11. Shuffle: On New Music

11. Shuffle: On New Music

"The role of the forger", Gould wrote, "of the unknown maker of unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture. A forger is also, if you look at the history of the word, a maker of links, one who works at the forge with fire, hammer, and steel, a welder of parts."

There’s been a recent obsession with “discovering” media through social networks and educated guesses based on statistics of what other users with similar tastes find interesting. Pandora radio is the most advanced musical version of this type of system. They’ve gone past pure statistics, actually doing research on what musical characteristics determine taste and enjoyment. This is called the Music Genome Project. Like most people my age, I consider myself somewhat of a music snob, but as with Netflix predictions of what movies I will like, it’s usually the formula that laughs last as Pandora makes a perfect selection of an obscure song that I’m obsessed with, or it plays a song that I’ve never heard before but like so much that I go out and buy it on iTunes [read torrent it for free]. Soon, these two services (iTunes + Pandora) will be combined, so that you could say, "all right, I feel like discovering new music, but not entirely, so make me a mix based off of this song, and give me a two-thirds mix of similar songs that I know/own versus songs that I haven't heard yet." This is like the passive learning we talked about above, only here it’s the passive discovery of new music.
We also spoke about ambient noise being mixed into the music, which is a progression of the modern obsession with multitasking. How often have you wished that you could listen to music in the background of a boring lecture or conversation? We see two friends on the train talking, each with headphones coming out of one ear. That’s like a 50/50 attention allocation, and it’s the future. The device’s microphone would have noise canceling so that you could tell to filter 80% of the outside noises of the street, but leave 20%. You can already see this trend as single ear bluetooths are now able to play music.
So what’s new? Say that the device was playing music softly in the background of a conversation. It’s also following along. As the subject turns to your mutual friend Tom, it slowly fades into the leitmotiv you already have set for him, thus channeling a subconscious memory of his character. It might also display a transparent ghost image of his face on your display- the constant multitasking of the senses.
This advanced computer DJ also reacts to outside environmental and temporal events. During the rain, or on a gloomy day, it might play appropriately subdued music. Right before an election, or a sports game, it might turn the mood to upbeat tracks with appropriate lyrics- remember, it has started to understand key words and subjects. Imagine watching the first rays of the sunrise perfectly timed to the climax of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Or location based music: you step on to the Brooklyn Bridge and it starts playing New York, New York by Sinatra. Again, this is the cinematizing of real life.
But there’s a new trend in music which similarly points toward this individual tailored sonic experience. Glen Gould, one of the greatest musicians and thinkers of the 20th century saw it coming long ago:

“Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple authorship responsibility in which the specific functions of the composer, the performer, and indeed the consumer overlap.”

Obviously he understood the effect that media would have on the arts, often echoing directly or indirectly the words of Marshall McLuhan whose work he was familiar with. An obsessive perfectionist, he realized ahead of time that the proliferation of recorded sound would cause a drastic shift in the way we experience musical performance. Just like real people can’t compete with their airbrushed counterparts, live performance cannot compete with the perfection of a recording, which might actually be the culmination of dozens of takes. At the end of his life, Gould demonstrated this as he made perhaps the ultimate recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reportedly weaving together bits and pieces of thousands of recordings until the perfect version was created. While achieving a spontaneity unattainable to a recording, no live performance will ever match this level of technical virtuosity. This is hyperreality at its best- like a Technicolor version of the drab real world.
But Gould also had something to say for the autonomy of the listener. We are already given some freedom in how we listen to a recording through equalization- the adjustment of treble and bass levels on a car stereo- which changes the color or feel of a recording. Expanding on this, Gould realized that there would come a time when the listener would have even greater control. He talked about the ability to take and choose between, say, each of a dozen or so “perfect” takes of a particular piece- each recorded by the same performer, but having distinct feelings which make them individual. Certain dynamics would be emphasized or left out of particular passages, etc. Thus the listener would get to decide which recording was the most effective, or even splice two together to achieve a pleasing synthesis.
Working in the time of LPs, Gould was never able to see his vision in action, but today it is possible and in increasing demand. Throughout the past decade we have seen the popularization of audio “mashups” or synthesizes of multiple songs into one completely new product. This is basically a variation of a remix. At the same time, progressive artists have actually begun releasing the individual source tracks to their songs- enabling the easy extraction of audio, guitar, bass, drums, etc.- to allow for other artists to sample their work. This is the phenomena of remediation, which is a growing trend, and a progression of copy & paste aesthetic first seen in the pop art collages of the 1960’s. I talk about this much more here.

“The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.” -McLuhan

So this trend taken to its natural end would lead to a very unique musical experience. Instead of listening to individual songs, we could enter “mashup mode”, which would combine multiple tracks in a logical and aurally pleasing way, creating infinite musical experiences. [The video on the left is a perfect example] Nothing would ever sound stagnant, because it would always be changing. Instead of friends simply showing each other cool songs, they would record particularly pleasing moments throughout their daily listening of woven audio, and send them to one another for reflection: “dude, there was this part where it mixed ‘the Rite of Spring’ with ‘Giant Steps’ over this sich hiphop beat- you’ve got to hear it...”

The listener is the artist, and the art is selection.

The technical side of how these songs would be automatically woven together without sounding horrible is very complicated, but many people have developed different ways of getting it done, and the results are fascinating:

Track 1 is the work of Daniel Iglesia, a sound designer at Columbia University, which is based off of FFT analysis. His program automaticall locates similar points in two different songs at which to splice them together. This technique is called "convolution": "I ran it against two instrumental recordings of similar instrumentation: jazz ensemble with solo sax. I used Coltrane's Giant Steps and Coleman's Lonely Woman. I ran both complete files, which took quite a while to compute (since the required computation grows exponentially with the length of the sounds). Again, after looking at the list of similarites, i selected the sequence of splices. This was done at two different integral thresholds, with differing results"

Track 2 is a remix that I made in less than 15 minutes, combining the beat of Hip Hop by Dead Prez, the lyrics of Lil' Wayne's Amile, and a keyboard invention by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed appropriately enough by Mr.Gould.