Hello!
Welcome to the Verge.
My name is John Gump and I author and maintain this website.
The main focus of this weblog is to assess modern musical technology in the context of the humanities.
Strangely, such assessments seem to be rather rare.
While the tech press is forever talking about the newest and greatest,
we are more interested in the larger trends of digital music production and distribution as a whole; and in the effects
that these developments have had, or might have, on the nature and evolution of musical culture.
The Verge might not seem like a true blog to some people because there is no way for readers to comment here, though it is noteworthy that Dave Winer himself doesn't allow comments on his blogs. But whether or not this is a 'real' blog, I hope people find it interesting.
All of the statements of opinion anywhere on this page, reflect my views and only my views.
The Unintentional Empowerment of the Composer
Part 3
Part 2
Part 1
The Digital Audio revolution: A primer
January 8, 2010
Remixing is a recurring subject of controversy in discussions of recent musical developments. From academic publications such as Lawrence Lessig's latest book, to exchanges like the ones in this thread at KVR, to anarchic shitstorms like the comment section following this Techdirt post, discussions of remixing are as polarizing as they are popular.
Remixing as a concept presents us with many questions that are far from easy to answer. The classic discussion of the issues surrounding this concept is Chris Cutler's Plunderphonia. This article is justly famous, in no small part due to it's stark and intelligent presentation of one side of the issue. Sadly, I know of nothing on the other side that is even half as good. Most of what I have found concerns not the art of music, but the livelihood of recording artists and other beneficiaries of IP law. Although there are many who decry the aesthetic emptiness of remixed music, one senses that these aesthetic objections are merely talking points in a greater effort to vilify the unauthorized usage of copyright material.
I myself am not in a position to write a response to Chris Cutler's article from the 'other side', as I tend to agree with most of what he has written. But there are, implicit in his article, a few assumptions that I find myself in disagreement with. These assumptions are expressed, not in titles, or headers, or summations, but in obiter dicta. They are examples of what Suzanne Langer referred to as 'natural ways of thinking': things that are not asserted, simply because they seem so obvious.
While it is pointless and irresponsible to take someone to task for 'what you just know they really meant' when they wrote something, it is also important to recognize that assumptions are at least as powerful as assertions, and that they deserve to be examined at least as carefully. And so, like a good remixer, we will rip the aforementioned obiter dicta out of context, and discuss them on their own merits, without worrying about their author's intentions, or holding him accountable for our interpretations.
(Musical) "Notation does not merely quantise the material, reducing it to simple units but, constrained by writability, readability and playability, is able to encompass only a very limited degree of complexity within those units"
The idea of notation being 'limited' is both trite and true.
It is trite because it is commonly used as an excuse by insecure musicians who are too lazy or preoccupied to learn how to read music. (The ones who aren't insecure just sort of shrug it off, because really, who gives a shit?)
It is true because it is very easy to imagine sounds and musical events which would be difficult or impossible to notate, but which would be easy to create using modern technology.
But 'limited' is a problematic word. For example, a deck of cards is a very limited thing: there are only 4 suits, and each suit contains the exact same 13 'numbered' cards as the others. But limited though it is, there are in the neighborhood of 1068 possible shufflings of it. (For a sense of scale, consider that only about 1018 seconds have passed since the big bang took place.) Nor does the 'limited' nature of the deck seem to have limited the number of different kinds of games that may be played with it, nor the variations possible within those games.
Similarly, the number of musical possibilities that can be accessed by notation is rarely a limiting factor in modern music. A tiny handful of the harmonic combinations available via notation are used in popular music (and yes this includes 'underground' popular music). And almost a century after Stravinsky challenged the boundaries of notated rhythm in the Rite of Spring, the vast majority of musicians seem content to create music that uses stereotyped and easily notated rhythmic patterns in 4/4 time almost exclusively.
In one sense, whether or not a working method is 'limiting' is a personal issue. If you are an Inuit throat singer, and you want to jam with other Inuit throat singers, notation is going to be pretty damn useless to your efforts. But if notation is limiting in this sense, so is every other working method available to musicians.
All working methods are good for accomplishing some things, less good for accomplishing others.
If the method is good for accomplishing what we want to accomplish we might call it 'intuitive' or 'straightforward'. But if the method is not good for accomplishing what we want to accomplish, if it's principles seem unintuitive or it's rules seem arbitrary, we are apt to call it 'limiting'.
It is easy enough to say that notation comes up short in relation to the theoretical possibilities of recorded sound manipulation. But when one compares the practice of people making music with notation to the practice of people making music by manipulating audio directly, the perception of any limitations will depend, as always, on the creativity of the people making the music.
