music: Paul Oakenfold- Tranceport
I can remember conjuring images of the future as a kid. Fueled by Blade Runner, and Back to the Future II, then later by Akira,, Show Crash, Neuromancer, and especially by the RPG Cyberpunk 2020 the future as I dreamt it would be a dark, grimy urban place replete with healthy amounts of libertarianism, grit, corruption, shadows within shadows, minor technological miracles around every corner, a blurring of the line between biology and computer science, militarism, and governmental collapse. Luckily the extreme cases offered by these visions I sucked up as an adolescent have not fully come to pass. We are not living in a nuclear winter, the government is still more or less intact, there are not gratuitous bouts between street gangs, and technology has not yet gotten the upper hand on our mortal coils. Still, there are some very strong indicators that we are living in my childhood’s future.
Things change slowly, so slowly in fact that we barely notice the changes. Even the progress of certain cultural artifacts that evolve rather quickly, such as computer technology, is not really perceived as progressing minute-to-minute. Who among us fleshy simpletons would have thought even 10 years ago that you could jump on the internet and download DVD quality feature films in a matter of hours or even minutes? But technology does change. The contours of automobiles, the production of popular music, the integration of communication media into our daily lives (now people walk around with ear-implanted Bluetooth telephones!) indicates that things have been changing, and quick. If we aren’t living in my childhood’s vision of the future right now, we will soon enough.
There are brief moments where I find myself looking around and for the briefest of seconds actually seeing the future in the present. And as of late these moments have become more and more regular. Volker and I were discussing this as we gazed out on the skyline of San Francisco from Angel Island a couple weeks back; this is the sense I’ve been getting more and more as I roam the city’s streets after sunset. This is the feeling I get when I scan headlines and news abstracts online. This is the feeling I get when I peer underneath the hood of a car and find more electrical wiring than mechanical moving parts. This is the feeling I get when I reflect on how much of the social human interactions we enjoy are tied to TV, movies, cell phones, email, instant messenger, and myspace. This is the feeling I get as I pause for a painfully brief moment to realize I’m about to complete my 28th year of life on this planet, and that these are the darkest days of the whole year. The immediate future will see me on the road heading North for the next couple days, much like Hiro Protagonist on his bike. Now is the time of year to breathe in, take stock of my surroundings, and attempt to cling to those aspects of life that are the most vital, the most real, the most human. Here and now, it’s getting harder and harder.
music: Paul Simon- One Trick Pony
Tracing the sociology of music recording is better left for other anize’ers. Suffice it to say that I’ve been up past my eyeballs with my own issues of archiving the music i’ve amassed over the years. 10 years ago organizing a music collection would have been somewhat similar to baseball cards, taking little discrete packages containing portable media and alphabetizing: Lastname, Firstname. Perhaps sorting by genre, although certain problems (Bela Fleck, Beastie Boys, Beck) arise when you start doing that. (I’ve even heard of collections being sorted by principal instrument, but this was mostly a Jazz collection. Still, when Kind of Blue is filed under “Trumpet” you aren’t accounting for the fact that Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane, and BIll Evans played on it, and then you have the opposite problem for Miles on Adderly’s Something Else). But the time of tapes and even CDs is behind us, everything is now done with little digital files that live on hard drives of computers, portable hard drives, and portable music players that effectively render the classic “desert island” music question obsolete for generations ever more. The current project is to rip each of my CDs into .ogg files, and then — the hard part — label them all correctly. Seeing this project to fruition will makes transferring and sharing music much easier, and browsing such a big collection very fast (it also ensures that you will never make a mix tape whose last song gets cut off 20 seconds from the end). It also saves an amazing amount of shelf space-an entire wall of music in tape and CD cases can fit onto one hard drive.
The rules of labelling and archiving, however, have changed with this more flexible media. Maxell XL-II J-Cards and CD Jewel cases have gone the way of the card catalog. Even older conventions such as “Lastname, Firstname” are done. There are standards — there must be standards — for digital music libraries, but i’m still largely unaware of the good ones, and largely unsaisfied with the ones corporate America has forced many of us to use.
