I am of the generation old enough to have seen people in lab coats working in sterile conditions in the basement of the old Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street to manufacture COMPACT DISCS.

Yes, there was no chance of burning them on your laptop then - because we didn't have laptops. Even in 1996 I was still have to go to a specialised duplicating studio if I needed custom CDs burnt for particular projects.

So the following article by Melissa Viney in the Disappearing Acts feature in the Work section of today's Guardian was fascinating.

How to make a vinyl record

Vinyl may have been overtaken by CDs and downloads but it still has passionate fans, with the last major plant in the Uk pressing about 25,000 records a week on its 40-year old presses

Forty-year-old record presses, installed by EMI in the 70s vinyl heyday, grind noisily away, oozing hydraulic oil on to the floor. Long pipes run the length of the factory floor, carrying steam to power the presses. It's as if the digital age has never occurred.

Hi-tech this is not, but über-cool niche it certainly is. I'm on an industrial estate in Hayes, Middlesex. This was once the EMI vinyl manufacturing plant, until the record label sold it off in 2001, and it became the Vinyl Factory. In the 70s this plant pressed 1m records a week. It's now the last major vinyl plant in the UK and presses around 25,000 records a week.

General manager Roy Mathews began work here straight after school as an apprentice. That was 50-odd years ago. In those days the Beatles and Pink Floyd used to trail through the factory, keen to see their records (Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Dark Side of the Moon no less) being pressed. Mathews met them all, but no such thing happens today. The stars don't do factory visits any more; it's a reality too far.

But while CDs and downloads have taken over the market, vinyl itself has never lost its credibility. Devotees cite its superior sound quality and the personal, tactile relationship one develops with the big black disc and accompanying artwork. The Vinyl Factory's mission statement is: "Music is a physical experience." What's more, vinyl is experiencing a resurgence. Massive Attack, Grace Jones, The Pet Shop Boys and Mumford & Sons have all pressed limited runs here.

Mathews pulls out a black LP called the "lacquer". This is the master cut that the Vinyl Factory receives from Abbey Road Studios. It's an aluminium disc coated in acetate lacquer into which an analogue signal has been cut using a heated diamond stylus. At this point, the disc is a soft facsimile of the final record.

We move to the hub of the factory floor, where an assistant cleans the surface of the lacquer using distilled water and then softly brushes it using soap solution to remove any grease before placing it in the silver plating tank, where mechanical jets shower the disc with a thin layer of silver to make it electrically conductive.

Before our eyes the disc gathers a beautiful silver sheen. It is then placed in an electroplating bath where, over three hours, individual nickel molecules attach themselves to the silver. The resulting "master" is washed and separated from the original lacquer. As this master is now a negative imprint, another positive nickel copy is made, called the "mother".

The mother copy is played and checked for faults. All being well, negative nickel "stampers" are then produced from the mother. These are cleaned and used to press the final run of records.

Mother, master, stamper, positive, negative: I am initially bemused by Mathew's flood of terminology. To him it's clearly second nature; after half a century, vinyl manufacturing is stamped on his brain indelibly.

A pile of paper record labels are placed in a record press. The vinyl arrives in the form of black PVC pellets contained in a large vat with spidery tubes running out of it and into several large presses. The pellets are sucked up the tubes and into the sealed press and melted at high temperature. A sausage of black vinyl is squirted out, into a circular block, which is sandwiched between two record labels before being flattened between the A and B side stampers. The excess PVC that seeps out of the sides is trimmed off and dumped in a bin. It is fearsomely hot to touch.

The press then produces a perfectly round, covetable finished disc that it slots into a sleeve before depositing it in an adjacent box. Once a run is complete, the used stamper is removed and the next one is cleaned with pressurised air to get rid of any grit, slotted into place and screwed in, ready for the next run.

Warm, noisy and greasy, these old machines keep on keeping on. The pristine records they produce belie the frankly rather clapped-out looking machines that continue to manufacture them. Old school engineering triumphs here. Nothing has changed. But why tinker with perfection?

One of the Vinyl Factory's staff cleaning the nickel stamper being it goes in the press -

it's a noisy job but the product is a thing of beauty. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

Unwanted sounds

Another review of Garret Keizer's book The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise published by Perseus, this tiome in the Guardian Review, by Steve Poole

The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise, by Garret Keizer (Perseus, £16.99)
What is noise? In this thoughtfully soft-spoken and beautifully written polemic, Keizer considers noise as "unwanted sound" or "repulsive sound" or a "pollutant" or "sonic abuse": as he says, "The essential difference between music and noise is neither acoustic nor aesthetic but ethical." (Your favourite symphony might count as noise if your neighbour is blasting it out at 4am; while some people choose to incorporate the hum of machinery into sound art.) Keizer tells stories of noise disputes in cities; the harm done to birds, squirrels and whales by industrial noise; and, wryly, the surprising amount of noise it takes to make a book such as this one.

