A short essay on how looking at sound manipulation can help us interpret how we perceive the world around us.

1. On the Relationship between Sound and the
World By Casey Morrison
What is popular music made of? .................................................................................. 3
How we hear noise ...................................................................................................... 7
Discriminating between sounds ................................................................................... 9
Replication of human noises in a digital environment ................................................ 11
On changing and unchanging .................................................................................... 14
Memory & nostalgia ................................................................................................... 16
Analogue to digital converters .................................................................................... 19
The mixing desk ......................................................................................................... 22
Eight little notes .......................................................................................................... 24
Recording................................................................................................................... 25
You’ve got 12 seconds to impress ............................................................................. 27
The album .................................................................................................................. 28
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2. Re-pitching Victoria Beckham .................................................................................... 30
Value .......................................................................................................................... 32
The creative process .................................................................................................. 36
Compression & EQ .................................................................................................... 39
Speakers .................................................................................................................... 41
Midi & Software .......................................................................................................... 43
Surround sound ......................................................................................................... 45
Why limitations are useful .......................................................................................... 47
Writing lyrics ............................................................................................................... 48
The end ...................................................................................................................... 49
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3. Introduction:
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, or so someone said. This is
more like a brief essay on how someone who thinks a lot about sound feels about how
sound represents the world. It looks at popular music as well as the techniques about
how popular music is made. It should be easyish to understand as I’ve avoided using
most jargon.
What is popular music made of?:
Popular music is the history of black culture. Someone clever analysed all popular
music songs starting from 1950. They transposed all of them into the same key. This
means they all have the same starting note, and you can see how much they move
from this note through the song in the steps up the keyboard (of 2 steps,3,4,5 etc). The
common steps in pop music are 1,4,5 and 1,3,2.
Prog rock added some odd timings but every
song written by Bill Withers fits in this pattern.
Think of the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah “it
goes like this the forth, the fifth, the minor fall
and the major lift”, they are all ways of talking
about these step changes.
This study’s conclusion was that songs diverters
from these set patterns in around 15% of cases.
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4. Occasionally someone went to a seventh or a minor ninth, but most they stayed with
fourths, fifths and seconds. To me this suggests that popular songs are popular
because they remind us of something else. This is as true of cover bands, endless
Westlife remakes, and of mashup tracks by 2ManyDJs which sample others’ music in
loops to make new music. It is also true of the basic building blocks of music.
Somewhere else it is said that a third of all popular music songs use the same four
basic chords of CFAG. Chords are 2 or more notes layered on top of each other to
make a set sound. Chords are what Chuck Berry made with his fists against the piano
which jumping around. Apart from this, chords are easy to predict. Some of my
favourite songs only use 1-4 chords (look up “songs with one chord”). The first hurdle
early songwriters make is to use too many chords. If chords represent changes in a
song, then you need to suggest changes without actually changing (see Buddhist
philosophical argument on changing without changing – only joking). There are certain
set chord changes that we are used to hearing and are used over and over again. They
are unbelievably easy to spot if you are looking for them, but for enjoyment’s sake we
allow ourselves to be deceived. It’s rare that people say “this sounds a bit like” with hit
songs, (only with your demo). This is because sound engineers and producers are
good at hiding the mechanics, even though two songs will be almost identical under the
hood.
Melody is not quite so easy to predict as chords, which is ironic given that it uses only
one note at a time. This ‘one finger’ typing approach allows much more variation in the
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5. timing differences and rhythms in the steps
between notes. This said, melodies frequently
borrow classic formulas that we expect to hear –
leading up to a chorus, returning to the home
notes at the start and end. It’s all deliciously
predictable. Songs in a key will use a scale of 8
notes. Think about that: 8 notes for every song
you’ve ever heard. (note: the exception is the
key change when they raise the whole song by
two notes, like when Boyzone rise from their
stools).
Burt Bacharach famously said in relation to melody: “if you can’t whistle it, it’s not a
melody”. A melody has to stick in people’s heads. You should be able to hum, whistle
or beat box the whole song with your mouth. There’s always something to focus on
when the whole song is simplified like this, it might be the baseline bit in Paul Simon’s
Graveland or the drums at the end before the chorus that go boom, boom b-booom as
you wave your hands around. This is the reason you can play most melodies and
therefore most songs on a mobile ringtone. Or you can if you orden them from those
premium numbers. Not those premium numbers..
As well as the melody and chords most recent musical exploration has been done with
grooves. Grooves can be summed up as the rhythmic ‘feel’ of a song. It’s the thing that
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6. made disco disco, the thing that makes Curtis Mayfield, made Stevie Wonder. It’s much
more than the collective sound of the instruments. It’s the thing that makes you tap your
foot, the thing that denoted how you danced at that wedding (it appears to be the birdie
song from the pictures) and fundamentally holds a lot of power over whether you react
physically to the music. Or not. If music leaves you cold then its probably due to lack of
groove.
Rap music works in part because of the groove of the main riff, bass line and drums; it
feels and breaths at you, more than it sings to you. Ben Folds did a funny piano
melodic version of a Dr Dre song called “bit*ches ain’t sh*it” and it’s funny because out
of the context or the original song, you see how ridiculous and offensive the lyrics and
how simple the melody are.
Dance music in a similar way explores small changes within the existing
formulas. All dance music has the same drumbeat with small variation in
tone. That’s an impressive claim in a whole genre. The drums are
always in the same patterns (kick, hi-hat, kick & snare, then hi hat giving
the open-closed feeling). Given that the formula is so restrictive and the
amount of words, melodies and changes are so few, it’s surprising it
ever got mainstream. Burt Bacharach would have a thing or two to say
about it. I wonder what will come next.
