Issue 35

It’s tempting to picture Björk as the only singer-songwriter in Iceland, wandering alone over the frozen tundra with only her swan-shaped dress for company. Satisfying as that image may be, the streets and clubs of Reykjavik are apparently teeming with indie musicians. One of the hardest-working is 23-year-old Jófríður Ákadóttir, whose output of solo and collaborative tracks is truly impressive.

When Ákadóttir records on her own, she calls herself JFDR. (This tells me that I’m not the only one who struggles to pronounce and spell her name.) Her style is ephemeral, the lyrics only sometimes intelligible, yet she’ll mesmerize you if you let her. The song “Anew,” simply produced with voice and guitar, shows what’s at her core. The video of this young golden-haired woman in a sunlit, bright-white room is a metaphor for the experience of listening: there’s almost too much purity to bear:

 

The majority of JFDR’s output is electronica plus vocals. It’s an interesting combination of sounds. Tones and noises float and swirl like space dust, not quite within grasp, shapeless. But into that fantastical texture Ákadóttir drops vocals so authentically human that you can hear her breathe.

Here’s “Instant Patience,” with a chorus that makes about as much sense as any of her poetry: “Is it logical, incomprehensible? Admiration, consolation, instant patience.” This is the kind of verse that uses words more for their sounds than their meaning:

 

In “Destiny Is Upon Us,” the untethered vocals are almost grounded by the greater variety of textures in the accompaniment, including a sample that sounds like rummaging through a spoon drawer. The frenetic energy of the electronic score tricks the ear into thinking this is an up-tempo song, although Ákadóttir’s vocal line is actually quite slow:

 

Ákadóttir isn’t always JFDR. Despite the profound loneliness that Glenn Gould idealized in his radio sound-sculpture The Idea of North, Ákadóttir proves herself to be a highly social creature, at least musically. Often she collaborates with other performers, mostly fellow Icelanders.

She’s done a few tracks with recording engineer and composer Aaron Roche. “On with My Work” has mantra-like acoustic guitar patterns and harmonic minimalism that take you back to the New Age. And the video is fun because Roche looks like history’s most introspective Viking:

 

In 2011, Ákadóttir joined with Áslaug Rún Magnúsdóttir on clarinet and Þórður Kári Steinþórsson on electronics to form the band Samaris. They often sing in Icelandic. “Góða Tungl” (“Good Moon”) uses old Icelandic poetry. The melody has an ancient, folk-like quality, distinct from Ákadóttir’s amorphous solo work. This is an early track for the band, one that Ákadóttir helped write:

 

Recently she hasn’t been doing as much of Samaris’ writing, and has complained in interviews that she misses the “softer, more feminine” sounds the band used to have. “Wanted 2 Say” is one of these later songs, from the 2016 album Black Lights. The style veers toward conventionality in its phrasing and drum beat, sort of like an Icelandic Radiohead:

 

Playing music with others is nothing new for Ákadóttir; much of her experience along those lines has been a family affair. The fact that Jófríður Ákadóttir has a twin sister somehow seems appropriate for such an Elvin presence. Jófríður told the Reykjavik Grapevine that she and her sister Ásthildur had had “soundwaves going through us” since the womb. Their mother is a clarinetist, their father a trumpeter and composer. The twins were only 14 in 2009 when they started a band called Pascal Pinon, and it’s still going (although Ásthildur had to pull out of a recent tour because of health issues).

Nobody told the twins that young girls weren’t “supposed” to record and produce their own albums, so they went ahead and started doing it. Here’s Pascal Pinon’s “Bloom”:

 

While singing with her sister must feel personally primordial, Ákadóttir does not shy away from new projects. In 2014 she joined a band called Gangly. One critic recently described the trio’s music as “soundtracking perpetual darkness.” In this song, “Holy Grounds,” you can hear influence from the metal ballad tradition, such as Dream Theater or even Metallica, but with greater reliance on computer-generated sound:

 

Maybe her work with Gangly indicates a turn in Ákadóttir’s musical sensibilities, but I doubt it. It’s just one more color of igneous rock on the heaping pile of musical pebbles she’s collecting. Beneath it all, solo and simple-to-pronounce JFDR is still wandering the song-tundra of her mind.

