Free hearing conservation workshop tonight!

To all my NY Peeps: AES is bringing Benj Kanters (of my alma mater, Columbia College Chicago) to NY for a presentation on hearing loss. I caught part of Benj's presentation at AES this year and it was fascinating --and he is a very engagingand dynamic speaker. Details below.

The Audio Engineering Society - New York Section
invites audio engineers, students and all those interested in audio to a most interesting evening

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Join us for a Meet & Greet at 6:30pm, Presentation at 7:00pm
Note Special Venue For This Meeting
New York University
Steinhardt – Music Technology
35 West 4th Street, Between LaGuardia Place and University Place, 6th Floor
New York, NY

This meeting is open to the public.

Let Building Security know you are attending the AES meeting.
Hearing Conservation Workshop
Host: Doron Schachter, Interval Music
Presenter: Benj Kanters, Associate Professor and Associate Chair,
Audio Arts and Acoustics Department,
Columbia College, Chicago IL
The Hearing Conservation Workshop offers a new approach to promoting awareness of the ever-increasing problem of noise and music-induced hearing loss.
This program is specifically targeted to students and professionals in the audio and music industries, using the same language and principles as those governing audio systems, music and acoustics.
The workshop is a two-hour presentation, including images and animations reflecting the latest in hearing research. It is divided into three distinct but interrelated units:

1. Hearing physiology, providing a basic understanding of how the ear translates acoustic energy (via hair cell transduction) into what we perceive as sound.
2. Hearing loss, examining the mechanics of noise-induced loss.
3. Hearing conservation, examining currently accepted noise exposure limits and, ultimately, what can be done to protect hearing. We look at everything from the latest developments in “high-fidelity ear plugs” to concert in-ear monitoring systems, both of which are finding a high degree of acceptance in the professional audio and music performance industries.

The Workshop has received funding from corporations and foundations that understand the value of this initiative. This enables us to offer the workshop at no cost to the host institution. Our goal is to make it easy for schools and other institutions to bring this important message to their constituents.

Additional information is available at www.heartomorrow.org

Bit rot

Thanks to Tim Boyce of Masterdisk for bringing to my attention this irreverent (but for the most part solid) article on Gizmodo about digital data preservation. We are beginnig to realize the cost of keeping so much data in digital form. That is why my mantra is "prioritize, prioritize, prioritize"...

Archives News!

Not one, but two articles on the first page of today's New York Times highlight archives. The first one is about the challenges of archiving born-digital material (in this case, Salman Rushdie's new exhibit at Emory); the other one, the very exciting news of the 160,000 hours of C-SPAN video now freely available on the Internet. It does not appear that C-SPAN has a viable business model for their web site yet, but I applaud the herculean effort that this enterprise represents. We live in wondrous times.

Coming soon: An 8-track museum

There is a cute article on the Wall Street Journal (thank you Andy Lanset) about an 8-track collector in Texas trying to build a museum. There are some errors in the article (for example, the idea that 8-tracks are sonically superior), but it is quite amusing.

Introducing the Selenophon

This one I had never seen before. Thanks to Jeff Berman, who generously gave me some old radio-related magazines, I learned about the Selenophon, which is essentially a variable-density paper-strip player (and thus can be called a direct descendant of Léon Scott's 1860 phonoautograph). Built in Austria, it may also be considered a precursor of the later (and much-malighned) 8-track cartridge, since it also carries eight (mono) tracks per side, for a total of 16. Note also the news announcement about the long-playing (LP) record, running at 33 1/3 rpm.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives

There is a nice new article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the archives at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, headed by good pal Andy Leach. Andy and I used to work together in Chicago's Center for Black Music Research, and he is the nicest guy, as well as a heck of a pedal-steel player (he can be heard in my CD). Way to go Andy! You just may have the most fun job in the field.

Wow & Flutter

Last week-end we went to Wow & Flutter, a performance by Andrew Schneider at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. I could not resist the name. After so many years trying to minimize it (and finally getting rid of it in digital --unless you count jitter as a form of flutter), I seek it! The piece was more related to distortions of memory than about our woes with tape. The review in the New York Times is pretty accurate.(Incidentally, I just read about a homemade wow & flutter meter --for the advanced hobbyist).

Speaking of flutter, I am a big fan of Jamie Howarth' s Plangent Processes, which digitally removes extremely small flutter artifacts inherent in the mechanical nature of tape recordings (bearings, idlers, etc). It is probably the only restoration process I have ever heard that created a marked improvement without any side effects.