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7. How we hear noise:
Microphones are the closest you’ll get to being able to extract what you actually hear
directly. We hear so many thousands of noises every day that we rely on our automatic
brain filters to automatically reduce that number. You can test your filters by focussing
on a certain distance and only listen to things from there. This process happens even
more with thoughts, or maybe visuals. It’s been
proved (as much as anything has reference) that the
things you see are directly linked to what you have
seen previously. We seems to store things in
relation to previous information – in presentations
and best man’s speeches you should link new
information to what the audience already knows
about the groom’s sordid habits. Constructivist
thinking – we perceive and process all new things in
relation to what we already know. So what we hear
is directly linked to what we have previously seen.
Where you put microphones is also key to how
people hear the sounds. It’s not a case of putting a
microphone in front of an instrument and hitting record. You can mic a singer’s chest
cavity, you can record the noise of someone hitting a golf ball and use it as a snare
drum, or you can use ambient mics to record natural audience clapping. If you put the
microphone on the top of an acoustic guitar you get a completely different sound than if
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8. you mic the body, or the neck. We hear these small changes because we listen for
them in recording, but they exist everywhere. With all the body language in business
books, I would have through there would be space for one on sound in business (I’d
call it Sound Business ho ho ho). The angle of your body to the listener matters, as
does the distance to listener, the shape of the mouth when particular words are said.
We’re not that clear what the effects are yet, but you could easily do a few studies.
There’s probably some NLP stuff on this.
Back to sound. So what we do with our filters is we narrow the frequency bands that we
hear. Restricting the amount of information makes things easier for ourselves. The
number of actual sounds we hear is narrowed, for example only dogs hear frequencies
over 20Khz, but they are processed somewhere in our bodies. Like those Mosquito
products that emit sounds to stop youths hanging around outside corner shops.
People learning a language often can’t tell the difference
between certain sounds. Language have similar number of
phonemes (the sounds that make up languages – English
has 40, Russian has 41 very different ones). Someone says
a word is pronounced like “naom” and you say “naom” and
they say “no, its pronounced naom”. You may have had
similar things with people learning English – just try
explaining to Johnny Foreigner the difference between bitch
and beach. Frustrating, but you have to focus on the details
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9. to hear the distance between the two.
So my girlfriend is bothered by noise. We live in a noisy flat it’s true, but she seems to
build herself up to hear it. It’s a bit strange as she is not that bothered by music or my
noise in general. For me it’s like she has deliberately chosen to let the irritating sounds
through, rather than actively try and filter them out. But these things are easier to
analyse when you sleep soundly.
Discriminating between sounds:
The ratio of signal to noise can easily be described as the ratio of good to bad (& ugly).
It’s like chocolate to chocolate & chips, Cagney to Lacey, Bruce to Springsteen, Clint to
the Eastwood.
Discrimination is an important point for me in South America. Like Cousin Joe, the
distance between what people here want and don’t want doesn’t really exist. People
don’t mind so much if the food is a bit rubbish, or if it’s always noisy, or the difference
between fine cigars and cheap fudge because they literally don’t notice. Buildings look
filthy, stickers are left on new fridges and it’s not because people are lazy, but that they
don’t judge on aesthetics as much.
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10. So the distance between the bad & ugly, in
this case the ratio of signal to noise, doesn’t
really exist. This makes it easier to live
tranquilo, but when making a product, quality
thresholds are not that high (products there
display the oddly imperialistic stickers of
‘export quality’). In a winner-takes-all society
people are prepared to pay double for the
five percent extra that a true professional is
able to offer. It’s like this with CEOs – if they
can increase profits by 0.1% then they have
earned their $500k bonus. Likewise, being a
sound engineer in the UK is not easier
because there is more of this business in the
UK than in South America (although the latter is true), but its more difficult because the
distinction between someone who’s ‘ok’ and someone who is excellent is worth paying
double for. Winner takes all, and everyone is only as good as their last product. The
lower threshold has to be much higher too if you’re judged on your off-days. It’s the
bottleneck of sloppy sounds, sound engineers blaming musicians and visa versa.
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11. Noise is something that you cannot separate
from sound. Simply because the ears hear it as
something separate people assume you can
scrape the layers off and get rid of the noise.
People assume this is digitally remastering
which was mainly a huge marketing ploy by the
new makers of digital formats. But noise is like
separating colours from a painting, once they
are mixed, they are mixed forever. The most
sophisticated noise removal tools work in the
same was as those airplane noise cancelling headphones. They take a sample of the
tape hiss, or plan rumble or whatever constant noise there is (sadly it needs to be
constant) and then it lowers these specific individual frequencies in the music you hear
in your head. So the hiss has gone, but a little bit of the music is gone too.
Replication of human noises in a digital environment:
I did my dissertation on digitally reproducing African drums in a studio environment. I
went to Uganda thanks to a hastily put together grant application to the Axa Insurance
company. I spent two months recording hundreds of drums all over the country, being
baffled by almost everything (although this may have had something to do with the
mind effecting malaria pills I was taking). So I spent a long time thinking about
expression, about nuance and about rhythm. Sounds are not on and off like human
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12. voices in a choir - as soon as one sound is added to another it changes the first sound.
This is not a zero sum game. When you mix liquids you get whole new liquids
(especially if you’re the guy who invented acid back in the 1950s and took a swig of his
new potion and had an interesting cycle ride home).
This is the reason why recording each note of a piano individually and then layering
them to make chords or melodies doesn’t work. So human beings have got inventive in
trying to get real sounds out of mechanical systems.
There is a drum in south east Africa call the talking drum. It changes its pitch because
you can bend the skin, a bit like the tabla drum where you can bend the pitch up after
you have hit it making a ‘whoooom’ sound. So you have some expression with this, but
still.
One way to express is to use loops. So some
faceless human plays the bongos at 120
beats per minute and you loop it over and
over. You can change the pitch of individual
parts, you can reduce the frequency spectrum
of the whole, you can alter the loudness, but
you're essentially stuck with the loop.
