her and a friend thought that was what Jimi Hendrix said when they first heard Purple Haze. I never knew anyone else who thought that. Actually this is the first time I've heard about anyone thinking this, other than her and her friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I distinctly hear: "The beat goes steady like a firm cock..."
I meant this, sorry:
http://www.amiright.com/misheard/stories/blacksabbath.shtml
Are you reeling in the yeast
Stowing away the thyme
Are you gathering up the cheese
Have you had enough of mine
We Found Dove In A Soapless Place
Summation 2
I used to wonder why Sting would brag about his billiard skills (besides just his stalking) in "Every Breath You Take". "I'm a pool hall ace / with every breath you take".
Another long-time favorite in this way is "Benny and the Jets". In that case, though, it was hard to figure out in spots what Elton was singing at all. It turns out the most difficult section translates to "Get about as oiled as a diesel train".
Oh, and let's not forget this gem from Devo's "Whip it": "Tattoo detective" translates to "Try to detect it." Personally, though, I like my version better...
Hold me closer, Tony Danza... aw, Elton, you're a big softie.
See, this is how I know it's going to be a great day.
For years, my ex had been singing:
She never drinks the water, makes you order "fresh and pay"...
until I pointed out that it was probably French Champagne.
In the garden of Eden, baby.
Grandaddy of them all i'int?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
I've got a black magic woman and she's trying to take a pebble out of me.
... is from Venetian Snares' album Detrimentalist.
"Don't let your neighbour watch my baby's knees~"
Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame
My personal favorite is from "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival: "There's a bathroom on the right" instead of "There's a bad moon on the rise."
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
We'd have less of this with better sound reproduction.
When you move into a 'high end' system a lot of things become clearer. Going back to when Hendrix's " 'scuse me while I kiss...", that came out in the late 1960's. Our home stereo was record player amp combo that folded up like a suitcase. Our other source of music was whatever car radio, AM only, there was. By the 1970's people had Japanese receivers with a million buttons---some of the buttons actually did something useful. Few people ever graduated to anything that was hi-fidelity.
Sir Paul McCartney in an interview a few days ago expressed sadness that he puts a lot of effort into making a song with good sound quality, and people today listen to it on an ipad with cheap earbuds. Nothings changed.
The girl with colitis goes by...
Most Indian languages are written exactly as they are spoken, no silent letters. They also have very strict rules about how the pronunciation changes when say, a "n" follows a "ga" or "cha" or "ta" or "tha" or "pa". In fact Hindi would reduce "N" to a dot, because the preceding consonant would unambiguously define the pronunciation of the n, even though n has three different glyphs representing the labial, palatal and the dental versions of it.
Steven Pinker mentions some African languages using seven tenses instead of the usual present, past and future. Jared Diamond mentions some Pacific Island language that has words for "towards the sea" and "away from the sea", as in "there is a speck of dirt on your seawards cheek"
The richness of the languages and constructs are astounding. And most of the 6000 languages of the world are moribund and are expected to go extinct soon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A classic bluegrass tune "I Wonder Where You Are Tonight" by Jim & Jesse.
Often heard as "I'll Wear Your Underwear Tonight".
The fire engine guy.
The Vacant Lot on Blinded By The Light
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
- Let's create a movement to spread English use as a lingua franca.
- But our language sucks: even we cannot hear it right enough to understand it or write it correctly. Everyone in the world will be in a mess just like we are now!
- Yeah, isn't it interesting? Mwahahahahah...
Speaking of the richness of languages, TFA oversimplifies some important language tendencies too.
For example, Zipf's law (which is also linked in TFS) has little to do with "familiarity" or being "more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with."
It basically is just an observation that the statistical ranking of word in most natural languages is inversely proportional to its frequency. From the Wiki article:
Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.
Yes, I suppose one might get out of this that "we tend to choose words we're more familiar with," but Zipf's law is a MUCH more specific constraint on distribution of word frequencies. And it's more a statement about what word frequency distributions ARE rather than how we come to choose words or what we may be "familiar with," unless by "familiar with" you just mean "occurs more frequently."
Moreover, there is some research that has shown a distribution somewhat like Zipf's law will emerge even in texts generated with artificial random "languages" composed of random letters... which makes the claims about how we're making conscious or sub-conscious choices about "familiarity" even less likely.
He eats you then he retires.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Wow the hot Russian tennis player also writes articles on linguistic processing in the New York Times?
Amazing!
She's got electric boobs, and mohair pubes, you know I heard it from a Pakistani...
A few weeks ago an older relative asked me "What's all this We're up for Mexican Lucky about?" I was admittedly boggled.
