USAR02: Music and Technology

Technology and the Value of Music.

Ng Kok Hoe. USAR02 ["Music And Technology"], University Scholars Programme, National University Of Singapore.

The Value of Music

The issue of what technology does to the value of music is both complex and broad. The concept of value in music has never been conclusively defined. What makes a piece of music good or better than another is a contentious issue, encouraging scholars and critics of popular music alike to propose their own measures and standards. While some rely on a more technical analysis of musical content, others believe that it is the associative qualities of music, or the images and emotions which it evokes, that distinguishes a truly great musical work. It might be said that there are probably as many measures of value in music as there are distinctive genres. If the value of music is difficult to define, what we mean exactly by technology is just as hard to pinpoint. What is technology in music? Ostensibly, it might refer to state-of-the-art developments in sound synthesis, advances in performance techniques and recording standards through the use of electronic equipment, or even the dissemination of music through the internet. But on further deliberation, it becomes clear that technology has influenced music in more ways than these since a long time ago. The development of musical instruments both in physical design and choice of materials, for example, is also a technological process. If we trace this process back even further, we will find that technology already made its mark when primitive humans first made use of crudely constructed percussive instruments, even if that is primitive technology.

Given the breadth of the two topic areas, it is necessary to define the boundaries of our present discussion of the impact of technology on the value of music. We will first discuss the value of music, explaining and adopting the approach proposed by Leonard Meyer, then look at a specific application of technology in music, before we examine the interactions between the two. From this discussion, we will finally extrapolate the wider implications of the use of technology in music.

Value in music is the quality of the music. It is what makes a piece of music good music. Instinctively, we tend to feel that this is an amorphous area that is both contextual and highly personal. Contextual because depending on the occasion and setting, some musical genres are more appropriate than others. For example, a person may be able to appreciate both classical music in a concert hall and popular music over the car stereo. In this sense, music is context-specific and there are no grounds for comparison across different genres. Value in music may also be felt to be personal, in that every individual should be entitled to his own preferences with no need to justify his musical taste against some technical yardstick. These are problematic issues which we have to address in defining the value of music.

Without delving into the intricacies of aesthetics which are beyond the scope of this paper, it is clear upon careful reflection that even though music of different genres may be essentially different, most people do not dispute that there is some order of value in music that straddles across contexts. For example, even the most avid Backstreet Boys fans will have no problems admitting that a Rachmaninoff concerto has more musical value than the latest Backstreet Boys hit. Even in the world of largely formulaic popular music, occasionally a song surfaces and endures against a background of run-of-the-mill hits that fade as quickly as they catch on, an indication of the fact that we are constantly judging music for their value, regardless of context. What is important to fans of popular music then, is that they are entitled to like and enjoy the music produced by their preferred artistes. If that is the case, then context is no longer a problem in the definition of musical value. Leonard Meyer explains that a piece of music can be pleasurable even if it does not contain much musical value (33). How much pleasure a musical work confers, in other words, is independent of its intrinsic musical value. In a specific context, one form of music may be more appropriate than another because it provides the instantaneous sensuous enjoyment necessary to the occasion, but that does not mean it has higher musical value. Meyer's explanation also addresses the problem of personal taste since, by the same argument, how much people like a piece of music does not indicate or affect its inherent value although an individual is definitely entitled to like a piece of music even if it is inferior in musical value.

Given that there is a common standard by which we can appreciate musical value across social contexts and personal boundaries, it remains to be explained what this standard is. Leonard Meyer, using illustrations from classical music, proposes a syntactic approach to musical value (27). Elaborating upon his distinction between the pleasure derived from and the value of music, Meyer explains that music can be appreciated on different levels, from the sensuous, the associative, to the syntactic. Along this continuum, the sensuous musical experience is about pleasure derived from the sounds of a musical work while at the other end, the syntactic experience is concerned with the musical information contained in the work. The associative element in music, when we make extra-musical connections with other aspects of life based on what we hear, can either enhance the sensuous experience or enrich the syntactic facet of music. Whereas appreciating music on a sensuous level leads to pleasure, value in music has to be evaluated on a syntactic basis. Using informational theory, Meyer argues that the more uncertainty the music contains, the more musical information it provides and therefore the more valuable it is. A good musical work is therefore goal-directed, but rich in detailed nuances in the form of resistance and elaboration as the work progresses towards its natural conclusion. Sufficient resistance along the way prevent the musical piece from reaching its closure too easily and increase the uncertainty along the way. These resistance, however, must not be so elaborate as to distract the listener from the musical work's general progression. This is the mark of true musical value.

