#106

This is actually the focus of my master’s degree!

That gives me a potential idea if anyone would be down to do it… Would Lines members be interested in recording brief video responses to my research questions? I’d like to make a short documentary feature as part of my finished work but C19 travel restrictions etc had basically put an end to those hopes. If people would be prepared to record themselves - or if anyone would rather not be shown on screen, record audio responses and provide some shots of their equipment - I could actually still make that happen!

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#107

T
Nostalgia is massive for me. It’s less a case of trying to evoke a different era (something one might describe BoC as doing, deliberately or otherwise) and more that my musical education is grounded in certain sounds and techniques.

From before secondary school and throughout my teens, sound was something that was shared via cassette. One friend would buy a record; another would record a tape of that; another would record a tape or that tape, and so on. Sometimes the tape would be recorded on a dual tape deck, other times it would be two separate units - sometimes the levels would be quite and the hiss would be as loud as the music, other times the levels would be smashed through the red and the tracks would start to distort.

Add that to the fact that much (most) of the music I was making copies of was made on 12 bit samplers with low bitrates and that ringing element became an integral part of what I associated with “how things should sound.”

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#108

What’s involved with this?

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#109

Some of it is nostalgia. A lot of it is just current fashion. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense at all. We’re expanding our esthetic to include imperfection, and to even embrace imperfection as an aspect of beauty. It’s analogous to wabi sabi.

But lo fi is also a feature of privilege, in that we now can have pristine sounds very easily and cheaply, whereas prior to digital we were constantly chasing perfection and trying to eliminate noise and wobble. Now it’s a choice we can make—not something we are stuck with.

Also, lofi sounds work well to create a sense of auditory depth, not just historical depth. They fit well into the background, and can help set off the foreground sounds by contrast.

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#110

forgot to answer !

the question is super interesting to me and feels pretty central to my practice - but I have almost no relationship to nostalgia here (I was born in 1998, and my first music experiences were on an ipod).

An old professor showed me this corny series on information theory and it kinda changed me

the dynamic between entropy and meaning is baked into communication at every level, and I see fidelity as a way to listen to this concept.

lossy digital forms of compression are the most interesting to me because they let you manipulate information at a mathematical level. it’s an aesthetic tool, but also a conceptually interesting one. I owe a lot to beat-makers and POC musicians for inventing these techniques.

(~~ technology is meaning ~~)

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#111

if we’re talking about home recording here I’m not sure I could agree less with this. it was arguably still cheaper and easier 20-30 years ago to get something down quickly. this also assumes a general desire to sound pristine or “perfect” in the first place - a bit strange in a thread dedicated to lo fidelity.

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#112

You might enjoy reading The Information by James Gleick if you’ve not already.

Also definitely Ways of Listening https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ways-of-listening-9780199773909?cc=gb&lang=en& - the ecological approach could be a good framework for this kind of enquiry. Have you already encountered it?

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#113

Well noise complaints posts in mimeophon thread indicate that there are a lot of people who want pristine sound.

To me lo fi is not about nostalgia but about giving up control to some extent. Also about making music that is akin to life itself - unpredictable and imperfect. If something is too polished it’s boring :slight_smile:

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#114

Befaco crush delay is another that uses this chip / principle

“Crush Delay v3 is a special Echo-Delay unit based on the PT2399 IC, which is able to offer 400ms of clean delay and up to 2 seconds of dirty repetitions, having a special talent to generate noisy-glitch textures. The module bases its operation on controlling the PT2399 chip with circuit bending techniques, converting the unit in an advanced VC digital trash generator. This third version comes with some interesting new features like redesigned VCAs circuits, wider range for clean delay and reduced depth to make it skiff friendly.”

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#115

I’m sure many are familiar with this quote, but it’s worth reading again:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it.

