Music Is Dead: Thanks Apple!

One of the reasons that I'm involved passionately with the production of live musical performances is that music is such an important factor in the cultural fabric of our humanity. At the expense of sounding like a Luddite, I have lamented often the fact that most people these days get their music fix in the form of overly processed and compressed digital formats. Never mind that most do not flock to live performance venues for their musical experiences, but choose, almost exclusively to have their music delivered through their iPods, streaming audio, or any other of the mp3 ilk, with sound quality that is often degraded almost to the point of distortion. I came across this information published on the site Gizmodo and would like to share it with you:

"Each year, Stanford Professor of Music Jonathan Berger does an informal test of his students by playing a bunch of different music in a bunch of different formats. Over email, here's how he told me performs the informal study:

Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 - particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.

In other words, younger people haven't just grown more tolerant of thin, soulless MP3 renditions of their favorite music, they actually like them. Shitty MP3s, even. Professor Berger as saying that it's the "sizzle sounds" that people are loving because it's what they're comfortable with. So, yes Virginia, iPods really have killed music. People aren't just ignorant of high quality audio, they actually hate it. Gee, thanks for contributing to the downfall of civilization, Apple. Music is dead, everyone, carry on."