I was in Reims on Saturday, waiting for this clock to ring and thinking about the digital revolution that made it possible. Not the current wave of digital tools, but the more profound revolution in digital thinking that got started around the same time as Reims cathedral, when Western society began to understand the power of viewing the world in bits and what had been unwieldy, continuous smears of qualities (time, space, sound, weight) were resolved into discrete numbers that could be stored, compared and manipulated to reveal not only underlying natural laws but new ideas and inventions that had previously been literally unthinkable.
The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society describes this first digital revolution in such an elegant, interesting way I’m ashamed to admit that I only started reading it because it’s green, but there you are. Alfred Crosby (who seems like a pretty cool guy) doesn’t ignore the usual material stuff like clocks and cash, but unlike Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel (aka the Official Book of Interestingness), his concern is what French historians call mentalité, a society’s mental model of reality, and how a new, quantitative approach to reality came to dominate our thinking:
In practical terms, the new approach was simply this: reduce what you are trying to think about to the minimum required by its definition; visualize it on paper, or at least in your mind, be it the fluctuation of wool prices at the Champagne fairs or the course of Mars through the heavens, and divide it, either in fact or in imagination, into equal quanta. Then you can measure it, that is, count the quanta.
Then you possess a quantitative representation of your subject that is, however simplified, even in its errors and omissions, precise. You can think about it rigorously. You can manipulate it and experiment with it, as we do today with computer models. It possesses a sort of independence from you. It can do for you what verbal representation rarely does: contradict your fondest wishes and elbow you on to more efficacious speculation. It was quantification, not aesthetics, not logic per se, that parried Kepler’s every effort to thrust the solar system into a cage of his beloved Platonic solids and goaded him on until he grudgingly devised his planetary laws.
The idea that digital products possess an independence, a life of their own, that they can contradict not just your wishes but your intentions, reminds me of the New Order song, Blue Monday. The story is that the now iconic sixteenth-note kick drum stutter was an accident. They just hadn’t learned how to program their new DMX drum machine. The thing about digital is, you push the button and the machine pushes back. Like Kepler’s orbit calculations, once you set some initial conditions, the number crunching begins and follows its own precise trajectory, producing a result that may delight or disgust.
It’s also rumoured that New Order sampled the choir sound from Kraftwerk’s Uranium. Kraftwerk is a useful counterexample. Because the real significance of the digital revolution isn’t what it allows you to do, but how it makes you think. Kraftwerk, for all their machinophilia, are classically trained musicians who think analog. They might have produced the intro to Blue Monday, but they probably would have thrown it away as a mistake. (I can’t believe I’m criticizing Kraftwerk, but once again, there you are.)
What we’re experiencing today is not just one digital revolution, but the combined impact of three: we’re using 800 year-old digital minds to manipulate digital content with digital tools. We can create entire musical genres with the unintended flip of a switch and then say, “Hey that’s not bad. I’ll call it hard dub grime step.”
Which is also what medieval digital musicians were doing. Gregorian chant was basically monophonic and not divided into regular notes. There was no sense that this syllable was one half or one third or one sixteenth of that one. Every syllable was just as long as it needed to be. Then someone (maybe a priest at Notre Dame in Paris named Léonin) started to put a new, friskier melody on top of the chant and polyphony took off. To do that, he needed to use a digital frame (musical staff) that broke musical time into regular quanta so that the different parts could be lined up. To make matters even more interesting, the added melodies were often snatched from popular secular music overheard on the streets. So the result was not only “sampled” but was a true mashup. That’s right: Western music is based on medieval mashups. Take that RIAA.
Digital mind + tools + content means treating products like fruit flies in a lab, (re)combining quickly, over and over and being surprised at the result. That’s the way I do a lot of music these days. I set stuff up and let it run then look for the interesting results. Here are some sound files I made as part of a series on the periodic table. All were made with the very lovely Reaktor and various effect plug-ins:
Download Hydrogen.mp3
Download Helium.mp3
Download Uranium.mp3
Download Iron.mp3
The funny thing is, we're so thoroughly digital now that we can leisurely return to the pre-digital days before Léonin, before meter and notes, when time was an indivisible stream and sounds were just as long as they needed to be.
(image: Digital Cathedral, VCL/ISTI)
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