{"id":107,"date":"2006-01-26T15:20:07","date_gmt":"2006-01-26T20:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.elharo.com\/blog\/?p=107"},"modified":"2008-05-28T18:00:29","modified_gmt":"2008-05-28T23:00:29","slug":"the-monkees-most-complex-music-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/pop-culture\/music\/2006\/01\/26\/the-monkees-most-complex-music-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"The Monkees: Most Complex Music Ever?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am not a musician or a composer. I can’t personally hear or judge the complexity of different songs and records. However I recently noticed that maybe I don’t have to. I’ve been reencoding most of my CD library using Lame<\/a>. Lame uses variable bit rate encoding. I’m sure audiophiles will correct this simplistic explanation, but in brief Lame samples different pieces of a song with more or less frequency as necessary to match the music. A pure tone could probably be reproduced using very limited sampling, whereas a dissonant cacophony of white noise with no predictability would require a very high sampling rate. Lame also takes into count the nature of the human ear. Frequencies humans can’t hear can be thrown away, and frequencies we hear preferentially need to be sampled more frequently.
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In compression terms the more random something is the less compressible it is. Purely random data cannot be compressed at all; and this is what allows me to judge the complexity of any given piece of music. The higher a bit rate Lame has to use to compress a piece of music the more complex and less repetitive it is. Most of my songs compress at about 160-180 kbps; but there’s a very wide variation. Tom Petty’s Into the Great Wide Open<\/a><\/cite> is the simplest piece in my collection. It sounds good at only 98 kbps. <\/p>\n

The most complex piece in my collection: Pleasant Valley Sunday<\/cite> by the Monkees at 247 kbps. I always knew there was reason I liked that song. :-)
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I am not a musician or a composer. I can’t personally hear or judge the complexity of different songs and records. However I recently noticed that maybe I don’t have to. I’ve been reencoding most of my CD library using Lame. Lame uses variable bit rate encoding. I’m sure audiophiles will correct this simplistic explanation, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}