How Music Works (22 page)

music as MP3s had already been invented in Germany by that time, so this

extremely efficient compressing/encoding trick was not a complete sur-

A

prise. And it was certainly no surprise that squeezing more sound infor-

mation into smaller spaces continued to be a priority for a subsidy of a

phone company. But like many people, I worried that

the quality of music might somehow get sacrificed in

this “rezzing down” process.

I was right. Those early, low-bandwidth digital files

sounded slightly off, as if something ineffable was

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missing. It was hard to put your finger on why they sounded wrong, but they

did. All the frequencies seemed to be there, but something seemed to have been sucked out in the process. Zombie music. MP3s have improved quite a bit since then, and now I listen to most of the music I own in that format. I believe what Lucent was working on ended up being used for satellite-radio transmission:

getting “CD-quality” sound into smaller bandwidth transmissions, so that a satellite could send out lots of channels of sound that seem to be of high quality.

Similar processing would be applied to photographs and video signals, which

allows us to stream movies without them looking completely grainy or pixelated.

In 1988, I got an advance peek at this technology as it was applied to visual information when the designer Tibor Kalman and I visited a printing studio

on Long Island. The studio had a machine that could digitize and then subtly manipulate images (we wanted to “improve” the image that was to be used on

a Talking Heads record cover). Like the early computers and recording-studio gear, this machine was incredibly expensive and rare. We had to go to it (it couldn’t be brought to the design studio), and we had to book time in advance.

A Sytex machine, I think it was called. Impressed as we were, its cost and rarity meant we didn’t think much about incorporating its talents into future projects.

After a while, as with sampling, the price of scanning images dropped,

and manipulating images using Photoshop became common. There are some

film holdouts, and I have no doubt that, as with MP3s, something has been

lost with digital images, but, well, for most of us, the trade-off seems acceptable—and inevitable. Needless to say, as images become digitized, they enter the river of networked data. Images for us are increasingly sequences of ones and zeros—information, like everything else. The digitization of every form

of media enabled the Web to be what it is, much more than a way of trans-

mitting text-based documents. This slicing of content allowed a wide vari-

ety of media to flow into that river, and in a way we owe all the pictures,

sounds, songs, games, and movies that are part of our Internet experience to the phone company, information science, and psychoacoustics.

CDS

CDs, which made their debut in 1982, were jointly developed by Sony

in Japan and Philips in Holland. Previously, digitized movies had been

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stored on LaserDiscs, which were the size of LPs, and the prospect of encod-

ing an entire record album’s worth of sound therefore seemed within reach.

If the discs could be made smaller, it could be lucrative. Philips had the laser aspect in development and Sony had the manufacturing prowess, so they

agreed to work on this new format together. The arrangement was unusual;

usually one company developed a format on their own and then tried to exert

control over it so they could start charging others for using it. As a result, a lot of proprietary nonsense that could have burdened the acceptance and dissemination of CDs was avoided.

It was rumored that the length of the CD was determined by the duration

of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, because that was Norio Ohga’s favorite piece

of music, and he was the president of Sony at that time. Philips had designed a CD with an 11.5 cm diameter, but Ohga insisted that a disc must be able to hold the entire Beethoven recording. The longest recording of the symphony

in Polygram’s archive was 74 minutes, so the CD size was increased to 12 cm

diameter to accommodate the extra data.

Unlike LPs, whose grooves and bouncing needles limited the volume, the low

frequencies were practically unlimited with the super-high-end CD technology.

The music was no longer mirrored by physical grooves, but was now encoded

in a series of digital ones and zeroes. Though these discs spun around like LPs, they were technically nothing like the old records. Their extended audio range resulted from the fact that since there was no physical analogue of the sound, the coded messages “told” the CD player what frequencies to play. The ones

and zeroes could tell the stereo system to play anything audible to the human ear, at whatever frequency or volume was desired. This sonic range in digital music was really only limited by the playback and sampling mechanisms which

allowed sounds outside the human hearing range to be recorded. The expanded

and unlimited sound range was now, or would soon be, available to everyone.

Inevitably, this sonic freedom got abused quite a bit. Some records (the

writer Greg Milner mentions most Oasis albums and
Californication
by the Red Hot Chili Peppers) were made so artificially loud that though the music seemed amazing on first listen (it was louder, and more consistently louder, than anything else), it rapidly wore on the ears. Milner claims that this “volume war”

was spurred by radio DJs and technicians who wanted their stations to seem

louder than the stations near them on the radio dial.1 To achieve this, inventor Mike Dorrough developed a device in the sixties called a “discriminate audio DAV I D BY R N E | 123

processor,” which caught on widely years later when every station was trying to be louder than every other. Milner speculates that musicians and record producers responded to this competition by figuring out how to make their records sound louder, and stay louder, for the whole length of the record.2 Pretty soon there was ear fatigue all around. The listener never got a break; there was no dynamic range anymore. Milner suggests that even rabid music fans can’t listen to these records over and over, or very much at all. The actual enjoyment of them is short lived, and he proposes that this might have had something to do with pushing consumers away from purchasing recorded music. The technology that was supposed to make music more popular than ever instead made

everyone run away from it.

CRAPPY SOUND FOREVER

Early CDs, like the MP3s that followed, didn’t sound all that great. Dr. John Diamond treated psychotic patients with music, but by 1989 he sensed

that it had all gone wrong. He claims that the natural healing and therapeutic properties of music were lost in the rush to digitize.3 He believes that certain pieces of music can help soothe and heal, if they are the entirely analog versions, while the digital versions actually have the reverse effect. When his test subjects are played digital recordings, they get agitated and twitchy.

