by Michael

The Right Song at the Right Time

I was driving in the car a few days ago and heard a song [classical, but with a lot of trumpets and with a Latin flair] that I knew was not going a be a song that I liked… and I loved it.

At that moment.

I’ve had enough of these experiences like that to know that if I went home and looked this piece up on Amazon and played a few clips, or worse yet, bought the CD, I would not like it all that much.

I remember hearing Bolero in the car one day, loving it, and then looking up the particular piece and… could take it or leave it.

All this is to say, for sake of argument, that at any time during our lives, there is an optimal song we could/should be listening to. That we would just LOVE at the particular moment.

You see, usually we just say we like a particular piece of music, a song, a group of musicians, because on average, we enjoy listening to their work.

Maybe we have listened to them enough that we have experienced this ‘right song at the right time’ phenomena while listening to them, which is some very positive reinforcement that we have chosen the right ‘favorite thing’ to be listening to a lot.

OK. So here it is, 12:05pm the Wednesday before Christmas. What would be the optimal song for me to be listening to now?

Is there any way to actually determine what it is?


Jerry Maguire: it takes a few tries, but he finally finds his Right Song at the Right Time

At the time of the most recent experience in the car, I was kind of spacing out, kind of bored, the landscape, albeit strikingly beautiful snow-covered pines in the Rocky Mountains, was black and white and dark green and coming across my brain as forbidding and soporific. The music, on the other hand, was upbeat and kind of tongue-in-cheek and simple enough to render OK on the Bose stereo.

So, can we just examine our mood and narrow down our choices of what to listen to, thereby increasing our chances of being able to hear The Right Song?

Through experience and observation, I think one can narrow down the genre where the Right Song, on average, might be found in the following circumstances/mood (YMMV):

Drunk: George Thorogood, Elvis Costello and other bar-band music
Tipsy: Country Music, Everything!
Morning brews: Bluegrass
Morning hangover: New Age
Leisurely long-term boredom: Classical
Stoned: Reggae, Everything!
Hallucinogens: Grateful Dead
Sad: The Blues [weird, I know]
Happy: Any one of your all time favorite songs [see Jerry Maguire clip]
Angry: Heavy Metal, Rap
Energetic: Rock & Roll

Are their other ways to narrow down and quickly find the Right Song? If you have ever tried to do this, and who hasn’t, you soon realize that the very process of trying to find the right song, even listening to a few that are NOT the right song, affects us so much that the Right Song will no doubt have changed from what it was to something completely different.

When we complain about ‘there is nothing to listen to, with 5000 CDs here, and untold 100,000s of songs online, we are really saying: “I have no idea what my Right Song for this moment is, and not knowing SUCKS!” 🙂

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Music / Philosophy 0 comments
 by Michael

Das Racist

I think these guys have started something new in ‘music’ – it is highly visual, however, and very reference-heavy with a kind of mix-tape approach culled from society as a whole and not just other people’s music.

It is like Funkadelic meets Sun Ra meets Y2K. I do not think audiophiles in general will appreciate this genre so much. Just sayin’… 🙂

Yes, I did see them first on Conan [so it does translate to a live presentation… people switching instruments with each other at random during the song, a Michael Jackson looka-sounda-like, etc.].

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Music 0 comments
 by Michael

Radiohead: The King of Limbs (Review)

A new Radiohead album was released by the band:

The King of Limbs

Last night we heard the uncompressed WAV file burnt on to a black CD at 10X speed. We played it on both the Audio Note CDT-5 transport with the Fifth Element DAC, as well as the Emm Labs XDS1 CD player. Both digital front ends were going through the Audio Note M9 Phono and Audio Note Ongaku into the Coltrane Supreme loudspeakers.

The MUSIC

There are 8 songs for a total of about 38 minutes. They are a pretty direct descendant of their last album ‘In Rainbows’. Most of the songs have the recent signature Radiohead sound vis-a-vis an evident extreme attention to the detail of every single note and sound.

There is with a lot of stuff going on in these songs. creating an enveloping sonic ocean that, for me, appeals to the heart in equal proportions to the mind. The last song was a little different from the others – sounding a lot like Cocteau Twins but with the addition of a drum machine.

We liked it quite a bit, although it was much too short.

The SOUND

With all the evidence that CDs burnt from LPs and Reel-to-reel tapes can sound better than commercial CDs, I had wondered before I heard this whether this CD burnt directly from the WAV files directly from Radiohead might sound better than the typical commercial Radiohead CD.

In my opinion, this CD did not sound better than the typical Radiohead commercial CD. We need to do more back and forth listening, and I will update this if my opinion changes, but this CD is more reflective of the CD quality of, say, circa 1997-99. Plenty good for listening to – and enjoying – but not outstanding [for example, things like soundstage depth and harmonic purity were just average… actually a little below average].

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in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Music 0 comments