OG_Dave

I skipped much of the conversation due to the prevalence of an assumption the validity of which is subject to debate: i.e. that "intelligence" is a result of evolutionary processes. There is copious material from religious to philosophical tracts and, increasingly in quantum physics research that indicates intelligence is an a proiri condition of all manifestation. Thus, all "life" is by definition intelligent. The other inferred assumption is that humans are capable of recognizing life when they see it. Science is not so wise as it wants or needs to be. As for recognizing intelligence, truly our species is hardly qualified to judge. In other words, yes there are untold lifeforms strewn about the universe. The place is teeming with life. Without meaning to sound rude..its merely a human conceit borne of arrogance and ignorance that stymies recognition of the obvious.

lyrics are a trip. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. I tend to hate new songs but like them after 10 0r 15 years pass.

Me too although I love "classical" music and Be-bop/swing. Then again, they tell stories there too use, but it's non verbal communication.

I enjoyed both articles, thanks!

My wife coined the the term "tyranny of mediocrity" back in 2010 or so to describe what daily life at her 40/hr a week job had become. Funny girl. It's been a race to the bottom for a while now and all the lies and incompetence are being seen for what they are by a growing percentage of people. It's getting downright crowded here in loony land with all the new converts.

<cough> Not to disparage this young man in any way, but yea. I find it incongruous that so much effort can be put into developing an elevated craft yet somehow bereft of the ineffable. <scratches head> Did I say that right? Al Di Meola bores me to tears. <Heresy alert> So did Jeff Beck.

Homer...the Simpsons were solely responsible for me breaking an 8 year TV boycott whenever it was they came out. "It's funny 'cause it's true!" But as far as AI goes, it's one of the more spectacularly imbecilic grifts yet. Right up there with bit coin and expanding NATO. I know that most people will fall in line with AI with nary a thought. I will simply wait until the inevitable catastrophe results and wait to see what affect that has. None I suppose. Fortunately, I am too old to be put in a goo filled pod to live out my life as a battery. I also happen to believe that the constraints of reality will burst that little bubble before much time passes. Sorry dystopian AI future, your hand is a dud.

Exactly. It's the story told honestly that draws people in. Technical skill is largely an illusion in one sense. I've heard plenty of virtuosi that bore the dickens out of me!

I was just writing a few lines on self sabotage and found this post. 🙂 Specifically, I, like you, have some technical ability though I consider myself a rather mediocre singer. I have gotten to a point where I don't cringe when I hit playback and I get compliments on my voice - and actually always have. What I don't have is the belief that I can sing well. I have a belief system that I'm somehow not quite up to scratch. And I struggle with this singing in my own true voice thing a lot. One of my brothers was like "Why do sound like an English guy on that song Dave?" I told him that the song needed me to sound like an 80's pop singer. Nothing to do with me at all. Liar that I am. I especially struggle on high notes...being able to confidently sing in the mask eludes me. Doesn't stop me, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Anyway, last night - in my community there's a hosted evening once a month for songwriters to come and play a couple tunes to an audience of songwriters. It's weird and nerve wracking and fun. Everyone is actually listening and some of the people are remarkably talented. I had one too many 8 percent beers and totally crashed and burned one of my tunes. Like laughably bad. I'm an old hand at live gigs and this was pretty much the biggest train wreck ever lol. Self sabotage. There was a guy there, no idea who is he, but holy sh*t, that guy killed it. He even sang a song about how he had a realization that he could be the guy that shared the music that was blowing his mind as a kid. That he could be the guy that made music that somebody else could enjoy as much as he did. And that light a fire in him and he keeps it lit, letting it burn in him. Owning it. It was a nice story about his mom helping him to that understanding. At least that what my ears interpreted. Powerful and thought provoking. I think our self myths are correctable. In this life you are what you choose to be, you just have to give yourself permission to not be afraid of the shadows a strong light casts. And then work your ass off (again) to gain the technical things like stamina and consistency. I am definitely an emotional coward. Self sabotage. You got this man. You obviously love it, so relax and let yourself enjoy the gift.

