The Confluence
July 3, 2010Last month, I wrote that "We live in a world in which ancient and modern musical traditions from across the globe have suddenly found themselves to be confluent with each other" and that "This confluence is the context in which the global musical culture of our time exists." It is time to explain what I mean by this.
Music has been a localized phenomena throughout most of human history. Whether you were listening to Irish fiddle music, or Indian classical music, or Balinese gamelan music, or the polyglot European art music of the 19th century, what you were listening to was the product of a cultural tradition that was limited by geography. There were only two ways for music to get outside the region it was made in: either the musician had to travel, or someone had to write the music down in some form of musical notation and get it published.
Neither travel nor notation ever did much to transcend geography, at least not by the standards of our own time. While it was not uncommon for musicians to travel, say, within Europe, there were few if any musical pilgrimages to other parts of the globe (with the exception of American expatriates to Europe like Louis Gottschalk). Nor did the advanced musical cultures of the East draw on the practices of Europeans. All in all, musical culture in 1876 was as geographically limited as it had been in 1376. And then, in 1877, Thomas Edison invented the Phonograph. And nothing about music was ever to be the same again.
Of course, this is an exaggeration. Edison's invention was regarded as a marvelous curiosity to be sure, but few saw it as being anything more than that at first. Many years were to pass before the full effects of this invention were felt, and by the time they were, it was no longer a marvel, but an unremarkable household object. Recorded music conquered the world by stealth; becoming part of modern life as a humble domestic servant, and assuming a position of cultural leadership while no one was looking.
Some aspects of this cultural leadership are well-known: the celebrity music machine, for example, has been one of the most visible parts of modern culture since a recording of Caruso's voice sold a million copies in 1907. But many of the less visible aspects of the recorded music revolution are shrouded in obscurity. The Confluence is the greatest of these.
The Confluence results from the fact that actual, audible, repeatable musical events can be created anywhere in the world and sent to anyplace else in the world. The ramifications of this fact are beyond counting, but a few of the more salient include:
- The formative influences available to musicians have multiplied exponentially.
- Musical syncretism, once the province of an educated minority, has become the norm, as musical cultures incorporate elements of music from around the world into their art.
- The historical, geographically bounded traditions within which music has been created throughout most of it's history have become attenuated as they have intermingled with other traditions.
- New traditions, defined not by geography but by the preferences of musicians and listeners, have come to dominate people's conceptions of music.
- For the first time, notationally illiterate musicians can preserve their art for future generations.
- Conversely, the musical knowledge-stream has been enriched by the permanent addition of the sounds created by the myriad musical cultures without a notational tradition.
This list, which could easily be extended, is enough to demonstrate that recording has changed music fundamentally. Any musical sound can be recorded. No matter how obscure the creator, no matter how remote the culture, no matter how different the tuning systems employed, no matter how complex the rhythms involved, if the result is an audible musical event, then it can be recorded.
And if it has been recorded, then it will become part of The Confluence.
Top of post.
Top of page.
_____________________________
What Has Happened to Music?
May 31, 2010One of the things that makes a reasonable discussion about music such an unlikely event in our time is the fact that our knowledge of this thing we call 'Music' is profoundly limited.
In the past 100-odd years, 'Music', however understood, has undergone all manner of changes. To call the cumulative effect of these changes 'revolutionary' understates the matter, for revolutions can be seen in vast profusion wherever one looks:
- The Phonograph was revolutionary.
- Radio was revolutionary.
- Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was revolutionary.
- Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire was revolutionary.
- The Cassette Tape was revolutionary.
- Professional Multi-track tape recorders were revolutionary.
- The Condenser Microphone was revolutionary.
- The 1925 recording of St. Louis Blues featuring Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong was revolutionary; and the same could be said of Duke Ellington's 1932 recording of It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).
- There are many who would say that the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon are both revolutionary. And of course there are others who would say that these albums are horribly overrated, while truly revolutionary albums like Pet Sounds and The Madcap Laughs are neglected, and so forth.
