linterry's blogger

Yesterday I bought a new pair of Bauer skates from Canadian Tire. I immediately went to Nathan Philps Square and had a go at the public rink. There were tons of people there, but thankfully nobody crashed into me.

The only reason I even bother skating is so I can eventually, one day, master the crossover turn. The crossover turn is just the sexiest thing alive, when you see somebody do it properly in real life. It's funny becuase i see it on TV all the time and it kinda just whizzes indifferently past my brain, but in real life it's like "OMFG, how does that work?". It's just unreal how somebody can stay upright with their body angled like that. It's kinda like motorbikes and how they are like 30 degrees from the ground when they turn; it's like, huh? Is that even possible? Yeah I know the physics princples behind it, but it still amazes.



I think I have the crossover turning left sort of figured out. I practiced it like a madman in 4th year university whenever I had free time to go for public skating. The tough part is trying to skate on the outer edge on the inner foot, it just feels like you're going to fall down. I think at just about any public skate in Toronto, the number of people who can perform crossovers stands at about 25-30%. Usually they're very accomplished skaters, they move so blindingly fast around the ice and it looks like they're not even trying. They can skate backwards, crossover backwards, they've pretty much got everything thanks to (i think) formal training. The only thing I can do is skate forwards and crossing over to the left. It's pretty sad that I can't even brake stop. I tried practicing it but it's even scarier than a crossover. I also don't think I'll ever be able to crossover to the right, since it feels like shooting a basketball with my left hand. That's why I never stay around when the rink direction changes to clockwise. It's just pointless for me.

BTW I found this awesome chart on one of the CDRlabs forums: http://cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=142231#142231

Germans are so fucking hardcore. This is a chart published by c't magazine that rates all kinds of Blank DVD Media (based on the manufacturer code) on a lot of useful criteria, one of which being durability. It's sad that the two 50disc DVD-R spindles sitting on my desk (Sony and Maxell) are the worst of the group. I was wrong to bash CMC Magnetics, apparently they do very well in durability. The best DVD-R 8x Media seems to be TDK's own TTH01 media.

While the stereotypical Christmas features presents and parties with friends and family singing gay songs around meticulously decorated coniferous trees, the above pictures are more representive of a typical Terry Christmas. Driving around bleak plazas on a rainy day, trying to find a place that was open for lunch. Although I would like to say that it was somewhat depressing, I'm afraid I'm not qualified to make such a statement becuase I had a girlfriend beside me all the time and the people who really suffer during the holiday season are those who are all alone.

Surprisingly Quiznos at York Mills plaza was still open and we had lunch inside. There were actually quite a few people buying sandwiches today. On a normal day, I don't really give a crap about the other customers, but just because it was goddamn Christmas I kept careful track of who came in. Everytime somebody came all by themselves, I had to wonder "Does this person feel lonely? Do they not feel embarassed to be buying a Quiznos sandwich on December 25th?" "Shouldn't you be celebrating something fierce with your buddies?" Of course, I also ask myself these questions, but since I totally suck at Christmas I'd rather not think about it.

Then I saw the funniest thing. This Cantonese family came in: brother, sister, and dad. They bought their Quiznos subs and ate their food in the goddamn car. It was even funnier because their car was parked right in front of Quiznos. Why would anyone want to eat their lunch in a car when a decent table and chair can be found 5 metres away? Well, there are probably a few good explanations - but none of them are as satsifying as mine: They're just too fucking embarassed to be caught eating together in a Quiznos on December 25th. It's just too lame for words. They should be partying it up, sharing gifts, eating a wonderful home cooked meal with tons of friends and family, but instead here they are, paying $23 for three Quiznos subs.

