Discussion posts at Killed in Cars

Paul, mastermind of Killed in Cars, had an idea for posting some informal essay-ish materials based on (and expanding on) conversations we've been having about various musical issues. He just posted the first round, which I wrote, and he'll be following up with his own post shortly... You can read the first one at this direct link. But join the fun yourself, too--click the "submit" button on the Killed in Cars tumblr, and send in your own thoughts...

Technology and Humanity: making healthy music

New Music and popularity: is it the mastering?

A former classmate of mine, who is now a (very good) composer, performer, and educator, recently posed this question on a social media site: “Why does classical music insist on using an antiquated poor recording process?” He went on to explain that he was annoyed by the wide dynamic range used in classical recordings because it makes for long passages of very quiet audio playback with only occasional louder sections. This makes listening to classical music difficult in less-than-optimal situations, like during long car commutes, for example. 

In contrast, pop recordings have been mastered at ever-hotter levels in recent years, and also compressed (some call it “hypercompressed”) to make the volume difference between loud and soft passages negligible. This difference in how the music “pops” in a car or on the radio, my friend observes, might be one factor contributing to small audiences for classical music, simply because the recordings are produced to be effective in listening environments most folks simply don’t have any more like "hi-fi" rooms dedicated to careful listening.

Much has been written in the last decade about the “Loudness Wars,” happening both at mastering houses and again at radio stations, but this was the first time I’ve heard anyone have a distinctly positive attitude toward heavy compression of recordings. Personally, I have been irritated by too-loud recordings that sound harsh and brittle, rather than letting the music breathe with actual dynamics. While I still listen to a lot of music, I have found myself experiencing the “ear fatigue” often mentioned in connection with Loudness Wars.

It’s true that classical albums with a huge uncompressed dynamic range don’t fit nicely into the routines of those who might listen to music on a long car commute. It would be interesting to see data on how many people listen to music on long(ish) commutes to work or school by car. I’m sure the numbers are higher in sprawling car-centric places like Los Angeles and Denver, but I suspect that the numbers would be much less significant in big cities with better mass transit like NYC and Chicago (and the dynamic range issue doesn’t seem as pronounced for ear bud listening on trains), or in places with smaller populations and short commutes.

Perhaps “radio mixes” could be made available for those who might prefer them for practical reasons. It couldn’t hurt to give the idea a try. But the “traditional” mixes should remain available, too, for reasons I’ll go into below—and I don’t think dynamic range is a primary reason behind New Music’s lack of popular acceptance.

The resurgence of vinyl

The effects of ear fatigue in my own music listening routines have led me to a much-renewed interest in vinyl. I used to buy vinyl when it was the only available format, or when the used price was too good to resist, but in the last several years I’ve been buying new music on vinyl whenever it’s available. I have discovered that I can listen to records more deeply and for much longer stretches than I can handle with new CDs or mp3s. I notice myself becoming distracted or even irritated with digital formats. I think that was probably happening for a long time, but I couldn’t articulate precisely what was bothering me until I started finding articles about the Loudness Wars and ear fatigue. The contrast between formats seems to have increased in recent years, and indeed CD mastering has been pushed to the limit over roughly the same span of time.

Consider the seeming resurgence of vinyl: “the kids” who are downloading mp3s aren’t buying CDs anymore—but they are buying some vinyl. It’s a small market, to be fair, but it’s also a growing one. Many indie/weirdo bands have reached a point where records are more desirable than CDs on merch tables. And one of the biggest differences between CD and vinyl is a reduced dynamic maximum in analog media—that is, records are “quieter” than CDs. In spite of physical playback limitations to volume, vinyl mixing/mastering jobs tend to take fuller advantage of the available dynamic range, certainly in comparison to the brickwall radio pop mixes we’re getting lately.

Some have been cynical about the uptick in vinyl sales, dismissing the purchases as consumer totems of hipsterdom, but many vinyl junkies describe the sound of records as being better than CDs. I’ve grown to agree. In spite of pops and crackles on older/used records, I’m finding that vinyl almost always sounds better to me. More precisely, it feels better in a way that is difficult to quantify but is easily experienced when you’re immersed in the sound. What vinyl lacks in terms of added self-noise, possible clicks and crackles, narrower stereo field, or decreased dynamic and frequency ranges, it somehow compensates for with that ever-elusive concept of “warmth,” often described in comparison to digital playback as more “natural.” 

I notice this difference less on older, quieter, or less compressed CD releases, but once you’ve focused on the distinction, there is almost always a little more of that “warmth” on vinyl. I don’t think of myself as either a hipster or a retrogrouch, but I do think I’m experiencing something that amounts to more than just an aesthetic difference—there is a subtle difference in mood. While I see validity in the possible utilitarian need for more compressed mixes, this phenomenon points to an issue of health/wellness that forces me to lean hard in the other direction where my own listening needs are concerned.

Tuning/temperament

I'd already been thinking about the idea of music and health/wellness from another perspective--tuning and temperament. I'm not sure precisely what got me wondering about tuning systems lately, but I've been reading a lot about the history of tuning and temperament and seeking out recordings made outside of the equal-temperament tradition. A quick definition of "equal temperament," for readers who aren't familiar with the notion: the octave is divided into 12 equal intervals, allowing for easy transposition and modulation on instruments like the piano and the guitar.


I remember briefly touching on systems other than equal temperament (ET) in music school, but it was more for the sake of trivia. As compositional practices in the West leaned increasingly on modulation, the ET compromise was the only practical solution, making everything sound the same in all keys. But at what cost? I wonder how much communicative potency we lose in our music when pure intervals are compromised, or even if modulating heterophonic musical approaches communicate with less depth than more centered tonal approaches. I want to write music that is effective, communicates clearly, and is "healthy," for whatever that's worth. To that end, I think it's worth taking a serious look at alternative tuning and intervallic systems.

The talk around alternatives to equal temperament gets quasi-mystical at times. It's all vibrations. Frequencies are made of standing vibrations, art is essentially using a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to (hopefully) communicate or "resonate in consonance" with others...but it's impossible to dismiss biological components to hearing and our responses to auditory information. Music is indeed made of powerful frequencies that become even more powerful in harmony, and the vibrations from music and other sound stimuli do effect skin, bone, and body resonance. Perhaps these subtler contributions to hearing are themselves sensitive to particular shifts in tuning/temperament, or the difference in waveforms (analog) and close approximations (digital). And maybe the subtle differences become more substantial in combination--for example, is the difference more obvious when comparing a raga record to a hypercompressed pop CD?