Turns out he thought We're up all night to get lucky sounded like a nice riff about gambling across the border.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I wanna fly like a duck...
I wanna run like a wounded badger...
When I was a kid, I thought there must be some special lure to get you to go to one of Disney's attraction. I'm talking about Janet Jackson's Epcot Bait.
A good example is a recent Verizon commercial talking about other Internet providers being "Half Fast" with asymmetrical upload/download speeds. Yes if you don't KNOW they are saying "Half Fast" it does sound like they are saying it's half-assed.
WTF they weren't singing "Tattoo detective"???
When we were kids, Dad would dance around the kitchen with us when the Jose Feliciano song would come on the radio at Christmas time. With him holding the doggie up in the air, on the chorus he'd make a big show of smelling the dog and then we'd all sing out loud "Funny-smelling dog, funny-smelling dog"! Fifty years later, that memory still floats through my mind whenever I hear that song.
The Steve Miller band stumped me for years with "big old jet airliner," though I had no idea what he was saying. My best guess was Jeb O'Brian, whoever that was.
In my 20s I spent a LOT of time listening to and writing down lyrics for my cover band and finally figured that one out (and no, I didn't have the album, in fact, I rarely had the albums, thank you very much - not really my favorite music, but I played it).
And in some cases it's purely a matter of poor enunciation and the singer not really caring that the sounds coming out of their mouth sound nothing like the words are supposed to.
Better known as 318230.
When I was a kid, I thought "Silent Night" telling me to "sleep in heavenly peas".
Then there was the hymn "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear", which I thought was about Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.
Shania Twain - That Don't Impress Me Much
...could just be most singers are mumbling and the damned music is too loud.
Now, excuse me while I look for my fucking hearing aids.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Hold me closer, Tony Danza...
Pat Benetar was one of my favorites
The iPad's sound chip has phenomenal fidelity, as does most digital hardware. (Although laptops often suffer signal noise due to unshielded signal lines outside the chip.) If he thinks we're getting poorer quality than in the 60s, he's mad. An iPad can produce a higher quality recording than anything the Beatles ever produced.
On the other hand, if he's talking about his recent material, sound quality is meaningless if the song is unlistenably crap.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
As a kid I always wondered what the hell submersibles had to do with free will.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
There is at least one released version of "Purple Haze" where he sings something very similar but instead of proclaiming to "kiss _this_guy" he sings "S'cuse me while I kiss _that_ guy."
It's the "Live at the Sandiego Sports Arena" version on the Jimi Hendrix Experience box set.
The words were difficult to understand due to the lead singers braces just having been retightened.
http://www.snopes.com/music/so...
Wrapped up like a douche, another boner in the night.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
The song (always 17 by Harry Chapin) says "truly" a bunch of times like "truly she's the only hope we've seen"... Her name is Julie, and her mom didn't find out she heard the lyrics wrong until Julie was in high school.
Does a one-armed gay bother you?
(Does Watergate bother you?)
I give you, "Ken Lee":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Last summer I saw my nephew for the first time in a couple of years (he was about twelve years old) and found it eerie when he sang "Judy In Disguise" as "Judy In The Skies".
I'd made the same misinterpretation at his age; watching him sing those same wrong lyrics was like a time warp. First time I felt that weird "oh we've got some of the same 'DNA stuff' floating around in us" feeling. Wouldn't surprise me if it's because our brains are wired up quite similarly in some key places.
Ah fucken...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Revved up like a douche, another runner in the night..."
One of my favorites is "Hands to Heaven" by Breathe -- which is mostly a mawkish 1980s power ballad, until the chorus swells and...
"Tonight I may just tweak your ass..."
Whoa! Getting a little raunchy there aren't we?
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
So far there's only one reference to kissthisguy.com and it's about a particular mondegreen in a particular song. I think the summary does us all a disservice by not tying this site into the discussion. It's a site all about the topic.
It would be interesting to test for any correlation between political philosophy and tendency to mishear song lyrics. I am reminded of a study some years ago that found conservatives are more easily startled than liberals, in general.
It's bound to take your life.
There's a bathroom on the right.
NASA used to employ stenographers to record meetings, who would then transcribe their notes. I remember reading some transcripts that repeatedly mentioned "chief horses", and it took me a few moments to realize it was "G-forces" being mentioned.
cheap earbuds
This was the OP's point. And just because the iPad has a DAC, that doesn't mean perfect fidelity in today's terms.
Oh, she's got a chicken to ri-ide
She's got a chicken to ri-i-ide
She's got a chicken to ride and she don't care
My baby donkey!
http://www.rathergood.com/chic...
