The drummer in Maths, Alfie, reminded me of how I used to look and act when I was playing in Abjure, although none of his sticks, cymbals, stands, pedals or drum heads broke so I suppose he must be a gentler chap.

Jairus were on good form. This was the first time I’ve seen them with the new line-up, and they rocked the Portland solidly. Symon Minter’s work with Jairus is among my favourite drumming, but Doug Jenkins worked hard and lived up well to the difficult task of replicating Symon’s beats and fills on the old songs. The new material set the joint reverberating wonderfully.

Pneu were like Lightning Bolt, but more intense. Between songs, as well as keeping a beat going, the drummer kept motioning to the audience to come closer. The crowd became a gathering. He played some drum fills on the beer glass of a lady standing next to the drum kit, and some other fills on the guitarist’s guitar neck. He played the hi-hat with his elbows. Everyone in the room was smiling. It was beautiful. At the end of their set, I overheard a very cute woman in the audience say, I wouldn’t want to be up after them.

Shield Your Eyes were up after them. Not quite my cup of tea, but on the plus side they seem to have a new bassist and she’s very impressive.

It’s not a lot to ask.

I propose that online music stores should, except perhaps when they are selling solitary songs, sell their records in a format that includes all of this. It would probably be something like a JAR file but for musical records instead of Java programs. Each file would have a copy of the inlay card and cover art as a PDF or suchlike, and a playlist in XSPF or similar. The tracks would also be included in the JAR (or whatever; let’s call it a UZQ file in honour of Michael Paradinas’s best-known alias) file as FLAC files.

How hard would this be to implement? For a major online music retailer like 7digital or iTunes, not very difficult. What about player software? Most player software could very rapidly be extended to accommodate such a file structure.

So, why hasn’t this been done? Is the industry waiting for someone to write a UZQ file format specification? Has someone already written an archive file specification for music based on JAR, TAR, XAR or similar, but it didn’t catch on? Please leave your thoughts and insights as comments below. Thanks!

Anyhow, the closing arguments have now been made, and the jury has retired to consider the verdict. Although I have never in my life downloaded a torrent file hosted by The Pirate Bay, and although I am not a lawyer, let alone a Swedish one (and will be simplifying the legal aspect of my argument below), here is why I think the organisation's actions appear to be legal.

The Pirate Bay allows users to upload torrent files, to search for them and to download them. A torrent file contains information identifying a torrent. A torrent is a piece of information hosted by one or more people, which can be downloaded over the internet. The information in the torrent could be a PDF of a pamphlet you wrote and decided to share with the world, or it could be a promotional song a band wanted to release for free in a way that allowed fans to share the cost of hosting it for download. On the other hand, it could be a copy of the latest Madonna album.

Note the clear distinction between the torrent file and the torrent itself. It is much like the difference between a signpost (or a set of directions) and the place to which it points.

Now, it does appear to be the case that users are uploading torrent files to The Pirate Bay which link to torrents containing copyrighted material. If another user downloads that torrent file and uses it to download the copyrighted material in the torrent, the second user has breached copyright law. Those people providing the torrent may also have breached it, since they are offering their own copies for copying. The user who uploaded the torrent file to The Pirate Bay might also have abetted such breaches. But the site which hosted the torrent file has not copied copyrighted material, nor has it offered copyrighted material for copying. Therefore, it has not breached copyright law.

If you're getting lost in all these torrents, here's an analogy.

The market stall

Suppose I set up a market stall furnished with a noticeboard, and I allow passersby – unsupervised, and at their own risk – to post notices to the board and to read ones already there.

If the passersby just post notices about car boot sales and community fairs and other entirely legal activities, then all is hunky-dory.

If a user posts a notice advertising, say, illegal drugs for sale, then this is more problematic. Suppose this happens, and another user uses the instructions in the advert to locate a dealer who does indeed sell him drugs. Would I have abetted that by offering the noticeboard service?

There are four people involved here:

1. me, the provider of the noticeboard service;
2. the noticeboard user – let's call him the adman - who posted the advert offering the illegal drugs;
3. the noticeboard user – let's call this one the addict - who, after reading the ad, bought the advertised drugs; and
4. the dealer who sold the addict the drugs.

I think we can confidently assert that the last three of these people have committed crimes. The dealer sold the drugs, which were illegal to sell; and the addict bought the drugs, which were illegal to own. The adman greatly facilitated the selling of the drugs by posting a notice explicitly referencing them and explaining how to obtain them.

Did I, as the provider of the noticeboard, commit a crime? After all, the noticeboard is where the adman posted his ad, so looking at the noticeboard is how the addict found out where to get his drugs.

* * *

I think the answer's no in this case: unlike the adman, the noticeboard provider has not abetted the selling of the drugs, even though his noticeboard was used to advertise them. The great difference between the adman's actions and the noticeboard provider's is that the adman's were specific to the selling of the drugs, which is illegal, whereas the noticeboard provider's were not.

This is not to say the noticeboard provider wouldn't be irresponsible to leave the adman's advert in place if it came to his attention. But being irresponsible is not the same thing as being illegal.

Similarly, if the communication between the adman and the addict had happened in the form of, say, a conversation in a car, would the manufacturer of the car be liable because it provided a space in which the communication took place? No; no reasonable court would conclude that. The conversational conduct of the occupants in a car is not the manufacturer's legal responsibility. Nor is it the legal responsibility of a noticeboard owner to prevent users from using the noticeboard for illegal purposes: the users are responsible for their own actions.

And so it is with The Pirate Bay, as they make abundantly clear: The responsibility lies upon the user to not spread malicious, false or illegal material using the [torrent] tracker.