"Old art music paradigms and new technology are simply not able to fit together"
This is just plain wrong. It might have been less wrong when it was published in 1994, but it was still wrong. Of course 'new technology' can mean many things, but no matter which of these meanings we choose, the resulting sentence will still be wrong.
It is certainly true that recording technology has changed music in ways that we are only beginning to understand. And it is also true that this technology has fostered the development of musical cultures (often referred to collectively as 'Audio Culture'), that are in many ways at odds with 'old art music paradigms'. This much, at least, seems beyond reasonable dispute.
But it is a big leap from noting the differences between audio culture and 'old art music pardigms', to asserting that they are inherently incompatible. And it is a leap that will end in a fall, because if anything, the technological developments of the past 15 years have strengthened, rather than weakened, the relationship between 'old art music paradigms and new technology'.
Because the very digital audio and MIDI technologies that have made remixing such a widespread phenomenon have also allowed an unprecedented number of people to play within those very 'old art music paradigms'. We have written elsewhere on the relationship between the orientation of a modern DAW interface and classical notation. This relationship is even stronger if one is using the DAW to control multisampled orchestral instruments.
These instruments commonly come in sets that are organized in groups that mirror the organization of the modern symphonic orchestra. Such sets come in many forms: from budget packages such as the Garritan Personal Orchestra, to the immense Vienna Symphonic Library, to the over the top extravagance of DVZ. Some of these sets even come bundled with the more expensive versions of the notation software that we discussed here.
In fact, the very existence of something like Sibelius 6 is by itself enough to show that 'old art music paradigms and new technology' are perfectly capable of fitting together
"....the moral and legal boundaries which currently constitute important determinants in claims for musical legitimacy, impede and restrain some of the most exciting possibilities in the changed circumstances of the age of recording."
Ah, controversy at last.
This sentence contains a great deal of equivocation. The heart of this equivocation are the words 'musical legitimacy'.
The only musical art that is 'illegitimate' in the legal sense is anything that uses recognizable bits of copyright material without permission. Outside of this one very strictly enforced rule, musical culture is more or less a free for all. Hell, you can even write a song that is openly about your ass and nothing else but your ass, and still achieve #1 hit status.
Of course, 'legitimate' in the legal sense has nothing whatever to do with the vague sentiments that determine artistic 'legitimacy'. But really, does anyone care about such things any more? Worrying about artistic 'legitimacy' is almost something out of the Gernsback Continuum; a concern redolent of another time, and another culture; a culture of sanitized Hollywood musical biographies like Rhapsody in Blue or the Benny Goodman Story. Popular artists no longer humbly seek the approval of professors of music, whose cultural influence is a feeble shadow of it's former self. Does anyone care what Benjamin Boretz thinks of Timbaland or 50 Cent? Does anyone even know who Benjamin Boretz is?
No, one senses that this concern over the 'claims of musical legitimacy' is secondary to concern over musical legalities, i.e. copyright infringement. By conflating legal transgressions with transgressions against some imagined aesthetic straitjacket, the whole ethos of sampled music is imbued with an air of visionary artistic dignity. Sadly, it is quite possible to infringe on other people's copyrights without being remotely visionary: all one needs is a sampler and a CD player.
But the big question is: does the strict enforcement of copyright law really 'impede and restrain some of the most exciting possibilities' of music in our time?
Of course, this depends entirely upon what you find 'exciting'.
I have to confess that my first answer was 'No'. While I have long thought that the current tendency of the recording industries to respond to even the most trivial acts of infringement with a lawsuit is a good deal worse than useless, I found it hard to see how it could 'impede and restrain' artistic progress. If there were no royalty free sources of recorded sound this would have seemed different, but there are many such sources available. From the The University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios samples page, to the Freesound Project, to the immense collection at Open Source Audio, to The Lofi Sampler to our very own samples page, the internet is overflowing with free and legal sources of every imaginable kind of sound. And when I say 'free', I mean as in 'free beer'.
But again, that was my first answer. And upon reflection, I had to admit that whatever the musical possibilities of the free audio samples currently available, the fact is that they are incapable of allusion to, and outright quotation of, the many important cultural memes that are not in the public domain. Quotation and allusion are important elements in most samplist's art. In fact, one could go further and point out that allusion and quotation are characteristic devices in a great deal of modern music generally. One doesn't need to be a fan of Girl Talk or DJ Shadow. The music of 'serious' composers from Charles Ives to Luciano Berio is filled with direct quotations and allusions.