I've always hated Christmas. I liked it as a kid, sure, when I still believed in Santa Claus. But gradually it has transformed into a self-evaluation day of sorts - a day when you ask yourself retarded questions like "Am I really happy?" "Do I have enough friends who love me?" "Am I special enough?" Christmas is like that one day where everyone expects to get high - so unless you have the most mind-blowing orgasm receiving awesome gifts, getting drunk, or having sex with five different girls, it will inevitably end up being a disappointment.

For the majority of people I know, and that's not many, Christmas just ends up being like any other day. Wake up, surf the net, eat lunch, surf the net, eat dinner, surf the net, sleep. Yet unlike any other day, every hour is filled with a depressing feeling that something big is supposed to be happening, but instead it's just raining outside and there's jack shit to do.

I really felt sorry for my girlfriend, because I wish I could offer her a more, Christmas-sy Christmas. But as always, my willpower is insufficient to change my inevitable destiny, and the result is yet another Terry Christmas as perfectly represented by the pictures above.

It seems there's a whole "DVD write quality" subculture that revolves around using tools like Nero CD/DVD Speed and DVDInfoPro. These tools will scan your DVD backups and give you various information like

- PI error (C1) count/average/peak
- PIF error (C2) count/average/peaks
- Jitter
- Overall Quality Score

While I used to adopt a "Burn-and-forget" strategy with all my previous backups, with a diagonstics tool like this, it can turn into somewhat of an obsession. I was surprised to discover, that practically every DVD backup has literally thousands of errors on it (yep, that precious porn collection, thousands of errors on them) - but as long as it's within a certain spec it should be readable by just about anything. The difference between various media is that while a high-quality Japanese disc like a Taiyo-Yuden (TYG0x) may only have about ~2000 PI errors and ~100 PIF errors, a shitty quality Taiwanese CMC Magnetics (CMC MAG) can have up to ~100,000 PI errors and ~1000 PIF errors. While the disc still works, it probably won't last past a few years, and especially for PS2 backups, they'll probably end up unplayable. I guess nowadays, with practically everything in the electronic world having a lifespan of less than half a year, it doesn't really matter, but it's nice to have the peace of mind that anything I backup is actually backed up, and not put on a goddamn time bomb.

I was also surprised to discover that a recently purchased Maxell 8x DVD-R 50-disc spindle from Future Shop had absolutely horrible quality. The manufacturer code is RITEKG05 which actually had good reviews from around the net, but apparently the Maxell-branded RITEKG05's are horrible. No wonder they were on sale, only $15 for a spindle of 50. Burning at 8x on a Pioneer DVR-110D, I get quality ratings as low as 60-70 where a "normal" disc is supposed to hover around 95. You get what you pay for. I also tried out a previously purchased Sony 8x DVD-R 50-disc spindle (code:SONYD08), these give me around 96 on a 8x burn. They only cost $5 more.

The plot thickens. When I drop the burn speed down to 4x on the Maxells, the final quality rating jumps to about 94. Hrm, burn at 8x: shitty quality (65), burn at 4x: normal quality (94). Label says: Maxell DVD-R 8x. So I guess my question is: if these discs can only be properly burned at 4x, then why the fuck are they marketed as 8x? The only answer I can come up with: to appeal to our ridiculous attraction to low prices, and to take advantage of our general ignorance of DVD Media quality. Really, trying to buy DVD Media nowadays is a crapshoot if you don't surf the right sites (and even if you do, it can still be a crapshoot) - how do you diffrentiate between one brand and another? They pretty much seem all the same, so as long as it's branded by a company you know (eg. Maxell, Verbatim, Sony) the only thing you can emperically compare on is price. I mean, no store ever lists the manfacturer code, the only way to find out who actually made it is to buy the damn thing and put a disc into your own drive (by that time, you can longer return them).

