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This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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To get into the studios of KZSU you have to go down four or five six stairs
an unlock a nondescript metal door from which threshold you descend a few more
stairs before entering the dimly lit environment, pulsating radio station full of posters,
photos, bulletin boards, psychedelic artwork, a sea of electronic gadgets, wires, consoles,
headsets, stacks of CDs and LPs, and some weird looking disjockeys with freaky hair and
unbranded kool-aid. KZSU is about six feet below its street level. Just about right for a radio
station that plays a lot of underground music and that broadcasts a program like entitled
opinions which is an underground cult show for people who are not afraid to think and
prefer the blood of Odysseus's black ram to the one wonder bread of NPR or the scones
of the BBC. See at the boy Kwise Brunetto this is KZSU. My name is Robert Harrison and
we're coming to you from the underworld or more precisely from the catacombs.
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Looks so good it looks so cool your plan to live in to the pool but don't give a hand on me.
That's right here we are in the catacombs like the early Christians in the underground
burial sites of the Imperial City practicing a persecuted religion. In our case the religion is that of reflective
thought and our communion is a communion with the dead who carry on their afterlife in the
books poems and ideas that we spend most of our time discussing on this show.
Those of you out there who joined in our feasts and who think for yourselves instead of having
things spoon fed to you by the providers. I mean the media and this vast Borg collective we call
the worldwide web. Well you know as well as I do that thoughtful reflection is indeed a
persecuted religion these days. We have an extremely interesting show for you today. Our
topic is an unusual one for entitled opinions, the transistor and the digital revolution it made
possible. The initial impetus for this show comes from an email I received a few months ago from a
listener who wrote the following. "I am concerned about this country's future. Our young
generation is not as tech savvy as everyone thinks. In fact they are less knowledgeable about
technology than my generation, age 56. They simply know better how to use it. That's all.
Is someone who uses a telephone, TV or radio tech savvy? How many people even know what AM and FM mean?"
I'm not sure kids today have ever seen vacuum tubes. Do they know how many transistors are in their
computers? I suspect not. I recall many years ago being excited about getting a nine transistor
radio. I still remember that after all these decades. Today's modern CPUs have about
700 million transistors and as many on the video card over a billion in one system only us older folks
can appreciate that." I will confess that when I first read that communication I did not have
the foggiest idea how many transistors were in a computer or video card. In fact I was not even sure
I could tell you what exactly a transistor is. All I knew was that I used to listen to transistor
radios in the old days. In fact I still have one that I keep near my bed and it still works like a
charm. So the first thing I did after reading that email was to try and find out the basic facts about
the transistor and while I was at it find out what AM and FM stand for. Because let's face it it's
pretty appalling when you think about it that you can host a radio show that airs on KZSU 90.1 FM and not
know what FM stands for. What I discovered in my research is that the transistor may well be the
most momentous invention of the 20th century and that's saying a lot because the 20th century is
responsible for more momentous inventions than any other century in human history. So trust me when I say
that we have a fascinating show on tap for you today about the transistor and other related developments in
electronics that have changed the basic fabric of the world we live in, speak in and hear in. Above all
here in for in the past few decades we have witnessed staggering revolutions in recording
technologies that have brought about wholesale changes in various sectors including most notably the
music industry. So brace yourselves for a joy ride. My guest today is exactly the right person to take us on that ride.
His name is Jay Cadus. He is the chief audio engineer at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, otherwise known as
Karma. Jay regularly teaches audio recording classes at Stanford. He is a supreme sound engineer as well as
musical producer. Let me also mention that he's a Bay Area native and a very accomplished musician in his own right, a guitar player in fact. His late 60s band, The Mizzan Throps, played at the
Fillmore and opened for muddy waters which is truly amazing. Jay has played with many other rock band since and he is interested in all aspects of music and recording technologies.
And in addition to all this expertise he also knows what a transistor is. Jay, welcome to the program. Thank you Robert.
So before we talk about the transistor Jay, Karma, pretty fancy outfit you have there. Can you tell our listeners what takes place at Karma and how was it founded?
Well, it was founded originally as a research center to basically explore the ability of the computer to be applied to different aspects of music. From the synthesis of music to the analysis of music and basically to see what you could do with a
computer in the musical environment. And it's sort of grown from there to the point now where we teach courses on everything from the basic programming of digital signal processing software to designing
hardware interfaces between humans and computers to be used as musical instruments. So basically designing new digital musical instruments that may bear absolutely no resemblance to any existing form of musical input.
And everything in between. So we study psychoskistics and what what what the acoustics of musical instruments, room acoustics, things like that. And also all of the things you can do to music or with music using a computer essentially.
So you find that being a musician yourself going into this more technical the electronic underworld of sound and music is a pretty easy kind of transition.
