Pink Air

A thousand miles away

So have you chosen your funeral music yet? No rush, but I figure we’ve got about fifty years left and it took me almost forty to settle on mine, so I’m just saying. And I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a lot of advertising in the Netherlands just now for funeral insurance: uitvaart verzekering or "outward voyage insurance". (I enjoy the visible brickwork of Germanic languages.)

I've seen one ad specifically focused on music as something you might want to prearrange. Which is worth considering, if only to avoid those unfortunate choices that are sometimes made on the basis of a title or single lyric taken out of context (e.g. "Every Breath You Take" at a wedding). I think this company missed the irony when they chose "This Is The Life" to illustrate their Celebrate! (vieren) funeral package.

I saw this CD in the library yesterday and began to think about what makes music work at a funeral. Classical seems to be a standard choice and within that there are the standards: Barber, Pachelbel, adagios in general. Solemn and bittersweet seem to be the watchwords.

Which I guess is the thing. People generally want to strike a balance between grief and acceptance. Things become clichés because they work and adagios work because they encourage a slow leak of emotion. Enough bleeding to get the hurt out, but slow enough that a scab forms and you don’t die. There’s a nobility to them that marks the occasion and the deceased as important, but stiffens you against complete collapse.

But adagios are also fairly impersonal. They speak about death and impermanence in general. Funerals are increasingly seen as stages for a personal tribute and while not everyone will get a bespoke musical memorial from the likes of Sir Elton, popular songs with personal relevance and familiarity are probably more common than classical standards today.

There are a number of websites that offer lists of popular music for funerals, some of which are quite specific, like songs to be played while white doves are released. Or this one, songs for suicides, which starts off with The Smiths’ "Sing Me To Sleep". I think that if you loved someone who had just killed themselves, hearing this tired voice from the grave would be more disturbing than consoling. Despite Morissey's plea not to feel bad for him, you’d feel blamed, or at least, at fault. Plus, it’s just heartbreaking. If your heart is already broken, I’m not sure that’s useful. And funerals, and funeral music, should be emotionally useful. Again, there’s a difference between choking up and just choking.

I think there’s something to be said for creating a sense of wonder at your funeral. Wonder that this particular person existed. About the ways we do and don’t belong in the world. How a stream of experience makes a person and then stops. Or maybe goes on. And you can call it a “celebration”, but saying goodbye to someone you loved isn’t fun. Stately is good but sombre isn’t necessary. For me, wonder captures all of that. It means appreciating without falling apart. It might change at some point, but for some time now my funeral music has been "Spider and I" by Brian Eno.

The digital revolution circa 1200

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)

Lola versus Dude (looks like a lady)

In the battle for best rock song expressing the idea: “Whoa, I totally thought that dude was a lady.”

Which is immediately one point to Aerosmith for clarity of expression. And one point to the Kinks for non-clarity because making you think your way to the message makes it more memorable and persuasive.

The protagonists of both songs eventually decide that if it feels good, do it. So neither loses points for chickening out. But Aerosmith gets a Ballsy Bonus because their core audience was probably somewhat more homophobic.

They earn a similarly testicular Balls Out Power-Up for unapologetic rocking of what could be cabaret material. Lola picks up some growly volume in the middle eight, but overall, it might easily be performed by a man in a top hat.

But Steven Tyler actually has performed in a top hat, so that point is withdrawn.

Both songs deliver a largely queer-positive message to a popular audience. Unlike Lou Reed, neither performer had a foot in the art world which would have been a soft target. (Walk On The Wild Side is doubly ineligible for competition because there is no revelatory whoa moment. Holly shaved her legs long before Lou met her.) As a pop mind-bomb however, Lola has the edge because it's just so damn catchy, a natural camp/fire singalong.

So it's tied at two all. Time for the Special Guest Tiebreaker from someone who knows more about the subject than Tyler and Davies put together. (Which nobody wants to see really. But you really should see Nobody Someday.)

Baby robot

Radiohead held an online contest to remix their song "Nude". James Houston, a student at Glasgow School of Arts, missed the deadline but aced the contest with this lovely video reinterpretation that's become so popular that Radiohead heard about it and linked to it on their site.

I like Radiohead, old computers and cleverness, so of course I love it. But it also makes me feel like weeping, which is odd. I think that Houston may have explained my reaction when he says:

I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

I find that incredibly touching. As a person with autistic tendencies, I feel an enormous sympathy for babies, animals and machines. This is a song I wrote a few years ago, a lullaby for newborn robots:
Download baby_robot.mp3

(image: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/hacked-robot-babytoy.html)

Measure for measure

I've been meaning to mention the New York Times' songwriting blog for a few weeks. As someone interested in both the meaning of pop songs and how they mean, I find the writing here satisfying and enlightening in a way that very little published musical criticism is.

It's nice (but not necessary) that the authors (Andrew Bird, Darell Brown, Rosanne Cash and Suzanne Vega) are also well-known musicians. In fact, musicians' views of their own songs are often a distraction that keeps you from paying attention to what the song means to you.