György Kurtág (b. 1926) is old. Really old.

If his music sounds young—somehow new—that may simply be due to his having labored in the shadows of Messiaen, Ligeti, Cage, et al. all these years. Or it may prove some version of what Schoenberg said in the First Golden Age of Atonal Expressionism: there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.

Once in a while C major does peek through in Kurtág’s works. For Kurtág, though, we should insist on a corollary: there’s still plenty of good music to be written within the radical economies and expressive extremes of post-Webern, post-tonal musical language.

You remember Webern. An acolyte of Schoenberg, he made music of shocking brevity and emotional power over a hundred years ago:

 

Webern’s music can be cryptic, mysterious. He seldom says anything twice. (Compare that with Wagner, or Philip Glass!) But Webern teaches us the beauty of surprise, of violent contrast, of understatement as well. Kurtág proved to be the grasshopper who learned his lessons well. In the age of Glass and Pärt, he created equally brave new worlds from minimal and simple.

Listen, for example, to Kurtág’s Opus 1, his first “authentic” work, written in Paris between 1957 and ’59. Romanian by birth, he had studied for years in Budapest, a city with a rich artistic heritage but one in which Communist authorities kept a stranglehold on artistic activity. In Paris Kurtág’s encounters with the lectures of Milhaud and Messiaen at the Conservatoire, with the music of Stockhausen, Ligeti, and Webern at Domaine Musicale concerts, and in therapy with psychologist Marianne Stein opened vital new creative doors for him. When Stein urged him to simplify his working methods as a means of overcoming a desperate case of “composer’s block,” here’s how he responded:

Okay, definitely more robust and direct than Webern. But listen to the colors! All those textural twists, hard snaps and glissandos, filmy fadeouts and crashing blows. Remarkable for a string quartet, even considering the precedents set by Bartók, another major influence. Nor was Kurtág afraid to repeat things:

These are from Quatuor Molinari’s 2016 Kurtág: Complete String Quartets (ATMA Classique ACD2 2705). It’s sequenced chronologically, so you can trace the composer’s development from Op. 1 (1959) to Arioso: Hommage à Walter Levin 85 (2009). Plus, these are terrific performances by a young Canadian quartet that lives and breathes new music.

And yet you may not want to start your Kurtág journey with the quartets. A better choice will be available in a few days: György Kurtág: Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir (ECM 2505–07; 3 CDs; 24/96 download promised from HD Tracks). Its varied offerings present an even more comprehensive, compelling Kurtág portrait. Good for beginners, absolutely essential for hardcore fans.

The title may be misleading. By “ensemble,” the curators of these discs mean one-on-a-part instrumental groups, anywhere from two to twenty-odd players, sometimes dispersed within the performance space, sometimes featuring solo singers or a choir. Such an approach allows for maximum individual expressivity and a balance of intimacy and power, which serves Kurtág’s disparate creative impulses well. Paradoxically, his reliance on simplicity—in many distinctive disguises—emerges more clearly than ever. As conductor Reinbert de Leeuw says,

I was completely overwhelmed by the simple means Kurtág needs to create his own musical universe. How is it possible that just playing the open strings of a guitar as in the opening bars of “Grabstein für Stephan” followed by the pianino taking over these chords is breathtaking?

A lot more “breathtaking” stuff follows. Think of Kurtág’s relationship to the Western canon as roughly similar to the relationship between wine and cognac—or better yet, some peasant distillation like grappa or slivovitz. You and your friend can put away quite a bit of wine and still walk home, whereas the equivalent volume of grappa will put you both under the table. There’s a limit to how much Kurtág I can handle without slipping into Beethoven or Dvořák to clear my head. It’s that concentrated. Here are snippets from  . . . quasi una fantasia . . ., Kurtág’s own Op. 27 No. 1:

Even the four complete movements are quite short; only the last lingers more than a couple of minutes. Yet what drastic contrasts mark them! One must listen closely, and when one does—when one truly opens up to these sounds—the effects are devastating.