For some people it is it sort of depends on your your I guess your your brain because some people are just you have a facility for working with technical stuff and some people have a facility for artistic creativity and some people can do both.
And actually there are quite a number of people in the latter category. I can't do both. I can tell you I had to take a air clearance test in order to get my show here on KZSU.
I had to memorize what all these buttons in front of me on the console mean.
What you have to do to get this station up at six in the morning if it's been off. And what to do in case of emergency. But I tell you when I look at the electronics and something is not working.
I am in full admiration of the chief engineer who can go in there and actually work with the wires and figure out how these things work because for me it's a complete maze and a force that I can't get into at all.
Well it's a separate discipline and you sort of have to spend some time with that discipline if you really want to get you know develop the facility with it.
So I quoted from this listener about you know the transistor and how when he was young he remembered the first nine transistor radio to come out which was an amazing thing.
I had one of those. It was a candle. That was the brand. I used to sleep with it under my pillows. I could listen to radio dramas from the 30s on AM radio all night.
Well I mentioned I still have one and it's handheld and you can turn on and off. It's the best thing to have near your bed. Oh yeah it's great.
But when he said that he remembered how excited he was that there was a nine transistor. I take it that before the nine transistor it was like one or two transistors. Two or three. Two or three.
So from that time like the nine transistor radio to our own time a huge revolution has taken place and the transistor is at the heart of it.
Yeah it's sort of like the discovery of fire I think in a way the way it's sort of revolutionized society. I mean that might be putting a little too much emphasis on it but the transistor has developed into such a complex instrument the computer.
And essentially a computer is just a huge collection of individual transistors and the magic is in the way they're connected in the way they're programmed to behave.
What exactly is a transistor before we talk about the computer? Well the transistor is sort of the fundamental building block of modern analog electronics and by analog we mean that we have a continuously varying signal of some sort.
So for example sound is a continuously varying changing pressure of the air that surrounds us. And then when we put a microphone in front of it it converts that air pressure variation to an electrical variation.
And again it's continuous so it has a discrete value at any time that you want to measure it. This is then converted into what's called a discrete or digital signal by the computer because the computer can only work with individual numbers.
So it can't actually do continuous processing like analog electronics do. So it has to chop things up and it does chop them up in very fine increments and so that to us humans it appears as though it's a continuous output.
Is that what a bite is by the way? A bite is a collection of bits. And one of these little bits is an individual a yes or no decision basically.
It's a binary number which we implement in the computer by either having a voltage or no voltage.
So it's on or off. Exactly. And that is what the transistor regulates. Well that's one use for the transistor. The transistor can also be used as a continuous analog device.
And so it can be used as an amplifier or a rectifier to build nine transistor radios.
And when you say amplifier I also of course looked up what does AM stand for and I found out that it means ampered to modification modulation modulation.
Yeah.
It's opposed to frequency modulation modulation.
Frequency modulation. And I read that stuff and I try to make sense of it. I still can't tell you what the difference between that.
Well it's really pretty simple. I'm quick to see modulation.
Amplitude modulation is the same thing as a volume control. So if you apply a signal as a modulator it just controls the amplitude of the other signal.
That's how AM radio works. So there's a constant carrier that's what the antenna puts out and it's modulated by the analog signal of your voice or the music.
That makes it the actual amplitude at the antenna go up and down. Frequency modulation rather than modulating the amplitude of that signal modulates its frequency about a center.
So if you say you have a 90 point one I think that's the frequency here. 90 point one megahertz then as the amplitude of your voice goes up the frequency goes up.
And as the amplitude of your voice goes down the frequency goes down. So it modulates the signal but in frequency rather than an amplitude. And that's the difference between AM and FM.
And why is there still such a thing as AM after FM came around?
Well the way the signals behave in the atmosphere is different. And AM radio actually can bounce off the stratosphere because it's a charged layer in the atmosphere and can come back down.
So you can get better spread it travels more distantly. FM is shadowed by other objects. So it doesn't for example go under underpasses as well as AM does.
So that's why when you were a band and you got an AM radio it was much more important than FM radio right?
Well actually partially also FM radio was always kind of looked upon as a sort of a secondary medium because AM radio had been really developed before FM became popular.
And so that it was sort of considered the real radio and then all the offshoot things like KMPX or KSAN in San Francisco that played all that hippie music. That's FM.
And so did you ever get on that? No but I knew some of the I had a friend who wanted to be a DJ so we hung out in those places quite a bit.
Well about the transistor going back to the role of the transistor. I read in my research and my research by I mean the slow life stuff that I get online.
In 2002 someone wrote about 60 million transistors were built for each man, woman and child on earth in the year 2002.
That's a staggering number of transistors per individual. Well yeah but think about how many brain cells you have.
That's a lot more than there are transistors.