Another way of producing individual sounds is
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13. to use multiple short samples and put them to make a rhythm. Again, you can
manipulate individual sounds, as well as the whole sound, and play with the rhythm, but
overall the amount of expression possible is lacking. Next I played with expression
pads in the shops, which you can programme though computer language to change the
sounds. Without getting too boring, this gives you some control over the physical
elements, but the existence of soul is still lacking. Its still a one shot game, on-off
information, without starting to sound weird.
Multiple rhythms can give you a good sense of different points of view that exist around
the world. Just like use of language (in English, nouns have no gender, and stupid
sentences like “I don’t know” only change the sound from the negation “I don’t, no”,
depending on the length of the pause). Rhythms in different parts of the world
completely change how people think. In East Africa they have a sense of time that
deals with continual things going on concurrently, so they can layer things that would
seem at odds to western minds. The best example I have been given of this is in the
West we have a series of monogamous relationships sleeping with on average 12 or so
people in a lifetime. The same exact process happens in east Africa, except that the
sexual relationships happen concurrently. This would seem a better system to me, but
it falls down on promiscuity/ infidelity morality and on the HIV risk.
Computers are supposed to be binary objects; they operate in games of noughts and
crosses. Computers have problems but the things that worked yesterday will work
today. But overall I have come to the conclusion, counter intuitively that this is not the
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14. case. There are times when software doesn’t don’t work like it should because you’re
making some kind of mistake, but there are other times when things will continue being
wrong until you take a break and do something else.
So you come back the next day, and whatever was broken is no longer broken. You will
have renewed your faith in your own abilities, but the mechanical failure will be a
mystery. My generally feeling is that for some reason you need to do something else
and it’s a fixed system like a computer that tells you to do it. So I have faith too, in this
kind of thing at least.
On changing and unchanging:
The basic process of music is interaction between
a sound and a listener. If there is no listener there
can be no communication, no sound, no tree in the
forest waiting to fall. But interestingly for me, when
sounds don’t have continual changes then the
listener is forced to change. This can be seen in
dance music where the smallest change define the
song from start to end for example the opening of
a filter over 30 seconds in a Daft Punk song (with
the lyrics of three words ‘around the world’). This
would be boring in other genres of music.
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15. There are basically two forms of music in my mind: firstly those that change every 8
bars to so (and even when they don’t change, they use tricks to make you think they
have) and secondly those that don’t change. This goes along with a philosophical idea I
wish I knew the name of. There are two fundamental ways of dealing with outside
forces; change or tolerate. In India toleration is key, often linked to religion – by
concentrating on the oceans we are less
conscious of the turbulent waves. In the
US and A change is embodied by
capitalism. If you are not constantly
looking at what is wrong with something,
or how it can be done better, then you
can’t propose how it could be done better
(and get the market share). So Beastie
boys, Bhundu Boys & Motown fit into the
change section, while Björk, Bonobo &
later Doors stuff fit into the unchanging
category. The unchanging is everything
with delayed gratification, where you know what’s coming and where changes are slow
and predictable.
Small changes have a huge on the whole. Individual differences before and after a
change are negligible when you compare them directly, but the sound overall is
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16. transformed. You hear it most on songs
recorded years ago, before some small
something made you change a small
element at the last moment. I recorded an
album a few years ago called Songs from
the Sea and used a type of EQ called a
harmonic exciter sounds like a brand of
condom. This counterbalanced the lower
frequency end of the microphones I was
using and I loved the sound. Little by little,
in incremental, barely perceptible changes,
I added it to everything on the mix, it
sounded great. I added it to the master, and now in hindsight the end product hurts my
ears to listen to. Its too harsh, too final, like the late nineties red hot chilli peppers
album, its wrong in all the things I liked about it in the beginning.
Memory & nostalgia:
It’s interesting how people remember songs. The guitars in early Kinks songs people
think of as distorted, but they’re not really. They’re just been run through an overdriven
amp. Ironically they would sound softer if they had been distorted more as distortion
rounds sounds, adds harmonies and makes them more level in volume. A distorted
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17. guitar sounds funny if you turn in right down, like in a badly mixed demo, its such a
small sound, when we’re used to it being a huge wall of jimmy Hendrix sound.
Like nostalgia about the kinks, people feel an emotional change when they think the
physical sounds have changed, even when this isn’t the case. People think they hear
cymbals crashing in, instruments getting louder, a string section rising to a crescendo.
In fact if you listen in hindsight, all that has happened is the singer’s voice shook a little,
maybe he or she imagined the crashes, and you can hear all this clearly. And what you
remember as the listener is something quite different.
They did experiments with videos of car crashes and people swore afterwards that they
remembered seeing broken glass on the road, although there was none. Our brains are
clever enough to fill in the gaps. Is this related to constructivism – prior experience tells
us what should happen etc? What this really means is that we are complicit in creating
our own version of our favourite songs. This raises the principle of not liking what you
don’t understand; one group of people have formed an emotional connection with
Aretha Franklin (before she ballooned), other people connected with her song through
the first group, and a third group have no connection with her or them. So in this way
the song doesn’t matter as much as our relationship with it. So in this way the sound
has no importance whatsoever.
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18. 18

19. Analogue to digital converters:
Binary systems is also how we Britishers live our lives, very different from our South
American chums. Over there are gradual curves, nothing is ever quite working or ever
quite at rest. When labour is cheap its easier to have four staff half working. I like this
idea more in theory than it works in practice.
Someone once told me this in relation to music hardware setting: if the dial goes up to
10, then use setting 5. I find this ridiculous, not least because most amplifiers obviously
go up to 11, but I see the idea of always using the middle settings and on occasion I
confess I have used it.
