Monthly Archives: May 2011

My music, since moving to London

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Innocence 2010

Innocence was originally a piece I composed for a friend in the summer of 1999.  The original felt very immature and simplistic, so I decided to try to re-write the tune just over 10 years later, picking the main themes and developing on them in ways that reflect ten years more life and experience (musically or not) that have passed since writing the original.

IH2M – “It happened to me”

Written with Easter as a theme – Jesus’ death and subsequent resurrection are clearly important to any Christian.  I came to Christ as a cynical skeptic.  In many ways I still am, but this reflects an answer to my “conversion” prayer that basically was something like this:

God, I’m not yet a believer.  Seeing is believing.  I want to see what you went through.  Show me it’s real.

I then spent a while being shown, in a vision, exactly what Thomas saw and felt when he saw Jesus after His crucifixion.  He was able to put his hands in Jesus’ side, and to feel the nail-marks in his hands.  I saw this before I’d even read of the biblical account of this story.  From this I immediately had the name “Thomas” to look up in the bible, which took me to John 20, 24-29:

24 Now Thomas (also known as Didymus[a]), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

26 A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

29 Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

I’m still a skeptic of all things.  But like Thomas I want to believe.  So I wrote this to help anyone else identifying with this plight/mindset, as a way of saying “it happened to me”.  I didn’t want to believe.  Yet when confronted with real truth in whatever format, I did want to believe.  And both sides of the story added up.

MP3 compression ABX test…

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A friend pointed me at this interesting ABX test website that compares MP3 audio compressed at 320Kbps with MP3 audio compressed at 128Kbps.  Comparing A vs B and hearing discernable differences is one thing – but can you blindly hear a track and correctly identify it as A or B?

In the A vs B test, I could hear a difference between the two clips in each test, but there was very little in it.  It would seem that MP3 compression technologies have improved a lot since I last used them with any seriousness.

As for the “blind” test, it turns out that despite today’s tiredness, my use of Sennheiser HD25′s on a standard laptop headphone output, my hearing isn’t so shot after all!

Try the test for yourself here at mp3ornot.com!

BBC iPlayer user interface fail

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Just thought to post up something that’s really bugging me on the BBC iPlayer site lately.  Why does the search entry box not clear the text string “search” when clicked on, like pretty much any other search function on any other website I’ve ever encountered?  It would save maddening situations like this ever being a problem, however much the user knows about the web:

Confused, much?

“Yes” or “No” to AV? Ummmm…

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So it’s the night before the big vote here in the UK, where we will vote on possibly the biggest political change in a generation. So which way should we vote?

Frankly I can’t decide. And that disturbs me, because I can normally form an opinion one way or the other on pretty much any subject. But the best I can do for this one is say ‘meh’.

In my view, neither side has actually presented a clear objective argument for or against their own cause. Or at least if they have, I’ve yet to hear that through the media.

The answer I think will come to me in the morning, where I’ll take a look at each campaign’s website and see which feels more right to me – but as it stands right now I’m going to have to seek out the location of those sites. On the one hand, I feel good about actively engaging with the issue. On the other hand, it seems rather sad to me that neither side has used the media enough to send out enough of a clear message for such pro-activeness to be unnecessary.

Perhaps one ironic outcome of tomorrow’s vote is that very few of us will have cared enough to seek information to form an informed view on the matter, so either they won’t vote, or will simply flip a coin for it with no thought towards the consequences.

I hope the right answer comes out. I just wish I could decide what *I* think that is and why. I fear there are too many others thinking the same…

**UPDATE**

Some more trains of thought have passed since writing the original post. Let me explain:

Maybe what we’re being asked to vote on tomorrow isn’t the core problem with politics in the UK. Maybe the problem is what we expect of our politicians to be doing when they come to power. Party politics has lead to an interesting disconnection between what is debated in Parliament (along with how and why), compared with what the average person on the street is concerned with. I wonder how a shift away from party politics towards individuals voted on the basis that their views most closely reflect those of their constituents might affect the politics and decision-making in this country. Would such a system produce better decisions? Would it lead to more engagement on key issues from the “man on the Clapham omnibus”? Would it lead to more satisfaction among the general population, knowing that their opinions are better informing key issues? Would voter apathy become a thing of the past? Would the country be more stable?

As I muse over this tonight and tomorrow morning, I have a hunch that saying “yes” to AV tomorrow might be the better way to introduce such significant changes to the politics and mindset of this country, and that voting “no” might serve to say that the UK population is happy with the party political system as it is – which would seem to me to be a logical fallacy, given how many people surrounding me seem overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the major parties swapping governmental power between them with very little positive net change, and with what so many around me seem to think is so little input from them.

On having two LP copies of Dark Side of the Moon

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I’ve inherited two copies of DSOM, and am completely torn between them. On the one hand, I have what appears to be a first-run (or certainly close to it!) copy, which has clearly been played to death on older, heavier and less-than-perfectly set up decks than ours. It’s also picked up more than its fair share of scratches through the years. Our new cartridge has just done a wonderful job making this old disc sing, but it’s clear that the detail has now pretty much been scraped out of the grooves.

Despite the crackles and occasional scrapes, this older copy sounds somehow more direct and open than the CD copies I’ve encountered, revealing little details during instrumental sections that I’ve not heard before. Bass is crisp and taught – and there’s an impression of the mix being polished to perfection, of being finished somehow. All the sibilance and crackling distortion on vocals and guitars is gone. Keyboards are clearly well integrated with the mix – adding texture, rhythm and depth, but without taking space used by the guitars. Cymbals are crisp without being overdone. Toms, snare and kick are a little softer in timbre than I would perhaps like. Another evident fault is that the treble in the left side is somewhat reduced in level compared with the right.

And so onto the newer copy, about which all I know is that it’s a Dutch pressing that somehow found its way to a Bristol (UK) record store to be purchased as a replacement for the older and more tired copy. Using “Money” as the reference track, this disc sounds more detailed than the original, but the bass is somewhat lighter, and less detailed in timbre. The soundstage is certainly helped by the fact that treble levels are more balanced between left and right channels. Percussion is certainly tighter, and the mix holds together better in the instrumental section of the track.

The problem is that the extra detail and the subdued bass combine to form a presentation that really does not sound as polished as the earlier pressing. It’s actually quite fatiguing to listen to. More like the CD presentation actually, but not in a good way.

Moving on briefly to “Us and Them”, the newer copy is much tighter both in terms of soundstaging and pitch stability – but it lacks the low-frequency weight and timbre that make the song so intimate in its early stages.

So in conclusion the newer disc is certainly more “hifi”, so is worth keeping for that. But musically I feel that the older copy conveys more of the message – and so it’ll remain in our collection as a great example of how technical superiority doesn’t always help convey the musical message more effectively.