Mix Tapes, Tables, Mules

A couple of recent posts from John Quiggin and Tim Dunlop have inspired me to expand upon some ideas that I’ve been boring a few of my friends with lately, concerning the impact of new music distribution technologies on the way that music is made and listened to.

John’s post took as its point of departure this article from Salon by Joel Keller, which is a lament for the compilation cassette, as immortalised in High Fidelity. In the days when making a compilation tape meant sitting there and pressing Record and Play together and waiting until the track had finished and pressing stop and then repeating the process over and over again until your cassette was filled up on both sides (bearing in mind that the final track on each side had to be carefully selected so as not to waste any blank tape or cut the song off in the middle, and that this had to be done on a trial and error basis without any handy software to keep track of how long you’d recorded so far), each such tape was something of a labour of love. If it was worth spending three hours putting it together, then it was worth making every song count. By comparision, todays compilation CD involves a few clicks and drags and five minutes of the CD burner whirring quietly. According to Joel, that ease has come at a price:

The process of making a mix tape gave people a connection with music that the electronic version simply can’t replace. Because it is so easy to drag and click a mix into existence, the sense of satisfaction with making what many feel is a work of art gets diminished.

John Q seems to sympathise somewhat with this argument, before countering that

[i]n most cases … (including that of blogging) a decline in average quality is quite consistent with an improvement across the board, in the sense that more and better good quality outputs are produced, even while the average is dragged down by people who would previously not have produced at all.

I take him to mean that, since technological advances have made it quicker and easier for someone to put together a compilation, there are a lot more of them being done by people who wouldn’t otherwise have bothered. While those people might be producing discs of a lesser quality (in terms of music selection, I suppose - the sound quality would certainly be better) than the old compilation tapes, there would surely be others (perhaps the tape compilers from way back, revelling in the new possibilities), who would produce stuff that was as good or better.

Most of my early jazz listening was done by way of home-made compilation tapes. I used to record the jazz programmes from the radio onto one cassette, then listen through and dub the tracks that I liked onto another one. So tracks from an analogue turntable were broadcast on analogue FM (or even sometimes AM) radio, recorded by me onto an analogue tape, and then dubbed onto another analogue tape. The sound quality, naturally, was shite. I remember downloading an mp3 of Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson doing “Mean to Me”, a track which I’d recorded years ago onto one of these tapes. I was astonished to find that the original was about fifteen metronome points slower and about a tone lower than the one that I’d been used to. Probably some turntable in some community radio station in Adelaide was running at 38rpm one day, and I’d been listening to the results ever since. It’s probably true, though, that I listened to those tapes much more, and much more closely, than I’ve listened to most of the CD’s or mp3’s in my collection. Partly it was because they were all I really had to listen to (as a teenager who was, for reasons that I’ve never quite uncovered, unmoved by commercial music). But it was probably also partly because they were a creation of mine. They represented an investment of time and effort, and each track was meticulously filtered according to my own taste. In Joel’s terms, I was perhaps more “connected” to that collection of half a dozen somewhat-stretched TDK D90s than I am to the hundreds of hours of music that I have at my fingertips these days (with thousands of hours’ more only a guilty mouse click away).

Thing is, though, that although it’s probably true to say that I knew my recordings more intimately then than I do now, I think it’s wrong to blame the technology for the change. If any of us sees the value (as perhaps one should) in lovingly crafting a compilation, sitting and listening through each track carefully, matching tunes, matching levels and so on, then there’s every opportunity for him to do so (and a lot more that he couldn’t have done on a tape. Think crossfades, think effects, think tempo matching, pitch matching, compression). If people are not into doing all that, then presumably it’s because they’ve decided they have something better to do with their lives. Which, you’d have to say, is fair enough. Just because we’re no longer forced by the technical limitations of the medium to jump through all those hoops, it doesn’t mean that the hoops aren’t still there to be jumped through if we feel so inclined. (Incidentally, for audio CD burning, I recommend Feurio, a free tool that I wouldn’t be without. Bit of a learning curve, but the results are worth it.)

Here’ are a couple of quotes from George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier, p184), in a departure that will eventually (I promise) return to the point:

Here am I, working eight hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something ‘creative’, so I choose to do a bit of carpentering - to make myself a table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a touch of artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself. But even when I get to work on my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago felt towards his table, still less as Robinson Crusoe felt towards his. For before I start, most of the work has already been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill. I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the cabinet-maker of a hunderd years ago would have had to do the work with chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only needing to be fitted together, my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the mechanised future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and materials available then, there will be no possiblity of a mistake, hence no room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato.

