Flook Foyer

Moog Music’s synth Animoog is out today. Synthtopia gets full credit for being first; James concludes with the question “time to buy an iPad?”:

Moog Animoog – The ‘First Professional Synth For The iPad’?

I’m looking forward to playing it and having some time to work with it, and fully expect to make some actual music with it, which is the whole point. I can already see that it has some interesting ideas, and it seems an eminently sensible approach to iPad synthesis. It builds on Moog’s software models of their filters, delays, and whatnot, but exploits the iPad’s touch design by assigning morph-able timbres and polyphonic pitch shift to the X/Y pad of the iPad. The results should be terrific fun to play with, and I don’t think I have to test it to assume it’ll be worth a dollar. In fact, given the pricing of computer soft synths, I expect it’ll be worth $30, too.

Significant points: unique synthesis, MIDI in/out support (even so-called “virtual MIDI” with other iOS apps reportedly works), and polyphonic operation, all at an absurdly low price.

http://www.moogmusic.com/products/apps/animoog

Moog video tour

This is already looking like absolutely the sort of synth you’d hope Moog would release. It has some characteristics in common with their hardware, it uses code that we’ve already heard producing great sounds in the Filtatron app, and it also remains different from their hardware, tailored to the iPad. Centering it around an X/Y plot for control is also fitting, as that was the central innovation around with the Minimoog Voyager was built as the modern-day successor to the original Minimoog.

Wired has a review (see video); Moog has posted sound samples, below.

Wired’s Michael Calore concludes:

WIRED A varied instrument capable of both subtle and wild sounds. Excellent sound quality. Plenty of presets to explore. Hours of fun, even if you’re not very musical. This is what the iPad was made for. On sale for $1 — which is a steal, people — for a limited time.

TIRED Advanced features are quite complex, and you’ll need to RTFM. Keys are tiny — you can make them bigger, but that reduces the range of notes. And you thought it was tough to wrestle the iPad away from the kids before.

Moog Debuts an iPad Synth From the Outer Limits

Animoog by moogmusicinc

Here’s where I start to lose the plot. It’s only my opinion, but I imagine I may be giving voice to some other folks who feel similar frustrations. My concerns are partly about Moog, but largely about the growing hype cloud around synths for the iPad.

I think it begins here: something about the video above sets my teeth on edge. It’s not entirely Moog’s fault, but it means it’s time for some reckoning with this whole, uh, iPad thing.

In short: the app is sonically terrific, but it’s past time to properly evaluate the usability of the iPad. And saying this is the first “professional” synth, or that you need a synth from Moog just to make music on an iPad, simply isn’t fair.

The iPad Shares Some PC Strengths – and Failings

The iPad clearly deserves credit for what it does beautifully. I spoke to a major music software pioneer last month in San Francisco who shall remain nameless, and I talked to him about why he was so excited about the iPad. He cut straight to the crux of the matter: by allowing you to touch the interface, you more directly interact with a software instrument. (I’m paraphrasing. I think he said it better.)

Here’s the thing: the iPad is then a better version of a software synth, but not a better version of a hardware instrument. It’s a different beast, but it is on some level an evolution of software. (I would argue this is why my ongoing criticism and praise for the iPad, whether or not you agree with it, has been consistent. I was initially concerned about software lock-down or consumption-focused applications because I was judging the thing as a computer – and likewise found things like MIDI input and output equally useful. That is, I’m certainly biased, but I try to be at least consistently biased.)

And as a result, something about the teaser video above looks horribly, terribly wrong. The modern Moog Music is the brand that, more than any other, more than any boutique modular vendor or blog or synth builder or eBay find, has stood for the beauty of hardware design. This is wrapped up with lots of mysticism among their fans about the sound of analog – some legitimate, some not, some misunderstanding the role of digital circuitry in making analog gear work, and some very real. But more than anything else, it’s about the value of designing hardware that integrates sound-making with physical control.

Having spent the better part of the summer having design discussions about what individual knobs should do, I can tell you first-hand that designing hardware is radically different from designing software. I enjoy each uniquely for this reason: software lets you do anything; hardware forces you to make choices.

If we had simply fetishized beautiful Moog gear with its wooden endcaps and such, then this criticism would be unfair. But I’m assuming it isn’t just nostalgia that makes us appreciate those designs.

Framed by that beautiful gear, artist Marc Doty looks frankly ridiculous tapping away at a screen you can’t see. It looks wrong for two reasons: one, because you know that the experience of the Moog hardware is so very different, and two, because the effect of playing the iPad is somehow incongruous, too.

Now, obviously, our friends at Moog I’m sure aren’t suggesting that we switch from their hardware to iPads. But it’s worth saying why I think the two things are so different, because in the celebration of the cheapness of software, and Moog’s own marketing blitz for their new app, it might otherwise get missed.

Tap, Tap, is This Thing On?

Of course, computers look ridiculous. We all know this. Seeing someone behind a computer is a problem precisely for the reason that watching someone play a video game is ridiculous: the human is involved in an essentially abstract activity in which physical motion only makes sense with visible feedback from a screen. People repeat this criticism to me when I see them the way that people repeat greetings like “Good Morning.”

Illustration:

“Mornin’!”
“Hey, you doing?”
“Pretty good, you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“Weather’s nice today.”
“Yeah, winter’s coming.”
“How’s your work going?”
“Busy.”
“You know the problem with computers? They lack the kinetic experience of connecting a physical gesture to a sound, because of the natural abstraction of software. The keyboard/mouse interface paradigm introduced in primarily with the 80s Macintosh and copied from the XEROX PARC GUI research was never intended for musical use. The convenience of the computer is unassailable, but we have this fundamental interaction model problem. Audiences are therefore un-engaged in laptop performances, because all they see is a person behind a glowing laptop screen with the Apple logo. They could be checking they’re email.”
“Yup. Laptop music sure is f***ing boring. Guess you’d better by a f***ing fader box for fifty bucks. So, see you tomorrow?”
“Ciao!”