Even more unscrupulous is the fact that seemingly identical spindles can have different manfacturers. Take for instance, the crappy Maxell RITEKG05's I bought. Two months ago, that exact same Maxell 50-disc spindle (and I do mean the exact same, same packaging, same manufacturer code, same color, same everything) was made in Japan at had the manufacturer code MXL RG0x. These discs are much, much better. Nowadays you can no longer find them. Imagine during the transition period, when Maxell decided to fuck its customers over, you walked into a Future Shop, and saw a bunch of Maxell 50-disc spindles. They all look the same, yet half are made in Japan (and can be properly burned at 8x), the other half is made in Taiwan (and thus can only be burned at 4x). Is there not something wrong with that picture? Shouldn't Maxell and just about every other DVD Media brander have an obligation to list the fucking manufacturer code somewhere on the goddamn package?

This also reminds me of the time when I bought the Linksys WRT54G Wireless Router. Exact same packaging, except some of them were Version 3, some were Version 4, and some were Version 5 - and they were all mixed together on the same shelf. Well, what's the big deal about the version? The key difference is that Version 5 doesn't use Linux and thus you can't install any third-party firmwares on it (thus: it sucks) So how do you distinguish them? By checking the serial code and cross-referencing it to this chart on the Internet. I had to ask a Future Shop employee if I could borrow their Internet just so I could avoid buying a Version 5 by mistake. That's just ridiculous isn't it?

Experiences like these only make me wary of buying anything from the computer market. I just hate buying computer stuff, it postiviely freaks me out. I want to believe that my naturally induced paranoia is completely unfounded and that I should just relax, but whenever I relax, I end up getting fucked over. If only I could turn off that part of my brain that goes ga-ga at low prices, I could also probably avoid getting fucked over. But that would probably require a lobotomy, so it's out of the question. Until then, I will just try to avoid any computer purchases as much as possible. I was thinking about buying a new LCD but given my previous experience, I think that will just drive me into another frenzy of obsessive-compulsiveness for the next few months. I don't need that.

You know how there are some people who just love the old NES and SNES music? Some of those really hit tunes from say, Castlevania, Mario, Megaman, Final Fantasy, and such? If I asked you why people like these songs so much, perhaps you'd give either one of these reasons:

1. nostalgia
2. constant bombardment
3. why does somebody like Destiny's Child? they just do.

But I personally believe, in my humble opinion, that while those above reasons are all valid, perhaps there is another, deeper, more insightful reason: compositionally, from a music theory standpoint, old video game music is more sophisciated than most music that we hear today. After all, we must wonder how video game music got anywhere being rendered through crappy square wave and sawtooth synthesizers. The answer to this is: they made up with that in spades with great composition.

I know I sound like a music snob from making that statement, but it's not really being a music snob as it is being a music theory snob. Generally, there is one metric that I have always adhered to when trying to evaluate a song:

The longer it takes for me to decompose the song into harmony and melody, the more sophiscated it is

I love decomposing songs. I grind out the melody first, and then slowly but surely, figure out the chords. Not surprisingly, some songs take longer than others. Certain pop songs, like probably 90% of what you hear on the radio today, can be done fairly quickly, as they tend to stay in one key and move in predictable chords patterns (always starting on the tonic, never modulating, etc. etc.). Sometimes it's not even worth decomposing certain pieces (esp. R&B and rap) because they are so deprived of any harmonic content: it's just a bunch of maximized beats and maximized bass and pitchless vocals. Pure engineering. Predictiably, I rarely listen to these kind of songs and neither does my girlfriend. They are just naturally deemed "uninteresting" to the ear, even though the music video might be super hot.

Probably next up in the complexity chain are certain J-pop songs and some American songs from the 90's (I don't listen to oldies like the Beatles so I can't comment on those). There seems to be a certain deal of correlation between hits and how compositionally sophisticated it is (but not always). Songs from Keisuke Kuwata, Radiohead, and Alanis Morisette are all very interesting to decompose.

