I was reading Gizmodo yesterday, probably because I’m trying to expand my Internet horizons beyond the six websites I read everyday (in order: ESPN, Amazin’ Avenue, Gawker, The Fark, CNN, Electrical Audio). It’s probably hard to believe that someone who’s blog relies heavily on news from around the world could only care about half-a-dozen websites out of all the pages on the entire Internet, but it’s embarrassing how little I know about good, informative websites. Feel free to suggest some for me to check out, I’m not working tomorrow so I have all day to play online.

Wow, that was a long tangent. So…I was reading Gizmodo the other day, and I came across a story called, Music Is Dead: iPods and Young People Have Utterly Destroyed Music. Since I love hating on pedestrian music fans and young people, this article was pretty much the electronic equivalent of a blowjob.

“Each year, Stanford Professor of music Jonathan Berger does an informal test of his students by playing a bunch of different music in a bunch of different formats.” For the last six years, his students perpetually prefer a 128kbps MP3 to higher bit-rate MP3s as well as other formats. This is shocking to me. I don’t claim to be “golden eared.” I am not an audiophile. I don’t have a true aesthete’s ear for subtle nuances in sound, but I can tell the difference between an MP3 that is encoded below 192kbps and one that is encoded at a higher bit-rate, and the quality increases vastly as you decrease the amount of compression applied to a piece of music. The poor quality of my iPod has been relegated to backup harddrive status. Other than on long car rides, I really haven’t used my iPod for much else since I bought it four years ago.

Dale Dougherty at O’Reilly Radar questions vinyl fetishists, asking what they heard that he didn’t hear when listening to records, and wonders if the crackles and pops on records are comparable to the “sizzle sounds” people hear when listening to MP3s. Doughtery writes, “Our perception changes and we become attuned to what we like — some like the sizzle and others like the crackle. I wonder if this isn’t also something akin to thinking that hot dogs taste better at the ball park. The hot dog is not that special, except in the right setting. The context changes our perception, particularly when it’s so obviously and immediately shared by others. Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it’s more than the convenience of listening to music on the move. It’s that so many people are doing it, and you are in the middle of all this, and all of that colors your perception.”

I don’t quite agree with Doughtery. I think that logic might apply to something like Facebook or Twitter, where the herd mentality encourages participants to feel like they are doing something good simply because millions of other people are doing it, too. When it comes to music, the argument doesn’t hold much water. Listening to music is, usually, a private thing. I don’t think people who are listening to and enjoying MP3s are doing so because “well, everyone else likes how they sound, so I do, too!” In an otherwise sound article, that idea is illogical. In contrast to what Doughtery says, I do think it is more closely related to convenience than to context.

One problem not addressed by either website is the effect that the loudness war could potentially have on music listening habits and people’s appreciation for diminished sound quality. Professor Berger’s listening test that is administered every year? He’s found that over the last six years, not only has preference for MP3 risen over time, but so too has preference for music with high energy. “Cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc.” These are all elements that could be affected by the growing trend of amplifying songs to their limit (or beyond) to make them stand out from others. Many engineers, and audiophiles argue that the effects of increasing loudness are vastly negative. But if Doughtery can hypothesize that people prefer MP3s to other music formats because “it’s akin to thinking hot dogs taste better at the ball park,” I’d like to counter that with a theory of my own. The “high energy” songs Berger plays for his students are preferable because they stand out from the orchestral and jazz music he is including in his test. Regardless of the format of the music being presented, that rock song Berger is using in his test is obviously going to appeal most to college age students. That lack of exposure to music that hasn’t been co-opted by the loudness war can — and might very well — influence their decisions, much more so than the herd mentality theory put forth by Doughtery.

That study seems like there are too many variables involved. Pick one genre (if the students prefer rock, just use rock songs — hell, you can even use Pandora and its 400 attributes to find a group of songs that are musically similar), and then play those songs across various formats. Who knows, the results might be remarkably different.

So, are youths and their ape ears destroying music? Are we doomed to continue on this path towards more convenient, lower quality music? How do we cure those who are cursed with ape ears!? I need answers, people!

Note: The title of this post is a play on the title of a comedy CD by WFMU DJ Tom Scharpling and his partner in funny (and Superchunk drummer!) Jon Wurster. That CD, New Hope For The Ape Eared, is available for purchase from the Stereolaffs website. Pure comedic gold, I tells ya!

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