Although this approach may seem rather technical at first, it is in fact very coherent with our intuitive understanding of good music. For example, enduring pop songs tend to stand out because they are somewhat different from mainstream fare. They may stand out because the artiste has a very distinctive singing technique, the melody is very unique or because the lyrics tell a special story. We experience uncertainty as we listen to such songs because they are different from the vast majority and therefore we do not know exactly what to expect, at least at the first listening. Even on subsequent listening, we can continue to appreciate these songs for their distinctiveness. In this sense, there is more musical information in these songs and they have higher musical value.

Meyer goes on to argue that besides the purely syntactic factor, musical value is also dependent on musical content on a syntactic-associative level (35). He makes the bold proposition that not only is emotional maturity a prerequisite for appreciating music of high value, good music, in mirroring the tumultuous nature of the human experience, actually in turn nurtures emotional maturity. The concept of delayed gratification is inextricably bound up with the idea of uncertainty in music. Musical resistance along the way postpone the smooth attainment of a musical tendency and appreciating such musical elaboration as the piece progresses to its conclusion is an exercise in and a test of the listener's ability to withhold gratification, in this case the attainment of the musical tendency, until it is finally appropriate. Listeners who live on instantaneous musical fixes therefore tend to prefer music intended to deliver on a sensuous level and have no patience for syntactic sophistication. But this argument works in the other direction as well. Just as emotional maturity and the ability to tolerate delayed gratification is a prerequisite of appreciating music of a higher order, such music actually refines the emotional maturity of the listener. Musical resistance in a goal-directed piece of music mirrors the powerlessness of the human individual and the tests we must all weather as our lives unfold in personally chosen directions. Exposure to music of value therefore promotes reflection and broadens human consciousness. Good music, in this sense, is ultimately about life and existence. Because the syntactic complexity of good music has wider extra-musical implications and connections, value in music has an associative quality to it as well. For this reason, this aspect of value in music is termed syntactic-associative.

This is a satisfactory approach to understanding the value of music because it addresses the value of music on both the technical and the affective levels. It also accounts for the role pleasure plays in the musical experience and addresses the issue of personal preference in a way that does not supercede the need for a clear standard to understanding the value of music.

Technology in Music

Technology in music, as mentioned at the opening of the paper, has many dimensions. It is necessary to define the boundaries of technology as will be discussed in this paper not only because of the sheer breadth of this area, but also because different applications of technology may affect value in music very differently. Not many people will object to improving the physical structure of musical instruments for example, but just as few can readily agree that music produced on computers have equal value compared to that performed on acoustic instruments, at least not without thinking twice. For the purposes of this discussion, it is therefore useful to specify the particular aspect and application of technology we are concerned with.

The full gamut of technological interventions in music comprises such areas as technology applied to the improvement of instruments and their sounds, using computers in the composition process and during performance, the technology of recording and storage, and the electronic distribution of music over the internet. In sum, technology these days can feature in any stage of musical production from the conception of the musical idea to the final dissemination of the finished product. If the influence of modern technology on music is significant when viewed this way, it is even more astonishing that all these can be accomplished in a minimally equipped home music studio built around the personal computer. With a basic desktop computer, the only extra hardware required are a reliable sound card, a set of speakers and a MIDI(musical instrument digital interface)-compatible keyboard. Matching software are in abundance in the market, allowing any music enthusiast to create new sounds, compose, arrange, record and distribute music all from the comfort of the home. The home music studio is therefore a succinct summary of the degree to which technology has become associated with music in recent times.

The power of the home music studio is tremendous if we imagine what it can offer to a music enthusiast with minimal formal musical training. After setting up the home music studio, lay musicians can download their favourite songs from the internet in MIDI format. They can then play these songs with their software, observe the key strokes displayed on the screen and learn to play the songs themselves. They can also tweak the song in many ways, such as removing an instrumental track which they do not like or changing the tempo of the song. With increased competence on the keyboard and familiarity with the software, they may even add tracks to the song or come up with their own versions of songs and then post these up on the internet. This is an appropriate and realistic scenario because the greatest strength of the home music studio is that it opens up musical avenues to untrained enthusiasts, and because these lay musicians are more likely to progress from altering readymade music, to making their own duplicate versions of existing tunes before they eventually generate completely original music of their own. This paper will therefore concentrate on this scenario of the lay musician in a home music studio in our reference to technology.

