stevenberlinjohnson.com: Behind The Music

For the past few weeks, as our house renovation draws to its agonizing close, I've been assembling a little home theater setup in our living room: plasma screen, surround speakers in the ceiling, new progressive-scan DVD player, digital surround receiver, and as of last week, an HDTV-compatible cable box, courtesy of Time-Warner cable. So my late nights have been spent mostly sampling all these new A/V formats: HDTV and progressive scan visuals, DTS surround sound, etc. It's always an interesting process, the eyes and ears adjusting to a new kind of stimulus, and inevitably altering your perception of older formats along the way.

I'll have more to say about the HDTV experience later, but today I'm thinking more about the Super Audio CD (SACD) format, which I've also been test-driving. It's a higher-resolution format, but to my ears at least, the most important difference is that SACD disks can be mixed in full six-channel surround sound. Unfortunately, it's very hard to track down true surround disks of music that I actually like -- it seems like there are only about 100 SACD disks released thus far, and many of them only have two-channel mixes on them.

But this past weekend I managed to get my hands on a six-channel SACD of Beck's lovely Sea Change, which was already on heavy rotation in my house in its two-channel presentation. Apparently, the mix was done by surround legend Elliot Scheiner, and it's certainly an aggressive approach. Some surround mixes keep most of the instruments and vocals up front, and just use the rear speakers for ambient noise and reverb, etc. Scheiner's remix of Sea Change spreads the instruments around you: a clavinet behind your right ear, a bank of strings hovering in the middle of the room, a hammond organ swirling around the entire space. Hearing an album you've enjoyed for a while in stereo remixed this boldly is a revelation: you hear all the little details with an astonishing clarity. There's a little riff in the open track ("The Golden Age") where an electric guitar and an electric piano play roughly the same line. On the stereo mix, I'd never really noticed that guitar lurking behind the piano, but on the SACD version, they were coming from opposite sides of the room. You couldn't not hear them as separate sounds.

There's a trade-off here, I suppose. Maybe I'm just getting accustomed to it, but I've found it harder to hear the song's overall gestalt in the surround mix. Having everything so sharply defined made my ears lock in on the individual parts, rather than the whole. This may just be a matter of training: listen to enough surround mixes, and you develop an ear for them. But listening to Sea Change did make me think something that had never occurred to me during all those times that I'd read rapturous prose about surround mixes "putting you right in the middle of the band." Unless you're a musician, there really aren't any normal circumstances in which you'd listen to music seated in the middle of the instruments. When you see a live concert, you're hearing the music bouncing off the walls of the space surround-style, but the instruments are all up on stage in a traditional left-to-right configuration. So in a strange way, listening to an aggressive sound mix sounds less realistic, less "faithful" than a stereo mix. Even if you've got the best seats in the house, there's never a clavinet player sitting right behind you. But perhaps we'd be better off if there were one.

The Basics

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of seven books, and co-founder of three web sites. We spend most of the year in Marin County, California though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbeej at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

My Books

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
An exploration of environments that lead to breakthrough innovation, in science, technology, business, and the arts. I conceived it as the closing book in a trilogy on innovative thinking, after Ghost Map and Invention. But in a way, it completes an investigation that runs through all the books. Sold more copies in hardcover than anything else I've written.
The Invention of Air
The story of the British radical chemist Joseph Priestley, who ended up having a Zelig-like role in the American Revolution. My version of a founding fathers book, and a reminder that most of the Enlightenment was driven by open source ideals.
The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!

Comments

Hmmm, maybe we _wouldn't_ be better off. Don't you think that you're being made to hear the music in a way that it wasn't intended to be heard?

Quadrophonic never really caught on, and I'd be kind of surprised if this did. Mind you, the record companies have become more astute at re-selling us things we already have, it seems -- as you appear to have demonstrated. Which gets to the nub of this: don't you think they've just created another format to rip us off?

And one more thing: what does it sound like when you plug in headphones? ;-)

Posted by: Martin McCallion | June 12, 2003 at 08:15 AM

I'll be interested to read your comments on HDTV. I've found many movies to be quite unsatisfying when viewed on HDTV because it can frequently make them look like sit-coms, or worse, cartoons. "The Fifth Element" is particularly affected. Of course, it makes sense considering that most current programming i snot intended for HDTV and as HDTV becomes more prevalent, the programming will adjust. For example, I've heard that actor make-up is apparent in HDTV and looks rather ridiculous.

Posted by: pb | June 13, 2003 at 05:23 AM

The thing that always bothered me about surround sound, in music anyway, is that its only real advantage is for doing things that defy your psychoacoustic expectations, sort of the way bullet time was meant to do for motion picture photography. The premise is supposed to be that it's easier to reproduce real acoustical environments with more speakers, but each of these speakers is located in the actual physical acoustic environment of your room. Unless you've got an asymmetric listening room with very flat frequency response, and unless you are perfectly stationary and situated in exactly the proper place in the room (every room is different, and the same room varies depending on how many people are in it, whether the blinds are open or closed, and so forth), then what you don't get is a replica of another acoustical environment. You instead get the sound of music coming out of five or six or seven speakers, which is just as arbitrary as two. You have to sort of suspend psychoacoustic disbelief to really get the proper enjoyment out of music material, and that can be tough to do with music for which there are already a number of pre-existing listening contexts in place to color your experience.

That's not to say multichannel audio is useless. I've heard enough interesting electroacoustic music to know that multichannel audio can be used to good effect. But most electroacoustic music isn't meant to be evocative familiar suroundings; rather, it creates impossible places, and surround sound, multichannel audio, and 3D imaging over stereo are perfect for this sort of thing.

Posted by: taylor guillory | June 13, 2003 at 12:53 PM

"Maybe I'm just getting accustomed to it, but I've found it harder to hear the song's overall gestalt in the surround mix. Having everything so sharply defined made my ears lock in on the individual parts, rather than the whole."

Sounds like the experience of hearing music stoned, where tuning into the individual instruments is very easy and often interesting, but certainly distracts from the overall experience of hearing a song.

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