I'll have a dip in that pool of thought though I'm not read up on it, I will investigate. I lean towards the notion that "awareness" is a priori in the quantum realm and portions of a larger consciousness manifest pervasively in the "Newtonian" realm of matter bound physics. Similar to "The finer scale of consciousness: quantum theory" ideas but not exactly. There is, empirically, a reciprocal determination component at play on a quantum level which I find fascinating.

Exactly. I don't want to sound harsh but I find, especially lately, that science really is quite full of itself, and yes, I am fairly well indoctrinated in science, I just don't agree that it explains very much outside of its rather limited purview. Case in point: This is a meaningless dismissal and should raise red flags. Re: peer review. An article by Richard Smith former Editor of the British Journal of Medicine and a rather distinguished member of the Medical community in which he explains far better than I can some of the concerns with peer review as a control. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ A better outcome from the fungi article would have been an itemized rebuttal subsequent to a substantive review of the evidence they so casually discarded. While I once believed the conditioning that the universe was a dead place and that "magic" or "metaphysical" events, situations, etc. were simply fantasies, a cheap way out from the cold hard facts, I have been unable to reconcile many experiences within the constraints of the scientific model. My assertion being that science is merely a tool for understanding the mundane, not a container for the universe. We should not confuse the map for the territory. I ask: where in science can we find a love of music? How does science explain the perceptual sharing, the emotional reactions, created across time and space from one mind to another, whether that state of awareness is communicated via book, song, painting or sculpture? Why is live music so much more thrilling than recorded music? No, no I say to science. Hold your tongue and know that beauty is a mystery you cannot solve. Not by smashing particles together at insanely high voltages, nor through clever computing programs pretending to be intelligent. A tree has more to say on the subject that you ever will, my dear old friend. Science, it is time you admit defeat and let us go about our business. Look not to a single explanation for the complexity of the world. As Thethirdapple intimated, we have a severe perceptual bias, unsupported by the facts, and not necessarily because the facts haven't been presented. I submit this fealty blinds us to much, to our collective detriment. I rather like the idea that fungi act analogously to neurons within the context of trees as a forest. One mind composed of cells we call trees. We know insects have hive minds. Whose to say this model doesn't repeat? Whose to say humans don't have an analog? Jung's musings on archetypes fits. Mandelbrot speaks eloquently on the notion of fractals and we can extrapolate whether our dear old, tired friend science likes it or not! I'll put down my diatribe with a final thought - my father was a nuclear physicist who once said to me, "the more I learn about quantum behavior, the stronger my faith in God becomes."

AI is a hot topic. Personally, I think it's a laughably stupid idea and am eagerly looking forward to the first major calamity that comes from its unbridled introduction. Humans...ah humans, we never see a bad idea we don't like.

musical charade or musical charades? Sounds fun! Re the epistemology of science...I quit! fwiw, one of my brothers is a leading academician on the epistemology of science. Taught at UCLA for twenty years or so. Man, that guy is boring! lol

I was also going to point out (with respect) that "valid scientific observation" is quite a loaded term. Certainly the last thirty years give ample reasons to suspect "science" of having the same failings as its creators. i.e. biased, prone to corruption, and frequently wrong. Let's talk p values and statistical methodology, shall we? However, back on the topic of arboreal communication...this has been known for decades...I would say for tens of thousands of years, yet science pretends that a thing unproven by grant funded professors cannot rationally exist. Why is that? Druids have known since before Stonehenge that trees communicate, so catch up science! "Science" is a method, not a body of knowledge. And to the extent a body of knowledge is borne from prudent exercise of the method, the body of knowledge is less complete than complete. Re: non verbal communication - that is what music is, right? Perhaps this is a story of symbiotic intuition affecting group behavior? I dunno about you, but I am generally aware of the states of people's moods if I'm in proximity to them, certainly if I am engaged in a joint effort of some sort, and that awareness, both conscious and unconscious, mediates interaction. I used to play in a very good band and I clearly remember instances where we would lock into a pocket so tight that the energy in the room became something we could literally pass around to each other. It felt like a ball of energy and it was crazy fun, deeply powerful to get the chance to participate in. I was a lot like throwing a beach ball around, but crackly and slightly dangerous like it was alive and had expectations of its own.

