A Musical Rant!

For over against the convenience of instantaneous communication is the fact that the great economical abstractions of writing, reading, and drawing, the media of reflective thought and deliberate action, will be weakened.

- Lewis Mumford

We have a term in audio engineering to decry the compounding effect that prolonged exposure to sound and music, usually at considerable volumes, can have on the listening skills of the listener. We call this “ear fatigue”, when the audio becomes less defined, less clear, indiscernible from other materials, and finally incoherent. The effect, in contrast to actual hearing loss, is not proportional to actually volume, nor is it permanent. A few hours away from the sound source usually reinstates the listeners auditory intelligences.

What I’ve come to experience in my years working on many platforms and mediums of recordable media, as well as various forms of delivery of this media, is the certain and universally definite effects of these various media and how they differ from one another. I started engineering on 2” magnetic tape, about as “analogue” as one can get for first generation recording media. Running at 30 inches per second over the machine heads, the sound of tape was very distinct. The language to describe these impressions can be nothing but inadequate and abstract, as this is like trying to describe a colour. We have but the impressions it leaves on us to communicate it with.

Well, 2” tape felt wonderful. Full, bright without harshness, deep bass, well handled transients. Tape took an analogous impression of the music and imprinted it on the magnetic particles. For some reason, our brain’s liked these waveforms. Ear fatigue for tape hovered around a very reasonable 12+ hours for most material. That means we could be making very minute comparisons and enacting critical decisions with the material for this length of time.

Then came the modular digital revolution. Using comparatively inexpensive digital tape, we started recording everything to 16 bit, 44.1 kHz audio (or 48 kHz for broadcast). You will recognize these resolutions as “ CD quality” – this is what CD’s sound like. That means that between the softest and the loudest part of the music, there is a whole 16 steps. The kHz rating refers to how often per second the digital converters sample the audio( at 44.1 kHz, the converters are sampling 44,100 times per second). This is where the digital encoder takes an analogue wave (as we hear raw, real-world sounds) and converts it to a digital “word”. Many factors have a bearing on the “quality” of this translation – digital clock, converters, system integrity, jitter.

While audio impressions can vary wildly over a group of people, there are a few pieces of received wisdom that can mostly be agreed upon. 16 bit, while having a larger dynamic range than the magnetic tape of the time, didn’t “feel” as good. The cold translation of digital wasn’t as pleasing to our ears. Ear fatigue was hit at about the 6 hour mark. And it was hit hard. 16 bit would start to sound brittle and unforgiving. I remember watching people in some recording sessions grow noticeably agitated over prolonged periods of listening. Their bodies were responding to the gaps between the samples, I abstractly surmised.

Just as Marshall McLuhan believed television was more a tactile experience than a visual one, sound recordings create physical responses in listeners. When working with low resolution digital audio our brains were reacting to the lack of real-world analogous linearity. We were rejecting the digital interpretation of the real-world. But hey, it was a helluva lot cheaper that tape and no one without a degree in digital studies could really explain why we were feeling this way. It sounded clear, didn’t it? Tape was left behind, for the most part.

Digital technology moved ahead at a breakneck speed, as the market interest in it accelerated research and development. After a few years everyone was recording 24 bit digital “words” and sampling their sounds at upwards of 96,000 times per second. This was having a profound effect on the perception of the audio. Dynamic range increased immensely, clarity sharpened, ear fatigue rose to an acceptable 8-10 hours. The gaps between the samples was closing fast, creating closer translations to our beloved analogue. Keep in mind that these innovations were exclusively brought about on the creator side of things, wholly separate from the market/ consuming side of the equation.

Industry professionals and audiophiles marched behind the banners of progress. Everyone would soon be buying Hi-Fi systems and running everything at increasingly higher resolutions – things would sound better, people’s ears would become more discerning, the music would be uncompromised. It never happened.

The market, as one would call all of us, the consuming public, steered the technological trends in a decidedly different direction. MP3’s and their similar ilk were the future. Professionals were aghast! People were taking already inferior digital translations (CD’s) and further translating them to lower and lower (hence smaller and smaller) qualities for mass consumption. Our ears bristled to hear the grainy, piping and harsh new recordings that were sacrificed in the interest of file size and electronic mobility. This trend was in the interest of access, a very important and powerful requisite to the modern world’s musical habits. This one aspect, access, would change the world’s music forever; how it was listened to, delivered, created, shared, bought, sold, stolen…

This trend, this reality of people amassing thousands upon thousands of ill-translated sound recordings has had some very powerful effects on us as a listening public. The first I would write to is the psycho-acoustic and psycho-physical fall-out. As I remarked before, digital recordings illicite noticeable discomforts in listeners, mostly under the conscious awareness of the listener; agitation, ear-fatigue, loss of attention, even a physiological shutting down of the sensory organs. I believe the worse the digital translation, the worse these effects become.

