Close 'N Play!

After my post about Ol' Fatso by Augie Rios a commenter wrote: Don't know how, but I had the 45 of this in my "Close & Play" when I was a child.

I didn't know how, either, mainly because I'd never heard of a Close & Play, which turns out to be a record player for kids: CLOSE 'N PLAY AUTOMATIC PHONOGRAPH - CLOSE LID... RECORD PLAYS.

That would've been an exceptionally groovy present for a kid in the 60s or 70s.

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.

Media on demand, 19th Century: the Electrophone

Picture this: Marcel Proust, in 1911, is in his cork-filled room in Paris, writing À la recherche du temps perdu.

And he's listening to a live opera broadcast through a set of headphones.

That would've sounded impossible, some kind of sci-fi time warp, until I heard the story of the Electrophone on BBC Radio 4's Archive Hour last week.

The Electrophone was a British subscription radio service that used a telephone connection. It was available from 1895, a couple of decades before wireless broadcasting, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne. Proust was a subscriber to the earlier French version, known as the théatrophone.

Electrophone programs were live feeds from theatres and music halls, featuring the stars of the day. They even transmitted services from a London church that concealed some of the electronics inside a hollowed-out Bible, for decorum's sake.

Subscribers would contact the Electrophone company in Soho by ringing up their regular telephone switchboard, then request a program from whatever was being transmitted at that time.

At the receiving end, several listeners could hook up using headsets kept hanging on a purpose-made wooden stand, a listening-post (as we still call such a set-up in classrooms). The photo, from the British Museum's Connected Earth website, shows a 1905 model.

In France, le théatrophone was launched in 1890. Marcel Proust was a fan, and would listen to live feeds of Wagner or Debussy while writing. Proust was enthusing about the service around 1911: the image of a writer, working to music from a headset, is mundanely familiar to us now, but it's startling to find it so long ago.

Carolyn Marvin, in When Old Technologies Were New, writes about experiments as early as 1880, when visitors to the Paris Exposition Internationale d'Electricite listened to opera and theatre transmissions through a théatrophone hook-up.

In England in 1889 a novel experiment permitted 'numbers of people' at Hastings to hear The Yeoman of the Guard nightly. Two years later theatrophones were installed at the elegant Savoy Hotel in London, on the Paris coin-in-the-slot principle. For the International Electrical Exhibition of 1892, musical performances were transmitted from London to the Crystal Palace, and long-distance to Liverpool and Manchester. In the hotels and public places of London, it was said, anyone might listen
to five minutes of theatre or music for the equivalent of five or ten cents. One of these places was the Earl's Court Exhibition, where for a few pence 'scraps of play, music-hall ditty, or opera could be heard fairly well by the curious. (Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; paperback, 1990. Excerpts posted to Dead Media Working Notes)

The United States Early Radio History website has a marvellous photo from 1917 of an Electrophone being enjoyed by a group of convalescing soldiers in London, listening to 'the Latest Music Direct from the Theatres and Music Halls'.

The Electrophone service held out until 1925 when the wireless began to take hold, and the writing had been on the wall by 1923: see the news report at the United State Early Radio History website.

(Sadly, the Electrophone story from Archive Hour is no longer online: they don't seem to be into archiving past programs at the BBC as much as they are at our ABC.)

Image from United States Early Radio History