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Hot Chip plus 15 percent
(Jul 23 2007)

Hot Chip are an excellent British electronic band, who manage to successfully combine being geeky and very cool. They have released two albums, 2004's "Coming On Strong" and 2006's "The Warning".

A friend of mine really likes the more recent album, but accuses "Coming On Strong" of being very plodding and slow-paced compared with "The Warning". Although I don't agree, I decided to conduct an experiment with the excellent free audio editor Audacity (link 2, below), which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows, to see if the album could be improved by speeding it up!

The key here is to use Audacity's "Change Tempo" function in the "Effects" menu. This allows the tempo to be changed without raising the pitch (the high-pitched effect familiar from running cassettes or video-tapes faster). After a deal of experimentation, I found the best increase to be 15%. After putting the two versions to a listening panel of five people, all of the slower songs were deemed to be improved greatly, although the fastest ones sounded absolutely crazy. I am currently seeking out other albums to try this out on.

Apologies to Hot Chip if I have bruised their artistic egos.

Related links:

http://www.hotchip.co.uk
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/