(and p186):

The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train - or by car or aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage onto a mule and set out on foot, making a two days’ march of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary.

You can see that the arguments are similar (and similarly wrong, in my view). Of course, despite the Ikeaisation of furniture making (which, writing in 1937, he was spot on about), people still can and do make their own furniture. Orwell seemed to regard all the various secondary motivations which might drive one to make one’s own table (the aesthetic pleasure of shaping the wood; the ability to build something unique; the ability to dictate the quality of the workmanship - there must be a dozen others) to be somehow inseparable from the primary one (to have something to put things on). Certainly, if all you wanted was a table for the sake of a table, you’d go to Ikea rather than go out and start lopping down trees on your own behalf, but there are lots of reasons why, for particular people, it might be preferable to do it yourself.

Likewise, he seems to assume that the only purpose in making a trip is to get to the destination, and this end is reached either by the aesthetic means (dragging a mule) or the anaesthetic one (taking the train). He doesn’t seem to consider that the trip might be an end in itself, and that if one regarded it as such, one wouldn’t be at all disconcerted by the buses whizzing past. When I cycle to uni, it doesn’t bother me at all to be passed by the tram that I could much more easily be sitting on staring into space. I ride because I like riding, not because it’s the simplest and easiest way of getting me there.

Using the table example, you can see John Q’s point about declining quality quite clearly. Certainly, it’s true that a table from Freedom that you whack together with an allen key and a phillips head screwdriver is not going to be as good as a table that would have been made by a 17th century master craftsman. But all that means is that if I’d been living in the 17th century, I wouldn’t have been able to make a table at all, and I would have had to pay someone to do it for me. Not being able to get a prefabricated one would not have made me a better carpenter - it would have made me no carpenter at all. And whereas you could probably say that the average quality of a table made today is less than the average quality of a table made then, there are still plenty of great craftsmen around building furniture that is as good as anything that’s ever been built, I’m sure.

A counter to that argument might be to say that, had I been living in the 17th century, I would have had more incentive to learn proper carpentry skills (instead of just learning how to interpret Swedish assembly diagrams). Perhaps I would, but then, as someone without a natural affinity for carpentry, would I have been any good? If not, might my creations have been inferior to an Ikea product anyway, meaning that the mechanisation would have brought a net increase in quality, at least in my case. By that reasoning, the only people practicing “proper” carpentry today are those people who are actually into being carpenters, while the rest of us are happy to rely on the prefab stuff which is probably better than what we could have been able to make ourselves.

Of course, this is just looking at the situation from the supply side (have I been reading too much of Professor Quiggin?) The rise of mechanisation would also have had an effect on demand, and thus on the quality of the output. Think about two different types of tables. One is strictly utilitarian - it’s a platform to stick things on. The other is (at least partly) ornamental, like a fine mahogany dining table, for instance. Clearly, if I wanted to buy the former, I’d probably head to one of the local branches of a multinational mass-producer. If I wanted the latter, I’d be much more likely to head to an actual carpenter. In the pre-mechanisation days, though, I would have been heading to the carpenter wanting something cheap and effective. Perhaps back then, the demand for cheap stuff from people who couldn’t go elsewhere would have removed the incentive for the craftsman to do great quality work. Today, people who go to carpenters are looking for something special.

To grab at another analogy (and to head gradually back to the compilation CD discussion, which I haven’t forgotten about), let’s think about the impact that the invention of the remote control had on the content of TV broadcasts. In pre-remote times, there was a certain effort involved in getting up off the couch to change channel. Nowadays, we literally only have to lift a finger. It might help to think of the remote-deprived couch potatoes as being coerced (by the absense of technological innovation) into watching the same channel rather than getting up and changing it, whereas those with zappers have been freed from that coercion. I can see two opposing arguments as to the effect this might have had on the quality of TV programmes. On the one hand, the TV producers might have experienced the advent of the remote control as a kick in the arse, meaning that they could no longer rely on the inertia of their viewers to keep the ratings ticking over. On the other hand, though, there must be a question as to whether creating television with viewers’ index fingers in mind necessarily creates content that we’d describe as being “better”. Has the Channel Ten “Newsquiz” really added that much pleasure to our nightly viewing? Is it so desirable for every programme to be divided into a series of mini-cliffhangers, each to be resolved after the commercial break?

Getting back to the music, now, here’s another paragraph from the Salon article (which starts by quoting music writer Sal Tuzzeo Jr):

“On the subways you see people with iPods. They have, what, a thousand songs on them. Ten thousand, even. […]” Fewer people who are connected to the music they listen to translates into a less critical and picky audience for the crapola that the record companies and radio stations promote. The quality of music overall goes downhill.