The problem is, tablets (okay, iPads, since that’s all anyone at the moment is buying), while they look different than computers, can also look just as absurd. Somehow, they’ve escaped this criticism, perhaps because of their newness. Well, dear iPad, it ends now. The laptop has stood up to these complaints, and we know why we use them anyway. We make fun of them, and they’re tougher for it, and we still love them. Now it’s your turn. We may still use you, but you’re going to have to play with the grown-ups now and start to answer how wildly un-musical and un-usable your plain glass screen can be.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m fully aware of my own checkered past. I spend large amounts of my time looking silly. (This extends to a great many things in my life, but let’s focus for now on how stupid I look a lot of the time making computer music; lest this post become the size of Wikipedia.) I’ve spent years looking silly and strange using a laptop, since I first played with a computer in 1993. I did it enough that I knew, each time I heard someone reflexively complain about musicians “checking their email,” I was exactly the sort of person they meant. I have seen the enemy, and it is me.

But I have enough expertise in looking stupid to have a sinking suspicion that we must be very, very fast approaching the day where we start to (rightfully) make fun of the iPad, too.

This is not to say you should sell all your computers and trade them in for modular synths – though I do know some people reach that conclusion. I think software is a wonderful thing, in case that wasn’t blatantly and painfully obvious. It allows us greater flexibility of use, and the ability to create sounds you haven’t heard before.

The iPad is a terrific, new marketplace for such synths, because of a voracious consumer base and easy distribution. I doubt the Moog synth would single-handedly motivate an iPad purchase: you either want one or you don’t, and if you don’t, there are so many other ways of making sound I seriously doubt you’ll be genuinely missing out. If you do, you’ve probably already loaded up with other synths, and this one could provide extensive good times. And that is a good thing.

The danger is, in the understandable enthusiasm for embracing this market, we might lose sight of the fact that the iPad shares a lot of the same problems as the computer. To be fair, you can connect MIDI input and output to the Moog app, thus adding more tangible control. And X/Y touch works very well for continuous control, on the iPad as it did, once upon a time, on touch sensors on early Buchla synths.

But Moog, uniquely and more than any other iPad developer anywhere, had better start to think about how they will distinguish between the message about their iPad app and the rest of their hardware, especially since their hardware costs a lot more than 99 cents – and rightfully so.

I really wasn’t joking earlier today when I said I’d trade in my iPad to have a Moogerfooger ClusterFlux instead.

To be clear: the Animoog app benefits greatly from X/Y touch navigation, and you can replace the keyboard with MIDI input to make it far more playable. The issue is simply that what you wind up with is a different – if also powerful – experience from what you get from Moog hardware. And the actual programming outside of the X/Y pad can still be tricky on the iPad’s screen, which has been the ongoing issue with mice on computers.

Good Times Ahead

The big picture is brighter than the iPad alone. Musicians are finding ways of keeping their laptops onstage, but focusing on their performance – of instruments, of controllers, of vocals. Computers themselves can disappear, without losing their flexibility, as we saw with DJ sniff’s display-free Mac mini rig. And the same embedded technology that powers the iPad is finding its way into other tools that are more musician-friendly, even if they lack Apple’s magical, consumer-inspiring tech. Chris Randall’s Beepcat project proposes using the BeagleBoard embedded platform as open hardware for distributing all the power of software synths, without the clunky computer. (More on that soon.)

The iPad, too, can be a useful tool, so long as we appreciate and work around its limitations, as we’ve learned to do with the computer.

This is, of course, the beautiful thing. It’s not about whether you choose analog or digital, iPad app or Ableton Live on Mac or Pd patch running on Linux, hardware or software, knob or switch or touch ribbon or Theremin. We have a wide spectrum of possible choices. There’s great experimentation on the iPad, and the best way to appreciate that experimentation is to realize how many people are tackling it, in many different ways. The iPad synth developer is given a radically imperfect device with all sorts of problems; that’s what makes their solutions so interesting. Because the iPad looks so silly, it’s important to make it sound really, really good, just as the mouse and keyboard and office machine rig that is the modern computer has been transformed by software that can make you love the thing.

First ‘Professional’ Synth?

So, on that note, one final criticism. I’m disappointed that Moog marketing chose the phrase “First Professional Synth Designed for the iPad.”

Yes, this is the sort of thing marketing people do all the time. But it’s no less unfortunate. And I thought it was a bit funny to see in comments on Synthtopia’s excellent preview people saying that they were excited about it because it came from Moog.

Don’t assume that for a second. Assume the opposite: the Moog name means it better be damned good, or you should get your pitchforks. (That’s even truer given that the Moog brand was in the hands of some less-than-stellar owners once upon a time.) We love Moog the way we love the New York Yankees – we love their achievements, and we’ll spend the extra money, in order to celebrate those victories – and be equally savage if they don’t live up to their name. My sense from the people I’ve talked to at Moog is that they’re aware of these expectations, and the expectations, not the assumptions can be what’s motivating.

Independent developers have done some fantastic work in iPad synths, work that obviously influenced the creation of the Animoog. Implying their work was somehow not “professional,” when this synth is built on that work, is insulting.

I’m not holding a grudge here, because the people I know at Moog are uncommonly supportive of the work of other creators. It’s the Moog marketing department’s job to say their thing is the “only” or “first” pro tool. It’s my job to say it’s not, and to pay just as much attention to developers you’ve never heard of as the ones that have. And I know when people feel I’m not doing that job well – whether I think that criticism is fair or not – I hear about it. (Oh, do I.)

We love the Moog name, we put it on t-shirts and drink beer with it on the label and get tattoos and go to festivals named after it because we love the designers who built them, and the feeling of using their designs, and the sounds they make when we plug them in, and the music we produce together with and made for people we love.

Apple? Moog?

Just a brand.

And in the end, if we’re willing to pick up the thing and look really silly tapping away at a piece of glass, we’ll know that the software is very, very good, indeed.

Now, let me update my iTunes credit card information.

Since CDM doesn’t have an editorial board, and this is just me talking, we really do welcome your feedback. Am I pulling too many punches, and you want to go further? Do you disagree, and want to write up an op-ed? Fire away in comments, and if someone would like to write a response / rebuttal, we’ll publish that here or link to your own site. Also, if you think I look silly, you may feel free to call me names; I’ve only ever deleted really rude comments. -PK

Okay, I think this may be some of the best / worst promotional marketing I’ve seen for music software. It runs something like this:

Do you want to be just like Jamie Lidell?

The answer is as close as the iTunes App Store and your portable device.

Just download Native Instruments’ iMaschine app to your iPhone, fire it up, and then …

Forget it. Really. I mean, this guy is actually lying in bed in his PJs, the sound you’re hearing is really just the crappy internal microphone on an iPhone 4 iPod touch, and what you’re hearing really is the line out, and this is really all one take. (I confirmed as much with Native Instruments’ Constantin Köhncke as we watched the final take earlier this week at their office.)