For the sake of justice, if nothing else, let us hope the jury is of a similar opinion.

I don’t know what the audio-processing algorithms hearing aids use are, but it’s fairly clear that:

• the user doesn’t have much ability to modify them, except perhaps in the case of highly expensive models.
• they probably aren’t terribly powerful, because – judging by digital hearing aids’ power consumption – the processing power available to them is very small.
• although amplification is one of the primary components of a hearing aid’s processing chain, amplification alone won’t combat most hearing difficulties (certainly not Mel’s).
• they are optimised for speech, rather than music.

So I set about trying a different approach: CPU-intensive audio-processing using the best algorithms I could lay my hands on (i.e. Wavelab’s plugins), optimised for music. I set up an EQ stage at the end of the chain, modelled on the graph of Mel’s auditory response, and started applying filters before it in an attempt to make the end result sound as natural as possible. I had a hunch that multiband compression might be more effective for this than EQ – certainly more effective than EQ alone – and so it proved. Partly this is because multiple stages of EQ filtering can induce “ringing” (they become resonant – an unwanted side-effect). Although multi-band compressors include EQ filters to split the signal into bands, these filters didn’t seem to suffer from the same side effects, perhaps because the compression was attenuating any resonances that might have otherwise been present.

Anyhow, a few months ago – long after my first experiment, I was blessed with a few minutes of the Mel’s time, and we tried some of the filter chains, with The Decline as the test track (because it was the only CD I had to hand with a mix that I was familiar with). We were somewhat successful, but I haven’t had time to do much more with the algorithms since then.

I mentioned to Mel that I thought it would be cool to make portable Sharc DSP devices so people could carry their audio processors around with them, set up so that they could select and edit the algorithms. This isn’t very far-fetched. There are lots of battery-powered, pocket sized audio processors on the market at affordable prices (for instance, the Korg Pandora). I don’t know if they use Sharcs, but I do know that many price-breakthrough audio processors with pluggable algorithms that I’ve seen hit the market in recent years have used Sharcs, so they seemed like a good bet. (Mel knew the same company’s devices by a different name, Blackfin, and suggested those. Then we worked out we were talking about essentially the same thing :-] The Blackfin is a sibling product to the Sharc.)

And this is how I come to be writing a blog post called Earglasses. Sunglasses – filters for your eyes – are easy to get hold of, and not even very hard to make, but filters for your ears aren’t so straightforward. I doubt Mel and I can’t make earfilters possible by ourselves because we’re both too busy with other things, so this is where a community effort might come in handy. I’d love to see a bunch of people working to make earfilters – affordable, portable devices with an audio input and a headphone output and ton of helpful, user-programmable algorithms running in between – a reality. So making this an open hardware, open software project seems like the way forward.

I’ve registered earfilter.org and will set up a wiki there shortly. It will be a place that people can post their filter chains (from Wavelab, Audacity, etc), links to useful plug-ins, suggestions for hardware architecture, and anything else that’s relevant.

* * *

*It turns out there actually is a company manufacturing what they call Earglasses, a kind of latter-day ear trumpet. Whaddya know. Their engineering reminds me of Big Ears, which I’ve known about ever since I took up the dubious habit of reading Canford Audio catalogues as a teenager. (Actually, I learned a lot from those catalogues – and from CA’s competitors’ catalogues – which included pinouts, specs, regulations, construction diagrams and all sorts of other nutritious information for enquiring minds.)

**Mel’s post was, of course, not just about hearing. I’ve focused on that aspect of it here because of the earfilter.org idea, which I wanted to let the world know about. Mel’s underlying point is about communication, and I couldn’t agree with her more: any barrier to communication or comprehension can be frustrating. One of the greatest joys, for me, of living in the information age, is that we’re better placed than any previous generation to reduce or eliminate those barriers. Another great joy is that there are so many people working passionately and enthusiastically to do just that.

Then Pearl Jam fired Dave Abbruzzese. Dave’s Unplugged performance hypnotised me when it was aired, and his drumming on Vs. still inspires me to listen ever more closely to that album – if not to pick up some drumsticks and start playing on the furniture, or simply to bop around. It is paradigmatic drumming for me: an actualisation of a Platonic ideal. I cannot think of another album by any heavy rock band whose drumming surpasses this one in musicality (but I’ve heard a few that come close: Awake, The Need to Change the Mapmaker, Mötley Crüe, Return of Saturn, Infernal Love, The Colour and the Shape, H2O, Built to Last, and the Deftones albums spring to mind). Since Dave had been the most compelling reason of all for me to listen to Pearl Jam, his departure felt like the last straw. If Vitalogy was evidence of the band’s decreasing ability to assess the musical merits (read: release-worthiness) of their recordings, then Abbruzzese’s firing suggested it had also lost the ability to assess the musical talent of its members. My expectations of Pearl Jam dropped off the scale and I lost all but a peripheral interest in their subsequent work.

Today, I listened to Vs. and, while doing so, tried to find out a little more about it, and about the band. I stumbled across this compilation of interview excerpts, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that whatever they may have lost at one time or another, Pearl Jam remained inspirational in other regards (at least, until the time that article was compiled – in 2001). They seem, like Dave Grohl – who was very down-to-earth when I met him at a Rocket From The Crypt show many years ago – to have mastered the rare art of being rock stars while keeping their priorities as thoughtful human beings more-or-less intact. And since their priorities were typically commendable, this is a praise-worthy and inspiring achievement. I’ve seen good musicians in other bands lose perspective under much less pressure, and once or twice I’ve been among them.

Here’s to keeping your head when all around you are losing theirs, and to respecting human art above artifice.