 This is a great time to be a musician. True, the general economy is in the toilet, unemployment is rising, your palatial home is now worth fifty cents and you can’t fill your car’s gas tank for less than fifty bucks. On the other hand, you can record an entire album in your loo using your laptop and release it over the internet without having to get into bed with a record label. The artist currently known as Prince figured it out a while back. If he could sell his own record for twenty bucks a pop, he’d make more money – lots more money – selling lots fewer records than if he made a record for a label, which might give him twenty cents per record sold, minus all of their bogus give-backs.
Now we have YouTube, Podcasts, ‘viral ad campaigns’, independent online record sales, and PayPal. You can air and sell your record all over the world without ever leaving home or signing one of those onerous recording contracts that mysteriously leaves you in staggering debt after selling millions of copies.
There is, however, a big dollop of grit in the ointment of joy, and that is the medium itself. Digitally reproduced sound has been demonstrated to stimulate a completely different region of the brain than analog music. Analog (think ‘live’ if you’ve never heard a vinyl record or a (ick) cassette tape) sound goes right to the brain’s pleasure centers, while digital sound feeds the irritation nexus in the brain. Mp3’s, the savagely squashed down simulacra of sound, are quite a bit more irritating than uncompressed digital files, since even more of the important pieces of musical information have been arbitrarily pulled out, leaving holes and noise – some of which is spurious high frequency harmonics that extend beyond the range of human hearing but nonetheless register on the nervous system with the same impact as nails on a blackboard. Many people today have never heard live music, and that’s tragic. Many of those same people listen to nothing but mp3 tracks – even sadder - which contain about as much musical information as plastic sushi. “I don’t get it. They sound ok,” is the typical response to my knee-jerk jeremiad on the subject. Yes, they do sound ok, as long as you use them as sonic wallpaper and don’t listen to them.
The record industry was in such a hairy hurry to get the CD format to market in the 80’s that they settled for really crummy standards. Then they hyped the format as ‘perfect sound forever.’ It’s not. 44.1 kHz/16 bit reproduction is substandard in every respect. If you’ve ever recorded a track at 96 kHz/24 bit or what is now the gold standard – 192 kHz HD - and then dithered it down to CD standard, you’ve heard the horrible sonic loss that accompanies the process. “Where’d the music go?” you wonder. Mp3’s have gone a giant step further and lowered the sonic bar to the floor.
Sample rate, as in 44.1 kHz, is just that – a sample rate. It is a signifier of how frequently the analog waveform is sampled. It is not a continuous waveform like analog sound. It is a sawed off collection and reformulation of little chunks with all the in-between pieces missing. The brain tries to reconstruct or reconstitute the missing parts, and tries to fool itself into thinking that it’s getting the real thing. It’s sort of like giving someone a glass of milk powder and asking them to imagine the liquid component and drink it. OK, maybe that’s a clumsy analogy, but this subject makes me sadder than I’d like to admit and sometimes I become uncharacteristically inarticulate. Perhaps the perfect analog to the mp3 is the Twinkie ™. There’s no food in a Twinkie ™ and there’s about as much heart nourishment in an mp3. One is a place holder to make your stomach feel like there’s something in it, and the other is a place holder to make your soul feel like it’s being fed.
It’s gratingly ironic that so many people are suffering unawares from a lack of musical nourishment in an age that brings us more and more gadgets for listening to it. If I could tolerate mp3’s for anything more than demos, I could clip a playback device about one quarter the size of a cigarette pack to my sleeve while I work out, and have a thousand tunes at my fingertips. Mp3 players are ubiquitous now. You can find them in phones, cars, toys, kitchen appliances, toilet paper rolls, even Tasers. No, really.
How does this relate to a cappella? Well, for starters, the harsh flatness and smeary detail of low rez digital recording is nowhere more apparent than in the reproduction of the human voice. Synths always sound like synths, and pop music and electronica seem to suffer the least under the duress of digital, but voices fare badly. Stringed instruments come in a close second, but voices just get killed. There are software plugins that attempt to approximate tape saturation and some of the other charmingly retro aspects of analog sound, but they mostly just add more junk to the junk, which make tracks sound different but not necessarily any better. When I listen to voices on a digital recording, or worse – an mp3 ripped from a digital recording - I find myself straining uselessly to get inside the music, to hear all the pieces I’m missing, all the good stuff that was arbitrarily eliminated as unimportant by the sampling rate. What all those cool plugins don’t do is put back into the music what the sampling rate and the dithering process removed.
A short philosophical digression: The process I’ve outlined isn’t at all surprising when taken in context. We’ve become a society used to substitutes. Whether it’s fake food, faux fabrics, ‘reality’ tv (America’s next top bisexual plumber), fake singers (American Idol - or established artistes who lip-sync their concerts – you choose), fake news, fake tits, fake wood paneling (filled with formaldehyde), or cheap knock-off watches/handbags/perfumes, we seem to have come to a sanguine, comfy, accommodating relationship with fakery. We have accepted it, even welcomed it into our lives, not realizing the price we pay, and the price is that we are becoming progressively more malnourished in the fiber of our beings. Now, I’m not a Luddite, and I’m not proposing that we go backwards in search of the fictitious ‘good old days’. But hey, there is still an important qualitative difference between real and fake. OK. I’m done with that. And thanks, by the way. I do feel better. I can go on now.
So why, after all, is this such a great time to be a musician? Well, despite the obvious problems with digital media, it has democratized the process of making and distributing music. Artists, no longer held in thrall to labels, can flex their creative muscles in any way they choose. With an ease that was unheard of even a few short years ago, you can make a polished-sounding CD with a minimum of fuss and gear and a maximum amount of inspiration. Where once it took the deep pockets of a record label and the sophisticated armament of a high-end recording studio, now you can extrude lush textures in your humble home studio, and get them to your audience by hitting the ‘send’ button. Sites like CD Baby will carry your disc and pay you for every copy you sell, with the funds deposited directly into your PayPal account. Having been mauled by most of the major labels and a gaggle of small ones, I appreciate the simplicity and honesty of this system.
Yeah, it’s a great time to be a musician. Now, if we can only find a way to make mp3’s sound more like music….
 Add as favorites (85) |  Quote this article on your site | Views: 1384
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.6
AkoComment © Copyright 2004 by Arthur Konze - www.mamboportal.com
All right reserved |
