Brian McLaren

I received a letter from Brian stating that he would not be reachable by
mail in Oregon until the end of February, as he has gone to southern Cal.
for the time. John Chalmers, when he gets a minute, may have a suggestion
on how to reach him, since he is often near San Diego. It would be a shame
not to thank Brian for that series on psychoacoustic matters, regardless
of how much one agrees or disagrees with his reporting or conclusions.

I'm not sure Brian doesn't *believe* in telephones, I mean he's been known
to use one, but Gary is right in that he doesn't apparently have one in
Oregon and does prefer written communication.

Maybe we could convince him to get a phone but leave it hooked up to a
modem permanently...and thus accept e-mail but no voice-mail...

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Message written at 6 Nov 1995 22:36:28 +0000
In-reply-to: <951105190730_71670.2576_HHB36-1@CompuServe.COM> (message from
Gary Morrison on Sun, 5 Nov 1995 11:12:12 -0800)

I am not in the league of creating a CD (I am just an academic, and
not even a musical one to boot) but there is one part of Gary's
message which worries me -- I have said this before to individuals but
not publically.

I have a piece of (what I call) music which took me many times of
listening before I decided that I like it. I really do, and I play it
sometimes in the privacy of my office for the delightful close pitched
melodic fragments. I am not asking you to like it, but to worry about
the effect of not liking it until I had played it tens of times.
There is a problem with many works I hear, that they are created to be
"catchy" as otherwise they will never be played again. On the other
hand there are works which I dimmly remember, which I would like to
hear over again, but I cannot as they did not have a sufficient
gimick, so they are lost (at least to me).

I do not know either CD to which Gary refers, but I have doubts as to
whether he is right. I can remember thinking Wagner was a total bore
(but now I am happy to sit through a cycle), and thinking that Haydn
was dull, and I will not repeat my reaction to JSBach... In those
cases others had decided on the quality over the years, and I had
further opportunities. In the case of much new music the need for a
catchy tune seems of greater importance than depth.

Oh well! Back to programming.

==John ffitch

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Clearly there is subjectivity in here: What is "catchy" for example.

There are, however, some aspects of a CD that are a matter of hard, cold
fact: Does it have significant timbral or volume variations, for example? Does
the rate of the notes vary over time or across the various instruments? You can
measure those sorts of factors fairly unambiguously.

And there are things somewhere in between subjective and objective: Is there
drama in the music, for example? You can't measure drama, but many of the
measurable factors above have very strong influences on drama.

But John did address more directly what I'm particularly concerned about:
Does the music contain anything to keep the audience coming back? Will they
listen to it more than once or a few times? He mentioned a case where he didn't
learn to appreciate a composition until he heard it ten times.

Clearly that's a very meaningful example to consider. But I suggest that if
an entire CD has that quality, it will never be appreciated, because it won't
get heard ten times!

The thing I think many of us who have made CDs lose slight of all too easily,
is the environment around the music on our CDs. It's easy, and certainly very
important, to think of that environment as the other compositions on our CD.
That makes a lot of sense in the context of the movements of a concerto for
example.

But what we seem to lose sight of all too often is that how the compositions
on our CD relate to each other - as important a concern as it is - is only a
secondary environmental concern. Why secondary? Because as soon as that CD
goes into the shelf, the environment becomes ALL 200-some-odd CDs on that shelf!


If a CD is unmemorable, it will be played exactly once!

And CDs don't need any help in becoming obscure! The case I mentioned about
playing a CD a second time to remind yourself why you haven't played it in two
years, is not at all that big an exaggeration. I'd be willing to bet that a
third of my CD collection is in that boat, and I seriously doubt if I'm anywhere
NEAR unique in that regard. And that third includes some very major titles too.
For example, I don't think I've played my copy of Petruchka, or Haydn's 94th in
two years. If those CD weren't memorable in the first place, the chances that
I'd ever play them again are infinitesimal.


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