Best Discoveries of the last 12 months

I'm in the mood to make a top albums list for the year. However, I have a tendency to be a little behind-the-times in terms of music. So here are the top things I've discovered since this time last year. The first group of things have actually come out since September 2013. The rest are new discoveries of older things. In researching this, I discovered that at least three of these artists are on Jagjaguwar, and at least four are on Matador. I couldn't bring myself to rank them exactly, so each group is sorted alphabetically by artist. That way you have to listen to all of them!

From this year

Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire for No Witness
Sure, this ends up on everyone's top albums for 2014 (or will, when December rolls around), so I won't repeat everyone else's opinions here. Suffice to say, her voice is absolutely haunting. Listen

CHVRCHES - The Bones of What You Believe
This girl sounds like she's twelve, but she can sure sing. One of many great bands from Glasgow (along with Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, Primal Scream, and many more). Listen

Eagulls - Eagulls
Post-punk is still going strong in some parts of the world (Leeds, in this case). I first heard these guys on A.V. Undercover doing some fancy trick with a portable fan. Listen

Lady Gaga - ARTPOP
I've been meaning to write a post about why this album is better than Born This Way, but I still haven't gotten around to it. It has more edge, some nice bass lines, and a few spectacular hooks that she uses conservatively, which keep them from wearing out ("Watch me at the pool..."). Also I finally got to see her live on this tour. Listen

Moonface - Julia With Blue Jeans On
Moonface is the newest solo project of Wolf Parade (see below) singer Spencer Krug. The whole album is just him at a piano, and the piano work is absolutely astounding, and the lyrics are solid too. Listen

Typhoon - White Lighter
This is one of those baroque indie bands with dozens of instruments. I think this one has 14 members. I'm pretty sure this one got the most listens of all on this list. Listen

Discoveries

Foals - Holy Fire (2013)
I hadn't heard Foals before I stood out in the rain at Shaky Knees this summer. Everyone was cold and soaked to the bone, but everyone was too caught up in the music to notice. At one point, a tarp got dragged over the crowd and a few hundred people all danced together beneath it. I feel back in that moment again when I hear this album. "My Number" is so groovy. Listen

Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand (1994)
Okay, so I'm a decade behind on this one. If you are behind too, this is probably the greatest lo-fi album ever recorded. I got so obsessed with "Tractor Rape Chain" that I played it over and over until my hands were sore. I wonder sometimes if the low production quality hints at more than is actually there, and it is this inference that makes the songs more beautiful. Listen

Lovers - Dark Light (2010)
I'm not sure how such a good band picked such a generic name for both band and album. Anyway, they don't have a Wikipedia article, but I get the impression they are a lesbian indie rock band (in the vein of Tegan and Sara) from the west coast. I heard "Boxer" on the radio in a coffee shop and couldn't get it out of my head. Listen

Mogwai - Rock Action (2001)
This was the first Mogwai album to incorporate more electronic sounds into their music (as with their latest Rave Tapes, which gets an honorable mention below). It also has a lot more vocal parts than usual. This made it a bit divisive with the post-rockers, but in my opinion it is their best. Listen

The Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme (2010)
This appeared on someone's top albums of all time list. When I gave it a listen, I realized I recognized the intro to "Heaven's on Fire" from an ad for Gold Soundz on WREK. Listen

Regina Spektor - Soviet Kitsch (2004)
So technically I heard this back around 2011. I didn't really give it a chance which I've realized was a mistake. This is now my favorite of her albums, although I suspect it is less popular with her "Samson"-loving fans. The uncharacteristic fury of "Your Honor" and the adorable intro for it really make this album, although "Poor Little Rich Boy" is likely the strongest track. Listen

Screaming Females - Ugly (2012)
I first heard this New Jersey punk band's track "Expire" on WREK and became obsessed. I can't comprehend how such fury comes from such a small person. And she can absolutely shred. If you don't believe me, check out their cover of Sheryl Crow. Listen

Sebadoh - Bakesale (1994)
I didn't realize you could get such beautiful melodies from power chords. This band is the result of Lou Barlow not getting along with J Mascis and leaving Dinosaur Jr. Some of the other albums get a little sappy but this one is well balanced. Listen

Sharon Van Etten - Tramp (2012)
I don't know what to say about this one, except that "Give Out" gets stuck in my head like mad. She had assistance from members of The National, Beirut, and Wye Oak, so it must be good. Listen

She Keeps Bees - Nests (2008)
She Keeps Bees has been described as a gender-swapped White Stripes, where she (Jessica Larrabee) is the shredding blues rocker who taught him to play the drums. She's generally compared to Sharon Van Etten and Cat Power, but I think she's more talented than both. Listen

Slowdive - Souvlaki (1993)
There is some chill, ambient stuff here, but this is probably the most extreme on the list. "Alison" starts the album off strong, and the rest keeps the pace. Listen

Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary (2005)
This was the crowning achievement of a short-lived but critically-acclaimed group which split into dozens of other bands including Sunset Rubdown, the Handsome Furs, and Moonface. Every song on this is my favorite. Listen

Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs (2009)
Apparently this band has been around and releasing albums for decades now. Classic indie formula: soft, ostinato rhythm section with experimental guitar melodies. See also: I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One and And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Listen

Wye Oak - Civilian (2011)
I haven't been this obsessed with an album in a very long time. I can't seem to put into words how much I love this album, except that for a few weeks I listened to it at least twice a day. See also: Shriek and If Children. Listen

Honorable Mentions

Galaxie 500 - On Fire (1989)
Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.a.a.d. city (2012)
Mogwai - Rave Tapes (2014)
The National - Trouble Will Find Me (2013)
Cat Power - You Are Free (2003)
This Frontier Needs Heroes - Hooky (2013)

Color of Music II

I long time ago (ages it seems), I posted about mapping the audio spectrum to the visual spectrum after watching Neil Harbisson's TED talk. Well NPR mentioned that same talk today and it got me excited about the project again. I played around some more using my slightly more developed MATLAB and DSP skills, and the results are below.

Quick recap:

Sound and light are both waves though they differ significantly in frequency, medium, propagation type, and speed. A major similarity though is that we have sensory organs for both, and those sensory organs have some interesting quirks. Humans can only perceive small bands of each spectrum. The audio band is typically quoted at 20Hz to 20KHz (point of reference: the A below middle C on a piano is 440Hz). The visible light spectrum goes from roughly 700 nm where infrared transitions to red, to about 400 nm where violet transitions into ultraviolet (it's easier to talk about light in wavelengths=speed of light/frequency because the frequencies are huge numbers). The exact endpoints of these bands vary from person to person, and often with age; however, the range for an average human is well known.

Another quirk of human perception is that we don't perceive equally across these bands. I know a lot more about these limitations in the audio world than in the video world, but there is plenty to read on that if you're interested. We perceive sound on a logarithmic scale, both in loudness and pitch. The decibel scale adjusts for this, so that a 20dB noise sounds twice as loud as a 10dB sound, even though the former is actually about 2.8 times the pressure. And a 40dB sound again sounds twice as loud as that, but is actually 10 times the pressure of 20dB and 28 times the pressure of 10dB. Not only this, but we don't perceive loudness evenly over all frequencies. 

Wikipedia

Lower frequencies sound much quieter than middle and high frequencies, and the function is not an elegant relation. Psychologists studied people's perceived loudness and created the equal-loudness contours. Along the red lines are sounds at a constant "perceived loudness" (measured in phons, a made-up unit which sets it's point of reference so that 20dB of pressure equals 20 phons). For different frequencies, different amounts of pressure are required to reach that phon level. There are a number of functions which approximate the correction factor, such as the A-weighting filter.

Wikipedia

Pitch perception is logarithmic also. Similar to the ELCs, psychologists created a unit for perceived pitch, the mel (where 1000 mel = 1KHz). A pitch that sounds about twice as high (2000 mel) is about 3.5KHz. The equation is below.

Results

The goal then is to have something that hears a pitch, corrects for proper human perception of that pitch, and then maps that frequency's relative position in the audio band to a color in the same relative position in the visual band. Low frequency sounds would map to red and high frequencies to violet. I want the colors to map to the red-green-blue color space, so that they can be represented by a computer (e.g. an LCD display, a 3-color LED, etc.). Of course, there are all sorts of issues with a computer's ability to generate actual colors, which I touched on in my earlier post about this. However, there are rough approximations that can map the color spectrum to RGB. Here's the one I used from StackOverflow (this guy has awesome graphs and seems to have done some impressive work):

The basic algorithm is to take a FFT of an audio sample at regular intervals to find the amplitude of different frequency components. Then those frequencies are converted to mels for the perceived log scale and then mels are mapped to light wavelengths. These wavelengths are then converted into RGB vectors using the algorithm above. The brightness of each channel is then weighted by both the phasor magnitude of the signal and the A-weighting loudness filter. This results in a final RGB vector for each small sample of audio where brightness is relative loudness and color is relative perceived pitch.

I ran this against MATLAB's sample file (a clip of Handel's Messiah). These are with an FFT sampling rate of 100Hz.

I then generated a video to go along with the audio. The first is the standard result, but it flickered unpleasantly, so the second is with a 10 frame (0.1 second) averaging filter applied. Forgive the low quality of each, generating MPEG4 video in MATLAB is not an easy task, and I ended up stringing together a bunch of JPEGs).

Unfortunately, it seems music is too low-bandwidth to see significant changes in pitch. One thing I might do in the future is map notes to colors, rather than the entire band.

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment. :)