baffies them as much as Beethoven's ONWAI\D A ND UPWAI\D WITH THE AI\T5 Ninth. They match at music as we snatched at movies, filli ng our heads with plural images. A friend with whom MUSIC TO YOUR EARS I was brooding over the way recorded sound supplies a soundtrack for modem The questfor 3-D recording and other mysteries ifsound life said that I ought to seek out Edgar Choueiri, a rocket scientist- really, a BY ADAM GOPNIK rocket scientist!- who has spent a good part of his life worrying about such things. C houeiri, my friend said, had broken the code of something funda mental about the reproduction ofsou nd, and so I went to Princeton, where he has two laboratories, to seek him out. Those of us who have no laboratory at all might regard what Choueiri mod estly calls his "other'' laboratory as the only laboratory that anyone would ever need. It is the size of a small airplane hangar, and it is filled with plasma rocket engines that run on electricity: instead of a wasteful explosion of liquid fuel, a judicious leak of ions pushes the craft forward through a vacuum. If we ever start commuting to Mars, it will likely be a Choueiri-style engine that gets us there and back. The president of the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society, Choueiri is also the president of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences, and is very much, in spirit and appearance, a man of the old Levant. There's the elegant classical nose, the high, anxious brows, and the worried ex pression. In his smaller laboratory, adja Edgar Choueiri wants recorded music to sound as ifthe petformers were in the room. cent to the rocket lab, he works on his musical projects, ttying to force three f all the amazing things the mind albums. My own teen-age kids, as ob dimensional sound from ordinary stereo O does, the most amazing may be sessed with music as I was, have an en speakers. By three-dimensional sound he that it can take sound and turn it into tirely different way of listening. They does not mean wraparound sound, the music, and then take music and turn it ignore the glowing-tube amp and classy kind produced by speakers posted strate into meaning. The rest of the double articulate speakers in our living room; gically around the room. (Elvis had fifty leaps the mind makes look almost easy they bounce instead to tinny earbuds, two speakers installed in his private jet, by comparison: we like pictures of ba and often spend hours listening to Tay the Lisa Marie, aying for that effect.) In bies at picnics in sunlight because, after lor Swift or Radio head on the still more Choueiri's system, when you listen to all, in the world we like sunny days and tinny speakers of their computers. Sound choral music by his hero, Bach- from chubby babies. The stories we tell in lit quality seems secondary to some other any pair of speakers, even the cheap ones erature are like the lies we tell in life. But thing they take from music. Though on your computer-you will hear it com music is simply a set of physical vibra both are far better musicians than I ever ing not from speakers but as iffi·om per tions that reach our eardrums; from was, singing and playing guitar and formers in the room itsel£ those vibrations we make the emotional piano, they have a more limited concep Many of us dream of the moment map of our lives. tion of larger forms, of the record's two when a glint-eyed scientist with a tiny Yet, as generations pass, the style sides, of the symphony's three or four box will do something amazing- tum and manner of those maps change. N ot parts, of the swell and structure of a can off all the lights in the city, or send us long ago, I realized that one of the great tata. It isn't a question of classical tastes back in time, or make us glow emerald changes in my lifetime involves the way against pop; it's a question ofsmall forms and fly. Choueiri is that man, and his we listen to music. fu a teen-ager, I was heard in motion against large forms box is that box. Outside his smaller lab 1 a fanatic record collector, hungry for old heard with solemn intent. "Sgt. Peppet ' is an office whose shelves are fi lled