What, then, to do? Keizer would like planetary civilisation to become less noisy – which does not, he insists, mean less "festive" – for him, unamplified song and the sounds of non-motorised tools are rarely offensive. In the end, as Keizer shows, noise is basically about power: "A person who says 'My noise is my right' basically means 'Your ear is my hole'." To be read with Rage Against the Machine cranked up, but not too far, on headphones.

The voice of God?

Scientists are using data sonification to help find the higgs boson (the voice of god?). It's nice to see some high profile research at least considering an acoustic approach to fundamental problems of physics.

I've also included a link to LHCSound where the Sound Library where you can listen to the sounds and download mp3 files, numerical files and explanatory notes.

God particle signal is simulated as sound

By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have simulated the sounds set to be made by sub-atomic particles such as the Higgs boson when they are produced at the Large Hadron Collider.

Their aim is to develop a means for physicists at Cern to "listen to the data" and pick out the Higgs particle if and when they finally detect it.

Dr Lily Asquith modelled data from the giant Atlas experiment at the LHC.

She worked with sound engineers to convert data expected from collisions at the LHC into sounds.

"If the energy is close to you, you will hear a low pitch and if it's further away you hear a higher pitch," the particle physicist told BBC News.

"If it's lots of energy it will be louder and if it's just a bit of energy it will be quieter."

The £6bn LHC machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to shed light on fundamental questions in physics.

It is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel, where thousands of magnets steer beams of proton particles around the vast "ring".

At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams cross paths, smashing together near four massive "experiments" that monitor these collisions for interesting events.

Scientists are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing insights into the nature of the cosmos.

Atlas is one of the experiments at the LHC. An instrument inside Atlas called the calorimeter is used for measuring energy and is made up of seven concentric layers.

Each layer is represented by a note and their pitch is different depending on the amount of energy that is deposited in that layer.

The process of converting scientific data into sounds is called sonification.

Dr Asquith and her team have so far generated a number of simulations based on predictions of what might happen during collisions inside the LHC.

The team is only now feeding in real results from real experiments.

"When you are hearing what the sonifications do you really are hearing the data. It's true to the data, and it's telling you something about the data that you couldn't know in any other way," said Archer Endrich, a software engineer working on the project.

The aim is to give physicists at the LHC another way to analyse their data. The sonification team believes that ears are better suited than eyes to pick out the subtle changes that might indicate the detection of a new particle.

But Richard Dobson - a composer involved with the project - says he is struck at how musical the products of the collisions sound.

"We can hear clear structures in the sound, almost as if they had been composed. They seem to tell a little story all to themselves. They're so dynamic and shifting all the time, it does sound like a lot of the music that you hear in contemporary composition," he explained.

Although the project's aim is to provide particle physicists with a new analysis tool, Archer Endrich believes that it may also enable us to eavesdrop on the harmonious background sound of the Universe.

He said he hoped the particle collisions at Cern would "reveal something new and something important about the nature of the Universe".

And Mr Endrich says that those who have been involved in the project have felt something akin to a religious experience while listening to the sounds.

"You feel closer to the mystery of Nature which I think a lot of scientists do when they get deep into these matters," he said.

"Its so intriguing and there's so much mystery and so much to learn. The deeper you go, the more of a pattern you find and it's fascinating and it's uplifting."

Different Drums

After the Oblique Strategies of Brian Eno, one of my favourite aphorisms is from the writings of the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau:

"If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away. "

But a similar quotation appears on the latest tattoo of Megan Fox [who she?].

In an article in the Guardian G2 tabloid, it attributes the new addition to her bodyart that snakes down her right flank from the back of her rib cage to the tip of her hip to poet Angela Monet. The enigmatic quotation reads:

"Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music".

Yet Googling Monet suggests she does not exist.

The line appears to be an inspired re-working of a verse by the 13th century Sufi mystic, Rumi whose has a Nietzchian ring to it:

"We rarley hear the inward music but we're all dancing to it nevertheless"

Soft sweetie?

The headline in Charlotte Higgin's diary from the Hay Festival in today's Guardian reads Diva Minchin's rider demands.

She's seen his rider for the Festival. "Musically and lyrically talented comedian Tim Minchin has delighted the crowds with his witty, wry, humane, bittersweet songs. Using the skills of investigative journalism, I made a startling discovery about the nature of this man's rider: 155 blue M&Ms."

Tim's obviously gone soft. Back in 2007 his rider demanded:

Please also make sure that somewhere in the building there is:

113 Blue M&Ms in a ceramic bowl which has been washed with angel's saliva then placed in a the centre of a one-man tent. Some venues thinks a two-man tent will suffice. It won't."

No shortage of one-man tents at Hay, no doubt. But angels? Does wearing fairy wings count?