I've long been attracted to contrapuntal music. In counterpoint, one is focused primarily on horizontal listening (melodic phrases and their interactions), rather than vertical implications (stacks of chords supporting one melody at a time). While counterpoint doesn't solve the problems of tuning and temperament, it does take a lot of the emphasis away from vertical sonorities. And in musical moments where phrases stop and focus on a given chord, wide vibrato can serve as a way to both impart emotion and to blur "true" pitch, letting listeners' minds do the tuning. 

In my own writing, focusing on melodic lines intersecting instead of writing "chords & a melody" heterophonic musical textures, and frequently ending phrases with wicked vibrato, seems to have protected me from the most acute intervallic problems introduced in equal temperament. But I would like to incorporate "pure" thirds and fifths into my music whenever I can, and I'm also interested in exploring the changes in different key centers' "moods" in other systems like just intonation and well temperament. Because there were small intervallic differences between key centers in non-equal temperament, we see historical descriptions of particular keys having different "moods." The effect is a variation on the basic major/minor duality and the subtler emotional/communicative distinctions introduced by the modes of major/minor scales. I'm excited to have more potential forms of compositional nuance available, so the idea of keys-with-moods is appealing.

Cultural values and music

These tuning/temperament issues were incredibly important in ancient China. The Chinese shared an underlying philosophy that musical forms--and their tuning--could represent the relative health of society, or even contribute in some way to social decline by falling "out of tune." To the extent that music written in equal temperament wouldn't meet their requirements for real consonance, let's look at the value placed on music in our society as viewed through the times and places in which it is performed.

When wondering about the lack of popular appeal for New Music, there is always an elephant in the room that must be acknowledged: with few exceptions, this kind of music has never had popular appeal. Performances of New Music, or "art music" as it's sometimes called in delineation from music that appeals to more commonly-shared aesthetics, was mostly heckled when presented to concert audiences in the early 20th Century. It continued to evolve in small salon performance formats, mostly sharing the music between people who made it and wealthy patrons supporting it for cultural cache. Larger concert audiences have never taken much of this music to heart, and it continues to evolve mostly within the protective walls of academia. Performance environments of salons and universities meant that New Music never had to succeed in terms of popularity.

I share the desire to bring this music "to the people." I believe it has much to communicate and express to non-academics and non-musicians. And it's worth exploring every possible method to help that mission succeed. However, I think that success will be more likely if the effort is based on a realistic understanding of this music's (non) relationship with the general public. An honest analysis of the situation must acknowledge long stretches of anti-public, anti-popular activity by the ranks of the avant-garde, New Music, academia, etc. Fortunately, many friendly and open communication-based vehicles for bringing this music to wider audiences are already at work: ensembles playing in non-traditional venues, group performances/improvisations that invite audience members to collaborate, and the act of teaching itself, staying in contact with upcoming generations of musicians.

Public Performance
Club gigs almost always start late in the evening and end in the middle of the night, later than most folks can justify being out if they take their jobs seriously. The establishments hosting these shows mostly rely on alcohol sales as their primary revenue stream. The economic context of shows-at-bars points to some form of musical devaluation in the sense that audiences at these shows must have as much or more interest in intoxication and potential hookups as they do music. Consider also the deafening room volumes at most club gigs, largely necessitated by the many conversations happening throughout the audience. The result is a sensory overload experience in which subtler musical detail is lost.

The low cover charge at the door has generally stayed $10 or less for decades at most clubs, explicitly placing a pretty low value on the music. Bands playing small and midlevel clubs have long been lucky to merely break even on tours with tiny $50-$200 payouts after many gigs. Now that albums themselves are ubiquitously available free online, even merch sales are tumbling, save for vinyl enthusiasts and t-shirt sales. At least you can't download shirts.

More famous bands and commercially successful jazz and classical artists still play swankier venues with earlier start and end times and much higher ticket prices. The continued success of these musicians and venues, mostly still solvent even in our current economic troubles, is a positive sign that at least some forms of music continue to enjoy a stature of social value. And outside of performances, the massive popularity of illegal downloading in the last decade, and the growing popularity of streaming catalog sites like Spotify, last.fm, and Rhapsody, show that people still love to hear lots of music if the price is low or free. But the ticket prices for big shows have increased very, very rapidly--returning to the ancient Chinese perspective, it could be argued that the decline of the middle class in our country is mirrored in musical performances, as music is made by and for the extremes of the wealthy and the working poor, with less and less content in the middle.

Insights from art movements

Early 20th. Century art movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism, generally started among enclaves of "outsider" intellectuals, and as they declined as organizations, many of their techniques and ideals were preserved among academic art traditions. But there was a period where those art movements worked very hard to attain prosperity and stability within their societies. They weren't simply making weirdo art to exchange among one another; they were socially and politically engaged, doing their best to support the working class, especially in the case of the Surrealists. Their best work is rich in collective human experience and largely in opposition to bourgeoisie ideals of their day, which they were already observing as contributing to a certain hazy disconnection that ultimately matured into the postmodern detachment of television culture: lowest common denominator stuff, but with a self-referential and self-congratulatory laziness instead of consonance with basic archetypal building blocks that communicate more substantial collective values.

I first saw the communicative potential in avant-garde forms of creativity while reading "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" in middle school. Wolfe's descriptions of the Pranksters' colorful clothing, exuberant style, and willingness to talk to anyone struck my young mind as a beautiful and effective way to show the public new forms of art while nurturing collaboration and community values. In retrospect, the mood of change present in the culture-at-large gave them certain advantages of time and place, but their activities still reveal valuable ideas for artists who want to share their work beyond cultural boundaries, real or perceived: make it fun! It can be easy to lean toward negativity and observe that our culture has largely grown apathetic, lazy, and not particularly thoughtful, consumed by consumption itself. One artist or a group of artists won't change that course alone, but we can all make meaningful strides. Through our actions and our art, we can show that learning, thinking, and feeling can be fun and rewarding--that a well-considered life is an enjoyable one. We can take care of ourselves and each other, sharing our values and aesthetics at the community level, and in doing so we will empower and inspire.

Living thoughtfully

So I don't have all of this stuff worked out. I think all of these issues are interrelated, or at least they are in my work and life, and after wrestling with most of them for what's staring to add up to decades, I'm not waiting for a singular epiphany to part the waters. Reconciliation of the whole is a long process that continues to unfold as I grow and experience more. For me, the core value is living thoughtfully, participating in an open-ended process in which you first strive to understand yourself, and from an individual position of health and stability you can communicate more effectively with others and nurture your community. 

