Peter Gabriel Wants You to Re-Shock the Monkey 312
PreacherTom writes "The party line for the music industry has been clear: discourage music downloads at all cost. However, singer Peter Gabriel is taking things in a different direction. In order to promote his own label, he is actually encouraging people to not only download his music, but also adapt it into something more modern. In doing so, he actually posted a sample pack of Shock the Monkey consisting of vocals and other pieces of the original multitrack recording. Some in the music business would call this the commercial equivalent of hiring kidnappers to babysit. In actuality, Gabriel is pleased with the results."
Been done by NIN already..... (Score:4, Informative)
see
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/04/16/1417205.
Re:Been done by NIN already..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Been done by NIN already..... (Score:5, Informative)
A real answer for people curious about MP3's (Score:5, Informative)
First off, your idea that tracks are "seperated" is an understandable mistake! But, the deal is that it's not the tracks that are seperated, it's the component audio frequencies that compose the sound that make up the song that are.
Let's skip the boring stuff and get right to it. If this interests you, i'm sure that wikipedia will have a full explanation. Imagine three people are whistling (and that this makes up the whole, if somewhat boring, song. Person 1 is whistling at 700hz (hertz, or cycles per second. Human hearing is approx 20-20000 hz, rather like the specs you see on headphones, no coincidence). Person 2 is whistling at 703 hz (NOTE this is close to person 1 on purpose) and person 3 is whistling at 900 hz. So you hear, uncompressed three whistles. There are two things that happen to make an mp3:
1) If I can analyze this sound to find it's frequency components for a given "window" (or in mp3 speak, frame) of time, i can just record that. It would be easier (smaller) to say Persons 1, 2, 3 are whistling at 700, 703, and 900 then it would be to record the full sound of them doing it (think about that)
Still, music can be complex, and there are different qualities of MP3 you can make too (usually refered to as bitrate, like 128, 160, 192 Kbps (kilo bits per second) so we have
2) A principal not unlike optical illusions called Psychoacoustics. It basically says that if you have two signals A and B, and A is louder then B, and A and B are close enough in frequency, a person will only tend to hear A. Common sense time, if a headphone speaker is making a sound, and a big loudspeaker is making the same sound, you'll only hear the big loudspeaker. The question is, how much different will the headphone have to be before you hear it?
This is the science of psychoacoustics. Basically, the more compressed an mp3 is, the more will be "stripped" out - that is as the bitrate gets lower, the amount seperating A and B is allowed to increase. On the flip side, if the bitrate is high enough, there is no practical difference to the human ear, because you just can't hear such a small difference anyway That's why a high bitrate mp3 is STILL five times smaller then a
Check on fourier transforms, psychoacoustics, and mp3 on wikipedia for more (and if anyone has a better example, well, typed this pretty quick, go for it!)
Re:Someone help me out here.. (Score:2, Informative)
Alright I fucking HATE this description (and I've heard it before) that notes consist of "tone" and "noise". That's just a really detremental way of looking at sound. Most of that "noise" consists of harmonics, as well as other resonating frequencies thrown into the mix, so many that it "appears" to be random. Fuck, how simple do you want to get? is anything that's not a pure sine wave, "noise"? Take my 20% pulse wave, that's pretty fucking "noisy". God, I had a first year electronic music professor use this description, it screwed with my head for weeks until I realized that it was a total bullshit way of looking at sound. Thankfully, she got fired, and none of my other electronic music profs ever used that model again. "Noise" is random, very little sound is entirely random, it's just complicated enough that noone wants to bother breaking it down. But do some complex Fourier transformations on tones, and you'll see just how much "noise" that shit really is.
Sorry for sounding like an ass, I've just heard that description before, and it seems like a way you would describe sound on Seseme Street.
Re:Someone help me out here.. (Score:4, Informative)
In short - No. A single track compressed will work better in mp3 than individual tracks mixed together.
The reason is that mp3 is designed precisely to compress single multi-instrument tracks and makes use of psychoacoustics to do this. The gist of which is, the more complicated a sound is (multiple instruments/frequencies) the less of each individual instrument (frequency) you are likely to be able to perceive. Thus, with all the instruments together in the one track, the mp3 algorithm can work better to strip out the subtler elements you don't perceive. If you are just compressing a single instrument there is less of that compression that can be done because, for example, it doesn't know that the rhythm guitar is being drowned by the kick drum at that point in time. Or as a corollary, compressing a single instrument will have to remove stuff you can hear just to hit the same bitrate as the compressed single track. So, combining individual tracks will lead to a worse outcome, all other things being equal, than compressing the already mixed track.