For all we talk about microphone selection and placement and such, there’s not much substitute for being able to sing. That is, iMaschine can make anyone sound like this, just so long as they are Jamie Lidell.

And, actually, maybe that means this isn’t such bad marketing after all – perhaps not for iMaschine so much as music software in general. I’m kidding, of course – once you realize you’re not Jamie Lidell, you can work out who you are. And you do have a voice of your own.

iMaschine

I could at this point mention the features in iMaschine, but … what’s the point? It records stuff. You can lay down beats and then sing into it. Just like you can do with other tools for your iPhone or your laptop or even a piece of used sampling gear you found on eBay, all of which can fit comfortably into a bed on a lazy weekend.

In fact, who cares about how technically-sophisticated your software is, or if you have a fancy, high-end mic handy? I hope that we’ll all get a few minutes lying in bed somewhere this weekend. (I know that’s part of my plan.) So, use the internal mic on your laptop, or phone or tape recorder or whatever, use that bicycle for the mind, and in the words of Sesame Street’s “Sing,”

“Don’t worry if it’s not good enough / for anyone else to hear / just sing / sing a song.”

I’ll have a review of iMaschine by next week, but I’m even more interested in what you make.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

Continue reading The Deleted City visualizes GeoCities as it was, today

The Deleted City visualizes GeoCities as it was, today originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Sep 2011 19:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Steve Jobs’ abrupt resignation from Apple is of course plastered all over the news and social network feeds, so let’s consider instead the legacy Jobs has left over the decades for creative technology. The highlights for artists and musicians begin far before the iPhone. Jobs’ sometimes-obsessive dedication to design, to uncompromising capabilities particularly in regards to multimedia, and to stewarding the creative teams that built these computers has shaped the development of computing for music and visuals. Now, what happens next – including the important role computers continue to have in creation – could be no less compelling. Here are just a few landmark contributions:

The Apple II, product of the company Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded, was for many of us our first experience in computing. Jobs was an impresario and ambassador to the Apple II as it aggressively took on education and widespread popular computing. With those roots, the makers of electronic music and electronic music software to come found fertile soil.

The Lisa and Macintosh brought what were once experimental ideas in computing interaction to the masses. Jobs was not a perfect manager in his early years by any stretch – with Apple II and Mac divisions turned against one another and difficulties with Jobs’ sometimes-hostile management style, there were reasons behind the ouster of Jobs from the company he founded. But he also, as he was to do later at Pixar, managed to protect a team of innovators in design unlike any that’s been assembled since, the group of people who defined computing interaction and the expressive computer for us today. And the Macintosh, while best known popularly as becoming the engine of the desktop publishing revolution, was also a platform for changing musical performance and creation. Laurie Spiegel’s Music Mouse on the Mac would be one of the first software synths and audiovisual instruments (perhaps the first, depending on the definition). The Mac also would come to lead the way with technologies like MIDI and sequencers like Performer and Vision, taking a key role in shaping music to come. Moreover, the design and philosophy Jobs had helped guide, even to the very notion of the computer as a “bicycle for the mind,” was what convinced so many in our community that computing had a place in music and art.

And then there’s Pixar. Jobs literally saved the company from a near-certain demise, and with it a group of artists and engineers who defined both the potential of computer animation as a feature medium and the techniques used to make it look visually appealing. By all accounts, it was Jobs’ ability to protect this group of creative people and allow them to do what they did best that allowed them to remake animation. It’s a sign of the times that Pixar executives effectively took over the Disney animation department and not the other way around. Today’s real-time, 2D and 3D visuals, visual media as performance, visual media interactively responding to music, are all possible because of the technologies and modes of expression pioneered by the team at Pixar.

The NeXT, while a business failure, had a vital role in music and creative technology. Aside from producing the basic operating system that would become Mac OS X, the NeXT machine, with its unusually-powerful DSP capabilities, was the box on which real-time Max audio processing and many other key achievements in early computer DSP became possible. I hear there are even a few of these black boxes haunting labs and facilities around the world now, still in working order. And this design is all Jobs: flaunting convention or, arguably, even business realities, Jobs built the machine of the future. NeXT may have been Jobs’ Ford Edsel, but like the Edsel itself, it keeps looking better in hindsight, and it really did represent the technologies to come.

The revitalization of Apple will be what most pundits observe. But I think it’s tough to overstate its importance for the computer industry. I’d actually been preparing in my head an editorial prior to the announcement. The gist went something like this: we’re not living in the post-PC age. We’re living in the Apple age. Sure, computer maker executives point clumsily to a perceived shift to “tablets” that’s hurting their PC business. But mostly what they’re saying is that PC profit margins are falling, and they can’t make netbooks or tablets or anything else new people want to make up the difference. Look at Apple, by comparison: the “tablet” market is almost exclusively the “iPad” market for now, and at the same time, Mac sales are up, Mac market share is up, and Mac enthusiasm is generally up (the odd misstep with video editing and OS design oddities notwithstanding). Love them or hate them, Apple are the benchmark for computing, whether that computing experience is on a tablet, a phone, a laptop, or a desktop. That’s what a competitive company does. And it’s a combination of Mac OS X (now also a mobile OS) and Apple’s systems integration that makes it possible. (Like their competitors, Apple pulls together components from many, many other makers – but that makes the integration more impressive, not less.)

The Mac as musical instrument. Regular readers (or anyone who talks to me) know that I pull no punches when it comes to being critical of Apple. I think that’s my job. I also believe competition is important. But I think it’d be a mistake to dismiss musician Mac fans as being simply charmed by pretty computers. Apple’s OS is, of the three major desktop operating systems, the most able to make music with minimal user intervention. Their hardware is, generally speaking, reliable and enjoyable to use. For many musicians, comfort with the PowerBook and MacBook lines – from industrial design to operating system – is what allowed them to feel able to go out and produce and perform with a laptop. “Design” is more than skin deep. It runs to the very kernel of an operating system, literally, and in music it means design and engineering that can perform in tiny fractions of a second. Apple is not the only company capable of such engineering, but the work they’ve done in areas you can see and can’t see alike is all work you experience when you use their product.

When Jobs took over Apple, the entire music market was potentially on the chopping block. The idea of native creative software was no longer a sure thing. Jobs managed to build a platform ecosystem and an organization that supported continued leadership in the industry. In the grand scheme of the history of creative computing, that’s no small feat.

