"Artist=President Barack Obama"

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Alex Jones, contact LLOG immediately! Never mind Pizzagate, never mind Sandy Hook, never mind the FEMA concentration camps, never mind the fake moon landings. This morning I stumbled on evidence, lying around in plain sight, for a systematic program of deception so huge — and yet so improbable — that even InfoWars listeners will find it hard to believe: Donald Trump is actually Barack Obama in disguise.

For years, I've been collecting and analyzing the weekly addresses of various American presidents — see e.g. "Political sound and silence", 2/8/2016; "Some speech style dimensions", 6/27/2016; "Trends in presidential pitch", 5/19/2017; "Trends in presidential pitch II", 6/21/2017.

Today I was catching up with Donald Trump's weekly addresses, downloading the .mp3 files from whitehouse.gov. The most recent weekly address is available at

https://www.whitehouse.gov/featured-videos/video/2017/10/13/101317-weekly-address

with the mp3 download link

https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/2017/October/20171013_Weekly_Address.mp3

After downloading the mp3 file, in order to check its characteristics, I ran soxi. I've done this before, but in the past I just looked at the things I cared about, namely the sampling frequency and number of channels. But this time, I happened to look at the ID3 metadata fields as well:

Input File : '20171013_Weekly_Address.mp3'
Channels : 2
Sample Rate : 16000
Precision : 16-bit
Duration : 00:03:26.17 = 3298752 samples ~ 15462.9 CDDA sectors
File Size : 3.45M
Bit Rate : 134k
Sample Encoding: MPEG audio (layer I, II or III)
Comments :
Title=Weekly Address
Artist=President Barack Obama
Album=The White House
Tracknumber=1
Year=2016
Genre=12

I wondered whether this was a one-time glitch, so I checked the history. The first of President "Trump"'s weekly addresses is available at

https://www.whitehouse.gov/featured-videos/video/2017/02/03/weekly-address

with the mp3 download link

https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/2017/February/20170203_Weekly_Address.mp3

And the metadata is the same:

Input File : '20170203_Weekly_Address.mp3'
Channels : 2
Sample Rate : 16000
Precision : 16-bit
Duration : 00:04:20.24 = 4163904 samples ~ 19518.3 CDDA sectors
File Size : 4.27M
Bit Rate : 131k
Sample Encoding: MPEG audio (layer I, II or III)
Comments :
Title=Weekly Address
Artist=President Barack Obama
Album=The White House
Tracknumber=1
Year=2016
Genre=12

In fact this is consistent in all of the Weekly Addresses from Donald Trump's White House.

It's not an issue in all mp3 encodings from the White House — thus Melania Trump's 10/17/2017 "Hurricane Relief PSA" is attributed to "Artist=The White House", even if the year is still given as 2016:

Input File : '20171011_FLOTUS_DTC.mp3'
Channels : 2
Sample Rate : 16000
Precision : 16-bit
Duration : 00:00:31.50 = 504000 samples ~ 2362.5 CDDA sectors
File Size : 696k
Bit Rate : 177k
Sample Encoding: MPEG audio (layer I, II or III)
Comments :
Title=FLOTUS DTC – T6
Artist=The White House
Album=The White House
Tracknumber=1
Year=2016
Genre=12

And the same is true for the president's joint news conference with PM Theresa May back in January:

Input File : '20170127_POTUS_and_PM_May_JPA.mp3'
Channels : 2
Sample Rate : 16000
Precision : 16-bit
Duration : 00:18:19.20 = 17587168 samples ~ 82439.9 CDDA sectors
File Size : 17.8M
Bit Rate : 130k
Sample Encoding: MPEG audio (layer I, II or III)
Comments :
Title=POTUS and PM May JPA
Artist=The White House
Album=The White House
Tracknumber=1
Year=2016
Genre=12

It's just the weekly addresses that are attributed to "President Barack Obama"

By the way, you may be as disappointed as I was to learn that the "Genre=12" just means "Other" — I was hoping for maybe "[23] => Pranks" or "[58] => Cult" or "[136] => Christian Gangsta".

Jokes aside, what this means is presumably that the Trump White House inherited a recording and web-distribution set-up from the Obama White House, and neglected to change the ID3 metadata information for various categories of material.

 



6 Comments

  1. SpankyMc said,

    October 17, 2017 @ 12:24 pm

    It must be a signal from deep state operators ;)

  2. Y said,

    October 17, 2017 @ 12:41 pm

    Apropos of not much, since you use mp3 files for your analyses, do you find compression artifacts to be a problem for any of your analyses?

    I recall an old paper somewhere looking at the effect of mp3 compression on f0 or formant analysis and finding that the analysis was indeed affected by compression degradation, even if compression artifacts were not audible.

    [(myl) I'm using mp3 files here because that's all that's available — if uncompressed data were available, I'd use it. However, mp3 or similar lossy compression at reasonable bitrates is generally unproblematic in my experience, especially if the originals have decent signal-to-noise ratio.]

  3. Bill Benzon said,

    October 17, 2017 @ 4:33 pm

    Now we know what happened to Prince, formerly The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. He slipped into the the White House in the dead of night and inhabited their communication system. And then he went nuts.

  4. richardelguru said,

    October 18, 2017 @ 6:07 am

    It's always the little slip that gives them away.

  5. Acilius said,

    October 18, 2017 @ 8:09 am

    Just as I've always suspected!

  6. Neal Goldfarb said,

    October 19, 2017 @ 2:04 am

    Oh, man, Trump will go apeshit when he finds out. Of course, that's only a 7.5% difference from batshit, so it won't be that easy to notice.

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