- There are some people who would point out the revolutionary artistic implications of the work of people like John Oswald or DJ Shadow. Others regard these artists as being revolutionary only because of their anarchistic disregard for intellectual property rights.
- And of course, the celebrity revolutionary musical change-maker of the moment is THE INTERNET, which, depending upon who is talking, is either the coolest new thing ever, or the end of everything that was ever good about music.
Now it is certainly true that false claims to 'revolutionary' importance are common in our culture. When a word that once referred to the violent overthrow of a nation's government ends up being used to describe vaccuum cleaners and telephone interfaces, you know that it has lost some of it's original power. But if any cultural development deserves to be called revolutionary, it is the history of music from the Phonograph to the internet. Musical culture between 1900 and 1999 was subject to more technological changes than it had been for the entirety of it's previous history. And while the history of this technology is well established, it's effects on music are obscure: shrouded by ignorance and neglect.
Sadly, we are not humble in our ignorance. On the contrary, the vast majority of people seem to think that they understand the nature of music instinctively, without difficulty. This is not a matter of pride or achievement. It is, rather, an unthinking assumption. Nor is it a belligerant assumption; we aren't dealing with people refusing to look into one of Galileo's telescopes because they already know the real truth. No, it is more a matter of seeing things out of context, simply because no context has been provided.
We live in a world in which ancient and modern musical traditions from across the globe have suddenly found themselves to be confluent with each other. That this confluence has taken place has nothing whatever to do with these musical traditions themselves, but is rather due to the impingement of independently evolving technological forces.
At the same time, these same technological forces have given birth to new musical traditions. These traditions are unaware of what makes them different from older musical traditions, for they are an organic part of the same confluence that has subsumed these older traditions. This confluence is the context in which the global musical culture of our time exists.
Unfortunately for our understanding of this culture, few people seem to realize this. People interested in one variety of music insulate themselves from exposure to other varieties. The consensus makers of popular music have little interaction with the consensus makers of jazz or 'classical' music; and the rest of the world's music receives even fewer 'crossover' listeners. The ease with which we can listen to whatever we want also makes it easier than ever to ignore everything else. And so the forest remains unseen because everyone is busy building and personalizing their own tree-houses within it.
It might seem presumptuous to assert that such revolutionary change could have occurred without attracting the notice of the relevant experts and cognoscenti, but such a situation is not unprecedented. A quick look at the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein on the cultural influence of the printing press provides us with an example of the same kind of phenomena taking place on a much larger scale:
According to Steinberg: "The history of printing is an integral part of the general history of civilization." Unfortunately, the statement is not applicable to written history as it stands, although it is probably true enough of the actual course of human affairs. Far from being integrated into other works, studies dealing with the history of printing are isolated and artificially sealed off from the rest of historical literature. In theory, these studies center on a topic that impinges on many other fields. In fact, they are seldom consulted by scholars who work in any other field, perhaps because their relevance to other fields is still not clear.....If 500+ years have not been enough to integrate the history of the printing press into the rest of European history, it is hardly surprising that the history of audio technology has yet to be incorporated into the history of music. The nature of the relationship between technology and the evolution of music is likely to remain obscure for some time to come.
The effects produced by printing have aroused little controversy, not because views on the topic coincide, but because almost none has been set forth in an explicit and systematic form.
Nonetheless, we will be exploring this relationship over the next few months. These explorations may well be rather tentative, more a matter of making suggestions for future research rather than trying to come to any definitive conclusions. But one has to start somewhere.
Top of post.
Top of page.
_____________________________
The World Inside an SM57
April 26, 2010
The Shure SM57 is probably the single most common piece of professional audio equipment in the world. It is used on every kind of sound source, every day, in live music venues everywhere; it has been used on drums and guitar amps in countless recordings; and it has been on the lectern of every US president since Lyndon Johnson. Steve Albini hates them, of course, but the rest of the world uses them with abandon, and as a result they are as common as dirt and almost as cheap, being available for as little as 75 US dollars on Ebay.