32 THE NEW YOI\1\EI\. JANUAI\Y 28, 2013 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSEF ASTOR with those strange white dummy heads sion is music-Bach's Mass in B Minor which sound scientists love (though they is for him the "most beautiful thing ever look as impersonal as crash dummies, engineered"-and his dream is to try each one, I learned, was modeUed on a to reproduce its minute subtleties and specific head and given a nickname: thereby make sense of its mysteries. Carl, Philipp, Emanuel). Choueiri plugged in his box, which runs what he rosstalk is the core problem in cre calls his llACCii filter--the acronym also Cating three-dimensional illusions. stands for "Band-Assembled Crosstalk Essentially, we hear stereophonically Cancellation Hierarchy"- m1d Blue and see in depth because we have rwo toothed it to my iPhone. I chose the ears and two eyes. Information from Stones' "Beast ofBurden ," more or less your eyes or your ears arrives slightly at random, and there they were. I do not separated by the width ofyo ur nose or mean that the soundscape was wid the space of your head, and the brain, ened- ! mean that Keith Richards was using a variety of cues, computes the limping over to my left, licking at chords, distance berween the signals and re-cre and Ronnie Wood to the right, absent ates the three-dimensional space the mi ndedly smbbing away, as he does, and signals come from . (The Cyclops could Jagger in the middle nnd Charlie Warr:s nor watch a 3-D adventure movie about and Bill \/\lyman impassive to their rear. Odysseus and the Cyclops.) There are And what made this more amazing is three kinds of cues that your ears and that no one, as the track was recorded in brain use to locate sound in space, layers, over three months in 1977, had Choueiri says. There'si.TJ)., or"inter had any intention of re-creating the di aural time difference," which means mensional layout of the studio. how long it takes for the sound to arrive Choueiri belongs to a distinctly at one car rather than the other. LL.D., modern type: the engineer-aesthete. In or "inter- aural level diftere11Ce," means his Princeton house and in an apart the tiny differences in volume; the mem he has in Manhattan, on the Up sound of a lefi: speaker is very slightly per East Side, he disa-eedy displays col softer for the right ear than it is for the lections ofCub ist design, ceramic pipes, lefi: ear. And, finally, though not least and nonfigu•·ative Greek vases of the important, rhe•·e are the differences in Periclean period. He was brought up sound coloration- the tonality of the in Lebanon in the nineteen-sixties, sound that you hem·, depending, in part, among the Antiochian Orthodox on th e shape of your pinnae, the curly much the most ancient of Christians, outer ears. the Antiochians look upon the Catho But the creation of three-dimen lics rather the v.tay Boston Episcopalians sional sound depends on each ear's hear look upon Appalachian snake hand ing only what it's supposed to hear. lers--and he \>vrites poetry in at least When you listen to your stereo speakers, two of h is many languages. Teased the right ear hears sound not just from about being an aesthete in the guise of the right channel, the sound intended an engineer, he might nod cryptically for it, but also from the left channel, the and, later that day, send a poem he sound intended for the left ear. The same wrote, several years ago, in French, a thing happens when you look at a flat rueful personal testament called, simply, representation of a three-dimensional "L'Esthete." He is also an adept in the space: the right eye sees what the left eye art of Zajal, an ancient Arabic fonn of is looking at. Cancelling the "crosstalk" freestyle rap in which rwo speakers de is the key to creating an illusion of bate a subject in impro"ised song, chant depth. It's easy to do with your eyes. ing back and forth in strict strophic "You just put a physical barrier between verse. (Many ofhis Zajal debates can be the two eyes, show each one a slightly found on YouTube, posted by hard different image, and, presto, you see in core Zajal fans.) Yet his passion for three dimensions," Choueiri explains. those fonns is mixed with a faith that The same principle holds for sound, beautiful things and sounds can be fully and the same solutions are in some ways understood, and even mechani7.ed, like possible. "To get binaural sound is not the plasma propulsion that makes a thar hard," Choueiri says. "You can do rocket move forward. His primary pas- crosstalk cancellation with a mattress!
THE NEW 'rOI\KEI\. JAI\\!Am' 28. 2013 33 Really! Just place a mattress between XTC than anyone had previously that ofbeing in a concert hall on a good your two speakers, press your nose imagined possible, so that the signal afternoon, runs tl1rough your body. against one end so that each ear has a will never discolor, whatever the shape The added bonus is that the sound of different channel, and you get a very ro ofyour pinnae and however you swivel all stereo-era recordings, those of the bust three-dimensional effect." There your head. And yet the three-dimen past sixty or so years, can easily become are drawbacks. ''It's clumsy, awkward, sional illusion remains stable. "The three-dimensional, because they were and ugly," Choueiri goes on, "and it has human ear-brain system is good at all recorded with at least two micro the important psychological difficulty, of discerning changes in sound level," phones-they have sufficient informa course, of working only until your wife Choueiri explains, "bltt subtle changes tion encoded within them to switch comes home." You'd think headphones in the rel..'ltive timing between the wave over to 3-D. "It's exactly as if every would do the trick, nearly dividing the components ofa sound are too sublim movie since the nineteen-fifties had, aural feeds. But, Choueiri O.]