Are we sure this guy is not confused by satirists such as Weird Al? "There's a bathroom on the right" is a line in Weird Al's parody of the song "There's a bad moon on the rise". How many people did he interview that didn't know the difference? Weird Al is very talented, and most people totally under-rate him. His hilarious renditions of popular songs often sound so much like the originals people often don't know they are listening to his versions when they play on the radio, especially if they are not listening closely to the lyrics, or if they are not familiar with the lyrics from the original song. Once you get "There's a bathroom on the right" in your head it's easy to hear the original Bad Moon and still hear "bathroom" instead of "bad moon". I wonder how many other lyric divisions in this guy's study match up with Weird Al, Dr. Demento, and other comedic musicians.
I could never figure out why Neil kept going back to that Reverend.
Must be a good minister.
I just found out this year from the missus that that way-too-often played celebrity Christmas tune does not go "Jeeeeesus, woahhhhhhhhhh, let them know it's christmas-time" but rather "Feeeeeeeed the wooooooooooorrrrld"
You're gonna miss me by my taco.
Thirty four characters live here.
"...It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies...."
Maybe where YOU come from...
Even with good earbuds and a good DAC, most people listen to songs that have been lossily compressed to 1/10th their original size and don't sound nearly as good as the original. Same with the radio now days. Everything seems to have been digitally altered from the original.
like the One-Eyed Gott
(Pour some sugar on me)
Go son, shoot your own knee
ooh in the name of love!
Crazy train bridge (i know that things are going wrong for me)
I know that pizza goes with broc-co-li
you've gotta listen to my wooorld..oo oohh yeahhhh
At the time I first heard "Rock the Casbah" I didn't know the word "sharif" so there was no chance at all that I would not mishear that lyric.
Either you underestimate the sound quality of The Beatles' recordings (specifically the work from their early and late years - the era up to and including Sgt. Pepper's, with all its baroque overdubs, isn't so great), or you overestimate the sound quality of an Ipad. It really is no comparison...
How can I have sex without you (which actually kind of makes sense...)
Another (more well known mishearing):
Blinded by the light, Revved up like a deuce
I hear something like "...wrapped up like a douche". I just can't take that song seriously... it's the douche song.
The lossy compression really doesn't lose a lot acoustically. Some harmonics and some complex high-frequency sounds (like cymbals) are affected, but this is highly dependent on bitrate and codec. At 192Kbps, AAC doesn't lose much at all.
The biggest issue is the overuse of range compression effects on the original master recording to make the sound more punchy. Listen to a Beatles recording vs. anything recent. Look at the waveform of any popular music and you'll see an almost solid block with no variation. It's meant to sound loud, not sound good. Partly so that all parts of the song survive in a noisy environment like your car, and partly to accommodate junk speakers.
The host of the long-running Milwaukee Public TV show Outdoor Wisconsin is named Dan Small. On most shows, it sounds like he introduces himself with the line "Hi! I'm Damn Small." Once you've heard it that way, it's really hard to hear the "Dan" instead of "Damn".
always a classic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPHaahKa1Nk
Why punch a Corgi?
Time to eat a fly...
If you do an A B X test, people will consistently prefer loud over quiet, even if the volume difference is small. People still listen to songs on the radio, and if your song is not loud enough, it will not get popular.
This could be trivially avoided if the radio stations did automatic gain adjustment based on a proper model of how humans perceive sound.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that God's got a six-inch computer.
Anonymous coward (actually too lazy to register and paranoid that anything I post on the internet will be used against me).
"If he thinks we're getting poorer quality than in the 60s, he's mad."
No I don't think that. I became an audiophile in the 1980's. (Please don't blame me for the excesses of audiophiles today). Two channel stereo. My first system cost about $1,200, and eventually things were replaced one at a time for a cost of about $6,000, including some used speakers that were $2,500 new for $600.
Over the years friends wanted advice about buying some piece of stereo. What every audiophile of my era will tell you about that is: 99% of the general public's budget for stereo equipment was around $200. For everything. Also, 99% of two channel speakers in living rooms were stuck against a wall or bookshelf, while most speakers sound better away from walls and shelves. A $200 system can be enjoyable, fun, even wonderful, even with the speakers asymmetrically stuffed anywhere. It can also be ear bleedingly painful, but so can $100,000 systems. But a $200 system in 1980 or today, or cheap earbuds today, which is what most people listen to music on, is not going to give you the resolution to tease apart complicated recordings or mumbled vocals. That was my point
As for sound quality then versus now, try these:
Any Beatles song from the remasters a few years ago.