I remember being trained on basic maintenance on a 2" Otari machine, can't remember model number. I did not find the experience conducive to inner peace. Tape and tape machines were a PITA and digital has, imo, utterly transcended it as both a storage and playback medium. The discussion on the musicality of the storage medium has been going on for a long time though - even before digital reared its head. The studio I cut my teeth on used 456 Grand Master and I had a hard time with other tape formulas. I remember drunkenly (and ignorantly) debating the affects particle density had on reproduction quality. Ah, good times! It's interesting how much of what we do in the engineering realm is data archive. Make as pristine or faithful recording as possible. Tweak it to a cartoon level caricature of the original so that it sounds emotionally engaging on myriad playback systems, all the while keeping an eye on distortion artifacts imposed by a given media. Some we like, some we don't. Some affinity is subjective, some is objective. I loathe .mp3 as a format. Hate it. I hate the theory behind it. Intentional mediocritization. Bleh. Also, playback device is hugely important. I cannot listen to any media on my phone. Sorry. I need a speaker larger than a gnats ass to reproduce sound that will garner my interest.

Thanks! Made, in part, from a tree on my land. The maple feet and cross member 🙂 I am running 30' ADAT and word clock BNC cables. Any longer seems a bit sketchy. I bought decent but not outrageous quality cables and haven't had any clocking issues. I have a complicated setup where I have both the Apollo and a Focusrite 8PreX set up as an aggregate audio device in Mac OS 10.15. I set the Apollo as clock source and set drift correction "on" for the Focusrite. This way both the Focusrite Control App and Apollo Control clocks are set to "Internal" and I run the BNC from the Apollo to the Audient. I don't think the Audient takes word clock over ADAT.

Yep. It's an ASP880 connected via ADAT and word clock to an Apollo 8 that I bought specifically for recording drums! I built a little sidecar to sit right next to the kit that I can rotate so I can see the pres and tweak real time while sitting next to it. I have an iPad at hand too so I can adjust levels through the DAW and gain stage the whole thing from the drum throne. This was devised before auto gain became available and I'm sure I would have gone that route if I could but this set up works great and I love the Audient sounds for drums.

I have a smallish decent room I set up loosely along a live end dead end model. There's a fair bit of hidden bass trapping and I have lots of wall treatment left to do...best home studio I've ever had for sure. Apologies for the poor layout...

I've been experimenting with using outboard gear as plug in inserts in various places in my DAW. These days I'm mostly the songwriter, producer and performer, and I find it critical to get a nearly there mix right up front in order to feel the song properly, especially for drums. Mix as you go! One thing I like about this approach is the tracks remain dry though I hear plenty of goo. I still find most digital recording to be too clinical, especially my own! I use Studio One and the "pipeline" functionality works well for me. (Pipeline allows you to assign sends and returns to outboard gear from the DAW in a plug in UI). I have an Aphex 141B DAC which helps me use eight of my 24 ADAT outs and I return to open line ins. The fun part is...I recently acquired two Drawmer units - a 1974 EQ and a 1978 Compressor. I've been recording live drums through the 1978 on the drum bus. I'm one of those drummers that likes it to sound big in my headphones and am pleased as punch with this toy. Super flexible, can be obtrusive but I dial it way back, just enough to keep things in check and a little forward. I also have an ART PRO VLA II set up on a parallel bus to my mix bus and send both of those to what I call the 2 bus where I EQ the whole thing through the 1974. I like what this does to the sound I hear when tracking. I'm surprised with 3 hardware inserts that latency isn't an issue but so far it's been good. I'm sure as track counts grow so too will latency but I think in this configuration the latency for each device is independent and contemporaneous so only the longest lag matters. I have these returns going into a Focusrite Clarett 8PreX which has no trouble with the ADC part of the picture. The dirty patch bay is starting to piss me off though

