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Things 117: Dubstep special

Our story begins with this video, in which a rather sharp-looking old dude performs some kind of strange traditional dance, and some wag replaces the soundtrack:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0J4SHJdvY

I originally saw this posted on BoingBoing, where Cory Doctorow described it as “fast-footed country dancing with a dubstep soundtrack”. Within minutes, commenters disagreed with the dubstep diagnosis, with hardwarejunkie9 observing:

I think we all need to shake this “everything’s dubstep” problem we have.

This begs the question: what is dubstep?

A good place to start is this animated visualisation, which charts the evolution of different musical genres from one to another over time, and also by location (which is quite a feat of research and design).

What struck me most about this data was a comparatively trivial point: dubstep is apparently the only new genre to emerge in the first decade of the 21st century.

We might wonder how long it takes for a genre to be recognised, and how we should define what constitutes a genre anyway. These are very tough questions, and I’m going to sidestep them entirely by instead waving my hands generally in the direction of this trended search volume data from Google.

So it seems that dubstep looks like a duck and sounds like a duck and so probably is a duck, if by ‘duck’ we mean musical genre.

We come now to the critical question: how can we successfully identify if something could fairly be described as dubstep?

A very informative definition was given by Bassnectar in an interview in 2007, with remarkable aplomb and cogency for an off-the-cuff response, which you would ideally watch with the visual aids in this video if there wasn’t some kind of dispute over the use of the audio, so instead you need to listen to the first 4 minutes of the full audio interview here:

Without the build-up it doesn’t mean much, but if you don’t have the time or audio capability to listen to that right now, his conclusion is:

Dubstep is […] this ultra-slow ultra-dirty spawn of hip-hop […] at a half-time breakbeat speed, so it feels abnormally slow, and just gives this really heavy feel.

Actually, that doesn’t sound very cogent at all in isolation, so I guess you really do have to listen to the whole thing. Sorry.

Anyway, there are some who say this definition is outdated, but at this late point in the cycle it seems likely that splinter subgenres are blurring the definition, and we may need a few more years of hindsight to accurately identify where dubstep ends and something new begins.

Meanwhile, this post has gone on for far too long without actually giving any examples of real live dubstep in the wild. I like to use this video as an illustrative example, since it also shows it’s possible to retain a performance element (including a self-indulgent “solo” interlude) and demonstration of skill in creating live electronic music, which some people feel are necessary for a genre to attain some sense of legitimacy:

Finally, some people will discount a musical genre if you can’t dance to it. While hardly something accessible to the typical club goer, I think this video demonstrates a closer link between movement and sound than many more conventionally danceable genres achieve:

As you might have noticed, there’s a notable difference in the music between those last two videos, and I think this represents one of the ways in which dubstep is beginning to diverge towards new genres after over a decade of development.

So, there you have it. Now you too can argue about what is and is not dubstep in the comments under any modern electronic music video on youtube.

Further listening:
Goldie Lookin’ Chain’s “Dubstep Christmas”
One hour of looped dubstep cat
Dubstep radio on last.fm

–@metatim

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Things 116: Cloud Phase Time-Lapse, 3D Map, Better Tube Map

Video
Point a camera at the sky, create a time lapse video of the clouds. Do the same thing every day of the year. Play back all the videos simultaneously in a grid. Voilà: a kind of phase-diagram visualisation, with seconds representing minutes and space representing seasons. Brilliant.

More detail here. Via Data Pointed.

Link
This is apparently pretty old, and with Google Earth and Street View already taken for granted it’s difficult to appreciate how impressive this is: in-browser 3D maps of major cities by Nokia. A plugin is required, and the sad thing is that I imagine that small barrier is enough to vastly reduce the number of people that will actually try it out.

Picture
Various incarnations of the London tube map regularly feature in Things: in the past I’ve posted about a to-scale tube map, a curvy tube map, and a travel-time interactive tube map.

Unsurprisingly, I rather like Mark Noad’s version, which is an ambitious attempt to make a tube map that is not just interestingly different but actually better than the current canonical version. By retaining the simplicity of design but improving geographic accuracy, I would say it succeeds.

Puzzle
This week, a very first world problem. If voice recognition software fails to understand something you say (e.g. Google voice search, xBox 360 Kinect voice commands, or Siri), what do you do? Having had this happen a few times now, I’m very aware that the natural human response of just saying the same thing but louder might not actually be the best thing to do. (I also imagine my neighbours don’t need to hear me shouting “Xbox go back! Xbox! Go! Back! Xbox go frickin’ back! Fine, don’t then!”)

For example, other approaches to ensure your input is recognised could include: reduce background noise; enunciate more clearly; speak in a monotone; move closer to or further away from the microphone; use a different phrasing; or attempt to put on an American accent.