>lains, in inal for humans to detect. The BACCH for some reason, been filmed with two the real world, when you move your filter, essentially, shifts the XTC action cameras, even when it wasn't me:lnt for head, the sound signals change a little, from the more palpable level domain 3-D projection," Choueiri says. "You and the brain knows where the sounds called the amplitude domain-to the would have this entire signal latent in are coming from. That doesn't happen more subliminal temporal domain, the film, even ifit hadn't been employed with headphones, so the mind decides called the phase domain." Since our for the effect." that the sound source can't be "out there." brains are hypersensitive to color and Several catches remain. The "sweet Instead, as Choue.iri says, "the sound signal but rather dumb when it comes spot'' of rhe 3-D effect- the space in image collapses into your head." to tiny time changes the illusion is con which a single listener perceives it in Thinking about water wmres helps to vincing, bur the differences that pro full- is small, with room enough for elucidate the solution. Suppose, Choueiri duce it are too subtle to notice. just the single listener. Choueiri has :1 says, you dropped two pebbles in a pond. Choueiri, as an amateur closeup solution for this problem, but it is of Their wave patterns, as they spread, card magician, sees a likeness between Rube Goldberg-like complexity. "We would intersect. In theory, ifyou dropped what he has done and a theory of magic have a motion-capture camera placed a third pebble where one ofthe two peb called Too Perfect Theory. Basically, above the filter, and all you have to do is bles originally dropped, and timed its Too Perfect Theory says rh:1t error can to signal ir," he says, demonstrating by impact perfecdy, you could create waves reinforce illusion. Any trick suggesting waving in the air, but only once, like a that would arrive at the left ear of some only one logical path, no matter how taciturn drowning man. "And it takes water nymph just in time to cancel out skillfi.ally done, will be discomfiting ro your picture- captures your unique the v.eaves from the right pebble. The a spectator, while the tricks that please skeletal structure. Then, as you wander crests of one would coincide with the do so because the magician has, so to ar·olmd the room, it tracks you, and troughs ofthe other, creating a little mne speak, opened many different doors for sends the information on your location of silence. Then you'd do the same for the bemused watcher to explore. Pass a to the filter, so that it au tomarimlly ad the other pebble's waves and the other cigarette through a quarter, and every justs the sweet spot." This means having ear. There wouldn't be any crosstalk. spectator will deduce a hinged hole a motion-capture camera in your living The catch with previous attempts at in the coin. Pass a cigarette through a room to track the musical husband as he that kind of crosstalk cancellation, or coin, and then lead the viewer to won roams in tune with the music, and the "XTC," as it's known in the field, is der whether it might be the cigarette prospects of household resistance, as that the sound coloration, the timbre of that contains the gimmick-anything Choueiri is the fi rst ro admit, cannot be any particular instrument, is extremely that broadens or coarsens the path en dismissed. sensitive to small changes in position. a·iches the effect. Choueiri: "Both tech If you move your head even slightly, niques-the magician's and that behind et more than wave forms and pin the wave interferences get out of the BACCH filtea-rely on using imper Ynae are at play when we listen to synch. As a result, the sound color fection to shift the attention from the music. We hear music with our minds. ation distorts, in a sort of acoustic palpable to the subliminal." Reproduction isn't transparent. One of moire. Pianos sound as tinny as xylo Choueiri's system can produce r·e Choueiri's favorite cautionary tales is of phones. Engineers have long known markable effects fi·om ordinary speak an experiment conducted during the that the "eay to fix this is to feed "error" ers: the sound of a fly bu7:~:ing in a cir First \!1/orld War, in which a tinny Vic into the design of the XTC wave. But cle around your head; the sensation of trola recording and an operatic soprano that, it was feared, would tend to de someone walking toward you and then were cloaked in darkness at Carnegie stroy the 3-D eftect. It's as if the guy whispering in your ea.