I’m not quite so drawn to Kurtág’s vocal music. In an essay included in ECM’s program booklet, Paul Griffiths may have put his finger on it:

[This music] does not need a physical voice to utter, any more than it needs a physical body in order to be corporeal, and to affect us corporeally. Indeed, we may well feel that Kurtág’s instruments . . . shout the more vehemently, sing the more sweetly.

Just so. Nevertheless, here are characteristic bits of two provocative Kurtág song settings:

You took
my heart on the palm of your hand,
which you then carefully turned upside down. (Rimma Dalos)

Bend down. (Bends to the ground.)
Stand erect. (Rises slowly up.)
Take off your shirt and underpants.
(Takes them off one by one.)
Turn and face.
(Turns away. Then faces him.)
Put on your clothes.
(Puts them back on.) (János Pilinszky)

Many more such surprising moments lie within this stunning new collection. It was recorded in Amsterdam and Haarlem over a four-year period with the sort of consistent care that, in a better world, would make it an absolute must-own for audiophiles. At the very least we should be thankful to Manfred Eicher and his New Series team for their patient watchfulness over the project, and for their wise decision to issue everything together at once.

Over the years Kurtág has also written dozens of minature minatures, little pieces for children and others with short attention spans (or else a refined appreciation for atoms and molecules). You should sample them. My current favorites are those collected as Jelek, játékok és üzenetek (Signs, Games and Messages) for viola solo, played by the remarkable Kim Kashkashian on another ECM release. Here is part of the riveting “In Nomine — all’ongherese” that leads off her recital:

The composer and his wife Márta are well-known for piano-four-hands performances of the Játékok for keyboard. Others have waxed more poetically over their appearances than I could ever hope to do. But they’re worth checking out, a loving couple united by their sensitivity to great music past and present. (Go to YouTube and click “Show More” to see the entire set list.)

 

I’ve lost count of the number of homes I’ve visited where the resident audiophile had assembled an expensive sound system from highly reviewed components. The number of these visits is easily in the high hundreds, if not in the thousands.

I’d say that a majority sounded mediocre. Honestly speaking, probably half of those could best be described as having boring sound. Maybe 25% of those could best be described as “Why do I feel better when the system is off ?”

Although there are usually several reasons for this, I only want to address the major one here. Curiously enough, it’s the one component that never gets reviewed. It’s also the component that—by a huge margin—makes the most difference in the performance of every system.

Hopefully you guessed that the most important component is your listening room. It will ALWAYS make or break the performance and the musical impact of your system.

I should clarify what I mean when I say “the room.” Most of us don’t have the luxury of selecting from several good rooms. We only have one, and it may not be wonderful. So the question becomes, how can I make my system play its very best with the room I have?

When you’ve got your system voiced properly, it’s as if your system has disappeared. I call that effect “playing the room.” Our goal is to work with the room, rather than against it.

Too many audiophiles throw money at more costly components, with little chance of achieving the full improvement potential that they seek. In other words, the performance of their system may change in some way, but rarely does the new component make the level of improvement that it could have. That’s because their system/room is obscuring the magnitude of any real differences.

Many audiophiles will stress about getting the new, latest, and greatest component, which may very well offer valid potential. However, these “improvements” are minute subtleties when compared to a possible plus-minus 6–12 dB variation in the system’s actual frequency response in the room. Plus, unwanted acoustic reflections in the room finish the job of smearing—maybe even obliterating—the fine nuances of a musical performance.

In the section on set-up in Get Better Sound, I describe a basic set-up program, beginning with the bass. FYI – there are other sources relating to set-up within your room, not just GBS.

The fact is, the bass response can vary wildly—for example, from a plus 6–8 db peak at 80 Hz, to perhaps a minus 6–8 dB dip at 40 and maybe another minus 6–8 dB dip at 160 Hz. These sorts of wildly varying bass resonances (that are due to the room dimensions, including speaker and listening seat placements) will literally SWAMP any minute differences in electronics and cables, as well as speakers.

Here’s the point I keep emphasizing—electronics, cables, and speakers are often a costly expense. Working with your existing room can be (almost) FREE.

You can get smoother response and minimize unwanted sonic reflections, all for little or no cost.