Always an interesting topic. I was in audio engineering school in 1986 when CDs were first becoming a thing. At first, no one in class could wrap their heads around how a laser could read music. While nothing significant had been recorded digitally at that point, one of the instructors said something along the lines of "well you all just wasted your money learning how to record analog, in ten years everything will digital." I can't believe how many things have changed. As the technology developed, there were a lot of engineering surprises that needed resolution - the unknown unknowns, like aliasing and dithering, figuring out what the Nyquist bidnezz was all about in terms of lived experience. Then the issue of emulating the action of atoms and electrons in complex circuits in software on the digitized signal. Crickey, the thought of the initial modelling done to trace the action of a compressor, for example, on various signal amplitudes makes my brain hurt. There were shortcuts taken in implementations by manufacturers too, mostly out of ignorance I assume, but they had a negative impact on perceptions. AVID comes to mind. No one really grocked (perceptually) how tape compression affected everything - up to the point that it wasn't there anymore and people (audiences and artists alike) reacted negatively to the unfamiliar clarity. Thus the mass drive to add some "analog mojo" back into recording with tape emulations, summing mixers, blah, blah, blah. I have come around to a hybrid studio for a variety of reasons. I won't use and don't miss tape machines, for example, but I do like interacting with rack gear. Compressors and EQ seems more 3D to my ears when done on hardware and I put everything through a hardware chain for final mix and also for mastering. But I do the overwhelming majority of tweaks using plugins, despite their nearly universally horrid design. (Side note developers: some of us wear reading glasses! Please always make font sizing an option!!) Ultimately the trick is to use a tool appropriate for the job. I tend to agree with the premise that the digital ecosystem has evolved to the point where it is easily peer with analog in terms of audio reproduction capability and certainly exceeds analog in certain respects, like recallability, portability, extensibility. However, it also lacks in certain areas, mostly in the ineffable interaction that tactile pots, faders, etc. give, although I'm sure that folks who've never sat at a Neve desk don't miss the tactile thing and would probably be as uncomfortable sitting at an 8' board as I am trying to get my mouse to move that frigging itty bitty GUI to a sensible spot on the dial.

How old is this cat? if young, then maybe some round about discourse on listening will help. Regardless, a direct approach seems ill advised unless you're in a definite teacher/student relationship. Music really is all about listening - that and using good judgment in the context of the song - whatever that means. This is in fact a teachable skill. Tread lightly!

Cliff Richard. That guitar sound still kills me.

Lhasa de Sela. Heard her first watching some TV show called "I love Dick" which I had no intention of watching and turned out to be not bad. She's been dead for awhile now but I like the mexicano vibe she pulls off. Not bad for a Canuck. These days I find most new music in a similar fashion to combing the bargain bin at Tower Records in mah yout...I flip through "related artist" links on Amazon Prime Music patiently waiting to hear someone whose album doesn't open up with a mawkish cover, ambient acoustic guitar, or waifish voices singing twee adventures. I like the Birthday massacre vid. Reminds me of a cross between Rammstein and the East Bay music scene in the early 90's.

You know Dave, I like that story, and I understand (kinda, I think) the topological distinction being made. Thanks to your insight, now I see it really isn't a pre amp per-se. If I understand you correctly, it's a portion (active) of the mic gain circuit externalized to facilitate prototyping, yes? That being the case, I'll refer to them as activators. 😀 It's been quite some time since I've thought about circuits in any meaningful way and most of what I learned about electronics is a getting a bit woolly. Altogether a different design basis from the DM1s (Class A design with a self-noise figure of 9μV) which really is an inline preamp. Using mine with Royer R10's, I haven't noticed any noise or color, but these aren't my favorite mics, they're noisy all by themselves. I'm sure in pristine facilities there might be some perceivable color but I wouldn't use these devices to add color to a source, like I would with the Tierra Audio Flavours line. There's no transformer or anything imparting harmonic content really and I've found them very transparent so far. Perhaps a wee little test is in order. RABid - are those CB700 concert toms in your avatar? You should open that box! Also, whoever moderates this forum - kudos. I love the quote functionality implemented here. Super easy to use.

I just noticed your affiliation with Cloud Microphones. Great company by all accounts. As I'm rarely satisfied with marketing terms like "activator," I decided to look up the patent, which describes it thusly: "A novel microphone incorporates a phantom-powered JFET circuit for audio application. In one embodiment of the invention, a novel phantom-powered JFET preamplifier gain circuit can minimize undesirable sound distortions and reduce the cost of producing a conventional preamplifier gain circuit." So I'm still gonna think of it as a preamp 🙂 The patent is quite interesting, especially on the mic side. Gonna have to do some research on "backwave chambers" I totally agree with having variable impedance available though. Certainly makes the device more appealing. btw, I love the name Funky Young Monks. One of my old efforts went by the moniker, "Funky Monk and the Shakedown"