ZOMG BLOG DEUX

Technology’s Historical Ménage à Trois or: Why Thinking Synthetically Causes Bewilderment

The task of systematically organizing how society, music, and technology directly or indirectly influence each other has proven to be a difficult web to untangle. More often than not, I have the overwhelming sensation of trying to view an episode of Days of our Lives for the first time, in the middle of the 6th season. I attribute this confusion to my desire to view their relationships as a linear progression; however, it is now clear that this love triangle is anything but linear. So, this is how I have made sense of it thus far: human societies consist of community members joined by the glue of shared interests and/or needs. These societies build institutions that are beneficial to the individuals involved in the community and which also represent the shared values and particular viewpoint of the members. This set of common values and viewpoints in society’s structures could be referred to as the group’s cultural identity: which hints at, if not that culture is innate in human group interaction, that society and culture have been historically fused at the hip. Thus culture can provide avenues for expressing attitudes and values of members in its society. One creative cultural form of expression is music. Yet another product of society and its institutions is the development of technologies. Such technological advancements have added to music’s ability to bridge Toynbee’s technospherical gap by expanding the artistic tools for communicating musically; for, “the act of performing music is innately tied with the struggle to contend with a communicative disjunction” (Toynbee 69). However, artists cannot create authentic musical works all willy-nilly, because in order for a work to be viewed as authentic, it must be appropriate to its cultural context—meaning that culture has the final say in whether an artistic means of communication are valuable and authentic. As we know, cultural notions of value are changed with the introduction and naturalization of technologies. And the circular exchange between society, music, and technology goes on and on. Now, I understand that is a vague and basic description of how these concepts interact, but it serves the purpose of illustrating the framework within which this paper is written. The angle I am attempting to take focuses on technology’s part in this sordid affair. The question is this: historically, how does technology shape the cultural contexts in which we interact with music? Music as an expressive art form has since its beginnings, been entangled with technology, however I will start with the advents of the phonograph and gramophone—which for all intents and purposes, I will generally use interchangeably. Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention: the phonograph, gave birth to the glories of recording and playing back sound. Approximately a decade later, Emile Berliner improved upon Edison’s creation and gave the world of recording the gramophone—a more durable device. These recording/playing technologies employed mechanical, analog mediums called records that stored sound information in the form of grooves on a disc. It did not take long for records and gramophones to make waves among the American public: soon enough, they would be mass-produced, made cheaper, and thus, more accessible to an array of economic classes. This notion of recorded sound may seem second-nature to us now, but at the time it was revolutionary and did no less than alter the face of musical consumption, production, and distribution. The introduction of recorded music in a tangible form shook the musical world in a most violent way, with a great deal of cultural impacts. “Capturing Sound” by Katz outlined the various effects that the record brought about, ranging from issues of: tangibility, portability, invisibility, repeatability, temporality, receptivity, and manipulability. Now that consumers were able to go and buy what was (and is) essentially preserved sound, they can ultimately own music—cutting-out the importance and presence of the performer almost altogether. Additionally, the novel phenomenon of record collecting spawned a culture of ‘digging in the crates’, along with a new relationship between consumers and physical music-storing devices. This activity and sometimes obsession with physical artifacts has been made possible by the reasonable prices of mass-produced records and later, cassette tapes. Furthermore, music became more democratic in nature, not only because the poor could afford music that was once restricted to the upper classes, but also due to the fact that later on, individuals would utilize magnetic tape and records to create music that communicated their particular perspectives. CDs are another great example of this, because with the installation of burners in computers, CDs were duplicated with ease. This process of democratizing music through technological advances has forged the way for new genres of music to be invented, as well as the start-up of many independent, small record labels. In general, consumers of music have been given more power and choice in relation to their musical experiences. For instance, recorded music’s portability divorced music from its unique spatial and temporal setting. No longer was the performer/artist’s presence necessary; all that one needed to enjoy her/his preferred tunes was a record, tape, CD, and a player—though in contemporary times these two are conveniently fused into technologies such as MP3 players. Hell, you don’t even have to buy music anymore with online MP3 sharing. Though this all seems like a blessing of convenience, one must consider that by separating music from its original spatial and temporal setting, does one lose something? I would argue that there is certainly something lost in the process of making a performer/artist virtually invisible. Live performances—in the most holistic sense of the word—bring listeners together in a communal setting and often involve some sort of visual stimulation, whether that be the energy of an performers jamming on their individual instruments or the light-person at an electronic music club. Either way, an environment is being created that is meant to add to the experience and meaning of the music. Images can act as communicative aspects that heighten one’s understanding of an artist’s musical vision. It is no matter what side one decides to take on what is lost or gained by technological developments; the point simply illustrates how technology has shaped music and how people interact with it, thus affecting cultural standards of music. Furthermore, these standards draw boundaries for means of authentically producing, distributing, and consuming music within a culture. Technology, in this way, often plays the devil’s advocate by introducing novel developments that are able to add to musical practice and thus, cultural expression. After these technologies are introduced, cultures must assess them and decide collectively to either value them, or discard them. For instance, the ability to share MP3’s with such ease has blurred the lines of authenticity and liveness when these files are utilized to create digitally sampled pieces such as mash-ups. This is especially clear in the case of electronic and hip-hop music genres, which generally utilize samplers as instruments central to musical creation. For “This simple fact [of using a sampler as a piece of studio equipment] totally obliterates conventional distinctions between performing…and recording. Everything that is done with a samper is, by definition, recorded” (Making Beats 46). Schloss’s Making Beats states that the “new and emerging technology” of digital sampling has “greatly [expanded] the creative horizons of the modern composer” (35). With the introduction of affordable and accessible means of producing and organizing one’s own music digitally, came the necessary reevaluation of what kinds of music counted as authentic or live, as well as what artists could said to be talented. It is clear then, that developments in technology serve as catalysts to cultural evolution—in terms

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