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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Daniel Barenboim's Reith Lectures have provided some interesting thoughts about the respective roles of sight and hearing:"Antonio DeMasio, has taught us many things about human emotion, about the human brain, and also about the human ear, and he says that the auditory system is physically much closer inside the brain to the parts of the brain which regulate life, which means that they are the basis for the sense of pain, pleasure, motivation - in other words basic emotions. And he also says that the physical vibrations which result in sound sensations are a variation on touching, they change our own bodies directly and deeply, more so than the patterns of light that lead to vision, because the patterns of light that lead to vision allow us to see objects sometimes very far away provided there is light...
... And not only we neglect the ear but we often repress it, and we find more and more in our society, not only in the United States, although the United States I think was very active in starting this process, of creating opportunities to hear music without listening to it - what is commonly known as muzak."
Camille Paglia's once observed that cinema was always implicit in Western culture and it's certainly true that literature is replete with visual description and imagery in a way that is not nearly as marked for the tactile or auditory senses. Nonetheless, it seems to me that much of the difficulty identified by Barenboim stems not from neglect as such but from both hearing and sight being abused in much the same way. Just as we are bombarded each day with imagery, so too are we bombarded with sound. For instance, while it is obvious why Barenboim feels that muzak devalues the concept of listening to the intricacies of music, it nonetheless seems to be the case that muzak is very far from simply being background music. I'm thinking of Brian Eno's experiments in ambient music, where Eno's sleevenotes for Music for Airports described his idea thus:"The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. "
The theory behind ambient was, and remains, a fascinating one but it nonetheless seems clear that theory never translated into practice. Modern muzak continues to be too intrusive to truly qualify as background noise, while the influence of ambient on dance music only saw it too becoming more complex, more engaging and less minimal. Equally, it has become much more common to have TV screens in public areas, allowing imagery to be piped as easily as music.
Update: A related piece from Stylus Magazine (via here) on how the dynamic range of modern music has become increasingly compressed, with less variance between the quieter sections of a record and the louder:"Levels have crept up over the last decade though, and alarmingly so. Nevermind is 6-8dB quieter than, say, Hopes & Fears by Keane—to contextualise this, those 6-8dB will make Nevermind sound approximately half as loud....
By the time you've listened closely (or tried to) to a whole album that's heavily compressed, you end up feeling like Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange—battered, fatigued by, and disgusted with the music you love... The story goes that Brian Eno “invented” ambient music after a car accident, when he was forced to stay in hospital dosed on painkillers, and someone left a radio playing so quietly that he couldn’t properly hear the music it emitted no matter how much he strained... It strikes me that the way many people are listening to music these days—on trains, in offices, on the street—is not a normal listening experience. It is neither conscious engagement nor ambient enhancement. It’s a hermetic seal, a blockade to the outside world. It’s the opposite of ambient music, in that it doesn’t become a part of or complement the environment it is played in, but rather destroys it."
posted by Richard 7:28 pm