I remember when analogue to digital converters first came out. The arguments raged
about how you can represent analogue, gradual changes in a 1&0 way. Me I think it’s a
false argument. But even the sound engineers failed to point out one crucial thing. Our
ears accept sound waves and tiny hairs translate them, based on frequency, into
electric pulses. So we end up with a digital format anyway, which mashes in our brains
in a way no-one is still sure of, and produces grimaces, or smiles on our faces.
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20. The way MP3s are
compressed replicates the
ways the ears work. MP3s became popular because you could upload a 600mb cd in
50mb share it with friends (and paedophiles) online. The sound is exactly the same,
except for the purists who claim they can tell the difference between Pepsi & Coke.
Anyway, the principle is this: when there is a loud sound, our ears only hear the loud
sound, and for a few milliseconds after this sound we are preoccupied with it, so we
don’t need any more information. We also can’t hear any other sounds during this loud
sound, but we presume they are there because maybe we hear them before and
afterwards, and we assume that they haven’t just disappeared. But disappear is exactly
what they have done.
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21. This is how we hear, so we don’t need to store all of the extra data. We keep the
cymbal crash and leave the cello for a second, meaning we can discard most of the
information and have a hugely different adverb smaller file size. Since this process is
done hundreds of times a second we can’t tell the difference. It’s an ideal example of
unwieldy monolith (BBC, Quangos or Microsoft) saying they can’t corrupt the sound,
then someone cracks the code and releases it to the world. Naughty naughty.
Someone one day will realise the same people who design this stuff are the same
people who release it to the world.
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22. The mixing desk
A mixing desk is a stupidly simple thing dressed up as something complicated. This is
one of major problems with a small amount of knowledge and something which
changed enormously during the information revolution. The Beatles recorded all their
songs with a four track tape machine, now everyone has access to the most
unimaginable equipment: hundreds of tracks, endless effects which only need the
imagination to produce something truly wonderful. So as we most often don’t do this,
maybe poverty is still in the mind, which keeps the power in the record labels hands. To
simplify things; South America doesn’t have any
proper record labels, but has a 13m population
basically ignored by the capitalists of the world.
Amazon.com will eventually open their virtual shop
doors here, but only when all the more lucrative
markets have been tapped. I think that all that would
be needed to capture this market is to produce
some decent bands, and have them valued on equal
terms with the rest of the world.
The mixing desk is one of those things that strikes
fear into people. Maybe, like universities, as soon as
sound engineers realise that people can understand
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23. it on their own, (in universities people will buy their information based on the specifics of
what they need to learn today), people will see you can understand a desk in two
hours. And maybe the fundamentals of social policy in a month, instead of a three year
degree in some shabby polytechnic.
A mixing desk is just one channel repeated over and over. In this case it makes no
difference if there are two channels of thirty two. They all have a way of getting sound
in, a chance to manipulate it with EQ, insert effects and send effects and a output level
knob to determine the noisiness in the speakers. In-between this you can send it to
other speakers, group it together and mix it with other sounds to create your mix.
Everything else is deliberately complicated language for engineers who wished they
were academics and who think they can charge people more money the customer has
an information deficit. The information problem is changing, and when it has changed
some more I’m going to learn how to do an oil change on my car. Oh I remember, I
haven’t got a car.
Anyway, the only problem with capturing the 13m South Americaian music market is
that there are pirate music, DVD & software shops on every corner. There are even
pirated books. And not just Jamie Oliver cookbooks sent round in pdf at Christmas.
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24. Eight little notes:
Having a western musical
scale was a major
breakthrough. The fact that it
corresponds exactly to a
change in frequency is pure
magic. An octave is a doubling
of the frequency (eg C0 is at
16hz, and at C1 32Hz).
But eight notes and their
semitones? How is it possible to make anything with eight repeated notes? It’s like only
having eight words and making fantastic but incomprehensible sentences.
Shakespeare invented 8,000 of his own words (or appropriated others), maybe we’ll do
the same with musical notes. No matter how you put them together eight notes is not
enough. However if you use eight to the power of eight you get sixteen million (& seven
hundred seventy-seven thousand two hundred & sixteen).
It’s like the invention of the zero in the fifteenth centaury as a decimal unit and the
effect on modern thought. It’s the piling up of information into blocks. Can you image
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25. what they did without the zero? It’s as hard to imagine as without the wheel or the
internet (why is it always the wheel and the internet?)
Music didn’t get beyond cave bongs and Gregorian chants until the mid 18th century.
What about Tudor stuff like lutes etc? Bloody Sting…For me this is the equivalent of us
developing a new way of seeing in the next 100 years. A complete change for one of
our 5 senses. Until then they used singular notes and drones and rounds. Then it
exploded with orchestras and operas. Then it fragmented again and we got jazz and
popular music something about slavery?. Then we were able to record things and our
relationship with music changed again.
Recording:
If preparation is like script writing, then recording is like acting on stage. There are the
logistical things to take into consideration; lights, camera, action, then there is the
internal training of the actors. They put their soul on stage through exercise and
methods, Hindu chants and kabala. But the process of acting is to destroy the self so
that you can create multiple ones. With songs this can be done with characters, think
Tom Wait’s various cabaret voices or Vic Reeves’ club singer?, or Stars in Their Eyes
before Pop Idol and X Factor came along and gave people the opportunity to sing as
themselves (usually badly) rather than imitating other people. But often the singer or
songwriter is only representing themselves.
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26. I think that recording a song is like putting part of being human down on tape. You have
to think hard about what you’re representing. When a sixty year old sax player blows
his notes, they are not the same notes a sixteen year old will play. They will represent
his having played the same 40 notes for most of his life. Depending on the song he will
be playing with heartbreak or with elation. Funnily I think these feelings come though
when someone is playing the keyboard too although it’s much less expressive, maybe
even the knobs that the sound engineer twiddles shows something of his life.
