Too Much of a Good Thing

This wonderful essay went up at Wired.com on April 11. Titled "Hell is Other People's Music," it describes our world in which music is too easy to access. "Just as music needs a backdrop of silence to signify, we need music-free stretches to make music meaningful. Suddenly, though, they seem endangered," writes Momus.  The article dovetailed perfectly with a piece I wrote about five years ago about the ubiquity of music and the promise/peril of personalized music technology. It never really saw the light of day, so I offer it here.   CPH

For many years I kept a quote of unknown origin above my desk, clipped from a campus newspaper. “Sometimes I wish my Walkman could play silence really, really loud,” it said. It reminded me how scarce silence is in the modern world and how hard it is to appreciate music without also appreciating the nourishing power of its opposite.

Silence is hard to come by, because nearly every cubic inch of the industrialized world is saturated with music. Music is piped into ballparks, shopping malls, elevators, lobbies, and restaurants. Cultural critic J. Bottum, writing in the March 2000 Atlantic Monthly, calls it the “soundtracking of America.” Recorded music, he says, “relieved us of any need to listen.” Music, once an important art, has in many ways been degraded by its sheer ubiquity into mere atmosphere.

 

Once upon a time, music was hard to come by, and because it was so scarce, it was special, even sacred. In his indispensable book, “Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy,” Robert Jourdain notes that music in the pre-concert era had to be either performed at home or experienced at special events. “Any musical sound, no matter how crudely performed, must have been as delicious as the meats and candies enjoyed only on festive days,” he says. The advent of concerts in the 17^th century helped cultivate music as a more refined and frequent experience, but only the well-to-do could experience regular performances, let alone marvel at Handel himself at the keyboard. It wasn’t until the player piano exploded in popularity in the 19^th century that average people could play the same tunes over and over in their homes and begin to share awareness of “hit” songs.

That’s when technology really began to change everything about music. Even relatively primitive recording equipment captured sounds now regarded as central to our human story that would otherwise have been lost in time: the voices of Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith, the trumpet of Louis Armstrong, the cello of Pablo Casals. Radio educated generations of music consumers. The Long Playing album, introduced about 1950, and multi-track recording soon thereafter ushered in an entirely new art form, in which geniuses like the Beatles could manipulate and mix tracks into sonic cinemascapes that will delight and excite people as long as civilization holds out.

Today, of course, we have easy access to the entire catalog of Western music, popular to high-brow, as well as the music of most of the rest of the world. The price we pay for such abundant choice is two-fold. On one hand, we can be paralyzed by choice; unless you have a trusted friend or record store clerk who knows your tastes intimately (and how many of use are that lucky?) you can gaze at racks and racks of, say, jazz artists, and be simply baffled.

On the other hand, if we only hear the music the commercial world pushes at us, we get complacent about listening, about exploring new music, and about really making music a source of enrichment rather than background noise. Merely hearing music, notes Jourdain, engages the brain stem but not the brain itself. Really listening to music is, by contrast, lights up the cerebral cortex in a more complex and comprehensive way than sports or reading or sex. But if technology lulled us into lazy listening, can it deliver us too?

Surprisingly perhaps, the answer is yes. While most of the technologies that shaped music in the 20^th century cultivated a more passive listener, many of the most recent advances in digital technology represent an invitation back into an active, exploratory and personal relationship with music. Low-cost digital studios, for example, have fired an outpouring of creativity perhaps unlike anything the world has ever known.

But more important for the music consumer, the internet promises a music delivery mechanism that finally reconciles choice and ubiquity. In other words, music can be everywhere and still be personal. Unchained from CD players, digital music will flow in narrowly tailored channels to our homes, our cars, our personal digital assistants, and any number of devices that haven’t been invented yet. On-line services will act like agents, helping you develop your tastes, discover genres you didn’t know you’d ever love, and unearth artists from the past who deserve to live on. You’ll be able to sample music before you buy it, assemble anthologies of periods or artists you wish to explore, and manage your collection of favorites in entirely new ways.

Really listening will be up to you, of course. But if technology lets you spend quality time with three or four classic Ray Charles tunes on your lunch break or find an important symphonic work that matches the length of time it takes for you to commute home from work, learning to listen again will become much easier than it has been in a world of too many choices, too much noise, and not enough guidance.