How Music Works (24 page)

to create or buy tracks made from scratch (often on synthesizers and drum

machines). Technology, or rather the aspect of technology that enabled the

use of copyrighted material, had, thanks to the efforts of rights enforcers and guardians, sent some musicians back to the drawing board. A group of hot

young programmers soon emerged whose skills were in constructing, for use

by others, these grooves made from scratch. With a relatively inexpensive

piece of gear or software, you could make contributions to major songs from

your bedroom. In contemporary hip-hop, there is now often no relationship

between a composition’s backing track and a simulation of a live performance by musicians in the traditional sense. In the early days, there were live DJs using vinyl to loop drum breaks, but now everything—every instrument—is

sampled, processed, or in some way shamelessly and boldly artificial.

This music floats free of all worldly reference. Most other pop genres

retain some link to simulated live performance, or at least to the instruments used in one, but a song put together with finger snaps, super-compressed or

auto-tuned vocals, squiggly synths, and an impossibly fat and unidentifiable bass sound doesn’t resemble any existing live band at all. In my opinion, this isn’t a bad thing. A new musical avenue has opened up, one that maybe had its roots with Kraftwerk and other electronic acts, but which has now morphed

into something very different. It’s music that, by design, affects the body. It’s very sensuous and physical, even though the sounds themselves don’t relate

to any music that has ever been physically produced. You can’t play air guitar or mimic playing an instrument to a contemporary hip-hop record; even the

sounds that signify “drums” don’t sound like a drum kit.

These artists therefore have a difficult decision to make when they’re

expected to perform. Nothing on their record was played by anything that

132 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

sounds like a “real” instrument, so the performance becomes a kind of kara-

oke spectacle with most of the sounds pre-recorded—or sometimes artist and

band deconstruct the recording in order to “play” its component parts in a way that resembles, visually at least, a traditional band. This sounds like I’m being critical, but actually playing and performing to samples and pre-recorded tracks can free the artist to create something more theatrical. The R. Kelly
Light It Up
tour pushed a traditional R&B concert into the realm of surreal theater. The music in these shows can be viewed as a soundtrack for a spectacle, a gathering, a show of camaraderie, visual bombast, and effects. Grace Jones and Pet Shop Boys did this years ago. They were mainly dance-club bands and visual

icons, not live acts, and they were both very arty about it. Now this kind of karaoke spectacle has gone mainstream. Even if the lead vocal is live, the audience often doesn’t care whether there is a band or not—the band is often just there to dress the set. I will admit that there is an inevitable excitement ceiling when it comes to these karaoke spectaculars, at least as far as the music goes, since there is never the possibility of the music rising beyond its pre-existing programmed level (and I don’t mean volume). But if the social and the visual elements are good enough—and using this technology they are freer to become

so—then it can be a reasonable trade-off.

Hip-hop artists have also revived the mixtape (or maybe it never went

away). Sampled beats and digital recording have allowed mixtape artists to

create seamless sequences of songs, dialogue, beats, and assorted weirdness

in ways that were never really possible using cassette recorders. Most of these are “released” as CDs, though the name harkens back to the cassette era. But I have a feeling that the era of the CD mixtape is also coming to an end. I have digital mixes that are one continuous hour-long piece of music, but now, in a technical sense, there’s really no limit. The artificial length that Sony imposed on CDs no longer applies. You could make a downloadable album that’s ten

hours long, or one that’s only ten minutes. Jem Finer recently created a piece of music that runs for a thousand years. Marketing and promotion aren’t very cost effective for one song at a time, so temporarily at least we still market and acquire songs in clumps (an hour or less is typical), as we have for decades. But there’s no reason that will remain the standard indefinitely.

Looking at the short end of the musical-length spectrum, ringtones

haven’t yet been recognized as a valid form of standalone musical creativ-

ity, and they may never be. But shortness shouldn’t matter anymore. One

DAV I D BY R N E | 133

could argue that the Mac start-up sound is a musical composition, as is the

short, mysterious, ascending five-second bumper that signaled the end of

each scene in the TV series
Lost
. Doorbells, whooshes, email alerts, and car horns are all valid forms of composition. Our musical landscape is indeed

broadening, as length doesn’t matter anymore: short, long, and in-between

all coexist.