Of course there are many ways to live thoughtfully and assess yourself, many combinations of personal growth and getting ideas and strength from those close to you. Some choose to describe the process in spiritual terms, and that can be helpful. For its simplicity and directness regardless of spiritual/religious leanings, I'd recommend "Tracking the Gods" by James Hollis as a resource for organizing self-growth plans (and thanks to Brian Alt for introducing the book for a book discussion group several years ago). It's a short book drawn from Jungian principles--simply put, it lays out the concept of archetype as a way to identify issues of growth and renewal common among individuals of cultures throughout history. You can establish what amounts to a "personal mythology" built on cultural and individual values that resonate with you, from which you can draw strength and purpose while knowing you're on a journey which will continue to evolve and amaze you through the years. What I especially like about the concept is how it lends itself nicely to the creation of common ground at the community level. You can apply it to particular spiritual/religious practices if you choose, or you can look at it as secular common ground--the value to the human condition, individually and collectively, is preserved either way.

As I try to comprehend the connections between these issues of music, art, culture, and community, I'm trying to listen to my body while also addressing the more intellectual implications. I often struggle to achieve a balance between the cerebral and the visceral in my own life, but the effort is more than worth it. I want to enjoy music that is healthy for mind and body, encourage others to experience it, and make it myself. Looking back, I think that a lot of my musical efforts over the past decade focused on social critique, highlighting the negative aspects of control systems, addiction, consumer culture, fanaticism, etc. Rather than continuing in that direction, I intend to make music that can be part of a steady diet of healing, growing, and togetherness. This is only one aspect of living thoughtfully, which in my case has led me toward choices like bicycle transportation, eating healthier with a focus on local, organic foods, and avoiding most television/cinematic products as forms of entertainment. I think it's important that artists try to participate in thoughtful living in their lives and work, toward individual and societal health. When our new creations resonate with people, new lines of communication open, and creative acts move us all forward.

To 2012!


I'd love to see this post turn into a discussion--please feel empowered, even obligated, to add your thoughts in the comments. Anonymous comments are fine. Sometimes the anonymous ones get pulled into the spam filter, so don't be alarmed if yours doesn't show up right away. I'll look for those and move 'em over as needed.

The short era of Other Music podcasts

Note: the following is my own opinion. My views don't necessarily reflect those of the station or the other Other Music DJs.

I received a DMCA complaint for one of the Other Music podcasts. Technically, as these things go, Google received the complaint, the contents of which have yet to be made available, which resulted in the offending post being reverted to "draft" status and the mp3 file of the show being removed as well.

Unfortunately, I had misunderstood how the DMCA applies to podcasts--as it turns out, a music show like ours would have to be posted in 5-hour blocks for no more than 10 days before removal to be compliant. It would also have to be presented in a format with only play/stop functionality. Explore this link for some of the intricacies of DMCA compliance as it relates to podcasts, if you're in the mood to get bummed.

Exceptions can be made upon agreement with copyright holders, so when we have guests on the show talking about their music or playing in the studio, I will make those broadcasts available. And I'm leaving the links available for the recent Paul Bailey interview show and the Bobbie Boob live-in-the-studio show. The other podcasts, however, are no longer linked.

I have a few observations regarding this situation, and I'd love to get a conversation going in the comments section of this thread. Please feel free to chime in:

Regardless of the letter of the law, I fail to see how 2-hour-long mp3 files, recorded at  low bit rate and transcoded from the webstream of each broadcast (and the webstream is a product paid for by the station) presented as singular long files with no track breaks, could conceivably hurt record sales for any artist. The broadcasts themselves never feature more than 2 tracks from any one artist in the course of a 2-hour show, and even if we played an album from beginning to end--which we wouldn't--the audio quality of the podcasts would be incredibly low and full of pops and crackles from transcoding.

The radio show has been on the air since the mid 90s, building an audience over time and establishing a reputation as a great "finding tool" for people who are interested in learning about creative music of the past and present. We help to expose lesser-known music to a considerably wider audience, and we spend a lot of time selecting truly exemplary music for broadcast, digging into our large personal collections and continuously researching new and old music that we want to feature. The situation is very much the opposite of trying to hurt the potential sales of creative music. I wish I had a way to compile statistics, but I can say anecdotally from the calls, letters, and Facebook comments and messages we receive that people who listen to the show do find new favorite composers and bands with our help, and they ask us for more information on music we play almost every week. And the artists featured on the show receive compensation for both the over-the-air and the live streaming audio of our broadcasts through the usual broadcast/SoundExchange channels.

Because the live broadcast of Other Music happens at a potentially inconvenient time for many of our listeners, and because people generally have busy schedules, many have requested that we offer podcasts of the show. Having fielded many of these requests myself, it's clear to me that these are people who want to find out about new and unusual musicians, and recognize the potential of our show to help them in their search. Having a podcast of the shows is not a way to get music for free for this audience--instead it is a starting point toward musical explorations which frequently result in album, digital music, and concert ticket purchases.

At minimum, the DMCA needs to be amended to take a more realistic view of podcasts and their place as promotional tools. If podcasts followed the guidelines that pertain to live-streaming audio, I can't see how they could be construed as anything but an asset to the promotion of music, especially if there were bitrate limitations applied to the products. In a deeper sense, I am frustrated with the DMCA's functionally putting podcasts of legitimate broadcasts into the same category as peer-to-peer filesharing and download blogs, and I am baffled as to why random takedown notices are still being used as a "tool" in an online environment that has for the last full decade made it possible to download virtually any record ever made. While I can't claim to have an answer for the larger problems of illicit album sharing online, it must be obvious to any observer that the law is it stands is archaic and functionally unenforcable.

--Speaking of "functionally enenforcable,"there are many free tools for recording streaming audio, including tools that can be used for "scheduled recordings" where you can set up your computer to record a streaming broadcast in your absence and listen later. I've been using Radio Recorder to make the OM podcasts, which would work well for listeners who use Apple computers. PC users can look at tools like the ones on this huge list. While not as convenient as my offering a podcast from a central location, listeners can certainly make their own recordings of the show with a minimum of trouble.

For the record, I have grand plans for this site and the radio show, and while I'm frustrated with the podcast situation, I'm not going to let it slow me down. Music has been essential to my life as long as I can remember, and I'm enjoying this opportunity to put my musical education and experience to work through reviews and interviews. In my years as a musician, composer, and performer, I spent lots of time informally reviewing and recommending albums to friends and peers--most would attest to my trapping them into extended listening sessions on multiple occasions. Now I'm excited to incorporate a more formal series of reviews and conversations into my musical activities. I'm already listening to huge volumes of music with passion and rigorous concentration, and I also love to write--it's a natural and enjoyable activity for me. So stay tuned for more reviews, interviews, and essays. A few goodies should be arriving in the next week.