So it's a proportional kind of thing. But how can we go from having a nine transistor radio to having 60 million transistors per individual?
In other words, are all these transistors? There's millions if not billions in a computer I get.
But they're all built on one piece of silicon. So it's basically a fabrication issue.
The individual transistors themselves are pretty much the same thing but when they first came out each one was packaged in its own little metal or plastic can.
So if you wanted nine transistors you had nine little metal cans. Well now you can manufacture microscopically sized transistors on a substrate and you can basically create millions or billions of them on a single piece of silicon.
So it's just basically it's all manufacturing. The actual transistors themselves are very similar to the originals.
But they've been miniaturized and the manufacturing processes have been optimized to the point where you can cram that many into a very small space.
And my correct in assuming that this has really infiltrated all sorts of domains of certainly technological activity.
But also in what you do for example recording. And even what we're doing right here which is recording a show on the radio broadcasting it on KZSU and then it's going to be podcasts on iTunes and on the web page.
How many billions of transistors are we using just for this one hour show?
Well I don't know what computer have you got in there. I don't know if we have a Macintosh I suppose.
Oh I don't know I'll have to look at it.
Back 5 down here. Oh is a G5? Well that's an older processor so it's hard to say how many.
Well I mean it's a word word word word.
But many. Every time you Google something you're using billions of billions of transistors.
Yeah I'll probably.
Yeah.
Well we're getting kind of well I mean we're getting to the point where we're sort of wasting them at this point.
I mean we have more capability than we can actually use.
Can I ask you Jay about some of the possible cultural and not cultural but let's say even psychological implications because you also studied the brain.
And you are also interested in psychoacoustics as you call it.
Right.
But I'm actually interested in what something like the technology of the zero one or the transistors are enabled in the computer to.
It's not just effect human behavior or human psychology but also to serve as a kind of constraint in terms of a model of.
For a human in fact I was reading in the New York Times just published.
I don't know if this is jumping too much in the realm of speculation but there's this.
I'm probably with that. No problem. Okay.
The article is called "In the calculations of online dating love can be cruel."
And it says that now with these people who are doing online dating they have to answer all sorts of questions.
And these questions do take the form of a yes or no or on or off.
Right.
Red hair, yes or no.
Or any kind of personality trait is becoming a yes or no kind of thing.
And then individuals in the system are broken down into bits which are personality traits or physical traits and things of that sort.
And it seems like there's been a shattering of the core of selfhood into a whole series of things.
That's just one example I can pass today.
Well that may be a misapplication of existing technology because if you think about it you could take a picture or a video of somebody which we convey much more information than yes or no questions and still convert it all to digital information.
You just have a lot more of it.
Well do you believe that the computer technology is doing anything to re program our brains?
I think it has changed something in our nervous system because the immediacy of the fulfillment of our expectations that computers deliver.
We used to wait for stuff like things would come in the mail.
Now we get email and we expect an instantaneous reply.
I think that it's had some effect on that level.
But in a general sense I'm not sure that it's really made significant changes in the basic essence of humanity because it hasn't been around long enough.
You know nothing in the way of natural selection will have taken place.
Selecting for people who relate better to digital technology or anything like that.
So we're still at the infancy really of the whole revolution that was brought about by the transistor.
So we've been through several generations but if you look at it on a geological timescale, it's infinitesimal.
I don't know.
Well we are in the infancy of this new digital revolution for sure but at the same time this guy who used to be the guru of virtual reality,
He's not really in a post state because he still believes in the liberatory potential of the medium.
But he's very skeptical about what direction it has taken and is taking as we speak.
And here I'd like to bring up something that you have an expert knowledge about which he uses more as an example or a metaphor, which is the invention of the MIDI.
And this takes us right back here home to Stanford because in the early 80s, as he says, a music synthesizer designer named Dave Smith casually made up a way to represent musical notes.
It was called MIDI. His approach conceived of music from a keyboard players point of view.
MIDI was made of digital patterns that represented keyboard events like key down and key up.
And before we go on to talk about what Lanier makes of the MIDI as a metaphor for all sorts of other things regarding the transformation of human selfhood, can you elaborate a little bit about more about what MIDI is and...
Yeah, sure.
It's a communication protocol between digital instruments.
So synthesizers can talk to each other, they can talk to a mixing board or signal processing device.
Essentially, you can send arbitrary information encoded as values.
So you can send a value between 0 and 128, or I guess 256 depending on whether you're sending control information or load information.
But the idea is that it's basically sending values between one machine and another, and the machines have to agree on what those values mean, where they are applied.
So it's just an interchange protocol, and it's up to the designers of these machines to implement what happens when they receive an instruction.
So the instructions can be interpreted as play this note, or they can be interpreted as, okay, change the pattern that you're using or load a new equalizer or some other process.
