Saturday, June 18, 2016

The Nekrophone Traces : Arsip, Manuskrip, Dokumentasi HOMICIDE



Dewasa ini komitmen seorang musisi atau grup musik untuk mendorong terjadinya perubahan sosial semakin langka. Satu di antaranya adalah Homicide. Dilihat dari peta musik, posisi Homicide memperkaya khazanah “musik alternatif” Indonesia khususnya mereka yang menyimpang dari musik arus utama (mainstream). Grup hiphop ini telah lama bubar namun masih menyimpan spirit perubahan yang kuat mengendap di bawah sadar para penggemarnya. s.14 artspace and library menilai bahwa riwayat dan reputasi Homicide layak dikaji sebagai sumber penelitian dalam ranah kebudayaan di tanah air.



Dalam pameran kali ini, s.14 atas kurasi Aminudin TH Siregar, menampilkan kronik perjalanan Homicide sebagai grup hiphop asal kota Bandung yang kental dengan lirik-lirik kritis tentang perubahan sosial, kejahatan dan penindasan terhadap kemanusiaan, anti kapitalisme, dan sorotan-sorotan yang tajam akan bahaya neoliberalisme dalam ekonomi global hari ini. Dibandingkan kualitas musikalitas yang lebih bisa diterima, lirik-lirik Homicide tidak hanya agitatif, tapi juga dikenal memiliki kekuatan diskursif sehingga memerlukan kecermatan tersendiri bagi para penggemarnya untuk bereaksi atau sekedar mengerti. Di puncak prestasi lirik, Homicide menduduki tempat istimewa. Oleh mereka, lirik secara sadar didorong guna menghasilkan efek penyadaran dalam sebuah proses perubahan sosial.

Tidak sedikit kaum intelektual menyadari bahwa seni harus membalikkan fungsi seni dari alat-alat ideologis menjadi alat kritis pembebasan manusia, refunction. Seni pasca auratik (seni yang telah kehilangan auranya) telah dimanipulasi untuk tujuan-tujuan ekonomis dan komersil, atau propaganda ideologis seraya memapankan penindasan-penindasan. Dewasa ini, seni pasca auratik, termasuk musik, telah menjadi komoditi dalam kebudayaan massa. Seni (musik) tidak lagi dihasilkan melalui pengalaman estetis, melainkan justru menjadi obyek manipulasi mekanisme pasar. Di realitas dunia musik Indonesia yang chaotic sekarang, “nilai guna” musik dilepaskan dan diganti dengan “nilai tukar”, hingga akibatnya, baik “musik serius” maupun “musik ringan” menjadi barang yang bisa dipertukarkan dan mengikis batas-batas hirarkis. Sepanjang kiprahnya, Homicide menyadari resiko dan paradoks yang mereka hadapi. Homicide menolak paham “musik sebagai musik” sepertihalnya “seni untuk seni” yang hanya mempertontonkan pemujaan berlebihan terhadap seni/musik sehingga justru dapat menyesatkan dan menutupi kebenaran.

Berdiri di Bandung dengan nama awal Verbal Homicide, grup ini awalnya diinisiasi oleh 3 orang rapper; Morgue Vanguard (Herry Sutresna), Sarkasz (Aszy Syamfizie) dan Punish (Adolf Triasmoro) dan satu DJ, Kassaf (Kiki Assaf) pada tahun 1994. Pada perjalanannya formasi terakhir Homicide adalah Morgue Vanguard, DJ-E (Ridwan Gunawan) dan Andre pada gitar sebelum membubarkan diri di tahun 2007. Dengan memperlihatkan koleksi poster, foto, video musik, manuskrip lirik, CD, kaos, vynil, dan cinderamata, pameran ini mengajak kita melihat cuplikan kontinuitas dan diskontinuitas sejarah grup ini di dalam peta perkembangan musik Bandung.