Of course, the counter to this (analogous to the first of my two arguments above) is that when people have thousands of songs to choose from at any one time, it’s beholden on the artists and the record companies to come up with particularly great songs so as to make it onto the playlists and keep their (paid, legal) downloads flowing. I’m not sure that that’s what will happen, but I think that Keller’s analysis is a bit flawed. Nothing about the fact that someone is listening to an iPod necessarily implies that they are “disconnected” from the music. They might have spent hours crafting the pefect playlist, and they might be listening to it for the hundredth time in the same sort of ecstasy that used to be reserved for the perfect mix tape. They might even have mixed their vinyl records down to mp3’s and stored them on the iPod (which I believe is the sort of thing that DJ’s are doing pretty regularly). There are lots of reasons that people might want to “connect” with the music (and lots of ways in which they can do it) without that connection being coerced by technological limitations.

Of course, the other wing of the television argument deserves consideration as well - is it true to say that the sort of music which is created specifically to stop people pressing “Skip” on their iPods will be of better quality than that which might otherwise have made it to the market? The obvious answer to this is that, to the extent that record producers feel bound to include this sort of “stickiness” as an element of their product, they’ve been doing it for years anyway, in order to cater for radio. Audiences can change radio stations just as quickly as they can switch tracks on their mp3 players.

It’s probably true that we are deprived of a certain amount of musical satisfaction because music creators are required to be inoffensive at all costs. It’s often been said that there won’t be any more Bohemian Rhapsodies, because the introduction would have audiences in their thousands reaching for their station presets. If we were compelled by technological backwardness to listen just a bit longer before we changed the channel, then that would open up a whole new palette of creative possibilities for the content producers, knowing that they could challenge us for that brief period of time before they had to win us back. If music (and maybe all art) is the manipulation of tension and release for emotional effect, then it must certainly be stifling to limit the amount of tension that’s permissible, lest your listener be unwilling to stick it out until the release kicks in.

I’m inclined to think, though, that there are reasonably few people who might otherwise have enjoyed more complex music, who will be deprived of doing so by the effects which an audience of technologically-enabled philanderers might have upon music suppliers, for the same reason that I think there are reasonably few people to whom Ikea has denied the joys of carpentry. People who are really into music will seek out music that they like wherever they find it. No-one is compelled to listen to commercial shite unless they actuall like it, in which case who am I or Sal or anyone else to argue with them? Music might be produced to meet the needs of fickle consumers who might never listen to the same song twice (because they don’t need to), but such music shouldn’t concern music lovers any more than an Ikea table should concern furniture connoisseurs. New technologies, as well as enabling a lot of undiscerning consumers, are also enabling the discerning ones, and the people who create music for them. Anyone with a PC and a room and few grand’s worth of audio gear can now create a recording that would previously have only been possible in a studio worth $500 an hour. Yes, that probably means that there’s a lot more crap being recorded, but surely it also means that there’s more good stuff, and the internet makes it possible to promote it and distribute it to people who do actually care about what they listen to. They might even take the time to burn themselves a special compilation CD …

UPDATE: There was a problem with Sal Tuzzeo Jr’s quote, which I’ve edited (see here). Also added a missing link to the Salon article. 24/2

January 31, 2004. Uncategorized. 6 Comments.

God and Politics

Reading political blogs, I often get pissed off. There are some points of view (and ways of expressing them) which, quite literally, set my heart racing and my hands shaking. It can be unpleasant in large doses, which is why there are particular sites that I tend to steer clear of these days, preferring to nibble around the edges of conflicts rather than swallow them whole. Kept within sensible limits, though, this visceral reaction makes political discussion a compelling pastime.

I noticed an interesting contrast this morning when I was reading the comment thread on this post by Robert Corr. Homer Paxton is defending a view that I find appalling, and yet reading it I find myself completely unmoved, apart from a bit of mild amusement:

I would have thought even Catholics who do not read the bible a lot would know that homosexuality is condemned as a sin in both Old & New Testaments.

It is even stranger that Secular humanists such as yourself rob try to put a worldly view on it.

Are you next going to argue that cricket be played with baseball bats?

(and later)

…you can’t pick and choose what you wish to take from the bible.

You either believe as God’s word and are a christian or you don’t are are not one.

Why is it that this stuff leaves me noticeably down in arms? I’ll tell you: it’s the God thing. If someone wants to justify a particular viewpoint on the basis of an irrational belief in a particular text, then any rational discussion of his viewpoint is redundant. Even if another believer in the same text wants to take issue with his interpretation, it seems odd to do so under the guise of rationalism, since irrationality is a precondition for this sort of unquestioning faith. It’s like a tea-leaf reader trying to rationally defend her view of the future against a tarot card reader’s - a conceptual mismatch.