PRIVATE MUSIC

The iPod, like the Walkman cassette player before it,C allows us to listen

to our music wherever we want. Previously, recording technology had

unlinked music from the concert hall, the café, and the saloon, but now

music can always be carried with us. Michael Bull, who has written fre-

quently about the impact of the Walkman and the iPod, points out that we

often use these devices to “aestheticize urban space.”4 We carry our own

soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid

with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score

for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an

action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own

private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same. That said,

the twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, ever the complainer,

called this situation “accompanied solitude,” a situation where we might be

alone, but we have the ability via music to create the illusion that we are

not.5 In his somewhat Marxist way, he viewed music as an opiate, espe-

cially popular music. (I’ve met some serious Wagner fans, and I’d be wary of limiting the accusation that music is an addictive palliative solely to pop.)
C

134 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

Adorno saw the jukebox as a machine that drew “suckers” into pubs with

the promise of joy and happiness. But, like a drug, instead of bringing real happiness, the music heard on jukeboxes only creates more desire for itself.

He might be right, but he might also have been someone who never had a

good time in a honky-tonk.

Private listening could be viewed as the height of narcissism—these

devices usually exclude everyone else from the experience of enjoying music.

In
Brave New World
, Aldous Huxley imagined a drug called soma that blissed everyone out. It was like taking a holiday, and you could regulate the length of the holiday by the dosage. Has technology turned music into a soma-like

drug? Is it like a pill you take that is guaranteed to generate a desired emotion—bliss, anger, tranquility?

ACOUSTIC ASSOCIATIONS

Some of us sing to ourselves or even just whistle when we think no one is

listening, and often there is music “playing” in our heads. A region of the

brain seems to be devoted primarily to sonic memory, and that includes not

just ringtones, dog growls, and ambulance sirens, but also snippets of songs, mainly recordings, that we’ve heard as well. These sonic fragments function

as nodes in a network of related memories that stretch beyond their acoustic triggers. Everyone has had a song “transport” them to a vivid memory of an

early romance or some other formative experience. Songs are like smells that way; they dredge up worlds, very specific places and moments. Other sounds

do this, too: intense rain, the voice of a well-known actor, a knife on a cutting board, a distant train.

Are mobile music devices and the musically cluttered world we inhabit

starting to substitute for our interior voices? Do we, little-by-little, stop singing and whistling because professionals are now singing and playing for

us, right into our ears? A slew of musical associations bounce around in our heads, linking to recurring memories and feelings which, after a while, facilitate the creation and reinforcement of specific neural pathways. These path-

ways help us make sense of those experiences. They make us who we are. Is

that space now inhibited by the inundation of the music and sounds of oth-

ers? Are the voices in our heads, the inaudible chatter that we use to sort out DAV I D BY R N E | 135

who and where we are, being replaced by the voices of professionals? Well, I haven’t stopped singing to myself, so maybe not.

THAT WHICH CANNOT BE PRESERVED

Ilisten to music only at very specific times. When I go out to hear it live, most obviously. When I’m cooking or doing the dishes I put on music, and

sometimes other people are present. When I’m jogging or cycling to and from

work down New York’s West Side bike path, or if I’m in a rented car on the

rare occasions I have to drive somewhere, I listen alone. And when I’m writing and recording music, I listen to what I’m working on. But that’s it. That relatively short list defines, to a large extent, where and how I hear music. I find music somewhat intrusive in restaurants or bars. Maybe due to my involvement with it, I feel I have to either listen intently or tune it out. Mostly I tune it out; I often don’t even notice if a Talking Heads song is playing in most public places. Sadly, most music then becomes (for me) an annoying sonic

layer that just adds to the background noise. It might sound like I’m a picky eater, but I actually do listen to a lot of music.

As music becomes less of a thing—a cylinder, a cassette, a disc—and more

ephemeral, perhaps we will start to assign an increasing value to live performances again. After years of hoarding LPs and CDs, I have to admit I’m now

getting rid of them. I occasionally pop a CD into a player, but I’ve pretty much completely converted to listening to MP3s either on my computer or, gulp, my phone! For me, music is becoming dematerialized, a state that is more truthful to its nature, I suspect. Technology has brought us full circle.

I go to at least one live performance a week, sometimes with friends,

sometimes alone. There are other people there. Often there is beer, too. After more than a hundred years, we’re heading back to where we started. A century of technological innovation and the digitization of music has inadvertently

had the effect of emphasizing its social function. Not only do we still give friends copies of music that excites us, but increasingly we have come to

value the social aspect of a live performance more than we used to. Music

technology in some ways appears to have been on a trajectory in which the

end result is that it will destroy and devalue itself. It will succeed completely when it self-destructs. The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, 136 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able capture or reproduce.

Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it’s composed, and

how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or

make it ourselves; playing, hearing, and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor.

DAV I D BY R N E | 137

c h a p t e r f i v e