HOMICIDE

Untuk mengiringi dan melengkapi cara kita memahami pameran ini, s.14 akan menggelar diskusi dengan tema Musik dan Perubahan Sosial dengan nara sumber Homicide (Ucok, Aszi, Iwan), Taufiqrahman, Lingga Agung dan Indra Hikmawan a.k.a Papap. Dan akan digelar workshop untuk pelajar bersama Ucok Homicide dan Jay – seorang beatmakernya Eyefeelsix untuk memberikan pengenalan dasar mengonstruksi musik hiphop dengan metoda sampling. Dalam rangkaian ini pula, tim s.14 akan memberikan pengenalan dasar musik hiphop melalui gerak, kreasi dan terakhir, akan ada pemutaran film sejarah musik hiphop yang diseleksi sendiri oleh Ucok Homicide.

Agenda Program s.14 | Mei – Juni 2016

Pameran Retrospektif
The Nekrophone Traces : Arsip, Manuskrip, Dokumentasi HOMICIDE
31 Mei – 30 Juni 2016

Tidak ada seremoni pembukaan,
pameran dapat di apresiasi langsung pada jam buka Perpustakaan s.14;
Selasa – Sabtu, 11.00 – 17.00 WIB, Minggu & Senin TUTUP
Terbuka untuk UMUM dan GRATIS,

Artist Talk & Diskusi | 17 – 24 Juni 2016
Musik & Perubahan Sosial
17 Juni 2016 | Indra Hikmawan & Lingga Agung
18 Juni 2016 | Homicide (Ucok, Aszi, Iwan) & Taufiqrahman
24 Juni 2016 | Linggo & Ucok Homicide

Kehadiran publik untuk diskusi ini dengan by RSVP, karena ruang yang terbatas, diharapkan yang hadir memang untuk mereka yang benar-benar ingin mengikuti diskusi dari awal sampai akhir, Terbuka untuk UMUM & GRATIS.

Public Workshop | 24 – 30 Juni 2016 (tentative)
Lets HIP HOP! | workshop untuk Anak bersama s.14| pengenalan musik HipHop melalui Gerak & Kreasi
Lets Sample! | workshop untuk Pelajar bersama Ucok Homicide & Jay EyeFeelSix | pengenalan dasar kontstruksi music HipHop dengan metode sampling 
limited seat, workshop fee charge.

Film Screening | setiap Jumat, 15.30 – 17.30 WIB
Sejarah Kultur dan Estetika Hip Hop,
Film pilihan & koleksi Ucok Homicide
Terbuka untuk UMUM & GRATIS.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1102813883074489/

Hip Hop Homicide, Museum Kecil di Sudut Bandung

SENIN, 06 JUNI 2016 | 00:23 WIB

TEMPO.CO, Bandung - Deretan kaus band di tiang gantungan, poster-poster, kolase foto aksi panggung, merujuk ke sebuah nama grup musik hip hop, Homicide. Di ruang depan rumah seni S-14 di Jalan Sosiologi 14, Cigadung, Bandung, album-album kaset, lini masa dan personel Homicide, kumpulan naskah lirik lagu, serta perlengkapan seperti microphone, serta pemutar piringan hitam, ikut bercerita soal perjalanan kelompok itu, yang telah membubarkan diri pada 2007. Sehelai foto merekam panggung terakhir Homicide di lapangan basket Gedung Olahraga Jalan Saparua Bandung pada Agustus 2007.


Berdiri di Bandung dengan nama awal Verbal Homicide, grup ini dibentuk oleh tiga orang penyanyi musik rap (rapper) pada 1994. Mereka adalah Morgue Vanguard alias Ucok yang bernama asli Herry Sutresna, Sarkasz (Aszy Syamfizie), Punish (Adolf Triasmoro), dan seorang disc jockey (DJ) bernama Kassaf (Kiki Assaf). Adapun formasi menjelang bubar adalah Ucok Homicide, DJ-E (Ridwan Gunawan), dan Andre pada gitar.


Bagi sebagian penggemarnya, Homicide merupakan kelompok anomali yang lebih dikenal di alur musik hardcore atau punk underground daripada di lintasan jalur hip hop. Lagu-lagu mereka dulu hanya beredar di kalangan terbatas. Lirik lugas dan galak dalam bahasa Inggris dan Indonesia menjadi ciri Homicide.