So why do audiophiles throw perfectly good money at buying some new product-of-the-month component, when they could realize far more musical satisfaction from simply allowing their room to get out of the way of their music?

IMO, it’s because they’ve never heard what their system could sound like with some careful thought and a bit of rewarding effort expended to make the most important component work WITH their system, rather than AGAINST it.

I do not want you to think that I’m against upgrading components. On the contrary, I’m all for it. But why compromise the value of an upgrade?

So add new and better components as your interest and budget allows. But hold off a bit until a basic foundation has been built to support the decision to “upgrade.” That foundation is working with the room.

Yes, there are a number of various set-up issues, many of which are room related. They are most often your primary resource for major improvements.

Getting your system to “play the room” is one of those discussions that could go on forever.   But you first need to get started.  The payoff will be years of enhanced musical involvement, and a system that will allow you to readily appreciate the value of a new component under trial.

Related to above…

A story about two identical systems with sound that varied wildly.

It must have been sometime around 2002. I was distributing the Avantgarde Acoustic loudspeakers. A few favorable write-ups had appeared about the sound of my demonstration here in Atlanta. So some audiophiles wanted to hear it for themselves.

A very nice gentleman called. He was going to be in Atlanta on business, and wondered if he could come by and listen for a few minutes.  Though I had never met him, he had called and e-mailed me in the past. Interestingly, he had essentially duplicated my system in its entirety, down to the cables and the racks.

He had bought it all secondhand. So he had no help from a knowledgeable dealer. He had asked me in earlier e-mails about the basic set-up information for the Avantgarde loudspeakers, as well as what bias I used for my tube amps, etc. I provided him with the technical information he requested.

The day of his visit finally came. After initial pleasantries, we sat down to listen in my music room for a few minutes, as he only had a brief time to visit.

We listened to one of my reference CDs that he also had at home. At the end of the first piece, he sat quietly, saying nothing. At the end of the second piece, he stood up, almost angrily, as if he was leaving.

Confused, I asked him pointedly to tell me about his reaction to the demo. Did he not like it, I wondered.

He said that he was devastated. After all, he had the same equipment that I did, and he thought his dedicated music room was probably better (most likely true, because I was simply using the bonus room over my garage).  He said, “I can’t understand why I don’t even have 25% of the sound that you do!”

I explained that I had carefully voiced the system to this particular room, and that made more difference than anything else. I suggested that he make use of the services of a particularly knowledgeable (and helpful) dealer that I knew in his area.

But he wouldn’t hear of it, because that dealer wasn’t “flexible enough” on his price. So he had spent many thousands of dollars on components and still fell short because he wouldn’t pay that local dealer $500 or so to come to his place and voice the entire system (that he had purchased elsewhere) to his room.

I heard later that he had bought even more costly electronics than I had here, and some cables that cost over twice as much as mine. And then, a few months afterwards, he e-mailed me to say that he was selling the entire system!

He had never approached the sound I had here. It was never musically satisfying. He almost made it seem as if I was the villain.

I should mention that he never bought my book, nor any other book (AFAIK) that might have helped him.

Basically, he thought if he kept throwing money at (used, but excellent) higher-end components, that technique alone would somehow magically carry him to musical nirvana. But he never understood, even when it was demonstrated to him, that voicing the system to the most important component—the room—was the foundational path to satisfaction.

So, did he save money by looking for sharp deals on high quality used components? In his case, the answer is a resounding NO. He actually wasted his money by not addressing the most important (and probably least expensive) aspect.

You can also read Jim’s work at his website, www.getbettersound.com .

One of the defining factors of High Baroque music is the explosion in the number of instrumental pieces being composed. It’s easy to think of the 17^th century and earlier as a time when vocal music like madrigals and Masses was the important stuff, with the occasional traveling lute-player passing through town to amuse folks. Acually, there was a ton of music for instrumentalists to play – it’s just that the pieces were short, and composers didn’t much care which instrument you used.

Lutes were popular because they were portable, easy to get some kind of sound out of (as with guitars today, I imagine there were a lot of really terrible lute-players back then because they thought it was an “easy” instrument), and they could handle polyphony. Those madrigals that courtly types were so fond of required multiple people to sing, but only one skilled lutenist to play all the parts. Instrumental music was, of course, needed for dances as well. And then there were the short works that today we’d call “absolute music,” music for its own sake.

