pnArt

For non-classical music the streaming subscription services such as Rhapsody provide a rich source of content at a nearly adequate quality level. Recent improvements in the Sonos search tools make it easier than ever to search Rhapsody even without a computer booted, and almost every popular song I could ever want seems to be accessible. But I still relentlessly build up my own music library.

Why?

Four reasons:

Ownership I like to own my stuff. I don’t want my access to music to depend on my fleeting financial fortunes or decisions made in corporate meeting rooms or the success or failure of Rhapsody’s business model or the reliability of my network connections or whether all the unions between here and there are happy with their contracts. My own music on my own harddrive (with suitable backups, of course) is the key to sleeping well at night, and maybe even enjoying some bedtime music on my way to dreamland.

Portability I can listen to my own MP3’s anywhere I want - at work (where most companies don’t allow streaming), weeding in my garden, in my car on long drives, traveling overseas, or out for a run.

Searching/Tagging The MP3 tagging scheme seems to have been first designed by geeks with a degrees in musicology from the back of a matchbook, and it’s since mutated into more strains than the flu virus. But its sheer amorphousness and lack of definition makes it clay in my hands, and I’ve used the tags to create schemata that allow me to search, recognize and organize my music easily. All of this is lost when I have to rely on some third-party to notate the music I’m hearing.

Audio Quality Most music services stream at 128 kbps. While there are slight quality differences between formats – MP3, AAC, RealAudio - there is no format where 128 kbps is artifact-free for close listening. It’s fine for casual music doing chores around the house or background music for dinner, but listen closely with good headphones or earbbuds and at times you will have no doubt that it’s compressed My lossy-format standard is MP3, between 192 and 320 kbps VBR. By ripping the music myself I get to choose the codec and the parameters, and I get to adjust loudness and gapless settings as I see fit.

The vast majority of my music is transcoded from CD’s I own. This addresses all four of the issues above. In recent years I’ve been buying used CD’s, partly because they’re cheaper than new CD’s and partly to thumb my nose, within the bounds of the law, at a record-industry that remains in denial about what century this is. They don’t make a penny when I buy a used CD.   In even more recent years I’ve been buying MP3’s online from Rhapsody or Amazon, as their selection is finally starting to broaden to the point of practicality.

I have not been tempted to use P2P file sharing. I’ve been amazed at the rationalizations used by that crowd to convince themselves that what they’re doing is not wrong. It’s striking how an adolescent sense of entitlement can energize such creative thinking.  A few file sharers admit what they’re doing is illegal but try to ennoble it as a kind of civil disobedience for a greater cause.  I can accept a civil disobedience argument in support of a great moral struggle – say, ending Jim Crow or apartheid, or achieving colonial independence.   But civil disobedience in the cause of pampered American or European teenagers getting more free stuff is too much of a stretch.

Bermuda is a tiny speck of former vulcanism dusted with sand and fringed with coral reefs, isolated in the Atlantic ocean a thousand miles east of the Carolinas. I’m watching the sun set from the Pompano Beach Club, high on a cliff on Bermuda’s west coast as I write this. I’m listening to classical music on KUSC , thanks to the world wide web, and it cuts out from time to time, thanks to the resort’s rather creaky internet connection. I’m sipping a 12-year old Macallan.

Moments ago I tried to connect to one of the “stations” I’m training at Pandora, only to be politely but firmly told that my IP address had spilled the beans about my location on Bermuda and their lawyers regreted to inform me that their service is only available inside the United States.

The sun is disappearing behind some clouds slightly above the horizon.

After I made some inquiries last week at Pandora about why they don’t do classical music I received a remarkably detailed email from Etienne Handman, COO of the Music Genome Project. He described the theory and goals of the Project - the heart (DNA?, brains? foundation?)  of Pandora. I sent him a skeptical response. I send everyone a skeptical response. Why do I do that?

The sun has emerged from beneath the clouds and is racing to the horizon. The rest of the sky, and the ocean below it, is gray.

I should have at least acknowledged what a remarkable thing is it to create personal radio stations, or I should say “radio stations” by proposing a musician and having it -Pandora - the Box, I suppose - play other music with what it guesses are the same “genes”. The listener dismisses some offerings, accepts others and trains it that way. I’ve created a “Moby” station; my wife has created a half dozen stations ranging from Celtic harp to Radiohead.

The sun has set. I toasted the last of the sun with the last of my Macallen.

Today we snorkeled from a boat chartered by the resort - it was excellent. Then, having not got our fill of boats we rented a battery-powered pontoon (I’ve been writing too much poetry - I almost spelled it “pantoum”) boat and tootled around the ocean near here. And then, after a hot sit on the beach, we decided we hadn’t had enough of snorkeling either and snorkeled some more around the rocky breakwaters here.

It’s 4 PM in Los Angeles. There’s a 2 vehicle accident south of Santa Monica. KUSC is about to play something by Bach conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisc. I’m about to have dinner at Ocean Grill, high over someplace in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

I was working in my garden Monday and listening to podcasts on my iPod. It was warm in the brilliant sun, but I was cooled by the wind which was strangely strong in the clear blue cloud-free sky, and the tall oak trees near my garden were thrashing and bending all around me.

I was behind on my podcasts, otherwise I should have been enjoying the weather instead of submerging into a pair of Etymotic ER6i earbuds – the “i” stands of “isolation” and Etymotic brags about how well they take you out of your environment. It was disorienting enough to feel the shovel in my hand, the wind in my face and slippery scree under my feet while listening to a detached academic interview in a radio studio. The studio in my ears was in Australia; the program was By Design on ABC/Radio National, and they were talking about architecture. It got more disorienting when the host, Alan Saunders, read a letter of mine on the air.

Of course, it wasn’t really a “letter”; it was an email. And it wasn’t really “on the air”; it was an MP3 I had downloaded over a wire. And he really didn’t do it then, since the show was broadcast in April and it’s now late May. But it feels strange to hear someone with an Australian accent unexpectedly read your own words into your ears while you’re working in your yard.

And it’s not really a yard either. We call it the “backyard” but it’s really a rocky hillside overgrown with shrubs and trees. Yet it does face south and get good sun, so for years I’ve been terracing it and improving the soil with green manure, plus the traditional brown kind, and I’m starting to get some decent yields.

Toiling on that hillside always transports me to other times and places anyway, so being time-shifted a few months or hearing my own words in a different accent from a land down under seems somehow just right when I’m mixing concrete or lugging boulders in my garden.

I sometimes think the terracing is more fun than the gardening. I have retaining walls made of landscape bricks, and ones made of cast-concrete and others made of pressure-treated wood or from rocks dug from the ground. The walkways and steps are made of granite or concrete or kiln-baked bricks or pavers or slate or wood frames and crushed stone. In my imagination the walkways are highways; the terraces are vast fields of productive farmland. To me this is the fruit and vegetable equivalent of some guys’ electric train sets with their tiny villages and towns and miniature economies and local politics.

I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (take it from me – I also grow apples). My father was a civil engineer and when I was one year old he gave me the best gift I’ve ever had – a dumptruck load of coarse gravel and sand in the side yard of our house in New London, New Hampshire. In this picture I’ve just taken delivery of my gift, and in the background you can see one of my relatives trying not to be recognized in my presence - something they still do today.

Between my father’s civil engineering magazines and all the construction going on everywhere we drove, I had plenty of inspiration for the years of roads and bridges and tunnels and aqueducts that I built in that sandpile.

Professionally I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps, nor those of my mechanical engineer brother, opting instead of the money, glamour and girls of software engineering. But, trees and their apples, you know – I still like messing around in the dirt with my little but strangely vast civil engineering projects.