Ever wonder what happens to your electronic devices when your done with them, and they no longer work, and it costs too much to fix them? Well, I did, and was excited that someone finally did a documentary about it to expose the secret life of dead electronics!

Michael Zhao is a graduate from the Berkley school of journalism, and for his thesis did a documentary about what happens to all our computers, mobile phones, audio visual components, and gadgets,when they either break down, or become obsolete, and we replace them with the latest hottest technology. It’s called ‘eDump’, and it’s pretty shocking. Here is a preview, watch the full 20 min. version from his website.

Here’s an article about it as well:
Time Magazine: Your laptop’s dirty little secret

I love technology and the latest gadgets, because I love the future, and progress, and efficiency, in fact, in my field of audio visual work, ideally computers should be upgraded every two years. But when materialism and excess leads to environmental disaster, and illness and suffering for human beings, something has to change. I always imagined the ton of electronic components we get rid of, and wondered what happened to them, I didn’t realise how neglegent and serious the situation was.

I remember the time I could finally unload my pockets from a phone, a PDA, and a music player by combining them with one Treo Palm phone! Awesome! I got such a mobile phone that was working fine and meeting my needs a couple years ago, I figured I would get another few more years out of it, then upgrade, and I could wait until then for the latest greatest technology. But it started malfunctioning years before it should have, becoming useless last year, and now i have had it in a bag, waiting to somehow recycle it.
After seeing the movie, I looked into it and found that enCorp now recycles a lot more than bottles in Canada and may be able to do something with it. There are also other companies that recycle electronics, fixing them so others worldwide who don’t need the latest technology can use them.

The eDump documentary really illustrated strongly for me how everything we do affects others, and how we should be responsible for our every action and understand the implications and consequences.
I encourage you to make some effort to sell, use, or recycle your electronic components as much as possible because there are literally tons of this stuff out there, and companies keep making more!

the future of eWaste? From the awesome Speilberg/Kubrick movie, ‘A.I.‘

Something incredible happened yesterday that barely made news (cause no one died…), A new $10 billion Particle Accelerator near Geneva on the Swiss/Franch border went live, firing it’s first protons.

Here’s a bit more about it:

Large Hadron Collidor – Wikipedia

It’s the largest particle accelerator ever built and took 3 decades to create. By colliding opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy at the speed of light, scientists intend to amongst other things, prove how the universe was created, and the existence of God!
And as if that isn’t cool enough, many scientists and the media believe that the LHC is so powerful that it is too dangerous because it’s experiments have the potential to create low velocity micro black holes that could grow in mass or release dangerous radiation leading to doomsday scenarios, such as the destruction of the Earth!

Now that is what I call exciting news.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/10/2361197.htm

Felisha was watching the MTV Video Music Awards yesterday, broadcast in Canada by Much Music, who censored a lot of dumb things, like the song ‘I kissed a girl‘, and the word ‘balls’. She called me for help because she was getting some weird audio problems…

I avoid awards shows and other such drivel like the plauge, and the VMA’s are no exception, it’s just one big ad for the dying MTV channel, and artists with a ton of money behind them to compensate for their minimal talent. Do you know that they don’t show a single video during the ‘Video Music Awards’? What a joke.

Anyway, I went to investigate and found there were two audio tracks playing when Felisha was watching the show. She had recorded it with our PVR, a digital video recorder that is also a DVD player with an optical 6 channel cable feeding into a surround amplifier. Boring technical mumbo jumbo aside, I found out that when the Amp dvd input was in auto rather than analog, it was getting TWO audio feeds from the TV station, and one of them wasn’t supposed to be broadcast, and had nothing to do with the show we were watching!
Here’s a sample of what we heard in the left speaker:

[Audio:Much_Music_secret_broadcast.mp3]

We found out that this was a behind the scenes feed from a video shoot in progress at the Much Music studios during the airing of the VMA’s for a show called ‘Fashion File’, according to Felisha. It was complete with personal comments of the event film crew, cussing and all, and this was being broadcast with the regular cable signal! We have also had the same thing happen with other TV stations like CTV. Seems kind of careless and unprofessional that this stuff gets broadcast to the public, but not so surprising  from a slowly dying medium, a lot like the blunders we’re seeing in the music industry…

Last weekend I went on a whitewater rafting adventure on the Nahatlatch river with my nephew. I felt the need to get away from the crap that bogs down our lives and really experience life and nature the way we should be, and have been meaning to do this for many years as it was an incredible experience the last time I went rafting on the Nahatlatch river at the awesome REO resort in Boston Bar, BC.
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The reason this river is so fantastic for rafting is it’s like it was perfectly designed as a natural amusement park, gradually building in excitement with more intense sections of rapids and natural obstacles… I can’t really describe it more than that, you just have to escape and do it for yourself!

