60 Second Sonata For The Disconcertion Of Dogs

Running Time: 1:00

Released On: "False Noise" - Various Artists (22 tracks)

Label: Charlie Dog Records

Release Date: 16th July 2021

Format: Download

Buy Link: Bandcamp

< We put it on our website at 320kbps so it SHOULD actually work!

o

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men! When we saw our good friend Mr. Eel calling out for tracks for a compilation called False Noise, we were intrigued. Is that 'a thing'? What does it mean? We're still none the wiser, but thinking about it at the time lead us to here. Wouldn't it be funny, we thought, to do a short piece at very high frequencies, so although you could see it was actually there (well, if you had audio editing software), you probably wouldn't hear a thing? Of course it would!

"Can YOU hear it?" We could say in posts.
"Is YOUR pet behaving strangely?"
It would have given people a laugh, eh? And fuck knows we could all do with one the way things have been for the last 18 months! Now, I guess it doesn't really need saying, but creating and editing a piece you can't actually hear has a rather high difficulty potential, so we thought we'd keep it simple. Maybe just a pure sine wave, circa 20,000Hz, drifting from speaker to speaker and back again. Twice. No point being too simple, but so long as it was enough for people to see a noticeable effect on their dogs, we'd be happy. When we'd finished our light-hearted masterpiece, we did some artwork to go with it (the confused cartoon doggy in the Magic Bullet t-shirt) and duly sent it off to the Charlie Dog man.
"Well played." Said he, appreciating our humorous concept.

Nice man. And sure enough, come July 16th, there it was on the Bandcamp release, ready for the world to hear. Or so it should have been. Now I don't know why, it's not like I didn't trust anybody involved, idle curiosity maybe, but I just thought I'd record the playback from Bandcamp to see that it came out okay. Note I said 'see', rather than 'hear'. However, when I tried this, the level meter simply flatlined. Nada. Now, I know that Bandcamp don't stream at the 1411kbps resolution of the WAV files you provide (it's worth noting this doesn't affect downloads!), there would undoubtedly be a lot of hanging browsers if they did, but I didn't realise it was quite as low as 128k. And there lies the problem; when the audio file is compressed that small, it sacrifices those high frequencies, regarding them as superfluous. Which, to be fair, they normally would be, but not when that's the whole point of doing them, eh?

As uploaded to Bandcamp - WAV format at 1411kbps - 100% visible

As uploaded to Reverbnation - MP3 format at 320kbps - still there

As streamed back by both - MP3 format at 128kbps - all gone, silencio...

Being only a minute long, I could get it on Reverbnation at 320k and still be seriously shy of the 8MB file size limit, so decided that would be the platform for our little gag instead. Only it turned out that Reverbnation don't stream MP3's at the resolution you upload them, you've guessed it, they stream at 128k too. Skit and I have never been ones to let abject failure stop us from doing stuff anyway, so we went ahead with the joke postings, simply adding by way of proviso;

"The reasons for your answers won't be what you think!
Be here tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel..."

Of course, nobody could hear the track (which probably would have been the case anyway) and no pets took a blind bit of notice, because Reverbnation streamed one minute of total silence instead. Thanks for that. Bullet (the dog in the picture) was most upset, but we did give him a nice juicy cartoon bone to make up for it. Actually, while we're at it, Skit and I would like to apologise to dogs everywhere. Oh, there is one bit of good news in all this; Alonetone, it seems, stream at 192k, the lowest resolution at which you CAN hear the track, so we get to try again! Well, when I say 'hear'...

WYRE ROSE