How Music Works (21 page)

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The other issue often mentioned was that club music was “manufactured,”

made my machines, robotic—the implication being that the heart had been

taken out of it. It was also claimed that this music wasn’t original; it was made by cobbling together bits of other people’s recordings. Like mixtapes.

I’d argue that other than race and sex, this latter aspect was the most threatening. To rock purists, this new music messed with the idea of authorship. If music was now accepted as a kind of property, then this hodgepodge version

that disregarded ownership and seemed to belong to and originate with so

many people (and machines) called into question a whole social and economic

framework. With digital technology around the bend, the situation would

only get worse—or better, depending on your point of view.

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c h a p t e r f o u r

Technology

Shapes Music

c h a p t e r f o u r

Technology

Shapes Music

I heard computer scientist Jaron Lanier speak at a symposium recently.

After playing some pieces on a
shen
, a Chinese mouth organ, he said

that it had a surprising and prodigious heritage. He claimed that this

instrument was maybe the first in which the notes to be played were

chosen by a mechanism, a mechanism that was a precursor to binary

theory and thus to all computers.

That ancient bit of gear found its way to Rome via the Silk Road, and

the Empire had a giant version built—as Empires are wont to do. This larger

instrument required an assistant to pump the air—it was too big to play by

mouth anymore—and, more significantly, a series of levers that selected the

notes. This system was the inspiration for what we now know as the key-

board—the series of levers that are used to play the notes of organs (which

is also a large wind instrument) and pianos. It was also inspirational to the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard, who in 1801 made a weaving loom whose

complicated patterns were guided by punch cards. One could control the

design of a fabric by stringing the cards together.

Decades later Jacquard’s loom was inspirational to Charles Babbage, who

owned one of Jacquard’s self portraits, in which he used these cards to make an image of himself woven in silk. Babbage designed his Analytical Engine—

a computational machine that, were it ever built, would also have been

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controlled by punch cards. In Babbage’s version the cards no longer controlled threads, but made the leap to binary abstraction—making pure calculations.

Babbage’s young friend Ada Byron (daughter of the poet) was fascinated by

the device, and many years later became celebrated as the first computer programmer. So, according to Lanier, our present computer-saturated world owes

something of its lineage to a musical instrument. And computer technology,

not too long after it came into being, affected music as well.

The technology that allowed sound information (and, soon thereafter, all

other information) to be digitized was largely developed by the phone com-

pany. Bell Labs, the research division of the Bell Telephone Company, had a

mandate to find more efficient and reliable ways of transmitting conversa-

tions. Prior to the sixties, all phone lines were analog and the number of

conversations that could be handled at one time was limited. The only way to squeeze more calls through the lines was to roll the high and low frequencies off the sound of the voice, and then turn the resulting lo-fi sound into waves that could run in parallel without interfering with one another—much like

what happens with terrestrial radio transmissions.

Bell Labs was huge, and gave birth to a slew of new inventions. The tran-

sistor and semiconductors that form silicon-based integrated circuits (making today’s tiny devices possible), the laser, microwave technology, and solar panels—the list goes on and on. When you’re a monopoly you can afford to spend

on R&D, and they had the luxury and foresight to take the long view. Scientists and engineers could work on a project that might not show results for ten years.

In 1962, Bell Labs figured out how to digitize sound—to, in effect, sample

a sound wave and slice it into tiny bits that could be broken down into ones and zeros. When they could do this in a way that was not prohibitively expensive and that still left the human voice recognizable, they immediately applied that technology to making their long-distance lines more efficient. More calls could now be made simultaneously, as the voice was now just a stream of ones and zeros that they could squeeze (via encoding and transposing), along with other calls, into their telephone cables. This was especially relevant considering the limitations imposed by long-distance underwater phone cables; you

couldn’t just go out and lay more lines down if suddenly it seemed more people wanted to talk to France. A voice is, in the abstract sense, a kind of information, viewed from Bell’s perspective. Therefore, much of their research regarding what made a transmission understandable, or how you could squeeze more

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transmissions in, involved applying the science of information in combination with insights gleaned from the science of psychoacoustics—the study of how

the brain perceives sound in all its aspects. So, understanding how we perceive sound became integrated with the quest for how to most efficiently transmit

information of all kinds. It was even relevant to the meta question “what is information anyway?”

Psychoacoustics has applications to the sound of ambulances (why can we

never tell where they’re coming from?), the speaking voice, and, of course,

music. The
psycho
prefix is there because what and how we hear is not simply mechanical, it’s mental (meaning the brain “hears” as much as the ear does,

not mental as in insane, or insanely great).

Of course, much of what we hear is partly defined and limited by the

mechanics of our ears. We know that we can’t hear all the high-pitched sounds that bats emit or the full range of sounds that a dog can hear. There are low-pitched sounds that whales produce that we can’t really hear either, though

they are strong enough to do us physical harm if we are too close to the source.