Which of these is most likely to work? Is there a better approach that I’ve not included here? Is just speaking loudly actually the best approach after all?

Or is the failure rate of voice recognition inevitable and unacceptable in most contexts, and the whole notion flawed from the outset?

@metatim

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Things 114: Kern Test, Robot Bird, Social Graph, Too Soon To Say

Puzzle
This week, try testing your ability to kern.

If you liked that, try the splines.

Video
It’s easy to get overexcited about human progress, when in the grand scheme of things we’re still pretty small fry. I would periodically remind myself of this by considering that for all our ingenuity, we still couldn’t make a robot the size of a bird that could fly like a bird. Thanks to the determined efforts of Festo, I’m going to need to come up with something else.

Link
I’ve seen this link crop up in a few places now, but for good reason – I think this is some really important stuff that we are collectively getting wrong on a large scale right now: “The Social Graph is Neither” by maciej.

Cutting large swathes of great text for concision, here’s my favourite part of the  argument:

[…] declaring relationships explicitly is a social act […] Social graph proponents seem uninterested in th[is] signaling problem. […] [and] how does cutting ties actually work socially? […]  In real life, all relationships fade naturally if you don’t maintain them, but right now social networks preserve ties in amber until we explicitly break them […] Can I unfollow my ex now, or is that going to make her think I’m still hung up on her?

[…] You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong.

However, after a lot of good stuff, it ends with something of a shrug:

It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.

I’m not sure that’s quite the right way to put it. I don’t think it’s about bringing our social lives online. Its more about augmenting our social lives with online functionality that goes with the grain of human nature.

That said, leaving ourselves enough freedom is critical. Quite how we do that is a topic for another day.

Quote
In the early 1970’s, Richard Nixon asked Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution. Zhou notoriously responded:

It is too soon to say.

Which everyone thought was quite wonderfully representative of Chinese sagacity.

This year it emerged that the whole thing was a misunderstanding too delicious to invite correction, as Zhou thought Nixon was referring to the much more recent student riots in Paris.

But this doesn’t matter, because the misread quote still stands as a useful reminder that we should err towards taking a longer-term view when evaluating the benefits of things. On a similar note, Ben Hecht says:

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Last Week’s Question
Last week I asked: when someone says “next Thursday” on a Monday, which Thursday do they mean?

Richard’s response was the same as mine – always clarify. However, where I was aware of two interpretations, he identified three [This part added thanks to Richard’s clarification – T.M. 25/11/11]:

I have come across three possible scenarios:

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(a) this = first occurrence, next = second occurrence
(b) this = occurrence in the week you’re in, next = occurrence in the following week
(c) this = occurrence in the week you’re in, next = first occurrence

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I don’t think anyone actually uses (a).
Personally I use (b).
I have met people who use (c).

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To give some examples, on a Tuesday, referring to “This Monday”
and “Next Monday”.

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(a) This Monday = 6 days times, Next Monday = 13 days time
(b) This Monday = -1 days time, Next Monday = 6 days time
(c) This Monday = -1 days time, Next Monday = 6 days time

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I can’t think of anyone who would use (a).  (b) and (c) agree.

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Another example, on a Tuesday, referring to “This Friday” and
“Next Friday”.

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(a) This Friday = 3 days times, Next Friday = 10 days time
(b) This Friday = 3 days time, Next Friday = 10 days time
(c) This Friday = 3 days time, Next Friday = 3 days time

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(a) is indistinguishable from (b), hence somewhere who is a (c)
might assume upon hearing (b) that their algorithm is actually
(a).  I would use (b).  I have met people who use (c).

However, I now wonder if this is paranoia – how divided are we really on this issue? Do the vast majority of people use one of these interpretations? My plan is to start to collect instances of people using this form of date referral, noting on which weekday it was said, and which day they were intending to refer to. I’ll report the results here when I have enough data, which may take a few years.

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Things 113: Next Thursday, Learning to Cheat, Bullet Time

Question
When someone says “next Thursday” on a Monday, which Thursday do they mean?

Tim Link
Playing a trading/smuggling game at the recent Sandpit event at the National Maritime Museum, I did something more evil than I knew I was capable of. That got me thinking about the ethics of lying, what games taught me about that, and exactly how rules-based games can enable people to learn about breaking rules. The post is illustrated with playing cards, since I had some to hand.

Link
Two advantages of eBooks are that book size hardly matters, and you can easily link from one page to any other page. Now think about what this means for the choose-your-own-adventure genre. Jon Ingold found you could take a totally different approach, and produced a playable murder mystery that would be as tall as a house were it printed physically.

Quote
A nice way to remember confirmation bias:

Tolstoy: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

Picture
“Bullet time”