SSS, babe and artifacts

Camille Saint-Saëns

SSS was my school-days secret code for Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 aka "the organ symphony". As for "Babe" - to my chagrin it was plagiarised as the main theme in that unhappy film. As for artifacts: I was listening to an MP3 recording of the symphony played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra this evening. I am generally very pleased with this performance but there is very obvious dynamic compression in the Finalle. For example the sound stage kind of disappears on cymbal crashes. And there is evidence of what are probably MP3 artifacts in some quieter passages.

The symphony is on a grand scale: majestic themes and a large orchestra with organ and piano. I have mentioned elsewhere my infatuation with the organ which I suppose is contributory to my great love for this work. Wikipedia observes that "the lowest pedal notes of both the Poco Adagio and the Maestoso, played on the organ, are of almost inaudibly low frequency. When experienced live in a concert hall equipped with a large concert organ with 32-foot pedal stops (e.g. the Royal Albert Hall Organ) these notes are very dramatic and give a deeply impressive aural experience." As in my school days so now I would love to have the chance to hear the work live. No recording can do justice to this sort of sound. So much for "high-fidelity" - electronics may have advanced radically on so many fronts but sadly it has not yet done justice to audio reproduction. And people do not seem to care which I find very strange.

MP3, like JPG, is lossy data compression. Typically an MP3 data file is a mere 10% of the size of the original. Quality is arguably lost even when analog audio is digitised but it is certainly lost when it is compressed as MP3. And yet if it were not for MP3 we would not have the present day ease of access to music. Similarly the JPG format has spawned the present day proliferation of digital photography. Compression "artifacts" are the difference between the reconstituted and the original audio (or picture). Most of the time we (we being the average populace) are unaware of these artifacts. I used to be very purist about such things but now-a-days, even more so as my hearing is not as good as it was, I am just happy enough to be able to download and store the music that I want, thanks to MP3.