Okay, well regarding the musical application of it, I'm going to quote again Lanier.
He said that given that it was representing the keyboard events like key up and key down, he said that meant that it could not describe the curvy transient expressions a singer or a saxophone player can produce.
It could only describe the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin.
And then he says there was no reason for MIDI to be concerned with the whole of musical expression since Dave only wanted to connect some synthesizers together, so you could have a larger palette of sounds while playing a single keyboard.
And then he says that in spite of its limitations, that it's note dependent.
MIDI became the standard scheme to represent music and software.
Music programs and synthesizers were designed to work with it, and it quickly proved impractical to change or dispose of all that software hardware.
MIDI became entrenched and despite her curvy one efforts, her curvy and efforts to reform it on many occasions, it still remains the standard.
And then he goes on to say that like railroads, when they lock in on a certain commitment, for example, the space between railroad tracks, you're locked in for a long time for centuries.
And he says that software is worse than railroads because it must always adhere with absolute perfection to a boundously particular arbitrary tangled intractable messiness.
And he says, so while lock in may be a gangster in the world of railroads, it is an absolute tyrant in the digital world.
So, if I can just go on, MIDI now exists in your phone and in billions of other devices.
It is the lattice on which almost all the popular music you hear is built.
Much of the sound around us, the ambient music and audio beeps, the ring tones and alarms are conceived in MIDI.
And he says that before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition.
After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid mandatory structure you couldn't avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital.
And then he goes on to say throughout this book, I'll explore whether people are becoming like MIDI notes, overly defined and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer.
Before we talk about that last remark, I think that's a grossly unfair picture of MIDI because MIDI actually opened the world up for music.
And it really went a long way to change the way people, for example, I've got a bunch of MIDI equipment at home.
I can sit down and flesh out a song without a bunch of other musicians around to see if it works.
Just to see, or if I want to change the key, all I have to do is push a button and the key will be shifted.
So it provides an amazing amount of flexibility if you know how to use it.
It locks you in in a certain sense. That's true.
But that was not what it was designed for.
And if you use it for what it was designed for, it's a superb way of communication.
And it wouldn't have survived so long.
It's still used and it's been, oh, I guess 81 or 82.
So 25, 30 years, I can check my math now.
Well, no, it's good. But that's the point.
I don't think that Dave Smith ever intended for this to last this long, and or would he have predicted that it would.
Was Dave Smith associated with karma?
No, no, he was at this Quenchless Circuits, I believe, for San Jose.
But there was a consortium of people producing digital keyboards that got together and agreed on this.
When was the last time you heard of General Motors and Ford getting together to agree on something?
This was a really groundbreaking thing in the music world.
And so I don't think it should be demonized.
I think it should be recognized for what it is, which is, you know, a limited protocol to connect machines together.
And it's been exploited by some rather clever people so that a lot of its fundamental limitations have been, you know, gotten around in some way.
So that's why it's still with us.
Well, it's a, this is an example of Lock-In on the one hand.
And so he says that, you know, someday another kind of digital design for describing speech will get locked in.
But that design might then be adapted to music and perhaps some more fluid and expressive sort of digital music will be developed.
But even if that happens, a thousand years from now, when a descendant of ours is traveling at relativistic speed to explore a new star system,
she will probably be annoyed by some awful beepy, midi-driven music to alert her that the antimatter filter needs to be recalibrated.
I think that's funny, but I don't think it's even nearly true.
Yeah, that's okay.
But what about this idea that, that, I mean, I, I understand the point.
Yeah, the people that, but what's more, what's more sinister is if the suggestion that people are becoming like midi notes overly defined, restricted,
and practiced to what can be represented in a computer, this book has a big polemic against organizations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, all these, where they're getting all this free, creative input and creating grids that are reducing the individual to larger units of organization where they can be.
Right.
But it's not like Google is implanted in our brains.
So we have the ability to use it or not.
So there are ways around it. And I use it for what it's good for and I don't use it for other things.
So, you know, the humans are flexible.
That's the issue. And that's not going to change.
Humans are biological organisms and there's a flexibility built in not only to our own development, but to our reproduction so that we're adaptable.
And, you know, computers aren't yet creating computers.
So, you know, if that day comes, then we'll have an adversary, I think.
But the way things stand, I'm not one of those people that really thinks of them as it.
It's not negative or positive. It's how you use it. And of course people use, you know, tools for good and for evil.
Well, this is great. I mean, because I've, on many times on this show, I've claimed and lamented the fact that we,
it's nice to think that technology, contemporary technology is an instrument to be used or misused, but that there might be some kind of self deception about whether we are the masters of the technology or whether technology has an inner drive to that will eventually,
whether it's a conscious driver, not be the masters of us.
I think we have to be careful about that.