Yesterday I maxed out on my 300 GB hard drive. There is no official count, but there’s probably between 2,500 and 3,000 complete albums there, along with other oddities and assorted tracks. This music thing is quite an addiction, but it’s a good one as far as addictions go. Beyond the problem of whether I’ll ever get to listen to all of it, and whether i’ll be able to pick out the stuff I haven’t listened to as appropriate, there’s the problem of whether I’ll easily be able to find what I want to listen to. The basics are in place: It’s currently organized by artist, “Firstname, Lastname” where applicable, with albums nested in folders within each artist folder. There isn’t a great deal of cross-indexing, though (again, searching “Miles Davis” would not turn up Adderly’s Something Else) which is something to work towards in the future. The key to that, and the present challenge, is tagging everything. This is made much, much easier by little pieces of software that tap into the database of, say, Amazon.com to pull tags for albums, but is taken to the next level by moderated data repositories such as musicbrainz, an ingenious program that uses the “acoustic fingerprint” of the track to determine what it is. While musicbrainz is enormously helpful there is still room for errors if contributors submit erroneous tags, and I’ve often found that there are no tags submitted for those hard-to-find EPs by, say, your college roommate who is now a professional rock musician. Downloading tags (even just the basics: artist, title, track #, album) is still frought with problems, and musicbrainz works really well for identifying single tracks as well as stuff you have very little information on. But if you already have the album identified and just need to save yourself the work of manually typing in tags from the CD liner notes, musicbrainz can be more frustrating than not, partially due to the peer contributor model. There are some other music databases out there that software enlists for tagging purposes, such as freedb and cddb, but what I’d really like to see is AMG step up and offer downloadable tags for every album in its catalog. Ideally the basics would be there (artist, title, album, track #) but it would also include fields for the names of all artists that contribute, year made, certain genre tags (see the list of adjectives on the left hand side of artist pages on AMG, or Pandora’s Music Genome), and the like so cross-indexing could start to happen. One of DJ 1ey’s goals is to be able to do searches like “bluegrass mandolin female vocals” or “ambient dance saxophone” and have all the stuff that fits these simple descriptions come up. It’s possible, i think, but to realistically make it happen I think we’d need to be able to download tags from sites like AMG and Pandora.
Tagging, cataloging, and archiving the official releases is peanuts compared to managing a library of live recordings. Here there is less precedent, because it is far less organized, but those that have stepped up have some good stuff to offer. Naming files has been standardized, more or less, to “artist_YYYY-MM-DD_dAtB, with d meaning disc, t meaning track, and the date referring to the day the concert was played. Unfortunately, there are rarely tags beyond this simple naming scheme. This works well for two populations: those who can rattle off setlists and venues given a random date, and computer geek types who deal with enormous data sets and grew up using operating systems like MS-DOS.. For the rest of us, mostly using Windows and Mac’s OS, we’d be better suited to use tags for live shows in the same way tags are used for studio releases. The problem is one of time: there is usually a simple text file that comes with each live concert that contains specifics on artist, date, venue, track listing, and other technical stuff like the equipmemt used to record the show. This is very helpful, really it is, but when the tracks appear on your media player as “gsph20020521d2t1” it takes a trained eye to decipher that this refers to that Tuesday Night at Matt Murphy’s in May of 2002 that blew my head clean off.
So the task has been put in front of me to start tagging the live shows I’ve amassed (and there are plenty). Manually naming folders is the easy way to start up, and this begins just like studio releases: by artist “Firstname, Lastname,” then chronologically by date within each artist folder. Some choices as to artists still are unclear (does Paul Simon go in the same folder as Simon and Garfunkel? Bela Fleck and the Flecktones go in the same folder as Bela Fleck’s Acoustic All-Stars? Again with Bela Fleck giving me problems…I think he needs his own team of librarians) but this often boils down to a question of volume. Regardless, the big issue is now how to standardize tagging for live shows, as well as avoid entering in things manually. Again, it’s rarely a problem of identifying the show, and more of a problem of avoiding the manual entry of tags, as well as a problem of standardizing tags so there is consistency between collections.
