During the early 1900s, there was a problem in the music industry. By and large, people were using gramophones to listen to their favourite songs. But the technology only allowed for approximately four minutes of playback, and the quality was awful: the high notes from flutes and violins, together with the low notes from the tuba or the base were either distorted or barely audible. Incidentally, this gave rise to the four-minute-long pop music that we are familiar with today, where the prominent feature is the human voice.
The main grudge, however, was that people could not listen to classical music, which is much longer and has a broad range of sounds. As you can imagine, the pursuit of a solution became an obsession for scientists and record labels of the time. In 1948, there was a breakthrough. Columbia records transformed the industry by introducing the Long Play record, the LP as we know it today, allowing studios to record up to 40 minutes of high fidelity sound. The technology quickly became the new standard for distributing music. And finally, it was possible to capture a full-length piece of classical music with all its dynamism in a single package. Then, popular music, most notably jazz, became longer and more lyrical. In cases where the music was shorter, multiple songs were strung together in a singled LP, and thus the album was born. In the years to come, the album became the key performance indicator; the more albums sold, the more successful an artist was regarded.
A few decades later, in the 80s, the Compact Disc (CD) was introduced, and the length of the album doubled to 80 minutes. The more significant change, however, was in the quality and format of the music. For the first time, sound became quantised – it was turned into data bits that could be manipulated after the recording. Therefore, having recorded a song, an engineer could play with the various frequencies to enhance instruments or textures that complement the human ear.
Interestingly, our ears are tuned to listening to people’s voices or sounds in that range. As a result, lower frequencies are more difficult to hear, and high notes can quickly become unbearable. For this reason, sound engineers, during the 90s, started reducing the loudness of the high tones, while increasing the volume of low notes to optimise music for the human ear. It was a bit like removing all the food you do not like from a platter and replacing it with your favourites. It worked. This practice became known as dynamic range compression. Ultimately, old music was remastered to fit this new fashion. People bought high-fi systems with an endless array of knobs, switches and dials to further sharpen the sound. Speakers became more sophisticated, clearer and, of course, much louder. In a way, this gave rise to the Sunday Session – you know – that neighbour that hauls out his massive speakers on Sunday and plays soul music and jazz for everybody to hear.
Today, streaming is a new way of distributing music. And once again, music is changing. During the era of the LP and the CD, musicians were paid for every album they sold. Therefore, the musical canvas, as it were, was 40, then 80 minutes long – it kept growing. Today, however, musicians are paid a royalty every time someone listens to a song for more than 30 seconds. Therefore, there is no incentive for creating a long, 10-minute jazz masterpiece, let alone spending years on a two-hour-long symphony. Instead, there is a new surge of three-minute-noodle songs, and even the structure of the music itself is changing. According to Nate Sloan[1], a musicologist, a lot of new music begins with a hook or a hint at the chorus so that you can stick around long enough for the 30-second mark. It’s a shame.
All in all, chart-topping music today is both shorter and louder. Music has become something of a pornographic quickie; it promises a fast release rather than a slow kneading, making and transcendence of time and space. Sir Rodger Scruton shared a similar sentiment in a film on the desecration of beauty[2]. In the video, he laments the mindset of American architects such as Louis Sullivan. Sullivan proclaimed that “form follows function” – in other words, utility ‘trumps’ all other considerations. As a result, 20th-century architecture degenerated into blocks of concrete and steel… nothing like the old citadels, the cobblestoned streets, timeless country clubs and the stories told by curves and creeks in ancient chapels – definitely nothing like the pyramids.
This utilitarian credo appears to permeate modern music, the arts and other areas of our lives. For instance, the arrangement of contemporary music clearly prioritises fun, sex, money, and dare I say, nothing more. There’s hardly any music that captures majesty, tragedy, awe and other subtle human conditions. There is a documentary on Netflix called Liberated: the new sexual revolution, which eerily depicts the same phenomenon of dynamic range compression, albeit in sex – the commodification of sexual intercourse as it were. And if you think about it, we all drive or aspire to drive the same cars. We eat the same food, our idea of fun is more or less the same. The music sounds the same. Politics are the same. Life itself appears to be compressed into a test tube or a petri dish where everything is accounted for and created to make sense.
But I also think the air is brooding for transcendence–the longing to pick up pebbles alongside a shallow stream; the toil of learning a new musical instrument. The madness of working on a life-long project with no purpose, except for the possibility of catching glimpses of oneself; sleeping under the moonlight and the stars on a warm summer night; bursting into uncontrollable laughter; whistling to a beautiful tune. Climbing a tree to reach for the last bundle of fruit right at the top – and maybe even crashing down, and living to share the story of broken bones and scars.
There is no material utility or intellectual meaning in any of this. Yes, we can deconstruct music into chords, keys, notes and other taxonomies. But this does not explain why some music, even though it bears known structural features, evokes feelings of nostalgia and transports us into other dimensions. On the other hand, music that is created in the strictest sense according to best practices becomes kitsch, lifeless and boring. It seems that beauty, art, love and other such spiritual matters exist outside the avenues of intellect, but well within the city of being.
In a way, this makes sense. Through intellect, we download our spirits into the world to make nail clippers, pencils, combs, roads and other such contrivances. Beauty, art and music, on the other hand, appear to upload into and replenish the spirit. When the pursuits of livelihood empty us, where else can we turn for solace, except to retreat home and sink into a warm tub of meaningless – a kind of meaninglessness that is beyond meaning, not devoid of meaning? How else can we mend our broken hearts if not through art? And how can we find consolation for living in this wretched world where an endless number of dangers, many of which are disguised in pleasure, threaten to do us in – in one way or another?
Oh, dear artist, you are the keeper of our souls. Through you, we rediscover the essence of our being, we replenish our spirits and maybe even find the reason for being. Certainly, most certainly, this cannot be done in 30 seconds. The industry is locked in the prison of utility, in optimising things at whatever cost. Do not succumb. The music industry got it all wrong.
References
[1] Z. Mack, “How streaming affects the lengths of songs,” The Verge, May 28, 2019. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/28/18642978/music-streaming-spotify-song-length-distribution-production-switched-on-pop-vergecast-interview (accessed Aug. 17, 2020).
[2] L. Lockwood, “BBC Two – Why Beauty Matters,” BBC, 2009.