Digital music consumption. iTunes, iPod, downloads, digital music consumption … yeah, that whole thing. Jobs’ personal commitment to music, and perhaps to the romanticized ideas of the relationship with album and artist, may last even when these individual products are long gone. Even as “cloud” music makes music more of a commodity, the feeling of satisfaction you get when you buy an actual album download from Bandcamp is in tune with the vision Jobs had of music listening. (It’s a vision misunderstood by record labels made nervous by that original “Rip. Mix. Burn.” ad campaign from 2001′s iPod launch, though I suppose what that campaign did accurately predict was the rise of the single.)

Digital music creation. Apple under Jobs was also a champion of music making software, acquiring Emagic, bundling GarageBand with every Mac, and developing Logic Studio and now GarageBand on iPad. Even beyond the immediate impact of this software, the focus on music creation apps and the underlying infrastructure with Core Audio and Core MIDI gets unparalled attention. Jobs has led that emphasis and the relationship with artists and industry from creation to consumption in a way that has impacted the entire music software industry. While third-party developers may not always be happy with the immediate results, the long-term benefit of making music instrumental to this generation of computers is hard to overstate. (Thanks to readers pointing this out in comments – and pointing out, as well, that once upon a time this was really more true of Atari than Apple. That history will have to wait for another day, though.)

Popularizing new mobility and interaction. Yes, the iPhone and iPad is what I’m talking about. But if you believe these designs will prove to have an impact in the greater history of computing, you have to assume that impact will be larger than a single product. The ideas behind mobile computing arguably began at Apple in Jobs’ absence, the era of Newton and John Sculley’s Apple, and then at upstart General Magic (a company which employed many of the future movers and shakers of today’s mobile landscape, including the founder of Android). But even those teams at Apple and General Magic had the thumbprints of the Mac team Jobs originally assembled, and their vision wasn’t truly realized until the iPhone and iPad. On the handheld and tablet, respectively, Apple under Jobs brought us new modes of interaction with software, from multi-touch and gestures to single-task focus, computers that began to feel more immersive, computing interaction that for the first time felt freed from the accumulated UI detritus (“chrome”) that had clouded the Mac’s original vision. Musicians and artists predicted (and built) these kinds of designs for years before the iOS revolution, and so it’s little wonder that some of the most ground-breaking software for these platforms comes from those communities. The ability to take a computer into a party, to make something as viscerally expressive as musical sound, is the perfect test for whether ubiquitous computing can be human. It’s the computer as part of culture, and it’s under Jobs’ Apple that we first saw those machines that made it seem like we were living in the future. If they’re not the last, if they do begin to come from other makers, that’s to me an even greater testament to that vision.

Jobs’ next act: Succession. Steve Jobs is by no stretch of the imagination a perfect manager; Apple’s products are hardly unassailably “perfect.” Often, the appealing vision of Apple is the counterpart of a lack of vision by their competitors, an inability to harness design and engineering talent – though that failure will give pause to anyone looking forward to the Jobs-less Apple.

But part of management is succession. Steve Jobs managed to grow as a manager, from the apparently tempestuous youth who was kicked out of Apple to someone who built a mature, wildly-successful global business. He learned from mistakes at Apple, at NeXT, and even at Pixar. He delivered new acts better than the last.

It’s immensely sad to many of us that health would be the reason for Jobs’ departure. I think those of us who work in computing and journalism hope for good health for everyone in this industry. But this is the nature of succession as a reality in any organization.

Jobs’ best days, his best achievements, have all come about as a result of intelligent leadership. Jobs didn’t design any of the products above; leadership is the ability to guide people who do that work. And to me, the best test of leadership is succession: it’s the ability to build an organization you can leave. I’m surprised by the gloom and doom around Apple. Jobs will be sorely missed. But I find it very unlikely that, as David Pogue argues, Apple will now be run “by committee.” This is the Apple Jobs built. Committees likely have nothing to do with it.

Ironically, Apple’s success following Jobs’ first departure – what were then some of the company’s best days – were partly possible because of the organization Jobs had built. Sculley ultimately proved the wrong leader for Apple, but he did helm smart decisions that helped Apple mature as a global business, helped the Mac mature as a platform, and defined how computers would be designed and marketed for years to come. And Sculley was not coincidentally a Jobs recruit. So, too, were many of the managers and engineers who built that healthy Apple, the Macintosh on which a lot of the music tech revolution has happened. They come out of an organizational culture and enthusiasm Jobs had built from the ground up.

Now, a more mature Jobs leaves Apple voluntarily, with a succession plan in place, and with an organization he has more directly molded. He’s staying on with the organization, too, and you can bet his voice will continue to carry enormous weight. If you want to evaluate the future of creative technology on the Mac and iOS, this is the greatest test yet of what Jobs can do as a manager, whether you love the man or not. In Sculley’s accounts of his long walks with Jobs in the early days of Apple, he reveals that Mr. Jobs was constantly aware of his own mortality. All of us will, without exception, be gone someday, someday not very far away. What is a “legacy” if not what you leave when you’re gone?

It takes a strong game to weave so seamlessly the combination of art contained within. Limbo was a game that so totally embodied itself that it found its way atop most “Best of…” lists the year of it’s release on XBLA. With the game properly ported and recently released on PC and PSN, DesigningSound.org took some time to catch up with Martin Stig Andersen.

When I saw Martin speak this spring at GDC I was struck by how well formed his concept of sound for Limbo was, not only that but how his formative years seemed completely in support of hit contributions to the soundscape. If you have played through even a section of the game you will know that this could be no small feat, as it’s not every sound designer that could inexorably link the flickering black and white images to abstract impressions of sound.

This is a story that follows a complete trajectory. From his days in University learning and experimenting with electroacoustic music, acousmatic music and soundscapes throughout the development and application of interactive audio gestures which help bring to life the action on screen.

Read on for further insight…

DK: How did your education prepare you for interactive media?