NES and SNES songs however, take the longest. The reason is simple: they modulate a lot. The modulate so much that sometimes it's hard to even determine what key the piece is in. Prime examples of this would be:

- overworld theme from Ogre Battle (Revolt)
- the victory fanfare from Final Fantasy
- the stage complete from Mario Bros 1
- more than 50% of the Castlevania tunes

When I was first starting with music, it was a cinch to break down pop songs from say Savage Garden, or Aqua, because they are compositionally simple. But for some reason I could never, for the life of me, break down any of the above songs. I always tried chords in the same key and nothing ever worked. It turns out that in order to figure out these songs, pretty much you have to throw away all concepts of dominant, sub-dominant and what not. All bets are off, really. A song like the overworld theme from Ogre Battle, changes key nearly 5 times. Some of those key changes might not even count as key changes because it's really just modulating through various major chords.

What good is key changes and modulation anyways? Well, used improperly (like in some cheezy HK pop songs, for instance), it sounds pretty jarring, and cheap, especially if it's just used to repeat the chorus for the 3rd time in a different key. But if a master composer is pulling the strings, a key change or modulation can sound almost transparent, to the point where if you tried decomposing it from memory, you wouldn't even think of changing the key. And the effect, while subtle, is quite profound. Songs with large amounts of transparent key changes or modulation pique our interest without us even being aware of it. It just sounds nice. At least to me, it does.

I suppose I'm just harping about something in my own little private world. But if I could just convey one thing, it's this: old-school video game music didn't enter through our heads just through constant bombardment. The best video game music, the ones we can still sing today, had such great melodies and harmony that they could overcome the cheap synthesizers that they were being played on. The only way to understand is to play them back on a regular piano - it's almost like an Euphoria playing the rising major chords from Castlevania 2's Daylight Town Theme or Ogre Battle's overworld theme. You almost never see stuff like that in pop songs.

Audition
by Miike Takashi



OMFG. This movie is intense. It's powerful. It left me in a state of shock for about 3 hours, where I could do nothing but constantly think over the horrid events. I just couldn't get the fucking movie out of my head, and my body seemed to be so uptight from the aftershock. I had to take a sleeping pill because it was already 5:00am.

Check out of the ratings on amazon. Not only are there a chock-full of gloroius 5-star reviews, but there seems to be a lot of commotion over this movie. One reviewier said that after watching the movie, he felt like his mind had been fucked with. I agree completely.

But here's the thing. There's no cheap, dirty tricks here. There isn't that much gore, except for the last 20 minutes. For the first 90 minutes or so, you could show that to five year old kids and they'd probably fall asleep. It's just your basic boy-meets-girl-and-falls-in-love scenario, except surprisingly, this part is also done extremely well. It's also very funny at times. This movie could have well been a blockbuster romantic comedy on its own, were it not for its sadistic ending. If you showed that part to five year old kids, they might have a case of minor trauma.

The reason why this movie can be distrubing with so little gore has everything to do with the sheer talent of Miike Takashi. He sets you up into a mood where you relaxed, off-guard, and pretty much immersed into the movie. There's a feeling that everything is so real, like it's something that could happen to you in the future. It brilliantly conveys a lot of the emotional subtitlties of dating, and it's hard not to smile and say "I've been through that before".

That's no small feat - a lot of movie productions just end up distancing the viewer and it becomes more of an intellectual affair. But this movie, with it's moody bluish-white tones, candid dialogue, and down-to-earth scenarioes - it's all emotion. That's why the last 20 minutes are so hard to stomach. I could no longer escape the world I had been immersed in, yet I had to witness some of the most depraved acts of torture and take it all deep into my heart. It was like Miike gently opened up my stomach with the most delicate skill, and then raked the insides with a rusty iron claw.

Interestingly, for the last 3 days I had been contemplating about not watching the movie. I pretty much read everything to know about Audition, so I knew the whole story even before watching it for the first time. So the DivX file sat on my hard drive for three days, tempting me for a double-click, but I just told myself I don't need to get a mind fuck today, thanks. Eventually though, my girlfriend kept nagging that we should at least see it once, so I gave in. Yet, despite expecting to be mind-fucked, and preparing myself for a mind-fuck, I still got mind-fucked. Badly.