Misalnya, pada penggalan lagu “Tantang Tirani”; demi semua momen heroik yang tak pernah tercatat dalam tanggal/ biarkan mereka lafal semua peringatan yang mereka hafal/ setiap ayat pasal karet pertahanan para tiran berpangkal/ kebebasan yang datang saat kau tak memiliki lagi harapan/ saat tak ada opsi tersisa selain berdiri menantang para tiran/ saat momen terhidup dalam hidupmu adalah memasang badan di tengah medan/ kawan, mana kepalan kalian!


Selama 13 tahun, Homicide menghasilkan kompilasi karya pada album, seperti The Nekrophone Dayz, Illsurrekshun, Godzkilla Necronometry, juga Barisan Nisan. Sejumlah arsip, manuskrip, dan dokumentasi kelompok musik itu kini tengah ditampilkan ruang seni S-14 dalam pameran retrospektif berjudul “The Nekrophone Traces” pada 31 Mei-30 Juni 2016. “Di sini tempat pameran yang tidak mainstream,” kata kurator pameran Aminudin TH Siregar, Jumat, 3 Juni 2016.


Homicide dinilai sebagai kelompok musik yang langka, yang menjadi salah satu pendorong terjadinya perubahan sosial. Selain memperkaya dunia musik alternatif di Indonesia, semangat perubahan sosial dinilai masih kuat mengendap di penggemarnya. Riwayat dan kiprah Homicide pun layak dikaji sebagai sumber penelitian dalam ranah kebudayaan di Tanah Air. “Oleh mereka, lirik secara sadar didorong untuk menghasilkan efek penyadaran dalam sebuah proses perubahan sosial,” ujar Aminudin.


Selain pameran, ada diskusi tentang musik dan perubahan sosial pada 17, 18, dan 24 Juni 2016, serta pelatihan musik hip hop, juga pemutaran film tiap Jumat sore mengenai sejarah budaya dan estetika musik hip hop. Pada Jumat perdana, 3 Juni 2016, film berjudul Style Wars (1983) ditayangkan. Sekitar 50 orang penonton menyesaki ruangan tengah.


Film dokumenter besutan sutradara Tony Silver tersebut menyoroti fenomena grafiti di New York, Amerika Serikat pada akhir 1970-an hingga awal 1980-an. Grafiti yang kemudian terkait dengan tarian break dance serta hip hop kemudian dijadikan generasi muda kota itu sebagai ekspresi individu, juga suara kelompok masyarakat tertentu. Menyasar kereta-kereta yang melintasi kota, grafiti mengubah wajah kota hingga ditentang pihak lain dan dilarang petugas keamanan. Grafiti juga menjadi semacam alat untuk berkompetisi di jalanan.


Menurut Ucok Homicide, film itu ketika beredar sangat berpengaruh luas dan menginspirasi pemuda di Indonesia. “Di Bandung saya harus antre lama untuk menyewa videonya,” katanya saat diskusi seusai pemutaran film. Tarian break dance bagi pemuda 1980-an juga berkesan kuat hingga beberapa judul film Indonesia ikut menampilkannya dengan sebutan tari kejang.


Adapun hip hop, ujar Ucok, baru muncul sekitar 1993, yang memadukan unsur musik rap, pemakaian disc jockey, serta elemen coretan grafiti. Pada 2000-an di Bandung, misalnya, grafiti yang tak terlalu berkembang seperti musik rap dan hip hop, tiba-tiba melesat pada 2005-2006. “Mungkin karena anak-anak sekarang sudah kaya,” katanya. Dulu, untuk membuat grafiti, diperlukan biaya cukup mahal untuk membeli kaleng cat semprot.


Sementara perkembangan komunitas disc jockey stagnan, komunitas penikmat musik hip hop dan rap kini meluas di berbagai kota, tak lagi hanya di Jakarta, Bandung, atau Yogyakarta.