MSA: My compositional studies at conservatory and university were very much biased towards the artistic side. At City University in London where I studied electroacoustic composition the general agenda was to discuss “whys” rather than “hows”, for example why a specific sound or sound structure evokes certain associations rather than how it was created. So, as far as technology is concerned I’m pretty much self-taught. On the aesthetic side, at university we dealt with all kinds of electroacoustic music, including interactive music, combining live performance (voice or instrument) and electronics. However unlike games in which interaction happens directly between the player and the game, in interactive concert music the interaction is something happening between the performer(s) on stage and an interactive playback system. In such situation the listener may not at all grasp the interactivity of a composition, which of course posed a lot of questions, like whether or not it’s important for the audience to actually experience such interactivity. Personally I’ve never composed a piece that I wanted to be perceived as interactive per se. Even with Limbo which is natively interactive qua being a video-game, I’d say I did my best to avoid drawing the players’ awareness towards the idea of interactivity. This is because the game isn’t really interactive beyond a basic moment-to-moment level where the player maneuvers the protagonist and interacts with the physics of the environment, while on the larger scale the game remains a fixed, linear experience.
In regards to interactive media I guess the most important skill I took with me from university is what you could call temporal awareness. By studying the perception of form and structure in music and audiovisuals I acquired an understanding of the various temporalities inhabiting not only sound but also visuals, and learned how to match and contrast such temporalities creatively in order to make sound contribute to the overall flow or even structure of an audiovisual experience. Working with Limbo I identified various temporalities inhabiting different types of gameplay, and was able to respond to those while at the same time building larger scale sound structures encompassing several gameplay moments each featuring different temporalities. I even consider there to be a tangible global sound structure contributing to the wholeness of Limbo, although a few people have actually commented on that. Studying acousmatic music and soundscape composition in general have also served as an important inspiration in my audiovisual and interactive work, although the concepts associated with these genres are not directly applicable to audiovisual media.

DK: When did you first become aware of Acousmatic principles and Soundscapes and their creation?

MSA: I can’t remember exactly when but sometime during my studies at conservatory in Denmark. Yet in Denmark, at least back then, there were a lot of misconceptions regarding those terms, and it wasn’t before joining City University in London in 2001 that I came to understand the essence of the ideas. Getting acquainted to the aesthetic foundation of acousmatic composition was undoubtedly the biggest revelation in my musical carrier, and I somewhat felt like being ported 25 years forward in time. It’s hard to think about the time before that, and I wish I’d discovered the ideas earlier on, or that I’d have had the imagination to come up with them myself! I remember when playing the piano in my childhood I had this abstract inner vision of pulling the keys on the keyboard apart, and entering the sound, like I wanted to be inside sound itself. Today I haven’t been using a keyboard for over ten years, and I’ve learned to form sound as if it was a piece of clay. Prior to joining City University I’d already learned many of the tools that are often associated with electroacoustic composition, such as MaxMSP and AudioSculpt, and I also did compose stuff that was acousmatic in nature, I just didn’t have the bigger perspective at that time.

DK: What were some of the inspirations taken from these idea’s that you applied?

MSA: What I found interesting in relation to audiovisual media was that soundscape and acousmatic music together embraces the entire continuum between representational and abstract sound, in this way dismissing the traditional dividing line between sound design and music. By deploying such approaches in audiovisual work you can make seamless transitions between realism and abstraction, and make sound travel smoothly between the diegetic and non-diegetic space of a represented world. For me it has a much bigger psychological impact when you turn a naturalistic soundscape into abstraction by making your sound effects play as “music” rather than adding some traditional background music. Moreover, making your “music” emerge from the environment is likely to make the audience more forgiving towards it since they’ll accept it as stemming, however abstractly, from the environment. This feature attains special relevance in video games where the player may get stuck from time to time and the audio elements need to be flexible in terms of duration. It’s important to note that although acousmatic composition does have certain potentials in relation to audiovisual work it doesn’t really make sense to use the term “acousmatic” in this context. Not at least because in the context of film the term has merely come to denote diegetic sounds that are off screen.

DK: Had you worked with interactive audio prior to games?

MSA: I did a few projects utilizing interactive audio, including electroacoustic theater performances where I created sound systems that reacted to noises made by the actors on stage, and pieces mixing instruments and interactive audio. Yet I haven’t been creating much that the listener could interact with directly. I think this comes down to the point that what I like to do with interactive media isn’t interactive per se but still more of a structured experience, and so, allowing the listeners to interact directly with a composition would probably give them the impression that the music is supposed to be interactive, and that they should be able to influence the course of the music itself. Video games, at least accounting those that are rule-based, are great in that the player doesn’t expect them to be interactive per se but contrarily accepts there to be an authored, linear path through them. Game design can communicate clearly to the player what to expect in terms of interactivity, and stay true to that. I found that more difficult outside the field of games where the lack of rules and conventions often cause the audience to be preoccupied with figuring out and interpreting the interactive system rather than engaging themselves in the experience.

DK: Was Limbo your first commercial game?

MSA: Yes, Limbo was my first game, although I consider it more as an artistic venture.

DK: While the outcome has a well defined audio aesthetic, how clear was the direction you were given for creating the soundscape for the game?

MSA: I’ve been lucky to work with a game director who’s as sensitive to sound as any other aspect of a game. Before I joined the production, which was rather late, the game director Arnt Jensen had already been thinking a lot about sound. For example, he wanted to give prominence to the boy’s Foley sounds, to emphasize silence and subtlety in the ambiences, and to avoid music that would manipulate the emotions of the player. On a more general level he wanted the sound to suggest a distanced, enveloped, and secret world. Those ideas corresponded very much to my own from watching the original concept trailer, and eventually Jensen entrusted me the task of developing the entire sound-world for the game. Based on mutual trust I think we managed to form a criteria of success where both of us were fully content with the sound.

DK: How important do you feel the sound processing involved with creating a sound is in regards to it’s final outcome?

MSA: Sound processing was essential in defining the sound of Limbo. Inspired by the bleak and grainy b/w imagery I ventured into using obsolete analogue equipment, and by running all sounds through old wire-recorders and tape-recorders they came to echo a distant past. Even sounds that were originally heavily processed using contemporary digital techniques such as time stretch and phase vocoding acquired this quality, as the analogue transformation helped to eliminate the digital byproducts of such processes. Using analogue equipment also enhanced the dynamic contrast between the sounds since louder sounds would naturally get more distorted than softer ones. The ear is really sensitive to such nuances, and interprets the more distorted sounds as being louder than the lesser distorted ones. Accordingly I never normalize sounds but always keep them at the level that I imagine is the maximum they will play back in the game. This allows me to enhance the dynamic contrast by running the sounds through various analogue equipment with fixed settings so that the result varies in accordance with the sounds’ amplitudes, and with tools such as Wavelab I can even batch process loads of sounds through such equipment. I find the approach is very suitable for games where you don’t have the fixed timeline of linear media but rather have to adapt to the pace of each individual player and correspondingly I would say to be very cautious with dynamics. Here the analogue sound processing helped specific sounds to be loud without actually being loud in this way minimizing the risk of listening fatigue should the player get stuck in the louder areas of the game. For example due to excessive analogue distortion, the foundry in Limbo sounds almost like a continuous explosion although the levels are actually quite soft. What I also discovered was that running all the sound through the old analogue equipment really helped the sounds sit together in the final mix. It worked like glue.

