"Frank Avis's Memoirs of 42 Years in Radio"

A highlight of John Pearce's radio memoirs (see earlier post) is his remote broadcast from a country dance for 3SH Swan Hill, probably some time in the late 1940s.

I've just found another entertaining account of a country dance broadcast, this time from Frank Avis in The Ball Broadcast, recalling his time at 2LF Young in the mid-1950s. Avis, best known as a radio newsman, is publishing his memoirs as a blog at FrankAvis.com.

Frank Avis started in radio at 2MG Mudgee, and his latest post (15 February) takes his career up to 2DAY-FM Sydney in the 80s and 90s. Along the way, he's worked at 2LF Young, 3BO Bendigo, 7HO Hobart, 3UZ, 3XY, 3AK and 3DB Melbourne, 6PR Perth, 3MP Mornington Peninsula, and 2GB and 2MMM-FM Sydney.

Frank arrived at 3BO not long after the young John Laws left, and he tells a couple of good yarns about Laws's time at the station.

Great stories from a radio insider: highly recommended.

Percy Leason in the USA

After I posted one of Percy Leason's Wiregrass cartoons, John Adcock over at the excellent Yesterday's Papers sent me some examples of Leason's illustrations from the time when he'd emigrated to New York.

Leason left Australia in 1937 and his family followed soon after. He stayed in the States until his death in 1959, painting, teaching, railing against modern art, and illustrating for books and magazines. (Garrie Hutchinson, Wiregrass: A Mythical Australian Town, 1986.)

These illustrations are from 1958, for the Golden Stallion series by North Dakotan writer Rutherford G. Montgomery.

Coincidentally, Percy Leason is currently included in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 19 October, Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915 -1950. The theme of the exhibition is the tonalist Australian painter Max Meldrum and his followers. At the ABC Melbourne website you can see a charming Leason portrait of his chidren, from the exhibition.

[Click on an image for larger view.]

Is 128kbps good enough for an mp3?

A handful of years ago when I first started ripping mp3s it was commonly held that 128kpbs was as high as you needed to go, because after that the improvement in sound quality was unnoticeable.

I've stuck to that, and a recent online experiment at Cognitive Daily supports it. Read the full story here, and as usual the comments are worth reading too.


Cognitive Daily home: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily
Cognitive Daily feed: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/index.xml

Music in the lab

Music Matters is a blog by Henkjan Honing about music cognition. It looks at music from a scientific point of view, something that instinctively sounds off-putting to me, but this is so interesting, so full of variety, that I couldn't resist reading on. Also, this guy is clearly a music enthusiast, not just a clinical analyst, and his writing is accessible. (I found it via the excellent Cognitive Daily.)


Some recent posts:

Why do people sing so shamelessly out of tune?
When somebody sings out of tune, we might infer that he or she has no talent for music. That is of course a misunderstanding...

A 2006 recording of Glenn Gould?
The recording was made using measurements of the old recordings and then regenerating the performance on a computer-controlled grand piano, a modern pianola.

Why does it sound slow?
We know that it is not simply the number of notes (or event-rate) that defines a listeners impression of tempo. There are quite a few musical examples that have a lot of notes but that are generally judged to have a slow tempo (e.g, Javanese gamelan music).

Is it a male or female performer?
This week an interesting new web-based experiment... Can listeners determine the gender of the performer on the basis of a recording? Do the experiment by clicking....

Associate Professor Honing is head of the University of Amsterdam's Music Cognition Group. As his CV explains: He conducts research in music cognition, with a special focus on the temporal aspects of music (such as rhythm, timing, and tempo), using theoretical, empirical and computational methods.

Anyone who writes (and, like me, neglects) a blog can sympathise with this post from 30 July last year:

Yet Another blog?
Still wondering —on a Sunday afternoon at home— whether yet another blog is of any use.

Henkjan, my answer in your case is a loud Yes.

It's Always a Good Idea to Attach the Head Set (1921)

Over at Allan Holtz's comic strip blog, the excellent (but mischievously named) Stripper's Guide, there are three panels of Today's Hook-up from the early 1920s . This was a daily cartoon by J.C. Henderson that sent up the new craze for radio.

The radio aficionadoes in Today's Hook-up are obsessed with pulling in that signal (hard work at times, apparently) and checking those program guides, to the point of neglecting everything else.

You can't help being reminded of the Internet, especially when it was just taking off and people were struggling with setting up their new computers and connections and, yes, getting a bit obsessed in the process.

There's a frustrated listener in the first panel who has 'worked and worked for over an hour' and 'didn't get a thing'. He's forgotten the classic first step of any tech support protocol: First and foremost, check to make sure all cables and cords are plugged in and firmly seated.

Or, as the caption says, It's Always A Good Idea To Attach The Head Set.

That Summer

A while back, I mentioned the excellent That Summer soundtrack anthology (1979). Its collection of post-punk/New Wave delights helped convince me that there was new pop worth listening to at the end of the 70s.

So I was chuffed to read Andrew Dubber's appreciation of That Summer over at his blog The Wireless. It made a big impression on him as well, and he writes about tracking down his own copy after he heard it at his cousin's place as a 12- or 13-year-old:

The soundtrack might just be the perfect record -- and for 14 years of my life, it became something of an obsession. I could not get my hands on a copy for love nor money.

Read about how Andrew finally found - and lost - a scratchy vinyl copy of That Summer. He includes a track listing, and an mp3 of Mink DeVille's Spanish Stroll.

Iva Davies, oboist

Dave Allen emailed about a notable Australian oboist I didn't mention, Iva Davies of Icehouse, who had studied oboe and composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music before achieving fame with Icehouse and diverse projects over the years. Astute listeners will pick up Iva on oboe throughout his recordings.

Dave, who was flautist and saxophonist with Sydney band Flake, played with Iva Davies on a recording of film music written by Steve Gard. This was some time before Icehouse (initially Flowers) was formed, and it seems to have been Iva Davies' first recording.

Dave tells the story at his Burning Mountain Studio blog:

In 1972 Iva was a student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. (Steve and myself also went there at other times). Steve was involved with the New Theatre at the time, where he met Chris Noonan (these days a Hollywood director [Babe, etc]) and Chris asked Steve to score music for a movie called Garbo he was making. Steve wrote the theme music and we recorded it at ATA studios in Glebe. Iva played oboe and tuba, Steve played guitar and piano and I played flute.