We had a little more adventure than planned this time on the river though, being that the river water levels are starting to drop. There are a lot of rocks showing in the river, but the rafts usually slide around them or over. But in a section of particularly rapid whitewater, we slid sideways up a large rock, and instead of sliding down, the raft stayed on the rock and the right side began filling with water rapidly. The rafts have a brilliant water drainage system preventing them from filling, but the river was so fast in this part, 50 tons of water coming at the boat, that it was totally pinned against the rock. As soon as this happened, the guide told us to jump left, which in this case meant hanging off the side of the boat so as not to be swept away by the river. Our guide, Cody, suggested people either get in the front of the boat, or get up onto the rock which I did somehow. He couldn’t latch his line onto the side of the boat in the water though to pull it back out, and it was looking bleak. All the other rafts had passed us by now, so there weren’t many rescue options. Suddenly, he was able to move the front of the raft enough for the rapids to grab the front of the boat, and we had a split second to jump into the boat, or be left in the middle of the rapids on a rock, having to later float down, bouncing in between rocks! I opted for jumping, but neither of us made it into the boat, and ended up hanging on the side as it went down the river. Luckily, safety training paid off and one of my crew mates pulled me in, and we were off again, but with only half of our paddles!

The other 5 rafts said we put on quite a show, and all were talking about, including the guides. This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often usually in rafting, and I was glad to have had the experience and come out of a situation that in the moment, I could see no easy outcome for.

I highly recommend next summer you take a whitewater rafting trip, on the right river, it is the most fun and exciting thing I can say I have ever experienced. I’m committing to go more regularly, so if your game, get in touch.

“The world is changing, and our outlook needs to change with it, because old models don’t cut it anymore…”

– Blake Ross, co-founder of Firefox web browser, downloaded over 300 million times worldwide

So I just got back from my first trip to Las Vegas last week to visit Felisha’s cousin and celebrate our anniversary… So what was my impression of the famous Vegas?

Money, Sex, Excess.

Yep, I guess that pretty much sums it up!

But one thing that really stood out from the trip besides the incredible heat, was the Cirque Du Soleil show we partly went there to see called ‘Ka’

This show defies any type of description, so I won’t attempt, but I will tell you that it was the most incredible live show I’ve ever seen, complete with 360 degree sound, a custom built theatre, and the most high tech, modular, mobile stage in the world. It was truly beyond belief, and it not only puts any live theatre show out there to shame, it makes Phantom Of The Opera look like an elementary school play.

Get a peek here:

http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/cirquedusoleil/ka/

In my last post I talked about how the quality and natural dynamics of music is being destroyed through digital software technology that allows unnatural processing of audio.

But there is a much greater threat to the quality of audio that has been the subject of my thoughts for some time now: The way we listen to sound.

Back in the 1970’s the quality of sound recording technology, production techniques and playback systems reached a pinnacle with some of the most incredible music and sound humanity had ever known, and this became further fine tuned in the 1980’s. Brilliant, rich full spectrum sound that went beyond the range of human hearing, but influenced the richness of the sound through frequency harmonics that enhanced what we could hear with our ears.
Two things initiated the downward spiral that has led us to where we are today: The Walkman and the CD.
Very briefly, the walkman influenced music lovers to listen to music on crappy little earphones, and the CD chopped off audio at 20kHz without researching the influence of harmonics above that hearing range on sound we do hear. This is why vinyl records really are better sounding than CD’s in many ways.
From there, the convenience of sound gave way to clarity, and quality until we come to the present day world, of massively widespread use by the majority of music and audio listeners of terrible sounding MP3’s played on the worst possible sound producing devices humanity has ever experienced: earbud iPod headphones, computer laptop speakers, and cel phones! And this doesn’t even begin to cover the music and production tools and techniques prevalent with the trend of do it yourself computer production.

To a producer like myself who has spent over a decade mastering the subtle art of trying to perfect music and sound, this trend is devastating to say the least. And if you ever compared how music sounds on a really nice hi fi stereo system (you know like the ones they used in the 70’s) with a computer laptop speaker, it would make you nauseous. You lose something like 80% of the sound! But that introduces another problem- people don’t really know what sounds good and what doesn’t, maybe because they have become so used to listening to terribly reproduced sound, in my humble opinion and experience.
(Just as a benchmark, and cost is by no means an accurate measure, if your speakers cost less than $500, they are probably cheap garbage that sounds terrible!)

This has brought up all kinds of questions for me with regard to what I do as a profession… Why create great sounding 24 bit 96kHz audio if it is going to end up at 80% of what you created? For the 20% of people that like good sound?
My only answer is to become more involved in the film industry side of audio production as a sound designer, since at least sound is formatted and reproduced in higher fidelity than with music. So that is what I have gradually been doing. A film I worked on last year is hitting the theatres in September here…

I truly feel for the future of music in an environment where it is so under appreciated. It makes me wonder what the future holds for someone in a profession like myself and wether or not there will even be the need for professional producers and engineers if no one can really appreciate or notice their efforts.