-. But its real value Hall; the auditors were unable to tell dropping the pebbles had to drop big to the musiclover, he believes, is that it one from the other. The audience's will ger pebbles in; the troughs created by eliminates the strain and tension oflis to hear perfect sound mattered as much the bigger pebbles would at some point tening to two-dimensional music. Lis as the perfection of the sound heard. become wildly out ofproportion to the ten to a Mozart divertimento through And it's alarmingly easy to mistake the crests ofthe otiginal pebble. the BACCH filter, and-apart from the apprehended sound for the actual sig Choueiri has discovered a way to uncanny experience ofdepth - a happy nal. Consider the story of Hugo Rie feed more error into the designs of the sense of release, of calm serenity, like mann, a great nineteenth-century Ger-
34- 1l£ NEW YOfll(EJt .!AI~ 28. 2013 man musicologist, who insisted that he for the better-for one thing, there is the endless, shifting weather-cover of had discovered "undertones," sympa more good food in the city than there sound that it does for my kids, a cloud thetic vibrations that could be heard be ever vms before, most of it genuinely in every sense, a perpetual availability of neath a single note, just as "overtones" rooted in the culture of~ ebec, where emotion to suit a mood and moment. are known to resonate above it. For a the fancy food used to be touched by a Music meant difficulty-and, when the while, Riemann's "undertones" were a colonial cringe toward France. But the difficulty was overcome, the possibili mainstay of music theory, until modern places I had known and the people I ties of life, too. It was something to acoustic analysis made it plain that no had grown up with in the old Anglo master. undertones exist, and that Riemann had phone quarters were largely gone. I The faculty club at McGill, a cozy somehow wished them into existence, walked down St. Catherine Street, the converted brownstone, hadn't changed and then into his ears and those of his main drag of Montreal, now drabber since my futher lunched there, on fad students. Listening and wanting are in than it once was, and past the site of a ing Anglo-Canadian specialties. (I re tricately entangled, in ways that may long-vanished sheet- music store, In called once ordering steak-and-kidney evade any measure. Talking to Choueiri, ternational Music, where upstairs, in a pie, and picking past the kidneys.) I I had learned a lot about how we listen kind of keyboard bordello, you used to hadn't seen Bregman since my wedding to music but was still struggling with the be able to rent one of a chipped set of day, thirty yeru·s earlier. He had aged other question: why we listen to it. Who rickety, out-of-tune pianos for half an and whitened over that time, but his could teach me something about that hour at a time. I would spend happy mind was as gently acute as I remem deeper level, not just where sound be afternoons away from school dallying bered. Among highly intelligent people, comes music but where music becomes with theJeromeKernandP. G . Wade there are two kinds of minds, the sharp meaning? house song "Bill," with its sharp edge of and the soft. We expect smart people to I discovered that perhaps the densest the dominant-seventh chords and its have minds like swords, made to fight concentration of sound scholars in the pretty major- seventh cadence. How and slash and slay. Soft smart minds, world could be found in my home town the chords had amazed me by their in though, ru·e ofanother, rru·er kind. They of Montreal, at McGill University, where stant assertion ofemotion: the poignant, absorb great quantities ofdata and opin I, along with five brothers and sisters, wistful C-major seventh (making its re ion, often silently, even sluggishly, and went to school. (And where my parents signed move to F-major seventh) had turn them around slowly until a solution taught for many decades.) One reason for got me through teen-age herutbreak. In appears. Darwin is probably the best this vvas the presence of the psychologist those days, even buying records was al instance of the soft style in science his Albert Bregman, a former professor of most as exciting, and usually as fiustr·at tory, and Bregman is very much in this mine, who spent almost fifty years at Mc ing, as chasing girls. I could still recall soft- mind tradition. Sitting down for Gill studying the psychology of sound, finding a copy of the long-out-of-print lunch, I haltingly tried to describe and whose masterwork, the eight-hun "Ella Sings Gershwin," with Ellis Lar Choueiri's work in 3-D sound, and he dred-page "Auditory Scene Analysis: kins, and racing home, to find out what quietly nodded. ''Yes, I suppose he must The Perceptual Organization of Sound;' "Someone to