And I think that there are things on the horizon that are potentially, will get out of our control.
Anything come to mind.
Nanotechnology is no technology that I think we need to really watch, because it's not out there yet.
And once it gets out there, it's conceivable that something on that scale could take on a life of its own.
So, especially because you said we're biological organisms, but nanotechnology from what I've learned about it in terms of when they start sending all these nanobites or whatever into our bloodstream and order to monitor cancer cells and something, it becomes part of our biological organs.
I'm not real comfortable with that idea. I'd rather do it with proteins, I think, than something that we're creating from the whole cloth and have no real idea where it's going.
Just as Shockley and Bardeen didn't really know where the transistor was going to go.
Yeah. And are you suspicious of the market forces or, let's say, capitalist forces?
Because they're only interested in the momentary gain they'll get from whatever they're doing.
And they don't care, or they don't know, or they don't care what's coming further down the pipe.
Because that's something that I have a real bone to pick with, the whole concept of instant gratification and the capitalist idea that we're going to grow and who cares what happens after us.
And one of the polemics in this book I'm referring to is that this dogma among technologists that information is or should be free is actually playing into the hands of a few corporations that are using all this free creativity.
Let's just say that not only should the information be free, but so should the interchange of the industry.
And that's where it's not free, and that's where things are going awry.
Well, what I find interesting in our conversations that we've had before, Jay, is that you have no nostalgia for old technology when it comes to musical recording.
So whereas a lot of people will still, our generation or yours, think that the vinyl LP is a much better crisper.
It's not the same thing on a CD sound and so forth, certainly not on the MP3 file.
The analog was somehow superior to the digital, but you think that on the contrary there's been a huge blessing.
Oh, absolutely.
Can you say something first about the difference between analog and digital technologies in terms of the recording process?
Well, the real difference is the idea of continuous versus discrete.
That is something that's continually occurring versus something that's sampled, which would be the digital representation.
We're essentially trying to do a representation of sound waves in electronics.
So it's an imperfect problem because for one thing, sound waves are three-dimensional.
Electronics are not.
So you're always going to lose something when you do a recording.
It's never going to convey exactly what you heard in the room.
Maybe someday there are some approaches to that which come closer, for example, the dummy head, where you actually build a fleshy kind of head and stick microphones in the ears.
If you wear headphones, it's very much you can move that head around and it's very much like you're in the room.
But if you're listening on loudspeakers, that doesn't work.
So to produce a representation of a sound event in rooms across the nation is a daunting proposition.
And it has never been done perfectly and analog didn't do it perfectly and digital doesn't do it perfectly.
So it's not as though there's some sort of fundamental difference in analog versus digital.
It's all in the implementation of it and how you use it, knowing its limitations and knowing how to get the maximum productivity from it or the maximum sound quality.
So for people who believe that albums on vinyl have a superior quality or a distinctive quality that you can't really get in the CD medium.
They're just nostalgic for something that's not the thing.
I think they're focusing on the wrong elements or maybe different elements. I wouldn't say wrong because people hear what they hear.
But I grew up with analog recording and tape recorder.
Admittedly, I wasn't using the top of the line, you know, Stooter or Ampecs machines, but be that as it may, there were a lot of problems.
I don't remember ever getting through a session without having to clean a cable or replace a cable or fix something.
And in the digital world, things don't sort of degrade the same way. They'll just stop entirely and I spent a couple of hours this morning fighting with that up in our studio.
But I think that the clarity and the alteration of the original signal is minimal in digital and it's more in analog.
If you have the ability to get the absolute best analog equipment there is, and this is something that not even a lot of the best studios are able to do because it's very expensive, you can get extremely good sounding recordings.
But anyone who's ever heard the original master and then heard the album that was produced from it will realize that vinyl is not a perfect medium of delivery for sound.
I hated absolutely hated surface noise.
Drove me crazy because I'm scratching up here.
Yeah, well pops and ticks.
Well vinyl was mass produced, so you got into manufacturing problems where they would start cutting the price of the vinyl because it was too expensive to use real virgin clean vinyl and so they grind up all the lPs and start making records out of that.
And pretty soon the surface noise was really obnoxious and then you started having to pay for direct metal master special 180 gram vinyl discs that cost three or four times as much just to get reasonable sound quality.
Now if you did that and you had a terrific turntable, yeah you could get good sound, but as soon as a truck drove by or the cat hair fell on the stylus, it was all over.
So I think for people, there may be a psychological thing about people who are really into audio file sound.
And they just love the process of doing it and cleaning their records and putting them on to them it's sort of like playing an instrument.
That's a ritual.
Yeah, well it may be beyond that.
To them it's their instrument.
They play this system to make the music come out.
Whereas musicians like us play an instrument.
I think that there's a certain thing that people associate with the sound and that may have maybe it's ritual but maybe it's just musician envy.
