5 Links to Consider | April 16, 2025
A round-up of this week's compelling and considered clicks, compiled from The Absolute Sound's veteran staff of experts and reviewers.
Tom Martin: We’ve just attended the 2025 AXPONA audio show in Chicago. We had a team of 5 on site: Adrian Alexander, Grover Neville, Jason Methfessel, Robert Taylor and doing video coverage. The magazine also had a group of reviewers covering the show and their summary will be published in an upcoming issue... For this video, we want to cover some of the highlights that we found. To be clear, we can’t visit every demonstration (there are 10 floors of demonstrations plus a convention center totaling over 200 rooms with thousands of products). In addition, a show isn’t a great place for some kinds of auditioning, because the noise level is usually high, seating positions are sometimes compromised, and the rooms themselves are often too small or too large. But we can look for interesting equipment and ideas. That’s what the team was tasked with scouting out, and I think we found some special items. It was an impressive show.
Some people are 'wired to connect with music on a deeper level,' study of 9,000
Genes affect different aspects of music enjoyment — from the emotional reactions that compositions evoke to the social connection music can foster. According to a study published March 25 in the journal Nature Communications, 54% of the differences in the levels of music enjoyment between individuals can be attributed to their genes. The scientists behind the work attribute the remaining percentage to environmental factors such as growing up in a family that played musical instruments or listened to music together, as well as other, past music-related experiences.
"This study explores something many of us in music have long suspected — some people are just wired to connect with music on a deeper level," Mitchell Hutchings, an associate professor of voice at Florida Atlantic University who was not involved with the work, told Live Science in an email. Read the full article...
(Image credit: Guillermo Spelucin/Getty Images) How a Funeral Home Became Warner Records - A weird corporate history
Nintendo has always been a gaming company but probably not in the way you think. The Japanese firm was originally founded in 1889 to produce handmade playing cards. Given that the Game Boy wouldn’t come out for another century, you might be wondering what they were doing for all those decades. Well, mostly making playing cards.
After the firm went public in the 1960s, they used an influx in cash to expand into other lines of business. That’s when they started to dabble into electronics. That dabbling turned into an obsession, the company soon dedicating more resources to the nascent video game business. When Donkey Kong was released in 1981, an empire was born.
In short, corporate history is strange. If you want to weather the highs and lows of the market, you’ve got to be nimble. That nimbleness is even necessary when you work in a line of business that is allegedly recession-proof, like funeral homes. How could you go out of business when people are always dying? Steve Ross wasn’t one to rest on his laurels, though. You’ve got to go back a bit to understand what I mean…
(American businessman and CEO of Time Warner, Steve Ross)
The first instance of what could be considered “computer music” dates back to 1951, with room-sized machines in Australia and England programmed to play existing songs—the first recording of computer music (restored about 10 years ago by the British Library), is a grinding, cello-like voltage sound playing “God Save the Queen” as directed by a computer program. Before the decade was out, Max Matthews, Lejaren Hiller, and others were experimenting with how to turn the computer into a complete musical instrument through writing programs that could algorithmically produce performances and also to synthesize sounds out of binary digits…
This is How it Works - Angel Olsen
Angel Olsen is an American singer-songwriter born in St. Louis, Missouri, known for her introspective, genre-spanning music that blends indie folk, alternative country, and indie rock. Her six studio albums, including Big Time (2022), explore themes of love, grief, and identity, earning her critical acclaim and a dedicated fanbase.
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