What few people realize is that this humble bit of kit embodies a staggering amount of scientific knowledge and technical know-how. Everything about this microphone, from it's tailored frequency response, to it's ability to work safely in earsplitting high SPL applications, to it's durability, small size, light weight, and low price, is a collective result of the disparate knowledge of countless people: electrical engineers, acousticians, materials scientists, machinists and manufacturers. The hours of research implicit in every SM57 are beyond counting.
The SM57 is an example of what is called a 'moving coil' or 'dynamic' microphone. There are, generally speaking, three kinds of microphones in common use: condenser microphones, ribbon microphones, and dynamic microphones. There are other kinds of course, many of which have been designed for very specific purposes, but the vast majority of the microphones used for musical applications such as studio recording or live sound reinforcement belong to one of the three categories listed above.
All three kinds of microphones were first developed in the early years of electrical audio engineering: the condenser microphone was patented by E.C. Wente in 1916, the ribbon microphone was invented by Walter Schottky in 1923, while the first dynamic microphone, initially called the Marconi-Sykes Magnetophone, was put into use by the BBC in the same year. This Magnetophone thingie was an amazing piece of work. It was known as the 'Meat Safe', because it "required an enormous (6ft x 4ft x 2ft) 10 valve amplifier" to operate. Even more imposing than the amp was the fact that it required an immense electromagnet, consuming 4 amps from an 8 volt battery (pdf), just to create the microphone's internal magnetic field.
Now what we call a dynamic microphone today consists of a diaphragm that vibrates when sound waves hit it, that is attached to a coil of wire that is suspended in a magnetic field. This concept was first developed by E.C. Wente and was awarded US patent #1,766,473 in 1930. Reading this patent, with it's description of an 80 year old technological concept, is quite humbling. This passage, describing part of a method of negating the natural resonance of the diaphragm, is typical:
To simplify greatly: the device described in this patent works by an action that is analogous to the action of a loudpeaker in reverse. The magnetic energy necessary to make this kind of microphone work is very great considering it's size, which is why the commercial development of these microphones lagged behind the development of condenser and ribbon microphones. The only way to get that kind of magnetic force in the 1920's was to use large electromagnets, which were bulky, heavy, and altogether inconvenient.
What changed this situation was the development of more powerful permanent magnets. The first of these were developed around 1930 and were made of Alnico (aluminum-nickel-cobalt). Alnico allowed Shure to introduce it's Unidyne series of microphones, which were, as the catalog stated (pdf) "The first high quality, low-cost moving-coil type dynamic [microphone] with true cardioid unidirectional characteristics". This might have been true, but the 55A still cost just under 43 US dollars in 1940, which amounts to about 660 dollars in 2010 when adjusted for inflation. This is not a low price for a dynamic microphone in today's market. The direct descendent of the 55A, the 55SH, today lists for just 200 US dollars. Shure's SM7, a first rate microphone used on hundreds of classic vocal tracks, lists for just 436 dollars. And the humble SM57 bottoms out the list with a MSRP of just 124 dollars, which would have been a mere 8 dollars in 1940.
What has caused this drop in price? Well, what hasn't? After the advent of Alnico magnets came the development of barium and strontium based ceramic magnets in the early fifties, samarium-cobalt magnets in the seventies, and neodymium-iron-boron magnets in the early eighties. Each of these developments allowed new levels of performance to be achieved, or allowed the same levels of performance to be achieved more conveniently, or for less money. These magnets have been exploited not just by makers of dynamic microphones, but by makers of loudspeakers, headphones, and phonograph cartridges as well.