DK: How did the implementation pipeline affect the way you designed sounds?

MSA: From the beginning I wanted to use the game’s sound system as a compositional tool. I didn’t like the idea of working in the linear environment of a sequencer, and then having to squeeze the result into the nonlinear environment of the game. In other words, I wanted to work from within the game and achieve synergy between the creation and implementation of sound. For example I would try out the sound in the game between each iteration of sound processing, and even get ideas to sounds inspired by implementation work. This approach essentially enabled me to work empirically as I usually do when composing electroacoustic music, and was very much in line with Playdead’s overall ambition of making decisions based on percept rather than concept. Besides working in Wwise I also did some of the implementation in the game engine which primarily involved setting up the triggers and RTPC controllers that conduct the ambience and overall mix. Again, this really helped me to try things out quickly, making adjustments etc., or, in other words, to work with core implementation and sound design simultaneously. Working with implementation side also enabled me to make appropriate sound recordings as I would have an idea about how the sounds would eventually be integrated in the game. For more advanced implementation requiring in depth knowledge about the game engine a team member took care of this on the fly which was crucial to the final result.

DK: Coming from background in sound with access and exposure to tools such as PureData, Max/MSP, Supercollider, etc…How enabled did you feel, in contrast, using the Wwise toolset with the game providing the interactive component?

MSA: For Limbo Wwise pretty much had what I needed. Yet in contrast to a tool such as Max/MSP Wwise is almost exclusively reliant on externally generated data meaning that it doesn’t allow for much internal generation and modification of data. So if you want to generate specific data to control the sound or to modify data sent from the game you’ll need external tools. For example, in Limbo I needed to temporally smooth out some RTPC values that I received from the game, and had to have a programmer to create a tool for this.

DK: What software, processes, and recording techniques did you use to help define the sound of Limbo?

MSA: Besides the antique recorders and filters I also used some state of the art software tools many of which are based on Fast Furrier Transform (FFT). FFT essentially translates a sound’s waveform into the frequency domain giving you direct access to modify the sound’s spectrum before making the inverse transformation back to the time domain. Having access to the spectrum of a sound and its movement in time allows for all kinds of sound surgery such as filtering out partials, freezing sound or multiplying spectra. IRCAM’s Audiosculpt is a great program for doing those kind of things but I also use an increasing amount of mainstream plug-ins that runs FFT under the hood. Another related technique that I used a lot in Limbo is convolution. Not convolution reverb, but more like filters where you convolve the spectrum of one sound with that of another, a feature available in PEAK Pro for example. Both techniques are quite demanding in terms of tweaking and handling the outcome, for example, to get rid of the associated side effects. I really dislike when you can hear trances of specific sound processing or recognize the techniques or actual software involved. Often the spectral outcome is unevenly balanced with excessive fluctuation in different parts of the spectrum, and I use quite advanced processors such as dynamic EQs, spectral interpolators and restoration tools to tame the results, and to extract the parts that I like. The processes were great for creating the diffuse components of the ambiences in Limbo.

DK: Can you talk a bit about the mix, specifically in relation to the State Based system you mentioned in your talk.

MSA: In order to make the sound in Limbo come alive I opted for an active mixing approach where I would continuously make decisions about the mix and change it in accordance with dramatical interpretations of the game. We took inspiration from films where sound helps to focus the attention of the audience by emphasizing important actions while ignoring those of lesser importance. Accordingly in Limbo, prominence is given to approaching obstacles and environments even before they’re revealed visually, and as you pass them they may be silenced entirely although they may still be in the frame thereby revealing new obstacles or environments to come. Besides contributing to the foreboding atmosphere of Limbo, such mixing minimizes the risk of making sounds become annoying to the player, simply because the sounds only play as long as they’re important to the actual game. In some cases I even use state based mixing to make swift shifts between entire soundscapes, for instance from a soft dreamscape to brutal realism, influencing also the levels of the protagonist’s Foley sounds. The Foley sounds of the boy which are more or less limited to footstep sounds were also subjected to some quite sophisticated passive mixing strategies. For example, the footstep sounds start attenuating gradually after the boy has been moving continuously for a shorter period of time, and regain in amplitude when he’s standing still. This helps to establish the boy as being relatively loud in the mix without actually having to be loud all the time, and serves to give the impression that the surroundings are very soft. Another example is related to ground materials. When the boy has been running on a specific kind of ground material for some time the footstep sounds start attenuating until he steps onto a new material whereby the amplitude gets a small boost. Using several such strategies the amplitude of the boy’s footsteps varies about 15dB in total, without taking distance based attenuation and active mixing into account, and the result is a continuous variation of footstep levels which I guess most players won’t even notice but which nevertheless brings life to the boy.

A special thanks to Martin for taking the time to share his experiences with the community!

Filed under: News, Exclusive, New Music

Electronic musician, vocalist, and inventor Tim Exile is back; while the Google Doodle today of an interactive Les Paul inspired lots of people to invest some time fiddling and hacking, in Tim’s case, it inspired a whole song. And, to my knowledge, it’s the first time the homepage of Google got its own ode.

Bet the Googlers didn’t expect this response.

All of this serves as a serious reminder: sometimes simple and ubiquitous is good. It also shows the serious value of silliness. Here, here.

Previously: Les Paul Google Doodle, Animated – and Scripted with SuperCollider

Game lovers may lap up anything the title Portal touches as though it’s covered in powdered sugar, but resident Valve Software composer Mike Morasky deserves special mention. His music for Portal, and now Portal 2, is dead-on: chilly, atmospheric, dystopian, but also pulsing with energy and able to capture the gaming blockbuster’s strange combination of diabolical cerebral puzzles with wit. It’s all the more impressive, as Morasky has straight-up parodied musical styles in his whimsical Team Fortress or horror movie-cinematic Left 4 Dead scores.

