10 years ago

[baratron]

Today I remembered something bizarre I did in my first year at college. In my hall of residence, we had individual study-bedroom things arranged in 4s around a central hallway & bathroom. People were in the habit of leaving our bedroom doors open if we were available to talk - and often you'd hear music coming from someone else's room.

Now, there were certain albums, popular in 1994-5, that absolutely EVERYONE had. Things like the first Elastica album, and "Definitely Maybe" by Oasis. So sometimes I'd hear a record coming from someone else's room that I had myself.

So I wondered what would happen if I put on exactly the same record. How cool it would be if the two copies of the music were exactly in sync. Would you get superposition going on, with constructive and destructive interference as you ran between the two sets of speakers?

But it never worked. Even if my hall-mate & I were in clear sight of each other, and visibly counted 3, 2, 1 before hitting Play, we could never get the music in sync. Thinking back on it now, I realise some people's CD players were quicker to spin up than others.

So I gave up on that. And just tried to start my copy with an exact 5 second delay, so anyone coming into our hallway would think there was an echo.

My hall-mates made me keep my door shut after that. And thus, I learnt that even in a purely science-and-engineering college, geeks were in the minority.

Comments

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

When younger (when I was at school) I would sometimes play music on two tape decks. You get those interesting echo effects but also interestingly tape players seem to play at slightly different speeds. The music will sometimes go into sync - and then out again.

Funnily enough I stopped being a geek sometime in the first year when they bored me to tears.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

You're not a geek? WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON MY FRIENDS LIST!

Heh (http://www.livejournal.com/users/baratron/325349.html#cutid1).

[kiya]

keshwyn and I once set up our respective CD players to do Oingo Boingo's "Insanity" in synch. They played at minutely different rates and got weirder and weirder as the song went on . . .

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

Friends used to do that with Sisters of Mercy records - easier to do on vinyl I think.

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

There's an album by the Flaming Lips (Zaireeka) which comes on four CDs, all of which have to be played at the same time. Supposedly it's different on each listen because the synchronisation will be out by different little amounts. In practice it's not very easy. :)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Wow. How many people have 4 CD players?

We only have 3. Plus 2 laptops and a desktop computer, but they're too noisy to use as music-listening devices - & they have crappy speakers.

Is it easy to get? I'm thinking I pretty much have to try it, now :)

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

Not many -- that's why it didn't sell very well.... It's available second-hand, though -- I think we got ours off Amazon marketplace.
We played it using (I think) ipod+portable speakers, desktop, laptop, CD player. However after two attempted listens involving a great deal of running back and forth and pausing and unpausing purplepiano decided to just give in and mix all the tracks together into one mp3. :)