Amplifying
Music with New Media
by Angella Mackey
+
Forward_________________________________________________________
Music is a massive subject-matter. It has a firm position within our world and has been in existence for millions of years. The themes within this paper attempt a fast-forwarded overview of music as a valuable entity, existing and growing through social construction.
Positioning itself within the contexts of our current time, an age of new media, I will describe the resources available to maximize on its uses and current social aspirations. I will speak of the currently-in-development Infosizer.
It
should also be mentioned that the ideas within this paper are subject to a
purely Westernized study/experience of music.
+Defining
Music_________________________________________________________
What is
music?
For
many, music exists solely as a form of art or entertainment. Quite often its
definition holds drastic differences across cultures and eras. And, as according
to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, "The border between music and noise is always
culturally defined--which implies that, even within a single society, this
border does not always pass through the same place....By all accounts there
is no single and intercultural universal concept defining
what music might be."
For
Bloch, and others of the German philosophical tradition, music was “the most
humanly revealing form of art and the form most resistant to description or
analysis in conceptual terms…Thus music was the truth to which philosophy
aspired but which could never reach the point of articulate understanding
since language itself, and philosophical language in particular, dealt only
in concepts or abstract figures of thought.” (Herschkop
309)
Music
– a complex concept - but not resistant to analysis. For a music-activist
such as myself, the goal to obtain a definitive understanding of what music
is, specifically and finally, has forced me towards this definition attempt:
Music : an
organized collection of sounds received and interpreted by a human being as
information, variance depending on an individual’s unique position within
the world, and resulting in emotional, spiritual, meditative, visual and/or
bodily effects when actively perceived by its listener.
The main
theme of this definition relays that music is a language (“a collection of
sounds interpreted…as information”). It is a coded system communicating information
between one party and another. Its inability to exist separate from a constantly
morphing interpretation that is unique to one listener in comparison to someone
else’s, is what makes it difficult to always communicate clearly and concisely
as most languages do. I might cringe in the face of a country-western
song, but Sara and Matthew could fall in love – just as the composer wanted.
For one to engage with music, the way that it is intended, is for one to engage
with the music’s social group. For one to engage with music in a way that
is not intended, is for one to relate with their own inter-subjectivity; their
own unique placement in the world. This does not make any musical interpretation
‘wrong’ or ‘right’- just different.
Thinking
of music in these terms, as a language uniquely internalized by an individual
based on their own reality, though, is far from the objectives of this paper.
In fact, music can be thought of as quite the opposite. Music is a purely
social phenomenon, meaning its existence is based on the interaction of at
least two parties. The music we listen to always has a composer; therefore,
there is communication between 2 individuals. If the composer also happens
to be the listener, or the composer happens to be inanimate (such as the dripping
of water from a sink) we are still filtering the sounds out and calling it
‘music’ based on the knowledge we have of it through our social
experience. One would not live in a stark dessert without any living contact
and conduct a musical piece, just as he/she would not have reason to speak
or communicate a language. Without hesitation, there will always be someone
in the world agreeing and connecting with you on the notion that dripping
water is ‘music’- and likewise someone to disagree. If you are receiving information,
there should always be a way to communicate it to another.
In
this way, we are understanding music (and the world) through terms of ‘social
constructivist’ thought – the importance of culture and context in the understanding
of what occurs in society and constructing knowledge based on its understanding
(Kim). “For the social constructivist, reality cannot be discovered: it does
not exist prior to its social invention” (Kim) Thinking in these terms gives
power to humanity; the release from an idea that things are not under our
control. Music is not a “god-given” inherent phenomenon we strive to “discover”.
We, together as humans, have molded a complex language that creates inexplicable
pleasure to our bodies; we have produced genres of narcotics for our ears;
we have created music.
And
so, how can it be beneficial to have an understanding of all this? Why should
we be aware that music is socially constructed and socially controlled?
+Defining
New Media____________________________________________________
We are
in an information age…and a somewhat confused one. Our communicative capabilities
(due to our technological advancements) can help us fully join forces as a
super-speed progressive human race – ideally, of course – but we are having
difficulty filtering and organizing our information. If together we specifically
organize information that helps people become analytically aware of their
social surroundings (and thus of themselves), we are less susceptible to the
brainwashing of money-oriented media or ‘higher’ controlling powers. As sociologist
Peter Berger suggests:
We
see the puppets in their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings
pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little
parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theatre and we find ourselves
in its motion. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position
as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment, we see ourselves as puppets
indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theatre
and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping
in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have
been moved. In this act lies the first step towards freedom. (Myers
& Spencer 245)
The point
being, we can prepare ourselves to make more informed decisions about what
we need and we want individually, and also see how we affect and relate to
others. In essence, we might as a whole become more empathetic. We might start
weakening issues such as racism, discrimination, violence, inequality and
ignorance. We might start concentrating our energies towards supporting each
other and our earth. This, coming from the empowerment of each individual
by offering them tools for information.