Il Barbarino (Arcana) is a new album by German lutenist Paul Kieffer. It’s a study in typical types of pieces lutes were used for in the 16^th and 17^th century, before the heyday of multi-length instrumental compositions. For a few pieces, Kieffer uses viola da mano, also known as a vihuela, which is a guitar-like instrument.

Several tracks have only the name “Fantasia,” and most of those are by Fabrizio Dentice (1539-1581). The word “Fantasia” in its various forms (fantasy, fancy, phantasie)–and whether it’s in a musical context, or sexual, or related to elves and dragons–invokes wildness and the extraordinary and unpredictable. Renaissance fantasias were pieces that either were actually improvised or were meant to sound like they were. That’s why it’s disappointing that Kieffer’s playing is so… careful.

His technique can best be described as quite accurate, but it’s not always musical, and certainly not emotional. The complex lines of polyphony come through clearly, yes, but overall the motion tends to be plodding and robotic. I don’t know about you, but that’s not my idea of fantasy:

 

The playing is more supple for “Da poi che vidi vostra falsa fede” by Palestrina. That work represents another common category of instrumental music in the 16^th and early 17^th century—arrangements of vocal works. Before Palestrina became the poster boy for the Counter Reformation and the model for perfect sacred music, he was a typical composer of his time. He wrote secular madrigals and songs like everybody else.

 

The majority of the 24 tracks are in genres related to fantasia – pieces with an improvised feeling – such as ricercars, toccatas, and folias. Kieffer’s sound is pleasant, but rhythmically too conservative. I’m never convinced that he’s trying to make us believe each phrase is off the top of his head.

It’s useful to compare the young Kieffer’s playing of the fantasia family with that of a veteran in the lute scene. At 63, British lute virtuoso Nigel North has lived long enough to understand the unpredictability of life, love, and harmonic progressions. (He’s also done in-depth study of pre-Baroque style; I became a fan when he was the lute and theorbo [“a plucked string instrument of the lute family, with an extended neck and a second pegbox ” says Wikipedia—Ed.] player for the terrific trio Romanesca in the 1990s.)

In this performance of a fantasia by Francesco da Milano (1497-1543), notice how the phrases flow, and there is subtle rubato on certain notes, not only shaping phrases as statements in conversation, but almost as if North were trying to decide where to take the music next. He’s not deciding – this is a fully written-out piece – but the fantasy style requires that ruse.

 

Another lutenist who has tried his hand at these sorts of pieces, Lutz Kirchhof wins for most intriguing album title: Music for Witches and Alchemists (Sony; the 2000 release is out of print but still easily available both as CD and streaming). Considering that provocative title, let’s see how Kirchhof does with a fantasia. This one is by Luis de Milán (1500-1561):

 

I’d place this performance somewhere between Kieffer’s mechanical precision and North’s fluidity.

Dance music was perhaps the most common use of instruments in Europe before the High Baroque. Compared to the fantasia family, most early-baroque dances were staid and controlled. But there were exceptions, including the tarantella. The title of the one Kirchhof plays by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) explains exactly what it is: “Musical Cure against the Poison of the Tarantula.” Notice how it pick up speed, phrase by phrase. By the end, you should be whirling so fast that the poison will fly from your pores. Kirchhof doesn’t take it quite to that level, but he gives it a good try:

 

The association of lutes with fantasy is not limited to 400-year-old compositions. Medieval Celtic Folk Lute Fantasy of Magic Gothic Castle is a self-published album by the lutenist Andrei Krylov, who recorded it with guitarist Lana Ross. In this case, “fantasy” is used in the literary sense; this music is technically “filking,” or the creation of folk-like pieces inspired by ideas from speculative fiction. Enter the dragons and elves!