There are several important points to note in this scenario. Firstly, only minimal formal musical training is required throughout the musical process described. In fact, competence with the software and a sound knowledge of computers and hardware are equally important to making music in the home music studio. While formal musical training will be useful and can lessen the time required for the musician to gain competence on his equipment, it is not strictly required. In fact, it is this factor that has helped to make music production more accessible to the general public and popularized the home music studio. Secondly, the home music studio endows the individual musician with considerable power. Whereas instrument technology, sound synthesis, recording and distribution used to be highly specialized and required a lot of expertise, these procedures have all been simplified and wired into the home music studio within which new sounds can be easily synthesized, recording only requires clicking on the right buttons and the distribution of music over the internet can be done in a matter of seconds. Not too long ago, this would have been unimaginable. Contrasted against the minimal formal training necessary, the power conferred upon the home musician is grossly disproportionate by traditional terms. Lastly, on top of the fact that home musicians require so little to accomplish so much, is the ease of it all. The convenience of the entire music-making process in the home studio today is a marked departure from what it used to take to create sounds, record music and propagate it. This convenience is at the core of what technology can do to the value of music, as we will go on to discuss.

Technology and the Value of Music

Our scenario of the lay musician working in the home studio has several points of intersection with the syntactic and syntactic-associative value of music as discussed earlier. The home musician who tweaks the sound files downloaded from the internet does not eventually come up with anything entirely original. Adding and removing tracks or altering the tempo of a readymade MIDI file may change the way the musical piece sounds, but does not modify the basic substance of the piece. The melody, chords and rhythm are likely to be intact at the end of the tweaking process. In this sense, the home musician contributes minimal musical information. The mere rehashing of old tunes with minor modifications is unconstructive in syntactic terms, since the content of the music remains basically unchanged. The ease with which the home musician can alter small aspects of sound files with the help of user-friendly software further encourages this trend. It might be argued that since the modification of sound files does not alter the syntactic content of the original musical work, it does not affect the musical value of the piece even if it does not contribute to it. Since syntactic content is retained, how much musical value there is in the final product post-modification depends more on the intrinsic syntactic value of the original musical work itself, regardless of what the home musician does to it with the help of his computer. In other words, a musical work of high value will remain so even after the home musician makes minor alterations to it.

But the impact of technology on the value of music may be more subtle than that. Modifying small elements of sound files is largely a process of playing with sounds, or in the language of our discussion of musical value, engaging music on a sensuous level. There is no attempt to engage the syntactic content of the musical work, but rather, the home musician at this stage only aims to master the way the music is rendered through his equipment. At best, the home musician can hope to stamp his individuality on the associative qualities of the piece, such as through substituting quieter instruments for loud brassy ones used in the original sound file, but the syntactic quality of the piece remains largely beyond his reach. The process is more sensuous than syntactic, more cosmetic than quintessential. In this sense, the routines with which the home musician busies himself with are largely a departure from rather than geared towards musical value.

To further this argument, the impact of technology on the value of music can be assessed from an even more metaphysical stance. The syntactic-associative qualities of good music as a reflection of the human experience is the essence of musical value. The key tenet of this argument is that the syntactic resistance in music against an easy resolution can be associatively linked to the struggles of human existence. A simplistic attainment of the musical tendency in a work naturally renders it trivial, just as life lived without challenges is life lived in vain. Measured up against this standard, music-making in the home music studio is immediately exposed to be inadequate because of the ease and convenience it permits which, ironically, is also its greatest strength. Although some proponents of electronic music may argue that the convenience of the process does not imply a lack of sophistication in the final musical content, and indeed it does not, the argument here is not just syntactic but also associative. While the home musician may be able to generate original music with rich syntactic value complete with a clear musical tendency and carefully weighted resistance, it is difficult to avoid associating electronic music with slick efficiency and hitch-free convenience. The ease with which a track can be performed at a manageable pace and subsequently revved up with the twisting of a knob, the way a track can be recorded first and then edited later to erase human errors and countless other such advantages offered by technology in music combine to give most people, especially the puritans, the impression that producing music this way is a shortcut, equivalent to taking the easy way out. While music of value reflects the trying nature of human existence, music churned out from the home music studio is the exemplar of music production reduced and life made easy through technology. Because music produced this way is philosophically antithetical to what is held to be the highest value in music, its products have little value in these terms.

Rethinking Technology and the Value of Music

Any attempt to rethink the impact of technology on the value of music must address the arguments brought up in the previous section. To address these arguments, however, it is in turn necessary to recast the scenario of the home studio musician.

The argument that producing music in the home music studio does not contribute to syntactic value is contingent on the home musician tweaking readymade sound files. Although beginning home musicians are largely restricted by their lack of expertise to altering other people's music and the home music studio lends itself all too readily to this cause, the studio is not limited to this purpose. With lots of practice and a little musical training, the home musician can go on to write and record original music. Creating original music in the home music studio is no more sensuous and no less syntactic than composing on paper and acoustic instruments. So depending on how the home musician arrives at his musical product in the studio, the impact of technology on the value of the music produced varies accordingly. While this recasting of the scenario may seem somewhat arbitrary, it illustrates an important point, that when technology in music is geared towards rehashing old music, the outcome is necessarily of little value. But when we channel the advantages of technology towards creating its own unique blend of music, these musical products are on level ground with music made in more traditional ways.