We
are already nearing the end of phase 1 of this process: the invention of ‘new
media’. It is the most predominant art form existing today, but also struggling
with a confusing reality, and lack of clear definition. Quite often it is
defined as “anything digital”, or “the convergence of art and technology”.
But this has resulted from a confusion between its
conceptual existence, and it’s literal definition meaning of “new” and of
“media”. Of course it commonly involves “things digital”, and of course they
often happen to be “new” types of “media”. But if we look candidly at how
this term has evolved, we see many more layers of information.
‘New
media’ is the all encompassing term used to describe our explorations of a
world where information makes sense and is ideally useful. Technically speaking,
we have the capacity to link every mind in the world to the same stream of
communication, and (if need be) at the same time. Technically speaking, computers
allow us to link every mind to everyone else’s. We can digitize all libraries,
watch live broadcasts of china or the moon; go to virtual realities thought
up by a 5 year old boy - we can…if we want. We’ve created the technology that
brings us closest to linking all of our minds, and entertaining us forever
( by each other), just short of a wish for telepathy. The technology
here….but what do we do with it? How can we organize it? What new and old
technologies are useful and what are not? What information is useful? And
how can we continue to keep life interesting, our minds stimulated, happy,
and able to keep building and progressing in new, positive ways when we’re
already getting bored of things such as television?
New
media is trying to answer all of these questions. In the commercial world
we are bending over backwards in order to maximize communication gadgets– adding cameras to our
phones. In the art world we are testing out if society might need a morphing
modular house unit, an interactive film, an intelligent light sensor, a room
that changes colour with mood. We are also acting as experimental social anthropologists
(aka ‘artists’) by expanding people’s perceptions
of things and reality through performance art, media criticism, shocking displays
of world cruelty, or unconventional graphic/interactive designs. We are trying
to see if any of this makes a difference; if our new methods provoke positive
or negative reactions.
The
human being, ideally enriched by the successes of ‘new media’, then lives
a glorious life. His/her mind, body, and soul are free. Number one, world
suffering is solved. Disease, poverty, inequality and polluted earth have
remedied themselves after tireless attempts to have the world maximize collaboration
in useful ways. Secondly, information has organized and customized itself
towards your individual wants and desires. Everything is interactive to preference,
and everything is independently intelligent to preference. Architecture and
clothing are self-sustaining; food is organic and plentiful.
The human being lives in peace and is able to concentrate on its most
valued activity – socialization. All of this is created through the progression
of new media.
+The
Value of Music_____________________________________________________
And
so where does music fit into the ideals of a new media world? Where is its
value?
Music
is an undervalued tool for communication in a time that currently defines
itself on this ability. As John Sheppard thinks “…misapprehensions of the
real, social, nature of music…are a direct consequence of the predominant
‘world-sense’ of capitalist industrial societies, a mode of experiencing the
world which, as we shall see, privileges visual and rational modes of communication
at the expense of aural and emotional ones.” (134)
Music, has quite a lot of information to offer if we
are willing to look. Having established the notion that it is socially constructed,
analyzing it can reveal things we might have not been aware of about ourselves,
our environment, and the rest of the world. New media values itself on individual
empowerment through the communication of ideas and self-expression – music
is one of its available resources.
Consider
the following scenarios:
Michelle and David are
a romantic couple. They are in the midst of a frustrating argument with an
inability to express their emotions clearly. David asks Michelle to listen
to a particular song as it is a reflection of how he feels. She does, she
understands, and the frustration is eliminated. Their eventual break-up turns
into a joyous reunion (true story…).
A television soap opera attempts to exist without background music. Are you really sure you know whether John’s intense and elongated stare is out of evil intent or loving concern without that soundtrack? And how long will you actually stick around to find out?
It’s your first day at a new job and your timid
personality leaves you no confidence to approach one of the 50 employees for
company over lunch. Then Ms. Styles walks in and you feel an instant connection
to her Mod haircut and shoes. You feel she might relate to your own musical
map; you feel she might relate to your current social desires.
It is not a secret that music can project emotion, and indicate connections to social groups and/or a sets of moral value. But pointing this phenomena out - how music is useful in our lives specifically for social purposes - helps to activate it more consciously as a tool -“a resource for action, feeling, and thought”( DeNora).
In the late 1970's, Paul Willis did intensive ethnographic work with two groups of music consumers, he called the “hippies” and the “bike boys”. Essentially, through participatory observation, he was able to observe how deeply music was implicated in the live worlds of his informants.