Elvis, Can't Help Falling in Love with You. I once had the privilege to hear this from the original 3" Amperex mix tape played back on Steve Hoffman's upgraded vintage Amperex studio tape player going through a pair of Audio Research 300 watt monoblock amps (tube? or hybrid?) driving Vandersteen 5 speakers... sorry you weren't with us at the time. Try the DCC compact disc of Elvis, either one.
Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion, or Celeste on Mercury Living Presence, Reiner conducting. 1995 CD, I never heard the vintage LP, and probably couldn't afford it.
Roy Orbison song "In Dreams," Try The Very Best of LP from 1967, or a few years ago a greatest hits collection, CD or vinyl. This song also made it onto some poorly engineered lp pressings, and maybe CD as well.
All the above are wonderfully recorded with great sound quality using 1950's or 1960's tube and analog equipment. I'm not saying they are better or worse than modern audio, just damn good. I will say that old technology and new technology are both capable of producing great or horrible sound quality.
End of Rant. We now return control of your browser over to you.
I remember hearing The spoof version, "there's a bathroom on the right", during one of those Christmas marathon broadcasts, many years ago in LA and it sounded like John Fogerty was singing it himself. On the Hendrix song, if you have a smidgen of brain left to think that he was high on some sort of dope non-stop, kissing the sky is not so impossible to hear from his words. Also a guy of his reputation singing lyrics with gay undertones is unthinkable in my never so humble opinion.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Anonymous coward again. Sigh, I should have stated the price of entrance to 'better' sound home reproduction is a maybe a couple hundred for earbuds or earphones, and under $1,000 for a whole 2 channel system.
Everybody in my family was a precocious reader -- me, my wife, my kids were all reading on an adult level while we were still quite young. So consequently we *all* have words we mispronounce because we learned them from reading before we heard anyone use them. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my word "sub-tull" and the word "suttle" I sometimes heard were one and the same -- "subtle".
The family will be sitting around and someone will use an unfamiliar word, then there will be a brief pause while everyone else envisions the phonetic spelling of the mispronounced word.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.
In THIS day and age yes. In the day and age he made the song hell no. Never even dawned on me to think he says guy. But there are plenty of songs with hard to hear clearly words.
Jack of all trades,master of none
OM f'ing G... I remember being like 8 years old driving from LA to Victorville and hearing that song and asking my mom why they'd sing about a "bathroom on the right". She just laughed and told me it was "bad moon on the rise" and kept laughing and laughing and laughin. All these years I thought I was the only one. Thank god for this article. Now I know I'm not alone or weird. I don't have to kill myself now as all my reasons for being depressed stemmed from this one incident and now that I know others heard it too I feel so much better. Guess I can take the suicide hotline off my favorites list now...
The above explanations for mondegreens seem very consistent with the recent understanding of neuroscience.
All perception of the world requires inference, as the signals coming into the brain are ambiguous, conflicting and noisy.
For instance, the brain tries to reconstruct a stable 3 dimensional perception of the world from constantly moving and imperfect 2 dimensional projections.
An increasing number of studies show that the low-level processing in the brain is surprisingly similar to Bayesian inference. In particular, it demonstrably relies on priors learnt from the environment (for example, vertical lines should be interpreted as corresponding to longer distances than horizontal ones) and by fusing sources of information (for example, the ambiguous local motion detected in one part of the image is reconciled with other ambiguous local motions into a perceived motion of objects).
For anyone interested, I'd recommend some material by Stanislas Dehaene.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
OK It's probably cheating because it's misinterpreted in a different language, but ... http://www.rathergood.com/elep...
I'd forgotten that site existed. Love it!
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
via Straight Dope http://www.straightdope.com/co... ;
Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!
Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker 'n' too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloupe, 'lope with you!
Hunky Dory's pop is lolly,
Gaggin' on the wagon, Willy, folly go through!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!
Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo!
Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!
Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!
IDK, it still sounds like, "kiss this guy" whether I'm listening with my McIntosh, or my MacIntosh. But certainly it's an improvement over the six-inch car speaker, powered by an AM car radio, which I first heard it on.
There are a lot of Stones songs, in particular, whose lyrics I never would've figured out without the internet. And I've had high fidelity equipment all my adult life. Not that learning the lyrics has helped - the mondegreens have been burned into my brain for decades now.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Must've been something I ate.
You used the whole meat
You used the whole meat
You used the whole meat
Beef, beef dinner
Yeah, if you listen to Jazz or Classical recordings from the fifties, they can be quite amazing. It seems it took some studios a while to figure out how to record amplified instruments, so there are a lot of bad sounding pop recordings from the early sixties. The Beatles don't belong in that category, though. Also, a lot of songs were mixed to "pop" on car radios, which at that time consisted of an AM radio, and one cheap speaker, so if you listen to them on an actual hifi...ouch! Certainly you can tell the difference between a modern recording, and an older recording, but much of this difference is due to differences in production techniques, rather than recording quality or ability, per se.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
there's no sex with violins?