Yeah, or something.
Yeah, that's it.
So I think that really enters into it.
And also when an LP gets old or after you've played it a few times, you say that it never really sounds as well.
Well I had a professor who who was an audio file as well as a biology professor.
He insisted that that the first time you played a record that the highest octave was essentially carved off by the stylus.
So he would record them to cassette which was arguably a worse, wasn't arguably it was a worse medium for sound recording.
But he just figured that he could capture what it was there and then play the tapes later and not play the record.
I think he had a real to real machine also.
So he may have actually been able to capture the entire spectrum that came off the record the first time he played it.
Okay, so the CD versus the LP is we can say that there's not been a loss, there might even be an enhancement and a lot of benefits.
So how about when we go from the CD which some people believe is becoming an obsolete entity that is just an inefficient delivery form for individual songs or MP3 files.
And that many people under a certain age get all their music from downloadable sites where they buy song by song.
Is how much audio quality is lost if any in that process?
There are a lot of technical aspects that have to be right in order to make these things work.
And CDs have their limitations too.
Compact discs were envisioned a long time before they actually came to market.
And at that point there weren't enough transistors on some of those chips to really do things right.
And the speeds of the computers were too low.
So they were basically shoehorning this stuff into the minimum amount of bits they could use.
Had we designed these today we would have used a lot more bits and things would have sounded a lot better from the get go.
But early CDs had one big advantage over analog and that was the low end.
CDs could go all the way down to DC direct current so that you could get all the low frequencies perfectly.
There's no analog recorder in the world that doesn't screw up the low end with head bump.
And it's a function of the way magnetic tape heads work with magnetic tape that there is just a low end nonlinearity.
And better machines sound better but every analog machine ever built has a certain amount of head bump in it.
So that's an alteration that's inherent in the medium.
Maybe that's why some people like that.
I don't know.
Especially for rock music.
It could add a certain amount of punch that we got used to hearing.
And a lot of what we got used to hearing and that's if you're my age which is a child of the 60s.
That's what you heard.
You never heard anything but analog recordings until mid 80s probably.
Maybe a little before that because some of the studios started to try and work with some of the early digital recorders.
But again those had some pretty severe limitations.
So you weren't getting a really good digital sound right off the bat.
And the early CDs that came out also a lot of them were reissued masters that were designed for vinyl which has a specific frequency response curve for which the mastering engineers incorporated into the masters.
Well if you play those tapes back on a perfectly flat compact disc they're going to sound terrible.
And that's what happened a lot of the time I think when we first switched to CD.
But there are CDs out there that sound amazing.
And if anybody can make a CD that sounds amazing you can't blame the medium.
No and you certainly can make amazing sounding CDs.
Well I say they sound okay.
They sound yeah.
Well our listeners will hear about this later but you know we've done a little collaboration but we're not going to talk about that.
But what I'd like to go through is the various stages of a recording process.
So after everything has been recorded in the studio and it's been mixed and then you have a master CD.
And then you send it away from manufacturer.
That master CD is of the highest possible quality you can get.
And then you're actually manufacturing directly on to the compact disc and those CDs that go to market then are of a very high quality that you're describing.
Yes.
Now that let's say that goes to CD baby and they send it out to iTunes and the other downloadable sites.
What happens when a CD goes into this other kind of form of the MP3 file?
Well it's already a discrete representation of the original sounds.
So it's chopped up into individual numbers.
And all those processes do is use smaller numbers instead of big numbers.
So if you go to an MP3 instead of using a 24 bit or a 16 bit word to encode each sample, the sample size gets diminished based on your ability to hear the difference between that.
Essentially the MP3 and all these data compression algorithms are using the human masking curves.
That is if we hear two sounds of the same frequency or similar frequency and one of them is louder than the other,
at some point the louder sound will completely obliterate the quieter sound.
And this is a phenomenon called masking.
It's really a very important aspect in mixing and also in delivering sound to a listener in that you can eliminate a lot of the raw data if you know that the person won't actually hear it or you think they won't.
So there are elaborate models of auditory perception that allow us to basically use smaller words for encoding the music and therefore we can then send them over the internet quickly as opposed to having to wait for something to download.
And that's what MP3s and all the compression, the digital compression techniques make it take advantage of.
But there is a loss in tail.
Yes there is.
Now you may not notice it. If you are listening on a car radio or casually listening you may not notice the difference.
But if you put the two together you will notice the difference. Virtually everyone would.
And talking about how all this technology has changed the music industry, we are talking about music.
Stuck a knife in its back pretty much.
At least for the commercial.
Because the music industry was based on selling a thing. It wasn't selling the music, it was selling an LP or a CD or some physical embodiment and you had to have that to make the music play.
Now you don't. And so now what are we selling? Well we really aren't selling anything.
