How Music Works. Дэвид Бирн
in basketball arenas and stadiums, which tend to have terrible acoustics—only a narrow range of music works at all in such environments. Steady-state music (music with a consistent volume, more or less unchanging textures, and fairly simple pulsing rhythms) works best, and even then rarely. The roar of metal works fine. Industrial music for industrial spaces. Stately chord progressions might survive, but funk, for example, bounced off the walls and floors and became chaotic. The groove got killed, though some funky acts persevered because these concerts were social gatherings, bonding opportunities, and rituals as much as music events. Mostly the arenas were filled with white kids—and the music was usually Wagnerian.
The gathered masses in sports arenas and stadiums demanded that the music perform a different function—not only sonically but socially—than what it had been asked to do on a record or in a club. The music those bands ended up writing in response—arena rock—is written with that in mind: rousing, stately anthems. To my ears it’s a soundtrack for a gathering, and listening to it in other contexts recreates the memory or anticipation of that gathering—a stadium in your head.
Photo by Harry Sprout
Photo by Joe Conzo
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC VENUES
Where are the new music venues? Are there venues I’m still not acknowledging that might be influencing how and what kind of music gets written? Well, there is the interior of your car.S I’d argue that contemporary hip-hop is written (or at least the music is) to be heard in cars with systems like the one below. The massive volume seems to be more about sharing your music with everyone, gratis!T In a sense, it’s a music of generosity. I’d say the audio space in a car with these speakers forces a very different kind of composition. The music is bass heavy, but with a strong and precise high end as well. Sonically, what’s in the middle? It’s the vocal, allocated a vacant sonic space where not much else lives. In earlier pop music, the keyboards or guitars or even violins often occupied much of this middle territory, and without those things, the vocals rushed to fill the vacuum.
Hip-hop is unlike anything one could produce with acoustic instruments. That umbilical cord has been cut. Liberated. The connection between the recorded music and the live musician and performer is now a thing of the past. Although this music may have emerged from dance-oriented early hip-hop (which, like jazz, evolved by extending the breaks for dancers), it’s morphed into something else entirely: music that sounds best in cars. People do dance in their cars, or they try to. As big SUVs become less practical I foresee this music changing as well.
Photo by Eric W. Beasman
Photo by Olaf Mooij
One other new music venue has arrived.U Presumably the MP3 player shown below plays mainly Christian music. Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the “sitting very still in a concert hall” experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn’t get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer’s breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As with dance music one hundred years ago, it’s better to write music that maintains a relatively constant volume for this tiny venue. Dynamically static but with lots of details: that’s the directive here.
If there has been a compositional response to MP3s and the era of private listening, I have yet to hear it. One would expect music that is essentially a soothing flood of ambient moods as a way to relax and decompress, or maybe dense and complex compositions that reward repeated playing and attentive listening, maybe intimate or rudely erotic vocals that would be inappropriate to blast in public but that you could enjoy privately. If any of this is happening, I am unaware of it.
We’ve come full circle in many ways. The musical techniques of the African Diaspora, the foundation of much of the contemporary world’s popular music, with its wealth of interlocking and layered beats, works well acoustically in both the context of the private listening experience and as a framework for much contemporary recorded music. African music sounds the way it does because it was meant to be played out in the open (a form of steady-state music loud enough to be heard outdoors above dancing and singing) but it turns out to also work well in the most intimate of spaces—our inner ears. Yes, people do listen to Bach and Wagner on iPods, but not too many people are writing new music like that, except for film scores, where Wagnerian bombast works really well. If John Williams wrote contemporary Wagner for Star Wars, then Bernard Herrmann wrote contemporary Schoenberg for Psycho and other Hitchcock movies. The symphony hall is now a movie theater for the ears.
BIRDS DO IT
The adaptive aspect of creativity isn’t limited to musicians and composers (or artists in any other media). It extends into the natural world as well. David Attenborough and others have claimed that birdcalls have evolved to fit the environment.3 In dense jungle foliage, a constant, repetitive, and brief signal within a narrow frequency works best—the repetition is like an error-correcting device. If the intended recipient didn’t get the first transmission, an identical one will follow.
Birds that live on the forest floor evolved lower-pitched calls, so they don’t bounce or become distorted by the ground as higher-pitched sounds might. Water birds have calls that, unsurprisingly, cut through the ambient sounds of water, and birds that live in the plains and grasslands, like the Savannah Sparrow, have buzzing calls that can traverse long distances.
Eyal Shy of Wayne State University says that birdsongs vary even within the same species.4 The pitch of the song of the Scarlet Tanager, for example, is different in the East, where the woods are denser, than it is in the West.V
And birds of the same species adjust their singing as their habitat changes too. Birds in San Francisco were found to have raised the pitch of their songs over forty years in order to be better heard above the noises of the increased traffic.5
It’s not just birds, either. In the waters around New Zealand, whale calls have adapted to the increase in shipping noise over the last few decades—the hum of engines and thrash of propellers. Whales need to signal over huge distances to survive, and one hopes that they continue to adapt to this audio pollution.
So musical evolution and adaptation is an interspecies phenomenon. And presumably, as some claim, birds enjoy singing, even though they, like us, change their tunes over time. The joy of making music will find a way, regardless of the context and the form that emerges to best fit it. The musician David Rothenberg claims that “life is far more interesting than it needs to be, because the forces that guide it are not merely practical.”
Finding examples to prove that music composition depends on its context comes naturally to me. But I have a feeling that this somewhat reversed view of creation—that it is more pragmatic and adaptive than some might think—happens a lot, and in very different areas. It’s