ANWAR SISWADI

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Bruno Bohong Ah... (Kassaf Mashup) Bruno Mars vs. Bungsu Bandung


Bruno Bohong Ah... (Kassaf Mashup) Bruno Mars vs Bungsu Bandung
Bungsu Bandung vs. Bruno Mars.Bungsu Bandung yang bernama lengkap Hj. Mimi Setiawati, adalah penyanyi Sunda asal Desa Mekarmulya, Situraja, Sumedang. Lahir 5 November 1962, bungsu dari lima bersaudara yang semuanya berprofesi sinden.
Posted by Kassaf Mix on Monday, March 30, 2015

Saturday, February 28, 2015

Vinyl's great, but it's not better than CDs


A Rolling Stones fan hold a vinyl LP.                    Paul Kane/Getty Images
Updated by Dylan Matthews on April 19, 2014, 11:00 a.m. ET @dylanmatt dylan@vox.com

Happy Record Store Day! There are plenty of business-related grievances to be filed against the annual vinyl celebration, but it's hard to argue with the spirit of a day encouraging people to explore and buy new music. Moreover, vinyl's just more fun as a format than MP3s or CDs; there's something viscerally satisfying about dropping the needle, and physically spinning the record back to rewind. And in a world where people feel all too welcome to hijack the playlist at parties they attend, it's nice to have a harder-to-commandeer format on offer.
Let's not fool ourselves, though. Vinyl is great, but the idea that its sound quality is superior to that of uncompressed digital recordings is preposterous. They sound different, and that's exactly the point.


What vinyl can't do


A nice explanation of some of the challenges of mastering vinyl.


On a theoretical level, there's just no reason it should be the case that vinyl sounds better. There are built-in problems with using vinyl as a data encoding mechanisms that have no CD equivalent. Vinyl is physically limited by the fact that records have to be capable of being played without skipping or causing distortion. That both limits the dynamic range — the difference between the loudest and softest note — and the range of pitches (or "frequencies") you can hear.

If notes get too low in pitch, that means less audio can fit in a given amount of vinyl. If notes are too high, the stylus has difficulty tracking them, causing distortion. So engineers mastering for vinyl often cut back on extreme high or low ends, using a variety of methods, all of which alter the music.

For example, one common cause of high pitches in recordings is "sibilance," or the hiss-y sound produced by pronouncing certain consonants, notably "s" or "z"s, in a quick, sharp way (ex.: "zip," "shack," "sap"). This creates enough problems for engineers working in vinyl that they often have to "de-ess" recordings, either by making the pronunciation less sibilant through editing or by straight-up asking vocalists to pronounce lyrics differently.

De-essing is a common technique outside vinyl too, but then it's an artistic choice; vinyl forcesde-essing upon you. If you want to keep aggressive sibilance in for aesthetic reasons, and want to press to vinyl, you're out of luck. And when de-essing is achieved through re-recording vocals, it can alter the music in subtler ways, making vocalists deliver lyrics less intensely and lose a degree of artistic expression in the process.

What CDs can do

Sound engineer mixing the audio behind the audio console. Denmark 2011.
Photo by PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images.

Since CDs rely on sampling an original analog signal being recorded, they do have some frequency limitations. While vinyl records, in theory, directly encode a smooth audio wave, CDs sample that audio wave at various points and then collate those samples. "No matter how high a sampling rate is," Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk once wrote, "it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove."

That's true. CDs work by taking a bunch of samples from a source audio wave and stringing them together. But this criticism is misleading on two counts. For one thing, vinyl pressing is not error-free, and the analog groove of a given record is not a precise replication of the audio wave recorded in the master, not least due to extreme high and low frequency limitations. It's true that CDs can't exactly replicate the whole audio wave in a master, in every case (update: in many cases, the Nyquist-Shannon theorem means it can) — but neither can vinyl records.

More importantly, the volume of sampling that CDs do should be enough to get a replica of the original recording that sounds identical to the human ear. The sampling rate for CDs is 44.1kHz, meaning that CD recordings sample the master recording 44,100 times a second, and can capture frequencies as high as 20 kHz. That is about the limit of what humans can hear; at least one experiment has confirmed that listeners in blind tests can't tell the difference between recordings that include frequencies above 21k and ones that don't. You may think you can hear more than CDs are giving you. But you probably can't.