But the use of pre-existing material is much older than than Charles Ives. In fact, the parody mass, a common and commonplace musical form of the renaissance, was based squarely upon the appropration of pre-existing material. Some of the finest works of seminal composers like Josquin desPrez used this form. There can be little doubt that the forms of musical creativity typical of the Flemish renaissance would have been impossible, or at least greatly inhibited, under a regime of IP law like the one we have today. If this isn't an indictment, I don't know what is.
Quotation and stylistic allusion are extraordinarily common in literary works. There has never really been anything very controversial about this. It just makes sense that you are going to quote people when you want to discuss their ideas. And stylistic allusion has been part of western literature at least since Aristophanes wrote 'Frogs'. But while the idea of Aristophanes having to ask the estates of Aeschylus and Euripides for the right to quote them is alien to literary culture, the exact same idea is the norm in audio culture. It has become the norm, not because artistic standards demanded it, nor because artists themselves have demanded it, but because companies and trade groups claiming to represent their interests have demanded it.
Recently, more and more people are starting to doubt the claims of the people making these demands. They have pointed out that the putative purpose of copyright is, as the US constitution has it, to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; and they have pointed out how often modern copyright law seems to be at odds with these words.
Although there are some who would argue about this, there is good reason to believe that this point has by and large been reached with the digital artifacts and computer applications used for creating, recording, and distributing music. The power that these tools place into the hands of a musician of modest means is really quite impressive, especially when considered in the light of history.
In 1960, if you wanted to record some music and distribute it throughout the world, you were contemplating a major undertaking, involving at the very least a recording studio, a vinyl pressing plant, and a whole bunch of expensive postal transactions. Even if you went through all of this trouble, you could only deliver records to people you knew, unless of course you wanted to randomly mail your expensively made records to strangers.
In fact, the only real possibility was to try to get a recording contract with a company that had a distribution network. And hopefully whatever company you signed with also had contacts in radio, so people could hear your music and therefore have a reason for buying it. This was the standard procedure, and it worked fine if you were lucky enough to land a recording contract. It tended to work best if your music was catchy and singable, and it worked even better if you were young and cute and had a marketable personality.
Otherwise, you were kind of screwed.
You could conceivably have used reel to reel tape instead of vinyl, which simply required two really expensive tape machines (one to record on, the other to make copies with) instead of a vinyl pressing plant, but that would have limited your potential audience to the handful of audiophiles who owned reel to reel tape machines.
By 1970, there was another option: the cassette tape, introduced by Phillips in 1965. Cassettes allowed ordinary people to record themselves with ease. The playing/recording decks became popular quite quickly, allowing people to share their music with a large number of others. Such sharing was also enabled by the small size of cassette tapes, which could be mailed anywhere for very little postage.
But of course, you could still only send your tape to people you knew of. There were a few places where you could send them in the hopes of finding a wider audience. The KALX radio show called "The Next Big Thing" was perhaps the best known of these. But this didn't add up to much in the end: if you were lucky, they would play your tape for a few thousand people in the Berkeley area. Once. And again that's if you were lucky.
The technological advances that took place after the cassette didn't seem to favor the independant musician at all. Digital audio started out as an extremely expensive technology. The first commercially available digital recorders sold for 150,000 US dollars each in the late 1970's, which adds up to over 446,000 US dollars today when adjusted for inflation. And then the compact disc, introduced in 1980, became the commercial medium of choice in just a few years. Compact discs were made by an expensive process involving technology that very few people understood. And they were quite obviously superior to cassette tapes by any reasonable measure: they had less distortion, a wider frequency response, greater dynamic range, no surface noise, and a longer playing time. What is more, they weren't worn out by normal use, something that couldn't be claimed for any previous audio storage medium.
It seemed like a dream come true for the recording industries, who somehow managed to get away with charging a great deal more for CDs, despite the fact that they are easier to mass produce than either cassettes or LPs. And it also seemed to be a huge step backward for independent musicians, whose home-made cassette tapes were reduced to amateurish anachronisms almost overnight.
But the underlying reality was quite different. Because a corollary of turning sound into digital information is that it creates an intimate developmental relationship between audio technology and digital technology as a whole. And as anyone can see by looking at the slide show linked to at the start of this post, digital technology developed at an astonishing rate in the years after the introduction of the CD: CPUs went from a clock speed of 4.47 MHz in 1980, to 25 MHz in 1990, to 1 GHz in 2000, to 3.6 GHz in 2005. In the meantime, the inventors of the CD developed these really cool things called CD-Rs, which allowed anyone with a burner to make their own CDs (or copy existing ones). And guess what? The sound quality was the same as a normal CD. Bit for bit identical, in fact. Of course, CD-R burners were a cutting edge technology with a 35,000 US dollar price tag when they came out in 1990. But today they are a commonplace computer part that can be had for as little as 12 US dollars.