Technology and Humanity: the Paradox of Choice

In the first installment of my exploration of interactions between humanity and evolving technology, I endorsed an attitude of openness toward new tech toys.  Generally I've found that an open embrace works best for me, but today I want to discuss a few qualifiers that might make for healthier relationships with technology over time.  I think it's valuable to advocate for new tech while taking a deliberate, thoughtful approach.

It isn't new technology we have to worry about--it's about fostering healthy relationships between technology and ourselves, individually and collectively.  And the difficulties in establishing relationships have less to do with the quality of new tech than a larger context of quantity, the sheer volume of choices we're now faced with as new tech is added to old at a seemingly exponential rate.

New technology is generally offered to us because it makes some aspect of our activities easier to achieve, or more efficient.  While this is effective on an item-by-item basis, when we're confronted with a large number of options for accomplishing similar goals, we run the risk of becoming bogged down in the selection process itself and ultimately becoming less efficient--maybe even less happy.  Barry Schwartz details many of the productivity and psychological implications of this issue in his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice, a great read if you ever feel like you're spending too much time picking out new pants or drink options at your favorite coffee shop, and you want some ideas on how to break those kinds of cycles.

Schwartz's book doesn't address how the Paradox of Choice can impact creative pursuits, and that's what I'd like to address here.  And I'd like to start with personal experience.  As time has passed, i have acquired more music gear, and over the same time I have found myself less prolific, less likely to practice, and for the last couple of years almost creatively incapacitated.  In retrospect, I think I understand how this happened, and I'm gradually digging my way out of a vaguely depressed, creatively stifled hole.

It snuck up on me over time, affecting my creative process before I fully realized what was happening. For a long while, I thought the rigors of adulthood, especially less time to devote specifically to music, was the main cause of my creative slowdown.  But now I think the time factor is relatively minor.  it all goes back to technology--in my case, it's integrating computers into my compositional process.  My downfall has been Reason, a softsynth program that I started using as a songwriting/demo-recording tool.  I could build bass and drum sections and synth parts/pads using Reason, and then move projects over to other recording platforms to add guitars/vocals and other "real" instruments as appropriate.

Reason versus the Paradox of Choice

It's a great program.  Its features offered me the potential to both streamline my workflow and expand my creative possibilities for making recordings.  I like to write extremely dense music, with large arrangements, lots of sounds old and new, and lots of playfully intersecting melodies, a kind of contrapuntal avant-pop.  In terms of technology, I had felt somewhat limited by the recording devices I used before Reason, where 4 tracks on cassette (or a few more via bouncing tracks) or 8 tracks on a Roland digital recorder kept me from hearing how more than 8 parts might be working together.  And it put a huge palette of sounds at my fingertips from within one device: samples of real instruments, wild synth sounds, electronic percussion galore.  It was like having many electronic instruments, each with a wide range of sounds, in one convenient package and all designed to work perfectly together.

That's where the paradox of choice comes in.  As I started to build tracks in Reason to use as the starting point for both demos and further recordings, I found myself getting hung up on the wide array of drum and bass sounds I could use.  And bass sounds in particular led to my demise.  There are hundreds of preset sounds one can try, and all of them can be further modified to change overall tone, overtones, front-end articulation, portamento between notes, octave output, polyphony, effects, and so on.  I found myself looping a measure or two of a bass riff and changing and tweaking sounds for many hours.  Over time, this started to hamper my creative process--my time allotted to composing became time spent making relatively inconsequential tweaks to the sounds used in short passages.  With enough repetitions of this routine, my compositional process itself started to change, and my focus shifted from thinking of pieces as wholes with complex large-scale interrelationships to getting stuck on tiny details.  I wasn't seeing the forest for the trees, to use the old cliche, and I got frustrated with my progress on larger pieces.  The act of writing music seemed less productive, less communicative, less fun.

Once the whole process took on these negative connotations, I simply spent less time doing it.  Eventually it spilled over to other aspects of musical activities, like practicing guitar.  And it became a psychological issue: I questioned whether I had lost my touch, whether I had anything left to say musically.  When I asked myself that question mentally, I felt like I had lots to say and do, but when I sat down to do work, my muse was all but gone.

Fortunately for me, I had lots of other things going on that demanded my attention, and life was generally wonderful, so I'm not wildly upset about the whole thing.  But in essence I feel like I lost roughly two years of my creative life to the paradox of choice, walking a labyrinth of Reason, both the product and the concept.  Ultimately I came to recognize the trap I was in from an angle related to the "path of a guitar tone" in my previous technology/humanity essay: approaching the music from a listener's perspective, who would actually appreciate the subtle differences between bass sounds, especially when the bass parts were themselves rarely the focus of the music?  Something had to be there, certainly, but it became clear that limits to the degree of effort worth investing in such things were indicated.  Now that I'm consciously weighing the relative importance of the steps in my compositional process, I can use the information I find to make better decisions, and hopefully better music.

That's what it comes down to, I think: technology needs to be as carefully explored and integrated into day-to-day activities as any other aspect of a well-considered life.  Returning to Paradox of Choice, Schwartz draws a few conclusions/suggestions that can easily to applied to creative pursuits:

Choose when to choose.  If you find that you're spending an amount of time making a decision within your creative process that just isn't worth it, stop wasting the time, and don't feel bad about it.

Make your decisions nonreversible.  Pick that sound, that font, whatever, and stick with it for now.  Focus on the content instead of getting preoccupied with what it might be wearing.  Remember how much you've already created, and trust the decision you make.

Learn to love constraints.  Don't feel like every aspect of everything you create has to be approached with full force.  You don't need to reinvent your favorite guitar tone for every song.  You already know how to get it, and you already know it will work.  Write that song.

There are times, of course, where you'll still want to take the longer route.  Sometimes it's worth it.  As for "choosing when to choose," for example, I frequently choose to write first drafts of things (including most of the stuff on this blog) by hand.  It takes way longer, but I think better on paper and away from computer screens.  And toward "learning to love constraints," I may spend less time choosing bass tones, but I'm all about using dozens and dozens of tracks to build recordings--that's simply what I like.  The important distinction is simply that I've thought about these exceptions to taking the simplest route, and I'm aware enough of how they might affect me that I can modify those decisions in the future if I feel like I'm becoming some kind of "slave to technology."

Technology isn't "the problem" nearly so often as we like to think--frequently it's simply a catalyst that can expose our weirder human tendencies in new and sometimes unexpected ways.  But we have to be ready to respond to our strange and insatiable new appetites if they're preventing us from doing the things we care about.  Life is short.  Create what you love.