And over time, engineers have come to make better use of those 44.1kHz. Scott Metcalfe, director of recording arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins's Peabody Institute, explains that engineers have taken to "oversampling," making digital files that use a much higher rate than 44.1kHz, and then compressing that back down to 44.1kHz for the actual CD. "It captures the signal at a much much higher sample rate and then mathematically takes it down to 44.1kHz," Metcalfe says. "It does a really good job of preserving information."

Metcalfe brings up another problem with this line of CD criticism. Even if an actual recording method can hold frequencies above 20kHz, that doesn't matter if there isn't a microphone capable of capturing them in the first place, or a speaker capable of playing them back. And most studios don't have microphones that record above 20kHz, and it's very rare for speakers to play frequencies above that. Indeed, most playback systems feature low-pass filters, which specifically cut off anything above that marker.

The fact of the matter is that CDs can create closer facsimiles than vinyl can.

What do people actually prefer?


There is, sadly, no Pepsi challenge for CDs and vinyl. Image courtesy of Pepsi.



Simply as a matter revealed preferences, the fact that Americans buy digital copies of songsat a much greater rate than alternatives suggests that they'd rather listen to digital music or CDs than vinyl. Taking both actual albums and track sales into account, the equivalent of 243.5 million digital albums were sold last year, compared to 165.4 million CDs and 6.1 million vinyl records. Given that compressed digital audio is considerably lower in quality than either CDs or vinyl, consumer certainly seem to care a lot less about audio quality than convenience.

But that's kind of an unfair comparison, given exactly that convenience differential. You can't fit thousands of tracks' worth of vinyl in your pocket and listen to it while jogging. So what happens if you set all else equal, and have people compare digital and analog audio in a controlled setting?

Unfortunately, no one appears to have done a double blind listener test comparing vinyl to CDs, but there is a good study from Florida State's John Geringer and Patrick Dunnigan doing that with CDs and high-quality cassette recordings. While cassettes sold to consumers often featured lower audio quality than vinyl records, there's nothing inherent to magnetic tape requiring that, and the format doesn't suffer from the frequency limits imposed by the risk of vinyl skipping. It's not a perfect test for our purposes, but knowing how people feel about high-quality analog stacked up to high-quality digital should tell us something about comparing vinyl to CDs.

Geringer and Dunnigan used identical microphone and mixing board setups to record four different concerts, each time using both a digital record and a high-quality analog cassette recorder (the MR-3 from audiophile favorite brand Nakamichi). They then had 40 music majors listen to the recordings, either with loudspeakers or headphones, while letting them switch between each recording at will. The test subjects were not aware of which was the digital recording, and which was the analog one. They were then asked to record their preferences.

It turns out that the music majors had a significant preferences for digital. "Participants gave significantly higher ratings to the digital presentations in bass, treble, and overall quality," Geringer and Dunnigan write. The results were weaker on some points than others (recordings of string orchestras were a particularly close call) but in no case was the average rating of the analog version higher than the average rating of the digital one. The most analog-generous thing to be taken away from the study is that there are some types of music for which people have no preference. But there were several where people had a real, noticeable preference for digital.

So why do people love vinyl?

Record enthusiasts rapidly search through boxes of vinyl records on the opening day of the annual WFMU's Record Fair, which benefits that noncommercial radio station based in Jersey City, on November 22, 2013 in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Perhaps the best audio-based case for vinyl is actually precisely the fact that it does mess up the original recording. A lot of vinyl fans talk about the "warmth" of records, particularly of the low-end. But, as Pitchfork's Mark Richardson puts it, "the 'warmth' that many people associate with LPs can generally be described as a bass sound that is less accurate." The difficulty of accurately translating bass lines to vinyl without making grooves too big means that engineers have to do a lot of processing to get it to work, which changes the tone of the bass in a way that, apparently, many people find aesthetically pleasing.

"Warmth" also comes from flaws in record players. As the University of Waterloo's Stanley Lipshitz once explained to Popular Science, speaker sound and the needle's height fluctuations can cause the record to vibrate, which the needle in turn picks up and translates into a "warmer" seeming sound.