The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

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#116

I’m surprised nobody mentioned this one yet:

It’s a pay-what-you-want plugin & album combo. The album is actually really beautiful imho.
While they state that Strata was inspired by tape music, the sound is more aking to granular/digital to my ears. Not surprisingly, since at its core it is a granular processor.
Still, pretty good at creating lofi textures and messing your sound up in creative ways.

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#117

I’ll write a proper post about it later on. I need to think about the logistics and practicalities of people sending me video files. Some kind of cloud storage would probably be best.

It will basically be a simple introduction to who you are (artistically speaking - i.e. your artist name and anything else you want to say about yourself) and then three questions around the concept of: what the term “lofi” means to you; how it manifests itself in your work; why it is important to your workflow/approach.

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#118

It’s funny, this is definitely an area I thought of when considering my focus. There was definitely a tipping point when samplers became able to reproduce sounds with perfect clarity whereas before then they always introduced imperfections and degrees of “character” through their algorithms etc. I definitely see certain lofi techniques as having a humanising quality - where the imperfections of a medium can be the point where variations occur. It’s fascinating to see how hi-tech some of the current lofi techniques can be (Eurorack modules, M4L/Reaktor creations, iOS apps etc). I can spend an awful lot of money to achieve the sound of a £10 tape deck

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#119

I don’t follow. Even if you don’t own a laptop (big if), you can get a portable recorder for under 100 bucks that has better sound quality than any consumer equipment on the market 30 years ago. Also there was no value statement in the post you quoted, just the observation that perfect quality is more accessible and ubiquitous than before.

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#120

But also what’s considered perfect moved forward and is not the same as 30 years ago :slight_smile:

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#121

I’m 60 now. I got my first multitrack in 1979 if I have the timing right. It was a Tascam 144 PortStudio, their original 4 track cassette machine.

It was life-changing for a 18-19 year old kid whose musical tastes and aspirations ran well left of “normal”.

It was ok in terms of sound quality but by today’s standards it was pretty crappy. But I used it for nearly 20 years and then it really got technically problematic so I gave it to a friend’s little kid, who loved it.

It let me do a lot of recordings that I still find interesting and will eventually release as a juvenalia set.

It was inherently lo-fi but I don’t know if I’ve done better work with all my modern digital tools, if I’m honest with myself.

Of course some of it involves the perhaps inevitable process of getting older leading to getting more stale or jaded or exhausted or whatever it is…

Anyway, I feel like lo-fi is in my blood whether I want it or not!

Edit: Discovering bands like Flying Saucer Attack and Guided By Voices didn’t hurt either :sunglasses:

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#122

I was thinking about that a lot. And in my thinking in the end it comes down to a personal vision on what is self expression.
While i was working as a concept artist in game industry and drawing i was looking at tutorials on how to get better. And vast majority of them come down to “make a picture in your head, sketch, perfect it, then apply colors, etc”. Linear process of expressing ones vision so to say and super boring to me. Digital photography in RAW - same. Noiseless audio - same to me.
My head never worked that way, the best way to start a drawing for me was always to make a blobby mess and figure that out in the process.
It’s kind of the same with music - pile the sounds, modulations, etc. and be surprised. Try to shape it into something personally likeable and that’s it.
I guess i’m not the person to have a “vision” on any level other than a feeling of it.

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#123

I’ve used this technique for some time now. Absolutely love it. I’ve been meaning to research how to possibly build a stand-alone device that would remove the need for cds, but it’s way beyond me. I tried to build a patchbay enclosure like in the video, but I couldn’t manage to solder wires to the little buffer chip in a proper way, so I stopped trying.

I can highly recommend getting a discman with skip detection just for this.

#124

This! So much this! Does it affect the music you listen to? I find that my attention tends to wander when things are too clean. When textures are too shiny and pristine I find nothing to adhere to. I need what I would describe as tangible qualities in the music.

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#125

Not necessarily, I have no problems listening to really clean sound, more of a comfort in making my own with some “hair” on it!

Does that make sense?

By the way, did you see the recent Make Noise video with Walker talking about the noise floor of the universe? Trippy stuff!

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