In 1997, when the Flaming Lips released Zaireeka, I'd been following the antics of their leader Wayne Coyne pretty closely.
His Boombox Experiment, which involved 40 boomboxes and an equal number of nearly identical cassettes, was a great demonstration of how music is an actual physical presence in a room. As an audience member walked among the boomboxes, the sound changed. That's the power of acoustics, which is often ignored by gear freaks but is absolutely critical in everything from recording to live performance to setting up your home stereo correctly.
(Credit:
The Flaming Lips)
Zaireeka--the word is a combination of "Zaire" (which represented a collapsing civilization to Coyne) and "eureka" (Greek for "I've found it")--was the Lips' attempt to bring this experience to a wider audience by releasing a single album on four stereo CDs, all meant to be heard at the same time.
Unfortunately, in 1997 I didn't have anything close to four CD players, and boomboxes had already ebbed in popularity to the point that nobody I knew had one. I wasn't going to go through the trouble of calling three friends and asking them to bring their full stereos over to my apartment--I don't think I would have had enough outlets for four amplifiers and CD players anyway--so I never bought it.
A lot of reviewers felt the same way, dismissing the album as an unreasonable gimmick. The Lips went on to bigger fame with more conventional records like 1999's still-fantastic The Soft Bulletin, but Zaireeka became harder and harder to find, and eventually I forgot about it.
Last year, it became available again on Amazon.com, and my wife bought it for me for a birthday present, knowing that I loved the band. A lot has happened in the intervening years--most notably, laptop computers with built-in CD players and speakers are so common that many households have more than one. In other words, Zaireeka is finally within reach for mere mortal consumers!
Last night, I took the plunge. CD No. 1 went into my main audio system--a Cambridge Audio CD player attached to an AMC amp and Acoustic Energy speakers, all circa 2000. On top of my massive old TV between the big stereo speakers, I put my three-year-old Dell XPS Gen 2 laptop with an Audigy 2 soundcard connected to a pair of cheap but serviceable Altec Lansings (still working perfectly after almost a decade). That was for CD No. 2.
CD No. 3 went into a Bose Wave system, which I set up on the far left side of the room. (I know, I know, but this was a gift and the weird fakey bass boost does wonders for connected MP3 players.) CD No. 4 went into my MacBook Pro on the far right of the room. Unfortunately, I don't have another pair of speakers, so I had to use the tiny built-in notebook speakers.
The Cambridge, Bose, and MacBook all have remote controls, so I stood in front of the Dell, hit play in iTunes, waited until the program actually responded and started playing, then hit the other three remotes at approximately the same time. At the beginning of each track, a voice announces "Track 1," then each CD says its name--"CD 1," "CD 2," and so on. It took me a half dozen false starts before I got them all to say "Track 1" at approximately the same time, and CD number 4 was a little bit late...but it didn't matter! Zaireeka is fault-tolerant!
In fact, Coyne noted in his tests that it's almost impossible to get four CD players to spin at exactly the same rate, and consequently planned the album to sound great without all four CDs having to be perfectly synced. That is, instead of having a lot of precision parts that they tried to coordinate between the four CDs simultaneously, there are lots of long notes, sequences in which one or two of the CDs is playing silence or nonrhythmic sound effects while the other two play various slow rhythms and melodies, and parts that actually sound best with a slight echo. Hearing CD No. 4 duplicate a vocal sequence (softly, to the right, and a bit distorted from the MacBook speaker) a split second after CD No. 1 wasn't a problem--it sounded no weirder than Jimmy Page's application of echo to Robert Plant's vocal tracks on a bunch of Zeppelin songs.
Occasionally, the band did repeat a fairly complicated sequence among CDs, but the notes were usually played fairly slowly, in regular rhythm (quarter or eighth notes) and in a pattern of harmonic intervals that went together--similar to the way a lot of guitarists first figure out how to sound OK with a delay pedal. A repeated theme at the end of Track 2, "Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)," (sic) stood out in this way. All in all, the compositions were beautiful and haunting and more than a little unnerving--a lot like The Soft Bulletin without the happy parts.
The experience gave me a new appreciation for 5.1 surround sound--I listened to a regular stereo CD when I was done, and missed the lack of depth. But I've heard plenty of 5.1 mixes, and this isn't the same. Again, the slight differences in timing actually make you note the shape of the room, how the sound bounces off walls and windows and curtains. Plus, the experience is going to be different every time--there's some of the spontaneity and magic of a live performance in it.
If you've got the equipment--and I bet many CNET readers do--to play this album in its intended state, and you like the Flaming Lips or psychedelic rock in general, this is an absolutely worthwhile way to spend $20 and an hour.
Surround sound is a no-brainer for movies and games--it helps you forget you're watching a two-dimensional screen, and immerses you in the action. Movie theaters have been incorporating it for well over a decade, and sound designers for games assume a 5.1 system.
Tomlinson Holman--he's the "TH" in THX surround--has codeveloped a system called 10.2 that contains 14 discrete channels for precise surround placement, plus two subwoofers. So far, only one 30-minute film has been encoded for it.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)But for music, surround sound faces a number of barriers. Listeners need new equipment--speakers, a 5.1-capable amp, and a player capable of playing either SACD or DVD-Audio discs. (DVD-Audio discs can be played in traditional DVD players, so home theater owners who've already set up their systems for surround sound can hear a surround mix, but it will usually be at lower resolution than a true DVD-Audio playback. This Wikipedia entry does a decent job of explaining.)
Listener habit is another one. Few people sit down and listen to an album anymore--music is usually background material, or played through headphones while moving around. A stereo track played through a stereo system will sound reasonably decent no matter where you stand, but a surround system really requires the listener to be in a fairly small sweet spot to get the proper effect.
But the biggest barrier may be psychological. Last night, I had the chance to listen to a number of surround mixes (and create one) in a studio setting, including an amazing track by Ellen Fullman, who has spent the last 20+ years building and perfecting an instrument with 100-foot long strings and composing music for that instrument. (Her music is beautiful, ambient and infinite, and reminded me a little of the earliest Fripp-Eno experiments or Tarentel...but my vocabulary for this kind of music is admittedly limited.)
Throughout all these surround mixes, there were occasional moments of brilliance--a couple times, sounds seemed to be coming from directly to my right or left, and I'd look over expecting to see a speaker there--but by and large, it seemed like more of a gimmick than a mind-blowing addition to the experience.
I'm sure some folks said the same thing about stereo when it was introduced. But I've always thought a recording should mimic a live performance, and in that situation, you usually have a group of musicians arrayed from left to right in front of you. Stereo reproduces that sound. But unless you're a performer, you're seldom in a situation where music is coming from all around you.
Some of the problem may be a limitation in imagination--surround's pretty new, and a lot of producers don't really know what to do with it yet, so they simply put an instrument in a particular position and leave it there. There are some theatrical artists for whom surround might make sense--I imagine Roger Waters, Tom Waits, or the Firesign Theatre would be able to do amazing things, and the 5.1 re-release of Dark Side of the Moon was generally well-reviewed. But for most music, stereo seems adequate--I just don't need to hear what it sounds like to play bass on stage with the Rolling Stones, as interesting as that experience would be in real life.
Disagree? I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise--maybe somebody can point me to a surround sound recording that will blow my mind.
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