I dare you to watch this movie (torrent). Puff out your chest and ready your testicles, but I don't think any amount of prepration will help. This movie penetrates any kind of armor you could possibly prepare and just ends up mind-fucking you anyways. I don't think I've seen a movie this intense since... Seven maybe. but it's not even close. Audition takes the cake for unparalleled intensity and power, and accomplishes this with a minimum of gore.

I remember my friend once telling me that during the winter, it's colder when the sun is shining brightly over a blue sky (as opposed to snowing on a cloudy day). This doesn't seem to make any sense, of course, but after taking sample after sample every day for the last few months, it is most definitely true to a certain extent. When the sky is gray and it's snowing hard, it's relatively warm. I can go out without my jacket and it's not that bad. But there's a blue sky, and the sun is shining brightly, then 9/10 it's postiviely freezing, to the point where I must put on a hood or my ears will be painfully cold. Weird.

I've watched quite a lot of anime over the past few weeks. Some standouts were:

Genshiken
I mentioned this in a previous post. One of the best series I have seen, bar none. It shows a great deal of self-restraint and possess a good amount of Reality-Flow. I just wish it was longer.

Azumanga Dai-oh
Probably my 2nd favorite. It has a fair share of awkward "WTF... okaaaay whatever" moments characterstic of stereotypical anime, but if you can stomach that then it has endearing characters and a warm atmosphere. Low shareability (by that I mean, don't watch this with other people, becuase the WTF factor will be too high), but it was surprisingly gripping at certain points. I like the opening and ending songs, which are quirky and have gobs of chord modulation.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
This one got a fair bit of bad press, and I can understand why. There's no Motoko, there's too much philsophical gibberish, and the color tones are not as coherent as the first one. Notwithstanding, it's still an excellent movie overall with extremely high production values. Apparently one animator had a mental breakdown from working too much on a five second scene, and had to be sent to a hospital. The movie is serious, immersive, and chock full of stylistic Mamoru Oshii camera angles. I was really disappointed though with the lack of color tone cohesion. It seems to have a brownish red theme at one point, but then at times it reverts back to the greenish-blue from the first. When it gets to the northern frontier, everything is pretty much out of whack. It's still definitely worth watching though, just for the Mamoru Oshii immersion effect.

Umi ga Kikoeru (Ocean Waves)
A very charming and subdued movie by Studio Ghibli. It's a love story of sorts with a healthy dosage of Reality-Flow, making the characters and situations very life-like. Their emotions and reactions contain all the delicate subtleties we take for granted every day - this is what pushes this movie out of its seemingly fated mediocrity. Emotional believability is definitely one of the high points. I actually found myself yelling out loud at one the characters in this movie because I was so convinced that she was a total bitch.

Some of the surprising disappointments were:

Final Fantasy:Advent Children
Words simply cannot convey the sheer amount of disappointment in this movie. It's as if they had all the pieces in front of them, but just didn't have enough talent to assemble them correctly. What a bloody waste. I loved FF7, but they just butchered this movie. It downright sucked. How much did it suck? It sucked enough that I actually felt like apologizing to my girlfriend for showing her something as talentless as this. The problem with this movie is that it just feels so pointless. It also had way too many action scenes, which would be far more forgivable is they weren't so bad. Every character in this movie fights like they were made out of paper. They fly weightlessly all over the place like hyperactive Dragonball characters and seem to ignore all rules of inertia, momentum, and impact. The (virtual) camera work is also shoddy beyond belief; it rotates far too much for its own good and just ends up making me dizzy. I had to watch this movie in 4 different segments over a timespan of two months, because as much as I wanted to finish it, it was just too much mental torture to endure more than 20 minutes at a time. Like I said, it's such a pity, the CG quality is absolutely mindblowing, but the directing and screenwriting are just awful.