Shempal Buddha, ship on a better sea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-J6Bscor_E&feature=related
J'ai mal aux dents, j'ai mal aux pieds aussi
"Two chimps in a wicker basket, you think that's really clever, don't you boy?"
Time to take her home, her lazy ass is constipated...
My local radio station JUST played that song, with a disclaimer that it had nothing to do with Tony Danza!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's not the electronics, it's the earbuds. And the popularity of crappy Beats Audio 'phones hasn't helped either.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Ok, I'll admit it, the lyrics I heard from Dexy's Midnight Runners was "Come on my knee". I knew it was wrong but that's what I heard.
Listen to a Beatles recording vs. anything recent.
Except that recent Beatles rereleases have been remastered with extra compression. In fact, I read an article once on "the compression wars" which compared multiple releases of Beatles (or was it Rolling Stones...?) recordings to chart the phenomenon.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The main difference, though, isn't about equipment quality, it's about art and craft, and getting it right first time. Digital makes it too easy to "fix it in the mix", and therefore encourages too much fiddling with the recording after the fact. Also, any amateur recorders now expect the equipment to do the job, but never learn how to use the equipment properly.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
people
And if you do an A/B test, most "people" can't tell the difference between Coke or Pepsi. These are not smart people.
Automatic gain adjustment will only make the peaks of the song hit the same level. They're all mastered to somewhere between -0dB and -3dB. If that source song is Mozart, there will be high peaks, but very low valleys. Dynamic Range Compression, on the other hand, is what makes songs sound the same volume throughout. And applied algorithmically, this can sound terrible.
However, FM radio stations already do this, due to the inherent transmission problems you'd have otherwise. Compare the same song between FM radio and MP3/CD and there's a world of difference in range.
Anyone else ever heard a lyric that you thought was better than the original? For me it's the first line in The Queen is Dead by The Smiths . I always thought it was "bend like a bow between archers" which IMO is better than the real lyric "bend like a boar between arches."
And if you do an A/B test, most "people" can't tell the difference between Coke or Pepsi. These are not smart people.
Limiting sales to smart people is not going to get the record company execs any yachts.
Automatic gain adjustment based on proper human hearing models would limit the volume of the range compressed songs, even the peaks. I.e. non-compressed songs would be allowed higher peak volume.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I always preferred, "There must be a ninja, playin' with my heart"
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
If every song is a flay line, they are all the same perceived loudness too.
Flat.
I had a bunch of third-generation copies of cassettes (yes, *cassettes*, dammit!) of Blue Oyster Cult albums back in high school. Never could figure out the damned lyrics. They *sounded* like "mistress of the salmon salt", and "the queenly flux, eternal light", but they couldn't be. Those phrases and most of the others I thought I heard made no sense. But try as I might I couldn't twist the sounds into anything coherent.
Then they invented the Internet, and I could look up the lyrics online.
Fuck.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
"An' Di wiill always love Hugh" Princess Diana was a hot news topic when Whitney's version of the song was released.
Otherwise there's partial half-wavelength cancellation with sound bouncing off the wall, at about 110 Hz for 2 feet.
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I hear lots of stuff in music just in earbuds that I don't hear on car radio speakers..
As I get older I hear more of these, and in many cases it's poorly thought-out writing. Mike Opelka of The Blaze calls his show "Pure Opelka". For several weeks I wondered why he called himself "puerile Pelka."
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I went through much of my young life believing these to be the lyrics of Springsteen's '10th Avenue Freezeout'
"Rape me, rape me, rape me - oooohhh!"
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Don't let the sound of your own meals make you crazy.
One of these days
You're gonna reach out and find
The one that you count on
Is said to be high
I'm a rocket man burning down the streets of a hysterectomy. - That's what I thought the words where when I was about 6yo
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Thought she yelled "penis" in her first song. The Grandkids had to hold me down so I couldn't change the channel.
I must say I am impressed by the radio person that manage to connect the song title Is this reebook or nike? with the intended song.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
Just discovered this yesterday - the real lyric is: "Kýrie, eléison, down the road that I must travel".
What the hell does Kýrie, eléison mean? It's, "Lord, have mercy" in Greek.
And all these years, I liked the song because it had a frickin' laser in it.
We need more songs with lasers.
It's a long way to the shop. If you want a sausage roll.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I figured that one out pretty quickly, but the first few times I heard it as "Carrie A. lays down on the road that I must travel."