Well you could say we were selling individual songs if any.
Well here is a question that when it comes to music is the whole concept of the album something that is becoming quickly obsolete.
I think it went almost overnight. You think it still was iTunes.
Well I am still doing them. But I think that if you are trying to make a living doing this you are not going to be selling albums.
You are selling performances now. So basically the music is just a lost leader.
And the recorded music is a lost leader and you make your money by doing live performances.
That is the new paradigm for the music industry.
Well I know that a lot of bands lament the fact that the album, the integrity and coherence and all the kind of thought that went into song sequence and consistency between one song and the other is something that certainly a lot of the musicians are still very committed to.
And are wondering what can change in terms of incorporating the new technology to make sure that the album like the book remains a fundamental unit of expression.
Well the only thing you could do is to make an MP3 that is the full length and not sell individual songs but just sell the whole album as an MP3.
That is physically possible but the size gets up to the point where it is not an immediate download.
But I don't see why on the consumer side do you think there is something that is going to naturally push listeners to back to a larger unit which is something.
Yeah maybe something incorporating music and visual elements. So that becomes an experience again.
So you know Blu-ray or DVD performances not necessarily performances of the band playing the music but of some kind of visual image that goes with the music. Think of Pink Floyd and images come to mind.
Yeah the wall and they are performing.
So things like that.
Again that makes it difficult for the musician because not only do they have to provide the music but they have to now become videographers and you know program all of the visual elements as well.
There aren't that many folks that can do all that.
I was reading recently that almost every kind of music has been hit very hard and it has been declining in terms of sales dramatically.
And in case like jazz very dramatically the blues suffering rock music declines.
And that there is some pop music that is okay.
And that country western is the only kind of music where the CD has held its own because people want CDs when it comes to country music.
Why do you think that is?
I guess all those pickup trucks have CD players.
Yeah.
Well that doesn't everyone have a CD player.
Yeah of course.
Why do you think rock music has suffered so much?
Is it because there is too much of it around?
Possibly saturation.
Possibly that there aren't any real geniuses out there at this point.
I don't know it is hard to say but things run their course.
I mean there has been popularity and cycles for different styles of music over the years.
But I think the big question for all of the music producers now is how are we selling and it is thrown a wrench in the works.
For many years it was just a very straight ahead system.
Everybody knew how it worked.
You just made albums and you sold them and you kept playing pretty much the same kind of stuff.
And it just worked.
And now it doesn't work.
And so everybody is sort of in a tizzy about where are we going from here kind of?
From the point of view of the consumer and I hate that word because someone who listens to music, I think of it as something more than a consumer.
I would like to think that.
Yeah.
However, it has this knife that has been stuck in the back of the industry.
Been good for music or in other words before this revolution that really goes back to the transistor in many ways.
There were a few dominant labels that made contracts with certain bands.
And when you got a contract you kind of almost had it made not necessarily but that was your necessary condition for making it.
And you were bound to them but they also promoted you and so forth.
And now it seems that those big commercial labels, the only money that they're really substantial money they're making is on the old timers.
And it's this old nostalgia thing. They're not making money by marketing new bands and things like that sort.
Whereas the movement among independent labels and musicians has exploded immensely.
Well, I think that the music, the labels ate the seed corn.
They basically consumed everything in sight and left nothing for the future.
And they are no longer the original paradigm in the rock world at least was if you got signed you had a one in ten chance rather than a one in a million chance.
But most of the groups that were signed never got the album out or if they did they didn't get it promoted.
Or if they got it promoted their record exec left for another job or something and suddenly nobody was taken care of their business and they just fell out of favor.
So we keep thinking of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as the paradigm.
But the real paradigm are people like my friends who got signed three times and never got an album out.
So it's unfair to make these sweeping generalizations about the music industry because it was pretty variable.
People with a lot of talent got nowhere and people with very little talent got all the way.
So we're at a better regime you're saying.
No, I think it's a wash. I mean some things are better.
Some things are worse.
The individual musician has a lot more access now to tools to but there's no there's no market left.
So you know you can make great music but what are you going to do with it.
But you know if there's one positive thing that comes out of this I think it's going to be that all those musicians that got all the MIDI stuff and started working in their bedrooms are going to have to go play live somewhere.
They're going to have to actually learn how to play an instrument and go out and entertain people.
And that might actually create a whole new generation of musical performers and it could just be another cycle.
But at the moment it's pretty much all live music that that's really where things have headed.
It's harder than it ever has been to make money selling recorded music.
But I'm finding it's harder than it's ever been to hear live music.
You know when I came to Palo Alto two decades ago then we're live music very readily enough.
I don't know if one place anymore that has live music in Palo Alto that I'm sure there is.
Christy could tell us.
Not as many as there used to be.