Ears are shutting down and bodies are being repelled very subtly from these recordings. It is creating communication calluses to protect our very sensitive physiology from these increasingly harsher and more degraded translations. We are slowly shutting down and our appreciation of music, in all its auditory and tactile depths, can only suffer because of it.

Secondly, there is the commodification of the music. I’m not speaking of the monetary value that has been attached to music for some time now – it is well established and accepted almost to a fault; music costs money to create, record, reproduce, and own. No, I’m speaking of the collecting and filing away, mostly through copying and “stealing”, of music. I won’t speak to the ethics of file sharing and illegal downloading – this isn’t the point. The loss of importance, of sacrifice, of and for this music is what interests me. The average downloader/file amassing consumer spends only a few seconds downloading a song. That, in relation to its commodity value, is very, very cheap. Does one then value that song as much as one did the vinyl LP one saved up for fifteen years ago? It would be impossible to create the relationship inherent in the physical experience of what music consumption used to be with what is now. Back then, we would travel to the record store, buy an album, tear off the wrapper, look at artwork, read the lyrics, absorb visual cues, and listen to the album linearly as the artist had intended.

What a striking contrast to the modern act of downloading a song. Think of all the tactile and sensory information, the stuff essential to creating a lasting and valuable experience, that is lost.

The value chain, as it began with the download, grows steadily cheaper and less valued. When one has upwards of 10,000 songs, each song’s importance shrinks inversely proportionate to the choice given. Too much choice, it has been clinically documented, overwhelms consumers and contributes to apathy. What once was an open mind in the face of a steady stream of new sensations becomes a desensitization to the avalanche of similarity. “ I can like anything” becomes “ I like everything”. Why choose? Why have preferences when you can have everything? This is where “like” and “dislike” become just an aspect of playlists and a subtle itch to skip ahead nearly everything you hear to get to what’s next.

This desensitization is inherent in our television watching habits as well; too much choice of mediocre programming births the classic channel surfer. We can’t stay on one thing for too long. We need to see what else is there, ever after the sexier, more sensational, more extreme next thing. Could this auditory callus I spoke of have anything to do with this as well? Doesn’t desensitized skin require more pressure and more forceful stimulation to become excited? Why do downloaders who haven’t actually listened to a fraction of the songs they have amassed continue to acquire new electronic music? If this is the fetishizing of our music, the addiction to possessing over actual respective enjoyment, I believe we can do without it.

As a side note, this desensitization of our sensory world extends outwards, dictating how we interact, or don’t interact, with eachother. How many people are plugged into these MP3 players on the bus now? They are secluding themselves from common experience, isolating themselves from whatever sensations sitting quietly on an active city bus might afford. This speaks to our phobia in regards to boredom. We have sacrificed so much possibility, so much chance and synchronicity, undercut our own auspicious sensitivities, all in fear of one moment of boredom. But that is another rant for another day.

The electronic revolution and its effect on recorded music also just extends an already prevalent force in the capture of any media that isn’t the direct experience itself, i.e., recordings for live performances, poster reproductions for original paintings, documentaries for live experience. This force is, to steal from McLuhan’s lexicon once more, the cooling of music. The temperature of the artifact we perceive as art (the song, the painting, the poem) cools. It loses creative heat as its travels farther from the forces that created it. By temperature, I’m speaking rather abstractly about vitality, the essence of the wordless, language-deficient act of creation. When something is created, something new born into our sensory world, a type of vibration is created. I call this heat. As the artifact travels from creator to receptor (from artist to us) , from translation to translation (from live performance to MP3), its invariably cools. It is reasonable to assume watching an Iraqi man die on a pixilated internet browser window is quite different from being present at that event. The artifact has cooled.

Well, the digitization and devaluing of music further cools it from its intensely

thermal moment of creation. We are so far removed from its original intended delivery, its original and intended sensory package, it is no wonder we have grown indifferent. It just doesn’t feel authentic.

I don’t want to communicate the impression that I’m some crusty luddite who hears the (digital) death knell of musical relevance. Far from it, I think this important concept of access has opened up a whole world of promotional, networking, and communication opportunities for artists all over the world. We can now hear and trade and turn ourselves, and each other, onto dizzying amounts of new art. But if that process doesn’t come around and complete the circle and become a thermal, authentic, tactile, and thereby valuable experience, we will increasingly feel more detached from beauty, from the act of creating beauty, from the communication we all so desperately crave.

To the extent that the last works of art still communicate, they denounce the prevailing forms of communication as instruments of destruction, and harmony as a delusion of decay.

Max Horkheimer, 1941

Caleb Stull, producer/ engineer
Figment Productions
www.figmentproductions.ca
info@figmentproductions.ca
tel. 604. 339. 3683