You have two jobs in controlling a recording session. You have to stick to time and you
have to get the best out of your musicians. I guess it is the same with any creative
process. I have been told by a theatre director that no mics can be on view, so we have
to hide all the mics and the feedback problem is my problem. Your options include
telling the musicians to prepare well and charging them enough so that they listen to
you. Then you have to make it as comfortable and as easy as possible for them to do
their stuff. In the UK maybe we’re too strict with timeframes and boxes, in South
America they give the impression of not caring enough about the details.
Twenty years ago musicians had to punch in and out of a particular bit of tape; Slash
used 12 guitar tracks on one rubbish Guns and Roses album. They even cut bits of
tape up like in the Beatles song Tomorrow Never Knows. Now we can put anything
anywhere like a sandpit, it’s completely changed the way people make music. Music is
like playing now; I remember when Mylo’s album came out he said; “I want people to
think; ‘what idiot made this’?”.
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27. You’ve got 12 seconds to impress:
My current strategy is to record as much as possible and cherry pick, rather than focus
on endlessly changing a product. If the song does sound good in the first 12 seconds,
it’s not going to get any better (anyone who’s ever tried to delete all the shite songs off
an ipod will testify to this). On the other hand, if there’s something there, some kind of
magic, then it’s worth tinkering with. The details are incredibly important. If you don’t
hear a change then you are not listening hard enough. I listened to Sam Cooke for
weeks until I had to stop. It showed me
that apart from the genius of “a change is
gonna come” the songs of the 50s were
too formulaic, they suffer from the Kate
Rusby-ism of all sounding the same.
But as for demos, once you’ve listened to
hundreds you can tell something special
in the first 12 seconds. It’s like the
elevator interview; you’ve got Douglas
Adams or Jerry Adams or Vctoria Adams
in an elevator and you want them to do
something for you. You’ve got until the 4th
floor where you get out, to impress, or
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28. until the penthouse before you’re thrown out. The seconds count and you have to
explain exactly what you want to say quickly and succinctly.
Now ask yourself one more question; what would Douglas Adams, Jerry Adams and
Victoria Adams be doing in the penthouse together. Urg.
I used to have a cd player that has a special function of only playing the first 12
seconds of a song (who knows why) before moving onto the next song. So an entire cd
would last under two minutes. Brilliant. So you got skip from one song to another and
you would judge, based on the first few bares what is worth listening to.
Someone told me about song writing, take your favourite part and put it at the start.
Then write something better for the verse, something even better for the prechorus and
then write an amazing chorus to lift the whole thing. If you set the bar high in the first 12
seconds, you can’t go downhill from there. The Cure wrote a bonkers song called 17
seconds, maybe Robert Smith was more tolerant than me.
The album:
Fair enough, the album used to be a thing of beauty, a side and b side with a flip in the
middle. Bored 60s teenagers would lie on beanbags and follow the dark side of the
moon. But the ipod age has some benefits too. Songs have been getting louder for
some time as sound engineers try and squeeze every decibel out of the ceiling so it
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29. sounds louder and therefore better on radio. We don’t need the huge range anymore,
people only have to turn it up on the car stereo and later turn it down. But songs getting
louder helps on the ipod. But people like my make all songs the same volume anyway,
so maybe they’ll stop the loudness wars.
The other thing about the ipod is that all tracks have equal value. Therefore the Police
will be judged on their blow-up doll song as much as they will be on putting out the red
light. Which means fillers now get let off albums which can only be a good thing.
Albums might not tell a cohesive rock-oprah story, but every song on there will be worth
its metal.
When putting an album together you have to think about track order. Until recently
there was an unspoken rule for albums that had two sides which continued into the CD
era. Here’s the secret: Tracks 1,3,6 and penultimate are the best songs (not
necessarily the singles). Have a look through some CDs – it works best with greatest
hits albums where the best songs are known. This changed with rap albums and skits
and also as music (along with performance art) became more bonkers. Its great some
of the things we get in the charts now that the numbers of purchased single CDs are so
low.
How can musicians produce mediocre music for so long and then come up with
something cracking; recent examples include Elbow, Bruce Springsteen and Bob
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30. Dylan. Have they got something to prove, do they care about ratings again (imagine
McCartney when he gets over the Mills incident).
Musicians often have a hit, gain a flowing then produce music that wouldn’t have ever
made them famous. This is good because people can like someone and then go on a
musical journey with them as guide into areas they wouldn’t have gone on their own.
Just think Radiohead (think of them rather than listen to them), or Pink Floyd or Sting
before he bought that lute.
Re-pitching Victoria Beckham:
Mick Hucknall is pretty soulful for a ginge and singing in a studio is not the same as
singing live. Live singers have to concentrate on the whole, studio singers have to learn
to focus on the parts. Consistency is much more important for a live singer. Studio
singers have to learn to focus on each
syllable, each word and peak at different bits
each take. Then the sound engineer will
assemble a whole vocal track from all the
characteristic bits, the little breaths, the little
breaks in the voice, the small wells of
emotion. Singing perfectly is not as
important these days as singing imperfectly.
Singers have got used to singing with
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31. themselves as well. It used to
sound odd to hear two vocals by
the same singer but modern R&B
tracks use as many as 10 different
vocal tracks for their sound
montage. So a singer has to stop
him or herself singing like they
would live, and become a
caricature of themselves. Live
music has really changed in
recent years as expectations
became higher. Artists stopped
making money off recordings and started making money from tours. Ticket prices
soared, festivals became mainstream, light shows and pyrotechnics became the norm.
I remember Carter USM shooting plastic balls out into the crowd mostly because my
short arsed brother didn’t catch any and I got three. Reproduction has to be different
but equally perfect. Performances have to be bigger than normal. It doesn’t even matter
with the technology if the singer drifts out of tune.
