There was definitely a change in composition with the advent of digital recording. Looping of rhythm tracks is now ubiquitous, and you can “hear” the ease of Akai, Pro Tools, Logic and other digital and sample-based recording in the music written in the last 10 years. Sometimes the uncanny perfection that makes all this possible is pleasing, while at other times it is audibly too easy to achieve, and that facility is obvious and boring. In hip hop, which might be the most radical popular music around, there is no relationship of the composition to live performance anymore — everything, every instrument, is processed or is shamelessly and boldly artificial. Most other pop genres retain some link to simulated live performance, but a song put together with finger snaps, super compressed vocals, squiggly synths and an impossibly fat bass doesn’t resemble a band at all...
MP3s, which is how many of us hear music now, are in a way like virtual music. The compression that allows their smaller file size eliminates what the software decides are redundant frequencies and sounds the ear probably doesn’t hear and won’t miss. Maybe. There is less “information” on an MP3 than on a CD, and less on a CD than on an LP. Where does this road end, and does it really matter that sheer information and recording quality is going down?
If, like the phone company, we’re talking about communication, information, then maybe some of that sonic richness is indeed redundant and is therefore superfluous information? Well, yes and no. Looking at a reproduction of a painting is certainly not the same thing at standing in front of the real thing, but an awful lot of the emotion, intent, ideas and sensibility is still communicated in the cheap reproduction.
There’s a point though, at which the richness of the retinal or aural experience is so diminished that it becomes irrelevant, but where is that point? I first heard rock and soul songs on a tiny crappy-sounding transistor radio, and it changed my life completely. It was sonic, but it was also a social and cultural message that electrified me. Now I’m not saying that tinny sound should be considered satisfying or desirable, but it’s amazing how lo-fi or lo-rez information can communicate a huge amount.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Digital Disappearance
David Byrne on the musical response to technology and the sounds that are lost in digital media.
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5 comments:
Helmut,
This is very interesting (particularly coming, as it does, almost precisely on the heels of the hundred year anniversary (http://www.radiocom.net/Fessenden) of the first voice radio broadcast a week earlier. I like the way Byrne appears, in the portion of the essay you excerpted, to be making a standard audiophile critique of the acoustic limitations of digital recordings, but ends up making precisely the opposite argument--that the inevitable limitations of the medium (in this case audio recordings) may actually play an important enabling role in spurring development in interesting directions (many great examples, via Mark Katz, in the original essay). (I am also reminded here of how some directors are starting to produce video recordings specifically designed to be viewed on the extremely reduced screen of a video i-pod, including, for instance, a series of one minute versions of the popular series "24").
Carlos - I did the same thing by posting it - started as a standard crit of digital (audio) media, and ended up thinking about how current tech constraints might drive new forms of experience. I've always liked Langdon Winner's thesis on technologies having "politics" (in that, for instance, some techs require a reordering of politico-administrative structures, and thus how we live within the state).
The point here, I suppose, is aesthetic rather than political. But I wonder about the extent to which shifts in the technologies themselves may ultimately affect the physio-biological elements of aesthetic experience, as well as standards of quality.
Those of us of a certain age remember that a certain amount of physical dexterity and hand/eye coordination was required to gently set the needle in the groove of a spinning record so as not to cause a violent bouncing/screeching effect, guaranteed to harsh the mellowest of buzzes.
Or, in other words, "the physio-biological elements of aesthetic experience."
Uhhh, that is what you were talking about, right?
Sure, Roxtar. Note also how the fingersnap in music and vinyl records occur almost simultaneously. No vinyl, no Dean Martin?
"Psychophysics" may be the word you want, helmut. What I want to know though is if a tree falls in a forest where there's only needle and acetate to record it, does it make iTunes?
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