Archive for November, 2010

Now what I’m going to tell you you already know back in some primitive part of your brain. Digital sound doesn’t sound as good as many analog recordings. Here’s why.

Digital sound is typically 44,100 samples per second. That sounds like a freakin lot of samples per second but it’s too low and that’s the problem. Really high quality sampling of sound takes place at 2,822,400 samples per second. This is known as SACD (Super Audio CD) developed by Sony and Philips. That’s 64 times greater than 44,100 samples per second. Currently, the best digital audio recordings have a sample rate twice as high as SACD. Or 128 times the typical 44,100 sample rate.

The problem is that CDs don’t hold enough information to be able to support SACD. You’d only get a couple of minutes or less of such audio on a CD. That is probably the historic rationale for commercial audio being typically 44,100 samples per second: the file sizes are not too big.

When I listen to typical digital audio, what I notice, if I crank it up–and I like to crank up music, typically–is that there’s no presence to the recordings. Some vinyl albums I had, when played on decent stereos–the stereos didn’t have to be top of the line, but they had to be OK–sounded pretty much ‘live’. They had presence. But digital audio, it can’t break through from the other side, as it were.

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I thought it might be interesting to reflect on how we’re finding the iPad as a development platform regarding our latest digital fiction project ‘Changed‘, bearing in mind that we’re not using the Apple SDK or exporting an App from Flash CS5 to produce this piece.

Changed is an atmospheric story set beneath a roadway tunnel. It’s based on a script by Lynda Williams (see Grace, a short film which Lynda wrote, here). It contains a mix of text, video, audio and some elements of interactivity. It’s self-reflective and strongly visual, the tunnel itself forming the ‘canvas’ onto which all other aspects of the story unfold.

The work is being designed as a ‘Web App’, which means it can be found on Mobile Safari on the iPad, bookmarked, and then added to the iPad’s Home Screen as if it were a native App. Theoretically, once downloaded, it should run offline where no internet connection is available. We’re also looking to try and keep it compatible with desktop computers/browsers.

It’s a bit of an experiment into what’s possible – but here’s what we’ve liked and disliked about the iPad development part thus far:

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What I’m going to tell you—I warn you—is of no consequence whatever. And it won’t even be of interest to you unless you’re an NHL hockey fan. And, worse, it’s going to test your algebra skills. The only thing I can say in favour of saying it at all is that you just won’t ever read anything else about hockey like what I’m going to tell you right now. It just doesn’t happen. This is the unicorn of hockey writing. Right here, right now.

It’s so messed up to be telling you this at all that I have to give you something to get you to read it. What I’m going to give you is like something you’d get out of a bubble-gum machine. But maybe the best such thing you’d get. Cuz it’s an idea. It’s from the bubble gum machine of the mind. I figured it out myself. I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else. I’m going to give you a little brain trinket. It’s a formula. The formula tells you how many points a perfectly average NHL team should have after they’ve played N games. That’s it. That’s all this is about. The only use it has is to be able to tell if a team is above or below average. Think of this as a peculiarly Canadian gift. It’s a way to think a little bit more clearly about something that is barely worth thinking about at all. But, you know, in Canada, we think about hockey. It’s more pleasant than thinking about the mess we’re in.

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