There was a product developed in the late nineties that changed modern pop. And
almost no-one will have heard of it. Autores branded Autotune is a software tool that
treats the human vocal as if it were any other frequency instrument. This means you
can tune, in real time, like Tom Waits might tune a carburettor. Its amazing to hear
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32. because we’re not used to vocals changing their sound, except with those rubbish 70’s
chorus effects, or with too much reverb and windblown ballad hair. You can make
someone’s voice sound like a robot by using the voice as a trigger to turn a synthesizer
on or off using a vocoder. But the fundamental characteristics of the human voice you
can change in real time. Its like doing operations on someone’s internal organs simply
by looking at them.
You can take a normal voice and make it warble like Celine. You can select which
notes to leave in and which to take out. You can change scale. You can add vibrato to
a voice which doesn’t have any. Its really amazing. You can make Cher believe. You
can almost made Britney sound good.
Value:
I think the value of something is related to how hard it is to obtain; music downloaded is
not as precious as your first LP, crisp and shiny in your sweaty hands. And I think this
works even if you stole the record – its still physically there and yours. But there is also
something delightful about paying for something, in effect, exchanging something you
have for something you don’t have. That’s why I think people should charge for
information – people have to invest something of themselves in the process (in this
case money and time) in order to value what they will get out. This is one of the
beauties of capitalism, if everyone had the same amount of money every single good or
service would be an auction of who is prepared to sacrifice most to get it. Therefore the
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33. person for whom the object holds the most
intrinsic value would be prepared to pay the most
for it, and therefore everything in the world would
belong to the person or people to whom it is most
valuable.
In teaching groups there has to be a collective
enthusiasm which only a group can make (I’m
still not sure what I think about groups versus
individualism yet, I’ve always stayed away from formal groups). So in terms of learning
it is better to changed less and get more people, so long as those people value the
learning, to include people who will impact the whole group.
I think this principle stands with pirated software and music. I am still of the opinion that
the music industry has to change it methods to better market niche music. Its not ok to
say ‘no one pays for the top 40 anymore’ when everyone sees this music as
disposable. Who is going to pay good money for music that they will tap their feet to for
a week or two and then delete from their Lady DiPod. But there is a huge new market
for specialist music that I haven’t quite found a formulised way of reaching. This is
exactly the same for news and films, the individual portal which all of us will make to
filter what we like from what we don’t like hasn’t been formulised yet. And the fight is on
to provide it. In this one respect my money is not on Google, although like Coca Cola
buying up Inca Cola and any other small brands, they might just buy it and develop it.
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34. Specialist internet radio stations are becoming abundant, so maybe I’ll waste some
time trying to find one that sits better than Radio 2. It’s a sad day when you realise
you’ve moved from BBC Radio 1 to 2.
The issue of property rights is one of the differences between the first and third worlds
(or developing world as its supposed to be called now, as if anyone find that joke
funny). In South America all software, music and films are pirated. While this is great for
the masses watching Ice Age or whatever for 70p, it
presents some problems under the veneer.
We were asked where we had bought some South American
films and it didn’t even occur to me until later, but its not
surprising that you have no film industry if no one can make
money from them. Who is going to invest the hundreds of
thousands of dollars it takes to make even a cheap film if
there’s no chance of getting any of it back.
Pharmaceutical companies are also given a hard time for profiteering, but you can’t
criticise them for making money at the same time as criticising them for not focussing
on aids drugs. Nearly 70% of everyone HIV positive is African so where are you going
to recuperate your research money? So unsurprisingly the companies focus on cure for
hangovers, drunk driving and cancer.
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35. Everyone in South America should be excellent at using the all kinds of software. This
is one of the things where the playing field is level, and I think that certain cities could
become a magnet for this kind of talent, internationally. I think Cuenca in the south of
South America has this option. They can bid for the same high level cases, converse
over skype and fulfil contracts much cheaper than elsewhere. But this is not currently
the case. I think there are two fundamental problems that need overcoming until this
can be the case. There needs to be a brand ‘South America’ or 'Cuenca' or whatever,
something that offers a quality mark. And people need to realise that quality is what
people are looking for and
You can’t complain that the USA are better at everything when they are better at
everything. In certain cases its mechanical – you can grow one solo type of maize in
the US and transport it here cheaper than the Chola Cuencas can grow it. Yes, you
lose the variety and the taste is not as good, but people need to eat and they vote with
their feet and kick out the president. But with non industrialisation things there is not
this barrier to entry.
The second problem as far as I can see is that everyone owns all the programs but no
one knows how to use them. Or they know how to use them a bit, but not completely.
When I ask people what they can do better than anyone else, they look stumped (it’s a
tricky question I know, but the number of designers, filmmakers and sound engineers in
this country you can count up). I think the future is ripe for South America in this field,
we’ll wait and see if they take it. People are still used to being told what to do, and have
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36. the salary mindset rather than
the pay by results. They are
paid to be somewhere
between the hours of 8 and 6,
no matter what they achieve.
There is absolutely no
incentive to do anything, and
bearing in mind that people
earn $250 a month it’s not
surprising. But I’m not sure
how it will change without the
painful unemployment that comes with increasing the hourly rate.
The creative process:
A butterfly mind is useful but it contrasts directly with the ability to specialise. One of my
problems is that I am quite good at many things, but not especially good at any one
thing. All this is linked to the ability to concentrate, the most uniformly useful abilities. I
am so used to my mediocre ways of doing things that I don’t strive for the absolute
best, the record that could change the sound of things forever. Or to put it another way,
I’m a perfectionist but in slightly the wrong direction. When I am recording I have utmost
concentration. It’s like I disappear for a while, it’s quite a nice feeling. Often it’s gradual
changes that take the time, the little tinkering with a sound, or a drum programme – for
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37. some reason the whole consumes much more than individual parts. I don’t know how
much it has to be with making something. I certainly never get like that writing policy
documents, or learning another language or studying (although task finishing can have
an allure there, whereas it never does with song writing).