Then, too, the other components of these microphones have undergone a similar evolution. The duralumin diaphragm employed by Wente has been replaced many times over, as can be seen by looking over this patent, assigned to, you guessed it, Shure Brothers, in 1993. It cites 7 other patents, one of which describes 'Multiple layer packaging sheet material' of all things. This patent in turn cites about 40 other patents, ranging over a hundred years, which describe things like methods 'for making a polyvinylidene chloride coated biaxially oriented polyethylene terephthalate container'....
Layers and layers of mind-numbingly complex technical and scientific insights, all to explain some packaging material. Packaging material which, apparently, is useful in the manufacture of microphone diaphragms.
This ramified repository of knowledge presents itself no matter where you look: magnet, diaphragm, voice coil, voice coil cartridge, methods of assembling voice coil cartridge, materials used in housing of voice coil cartridge....all reach with a million roots into the knowledge of the past; all are constantly being refined and improved upon.
And of course, much of the actual manufacturing is done in places like China and Mexico, where wages are lower. This sort of thing often creates a great deal of anger at places like gearslutz, but this is a short sighted anger. All products of modern manufacture involve components that come from across the globe, as Leonard Read pointed out in 1958. And what exactly is being implied when complaining about things being made in China, anyway? Are Chinese people worse at quality control for some reason?
In any case, if you sit back and think about it, the whole thing beggars the imagination: centuries of scientific knowledge; countless man hours of research and testing; manufacturing procedures taking place at facilities across the globe, using materials from across the globe, to be shipped across the globe. And all of this is taking place just to allow the Rod Torfulson's Armadas of the world to record their demos on a budget.
Kinda chokes you up, doesn't it?
Top of post.
Top of page.
_____________________________
A Skeptical Response to the Cynical Musician
March 13, 2010
There is an interesting post from January over at The Cynical Musician called The Paradise That Should Have Been. It is well written, and it seems to be reasonable. The author of this post is "deeply disillusioned about how it (i.e. the internet) turned out". The post is an elucidation of this disillusionment.
Now straight off we have to point out that it is impossible to speak reasonably about how the internet 'turned out'. The author is apparantly trained in economics, but seems to know little of economic history, for even a cursory glance at it's pages would show that there has not been enough time since the internet's inception to be able to discern how it will, eventually, turn out. One need only look at the early years of the phonograph to see an example of why this is so.
Ten years after Edison invented the Phonograph in 1877, no one yet had any conception of what we call the music industry, and there were still many who envisioned the phonograph's future not as an entertainment device, but as a business machine. Ten years later, Edison himself was still referring to phonographs as 'talking machines', and many records still came in packages that featured the name, not of the performer, but of the manufacturer. It was not until thirty years had passed, when Caruso sang on the the first ever million selling record, that the music business as we know it today could be said to have come into being.
The world wide web is just about 20 years old, and it's usefulness as a music distribution system is younger still. Many musicians still have no idea how to take advantage of what the internet already makes possible, and even the most tech savvy people in the world are powerless to say what it will make possible in the future. It is sheer hubris for anyone to claim that they know how it will turn out.
Moving along, we come to the author's main complaint about the internet, and it is a familiar one: he isn't making enough money off of it:
"The Internet should have been a godsend to musicians and creators of replicable works in general, for two reasons:
1. The two biggest problems an independent creator faces are distribution and promotion, which in the past meant the need to deal with publishers (and all associated creative and financial trade-offs). The Internet has enabled even the smallest business to reach a potentially global consumer base.
2. Creative works such as books, movies and music are pretty much the only products (others include software and news) that can be delivered on-line and as such seem custom-fitted to e-commerce.
Looking at the two points above, we see that the Internet should have opened wide new vistas for the creative sector and enabled thousands of independent creators to flourish without the need to court big business. So why didn't it pan out that way?"
Here again we see the same unwarranted certainty concerning how things 'panned out', as if one could take a snapshot of a transitional process and make final statements about it on the basis of such a snapshot. But the real problem is a more subtle form of confusion. The author bemoans the fact that the internet failed to 'enable thousands of independent creators to flourish without the need to court big business'. The existence of this failure is taken as self evident. The possibility that thousands of independent creators already are flourishing is one that seems not to occur to the author, which is odd, as this is quite obviously the case.