And yes, even as the cost of CD technology was plummeting, and the cost of RAM was falling, and the clock speeds of CPUs were improving continuously while the computers built around them were dropping in price, even as all this was happening, the mp3 codec was created by the Fraunhofer Society. This was destined to become the most popular of the various audio codecs that were developed around this time. These audio codecs are simply methods of compressing digital audio data so that it consumes less memory and bandwidth. What makes their development important is that it happened to coincide with yet another technological development: the establishment of this here interweb thingie by the world wide web consortium in the mid 1990s.
By the time Shawn Fanning launched Napster in 1999, it had become quite clear that the 'dream come true' of the move to CDs and digital audio generally had become a nightmare for the recording industries. Of course, it could be argued that they should have foreseen Napster and Grokster and Gnutella and all the rest of it. They certainly worried enough about DAT when it came on the scene. Perhaps if they had tried to set up deals like the ones that they have currently with Apple and Amazon, and had done so early in the game, they might have made the transition smoothly, and not watched helplessly as the whole world traded their music without giving them a cent. Perhaps.
But the troubles of the recording industries, whether avoidable or not, are not what concerns us here. What concerns us is the power that these same technological developments placed into the hands of independent musicians. In the first place, the progressively faster desktop computers built around the progressively faster CPUs made it possible for the first 'in the box' music production software packages to be released in the early nineties. ProTools, Cubase, Logic, Samplitude (pdf), and the open-source project Rosegarden all had their beginnings around this time, as did a hundred other software applications that have since been forgotten. These applications all had different feature sets: ProTools and Samplitude were designed as computerized alternatives to a multitrack tape recorder, while the others started out as MIDI sequencers (i.e. programs for controlling one or more electronic musical instruments by 'remote control' as it were). But by the year 2000, most of these applications were capable of doing both multitrack audio recording and MIDI sequencing. Today this is the norm in audio software, and there are dozens of these multitrack recorder/MIDI sequencer applications available. Some of them are extremely inexpensive. Some of them are free. All of them offer an infinity of creative possibilities to musicians of every skill level.
We have discussed some of these creative possibilities elsewhere. But it is hard to do justice to them in a blog post because they are quite literally infinite. And these possibilities are enhanced by the many cheap Chinese and Russian made condenser microphones, studio monitors, instruments and amplifiers that have become available in recent years. Of course, there are many members of the audio engineering profession who will sneer at these inexpensive tools, insisting that they are pale imitations of the expensive hand-made originals. And certainly in some ways they are right. But that doesn't change the fact that a person who sings into one of those cheap condenser microphones, sends the signal through a cheap preamp into a cheap A/D converter and records it on a cheap computer is going to hear something that sounds remarkably like their voice when they play the recording back. And if this person takes the time to reduce the room reflections in their recording space by using any number of cheap DIY room treatments, and takes the time to learn how to use a microphone properly, and above all if this person can actually sing, the recording will sound good. It's that simple.
Once this hypothetical person has made a recording that they like, distributing it is relatively easy. The first step is to make an mp3. Most computers come with software that does this conversion easily, but if by some chance it doesn't, there are numerous free conversion applications that can be downloaded. Once this is done, it's a simple matter to upload it to Last.fm or SoundClick or one of a thousand other similar sites, at which point anyone in the world with an internet connection can listen to it whenever they want. If you don't want to sign up for these services, you can buy internet hosting for very small amounts of money. One easy to use service charges 35 dollars a year for an account that has 512 MB of storage and 50 GB of monthly bandwidth. Thats enough space for over 4 hours worth of music at 256 Kbps (the standard high quality bit rate used by Amazon) and enough bandwidth for all 4 hours of music to be downloaded a hundred times over every month. And this service is relatively expensive. There are many cheaper ones with huge amounts of storage and bandwidth if you think you will need them. Of course, you will have to set up a web site, but with services like Fantastico, doing this has become falling-off-a-log simple.
So with some cheap digital technology, cheap hardware, cheap room treatments, and an internet connection, anyone can make recordings and distribute them throughout the world as soon as they have finished making them. Anyone can easily do a thing that required an immense and costly infrastructure to even attempt just 15 years ago.
THAT is the power of cheap.
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