Technology and Humanity: what is "natural?"

This is the first of a few essays on the relationship between evolving technology and music.  I've been thinking and writing about some of these ideas for well over a decade now, and thought it might be nice to get some ideas flowing on here.  This one focuses on pro-technology perspectives, and the next will explore a few potentially negative implications...

As my interest in music includes many genres and approaches, I sometimes found myself at odds with folks whose practices/interests aren't so inclusive.  This frequently takes the form of a disagreement over some variety of line beyond which, the other person suggests, music making becomes "impure," "artificial," "unnatural," or some such variation.  Usually these lines are drawn at some particular point of new technology being used to create music.  While I'm still a relatively young fellow, technology has advanced at a rapid gait in the course of my life, and I've heard quite a number of proposals for drawing lines representing good/bad relationships between technology and humanity in music: using effects pedals is bad, using extended-range instruments, using new kinds of techniques, amplifying various acoustic instruments, using turntables or DJ approaches, using samples/samplers, drum machines, loops, using computers for recording or live performance, and so on.  I feel increasingly distant over time from concerns over any of these kinds of boundaries.  Instead I see my time in music laying inside a great continuum of technological innovation and its inevitable acceptance into what we collectively celebrate as the human element in art.

My experiences with music and music technology both came into focus as a young lad learning to play the guitar.  Let's take a journey into the sometimes arcane world of guitar nerdery and see how it can inform the broader set of relationships between technology and humanity:

I got into guitar at the very end of the 80s, a period in which it seemed that all kinds of new technologies were welcomed into the art of guitar playing with open arms.  It was the era of whammy bars, effects processors, custom mods of guitars to make them shred-tastically easy to play, the marketing of 7-string guitars and 5-string basses, unique pickup combinations and switches, etc.  And the music being made with these devices seemed to take full advantage of the guitar's potential as a melodic instrument.  Guitar solos were featured in most pop songs.

When the grunge scene took over the airwaves in the 90s, it brought both an aesthetic change among most young guitar players as well as a regression in guitar's relationship with technology.  As guitar solos disappeared form popular music, guitarists discussed their quest for the perfect tone with the intensity reserved before for the quest for fast sleek guitars or wild & crazy solos.

I was learning about guitar esoterica mostly from guitar magazines in the '89-'94 range, and I picked up my initial value system toward the instrument with an 80s vibe--the guitar mags were slow to drop their coverage of the latest and greatest in hyperguitar, and often featured headlines like "Shred Is Dead--Not!"  Cheesy to be sure, but it left an impression, and it pushed me toward other attendant characteristics of that scene like practicing a lot and knowing how to read music.  Those habits helped me get into music school where my musical mind expanded a thousandfold.

Shred isn't dead at my house.  7 strings, thin neck,
high output pickups, locking vibrato, thin strings,
and low action keep my creative options open.

The guitar mags too eventually caught up with the grunge approach, where emphasis was ostensibly on songwriting, but in effect guitar took a less melodic and mostly supportive role in that music.  And as a supportive device, the mysteries of Tone were investigated with fervor.  Tone in this context was essentially about the sound of a guitar interacting with an amplifier.  The guitars used in the service of Tone tended to be older designs, with heavy woods, thick necks, substantial-but-awkward neck joints, heavy strings, and low-output pickups. And the amps tended toward older designs using vacuum tubes instead of transistors for both preamp and power stages.  Effects were minimal if used at all: pedals can absorb sound too, you see, even when they're turned off, and they add more cable length between the guitar and amp as well, robbing more precious Tone.

I wanted to get "cool" sounds out of my guitar, but I was immediately skeptical of the new quest for Tone.  And I still am, for two almost opposite reasons.  The first was that it all felt creatively limiting: here I was, standing with my newly-acquired multieffects processors, practicing my brains out, ready and willing to make virtually any crazy sound come out of a guitar, and people only want to hear a plain guitar into an amp?  I felt all dressed up with no place to go.

From the nearly-opposite perspective, who actually gets to hear Perfect Tone?  Let's go back to 1995 and consider the likely journey that the sound of your guitar-into-an-amp is going to take: you will record it onto tape, which might add some warm-sounding compression along with some noise.  Other instruments will be recorded and mixed together, altering one another's sounds in the final mix of your songs.  Fans will buy the recording, almost certainly on CD at that time, and listen to it.  And where will they listen?  Probably either on a stock car stereo with tiny speakers, or maybe one modified with huge subwoofers and amps to make bass frequencies comically louder than everything else in the music.  Or if they're taking it home to listen, everyone seemed to have those Aiwa 3-CD changer bookshelf stereo systems courtesy of Wal-Mart, on which the idea of EQ was a "bass boost" button that offered 3 levels of unmusical low-frequency fuzzy wool.  Or you played a live show, where a low-end Shure microphone was propped in front of one speaker on your cabinet and run through a PA system so that everything could be reproduced at 120dB+ for your audience, screamingly loud and often run through more compressors to bring overall volumes up while killing most dynamic nuances.

So much for Tone.  And the principle still applies.  The live amplification scenario remains essentially the same, and the recorded situation has become even worse, where you can assume your recording will be converted to low bitrate mp3s and heard on tiny computer speakers or earbuds.  For practical purposes, the only person that ever hears a guitarist's Tone as (s)he's crafted it to sound standing in front of the amplifier is the guitarist him/herself.  From my perspective, those sounds go through so many more layers of mediation before listeners experience them that I can't justify devoting much energy to their supposed perfection.

Let's relate this whole situation back to relationships of technology and humanity: what is "natural," or even one's degree of concern about the matter, comes down to priorities.  In my case, I may gravitate toward certain genres, sounds, or approaches, but I also like to keep my options open.  Wide open.  I find some aspects of the quest-for-tone interesting and useful in specific musical moments, but generally it's too limiting for me, especially contrasted with interests in melodic and sound sculpturing possibilities possible through a broader embrace of technological enhancements for the guitar.

This raises the larger issue of what we choose to call "technology," and how that definition changes over time.  Generally people seem to view pieces of equipment produced at or before the time they get involved in a particular activity as "normal," while items created or refined after that point get viewed as "technology."  Relating this to the evolution of guitar technology, things like modeling effects and making instruments from materials like aluminum and carbon fiber are among the newest technological innovations for use with electric guitars.  Just before that, other kinds of multieffects processors were new technology, along with refinements to designs of electric guitars like locking whammy bars and high output pickups.  Before that, solidbody guitar designs, made initially to reject feedback at high volumes, and stompbox effects to make a new world of interesting sounds, were the high tech of their day.  Electric guitars themselves, and designing the first pickups and electronic controls were the height of technological innovation before that, preceded by steel-string acoustic guitar designs that could project higher volumes than previous nylon string designs, and before those were instruments like the lute which added the technology of frets to early instruments like the oud.  And the oud itself is a sophisticated, carefully designed device.