Watch Over Me'' sounded be finding a way of re-creating the de remains a basic text in the field . like when played by someone who knew lays in the apperu·ance of the signal to Bregman was a mentor to many of how. Music represented for me not the ear," he said, "though I suppose he'd the significant figw-es in the grov,rth of what has come to be called "cognitive science," that new discipline in which psychology, philosophy, computer sci ence, and, sometimes, sociology and evolutionary biology all meet. At a less exalted level, he also gave me some of the best advice I've ever received. Trying to decide whether to major in psychol ogy or art history, I had gone to his office to see what he thought. He squinted and lowered his head. "Is this a hard choice for you?" he demanded. Yes! I cried. "Oh," he said, springing back up cheerfully. "In that case, it doesn't matter. If it's a hard decision, then there's always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant." Montreal has changed in the twenty five-plus years since I left, and mostly "Someday, son, all this will be yours." have to base it on generalized features of human heads? Or else broaden the sig nal. But either way it must have a really EARLY ELEGY: BARBER smaU spatial mnge, right'" I weakly agreed. Scissors and straight razors he keeps honed Having lunch with us was Robert in case-sits in one of the chairs £·1eing Zatorre, an organist turned neuroscien a wall of empty mirrors reflecting mirrors tist, and an expert on what music actu behind him, rhe backs ofhis head, one after ally does to the bmin. Zatorre explained the shrunken, redundant other. Finally, that there seem to be two "systems" in vvith a towel, he covers the television screen the brain that respond to music. One is mounted on the waU, the way he might- nearing "veridical," and responds to the pleasant the end of the day-a parakeet in a cage. sounds of the so ngs we already know. The other is "sequential": it anticipates - Claudia EmeTJ01l the next note or harmonic move in an unfamiliar phrase of music and is stim ulated when the music follows the logic sound. On a strange and wonderful would be a heard sentence that was cre of the notes or surprises us in some way CD, Bregman has catalogued and ated by the accidental composition of that isn't merely ru·bitrary. We recall the named such auditory illusions with the voices oftwo persons who just hap meaning of single hannoni es &om the charming specificity, including "Segre pened to be spe~tking hearing tries hard to avoid chi "learn" music as we learn language, and, tones" (we hear a melody separately meric percepts, but music often tries to with both, our mind disgu.ises from us fi·om any noise that might occur right in create them. It may wane the listener to the complexity of our brain's calcula irs midst; we don't strain to hear the accept the simult
36 1l£ NEW YOfll(ER. .!AI'UO.l\Y 28. 2013 Academy ofLagado in "Gulliver's T rav work, or how universal they can be the amplitude and timing of the XTC els." He studies systematically things shown to be. We really know. And if I wave, Levitin could show d1at what re that one would not have thought open had to, so to speak, explain to the muse ally moves us in music is thevitalsign of to systematic study. In one music room, ofmusicwhat I'm ttyingto do in my life a human hand, in all its unsteady and there is a hyper-cold bath; you dip your now, I'd say, I'm trying to show that broken grace. (Too much imperfection ann until it becomes painful--.ts it very what you make seem so beauti1i.•lly sim and it sounds like a madman playing; quickly does-and then you listen to ple is really, really hard. So hard that you too little, and it sounds like a robot.) music. Levitin and his students have have to study it note by note." Ella singing Gersh~n matters because shown that you feel less pain if you lis Later on, I asked Levitin about Rie Ella knows when to make the words ten to music and much less pain ifyou mann and his missing undettones. He warble, and Ellis Larkins knows when listen to music you like and have chosen pointed out that most of the lowest to make the keyboard sigh. The art is yourself, and, as an improbable older ex notes on most pianos are actually in the petfected impetfection. periment predicted, that men report ferred rather than heard. T he sound much less pain if they are in the pres board on most pianos isn't long enough n the academy, there is another ac ence of a woman whom they are tl)~ng to produce the bottom octave, but me I count ofhow music works. The new to impress with this strange sort of brain hears me right overtones, which discipli ne of"sound studies" takes as its music appreciation. me piano can produce, and neurons in subject what might be called me sociol Levitin's prize possession is what the brain begin to fire at the frequency ogy of sound- how styles of recorded might be called d1e Expressive Piano. of the missing bass note. Riemann may music interact with social aspirations It's a Yamaha D isklavier, a kind of have been hearing "undertones" of that and the friction of economic classes, electronically assisted player piano. Ir sort, unknown to the psychology of his producing a map ofmu sic listening mat can record d1e precise fingering and time, and was apdy, if not entirely accu has more to do with money and mass pressure of a pianist, and then play it rately, generali'l.ing fi·om them. Here, I culture than with the W THE r-l:W \'01\KEI\. JANUARY 28. 