For those of you reading this who don’t really know what I’m talking about, you don’t know what your missing!

For some time now there has been a debate about how modern audio mastering techniques have created music that is louder than it usually would be at the expense of the normal dynamics of the music.
Andrew Dubber blogged about it here with a video that demonstrates the issue:

The process of making tracks louder than they usually would be without them distorting is called ‘Limiting‘.

This is something, as an audio engineer that also does mastering, that I have wrestled with for many years. I like music loud, and it bothers me when something sounds too quiet when listened to with other music. But as a producer and sound mixer, I also love dynamics in music. When others have mastered songs I’ve mixed using standard ompression, it has really ruined the song. But you don’t want the music to seem quiet compared to other music, and you want it to sound good on the lousy stereo systems most people listen to music on! Hence the Dilemma.

I think that in many ways, Dubbers argument may be pointless really. The majority of people in the world wouldn’t know good sound if their life depended on it! Even many of the talented artists I work with for whom music is their life struggle with this, and my production students certainly do as well.

I blogged more about this major issue of the poor quality audio so prevalent in the world here.

Alan Wilder of Recoil and formerly Depeche Mode wrote an excellent article about it and about other industry changes as well here

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This is a more personal post, something I shy away from on this blog. I had to create a new category for it. Will be interesting to see if it becomes published material…

Over the years, as I have explored new ideas and learned hard lessons, it is painfully evident that I am becoming someone I’m not, very different from who I feel I used to be, who I really am. It’s something I’m really wrestling with amongst many other challenges in my life. But what defines who we really are? We’re constantly bombarded with people encouraging us to ‘be who we are’ and ‘be true to yourself’, ‘don’t take crap from anyone’, but I think that these ideas can be a hindrance to personal progress and development.

But I’m still very torn about this idea. I know the changes I’ve made in my life and regarding who I am have made a huge difference in my relationships with others, and my work and goals. It’s a very positive thing. But humans find change very difficult, and I’m no exception. The hardest part about this process is that I feel I am losing many of the things I have always felt defined me as a person, my brutal honesty and affinity with reality, my anti establishment, counter culture, non conformist rebelliousness, and my taste in many things that are unpopular to say the least, especially music. These are traits that are slowly diminishing as a result of my becoming an upstanding, exemplary individual.

But when those things hurt others who are sensitive deeply, and destroy precious relationships, and hold you back from realising your true potential, that’s where I feel motivated to ‘be who I am truly meant to be’, the person I hope I am becoming.

There’s a great rock song by Linkin Park ‘What I’ve Done’ that I posted about here on this subject.
I love the line in those lyrics, ” I’ll face myself, To cross out what I’ve become, Erase myself, And let go of what I’ve done”

Who knows if who we think we are is really who we were meant to be? We are total victims of our environment and upbringing, totally influenced by the world, as my favorite quote reveals. Does the end result really represent our true selves? I have come to the realisation that in the transformation that has been happening over the last 10 years or so, and will continue for another 10 or more, that in order to live to my full potential, and be who I am meant to be, I have had to unlearn many things from my past, in order to accept new ideas and be who I truly am, the person I am meant to be.

It seems in order to do that, I’m just going to have to somehow become detached from the things I ‘was’.

Check back with me in 10 years and I’ll let you know how it’s going.

For some time now I, along with many others in the music industry, have been going on about free music not representing a lost sale, but a gained listener.

Frequently, many music industry professionals suggest that an increase in legitimate sales must necessarily coincide with a commensurate reduction in ‘piracy’, as if this were a fact, yet, the research company BigChampagne has made no such consistent observation in nearly a decade of analyzing online data about music. Rather, it finds that piracy rates follow awareness and interest… The biggest selling albums and songs are nearly always the most widely pirated, regardless of all the ‘anti-piracy’ tactics employed by music companies.

Wired magazine talked about the factual data supporting mega rock band Radiohead‘s decision to allow users to pay what they wanted for their latest album.
All of the torrenting/free downloading of Radiohead’s of In Rainbows album contributed to the album making such a big impression on a listening public that’s bombarded with an ever increasing amount of information. Without it having been so widely traded, BigChampage’s data report says that Radiohead’s album wouldn’t necessarily have shot to the top of the charts and their worldwide tour wouldn’t have been such a smashing success, and I have to agree.

Applying economic principles to digital music, BigChamagne found that “the challenge of achieving popularity (or attention) when the old rules of scarcity (of product) and excludability don’t apply (to information goods) the way they used to, changes the monetization game completely.”

BigChamagne came to the undeniable conclusion that the music industry needs to stop thinking of shared files as lost sales, and start treating them as an aspect of reality upon which they can build part of their businesses.

You can download a detailed paper on this topic here. I haven’t studied it in detail yet so I would love to hear your insights.