Magic Gothic Castle features 9-string lute, with Ross playing classical guitar on many of the 49 tracks. (49 tracks is what happens when there’s nobody but the musicians in charge of production.) Their provenance is unclear, but they are certainly folk-influenced, and some seem to have roots in the late medieval and Renaissance polyphonic lute traditions. Krylov writes that he and Ross recorded the album in “Ancient Monasteries, Caves, Castles, in the darkness of Night, under the full Moon, under the last rays of the Sun, with the help from the voices of Medieval messengers, songs of Gothic bards and dances of the shadows of the Past.” If that’s not lit-inspired fantasy, I don’t know what is.

Here’s a track called “Gothic Fantasy”:

 

It’s not as polished as the playing of Kieffer, North, or Kirchhof, and the polyphony isn’t as complex as the works of Fabrizio Dentice. Yet the rousing, rough-edged sound is what makes Krylov’s music “authentic” in a certain way. Maybe it steals from existing tunes, maybe it mixes in his own ideas. But it evokes a particular time, and it serves as an escape. A fantasy. No duke tossing silver ducats at his court lutenist ever demanded less.

The following Monday morning after the delivery and installation of the $100k system that was used just to listen to Grateful Dead live bootleg cassettes and burned CD’s (referred to in my previous article),  I returned to the store and told the general manager of my reactions and observations in the latest example of high-end audio vanity purchases.

It had become clear to me pretty early on that the well-heeled customers of real High End emporiums buy for other reasons then just the music.

Of course the music does sound better, much much better of course but in reality you can buy a car for $20K , a car for $50k and a car for $100k. They all share the ability of getting you from point A to point B.  It just comes down to how you want to get to point B.

Once you get past a certain point, the laws of diminishing returns starts to play a very big factor.

There is a huge difference between the ride of a $20k Honda Civic and a $50k Lexus but blindfolded one would have a hard time telling the difference (meaning, in this case, better) between the ride of the Lexus and a $100k Mercedes.

So it is with all things luxury.

In this case, while many readers of Copper are probably well -read and have a long term experience of owning High End gear, Most probably are just stunned and shell shocked as to where the prices have gone compared to what most of us thought you had to shell out in the dawning era of the high end in the mid 1960’s.

And so,  fresh from the $100k system that I delivered just to listen to Grateful Dead bootlegs, I said to the general manager that the thing that stood out the most was that the system was powered by Crown amps (clearly an old purchase by someone who really doesn’t either understand home audio or got bad advice from another dealer)  I was told that the salesman was quite aware that the buyer had Crown power amps but did not want to confuse the buyer with too much change. In other words, that $100K purchase would be step 1 when playing the “long game” with a buyer like this.

“One needs to be patient” I was told.

He continued, with great confidence “When the time is right, a big (meaning expensive) amp sale will happen”.

And, just like he predicted, about a month later, the wife of the buyer frantically called to tell the salesman the the housekeeper (while vacuuming) knocked over one of the speaker columns and cracked the wooden base of one of the towers.

“Please tell me it can be fixed”, she said. He is away on business for a few days and it needed to be fixed before he returned.

The salesman then said “We can send down a master woodworker to do the repair but if you really want to make your husband happy, you should surprise him with the perfect amplifier to finish the system”

“How much are they?” said the wife.

The salesman enthusiastically told her that the amps are matching Levinson 33 Mono block towers (the latest & greatest) and only cost $35K for the pair.

He continued “They will look great next to the speakers and he will never notice if the speaker ever fell over and I can get the my woodworker and the amps down immediately as they just happen to be in stock!”

“Great she replied, send them down!”

Wow…I thought.  Brilliant and he was so right!

Another great lesson in luxury retail:

As long as the client has money, it’s all in the timing!