This confusion is probably due, at least in part, to the ambiguity of the word 'flourish'. The first sense of the word:
"to grow luxuriantly; thrive"
is quite distinct from the second:
"to achieve success; prosper".
This is a telling ambiguity. It represents two different ways of looking at musical culture. The first simply requires that the culture itself be thriving, the second requires that it make people prosperous and successful.
Now the cynical musician clearly believes the latter. Furthermore, he appears to believe that these two senses are more or less the same:
"The trends on the Internet are such, that it is becoming harder and harder to pursue recording music as a career. If recordings aren't a money maker, they'll be treated as one of three things: advertising, a hobby or not worth the bother. But we still want recorded music, don't we?"'Advertising, a hobby or not worth the bother.' Cynical indeed.
It is interesting to compare this with a rather different statement:
"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us. Usually the artist has to suffer certain deprivations in order to use his gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego."
These words, written by Flannery O'Connor, are worth remembering today, when cultural 'content' is often created perfunctorily and consumed indiscriminately. But more to the point, they place the cynical musician's remarks in a rather damning context. "If it is 'not worth the bother' to you" one can imagine her saying, "then you probably shouldn't".
Of course, Flannery O'Connor was a literary artist, a profession with rather an older and grander tradition behind it than that of recording artist. But the recording, as a category, is no temporary fad. On the contrary, it is the most common permanent form of musical thought in our time. I see no reason to hold recording artists to a lower standard than literary artists. Unless, of course, one doesn't quite take them seriously as artists.
I suspect this is often more true than people like to admit. Even the Beatles, who as a group formed the very model of a successful recording artist, look rather silly on a platform next to Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare and Proust. I mean, they all had the same hair cut. They wore uniforms for chrissakes. From the beginning, their popularity had at least as much to do with their being thought to be cute as it had to do with their musical talent. Melodies, even great melodies, don't make hordes of young girls want to scream your name and rush the stage and buy everything that has your picture on it. Melodies merely make people want to sing along with them. If you want all of that other stuff you need to be, not just an artist, but a celebrity.
Of course, this is what most people want. The glory of being an artist like Proust is an obscure glory: he lived with his parents until he was middle-aged, didn't publish anything until he was over 40, and died as an invalid 10 years later, leaving his life's work unfinished. Who wants that shit? Who in their right mind wouldn't prefer being rich and famous at 22? Famous for writing and performing simple 3 minute songs that everyone calls you a genius for writing, while millions of members of the opposite sex tell you over and over again how wonderful you are?
This is the dream of all prospective American Idols and their ilk: to be a rock star. And while the internet did not kill this dream, it has made everything much more complicated. The Beatles just had to show up at Abbey Road studios and play their music, and the machinery of the music industry took care of the rest. Today 12 year old kids have access to music production software that allows them to do, or at least to attempt, things that the Beatles and Geoff Emerick could only have imagined, while the internet provides methods of distributing that music throughout the world much more efficiently then even the largest old-fashioned distribution network.
And so the world is flooded with home made rock star wannabes. Many of them have no idea how to make decent recordings. Many, too, have much less talent than they have ambition. Because of these people, and they are legion, terabytes of bandwidth are consumed daily transmitting a world-wide, never-ending episode of the Gong Show...without the gong. Strangely, most consumers are uninterested in paying for any of this.
If you grew up with dreams of being a recording artist of the traditional variety, and worked hard toward that goal, making sacrifices along the way, this might well seem to be a frustrating turn of events, something akin to that obnoxious commercial for the Ladders. But it is hard to know how much the internet has actually changed things, and how much it has merely made it easier to see (or, harder to avoid seeing) things that have been going on forever. Stardom and celebrity have always been difficult attainments. They require an unpredictable and fortuitous confluence of events to take place, and there are always more people trying to attain them than have any hope of doing so. In the past, though, the activities of these people were confined to talent agency offices, theatrical auditions, Hollywood parties, and new band night. To the world at large they were invisible. The internet merely makes them visible.