Developer Valve quietly released 22 instrumental tracks from Portal 2 as “Soundtrack Volume 1: Songs to Test By,” free in 320 kpbs MP3 form. “Music to Code By” could be just as appropriate. Even if you ignore this post, know that this score will be racking up Last.fm playcount as it pipes into the headphones of nerd boys and girls.

GamesRadar published an interview with Morasky. Interestingly, while this is being released in soundtrack form, Portal 2 is in fact adaptive in the game. The system is in the foreground only in a few scenes, but there, multiple layers give a sense of progression. Any musicians who have been … erm … sucked into this game no doubt found these scenes highlights already, but here’s Morasky’s explanation to GamesRadar:

There are several cases where the music adds channels and complexity as you successfully solve portions of the puzzle, with each additional piece of music actually coming from the device that is participating in the activated game play mechanic. Obviously, this can heighten the sense of achievement as one completes the puzzle but also turns the mechanics of the puzzle into a sort of interactive music instrument that you can explore by selectively triggering the different channels of music with differing timings and configurations. Most of the interactive music is also positional so that as you move through the space you also change the mix and volume of the music you are hearing, which invites explorations of the space as well.

Morasky and Valve have been at the forefront of adaptive music in games – an area still left surprisingly unexplored – in particular in Left 4 Dead’s use of cinematic cues to heighten suspense and integrate with actual gameplay.

But that doesn’t make the soundtrack to me any less satisfying. With nods to spooky scifi and electronica convention alike, it nonetheless emerges with a distinctive voice – much like the game itself. In a world of cookie-cutter mainstream gaming, at least in the triple-A territory, the success of the title could be encouraging. Find it here:
http://www.thinkwithportals.com/music.php

Found via the superb gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun; who also note two additional volumes are on the way. Follow CDM’s Twitter feed and we’ll let you know when those hit.

And if you’d like to see more covered than in the interview above, let us know.

A new tool could be for the expressive, not just the lazy. That’s the read of Auto-Tune for guitar, and it makes me excited to see what people will do with it. It could be the advent of the true digital guitar.

Antares teased their efforts to bring Auto-Tune technology to guitars earlier this month, having gotten as far as working proof-of concept. (See Harmony Central’s exclusive video above, and Axetopia, Synthtopia.) I hadn’t worked out anything intelligent to say about it, perhaps because I was cowering in a corner in fear.

As a technologist, I have great respect for what Antares does, and their portfolio goes far beyond just the flagship vocal pitch correction. But suffice to say, Auto-Tune has been used in recording in some pretty unpleasant ways – the fault of the user, not the software, I’d argue. It’s regularly applied in order to suck the life out of great, perfectly-tuned singers, as well as to cover for people who can’t really sing, to the point that producers seem to not understand what the sound of a human voice is in all its complexity. (Case in point: Glee. The talented cast sounds incredible live and onstage, and like they have android stand-ins when they’re on the show. In fact, if you disagree with those uses, please – go use some of Antares’ terrific software for good, not evil, and I’ll write about it.)

Auto-Tune as a name, then, has come to symbolize a revolution, an extraordinary blockbuster of software – and the butt of a joke. So, it’s hard not to see a product called “Auto-Tune for Guitar” and carry some of that bias. Sometimes, as writers we actually need our readers to add some perspective.

Auto-Tune for Guitars could likewise be misused to smooth out some of the guitar’s natural intonation subtleties, though I think the danger is far less so than it is with the voice. But it’s more than that.

Reader Jesse Engel reflects on what it could mean. He notes that the significant advance is building the intelligence into the guitar, not just the computer, and that applications could be varied:

Don’t know if you saw this, but Antares has taken a fresh swipe at HEX guitar, putting a processor in the guitar and using it to do some more modern (Auto-Tune, emulation, etc.) processing. [Ed.: Hex refers to the practice of adding individual pick-ups to each of six strings. -PK]

The hex has been around for a while, but it’s a big deal to use it in this way for guitarists since you don’t need to try to do any polyphonic pitch recognition. Literally direct note access. Also, signals add nonlinearly, so effecting each string individually has a different sound than doing emulation on the mix.

The tech looks like it will help a lot of people fake being better than they are (especially bending to the right note), at the expense of the beautiful imperfections of great playing, but the potential of using hex pickups in these new ways is fun to think about.

The digital guitar has been a vision for a long time, from working out MIDI output to multichannel output. Gibson has been the name behind many of those efforts. Back in January 2004, Wired ran a glowing portrait of Gibson’s efforts in print:

The 100-Megabit Guitar: Gibson’s maverick CEO wants to shove Ethernet up your ax and rock the music world. [Wired 12.1]

It’s worth reading the whole article; the technical limitations of the Gibson system immediately come to light. Suffice to say, that vision never quite came to fruition; Wired even this year claimed that the project had been killed – at least at Gibson. None other than Adrian Freed, OpenSoundControl and alternative instrument design guru at the University of California Berkeley’s CNMAT research center, led the group – he, his colleagues, and his many students go right on innovating with or without Gibson. Updated: I’m not able to find the reference for that story, which I read in print. See comments for commentary by Adrian Freed, who sees otherwise.

At the time, CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, oddly speaking in the third person, pronounced, “Progress will happen. If Henry Juszkiewicz didn’t build a digital guitar, I can assure you the digital guitar would still happen.” That prediction may prove prescient.

The 2007 video below shows the debut of Gibson’s HD.6x-Pro Digital Les Paul – working with individual strings. I also saw a demo with Gibson, Intel, and Cakewalk that used each string in a surround speaker diffusion. It was a psychedelic effect, if not necessarily the most practical demo, but proof that a technology like this could have many uses.

For their part, here’s how Antares describes their technology. Notice that they aren’t only talking intonation, but other applications, as well.

Incorporating our world-renowned Auto-Tune pitch detection and manipulation along with our proprietary modeling technologies, ATG-6 is an entirely DSP-based suite of functions that offer everything you’ve always wanted from a guitar, along with capabilities you never imagined possible. From flawless intonation to astonishing tonal flexibility to alternate tunings that open up entirely new areas of inspiration and creativity, ATG-6 technology seriously expands the flexibility and range of the electric guitar while letting you continue to play your own way.

… Using our new Solid-Tune™ Intonation system, an ATG-6 equipped guitar constantly monitors the precise pitch of each individual string and makes any corrections necessary to ensure that every note of every chord and riff is always in tune, regardless of variables like finger position or pressure or physical limitations of the instrument. As a result, listening to a guitar with Solid-Tune is a revelation, offering a purity of intonation that has simply never before been possible.

