If you’ve already read Momo Araki’s excellent interview with Uwe Schmidt, you know the kind of brain power that’s behind the Atom Heart/Atomâ„¢/Señor Coconut projects. But do you know the sounds? For this week’s download, Schmidt generously donated the track “Mp3” — one of the first times he’s given away one of his tracks as a digital file. In fact, the track’s focus is the format itself, musing that compressed files signify the “corruption of quality” and “stands for low morality” between rattling electro beats. Originally from his 2007 album, Son Of A Glitch, Schmidt seemed like he was poking fun at the then burgeoning format while predicting the rather grim consequences of its widespread use. Thought-provoking and fun all at once, “Mp3” is typical Uwe Schmidt. You can catch him playing live with Tobias Freund on Saturday, April 9th at Public Assembly in Brooklyn as part of the Bunker Unsound Edition.
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While this is a very well done track, the assertion that the MP3 is a corruption, or a decline of quality is spurious at best. It was said at once time that the interval of a tritone was evil and demonic. Jazz was considered low class for years. This simply highlights the variable nature of “quality” as being something completely arbitrary and constructed by the dominant cultural consensus. The Mp3 is simply an audio format that approximates the raw file; nothing more, nothing less.
well. listen to a 128 kbps mp3 and an uncompressed/lossless version of a piece of music, preferably including acoustic instruments, and come back. if you did not hear any difference, let a doctor check your hearing. if you did hear a difference and just did not care, please mind that this platform is a place where, i dare to say, the majority of the people actually does care about this difference and generally perceives it as a decline in quality. however, provided that disk space keeps getting cheaper and bandwidths keep increasing, the whole issue will hopefully be obsolete, soon enough.
Well…you are not forced to encode in 128. Encode in 320 from a good source and do a blind test. You’ll got to be super trained with a really high grade sound system to spot the difference everytime, if ever, and it will be quite dependent on the music encoded …some tests done by serious engineers had some funny results about that.
And what about the noisefloor or the artefacts induced by vinyl playback and manufacturing for exemple? is that fidelity?
I’m all for quality that said, and yes we have Flac anyway
oh and Atom TM has always been a guy full on the derision and 2nd degree, so i guess this was maybe intended as a joke 😉