Honey and Clover
I'm a bit on the fence on this one. On one hand, it's extremely famous, popular, highly-rated, and has excellent production values. On the other, it's a bit pedophilic. The main female character, Hagu, looks exactly like an anime rendition of Goldilocks. She's short, talks like a babbling moron, and has too many over-exaggerated "Cute" expressions for her own good. Even so, we are supposed to believe that two 20-some year old guys in the story are madly in love with her. Not just one, but two. Sorry, that's just not convincing enough. I hate to sound cynical, but I think more than 50% of the series' popularity can be attributed to its watercolor look. If you think of lighting halos, soften filters, or the full-screen-smoothing effect in World of Warcraft, you wouldn't be far off. I'll still end up watching it for the production values, but it's just not my taste.

Fullmetal Alchemist
This kind of anime just falls under the same category as .hack, Inuyasha, Gundam, Bleach - stuff that I just find exceedingly dull. Yet this kind of anime also seems to be exceedingly popular. I don't quite know why I'm unable to enjoy these kinds of anime. I guess it's because there's just no immersion factor - I feel like I'm watching things unfold from a distance, rather than being pulled right in. I guess it's the same feeling that a lot of people had when they watch a movie like Memoirs of a Geisha. Whether it's the super-generic script, or the fact that the characters lack any kind of subtlety in their dialogue and reactions, something is just missing on a microscopic level.

On both Sunday and Saturday I went to the Sandford Fleming Library at U of T to brush up on my digital audio knowledge. I always get this warm, nostalgic walking through the halls of Galbraith and Sandford Fleming, which is strange because when I was in school I downright hated the place with a passion. I used to say that Galbraith looked so much like a morgue thanks to its industrial-like ceramic tiling. But now it seems that everything about Galbraith and pretty much U of T in general brings back warm fuzzy memories even though those memories were never warm and fuzzy to begin with.

I holed myself up in one of the 2nd floor wings at the SF Library reading fairly heavy-duty books about digital audio. They were classified under some strange code system that I was totally unfamiliar with, but after scanning the shelves I discovered that all the digital audio books were filed under T7881.x. At some point it dawned upon me that amount of information contained in just about any technical library is just staggering. There are so many math formulas, so many equations, so many concepts in the world of science that I would assume no single man could possibly digest all of this in a lifetime. Not that it's supposed to be some kind of universal goal to consume all the knowledge, but it's kind of sad to think that, even if someone wanted to, it's theoreitcally impossible to be well-versed in computer science, aerospace engineeirng, and radiology all at once for instance. The brain simply cannot cram all those concepts into its limited number of brain cells. So in some sense, just walking along the shelves of the library, there is a feeling of being overwhelmed, surrounded by so much knowledge that cannot even be consumed in a lifetime, and yet we are the ones who created this knowledge.

Of the many topics that I read about digital audio, the ones that interseted me most were DSP-related, and talked about PCM encoding, Fourier Transforms, and MPEG compression. I'll start with PCM, which is supposed to be very simple, but deceivingly so.

Up to now, I have always understood the technicalities of PCM encoding but I never had an intuitive grasp of it. For instance, when you mention the ubiquitous 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo format, what is that really? Well pretty much any computer guy knows it's just a bunch of 16-bit values sampled at 44100 times a second for each the left and right channels. But, what do those countless 16-bit values represent? Amplitude? Pitch? Timbre? From a data representation standpoint, it's a lot easier to think of a bunch of numbers representing, say, how loud a sound file is over time. That's something that fits immediatley into my head, something that just about anybody can grasp. But obviously PCM is much more than just amplitude. It's everything. It's timbre, pitch, and amplitude. It's violins, pianos, explosions, dogs barking, entire orchestras playing. It's cheezy synth sounds, great synth sounds, cheezy samples, great samples, all at once. How is it that a bunch of 16-bit values can capture all that?