But there are things we “hear” that have nothing to do with the physics of

the eardrum and the auditory canal. We can, for example, isolate the voice of someone talking to us in a noisy environment. If you were to listen to a recording of a noisy restaurant it would sound like acoustic chaos, but sometimes

we manage to make order out of it, and carry on a rudimentary conversation.

Repetitious sounds, the sound of waves or constant traffic, become somewhat

inaudible to us after a while. We have the ability to selectively hear just the stuff we’re interested in, and make the rest recede into some distant acoustic background. We also have the ability to perceive patterns in sounds. This too has nothing to do with our ears. We can remember pitches, and some people

with perfect pitch can accurately determine notes heard out of a musical context. We can tell if the sound of squealing subway brakes and the highest note on a clarinet are the same. We can remember sequences of sounds—a bird’s

song or a door creak followed by a slam—and the exact timbre of sounds—we

sometimes recognize a friend’s voice by hearing a single word.

How does this work? Can we simulate that mental process with a math-

ematical formula or a computer program? As you can imagine, such ques-

tions—how little information do we need to recognize someone’s voice,

for example—were of prime importance to a phone company. If they could

understand what exactly makes speech understandable and intelligible, and

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isolate just that aspect—refine it, control it—then they might increase the

efficiency of their phone system by eliminating all the superfluous parts of the transmissions. The goal was to eventually communicate more and more

using less, or the same amount, of the mechanical and physical electrical

stuff. This possible increase in information flow would make them a lot more money. Psychoacoustics, would eventually lead to an increased understanding

of information transmission. This arcane science was suddenly hugely useful.

An unforeseen consequence of this phone-related research was the emer-

gence of digital-based audio technology that was eventually used in, among

other places, recording studios. In the seventies a new piece of equipment

the size of a briefcase appeared in recording studios. It was called a harmonizer, and it could change the pitch of a sound without changing its speed or tempo, as would happen if you changed the pitch by speeding up a tape. It

achieved this by slicing up the sound waves into digital slivers, mathemati-

cally transposing what were now merely numbers and then reconstructing

those as sounds at a higher or lower pitch. The early versions of this machine sounded pretty glitchy, but the effect was cool, even when it didn’t work.

Around that same time there appeared other devices called digital delays,

which were in effect primitive samplers. The digital samples they created in order to mimic acoustic echoes were usually much less than a second long

and they would be used to produce very short delay effects.

More devices followed: machines that could grab and hold longer sound

samples with greater resolution, and some that could manipulate those

“sounds” (they were really just numbers) more freely. All sorts of weird-

ness resulted. Bell Labs was involved in manufacturing a sound processor

called a vocoder that could isolate certain aspects of talking (or singing)

like speech formants (the shape of the sounds that we use to form words).

This device could remove these aspects of our talking or singing from the

pitch—like isolating the just the percussive parts—the T’s and B’s and the

sibilants of S’s and F’s. This machine could transmit these formant aspects

of a voice separate from the rest of a vocalization and the resulting gibberish, when transmitted, was more or less unintelligible. But the components

of intelligent speech were still there. The elements of the sound of speech

or singing had been deconstructed, and could make sense again when put

back together. Wonderful, but what do you do with this? One use for this

technology was a sort of cryptology for the voice: the garbled nonsense

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could be “decoded” at the other end if you knew what had been taken out

and where. These machines were also adopted for music production. Below,

the German band Kraftwerk’s vocoder, made especially for them.A

A vocoder was typically used to apply those isolated and separated speech

formants to the sound of a pitched instrument. The instrument then appeared

to be talking or singing. Often the resulting “voice” was somewhat robotic

sounding, an aspect that likely appealed to Kraftwerk. I once used a vocoder like this that I borrowed from Bernie Krause, a musician and early synthesizer pioneer, who I met when Brian Eno and I did the
Bush of Ghosts
record. The vocoder was beautifully made, but rather complicated, and very expensive.

An early harmonizer (that digital pitch shifter) cost thousands of dollars. A good digital reverberation unit set a studio back maybe ten thousand dollars, and a full-fledged digital sampling device, like the Fairlight or a Synclavier that emerged soon after, cost much, much more. But soon the price of memory and

processing dropped, and the technology became more affordable. Inexpensive

Akai samplers became the backbone of hip-hop and DJ mixes, replacing the earlier use of vinyl, and sampled or digitally derived drum sounds took the place of live drummers in many recordings. We were off to the races, for better or worse.

With the digitization of sound, digital recording and consumer products

like the CD became possible, and entire record albums were soon sliced into

these tiny slivers of ones and zeros. Not long after that, the capacity and

speed of home computers became sufficient enough to allow individuals to

record, archive, and process music. All of this follows from Bell Labs desire to improve the efficiency of their phone lines.

Bell Labs eventually became Lucent. I visited their labs in the mid-nineties and they showed me a processor that could squeeze what sounded to the

ear to be CD-quality music into a miniscule bandwidth. I believe encoding