Basically your whole objective is to pretend to be busy while keeping an eye on
inspiration. You can test the water sometimes, but basically your job is to keep things
neat until it arrives. And when it arrives you’d better have cleaned your boots otherwise
you’ll get frustrated and it will leave again. So clean the desk, prepare some food, do all
the background administrative tasks.
A creative process needs to be separated from other things – like cooked & raw meats.
Hearing itself gets fatigued, and you can’t concentrate for long periods of time, yet you
need to keep busy. So someone invented administrative tasks, I’m not sure why they
seem to take such a large percentage of the time, but there you are.
I’ve been involved with some experimental sound projects while I’ve been out here.
There seems to be an abundance of ‘projects’ about forging cultural identity. To me this
is because the Andean countries are a ridiculous mix of mountain people, coastal
people, jungle people and ‘pure’ Spanish descent, who call themselves white - it’s like
me calling myself a direct descendant of Henry the 8th. And the geographic boundaries
were formed 500 years ago for administrative ease from Madrid.
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38. How is the Amazonian population of 5% supposed to influence things politically. No
wonder they kidnap oil barrens and then get shot by the police. Anyway, apart from
these projects the only way they have of forming a nation state is by keeping up
conflicts with neighbours. The war between Peru and South America was the longest
running in the Americas, 600 years. I wonder how long it is until some tired politician
about to be thrown from office starts it up again, probably about access to water in the
bit of the Peruvian jungle that used to be South America, and of course gets all its
water from the South Americaian Andes.
So back to the sixth form music projects, complete with handy book of crap artists
drawings. One of the things we are planning to do is record two people talking and then
use the sounds between the words to tell the story - sounds the body makes are a way
of understanding the sounds between the words. Its said Raymond Carver had a really
harsh editor and that’s why his short stories are so beautifully open. So we will use the
breaths, the pauses, the half starts between a man and woman, we will change them all
and then we will spread them all over a keyboard. My idea then is to use Caribbean
rhythms to interpret the sounds, really gradually so it turns from a stuttering
conversation in any language into a full orchestral sound using only the human mouth.
Someone else will have to draw the pictures.
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39. Compression & EQ:
Please imagine music as a cardboard
box which you can stuff with stuff.
Now imagine that the box is already
completely full with the first sound
that you put into it. The more you add
after that point, the more you take
away from the whole. So think
carefully about every single thing that
is added. Conventions of guitars,
drums, bass, vocals are to be
respected, but considered. You can
prove this in a physical session by
using hard compression in the recording and mixing processes. Compression can be
seen as a box. The box is already full with the first thing you put in it. The more things
you put in the box the less space there is for each individual thing. So if you can take
some instruments out of the box you free up space for other things. Or if you can take
some lower frequencies out of the guitar without changing the sound, you free up space
in the frequency range for the bass guitar. So less, as your aunty Kari used to say,
really is more. The job of the sound engineer as the painter is to take colours off the
canvas.
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40. You can make it so that when the vocal comes in it
takes a chunk out of the rhythm section (like a DJ
talking over a record), but you can’t increase the
physical space for the sound. This is quite useful for
instruments that have similar frequencies, so you can
make the vocals affect the loudness of the guitars for
the verses, without anyone hearing the difference.
This is the smoke and mirrors of sound.
Compression can also be seen as the space
between the instruments and the listener. The
comparative loudness between the loudest sound
and the quietest is the exact distance in inches. So
when Dido breathes into her microphone you can
hear it in your ear it doesn’t matter if she steps away to warble the choruses. You feels
close, like she’s singing her meaningless drivel to you and you only. She still makes
you a bit tingly for a while, and then annoys you.
EQ – removing specific frequencies allows the whole to be clear. In the battle of ends
versus means – the EQ buttons focus on the details and yet the same controls produce
the whole. If you have a problem you boost the little knobs knob and trawl the
frequency range waiting to hear the problem loud and clear. The little noise you hate in
the vocalist’s nose is now the only thing you hear. Once you find it you can cut it out.
40

41. You amplify your mistakes before cutting them. What a great principle. You celebrate
your failures (eg with girls), and then you stop doing them (maybe).
Speakers:
Most people buy speakers on their brand and on their sound. To this end is a bit like
the blue ray adverts that you get on DVDs
(and on the adverts for DVDs that you used
to get on VHS tapes). They always present
the future in the format everyone already
uses. So the sound they present as
surround is not surround and the whooshing
sounds and perfect picture are examples of
what could already be done. I find that
almost as funny as the anti-piracy adverts
and the television licence people who claim
to know where everyone without a licence
lives. Of course they do, its where everyone
lives apart from the people who they receive money from. It’s like me claiming to know
where everyone who isn’t me lives.
Purists ask for their speakers to be ‘flat’. This basically means that they don’t have a
brightly coloured ‘pop’ or ‘jazz’ button in them. It also means it doesn’t have a rubbish
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42. graphic equaliser. The record you just
bought paid some guy £much to spend
months of his professional life pouring
over the exact formation of EQ and then
you want to change it because you want
to annoy your neighbours ( by the way
bass frequency are longer waves and
therefore travel further and thought walls
to reach your neighbours).
Some people listen through headphones. I can’t believe how many people listen
directly through mobile phones and ipods. Especially in Leeds on the buses, maybe
everyone does feel like a failure on buses like Margaret Thatcher told us. I like the
headphone sound too, it’s like having the singer in your head and you get the full stereo
range. I used to think that the quality of the tape recording didn’t matter. I used to think
the transformation occurred in your head, but I’ve seen too many DVDs recorded on
tripods in cinemas and I think differently now.
BTW - whoever thinks that musicians will stop making money when the studios all shut
down is an idiot. I understand copyright protection. But music is not pharmaceuticals.
Think harder, or let someone else get on with it.