2013 37 cult of attention that placed the solitary alienated (and almost always male) lis tener in a temple ofsilence, the concert hall. Everyone faces forward, no one moves, applause is tightly regimented, and no one ever does the things that human beings normally do when they hear music: dance, move, act, eat, flirt. "It isn't strange that the MP3 genera tion walks around with earbuds on and listens to music while they're doing ev erything else," Sterne says. "That's the normal human condition of listening. It's very, very unusual to have any con cept of music apart from a dance prac tice-the separation of music and dance is very late and highly unusual." T he so ciologisrs, his work suggests, are dissolv ing music back into the field of sound from which an act ofW estern will has "Howard takes all theflu shots that other employees refuse to take. " divorced it. Sterne's diagnosis ofChoueiri and • the other high-end researchers is that "they're t1ying to resolve the an.xiety of the modern by reproducing the an.xiety therefore that.' Sure, everyone can agree "We have the sto1y ofever -increas of the modern." l-Ie m eans that the that there's a biological part of e.xperi ingverisimilirude;' he s.'\ys. "Bur, through an.xiety that produced the isolated ence. For me, I'm much more interested our the stories of infrastructures that urban listener in the concert hall is only in rhe questions about what we can and transmit electronic signals, there's this aggravated by the technology that, pre should change. I think actually that the very basic engineering problem: you've tending to liberate listening from the fundamental insight ofpsycho-acoustics produced this e.'Cperience and over here concert space, simply makes for more is incredibly profound for a humanist. you have this storage medimn and you lonely domestic concert halls. The Human ears aren't natural reflectors of want to put as much as possible on it, sweet spot on the sofa is a sad place sound in the world. T hey are themselves but you wantto reduce the cost ofd oing to be. these transducers rhar make reality it." That's what happened with the ad I am, both by temperament and by the perception of sound is nor a mirror vent ofMP3s: "They say, We'd really training, a little alle1-gic to this kind of of nature. Therefore, perception in a like to transmit CD-quality sound thinking, but there is no denying that vroy make.r sounds, and it makes sounds through the lines, but there's not it adds a necessary historical dimen differendy from a microphone and a enough bandwidth, so we have to do sion to the study of music's workings. computer detecting vibrations out in something. And they investigate what Choueiri' s project could, as Sterne sug the world." parts ofthe sound people are unlikely to gested, be seen as an allegory ofthe en Sterne's preoccupation is with the fal hear-you omit those parts and send gineer's dream: incredible intelligence lacy of·w hat one might call the official, rhe rest down the line. That's also what put to work to solve a problem whose Whig history of sound recording-a happened in rhe phone line way back solution merely re-states the problem. constant ascension to better fidelity, the when. Bell Labs' human-hearing re In this view, the BACCH filter, with its triumph ofs ignal over noise. Instead, he search goes back to the twenties: we narrow listening spot and irs Rube emphasizes the double movement where don't want to reproduce sound that Goldberg-style machinery to rake that technology makes rhe musical signal people don't need to hear and still have sweet spot with you, is an elaborate ode more and more compressed, more intelligible phone conversations. All of to a dying practice: it is a way ofmech "lossy" than it ever v.