So technology as a concept is a moving target, essentially different for everyone.  What I'd like to see is for people to adopt a more open attitude that is able to look forward and backward in time, recognizing technology as more of a process than any discrete object made along the way.  Today, technology-as-a-process includes both new physical instruments and a wide world of "virtual" instruments made possible through computers.  And the "_____ is so unnatural" discussions nowadays tend to circle around virtual instruments.  Even if you don't personally want or need to embrace new technology to make your own music, the same kinds of conditions continue to apply along the same continuum of evolving technology, and devoting time to criticizing art forms for the technology they might employ remains just as unproductive. It's my hope that we can mostly focus on issues of conceptual and emotional expression in music and other forms of art without becoming fixated on our own biases toward technology.  And toward that goal, I hope that we can choose appropriate tools, new or old, that help us best realize our ideas.

Or in the words of Frank Zappa,
shut up and play your guitar.

Books on music: the Source Anthology

I wasn't planning for so many book reviews in a row, but last week I learned that there is a newly-published anthology of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, which was a short-lived publication in the late 60s/early 70s that has reached legendary status among New Music devotees.  I got my copy in the mail yesterday, and since I'm already intimately familiar with the original print run, I'm compelled to provide an online review that mentions an important detail left out of all of the other online mentions of this new book.

The new atop the old.

Let's start with the positive: if you're a fan of avant-garde music from the 60s to the present, a music student, a music librarian, or a composer yourself, this book is beyond essential.  You should find a copy immediately and read it cover to cover at first opportunity.  This anthology presents interviews, profiles, discussions, images, and examples of graphic notation and text scores representing the wide range of new music efforts from the 60s and 70s.  Most of this material is unavailable anywhere else, and all of it is truly potent work that has lost no relevance in its 35+ years of hiding in rare book collections.  If anything, these resources emerge from the shadows of obscurity as essentially contemporary work.  It's remarkable how fresh this stuff remains.  Present-day efforts in minimalism, electroacoustic music, free improvisation, process composition, brutal prog, avant-garde concert music and the like seem at times to be practically regressive compared to the stuff one finds in Source.  It's as though the materials in the original periodicals were internalized and used among the small number of people who came into contact with the tiny original print run, while for others they've become a tragic secret of almost mythological importance to those who care about these kinds of music.  Or as Douglas Kahn puts it in the anthology's preface, issues of Source "have moved from limited circulation to even more limited circulation, all the while becoming increasingly relevant to contemporary activities, in musical and artistic practice and in historical study by students, teachers and scholars of the period."

But let us address that detail I have yet to see in other reviews or promotional material for the book, because I think it's extremely important: this anthology doesn't reprint the scores.  While I think the anthology remains critically important as a document of at least some Source content, this deeply undermines the value of this project in my opinion.  The introduction explains that this was an economic decision: the original publications were essentially handmade, large-format affairs that would be prohibitively expensive to reproduce given the anticipated demand.  Douglas Kahn states the case in the preface like this: "It made no sense to replace one collector's item with another."

Personally, I find this terribly disappointing.  While I can sympathize with the effort/money concerns that would surely make full or almost-full reprints very expensive, I think there is a market for more comprehensive reissues.  More importantly, I believe there is a great need for the scores.  Looking through original issues of the publication, it's clear that publishing scores was the focal point of the whole project, and interviews/discussions and other material were intended as supplementary to the scores themselves.  And Source explicitly declared its priority on scores, too.  Consider the opening lines of its inaugural issue, ironically reprinted in the scoreless anthology:

"Next to actual performance--recorded or live--the score remains to date the most reliable means of circulating and evaluating new music.  Source, a chronicle of the most recent and often the most controversial scores, serves as a medium of communication for the composer, the performer, and the student of the avant garde.  A magazine that is free from the inherent restrictions of foundations and universities (however enlightened), uncommitted to the inevitable factional interests of societies and composers' groups, can probe and be provocative--our first issue contains five new scores. "

At the time of its publication, very little of the music covered by Source was being recorded--in fact some of it doesn't lend itself to full representation through recording--and little was being picked up for print publication, either.  To read the scores, or have them available to try yourself or with a group of your friends, was perhaps the most important thing facilitated by its circulation.  Decades later, few of the pieces in its pages were ever subsequently recorded or published outside of their appearance in Source.  Without including them in this new anthology, those pieces remain lost in the rarity of the original issues.

Some pieces are represented with a few example pages in the anthology, but in a sense I find this practice even more irritating than simply excluding them altogether.  Keep in mind that most of these scores used unorthodox notational systems, from totally abstract sorts of representational/graphic scores to more personal modifications of relatively-traditional notation.  Most also included opening pages explaining their specialized notational systems.  In the anthology, scores that are represented feature a page of the how-to-play information and a page or two of the music itself.  And they're reprinted in a very, very small format in which it's frequently difficult to make out actual notes or details.

For students of this music, I can see how reprinting the instructional pages of the scores might help explain the "how" aspects of playing the music.  But without the full scores, it's impossible to experience the music by either fully reading it or attempting to play it, which would answer what I consider to be much more fundamental musical questions related to "why."  In fact, there is potential for actually blurring the distinctions of "why" in this music by printing only a few example pages of it: the focus shifts from the music itself to the superficial aspects of its unique presentation on paper.  Both then and now, the kinds of music represented in Source had to battle a reputation as crazy, random nonsense, weirdness for its own sake.  Where the original publications helped to clarify those impressions by sharing the scores in full, running only a couple of the most visually provocative sample pages for those in the anthology only serves to reinforce the stereotypes of novelty and technical/extramusical obsession this music needs to transcend.  There is much to say and emote through this music, but I'm afraid that point isn't easily made by talking around the music instead of letting it represent itself.