Now some people are probably thinking something along the lines of: 'But I don't want to be a rock star, I just want to make a living off of my recordings'. They might even mean it. But the sad fact is that it is just about impossible to do this without being a rock star. Steve Albini explained why this is so many years ago, and today, 15 years later, he still hasn't changed his mind. An exception to this rule is licensing your music for commercial purposes, and it is noteworthy that this kind of income is to a large extent impervious to the kind of 'piracy' that people like to blame on the web. I am yet to hear of a television commercial using a pirated copy of someone's song that they found on a p2p network.
But whether the internet has damaged or destroyed the dream of being a rock star, or has merely made the hopelessness of this dream more evident, it should be remembered that there is a lot more to music than these dreams of glitz and celebrity and screaming crowds and simple anthems. And the fact is that this 'more' is widely, freely and legally available all over the web. The internet has opened up countless creative and communicative opportunities to musicians. It offers free educational resources, ranging from basic recording guides and practical music theory, to advanced audio engineering and free interactive lessons in classical orchestration. It offers easy and free access to the scholarly work of musicologists from Phillip Spitta to Colin McPhee, recordings of the music of cultures from Tuva to Indonesia, and the scores of composers from Dufay to Bartok. One can download legitimately free software that allows one to make first rate recordings; software that has the functionality of equipment that costs many thousands of dollars.
Above all, the internet allows musical artists to practice their craft with integrity; beholden to no one and nothing but their own aesthetic convictions. And that is something that no amount of skepticism, or cynicism, can call into doubt.
Top of post.
Top of page.
_____________________________
Music and the Internet
February 10, 2010
In discussions of 'Music and the Internet', the locus of the argument has almost always been some or other variation on 'how will musicians get paid?'.
On one side we have the 'Everything is Falling Apart!' contingent, with it's constant demands for more stringent laws to protect it's members from what they like to call 'piracy'. These people generally seem to regard the internet as a threat, though some of them would be perfectly willing to accept it if only it could be controlled and licensed like Cable TV or Satellite Radio.
On the other side we have the 'Everything about the Internet is Totally Awesome!' contingent. These people counsel musicians to embrace the internet. This contingent consists for the most part of technological enthusiasts who are quick to notice the advantages of the internet, but who are often impatient with people who are less than thrilled about the disruptions it has created.
While this seemingly interminable argument is no doubt fascinating, one wonders if these issues really do merit their solitary place at the head of the table. For all of the talk, pro and con, about embracing new paradigms, the fact is that whichever side one is on, the whole debate has been framed by the music industry.
Think of it: the whole dialogue concerns getting paid and business opportunities; connecting with fans and giving people a reason to buy; the plight of 'fledgling songwriters who can't live off ticket and T-shirt sales'; the economics of abundance and the long tail. In other words, the whole debate has been about the financial well-being of musicians and the industries that support them; and not about the aesthetic well-being of musicians and the art that they practice.
I can not say that I know exactly what the 'aesthetic well-being' of music might consist of. But I am quite sure that I know at least as much about it as Edgar Bronfman, Lyor Cohen or Tommy Mottola. I am also quite sure that none of us deserve to determine which music will be recorded for posterity and shared with the world and which will be forgotten. And even though I respect the legacy of such visionary figures as Nesuhi Ertegun and Sam Phillips, I don't think that they deserved to make those determinations either.
But deserving or not, label executives and their A and R men did in fact make such determinations throughout most of the history of recorded sound. These people, and the industries they were a part of, acted as gatekeepers, standing between musicians and their potential audience. They didn't do this to be mean, or evil, necessarily. But the power to do evil was most definitely theirs to exercise as they saw fit.