The following Monday morning after the delivery and installation of the $100k system that was used just to listen to Grateful Dead live bootleg cassettes and burned CD’s (referred to in my previous article), I returned to the store and told the general manager of my reactions and observations in the latest example of high-end audio vanity purchases. It had become clear to me pretty early on that the well-heeled customers of real High End emporiums buy for other reasons then just the music. Of course the music does sound better, much much better of course but in reality you can buy a car for $20K , a car for $50k and a car for $100k. They all share the ability of getting you from point A to point B. It just comes down to how you want to get to point B. Once you get past a certain point, the laws of diminishing returns starts to play a very big factor. There is a huge difference between the ride of a $20k Honda Civic and a $50k Lexus but blindfolded one would have a hard time telling the difference (meaning, in this case, better) between the ride of the Lexus and a $100k Mercedes. So it is with all things luxury. In this case, while many readers of Copper are probably well -read and have a long term experience of owning High End gear, Most probably are just stunned and shell shocked as to where the prices have gone compared to what most of us thought you had to shell out in the dawning era of the high end in the mid 1960’s. And so, fresh from the $100k system that I delivered just to listen to Grateful Dead bootlegs, I said to the general manager that the thing that stood out the most was that the system was powered by Crown amps (clearly an old purchase by someone who really doesn’t either understand home audio or got bad advice from another dealer) I was told that the salesman was quite aware that the buyer had Crown power amps but did not want to confuse the buyer with too much change. In other words, that $100K purchase would be step 1 when playing the “long game” with a buyer like this. “One needs to be patient” I was told. He continued, with great confidence "When the time is right, a big (meaning expensive) amp sale will happen". And, just like he predicted, about a month later, the wife of the buyer frantically called to tell the salesman the the housekeeper (while vacuuming) knocked over one of the speaker columns and cracked the wooden base of one of the towers. “Please tell me it can be fixed”, she said. He is away on business for a few days and it needed to be fixed before he returned. The salesman then said “We can send down a master woodworker to do the repair but if you really want to make your husband happy, you should surprise him with the perfect amplifier to finish the system” “How much are they?” said the wife. The salesman enthusiastically told her that the amps are matching Levinson 33 Mono block towers (the latest & greatest) and only cost $35K for the pair. He continued “They will look great next to the speakers and he will never notice if the speaker ever fell over and I can get the my woodworker and the amps down immediately as they just happen to be in stock!” “Great she replied, send them down!” Wow...I thought. Brilliant and he was so right! Another great lesson in luxury retail: As long as the client has money, it’s all in the timing!

Most of you will be familiar with Moore’s Law, formulated by Gordon E. Moore, the founder of Intel, waaaaay back in 1965.  Imagine, if you can, the state of electronics components technology back then.  Integrated circuits were in their infancy, and very few people today would look at the first-ever 1961 Fairchild IC and recognize it as such.  In 1965, commercial ICs comprised up to a few hundred transistors.  That was the state-of-the-art when Moore formulated his law which states that the number of transistors in an IC will double every two years.  Considering the infancy of the industry at the time Moore made his prediction, it is astonishing that his law continues to hold up.  Today, the biggest commercial ICs have transistor counts in the billions.

Also, every ten years or so, sage observers can be counted on to pronounce that Moore’s Law is bound to slow down over the coming decade due to [fill-in-the-blanks] technology limitations.  I can recall at least two such major movements, one in the early 1990’s, and again about 10 years later.  The movers and shakers in the global electronics industry, however, continue to base their long-range planning on the inexorable progress of Moore’s Law, which continues to hold up remarkably well.

A couple of years back I attended a profoundly illuminating talk given by John La Grou, CEO of Millennia Media.  John showed how Moore’s law extends to a number of core technologies that relate to the electronics industry, and touched on the mechanisms that underly these developments.  However, what was most impressive was how he expressed the dry concepts such as transistor counts in more meaningful terms.  The one which particularly caught my attention was a chart that expressed the related growth in computer power.  Its Y-axis has units expressed as brainpower of a flea, the brainpower of a rat, the brainpower of a human, and the combined brainpower of all humans on earth.  In his chart, today’s CPU has slightly more than the brainpower of a rat, but falls massively short of the brainpower of a human.  However, by 2050, which will be within the lifetimes of many of you reading this, your average computer workstation will be powered by something approaching the combined brainpower of every human being on earth.

I wonder if, back in 1965, Gordon Moore ever paused to imagine the practical consequences of his law.  I wonder if he contemplated the possibility of having a 2014 Mac Pro on his office desk, a computer possessed of processing power equivalent to the sum total of every computer ever built up to the time Apple introduced their first ever PC.  Now Moore was a smart guy, so I’m sure he did the math, but if he did, I wonder if he ever asked himself what a person might actually DO with such a thing.  He must have done, but posterity doesn’t record his conclusions.  In the same way, I wonder what a person might do in 2050 with a computer having at its disposal the combined brainpower of every human being on the planet.  Posterity is not likely to record my conclusions either.  But John La Grou has given a lot of thought to these matters, and he stood before us to discuss them.