Throughout the history of recorded music, we have tended to value con-

venience over quality every time. Edison cylinders didn’t really sound as good as live performers, but you could carry them around and play them whenever

you wanted. LPs, revolving slower, didn’t sound as rich as 45s or 78s, but

you didn’t have to attend to them as much. And cassettes? Are you kidding?

We were told that CDs would last forever and sound squeaky clean, but they

really don’t sound as good as LPs, and the jury is out regarding their durability. The spectrum of sound on analog mediums has an infinite number of gra-

dations, whereas in the digital world everything is sliced into a finite number of slivers. Slivers and bits might fool the ear into believing that they represent a continuous audio spectrum (psychoacoustics at work), but by nature they

are still ones and zeros; steps rather than a smooth slope. MP3s? They may

be the most convenient medium so far, but I can’t help thinking that the

psychoacoustic trickery used to develop them—the ability to cause the mind

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to think and feel that all the musical information is there when in reality a huge percentage has been removed—is a continuation of this trend in which

we are seduced by convenience. It’s music in pill form, it delivers vitamins, it does the job, but something is missing. We are often offered, and gladly

accept, convenient mediums that are “good enough,” rather than ones that are actually better.

Where does this road of compromise end, and does it really matter if we

lose a little quality along the way? Isn’t the quality or accuracy of a recording somewhat irrelevant to music’s use and enjoyment? We laugh out loud

at antics on fuzzy, grainy, and atrociously low-resolution YouTube postings, and we talk to our loved ones on mobile-phone networks with voice quality

that would make Alexander Graham Bell roll over in his grave. Information

theory tells us that the amount of bits needed to communicate certain kinds

of content—what someone is saying, or the antics of a cat, for example—can

really be much lower than we think. If we only need to understand the verbal content of someone on the telephone, then the quality can be surprisingly bad and we’ll still know what our friends and family are saying. It doesn’t seem to matter that so much is missing. Maybe “good enough” is okay.

Or maybe not. Reacting to this tendency, some musicians have decided to

go back to analog recording, and some have perversely gone out of their way

to make their recordings sound as lo-fi as possible—as bad as they can get

away with. They want to get as far from digital cleanliness as possible. Why would bad quality, fuzziness, and distortion imply that the music is more

authentic? The idea is that if one accepts that crisp and clean recordings are inherently soulless, then the opposite, dirty and rough, must therefore be

straight from the heart. That might not sound logical, but that’s the way we think. It’s all part of the recurring belief that conflates new technologies with being inauthentic. Bad—even fake bad, in this way of thinking—means good.

It’s confusing, because most digital music does not sound “bad.” If anything, it sounds conventionally good—clean, spotless, with a full range of frequencies. Though it is actually less rich sounding than previous technologies, it fools the ear into believing that it sounds better. It’s this shiny, glossy quality that is considered suspect by many music fans. In response, they overvalue

the easily audible drawbacks of a previous era—the hiss, crackle, and dis-

tortion. In my opinion, realness and soul lie in the music itself, not in the scratches and pops of old records. So, while the cleanliness and “perfection”

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of much current music is not a guarantee of a moving musical experience,

neither is their opposite.

If, following the lead of the phone company, we find ourselves talking

about communication and information transmission when we talk about

music, then maybe some of the sonic richness of LPs is indeed superfluous

and can be eliminated with no serious loss. Could this work with speech as

well? Yes and no. Music has more going on simultaneously than speech, for

starters. Looking at a reproduction of a painting is certainly not the same as standing in front of the real thing, but an awful lot of the emotion, intent, ideas, and sensibility can indeed be communicated—even via a cheap reproduction. Similarly, I can be moved to tears by a truly awful recording or a bad copy of a good recording. Would I be moved even more if the quality were

higher? I doubt it. So why bother?

There does come a time, however, when the richness of the retinal or aural

experience is so diminished that the communication—in this case the enjoy-

ment of the music—becomes unintelligible. But how can we define that? I

first heard rock, pop, and soul songs on a crappy-sounding transistor radio, and they changed my life completely. The sound quality was atrocious, but

that tinny sound was communicating a wealth of information. Though it was

an audio transmission that carried the news, it was the social and cultural

message embedded in the music that electrified me as much as the sound

did. Those extra-musical components that got carried along with the music

didn’t demand a high-resolution signal—good enough was good enough. I’m

not saying that tinny sound should be considered satisfying or desirable, or that we should never strive for more than “good enough,” but it’s amazing how
much
lo-fi or lo-res information can communicate. Live concerts don’t generally have perfect sound either, but they can move us deeply.

Now I begin to ask myself if the fuzziness and ambiguity inherent in low-

quality signals and reproductions might actually be a factor that gives the viewer or listener a way in. I know from writing lyrics that some details—names,

places, locations—are desirable; they anchor the piece in the real world. But so are ambiguities. By letting the listener or viewer fill in the blanks, complete the picture (or piece of music), the work becomes personalized and the audience

can adapt it to their own lives and situations. They become more involved with the work, and an intimacy and involvement becomes possible that perfection

might have kept at bay. Maybe the lo-fi music crowd has a point?

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MUSIC SOFTWARE AND SAMPLE-BASED COMPOSITION

Music composition changed a lot with the advent of digital recording. As

we’ve seen, the first digital samples were short and primarily used by