Of course, Solid-Tune is smart enough to know when you want to manipulate pitch, so you can play bends and vibrato exactly as you always do. In fact, Solid-Tune Intonation makes it even easier to bend to the right pitch every time.

Antares ATG-6

Updated: Chris Randall chides me on Twitter (and I agree) for not mentioning Roland, specifically — that’s the reference above in Jesse’s from-the-hips comments to “hex” guitar. Roland has built a whole business around products that track notes played on a guitar, adding polyphonic pitch shifters, open tunings, note-by-note replacement, MIDI output, and even DSP effects processing. The difference in the Roland offering is that Roland has done all this work in a separate processing box you connect to their pick-up; Antares appears to be promising something that’s all-in-one in the guitar. And the analysis Antares is doing may well prove more sophisticated than what we’ve seen in the past in terms of distinguishing, say, a bend from different notes. That could open up additional and radically-new expressive possibilities, even if the underlying fundamental concept is more or less the same.

On the other hand, the other difference with the Roland offering relative to both Gibson’s past attempts and Antares’ upcoming ones: Roland successfully shipped and sold theirs. Until Antares does the same, advantage: Roland. We’ll be watching.

Why shouldn’t a digital download be better, not worse, than a CD release?

Sit in a studio as most of your favorite albums are recorded, mixed, and mastered, and odds are the digital material is being recorded at higher bit depths and sample rates. And while the perceptual record is more mixed, there’s also no question that, in terms of data, lossy compression schemes like MP3 do demand some loss in audio information. (Lossless schemes like FLAC, by contrast, use less data but do so without sacrificing sound information.)

All of this means that it’s news that you can get Radiohead’s “The King of Limbs” album in 24-bit, lossless FLAC. It’s the first time there’s been a major artist doing this kind of release online, say 7Digital – and, in turn, the first step back toward greater fidelity after the step backward from 16-bit, 44.1kHz lossless audio CDs to the lossy versions available now. By “first,” I can only imagine they mean on 7Digital; if you like this sort of release, it’s worth checking out HDtracks, an online store with content all going this direction (and lots of FLAC):
https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php

It’s also the latest case that demonstrates that iTunes need not be your only online store for music. UK rival 7digital is the first and only digital store to offer up the band’s brilliant “The King of Kimbs” in 24-bit FLAC.

http://7digital.com
Deluxe release @ 7digital [US link]

Whether their listeners can really hear the difference or not, it’s likely stores will begin to move to greater audio fidelity. For their part, 7digital says that the 24-bit FLAC codec for Radiohead “is the first step in 7digital’s move towards higher quality digital music downloads.” The reasoning is pretty simple. Bandwidth and storage costs are getting smaller for online stores as those stores grow and better leverage server infrastructure. Storage is generally cheaper now than it had been, too, though somewhat mitigated by the increasing popularity of solid state flash memory over larger, cheaper hard disk drives. But most of all, stores are likely to respond to artist and listener demand, particularly as resellers try to differentiate themselves from streaming sound and justify your purchase. It’s likely labels may also look to formats like FLAC to squeeze more revenue out of the enthusiasts who are most likely to buy full albums. The deluxe FLAC edition – bundled with 16-bit FLAC and 320kbps AAC for compatibility – costs US$11.99 instead of the technically-inferior US$7.92 320kbps MP3 version.

I’m skipping over the most important issue, though – how do you listen to this?

FLAC isn’t the only compressed lossless codec, but it is the only format that’s fully free and open source. It’s really an ideal tradeoff – you maintain smaller file sizes, but the quality of a 24-bit FLAC file is the same as a much bigger 24-bit WAV or AIFF.

It’s hardly a household name, but FLAC support is surprisingly widespread. Streaming players like the Logitech Squeezebox and Sonos products support it.

Many desktop software players will play FLAC, too: once codec support is installed on your OS of choice, in fact, most players will do it. Linux these days does it out of the box with most players. VLC is probably the easiest, sure-fire way to get FLAC support on Windows and Mac. On Windows, the excellent MediaMonkey, Winamp, and foobar2000 all play FLAC natively. On the Mac, the open source Cog is also an option (though it appears it hasn’t been updated recently, sadly). Aside from VLC, cross-platform, open source players like Songbird (Mac, Windows) and Banshee (gradually being ported from Linux to Mac and Windows) are promising, too.

Of course, part of the reason the situation is spotty is that iTunes has gained a certain hegemony. Nothing against iTunes per se, but I believe having choice is a good thing. Indeed, the predecessor of iTunes itself – the long-forgotten SoundJam MP by Casady & Greene on which Apple’s product was based – was the product of a period of heated Mac and Windows player rivalries. If you love music, you’ll want some options.

And the tide is turning. One of the most encouraging audio player initiatives I’ve seen yet is from Audiofile Engineering. I’m already a fan of AE because of their excellent wave editing and loop products (working on a new review – stay tuned). Now, they’re reviving the spirit of SoundJam’s principle rival, and my own player of choice in another life, Audion. Fidelia is a perfect choice of commercial player for Radiohead; it can play FLAC natively and even dither the 24-bit audio stream for a 16-bit output. I haven’t reviewed Fidelia yet as I’d like to see it mature a bit; minimalism is good, but some basic functionality is still emerging. But I do hope to talk about it soon. And while Windows users have had lots of terrific choices, it’s nice to see choice returning to the Mac, too.

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/fidelia/

Speaking of hegemony, mobile players have tended to lag in FLAC support, but that’s improving, too. The free and open source andless for Android supports FLAC, and I expect more as the Android music player market continues to heat up.

Many of these players do actually also support Apple’s Apple Lossless format – even including many of the free Linux options – so I expect future iTunes lossless exclusives wouldn’t necessarily be a dealbreaker. (That’s true even of andless, so you could, say, rip to Apple Lossless with iTunes and load Apple Lossless and purchased FLAC files onto an Android music player when on the go. Maybe someday we’ll even see DIY devices based on Android that offer high-fidelity audio outputs.)

An obviously-essential part of this equation is whether you can actually hear the results. I won’t start on music consumers who listen regularly on internal laptop speakers and generic Apple white earbuds. But I’d be interested in what you can detect, comparing different music content, using better listening environments. With “deluxe” editions bundling the MP3 and FLAC together, we’ll have lots of raw material for double-blind tests. Anyone with some experience in administering such tests – or who wants to get involved in a research project?