Is it wrong to prefer that "warmer" sound? Of course not! It would be as preposterous to rule that out as a legitimate source of aesthetic appreciation as it would be to discount distorted guitar lines for being "less faithful" to the original guitar sound. Audio distortion can be beautiful and there's nothing wrong with liking it. But there's also something to be said for listening to music as its creators meant it to be heard, and precisely because of their "warmth" vinyl recordings sound rather different from what artists hear in the studio.

"As a recording engineer, when I go to a digital recording, what I did is exactly what I get back," Metcalfe explains. "When you record in the analog domain, what you're hearing there is different from what you sent in."

Should I stop listening to vinyl?


Jack Black has strong opinions on the virtues of vinyl. Clip from Touchstone Pictures.



No! For heaven's sake, no. Each format has its charms, and their overall differences in quality are often overwhelmed by differences in the quality of initial recording equipment, in mastering approaches, and in playback setup. But if you're a vinyl collector, you also shouldn't go around telling your friends how much purer your audio is. First off, that's generally dickish behavior, but more to the point it's false. Digital recording just is more accurate. That's not the only thing worth considering by any means, but it does make the puritanism of some vinyl true believers look rather ridiculous.

Thanks to Paul Gold of Salt Mastering for help in researching this piece

Source: Vinyl's great, but it's not better than CDs SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2015

Science Shows There's Only One Real Way to Listen to Music



By Tom Barnes November 13, 2014

Steve Jobs, the man who invented the iPod and ignited the digital music revolution, never listened to MP3s.

Instead, he only listened to vinyl. He felt there was something vacuous about listening to music in a digital form and was surprised at the success of his own product — that so many people had willfully traded quality "for convenience or price."

Digital doesn't hold up: Nothing about the way we listen to music these days commands attention like or yields the quality of a physical record. Though there is a movement back towards vinyl, there's an even bigger movement towards streaming — and with it, a whole new paradigm for how we hear music.

But it's clearer than ever before that the digital revolution has changed not only how we consume music but what music can do for and to us. Expert scientists have begun to explore how the experience of listening to music online changes how we perceive it. And there's more to the difference than you'd think.



Skipping and skimming: Poppy Crum, senior scientist at Dolby Laboratories and consulting professor at Stanford's CCRMA school (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), spoke with Mic about the psychological effects our digital music habits are having. 

"True love or appreciation for a piece of music ... comes with depth of knowledge of that music," she said. She cited three important factors in creating a genuine experience with a piece of music — "repeated exposure, iterations and intent" — which can be short-circuited in a "taste and go" environment. To her mind, though, the benefits of streaming in terms of access and broad music appreciation far outweigh the potential negative effects of streaming habits on our emotional experience.

"Those sorts of heightened emotional responses of pleasure and enjoyment and satisfaction come in a way that is counter to rapid, quick streaming and constant exposure to a lot of different things," Crum said.

Skipping and listening inattentively, then, can get in the way of building those connections: "[It] wouldn't be experienced initially, and would bypassed very quickly in a sort of 'taste and go' streaming environment."

But that's exactly how we listen now. Recently collected Spotify data illustrates how short our musical attention spans have become. There's only about a 50% chance we'll actually make it to the end of a song. If people are barely listening to a song once all the way through, they're likely not returning to build those emotional connections. If they do, they might not have a foundational experience on which to form them.

Many music professionals have also discussed this lack of connection, and to some of them blame something called the "loudness wars" for part of it. For years now, recording engineers have used dynamic compression to make their music louder and more ear-catching. Though it may grab your attention at first, though, it can actually exhaust your ears to listen to it. It ends up looking like a solid brick of noise, as the following portion of the infographic "A Visual History of Loudness," created by designer Christopher Clark, shows. It should be noted, though, that some believe the loudness wars are improving and excessive dynamic compression is less rampant now than it was in the past decade.


Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer, believes this is one of the chief reasons people don't engage with albums as deeply anymore. "When you're through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued," he told NPR. "You may have enjoyed the music but you don't really feel like going back and listening to it again."