La Grou’s talk focused on audio-related applications.  In particular he talked about what he referred to as immersive applications.  In effect, wearable technology that would immerse the wearer in a virtual world of video and audio content.  Specifically for the audience at hand, he foresaw recording studio technology being driven by VR in directions that evoked the Sci-Fi movie Minority Report.  You want more channels in your mixing desk? … with a hand gesture you just swipe them in!  He was very clear indeed that the technology roadmaps being followed by the industry would bring about the ability to achieve those goals within a remarkably short period of time.  And indeed, such tools are in the well advanced stages of active development.

La Grou talked about 3D video technology with resolution indistinguishable from reality, and audio content to match.  He was very clear that he did not think he was stretching the truth in any way to make these projections, and expressed a personal conviction that these things would actually come to fruition quite a lot faster than the already aggressive timescales he was presenting to the audience.  He showed some really cool video footage of unsuspecting subjects trying out Occulus Rift virtual reality headsets (by coincidence, the acquisition of Occulus Rift by FaceBook was announced on the very day of his talk).  I won’t attempt to describe it, but we watched people who could no longer stand upright.  La Grou has tried the Occulus Rift himself and spoke of its alarmingly convincing immersive experience.

At the start of La Grou’s talk, he played what he described as the first ever audio recording, made by a Frenchman some 30 years before Edison.  Using an approach similar to Edison’s, this recording was made by a needle which scratched the captured waveform on a moving piece of inked paper.  This recording was made without the expectation that it would ever be replayed; in fact the object was never to listen to the recorded sound, but rather to examine the resultant waveforms under a microscope.  But today, by digitizing the images, we can easily replay that recording, more than 150 years after the fact.  And when you do so, you can hear the Frenchman humming rather tunelessly over a colossal background noise level.  One imagines he never rehearsed his performance, or even paused to consider what he might attempt to record for that momentous occasion.  Consequently, history’s first ever recorded sound is a man humming tunelessly.

At the end of La Grou’s talk we watched the results of an experiment where researchers were imaging the brains of subjects while they were watching movies and other visual stimuli.  They confined themselves to imaging only the visual cortex.  In doing so, they could find no observable pattern in how particular images caused the various regions within the cortex to illuminate.  But today’s computers being the powerful things they are (i.e. smarter than the average rat), they let the computer attempt to correlate the images being observed with the patterns being produced using AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques.  If I understand correctly, they then showed the subjects some quite unrelated images, and asked the computer to come up with a best guess for what the subject was seeing, based on the correlations previously established.  There is no doubt that the images produced by the computer corresponded remarkably well with the images that the subject was looking at.  In fact, the computer made as good a reproduction of the image that the subject was looking at as the playback of the 150-year old French recording did of the original tuneless hum.

I couldn’t help but think that it will be something less than – quite a lot less than – 150 years before this kind of technology advances to a practically useful level, one with literally mind-bending ramifications.  Already, researchers have imaged the brains of rats, while they (the rats, that is, not the researchers …) were learning to find their way through a maze.  Then, later, while the rats were sleeping, they clearly demonstrated that the rats’ brains were replaying their routes through the maze while they were dreaming.  In other words, this technology has already moved beyond the demonstration stage to the first stabs at deployment as a behavioral research tool.  Amazing, really.

And no sooner had I written the above, than I came across something even more remarkable.  Researchers doing work with rhesus macaque monkeys (which, apparently, have a capacity similar to humans to recognize faces) measured activity from various brain locations while the monkey was shown photographs of different human faces.  From these observations they were able to make some key determinations of how specific facial features register in the monkey’s brain.  Consequently, they are able to reconstruct a face that the monkey is seeing by monitoring the electrical activity of only 205 neurons in the monkey’s brain.  Below left is an actual facial image that was shown to the monkey, and on the right is a facial image reconstructed from the brain measurements.  Pretty darned incredible.