Well apparently it can, otherwise we wouldn't have MP3, and without MP3 people would be listening to less than 10% of the music they are today (which might be a healthy thing, but I'm not sure). All PCM does is capture an analog signal that varies over time. So those 16-bit values, if they could be described as representing anything, would be the original signal magnitude at a certain snapshot in time. So what you really have in a PCM file is a stream of discrete 16-bit signal magnitudes. The caveat here is that the signal magnitude is not the same as amplitude. If a PCM file just contained a bunch of 65535 values (the highest unsigned 16-bit value), instead of hearing some undefined super-loud noise, you actually wouldn't hear anything. That's because sound is only heard through oscillation. In order to hear something, the signal magnitude has to go from low to high and back again, like a wave, which ties back to some of the most basic principles of sound. So when you have a bunch of 65536 values, nothing is "moving", there's no oscillation, and therefore no sound.

So if a PCM file contained a starting value of 0 and then gradually ramped up to 65536 and then back down to 0, then you would hear something. But what? Well, apparently that depends on the speed at which you ramp up (frequency), the style in which you ramp up (timbre), and how high you ramp up (amplitude). In in the simplest case, if the 16-bit values ramped up like a sine function all the way to 65536 and back down again at say, 440 times a second, then you should hear a "sine wave" tone played at the standard concert pitch (A above middle C) at the maximum amplitude that 16-bit PCM can represent. Now it seems to make more sense. It's all about ramping up and down. There are just about an infinite number of ways to ramp up from 0 to 65536 (especially since you're allowed to dip back down midway), and that would determine what kind of sound it is. So timbre is captured in PCM by how the signal magnitude rises and falls. Frequency in a PCM is defined by how long it takes for the signal to rise from 0 and come back down again. Finally amplitude is defined by how high the signal magnitude will go before falling back down again.

But what about mixes? "What about them", you say? Well, when you think about how mixes work and how they're stored, it seems kinda strange. Let's say we have a PCM recording of a single violin playing. It's got a bunch of 16-bit values. Let's say this takes up 107k of diskspace. Now, let's say we also have a separate PCM recording of a single piano playing, which also takes up 107k of diskspace. Now, if we "mix" the two together in software, we end up with a single PCM recording of a violin and piano playing at the same time. Yet, this PCM file also just takes up 107k of diskspace.

From an information theory standpoint, that seems to violate some basic rules. How is it that you can get "double" the information in the same amount of 107k? It seems to make more inital sense that if you combine two PCM recordings into a mix, then you have twice the information and thus the amount of data should double. Yet this is not the case, despite the fact that we can hear "twice as much" stuff in the mixed file.

The only way to understand this is to undersatnd how to mix two PCM files together. Let's say you have one PCM file that looks like this

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

and another one that looks like this

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

the easiest way to mix them is to just add them up. So the final mix would be

3 5 7 9 11 13 15

It does seem strange that the simple act of adding numbers together is able to "mix" a piano and a violin together, or even entire orchestras in unison, but it does work! Of course, in order to prevent the combination from becoming too loud, you might need to divide the signal magnitudes by 2 or something, but the basic principle is that if you add the 16-bit values in one PCM recording with the 16-bit values from another PCM recording, you get the mix as a result. The only magic that's going on is in our own heads. Digital audio in the scientific domain is just a bunch of numbers - it's only when it's processed in our brains does it turn into actual sound.

