Until now, I have been pretty convinced that ghosts can't make music. Something to do with temporal forms not being able to strum a guitar, or no-one from Rentaghost becoming a chart-topping pop star.
And yet, have a listen to that YouTube video. Ghosts! Actual ghosts!
It's actually a remarkable bit of audio detritus that arose from when Suzanne Vega's song Tom's Diner got transferred from high-quality audio to MP3.
This may be news to some, but MP3s are low-resolution, designed to ensure that your cool and trendy iPod isn't the size of Battersea Power Station. They are a compromise between storage space and audio fidelity. WAVs are much better quality because they are lossless.
So MP3s are a lossy format. This means the lost sound has to go somewhere. There was a terrible Doctor Who episode once in which people lost fat, and the fat formed into blubber aliens that everyone wanted to kick in the face. It's exactly like that. Probably.
In a brilliant feat of reverse-engineered psychoacoustics by the American artist Ryan Maguire, that video is the sound of the audio that was lost in that lossy conversion of Tom's Diner to MP3.
This is part of the Museum of Portable Sound, which collects non-musical noise. It contains field recordings, old hi-fi gear, 1960s television commercials, urban soundscapes, the sound of Sigmund Freud’s toilet, and the sound of me grunting when I get up from a sofa. Alright, the last one was a lie. But it really does contains Freud's bog.
"This is one of the most revelatory and inspiring things I've heard recently," said Robin Rimbaud, a who releases spectral ambience as Scanner. If Scanner is impress, you know it's brilliant.
Pictured above: Vega in the video for Luka, which is the wrong song, but hey.
Further Fats: Ghost written – podcasts, music, Buffy and emails (2015)
Further Fats: Delia Derbyshire Day – even more original than the Atari (2017)
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