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43. Midi & Software:
It’s interesting to look at a computer language used in a creative setting. When I first
learnt about midi I couldn’t understand why they chose such crap sounds on computer
module soundcards, but I realise that it doesn’t matter now. MIDI (musical instrument
digital interface) is a language that you can use to programme fireworks, or cellos or
bagpipes. You could use it as the settings on the birth of your first child or to
programme your Teas-Maid. You can use it for anything to talk together about anything.
Soft synths are a great way of quickly putting together basic tracks. They are the same
as running MIDI information out to a keyboard and then recording it back in, but much
simpler and endlessly playable. They model all the old sounds so you can get an organ
with the sound “whiter shade of pale” and it will be exactly right.
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44. You can automate the sounds like never possible. You can pan them around, add more
effects, add swirls You can watch sound waves bounce like the voice on a posh stereo
or on and on like Ariston.
Editing audio these days is like
editing words, you can do the
whole thing visually. This was
impossible before computers, you
just had to guess. I think this will
have changed our attitude to
music as a single sensory art
form. Interestingly, looking at
sounds visually has allowed us to
share and exchange methods with
other people through the internet.
It’s much easier to explain sound
engineering methods when you
can see the before and after
shots, rather than saying, ‘you know when at 1.34 there’s that boom sound?’
This ease of communication about difficult auditory changes also applies to peer
reviews of music products and songs. There is a programme now where you can steal
the digital fingerprints of your favourite songs and apply them to your own. Steinberg’s
44

45. Freefilter mimics the EQ settings of any of Kool & The Gang’s hits (Celebration) or
Boney M’s (harder, but still Rasputin). And then you can put it on your own rubbish
track and realise it doesn’t sound any better. What you realise at this point is the huge
divergence in sound that makes up the spectrum of popular music. Unlike the notes
explained above, there is no classic seventies sound (although there might be in
particular guitar sounds), but two things are true: Firstly: we’re more conscious now of
using the whole frequency spectrum from 20hz to 20khz. Secondly: all songs
everywhere are louder than there were ten years ago as we squeeze the headroom -
and are getting louder. Much louder.
Surround sound:
Music in surround sound is
coming and it’s going to be
great. Every singe sound can
be placed within a six point
field. Like the early Beatles
experiments with drums only in
the left speaker, you can have
individual instruments coming
from a separate point on the
landscape. It also makes it
easy to rip a-capellas from
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46. songs and tinker with them or loops bits of Dylan songs to make Gabriel happy. Of
course the whole system only works if you sit in the exactly the centre of the field (just
like they tell you in the shops), but that goes the same with stereo: If you don’t have a
decent distance between the speakers angled in on the listener you won’t get the
benefit.
But imagine what the whole thing will do with an orchestra. One of the changes in the
arts has been the interaction between viewer and performer. Surround sound will sit the
listen directly in the middle of the orchestra, say between strings and brass. Not in the
best house seats, but in a place you could never replicate in real life. How wonderful.
Who would ever want to see live music if it wasn’t better (who wants to see theatre
when you can see a million dollar spectacular for £3. As Sharon Stone said ‘anyone
with $5 can see my ass, what’s your excuse?’). With the orchestra you can even reach
out and grab the little conductor chap’s stick. Imagine controlling all those people with a
little stick.
You can also position everything closer or further back to the listener by using reverb.
The more echoes you hear, the further away it feels automatically to your ears. So you
can plot the whole thing on graph paper. Remember graph paper?
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47. Why limitations are useful:
Not only does everyone spend up to their earnings (despite the fact that disposable
income has doubled in the west world since the war) but we have yet to recognise the
profound use of limitations. In recording, I have found that the physical limitations help
me focus on what I want in and what I can leave behind. Where there are endless
choices, I think the human mind’s initial reaction is to tinker around the edges, dipping
toes in water and not really doing anything. Everyone uses the modern computer to
play Guitar Hero.
So one of the things I do is pile things in early on, no matter what, then I start
discriminating between this and that, and I already have the basis of a song. Then I
don’t have to worry too much about
deleting the only thing I have recorded.
But I also take care with this gung-ho
approach. Often the first things you do
are kept so I make sure I always get a
good clean signal, that I always bother
to tune guitars and position
microphones. It’s really hard to throw
something out when it sounds great,
but if there’s someone talking outside
because you didn’t shut the door, or
wait until the final note range out, you
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48. have to get rid. Maybe its just that I think more about missed opportunities than
mistakes (was that a Groucho Marxism?).
Writing lyrics:
Eminem made people sit up and listen to lyrics again – it’s hard not to when he’s
murdering his ex-wife complete with some spectacular sound effects I think this is
probably libel. The pomp of the 70s ambiguity and drug lyrics gave way to real lives and
politics – people got shot for music (maybe), but Tupac Shakur gave a voice to violence
and music as a political tool, it should be obvious now that black violence is not going
away “I’m seeing it clearer, hating the picture in the mirror, they claim we’re inferior, so
why the fuck these devils fear you?”. “From out of the frying pan we jump into another
form of slavery”, & “Everyone’s afraid of the youth, but for me it’s reversed, we left them
a world that’s cursed and it hurts”. Sometimes Tupac sound more like Bill Cosby on
personal responsibility.
There’s a lot of talk by conspiracy theorists about ‘The Man’ (Van the Man?). They
control the music industry as a form of wider social control. I don’t have much time for
conspiracy theorists.
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49. The end:
Music is cheap. Time is cheap. Anything can be anything. There are certain musicians I
will buy anything of. Either I like a characteristic of their voice, I respect their writing or
else they represent a certain something for me (like they sum up reflection or anger or
a place). I love music and I think it defines our lives. I think you have to look at the
details to see the beauty. I think to understand time you have to get the back off the
watch at least to be baffled that don’t even understand clockwork. I think music is a
great portal through which to look at life.
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