Why is politics any different? After all, can’t conflicts between political opponents seem just as irreconcilable as those between religious opponents? Well, yes and no. For a start, I think that most people involved in political discussions subscribe (at least in theory) to similar standards of rational argument. In cases where opponents are debating the best means to achieve an end which both agree is desirable, each will be relying on a set assumptions about what makes his way better. For instance, I think everyone agreed that the world would have been better off without Saddam Hussein. The disagreement arose over the best way to get rid of him, or whether there even was a means of doing so without the costs outweighing the benefits. I’m not going to pretend that all (or even much) of the discussion on the subject addressed those disagreements in a sane and rational way, but there has been at least one prominent example of an individual feeling rationally compelled to change his position. Although we do spend a lot of time involved in meaningless mudslinging, I think that few of us who bother to debate are completely inflexible in our views. If we were, I think that everyone would lose interest fairly quickly. It might be the case that many bloggers are more concerned about lamenting closed-mindedness on the part of their opponents than they are about ensuring that their own minds remain open, but I think most of us have room for at least some movement.

There are circumstances, though, in which political conflicts can attain more of a religious character. Those are the conflicts wherein the opponents, quite apart from disagreeing about the means to an end, are also in disagreement about what the desirable end is. What if two people have a different idea about what sort of world they want to live in?

Except in extreme cases, I think there is fairly broad agreement across a wide range of areas about what kind of world would be best. I don’t think many people think that we should work towards a world where more people starve to death, or strive for a state of perpetual warfare. People might disagree on what degree of equality is desirable, but I haven’t seen many people argue that a greater disparity is always better (even as they argue for policies that seem directed to that end). We might disagree about the best form of democracy, but there don’t seem to be too many (open) advocates of totalitarianism left.

I’m wondering whether sometimes, in the heat of often wide disputes about means, we are inclined to overlook the common ground which most of us share when it comes to ends. I wonder whether political discussions could lose a lot of their religious character if we spent more time seeking agreement on the goals that we are aiming for before we started arguing about the best way of realising them. After all, things could be worse. We could be arguing about God.

January 19, 2004. Uncategorized. 4 Comments.

Dog Blog

This is Henry, the newest addition to our household:

He’s nine months old, and his lineage is (like most RSPCA pups) a bit of a mystery. We’ve been assured that he’s half Pomeranian, although personally I can’t see a lot of resemblance:

As for the other half, who knows? To me, he looks like a miniature Alsatian (the ideal guard dog for the small backyard?), but the vet reckoned that he couldn’t have any shepherd, because of his size. Any comments from anyone who’s good at divining dog breeds would be welcome!

We’ve had him for three days now, and it’s been pretty good. He was supposed to be house trained, but that didn’t stop him pissing in about four different spots as soon as he walked into the place, so we’ve been doing a bit of work in that regard (i.e., standing in the backyard at all hours with doggy treats in hand waiting for him to evacuate under his tree of choice so that he can be duly rewarded). I’m pleased to report that today he’s got a clean slate. He also seems to have a few little dominance issues (jumping up, nipping, the odd hump), which we’re working through. The good news is, he’s not one of those pups that just goes interminably nuts. As I write this, he’s lying quietly asleep behind me. As boisterous as he can be now and then, he’s quick to settle down and realise that it’s time to be docile for a while, which is important for maintaining sanity all round. It’s going to be a few more days before his desexing wound heals up enough for us to take him out walking, so I’ll report any dramas from the dog park as they arise. He’s pretty clingy, so I don’t think he’ll just vanish over the horizon. I just hope that he doesn’t find the nearest well-groomed lap dog and start doing his Ron Jeremy impression on it (an act on which his (the dog’s) neutering seems to have had little effect).

January 16, 2004. Uncategorized. 8 Comments.

Blog Gone

One of the blogs that got me interested in blogging, A Bright Cold Day In April is no more. Matt’s decided that he has better things to do than blog, which is certainly good news for his sake, but his gain (a life) is our loss (a thoughtful and entertaining read).

January 12, 2004. Uncategorized. 1 Comment.

Servicing

Tonight has been one of those nights when long overdue blog fiddling takes place (as a substitute, perhaps, for coming up with any interesting content). For the blog-minded (and, let’s face it, most of you are), here’s what I’ve done:

What’s more, it all seems to be working okay (looks in vain for some wood to touch) …

January 12, 2004. Uncategorized. 2 Comments.