If that's paired with a lo-fi recording, it becomes hard to experience the music in a deep emotional way. Research shows that musical quality has a huge effect on emotional response. A recent study performed by audio researchers at DTS divided a group of listeners into two groups — one that watched a video accompanied by standard stereo 96-kbps sound (Spotify's default audio setting) and the other group listened in 256-kbps audio format. The responses in the brains of the group listening with the 256-kbps audio were 14% more powerful on metrics measuring memory creation and 66% higher on pleasure responses. And this was just 96 to 256 kbps. 



What the future will hold: Even if elements of the digital experience risk music's power, it's clear that music is still a fundamentally important part of our lives. We wouldn't need an unlimited streaming service if it didn't. 

However, music's function may change as we move deeper in our increasingly digitized, technology-dominated world. 

"Music may have been something we were more focused on in the past, an event we could allocate more attention to. It still exists in that way in some sense. Now it's becoming something we distribute our attention across," Crum told Mic. She believes that ubiquitous music enabled by streaming may actually become a vital tool in keeping us focused within a world that continues to fragment our attention spans.

But something can still be lost — not just the cover art on a vinyl, or the existence of a platinum album. What we lose with our new habits for listening to music is a piece of ourselves; the musical part you keep in your heart, not your pocket. Listen closely, and listen well.


Correction: Nov. 14, 2014
An earlier version of this article misspelled Poppy Crum's last name. It is "Crum," not "Crumb." The article has also been modified to better reflect the original context in which her quotes were given.

Correction: Jan. 9, 2014
An earlier version of this article incorrectly conflated dynamic compression and data compression. While data compression — which reduces the size of a digital file for easy storage — does alter an audio file, it doesn't necessarily decrease audio quality in the way this article initially suggested. Dynamic compression, the phenomenon related to the "loudness wars," does create ear fatigue and alter qualitative aspects of music. The updated article also no longer cites vinyl records as playing at 1,000 kbps, as the exact number is unconfirmed and variable.








About The Author: 


Tom Barnes is a Staff Writer for Mic.com's music section. A graduate of NYU, he's worked brief stints with Columbia Records and Miracle Music. He believes the mind needs music like the body needs food and water, and he always feels the thirst.



Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Material Insights: Plastic manufacturer gets back into vinyl records

A CD and DVD maker is turning back the clock and going back to vinyl, the materials distribution landscape changed with an acquisition and two firms select a site for a HDPE plant in this week's Material Insights.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

5 Dokumenter Terbaik tentang J Dilla

Mendiang DJ dan Producer J Dilla (a.k.a. Jay Dee; a.k.a James Yancey) mendapat banyak penghormatan justru setelah meninggal, dibandingkan saat masih aktif memproduce beat lewat MPC nya untuk Slum Village, Madlib, Common, dan banyak lagi tokoh hip hop lainnya. Sebagai seorang legend, tentu saja peninggalannya akan tetap dikenang tahun demi tahun setelah kematiannya karena penyakit lupus di tahun 2006.

Hampir setiap bulan setelah kematiannya, bermunculan film dokumenter  tentang Dilla  untuk menghormati producer kebanggaan Detroit ini, belum lagi rilis rilis beat karyanya yang muncul lagi ke permukaan dalam berbagai versi.  Salah satu film dokumenter yang muncul adalah bikinan Fuse TV, untuk serial Crate Diggers nya, yang membahas Dilla dari sudut pandang crate digging. Film ini menghadirkan ibunda Dilla ("Ma Dukes"), Talib Kweli dan sejumlah kawan dekat Dilla. Ini baru salah satu tribute untuk Dilla sang kreator, Mungkin anda masih bisa menemukan lagi film dokumenter lain tentang Dilla, disini saya hadirkan 5 yang menurut saya terbaik. RIP J Dilla. 


STILL SHINING


STUSSY'S J DILLA DOCUMENTARY



FUSE TV: CRATE DIGGERS



STONES THROW DILLA INTERVIEWS


J DILLA INTERVIEW 2003

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Submerged Turntable by Evan Holm



Submerged Turntable from Brian Lilla on Vimeo.

Artist Evan Holm created an installation of submerged record player that’s still producing a nearly perfect audio…
To see more of Evan's work go to www.evanholm.com/.