Not the first (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A real answer for people curious about MP3's (Score:3, Informative)
If they aren't mixed together, how would you know you can get rid of the flute for that instant? Now let's not get to specific, when it's all just frequencies, after the math is done, the point is that your best bet for choosing what to take out will occur if everything you want to play can be analyzed together. So nope, that's why they don't have that. Happy to explain this more if i didn't make sense..
Re:Someone help me out here.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re: your first point about entropy -- the entropy in a downmixed track is strictly less than or equal to the sum of the entropies of the individual tracks. So encoding the tracks separately would require more space for the same quality.
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Informative)
Peter Gabriel is British. He has converted a garden shed on his own property into a recording studio where he produces for his own label. He actually runs his own website.
Yes, he's a big act, but since leaving Genesis he's been as much as possible an independent big act publicly at the forefront of not paying too much mind to copyright issues.
When his "people" came to him all upset that people in India were pirating his records his response was (paraphrasing):
"You idiots, book me. If they're not paying for what we're trying to sell they're at least demonstrating a demand for what we can sell that they can't pirate."
He has a long, personal history of being the good anti-Metallica.
KFG
More accurate explanation (Score:2, Informative)
This gets to the fundamental mistake in your explanation. If MP3s (or more generally, digital music) only stored the most prominant waves, the above phenomenon would not be recorded. The recording would not match the actual sound at all, as the complimentary aspects of sound waves are a big part of what makes music interesting to listen to.
What actually happens is that the waves are all recorded as one master waveform. The amplitude of this waveform is recorded regularly at very short intervals. For CDs, there are 44,100 recorded points per second. Due to the very small intervals, any waveforms that could not be caught at this fidelity would be due to frequencies so high that they're inaudible. MP3s try to draw the same curve without taking so many recordings. It essentially tries to fit a curve to the master waveform, carefully deciding on which differences would result acceptable errors that are either outside of human hearing or small compared to the other frequencies compositing the wave. There is never a datapoint in either CD or MP3 that says "currently there's a sound at 700 Hz and at 703 Hz." Instead, the only recorded data is where the wave is (in terms of amplitude) and (in the case of MP3s) where the wave is going.
The parent poster asked about "tracks" and how they're seperated out. I believe this the poster's just using the wrong terminology. What's actually seperated out is the output from the different speakers. These are more accurately called channels. "Tracks" are the output of a specific instrument, and are traditionally stored as two unique channels in recording studios. The bitrate of these channels would match, or exceed, the quality of the end recording. Therefore if a pop song has 16 tracks, it would take 32 channels, all individually stored at high bitrates, to store in an unmixed format. This is a lot more data than distributing the "mixed" version, where all the waveforms are saved together as two channels, and is what is sold at CD stores and as MP3s/AACs.
I hope this explains things a bit better
Jon
ps. Sorry for the original post as AC, but I don't want this post to be buried at 0 moderation.
Eno & Byrne - My life in the bush of ghosts (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Someone help me out here.. (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and let's not forget the many 8-bit parallel port sound devices in the early 90s like the Covox Speech Thing, Disney Sound Source and others.
Re:News for Nerds (Score:2, Informative)
He's as much a nerd as the rest of us!
Some may not like his music, but he's a shrewd musician and his performances are always spectacular.
The best idea I've ever seen in the music business as well, was that he released the audio from the concert on CD. So for each concert, in each major city, there's a CD recording the night. It's not edited clips or 'the best bits' - it's local hecklers and the bits where he gets his tongue tied doing a link to his next song recorded directly from the mixing desk - it helps you recall the night you experienced in your local arena/city hall, not the night someone else experienced in the Texas Dome, or whatever.
Re:Could this be... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More accurate explanation (Score:5, Informative)
You in particular have just mixed up HZ and KHZ and injected more bullshit like "It essentially tries to fit a curve to the master waveform".
Perceptual encoding is much more complicated than that.
It actually performs an FFT analysis and split the sound up into it's component sine waves.
Then, two methods are used to discard data.
Both known as perceptual masking. The first method deals with frequency masking, the second with time.
Human auditory perception cannot hear a quiet frequency when there is a louder one within a few hz of it.
So, you can discard all of them.
