Wes Phillips

I wrote this guy off back in the 1980s, when he essentially dismissed audiophiles as kooks&mdash;and this from a computer geek? But, by God, <I>this</I> is worth reading.

John Marks sends along this article about the Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ, a 32-ton, 6398-pipe, three-story organ that I, for one, am going to have to make a sonic destination. Be sure to visit the photo essay and other links while you're reading about the Cooper organ&mdash;there's a ton of fascinating information there.

Vinyl Recorder has an interesting graphic on how groove modulation works. Check out the home page, too&mdash;VR sells DIY cutters!

Jon Iverson sends along this site devoted to the ideas of experimental film pioneer John Whitney, who wrote <I>Digital Harmony</I>, a book that has fascinated JI for years.

"They Thought You'd Say This: Unlikely phrases from real phrase books" is a hoot. When I lived in Peru, I collected tourist phrase books from our local second-hand book kiosk&mdash;a place that had a two-for-one trade-in policy on books in English. Since I was teaching ESL to folks that wanted to get jobs in tourism and on the police squad dedicated to tourist-related matters, I figured that they'd need to know a lot of these common phrases. I was stunned at how many books had unlikely scenarios, but few of them were as outlandish as in this article.

Over at <I>The Times</I>, Terence Kealey begs to differ, not just with Barenboim's (and Plato's) premise that music uses sound to educate the soul in virtue, but also that "making music and playing it in an orchestra is the best way to understand democracy."

Next, we have this article, submitted by Jonathan Scull, which says the lectures rail against "passive noise pollution"&mdash;that Daniel Barenboim claims we are too frequently forced to hear music over which we have no control and, thus, we listen too infrequently to music we have actually chosen.