The players most able to get the ball rolling on this could be websites that focus on live music. Sites like setlist.com and JamBase have the potential to start concerning themselves with tags, but these sites are more about the show itself and less about the recording of the show. Archive.org Audio Live Music Archive is a mind-boggling resource that centrally hosts tens of thousands of live recordings, and in doing so has been forced to give considerable thought to issues of standardizing file names and tags. They, if anyone, are in a position to start requiring tags for their content, even requiring contributers to start submitting files that have already been tagged. There may be a technical and historical snag to this, though: the most popular file format for live music archiving for a long time was shorten, which did not allow tagging. Since lossless audio file archiving is done predominantly in FLAC which is much more tag friendly. But if the archive.org audio archives, or better yet it’s parent organization, the grandaddy database for live recordings could throw in a little musicbrainz-style tagger program a standardized way to tag live recordings would catch on and spread like a hot first generation bootleg did just 5 years ago.
Granted, opening a text file and using that as a reference for live recordings isn’t that hard. And when you are listening to something do you really care about how it is tagged? Not really. The tagging thing has gotten me all twisted for two reasons. The first is being able to identify and find music in very large collections. Thanks to Live Live and other parties I’m sitting on a collection whose contents are probably about 5-10% listened to, and thanks to Archive.org and Etree’s Bit Torrent is continually growing. The second, and more immediate, reason, is the recent discovery of Last.fm.
Last.fm is primarily a way to keep data on what you have listened to on your computer. Every time something plays, last.fm “scrobbles” or records the artist and track name. You can then over time track your listening habits. This can become quite addictive, especially when you add the networking aspect to last.fm-your listening habits are compared to all other users and you can browse their listening habits to pick up new and cool recommendations. Moreover, for paid users, last.fm sets up a Pandora-style “recommended radio” stream you can listen to. To the scientist in me, I think this type of data collection is way cool, and I want to be sure that last.fm receives accurate data. However, last.fm works completely off the tags given to any track. Therefore, if a song is inaccurately tagged, or not tagged at all, it is not scrobbled and you get a faulty data set. This is bothersome from a purely empirical standpoint — no scientist wants unreliable or incomplete data sets — but takes on dual importance when you realize that last.fm actually changes your behavior! Talking with friends about it over the weekend, we agree that the feedback we get from last.fm changes the way we listen to music. For me it helps me spread my listening around a little more, makes me realize how many times I’ve listened to that one Grateful Dead show this past week. But it’s to the point of ridiculousness — there are thoughts like the music we listen to on our portable mp3 players “doesn’t count” because it isn’t scrobbled. Or music that we have playing but don’t really listen do is a “false positive.” I too would think it is ridiculous but the truth of the matter is that last.fm, and by extension tagging, does affect listening behavior. The experimental psychologist in me is brimming with ideas and theories here, but before any of that starts to play out I need to properly tag my collection, including the live shows. Technology is intended to make our lives easier, and once the infrastructure is in place I think it will, but at this point there are more difficulties than answers. I wish I knew more about computer programming here, and maybe it’s a good excuse to learn. Either way, though, ripping, organizing, and tagging my music collection has become a pretty enormous project. I have a feeling that it will be an ongoing one-a 750 GB hard drive has been ordered and is on its way. That should allow me to feed my habit, and spend far too much time at the computer organizing and tagging, for some time to come.
music: Sigur Ros- Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do
My car has been in some pretty wild places. Since I brought it out to the East Coast in 2000 I’ve been dipping here and there, down interstates, city streetst, country lanes, and roads that it probably shouldn’t have gone on. THW-455 has traversed the country’s lattitude three times and longitude twice. It has been accomplice to several impromptu road trips. It has hauled my stuff around more than it would like (if it had the capacity for liking); I treat it like a truck. I lived out of the thing for two months in the summer of 2004. And all the while it had Wisconsin plates on it, even though i haven’t really lived in Wisconsin since 1997.
Today was the last day for THW-455. The car is fine, save some dents, dings, scrapes, and a small rust spot on the trunk. But I finally did the legal thing, went to the DMV, got a smog inspection, and transferred the trusty Camry’s title and registration to the state of California. It’s now got some stupid string of numbers and letters and a stupid red font that says California. Gone are the little dairy farm and sailboat of the far superior Wisconsin license plate. It’s all very strange, like a good friend who has been growing their hair and beard for eight years finally decides to shave their head bald. But it’s done. the old Wisconsin license plate is hanging on my wall, 2005 inspection sticker and all. But this is a new phase for the Camry. At eight years old and with 70,948 miles it’s hopefully just entering middle age, and even with this strange new alphanumeric designation I’m hoping that this car that has been so far with me isn’t through. After all, there is much more adventuring to be done.