From a scientific standpoint however, it does imply that at the very least, something is lost from each recording when they are mixed together. And that seems to be true, when you think of the impliciations. Once you mix the piano and violin together into one PCM recording, there's no way of extracting them individually out the mix. In fact from an information theory standpoint it's impossible. The only way to "extract" each instrument is to have a human listen to the mix, figure out what each part was playing, and have him replay each instrument and re-record (that's was pretty much my CMUSIC job). In other words, we need to rely on the interpretive powers of the human brain, which is what really gives the mix double the informational value for the same storage size.

just some random net stuff

utada hikaru's new single "passion" is out. it's supposed to be the main theme for square-enix's upcoming Kingdom Hearts II. the song's pretty good, I think. as always the case with mega-star tracks, composition, arrangement, engineering are all top notch. vocals are doctored and harmonized to perfection. it's got big sound, but it doesn't have that annoying commericalized in-your-face super-maximized BBE/loudness-button sound either. the video is ok i guess, not mindblowing. but the song does have this very nice bass+drum loop that's really catchy. like her previous single "be my last", it seems to be venturing into new territory. maybe the producer/engineer is different? i found the mp3 surprisingly easily through direct download links thru google. the video is on youtube.com

not so new, but i finally got to listen to j-pop superstar nakashima mika's "GLAMOROUS SKY", which a bit too heavy on distortion guitars for my taste, but the first two chorus bars are very nice, using the non-tonic progression (4,5,6) or (6,7,8) in combination with flavored chords. i really like nakashima's vocals, but some others have likened it to weightless air. the arrangement of GLAMOROUS SKY does remind me of all the teenager rock i've heard from time to time on mall radios in toronto, but the composition is good and i like the vocals, so it's a pretty good song

there are a lot of funny videos on youtube.com. youtube.com is infinitely more entertaining as a stand alone site if you click on "Videos" on the top and then try the different queries like most viewed or most discussed. here are some pretty good videos i saw yesterday.

- robot dance (this one is unbelievable! made me laugh for ages)
- ronaldihno's "touch of gold" (it's amazing but like the adidas kobe cm a few years ago there are some video editing tricks involved)
- urban ninja (some insane filipino dude doing unbelievable stuff in shopping malls and in residential complexes)
- crazy dog

there were others i think. but try the different queries and a lot of good videos will come up, just skip all the naruto/yugi-oh music videos, they are all really bad.

Genshiken

I just started watching this anime series today. It was so good, I finished like 8 episodes in one day. By my own personal standards, that's quite something, because usually I can't watch more than two episodes of anything before I'm inclined to do something else.

I feel that a lot of anime these days is just a bunch of incoherent scenes pieced together with completely unrealistic human emotion (eg the most recent episodes of Naruto). There's no "weight" to what the characters feel, maybe because the script is too simplistic and works too broadly, thus failing to capture the subtle nuances of human nature. An example: let's say a girl's playing a match of Puyo Puyo for the first time with her boyfriend, but she gets utterly demolished by an insane 9-chain combo in less than a minute. The broad and simplistic reaction would have her say "Oh, screw this. It's no fun playing with you" and have her showing this comical angry face while throwing the controller down in frustration. I suppose this is a "normal" reaction. But there's something that feels so, artifically constructed about it, like it's the kind of reaction you'd get if you asked someone to act it out in front of you immediately.

Now, let's say the girl just says nothing after losing. She breathes a sigh and puts her controller down calmly, as her boyfriend exclaims:


She gets up, crawls onto the bed,

and says, with her voice muffled by the sheets:


Now that's downright hilarious, well at least for those of you who know what cosplay means and what a Puyo Puyo looks like! There's a whole story behind that scene, but without even knowing it, I'm sure it's possible to feel all the "human-ness" in the girl's reaction to the ownage. You know? That's what diffrentiates, in my humble opinion of course, the great anime and the "WTF is this" anime. Emotions feel heavy, they have a distinct presence which makes them so convincing, so human. Now, there's nothing really wrong with the plain vanilla reaction (despite the fact that humans rarely give plain vanilla reactions except when they're acting badly in front of a camera), but if there are like ten plain vanilla reactions back to back, the feeling starts to set in that this is some kind of scripted production of sorts with color-shaded characters on a preset background. In other words, the fabric of reality starts to unwind and coherency starts to fall apart.