I don’t know who to pit here: Anheuser Busch, their ad agency, or the radio station that’s broadcasting the Seattle Mariners games, but I’m about to choke somebody!
I’m talking about those Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” commercials The ads themselves are fine (other than I really wish they’d come up with some new ones - I’ve been hearing the same ones for three years now). But somebody is fooling with them, apparently trying to make them a bit shorter.
And how are they making them shorter? Not by speeding them up a bit. Not by chopping a bit off the beginning or end. Those methods would make too much sense.
No, what they’re doing is, every time there’s a gap between the announcer guy’s spoken lines, somebody is excising a tiny fraction of the music, so that by the end, the ad is probably two seconds shorter. Maybe a non-musician isn’t going to notice, but to a musician like me, to whom timing is everything, it’s rage-inducing because the background music is blatantly stuttering. It’s as painfully obvious to a musician as an out-of-step soldier is to a drill instructor. It’s as obvious as a fastball in the back is to a baseball hitter.
I’ll go ahead an post the relevant XKCD comic to save somebody else the trouble:
I can’t say I’ve ever noticed this phenomena but I hope you’re wrong. Because if you’re right, and I notice it, I won’t be able to un-notice it, and then you’ll pay. Oh yes, much like the poor saps that intentionally inflict earworms on me, you’ll pay.
Beer. Television. Commercials. Music. Shouldn’t this be in the Cafe?
I’ve done slight doubletakes at the radio thinking that there was a botched recording or a slight skip – never thought they were doing it intentionally. Bastards.
Yup. Audio time compression. That magical method of excising the pauses between sounds. I thought they only did it with speech, but there’s no technical reason it can’t be done with music.
Don’t blame AB or the ad agency. Here in the home of Bud Light, the commercials run loud and strong. As a matter of fact, you should tape the version you hear and send it to AB. I’m sure they’d be delighted to find out they’re paying for one minute and getting 58 seconds.
FWIW, the kind of irritation you experienced may have a neurological explanation (and perhaps implications) beyond your conscious noticing and taking umbrage at the desecration of music. The part of the brain which controls our gross physical movements is the motor cortex, which is also stimulated (or provoked?) by rhythm. It may be that your irritation was more than merely aesthetic or intellectual; that on some level, arrhythmic (as possibly opposed to purely random, as in real life) sounds interfere with our abilities to function properly. It may be that being bombarded with disruptive sound can affect us similar to the way seeing strobe lights flashing on and off really fast interferes with our motor control, to sometimes hilarious effect.
There’s a couple of books that touches on this and/or many related subjects that I’m planning on borrowing from the library: Musicophilia by Dr. Oliver Sacks, and This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitan.
But since I haven’t read 'em yet, merely some synopses (where I got that tidbit of info about the motor cortex), I could be off-base about all this… but I don’t think so.
FWIW, I’m not a musician anymore but I’ve got the background and I think I share some of your sensitivity. When I was a kid taking piano lessons, I detected a discrepancy between my teacher’s and my metronome. My teacher didn’t believe me, especially since they were the same model unit. The next week, I brought mine in for a side-by-side comparison, and sure enough… My instructor was gobsmacked.
As I was reading your post, I had Blur’s Modern Life is Rubbish playing in the background… specifically, “Intermission,” which plays the same slice-and-dice tricks with its theme as did your annoying commercial, but much more so… the theme is frenetically accelerated almost beyond recognition. And yes, the effect is extremely annoying. (Seriously; I’m not making this up! This could be the best real-life/music coincidence since the time I reached a Jersey Turnpike tollbooth with the Talking Heads’ cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” playing, and I handed over my coins to the line “Take my money, my cigarettes/I haven’t seen the worst of it…”.)
Sorry I took so long to get back to this - 12-hour shift at work today.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it must be the radio station doing this editing. The Mariners changed their “flagship” station this season, and I didn’t notice the editing before this season. It’s odd, though, that they’re not doing it with other commercials. It just seems to be the Bud Light ads.
The Scrivener - That sounds interesting, but I’m pretty sure my annoyance is purely musical. I should mention that my primary instrument is the bass guitar, and as a bassist it’s my job, along with the drummer, to make sure the music’s timing is accurate and consistent, so messed-up timing just leaps out at me.
Strangely, though, my favorite band is Rush, and they love to use odd time-signatures. But the difference is that their stuff is supposed to sound that way, and they are in fact using genuine time signatures and it sounds correct because it’s written to sound correct. These ads, though, are just getting little split seconds cut out, and it sounds like a mistake.