Again, I truly appreciate the effort that did go into the anthology, and I don't mean to be harsh, but it's a very significant problem in my opinion.  What can be done?  There are some truly unusual elements painstakingly added into the original publications that couldn't be reproduced (I'll put some pictures below).  But the majority of each issue could be reproduced in original format/size with color where appropriate.  Perhaps they could be reissued as individual volumes like the originals over time.  What would each issue have to cost as a mostly complete reproduction--$100?  $150?  It would be expensive, but I don't agree that such a price would be "replacing one collector's item for another."  It would be making them uncompromisingly available again to a much wider audience who would absolutely get value for their high dollar commitment.  Practically speaking, it would make them available to college/university libraries all over the world again, and those are places that already pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for books or journal subscriptions when those materials are important for students.  I can't help but notice using WorldCat that very few libraries, academic or otherwise, have Source.  Imagine how many more students would be exposed to Source if all of those places had the opportunity to order a set.  Many non-academic folks in the U.S. would potentially have access to reprinted volumes, too, as land grant university libraries are open to the public.

For what it's worth, if the materials still exist for the unpublished 12th volume of Source, I'd be elated to see that published by itself, too.

It's also worth mentioning here that three issues of Source contained 10'' records of music from the publication.  These have been lovingly reissued as a 3 CD set by Pogus.  This set is an excellent supplement to either a purchase of the new anthology or a browse through any original issues of Source. You can also listen on UbuWeb, which is itself easily the best avant-garde art reference on the internet.

The editorial team of Source also produced a few radio programs for KPFA in the late 60s, a couple of which can be found here and here via archive.org.

Here are a few photos of Source materials:

Some notational innovations via
Barney Childs' "Jack's New Bag."

Brilliant inner-score page flips put a new spin on the repetition
common to many classical forms in Stanley Lunetta's "Piano Music."

One needs a slide projector to view this "score-map" from Jocy de Oliveira
in full detail, part of the multimedia "Probabilistic Theater I."

My favorite photo of Harry Partch at the bottom center:
Father of Captain Beefheart, Granddad to Tom Waits?

A page from my favorite score in the run of Source, "Blues and Screamer"
by David Reck.  Something about the approach to notation in this chart
continues to influence my approach to music on paper.  Efficient, clear,
and emotive/visually evocative all at once.

The graphic scores reproduced in color for the original run are amazing.
This one is from "A Piano: Piece" by Daniel Lentz.

The brown square for Jon Hassell's "Map2" is both an instrument and part
of its own score.  It's 3 layers of pre-recorded magnetic tape.  Add a playback
head/amp, follow the directions, and you're playing the most interactively
demanding recording you'll probably ever see.

I know I just complained above about the anthology including scores
just for their visual interest.  Forgive me, and blame Joel Gutsche for his
beautiful "Overture to the Iceberg Sonata."

Books on music: implications of recording

Recordings have always been my medium of choice for experiencing music: a little rough math tells me that I've heard roughly one new (at least to me) album every single day for the last 20 years.  When you grow up in a small Midwestern town and become obsessed with music, recordings are largely your only option for musical experiences--not many folks stopped even remotely close to my hometown on tours.  Lack of population density affected my own musical efforts as well.  In my early days of wanting to start bands, I never found enough like-minded musicians to start proper bands.  Instead, I wrote music myself, and recorded it either alone or with two or three friends.  Though we found the means to perform a few times, most of our efforts were purely recordings, which my dear friend Stu & I would often drive around and listen to in his car for hours on end.


In college and beyond, I've had many more opportunities to play music with others, and I've had the chance to see lots of my favorite composers/bands perform in the flesh.  But old habits die hard, or never die, probably, and I still prefer experiencing music through recordings.  I can listen repeatedly, create my own conditions for listening, make quick references to other recordings, no long lines, etc etc etc.


As a person who grew up in a world of recordings, I never thought much of the cultural or philosophical implications of recordings versus other forms of sharing music, from live performance to "amateur" home performances, sheet music, player pianos, and so on.  Intellectually, I was aware of some of the cultural implications, but I didn't "feel" them myself and didn't care to give the issue much thought.  I imagine this is how the youngest generation today will feel about how the internet is integrated into our society.  I'm just old enough to have lived a touch of grown-up time on both sides of that line, and I think I've given that issue more thought simply because I've personally experienced the positives and negatives on both sides.


I remember reading David Byrne's mini-review of Capturing Sound a few years ago, and I remember finding the notion that post-recording-era classical performances became a lot more vibrato oriented kind of interesting.  But the rest of the book sounded kind of obvious, and I never checked it out.  For some reason, though, I've read two books on the general topic of recordings lately, and noticed that there are another dozen or so on the market.  Here's a little mini-review of the two I read, along with some of my own brief thoughts on the matter(s).

Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner is a fairly large and comprehensive tome that seems to cover most of the same issues Byrne mentions from the earlier Capturing Sound by Mark Katz.  And honestly, I wouldn't recommend it.  Read Byrne's blog post linked above, and I think he gets into enough depth about the issues involved to satisfy most folks' need for information in this area.  You'll find discussion of acoustic versus electric recording, analog versus digital, the implications of various media formats for the marketplace (different cylinder and record speeds holding different durations of sound, etc), sampling, the implications of early multitrack recording, the implications of non-linear digital recording and editing, and so on.  Maybe this stuff would be interesting to somebody who hasn't used a lot of these devices firsthand, but the philosophical implications show up at a very practical level when you're problem-solving during a recording session yourself.


Even for people who haven't used recording devices and might find these issues new and interesting, I'd still have reservations recommending this book, because I found what I'd consider to be too many factual errors for a book of this size and scope.  I don't want to turn this into a detailed scholarly critique of the book, but here's a few things off the top of my head that I'm pretty sure are inaccurate in this book:


--p. 64 Stokowski and sticking a mic in the bell of a french horn: I doubt Stokowski specifically ever did this.  He may have been manipulating his mixes, but the horn is by design a distant-sounding instrument whose bell points away from the audience.  It's a bad analogy, in my opinion.  Mentioning literally any other instrument except the horn would have made the point without heading into sketchy unmusical territory.


--p. 106 the idea that there is no physical contact between a recording head and the tape: I've used many tape-based devices in my life, and I still work with recording/duplicating cassettes on a daily basis, and I can guarantee you that there is plenty of physical contact between recording heads and tape.


--pp. 134-135 lots of mentions of the creation of the 33 1/3 RPM format for records: in all of this talk, I couldn't help but notice that there was no mention of the actual origin of the 33 1/3 format.  RCA may have marketed the Vitaphone in 1931, but the American Foundation for the Blind and the Braille Institute of America had been working on the 33 1/3 format in the late 20s.  Coincidentally, Columbia finally started successfully marketing LPs of that speed in the mid 40s, and in the late 60s talking book records had gone all the way down to 8 1/3 RPM for maximum data on each record.


--p. 151 Sun Studios slap-back echo: Having heard a lot of those Sun records, I can't imagine that they were splitting a signal between consoles to get that sound.  It's just tape echo, which DOES require tape in the 2nd machine contrary to what this passage details.