Humans cannot hear a quiet sound when a louder one immediately follows it. (Think of a bass drum, you do not hear the squeak of the pedal just before the beater hits.)
So you can discard all those too.
The watery effect of heavy MP3 compression is from too many transients being discarded by the second method, so the transients appear spread over time. The thin lack of depth is due to too many frequencies being discarded.
"the net result of a sound around 701.5 Hz coming in and out every 1/3rd of a second. It would basically sound like 3 beeps a second, though more like a siren than a beep. If the waves were at different amplitudes, the same phenomenon would still exist but there would not be complete silence during the destructive phases."
This is crap. The cancellation has ALREADY HAPPENED when the waveforms were mixed before you do the MP3 compression. So you just need to compress the result, not the individual tones.
Also, it will sound like an amplitude tremelo, not a siren which would imply pitch modulation.
MOD PARENT UP!!! (Score:2, Informative)
some musicians like file trading too. (Score:1, Informative)
What NIN, Peter Gabriel, and others have done by allowing users to mix their stuff is nothing new but does allow for people to see use of the technology for promotion - although how this relates to sales and actually making any stand against RIAA tactics and to try to work with the filesharing public is beyond me, and is probably short lived.
Also done by Public Enemy, went a bit farther... (Score:3, Informative)
For Revolverlution Public Enemy not only had a remix contest, but it was before the album was even released. They had a couple tracks on their website, including the title track Revolverlution. The winner of the remix contest was put on the album. The cool thing, it's really a different track, the guy has a totally different flow than Chuck D., and definitly falls into the "using current song to create a new song" rather than just simple copying (like the labels tend to say about remixes).
Okay, this is what copyright actually IS... (Score:3, Informative)
So, instead of arguing, I'm going to educate - this is copyright 101. So please pay close attention, and you'll understand what is going on a lot better. I'm going to start by describing what copyright is and what it does, and then talk about why we still need it (and, I'd argue, need it even more than before).
Copyright today in most western countries is based on an international agreement called the Berne Convention, first signed at the end of the 19th century, and most recently updated in the 1970s. There is a history of copyright that goes far beyond the Berne Convention, such as the Stationer's Log in 17th century England and a clause in the original U.S. Constitution, but we're dealing with copyright as it is today, not its history (which, while relevant, is for another discussion). For the sake of this discussion, we'll call the copyrighted material "art" (it takes less time to type than "copyrighted material").
Copyright covers two basic functions - the first is the right to distribute (hence "copy-right"), and the second is derivative works. Both of these tend to be misunderstood a great deal by laymen.
The right to distribute basically means that the creator of the art is able to decide how that art is to be distributed within reasonable means. If the creator wishes the art to be released to the public for free download, the creator is allowed to do that. If the creator wants to sell the publication rights to a publisher, the creator can do that too. It's important to note that there is no explicit instruction in copyright law of how a creator is to distribute his/her art - what this amounts to in the end is that the wishes of the creator must be respected under law.
There are limits to these wishes, however. For example, while the creator owns the copyrights to the content itself, s/he does not own what the content is distributed on. So, if I write a book about an alien invasion where the aliens are using biological weapons, sell the publication rights to a publisher, and you buy the printed book, I cannot tell you that you can only read it in the wee hours of the morning, or anything like that. I also cannot tell you that you can't give that book you just bought away as a present, or sell it to a used bookstore, as you own the paper it is printed on, and can do what you like with it in that regard. I CAN tell you that you cannot copy it and sell it on the street corner, or give copies of it away, as that would undermine my wishes as to how it is to be distributed. If you disregard my wishes in terms of distribution, copyright law allows me to take action to protect my intellectual property and ensure that my wishes are respected.
(An example of copyright in action is the open source license, which recently stood up in court. That license has its binding power because copyright law supports it.)
These wishes are also mitigated by fair use. Fair use means that if you are writing an academic paper and you want to quote the aforementioned book about the alien invastion, you may do so without asking permission, so long as you give credit where it is due. There are other clauses and limitations, but those vary internationally, and most people here actually do have a good sense of what fair use is - it's copyright that seems to cause people all the trouble.
Depending on what country you are in, copyright extends anywhere from 50-75 years after the death of the creator. This is a source of much debate. On the creator's side, it allows the creator to leave a legacy for his/her family based on his/her hard work. When it comes to what it means on the side of the publishers or public, it's a bit more complicated. A lot depends on what ri