Willis’s work was pioneering in its demonstration of how music does much more than “depict” or embody values. It portrayed music as active and dynamic, as constitutive not merely of “values” but of trajectories and styles of conduct in real time. It reminded us of how we do things to music and we do things with music, dance… work, eat, fall asleep, dance, romance, daydream, exercise, celebrate, protest, worship, meditate, and procreate with music playing. (Qtd DeNora)In the act of musical production and/or physical performance, we are also theorizing about unique (and positive) situations in which music can help us achieve peace.
For example,
…to Adorno, [the performance of] chamber music, both as sound and as a social phenomenon, constituted a place of momentary refuge, a place of promise. A place of imagination, perhaps of memory, where an atypical kind of individuality might be thought, seen, and indeed heard. In chamber music he located a space for a lost sociability, where each musical voice was heard by mutual consent, and where being heard was not defined by the competitive survival of the fittest, the loudest, the most clever. In chamber music, as a principle of musical organization, Adorno heard and saw what Laroon drew: namely musical conversation, musical give-and-take, musical sharing, the musical support of intertwining voices – in sum, mutual respect and, in fact, an acoustic and physical-visual manifestation of “friendship.” In chamber music, Adorno could imagine the possibility of what otherwise seemed unavailable: a society that was in fact actually social (or sociable).
(Qtd. Leppert)
And
the conversation goes on. There are numerous case studies, correlations,
theories and personal examples linking music to social and personal betterment.
In thinking about this, can we not benefit from maximizing our musical production?
People have the ability to expose themselves to new music and new cultures
due to the internet, television and travel; to educate themselves on the possibility
of using it as a resource for the production and self-production of emotional
stances, styles, and states in daily life; But do they want to, and does our
Western society offer a truly a nurturing environment for the musically-charged
individual? Is it preparing us for an age of personal musical perfection under
the goals of new media?
A
single response to this question is that currently, in
The
idea is to empower our youth with information that opens their minds to an
infinite source of new perspectives. Offer them the knowledge that enables
them to look at their “puppet strings” and they might start swaying their
hips. It is then possible that repeated "template love songs" might
not bombard society so that a teen girl cannot see past anything else. It
is then possible for brain power to enter the picture, forcing a more intellectual
demand on popular music – on all musical genres.
It
is time for super new media to fly in and rescue.
+
The Value of Music and New Media: INFOSIZER__________________________
The
last hundred years has shown there to be an intensive imposition of Western
music and music thought upon the rest of the world. Even though the coming
of Western music was often seen as the "death-knell" of musical
variety in the world, a closer look shows the world’s twentieth century musics,
in part as a result of the pressure generated by Western musical culture,
in a "state of unprecedented diversity” (Nettle 3)
According
to Walter Wiora in his account of the "Four Ages of Music",
only in the first and fourth of these (overlapping) ages does Wiora see a unified musical world. In the first world music
was homogenous, beginning everywhere more or less in the same way, all cultures
roughly sharing an early history of music. In the second and third ages, the
cultures of the world diverged, each constructing music
appropriate to their values, social structure, aesthetic, and technology.
But in the fourth age (now), that of global industrial culture, the world’s
musics have again "converged, united by the diffusion
of elements derived from European society – its technology, economic and political
organization and much more…The twentieth century must be seen as a period
of the most intensive interchange of musical ideas.” (Nettle 3)
And
this is a most grandiose introduction to the new media piece entitled “Infosizer”.
<Infosizer is a musical instrument.
A musical instrument, when defined as a tool for making music. And since,
as previously expressed, music is a type of language,
a musical instrument might also be described as its regulator – music’s rule
book. There are only so many notes, tones, speeds and pitches a given instrument
can produce. So essentially, a musical instrument always has limits. This
can even apply to an electronic synthesizer, or a computer library holding
the sounds of all the instruments in the world. Why? For the time being, (and
insert at will) the limits of this text have no supported evidence that such
a thing exists. Theoretically, my argument is to state that the inconsistencies
in voice, touch and movement physically produced through randomness and conscious
decision of the human being when singing and/or playing an instrument cannot
be digitally recreated. It is a competition between the infinite powers of
the computer, and the infinite powers of the human body.
Infosizer, in turn, attempts maximize
on the infinite capacities of the human mind. It poses to be limitless. It
is an open-sourced online database of theories, ideas and exercises surrounding
the theme of music. It mainly consists of two parts: the ‘Library’, and the
‘Provoker’. The Library is filled with histories, case-studies, theories,
ideas consistently seeking to understand the who, what when, where and why’s of music. The Provoker
is filled with sporadic questions and exercises meant to activate and potentially
test/experiment with these ideas. Using whatever parts of this instrument
a musician/composer might want (as like any instrument), he or she will then
produce music in any manner they please based on the addition of this information
to their brain. This process can happen through inspiration, experimental
curiosity, boredom, and/or assignment.
