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Downerman
Revival
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Music is sound.
Sound is the regular perturbation a wave makes as it propagates through
a medium.
The medium we're most familiar with is air. In addition to being the
vehicle which sustains us, through a careful balance of oxygen and
nitrogen, air makes a decent medium for sound waves to move through. No
air, no sound; hence the phrase, "In space, no one can hear you scream."
When we sit around and play drums, or strum acoustic guitars, or blow into
flutes or recorders or didgeridoos, we cause waves to move through air -
we make sound, and if we're lucky, we create music.
When we go to a show, the performers create the waves on stage, much as
we do when we're sitting around - though in many cases those sounds by
themselves aren't very interesting. A solid-body electric guitar sounds
tinny and tiny; a non-electrified electric bass is almost inaudible; and
all you hear through a Fender Rhodes electric piano is the non-musical
clicking of the keys. These instruments are designed differently than
acoustic instruments like hand drums and acoustic guitars, in both wave
and medium.
The wave created by plucking an electric stringed instrument is the
starting point, the seed, for a subsequent series of manipulations which
create the final sound. This wave is not intended to be the final
product, what the listener hears; that's why it sounds plinky. The wave
which seeds a synthesizer can have no character itself
Electric instruments add a second medium: solid-state. This medium is
composed of the copper wires, lead-tin solder, resistors and capacitors
and operational amplifiers and diodes and other devices which manipulate
electrical signals. This allows for a tremendous amount of flexibility
and creativity in the output sound. A guitar can be made to sound like a
trumpet, a bass like a chorus of piccolos, a keyboard like a chorus of
barking dogs. Electronic effects are responsible for distortion, echo,
and that oily sound that Mike Gordon gets on Down With Disease. The
medium also serves to guide the propagation of these waves to best serve
the listener. At a show, this means taking the sounds that are made on
stage, moving them via wires and cables to a central point (the
soundboard) where they are mixed to be most pleasing to the audience, and
then routed via wires to loudspeakers (the "PA", or public address system)
where they are converted to waves which propagate in air.
Medium adds a third dimension to sound, in addition to propagation and
manipulation: it provides storage. This storage is a means of
holding the sound for some period of time, so that it can be enjoyed later
- whether a player-piano roll, a vinyl or wax record, a chrome oxide
cassette, or a compact disc. Until recently, though, all of these media
had one thing in common: the medium was a discrete object, and the sound
could only be enjoyed if the listener had the physical object available.
We are undergoing a tremendous revolution in the nature of technology, and
with it, a shift away from the local to the distributed
enjoyment of music. Obviously, the listener will always be local to
himself; but the music will make journeys previously unknown to us. I
have three examples of this from my own personal experience.
My good friend Rick was raised in Southern California, where he picked
up a love for surf music. Being of sound mind, though, he knew he could
not survive in the hostile environs of Orange County for long, and so he
packed up the whole fam damily and moved to Oregon. The love of surf
stayed, and his surf collection grew, but inspirations were few and far
between, until he discovered that a certain radio station had a certain DJ
who played only surf music. That radio station was KFJC, and that DJ is Phil Dirt. KFJC is
located in Northern California, near Palo Alto, but that's no matter -
Rick can tune into Phil Dirt's show every Saturday evening at 6pm (for the
excellent hour of garage music - I once heard a Cold Rain and Snow
by the mid-60's Dead that blew me away) and for the two hours of surf from
7 to 9pm. How? By the magic of medium: KFJC converts the waves from
Phil's vinyl and CDs (storage) into ones and zeroes (manipulation),
transmits them via the Internet in an MP3 format to a listener in any part
of the world (propagation), and at the end, these 1's and 0's are
converted to electrical waves, and those waves cause Rick's computer
speakers to disturb the air (manipulation again), bringing him delicious
surfy goodness from 700 miles away.
I know some folks in Berkeley who have created a virtual jukebox. They
have transferred their CDs to a central server, which acts as a huge
player. They can log in from any location - a home bedroom, a campus
office, a friend's computer - and serve up songs out of the ether, with no
download delays (ok, so it helps to have a T1 line dropped into the house,
but universal wide bandwidth will be a reality in the next decade). No
more having to root around in your car for that disc, or forgetting music
somewhere; just connect and go. Whether this is legal, in the eyes of the
stupid industry-written laws which govern distribution of copyrighted
material, is a common topic of discussion - but it's ultimately dismissed
as being irrelevant, because it's unenforceable. A small, private
collective can easily create a library of over a thousand titles. This
issue of distribution is far from being resolved; but while the lawyers
wrangle, the kids keep on programming, converting, and dancing the night
away.
A few nights ago I went to see a favorite local jamband, Grampa's Chili. Sprouted out of the
middle of the dance floor was an unusual mic stand; in addition to the
microphones and recorder, it had a transmitter. This transmitter was
sending the manipulated sound to a backroom in the club, where a laptop
computer was receiving it, further manipulating it, and transmitting the
show live onto the Internet. We are seeing more and more of this type of
Web simulcast, and I predict one day soon we'll be able to walk down the
street and listen to any live show going on at the moment, via a portable
receiving device no larger than a cellphone. Imagine hearing every Phish
show as it happens, without having to leave your home. Virtual touring!
Obviously there are many other stimuli which create the experience, not
least of which is Chris Kuroda's light show - but if you can't be on the
other side of the country, you can hear what's going on, as it happens.
Woo-hoo!
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