>as before, as is the information science comes out ofthese anizing the cultural prestige of atten case with the information in an MP3. acoustic questions from the nineteen tion, of enforcing the kind of listening What's lost in the compression process twenties- Bell Labs people trying to that we think we ought to give to mu is supplied by both the mind's capacity figure out how to cram more signals sic and mostly don't. There doesn't, to fill in musical gaps and rhe public's into a phone line." in truth, seem to be much dissatisfac willingness to tolerate what is in some The notion ofa pure musical experi tion with what people have now; those ways a worse product in exchange for ence is, for Sterne and his cohorts, the tiny, tinny earbuds playing music from the constant novelty ofa changing one. last sad effort of a nineteenth-century derail-diminished MP3s are satisfying 38 1l£ NEW Y()f\J(EJ\. JAl'lJO.l\Y 28. 2013 because, as Sterne says, in all but a technically speaking, "horrendous," he handful of aberrant cases nobody sits thought that the pleasure to be had from a down to listen to music. scratchy record ofRosalyn T ureck playing a Bach prelude came through unscathed. "'\ ]{ Jhen I got back to New York, "I often use it when I am in bed reading or V V Choueiri had something new to rela.xing," he wrote me later, admitting show me--a true Mr. Peabody device, that "our minds tend to automatically which he calls the Stereo Purifier. Iris de compensate for the shortcomings in toruli signed to fir into one large box, and to fidelity and get to the music almost irre simplify the business of finding the one spectively of how shrouded the sound is." right filter for your palticular ears. Inside He likened it to "a sublime apple pie cl1:1t the box is jammed every imaginable audio transcends its unpabrable shortening. • cable connector, to accommodate any Reading his letter, I was put in mind possible li stening system, and jammed of an entry I had recently come across in among all the cables and electronic com a diary kept by the English essayist Ed ponents is a Mac Mini and the BACCH ward Marsh, written in England at the filter. In this newest iteration, everything height of the Blit-L, about listening to a has been automated-in neat, self-gen concert of madrigals on a floating plat erated, Deco graphics-so that the tire form in Cambridge. "The river lined with some adjustments rhm he h."\CI to make by canoes and punts, and crowds sitting on hand before can now be done in half a the banks or standing on the grass, in a minute. You put on in-ear microphones, delightful atmosphere ofjoy in widest and the Stereo Purifier measures the air commonalty spread," he wrote. "The p•·essure ar the entrance of the car canal. programmes were sold out by the time I Choueiri admitted that the Stereo got there, so I don't know what they Purifier was more likely to flourish as an sang-but it was beautifully done, and aid to video gaming than as a way to such a lovely calm bright warm evening." hear Baroque choral music. "There may That is music as we hear it, and its be new 3-D audio techniques," he said, pleasure, as we know it, with the beauti "that will combine ambisonics and bin ful train ofund ivided adjectives-lovely aural dimensionality, and that would be calm and bright and wann. To worship the ultimate delivery system." Choueiri music's fuUness as a f.'lbric of sound is to can actually imagine a new musical deny its thickness as e.xperience. The an frontier where you could go to hear swer to Bregman's question "Why do we Bach at Carnegie Hall with micro like music?" isn't this thing or that thing phones in your ears, and come home to but many things at once pressing down reproduce the concert in your living hard, and then lightly, on our minds, as room, exacdy as you'd heard it. Ellis Larkins presses on the keyboard. He was, I thought, at once encour The few writers we think ofwho capture aged by the commercial attention the something of music on the page do so BAC'C'"fi filter was beginning ro receive- not with a crisp formula or any kind of it has become available in what's called a technical precision but through a gentle, Jambox, and there is lots ofChinese in fluid, many-adjectived, metaphoric web teresr-and discouraged by the reali7.a ofwords, laid out over the pool ofsound. tion that the "high end" of music listen Music is a current ofhard choices, made ing was ve•y small. Vve listened to Bach, to seem e-.1.sy by the mind. I like to think and then sat briefly in silence, and I sud ofChoueiri, amid his dreams ofdimen denly remembered something rd been sional music, listening to his small im meaningtoaskhim. Passing through the perfect record-player before he goes to bedroom on an earlier musical visit, I had sleep. I can imagine the sound ofit rrav· noticed that Choueiri had a small, old cUing across the New York night, calm tashioned record-player by his bed, the and bright and happy, filling all the ears kind I had as a child. I asked him whar it and spaces berween. • was, and why he had it near his bed. I twas, it turned out, a single-tube mon aural record-player made the year he was NEWYORKE R.COM/GO/OUTLOUD born, 1961, and though irs fidelity was, A convefSdtion with Adam Gop1tik. ll-E lEW 'rOIIKEII. JANJAfl:r' 26. 200 39