According to an interesting article in the Boston Globe, it seems we prefer music that sounds most like the way we talk. This is quite a revolutionary discovery. The (staunchly skeptical) cognitive scientist/linguist Steven Pinker once called music ‘auditory cheesecake’, prioritising language as an evolutionary imperative, but music as frippery.
I wonder if they’ve considered the possibility that perhaps it’s the other way around: rather than suggesting we have created music that resembles the way we speak, perhaps we have modified our patterns of speech in order to more closely resemble that music stuff we like so much…
In other news, I went out and bought one of those $99.95 Transonic DVD players they’re advertising at The Warehouse. I’d bought one of those Mizuda ones at Woolworths with the money saved from my first month not smoking – that would make it July 2002. It had a one-year warranty. Naturally, it died recently. Power supply failure. After speaking to a couple of friends who are electronic technicians for various radio stations, we figured it was cheaper to just buy a new one at that price. And that’s exactly what the manufacturers are counting on, I’m sure. Disposable home appliances.
Anyway, they’ve got them in boxes in a pile at The Warehouse. Apparently they can’t have any working models on display because of the number that get stolen when they do that.
I was a bit more troublesome than they’re probably used to. Rather than just pick up a box, stick it under my arm and go pay, I took my Region 1 NTSC DVD copy of Mulholland Drive in, and then requested that one of the players be unboxed, attached to a television and tested. Nobody was able to tell me if the advertised model could do more than one region. After being bounced around a few sales assistants, one really helpful guy pulled a box to bits, removed all the packaging, helped me set it up and we tried it out.
Mulholland Drive worked fine. So we tried a zone 4 (local) disc too. Also fine. This is a multizone player, without having to do anything to it. Great.
Paid the money, took it home – and not only does it do DVDs and CDs, but also MP3s, Windows media files and – this was a surprise – JPEGs. You can make a CD of images stored in jpeg format, and show them on your telly, slide show fashion. Good idea, given the prevalence of digital cameras – and, if you were so inclined, free internet porn.
The one thing it won’t do (and this is something of a shame) is read AAC files. You remember – we talked about this in earlier posts: the file format that is slowly replacing mp3 – that I researched and decided to convert my entire CD collection to. Not essential that my sub-hundy DVD player can do that, but it would have been nice.
A bit of setup was required: the machine default is to assume you want English subtitles, and that you have a 5.1 surround setup. Didn’t take too much to change. Not completely intuitive, as setup menus go, but workable. The player does this weird thing where it stops after the initial copyright notice, so you have to hit play again to watch the film – but all in all, happy with my purchase.
Watched Blade Runner again – just to make sure the machine worked properly, you understand…