Not as many.
No, the stone is gone.
I know that.
So, Keystone I guess it was.
Yeah, there are still, well there's been a consolidation in the industry too.
So in fact just last week the major live show producers was the live nation.
It took over I guess ticket master.
So they now own the entire the entirety of everything associated with live productions of big concerts.
The local stuff is still out there.
But you know there's really not much between your local bar and the film or the war field or you know,
Bill Graham presents.
There used to be and when I was in high school the reason that my band was successful was there were a huge number of local venues.
Longshoreman's Hollins San Francisco and the Rola Arena in San meandro were.
You know groups like the Yardbirds and Buffalo Springfield would play.
You know you were four feet from the stage so it was just a very intimate thing.
And like my band opened for muddy waters at the IDES hall in Hayward which is you know a Portuguese meeting hall that they rented out because it was idle on the weekends.
And so that was the music business then and then Bill Graham took things over and that was the beginning of this consolidation of everything into one sort of big bowl and now it's just gone to its logical conclusion.
So there's humongous and there's you know sporadic little things and nothing in between.
Do you find a lot of musical talent at karma when you get all those Stanford students coming in there?
Yeah I really do.
And that's what gives me you know gives me hope that there's you know these kids are actually the your your caller or the person that sent you the communications said that he doesn't think that young people understand what's going on inside.
Well he should come meet the young people at karma because they know more about a lot of this stuff than I do and it's it's really pretty amazing.
They not only know how to use the technology but they know what's behind it and you know when they come up to karma they want they're coming up there because they want to learn how to write their own software how to make their own systems how to design new instruments how to basically use the power of the computer to do completely new and different things that that's old folks haven't even thought of so.
I so they're motivated more by a creative desire rather than technical I think they're more there combining the two they have a they have a creative bent and they want to know how to it's how to use the technology in the pursuit of their creative desires and that's the perfect combination.
Perfect until you have to go out there and perform as you said maybe get them out of their rooms and make them make them have to play in these guys can put on they can entertain you for a whole night with just their laptop.
So you know it's it's pretty amazing I'm impressed with the kind of stuff that they do.
Speaking of the laptop just to conclude up we're talking about everything that the transistor has done to revolutionize things there was another article in the New York Times.
Let's see I know I brought it along and it is about not the date line but it was an article about yeah why five turns rowdy bus into rolling study hall.
So it's about how you know the school bus at high school.
Oh man they used to be rowdy that you know I know I wrote on the school bus jumping over seats and kind of through spit was out the window.
And now that they have everyone if there's a picture of it it's you know pictures worth a thousand words and it's about these kids all with their laptops without communicating to each other at all.
Each is in his own her own atomized world which is completely a social I think this is something that the current linear is lamenting.
Yeah we're becoming midi bits or whatever you know.
Well it's tempting but that's you know the pursuit that will be taken by the lazy person.
You know someone there's just kind of a divide I think there's people who want to be entertained and they're the ones that will sit in front of the TV and watch anything.
And obviously somebody is watching it because there's some really a dismal progress on.
But then there's people that that have something inside of them that they have to get out.
And those people are not going to you know be anesthetized by the availability of this stuff because they have an inner drive.
And I don't know that that's going to be changed by you know but the average person never was you know a real creative genius.
And so you know they've got a lot more things they can watch now.
You know people falling off buildings and all that really cool stuff.
But there is also you know science channels and biography channels and there's there are avenues you can pursue and you know the worldwide web.
Yeah there's a lot of crap but there's also a lot of really brilliant information and really well presented coursework and you know a lot of you know you can get a university education for free if you know where to look.
So you know it cuts both ways and I think that really it all comes back to human nature.
And unfortunately human nature hasn't changed since you know fire so you know we're in the same boat we've always been in.
It's just it's a lot easier to dig a hole in the boat.
That's why I always enjoy talking about you with you about these things Jay because you you're always correcting my apocalyptic scenarios which is that it's not all constant that the good and the bad.
The good and the bad don't always balance out in the end but that there's something much more demonic maybe about the contemporary technology.
But I hope you're right that it's just you know I think the technology isn't what we need to worry about.
It's what's inside of people that we need to worry about.
And like I say that doesn't show much sign of changing.
The technology only makes it easier for them to bang each other in the head.
That's true.
Well this is an occasion to tell our listeners that I think that for the spring quarter we're going to try to do as many shows up on music and long promise show on Pink Floyd and the doors and other things.
And this is an excellent prelude to a kind of spring season that's going to be heavy on the musical theme.
So thanks for coming on Jamie.
Oh my pleasure.
I love to talk about rock music.
Oh yeah.
So we've been speaking with Jay Cadus from Karma here at Stanford.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
Tune in next week.
We'll be with you again.
Thanks a lot.
Take care.
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