This power derived from the essential nature of the recording industries. Before the internet, recorded music required a tangible medium to be distributed. The form that this medium took changed quite frequently: going gradually from the Edison cylinder to the 78 rpm disc, to the LP and 45, to the cassette tape and on to the compact disc. Each of these changes were in the end unavoidable. Few if any companies could survive making monaural 78 rpm shellac records when microgroove stereo 331/3 rpm records were the industry standard. The monolithic nature of this progression is probably what gave birth to our monolithic conception of 'the industry'.
There are many who love this thing we call 'the industry'. Some are enamored of the grand tradition: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Hit Parade; Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith; Bing Crosby and Elvis and Johnny Cash and the Beatles. Others are shamelessly fascinated with the glamour and spectacle, apparantly unaware that music has any other value than as a pretext for celebrity gossip and fashion talk. Yet others define themselves in opposition to the industry even as they are working within it, in that strange sort of hostile symbiosis that we characterize with the adjective 'punk'.
But whether you love or hate 'the industry', it has become an anachronism. Though it may continue to exist for quite some time in some form or another, it will be as a ghost, a pale shadow of it's former self, because it's very raison d'être has disappeared, superseded in the blink of an eye by the internet.
I have discussed elsewhere how the internet and digital audio have democratized the means of creating and distributing audio recordings, but no one could possibly describe these changes any more clearly and eloquently than Clay Shirky, whose words regarding the catastrophic changes faced by the newspaper industries are equally applicable here:
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem.
The core problem that the music industry solved - the difficulty of making and distributing audio recordings - has stopped being a problem.
This is progress, as clearly and obviously as the advent of the printing press was progress. To anyone who really cares about the art of music as a whole, or about our ability to understand and do justice to musical traditions alien to our own, this is progress.
Whether or not anyone makes any money off of it is a trivial sideshow by comparison, one that only seems important to people because they are still allowing the industry to frame the debate.
Top of post.
Top of page.
_____________________________
Traditional Musicians and Remix culture
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.
No musician is well served by a culture in which a simple act of musical quotation is fraught with possible infringement issues. It might be the case that the flagrant acts of wholesale uncredited appropriation that some artists have engaged in have encouraged this climate of IP maximalism. But whether or not this is the case, the 'cure' of ever more expansive copyright laws is much more damaging to the development of musical art than the 'disease' of uncredited appropriation.
Remixing is simply a part of modern musical life. If you record your music, and people hear it and like it, it inevitably WILL GET REMIXED.
PERIOD
FULL STOP
All of the creators who can't accept this might want to start making their music in secure locations where it can't be recorded by anyone.
It could be glorious, just think of the chances to be exclusive.
Of course, there would have to be invasive searches if you really wanted to ensure that it wasn't recorded. They make some really tiny mics and recorders these days. Perhaps...hey yeah, a nudist concert event for the artistically pure!!
hmmmm......
Top of post.
Top of page.
_____________________________
Real Music Media Samples Go 100% Free
December 15, 2009We are restructuring things here at Real Music Media. Instead of being sample developers who do music, we are going back to being musicians who do intermittant sample development.
This was necessary for many reasons, the biggest one of which is that we would rather make music than edit samples.
And so, in the spirit of community, rather than closing up shop, we decided to give our catalog away for free.
Please make sure that you subscribe to our RSS feed, so you know about any new free offers we have before we run out of bandwidth for that month.
Top of post.
Top of page.
_____________________________
The Power of Cheap (and Free)
December 6, 2009An important side effect of our culture of constantly upgrading everything is the fact that useful things are always becoming cheaper. A computer that was state of the art in 2000, with a single core cpu that has a clock speed of 1 GHz, is not at all remarkable in 2009, when computers built around quadcore cpus with a clock speed of 2.66 GHz are common. But that doesn't mean that the computer of 2000 has become useless. After a certain point, improvements are less about necessity, and more about convenience, or even luxury.
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.
Top of post.
Top of page.
_____________________________