Please
view the compiled information from Infosizer’s
virtual history log of a past user as example to clearly illustrate how this
might function:
(1)User
A obtained articles 3289_S5, 6984_S5 and 0006_S5 (‘S5’ code pertaining the
‘sociology of music’) from the Library. 35 minutes is logged in their apparent
study.
(2)User
A obtained 7 questions and/or exercises from the Provoker. For example, 0747_Q9
was “What might music sound like for a future society obsessed with body perfection?”;
9956_E4 was “Prepare a musical score that will <insert loved-one> cope
with their next angry moment”.
(3)
In disregard of article 6984_S5, User A copies and
pastes notes from 3289_S5 and 0006_S5 and exercise 9956_E4 into their personal
user account database.
(4)
8 days, 5 hours later, User A logs on and posts this musical score and posts
it.
Aside
from the main Library and Provoker, Infosizer consists
of many other sublevels. The user has the ability to submit work and view
the work of others. He/she has the ability to post explanations and/or words
of information about their work and/or to keep this private within their personal
account. The user may upload articles texts or links to information about
music to the library, describing the genre/subject-matter and bibliography
(ieethnomusicology: Africa: Beetman: 1978 ) and indicating whether they are academically creditable
or not. They may also post questions and exercises to the Provoker. An online
chat system is available, enabling as many users to converse for as long as
possible about the ideas they are exploring.
Here are maps to Infosizer’s
structure:
Infosizer links users to online
instruments and/or electronic programs for making music. Infosizer will help, but the idea
is that the user will obtain existing instruments within their means to produce
exactly the music they see fit. Maybe the music produced is an unrecorded
hummed performance in front of the computer. Maybe it is a new musical score
for an orchestra. Infosizer
is not limited to any instrument or any idea. It is constantly morphing and
growing as is our world of information; as is the ways in which we socialize
and relate to one another; as is our human minds.
An added element, if need be, is that Infosizer is a tool meant to broaden an individual’s perspectives about music; twist and challenge them. After listening to a newly composed piece of a friend, you now have the ability to read text that is intestinally linked to its production. You have a window into a musical creation that is not one saying “You like this music because you hear it over and over again on the radio and the singer is stylish and hot. You should buy it.” (ideally…). Instead you might think “Wow, after reading Professor McClary’s ideas, I can see how John’s music uses gender dynamics for the interplay between the guitar and the piano…”
Of
course, Infosizer
is not meant to be an academic studying tool to complicate music and take
away mystical aura or entertainment value. It is meant to provide the information
if desired; empowering the individual with
the right to choose and understand music to a preferred extent. As previously
mentioned, and in line with the ideals of our new media world, Infosizer hopes
to challenge music in order to progress it. And as previously argued, to progress music is to progress us. We simply need to recognize
our needs and maximize on the technologies we have created.
+Conclusion_________________________________________________________
We are social beings. We need to communicate. It is how we progress.
Music is a valuable tool for communication - a language that holds customized and ever-changing information about who we are. Using the experimental techniques of new media as an art form, the technologies it produces, and the knowledge we have today of our own social constructs, we can ultimately strive for its ideal usage.
Infosizer
is an in-progress musical instrument experimenting with the possibility of
accomplishing just that – an ideal. It is online, it is free, it is interactive,
it is open-resourced, it theoretically infinite, it is empowering to our community,
it is empowering to the individual – it is new media – a truly glorious age.
Works Cited
Clarke, Eric and Nicholas Cook Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects
Essay exerted from: DeNora, Tia. Musical Practice and Social Structure: a Toolkit Oxford Oxford University 2004.
Explanation
Guide: Wikipedia.
http://explanation-guide.info/meaning/Music.html#Aspects_of_music
Kim, Beaumie.
"Social Constructivism",
Martin,
Peter J. Sounds and Society: Themes in the sociology of music.
Myers
D.G., & Spencer, S.J. (2001). Social Psychology,
Candian Edition.
Nettl,
Bruno. The Western Impact on World Music: Change, Adaptation and Survival.
Norris,
Christohper. Music and
the politics of culture.
Essay exerted from: Herschkop, Ken. The Classical and
the Popular: Musicalforam and social context.
Russell-Bowie, Dr. Deirdre. "The
World Alive with Sound and Music?
: A Bird's Eye View
of Music Around the World" .University
of
Sheppard,
John. Whose Music?: A sociology of musical languages
.Great
SnowBoarderMagazine. "Music Gives Tricia Byrnes and Ali Goulet the Edge"
October
2003. Press Release from http://www.snowboardermag.com/news/tbagmsc/
Leppert, Richard. The Social Discipline of Listening.
Essay exerted from: Drobnick, Jim.
Aural Cultures.