--p. 238 phase rotation: I don't think phase rotation is used to "smooth out" the signal.  My understanding is that radio stations were simply using it to make things louder.  Phase rotation is used on television commercials for the same reason, and that's why it often seems that the sound on a TV gets louder during commercial breaks.  But on recordings that are already compressed/limited to the max, the phase rotation just makes things get quieter via "inversion" as he later details on p. 283.


--p. 297 Reason: To my way of thinking, Reason isn't really a true DAW.  It's a softsynth/sequencer that isn't able to track "real" instruments by itself.  Some of the definitions in this section get a little sketchy, but to my mind the ability to sample tiny passages of real audio doesn't make a device into a true DAW that can act as a normal recording device in addition to various nonlinear editing possibilities.


--p. 330ish DAWs: This information is generally good and interesting, but I noticed the lack of coverage of the many small workstation DAWs that were marketed to the home recording community in the late 90s and early 00s.  Most of the old analog recording device manufacturers made these things as the evolutionary step between cassette multitracks and computers, and some still do: Fostex, Tascam, Roland, Yamaha, Kawai, and so on.  It might not have been a long period in recording history, but I know a LOT of records that started life on devices like the Yamaha AW4416 or the Roland VS2480.


--p. 344 Synclavier: Mike Thorne is not "the first--and only--musician to buy the Synclavier I." Frank Zappa purchased and made extensive use of the Synclavier I throughout the 80s, using it in both his "pop" and "serious" compositions including his final magnum opus, "Civilization Phaze III."


All minor quibbles, perhaps, but a few of them like the slapback echo (mis)information make me pretty skeptical that this book was thoroughly researched and/or edited.  To mention something positive, I do like the writing style.  Milner makes the timeline of "recorded history" read like a series of fun challenges.  It's not a dry, technical book.  And maybe some of those debatable technical points could be forgiven in light of that.


I had no technical issues whatsoever with Evan Eisenberg's The Recording Angel, and I would happily recommend this book.  Originally published in 1987, it's primarily about the various philosophical and social implications of consuming recorded music.  It's not media-specific, and it's written at the end of the vinyl era--CDs are barely mentioned.  The focus is on people listening to records, collecting them, building elaborate hi-fi systems, etc, and how these folks relate to recordings.  It's also worth noting that there is a heavy emphasis on classical recordings--jazz is mentioned infrequently, and pop music is hardly mentioned at all.  If you're looking for someone to analyze your obsessions over Phil Collins records, this won't be the place to look (but trust me, it's the hair).  That limitation aside, though, this book is a collection of great conversations among music (and recording) lovers, all of whom have insightful things to say about music-as-object through recordings.  The last few chapters of the book expand the scope to more general philosophical issues related to the connections between humanity and music, recorded or otherwise.  At times it's dense, but I found every bit of the density to be worth reading.


A few observations of my own about recordings and our culture:


I suppose it's understandable that this issue doesn't come up directly in books about recordings, but I think it's useful to look at the history of the player piano and how it developed around roughly the same time as commercial recordings.  One of my favorite novelists, William Gaddis, was at times consumed with documenting how the player piano's rise and fall heralded the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction, the beginning of information coding (the punched piano rolls match the way early computers worked), and a sort of end of the artist as the focal point of art, replaced by either physical consumables of art works or programmatic dissemination of art via radio and later technologies.  You can look into his ideas yourself either via his final novel(la) Agape Agape, or through several essays related to the matter in his Rush for Second Place.


Concerning both the player piano and making recordings, many of my favorite composers/musicians are folks who found ways to use aspects of evolving technology to make entirely new kinds of music that wouldn't have been possible before.  Conlon Nancarrow's player piano music is absolutely stunning and couldn't exist without the player piano.  And I wouldn't know where to begin counting the many people whose musical ideas grew along with evolving recording technologies.  A few of them were mentioned in these books, like Les Paul's "sound on sound" approach and various early "phonography" works made of multitrack-based compositions assembled in recording studios.  And sampling-based music is everywhere now, in almost every idiom of popular music and also in classical/academic music.  As I mentioned above, growing up in a world already full of recordings, many of which already took advantage of these possibilities, makes some of these implications fairly obvious, the epiphanies of the past becoming the presuppositions of today.


When I read about the effects of recording on society, either in these books or through other essays or online discussions, I've noticed that folks tend to focus on the perceived negative aspects.  There is much more to it, though. The "isolation aspect" of these new-ish technologies waxes and wanes.  CD sales are plunging as the x/y gen folks begin to age out of the music-artifact buying, and the millenials "appropriate" the music they want online for free. 

Are some isolated with their iPods? Perhaps at times. But another part of the equation is that "the kids" and some of us older folks are listening to more music than previous generations by volume, a more diverse selection of music in terms of variety, have begun to usurp the entertainment industries' marketing attempts toward them by simply communicating directly with one another about things they find and like, and seem to be attending live performance events at every opportunity. As music-artifact sales plummet, concert attendance seems to be going in the opposite direction (or at least I remember reading a lot to that effect just before our recent recession took hold). 

Maybe the kids don't understand what's going on viscerally, but I have a suspicion: as their forms of communication become more heavily mediated, they are on some level biologically compelled to split the difference, making up for the isolation of the media at hand by taking the chance to see the artists they've discovered in person (which is, of course, the least-mediated way to consume art). Ditto for live theatre, meetups, flash mobs, etc. 16 to 30-year-olds are back in the streets. Forgive them the ear buds.


You can use technology to improve your life or to hinder it. The choice is mostly your own. I have an iPod full of longer-form music that I listen to on my lunches as I walk around a downtown area. It's an important part of my day, and it leaves my evenings open to compose and perform, instead of feeling as though I'm disconnected from the musical world around me and need to take time out for more listening.  But sometimes I go though phases where I stop using it, or I don't listen to many recordings at all, and that's okay in its time, too.

Standardized media formats don't necessarily lead to standardized consumption.  The youngest generations are intuitively more media-literate than older generations, and they often see through marketing hype and find and share things they want much more smoothly amongst themselves in person or through social media interactions. The unique change that seems to be most dominant in the millenials is that they don't consider intellectual property to be so fiercely an independently-owned asset as generations before. They share the work of others freely, which may irritate some artists, but consider too that they modify/edit/mashup/build upon and innovate, too, with great fluidity.  The implications of this are beyond wildest dreams for the arts: Lautréamont/Ducasse may one day get their wish in "poetry should be made by all." If art can be consumed by all more or less equally, poetry might indeed follow. I find this exhilarating!