Tom Waits new Record "Bad as Me," Out 10/24 Two Singles Released from Anti

So......It turns out that it's true. Waits has a new record coming out on Anti and judging by the two singles already released it seems as though it's going to get the usual reaction. The hard core fan base will go ape s**t, "New record of all original material! First in 7 years!" Meanwhile, "Bad as Me", the title track, which seems most closely related to "Phillipino Box Spring Hog" (Cool Story, Uncompelling Track) is the first single released and will make it easy for the critics and haters to say that this new release is just more of the same old Waits: "Cliche, deranged caricature of his former jazzbo self," etc., etc., you know the lines. Waits is one of those characters in popular culture that evokes such a wide range of strange commentary. From intellectuals attempting to show off their personal knowledge of brake drums and piano strings whipped against dumpsters to rock classicists who haven't changed their opinions on the guy since 1972. Sure, he loves to feed this fire and fights to control his ridiculous fabled persona by attempting to keep it that way via any means necessary including not authorizing biographies or even interviews these days, but critics write about him like he's John Cage. They just don't know what the f**k is going on. Personally, I'm way more in to this here ballad, "Back in the Crowd", than "Bad as Me" at this time, but the other little snippets that fly out of the vintage stereo equipment and the ratty old car in the "Private Listening Party" video, which included something that sounded like a new rockabilly track reminiscent of "Lie to Me," have me ready to fork over some dough for a hard copy and maybe even the LP.

New Research on Musical Gestures and their Effects on Audience Perception

There is an extremely enlightening article in the latest edition of Percussive Notes (The Journal of the Percussive Arts Society) about the use of gestures and their effect on the Audience's perception of acoustic properties. Basically, studies have been done at Northwestern University in Illinois that prove that while gestures don't change the acoustic value of notes they do change the audience's perception of the notes. Bachelor of Music students who are not percussionist's were subjected to an experiment in which they watched and listened to the striking of single marimba notes with different attack and release gestures (Short vs. Long). Though the students were told to ignore the gestures they were ultimately unable to. The subjects were also informed that what they watched and the sound that they heard may have been mixed up from actual performances (which they sometimes were....though the sounds are acoustically identical whether the gesture is long or short...) and that they were therefore expected to judge only the length of the note based on aural perception. The data shows that the long gestures produced the perception of much longer notes to the young musicians. Pretty interesting stuff, which personally makes me wonder about the effects of the same test given to average audience members. Would the lines drift much further?
The effect is compared in the article to optical illusions such as the Ebbinghaus Illusion (shown above) or the Muller-Lyer Illusion, which famously trick the mind into thinking that two objects are different in size based on their individual surroundings when in fact they are identical. The author then goes even deeper into the mixing and matching of human senses to create our overall perception referencing surround-sound movie theaters and multiple scholarly articles on cognition, musical perception, and percussion performance. The findings show that whether the gestures actually change the sound or not, they do change the audiences perception greatly and therefore should be considered in performance practices. So, yes, Pete Townshend is a freakin' genius....