The point here is that technology in music should not be evaluated on traditional terms, just as it should not be devoted to the reinvention of existing works. Creating music in the home music studio is only easy and convenient relative to music produced in more traditional ways, such as live renditions using acoustic instruments or recordings of such performances. It was brought up in the initial discussion of technology in music that home studio musicians require minimal formal musical training and in return, get a disproportionate degree of control of the music production process within the confines of his own home music studio. These are only true relative to traditional means of music-making. While home studio musicians require less formal musical training, they devote great amounts of time and effort to mastering the complexity of the studio setup and learning how to get the most out of their equipment. Although the home studio musician may find it easier to record and distribute his music than the traditional musician, he has to concern himself with wave forms if he wants to synthesize new sounds and with creating layered but clear sounds as he mixes numerous tracks on his computer, things which a traditional musician need not be as well-versed in. And these are only examples. Any beginner to home studio setups attempting to record a complete song with just a few tracks will realize the amount of expertise required to create a decent-sounding piece. If the traditional musician chooses to judge the home studio musician's task to be easy by traditional standards, then the traditional musician's task is at least just as easy to the home musician by home studio standards. For one, the traditional musician only has to learn one instrument, while the home studio musician needs to be acquainted with quite a few. The point is, neither way is easier. But rather, they are essentially different processes. In this sense, the argument that music produced in the home music studio is of lesser value because it is easy to make and therefore by nature irrelevant to the human experience cannot stand.

Music created with generous help from technology is fundamentally distinct and therefore requires a shift in perspective on our part. Simon Frith, in talking about the development of recording technology, noted that musicians initially lamented that with the perfection of recording technology, sounds became so clean that they did not sound authentic (233). But gradually, they came to accept that recorded music was something of itself, and could not be judged against live performances because the two were basically different in so many ways. Likewise, music produced in home music studios is fundamentally unique. It is manipulated on a screen, recorded in the hard-disk and distributed over the phone-lines. The fact that lay musicians with minimal formal musical training can learn to be competent in the home music studio should already tell us that this studio is a unique musical terrain. Because music produced this way is essentially different, it is through exploiting the power of technology to create a new blend of music, not to rehash old tunes, that we allow this genre a fair chance to attain the kind of syntactic and syntactic-associative value which make what we consider to be good music.

Technology in music is as much an indication of progress in musical history as a sign of the times. Social themes of increasing individualization and social estrangement are echoed in music as the collaborative effort of bands are increasingly paralleled by solo musicians who manipulate a vast array of sounds from the comfort of their homes. The reliance on the internet has found its way into music, as people come to accept that it is the most effective way to share music with the most number of people. The need for efficiency and precision that characterizes the technological era has become a significant influence in music as more people come to rely on computer software to help them generate rhythms and play notes accurate to the split-second. As society revamps itself, it is necessary for us to overhaul our opinions of using technology in music accordingly. A rigid insistence on using old standards to judge new things is no longer viable.

One of the key features of this new musical trend is a diffusion of the lines between composer and listener as the latter now has the freedom and ability to alter the music created by the composer. Music, then, is becoming a collective experience involving both composers and active listeners. But this trend is not entirely new. In his review of the sociological development of music, Ivo Supicic notes that music first started off as a collective experience in primitive societies where everyone participated in the performance of tribal music during social occasions and it made little difference who the composer was (90). Similarly, music generated with and shared over the computer is a collective experience with active listeners who can participate in the music experience not just by appreciating the musical product but also by modifying it. The difference is that music shared over the computer is collective in spirit rather than in flesh. In discussing forerunners in the history of classical music, Alfred Einstein explains that "in some trait of his character even the most determined revolutionary goes along with his time; in some other even the most conciliating, most careful genius gives offense to time" (232). Elements of the old and the new are always intersecting and interacting. In the case of technology in music, only when we acknowledge that technology does not exist merely to help us do the same things in new ways and stop evaluating it by mismatching traditional yardsticks will we be able to appreciate the value of music produced this way. Ironically, by allowing technology to make music its own way, we help to preserve our cherished traditional notions of value in music.

Works Cited

• Einstein, Alfred. Greatness in Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972.
• Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Meyer, Leonard B. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth Century Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
• Supicic, Ivo. Music in Society: A Guide to the Sociology of Music. New York: Pendragon Press, 1987.