But these musicians are very focused on the often stumbly process of song making and how even for the creator, the meaning of the song emerges from the process and the song itself. They address the sweet spot of music appreciation that sits between the technical and the emotional and try to show how a note hit a little flat or the acoustics of a room can illuminate  a whole song.

Another example of this deeply in-between way of thinking about pop music is Tim Riley's book about every one of the Beatles' songs. I wonder if you could write a similar book about ads.

Everybody Talk About

...pop music, but not everyone agree. And while there are plenty of sources for song facts (interviews, production details, ratings, criticism), facts aren't what's really interesting about pop music. Even what the artist says is just another fact. What's interesting is the meaning of the song to you. You may be the only person who thinks that "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is actually about Jesus (or maybe that's me), but that's what makes pop music so emotional and fascinating. The lack of a single, incontrovertible meaning is what makes it interesting.

Our favorite songs release a flood of addictive brain chemicals, but it can be difficult to identify the exact trigger. On paper, the lyrics are often pretty vague given how meaningful they feel when the song is playing. The meaning seems to waft up from a soup of musical and lyrical elements--that chord change, middle eight, drum pattern, intake of breath--combined with our own, often idiosyncratic, knowledge and experience. We may obsess about what strings Jimi used or dissect the symbolism of the English hedgerow, but those are more symptoms of our devotion than explanations. It's that complex, cloudy, personal recipe that we really want to condense into language and share when we're talking about our favorite songs.

I love pop* music. I love talking about it and listening to other people talk about it and what it means to them. Those conversations are almost always more interesting than published music criticism where the opinions have be justified and dressed up as facts. I'd rather just hear people talk about what their favorite songs mean to them. So I made a site for people to do that and I hope that you will.
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*I mean "pop" in the broadest possible sense to include pretty much anything not written by Mozart.

Give the drum machine some!

Digital electronics are now commonly used to replace humans or other pieces of analog equipment in the process of music making. And from many points of view (cost, reliability, compression, stability) digital has been a great improvement. But from an aesthetic point of view, many people find the results disappointing, off-putting or worse. Analog vs. digital is one of those endless techno-religious wars in which values get confused with specs.

I think this is because for a long time, digital computers (broadly speaking) were not being used in the area of their creative competitive advantage, which is remembering and recombining, quickly creating interesting options for us to choose from and refine. (Which, now that I think of it, is probably something many analog fans would object to in the first place.) But now developers are focusing on this area and for some reason, the most interesting results all seem to be coming from Germany.

The latest example is Melodyne from Celemony in Munich. Melodyne 1.0 took an audio sound file and broke it into its constituent notes with a high degree of success if the audio was relatively clear and distinct. The notes then appeared as sound "blobs" which could be changed in length, pitch and tone and triggered individually:

Like a sampler, it allowed you to treat existing audio as if it were just another sound coming from your keyboard. But because it analyzed and represented the sound as individual notes in a performance, you could create variations on existing performances with an ease no sampler could match.

Last month, Celemony introduced Melodyne 2.0. What makes this version even more interesting is that, in theory, it can do the same thing for a multi-part performance, breaking it apart instrument by instrument, note by note, spreading the arrangement out in front of you for detailed manipulation. You can change a single note in a recorded guitar chord. Try out alternate versions of your favorite songs using the original audio. 1.0 allowed variations on a performance. 2.0 allows variation in a performance.

But I'm most excited about what happens when Melodyne doesn't work properly. When, instead of cleanly picking out the bassline from "Hit Me One More Time", it mistakenly combines some of the bass sound with some of the vocal and a bit of the drums to create some unimaginable Frankenstein of virtual "instrument" and melody that never existed in the original. What happens when you play that? Do you hear something that was latent in the original song? A molecular recombinant form with faintly recognizable DNA, like a distant relative of the original? Remixing will gain a whole new set of dimensions. That will be interesting.

(Celemony's video introduction of Melodyne 2.0 is interesting in itself. Strangely Kubrickian in tone. You almost expect to see a Hanso Foundation logo at the end.)

What about the children?

I'd seen it only once, followed by decades of feverish, fruitless searching. I began to doubt my memory and in the end, my sanity. But my white whale has finally surfaced on YouTube. Yes, it's Stevie Wonder at the pinnacle of his career playing an astounding live extended jam of his greatest song with an awesome band (including Ray "Ghostbusters" Parker on rhythm guitar and hat) for an audience of 7-year olds on Sesame Street in 1973. Amazingly, the brilliance of the performance is almost upstaged by the wild child on the fire escape who seems to be having a funktasm. The whole thing just makes me smile crazily and mourn the days when Sesame Street was interesting and brought the funk to the little children.

All you need is Live

At the risk of blaspheming the father, the son and the holy ghosts, I was disappointed by the "new" Beatles album, Love. Maybe it's not surprising given that it was built primarily as a Cirque du Soleil backing track rather than a self-standing album, but the mixes are so conservative that, with a few lovely and promising exceptions (like "Sun King" played backward fading into the intro of "Something") there's nothing revelatory or insightful about it, which is what a great remix should be. Love just feels less interesting than it ought to given the interestingness of the elements the Martins had to work with. It's as if they were asked to dj rather than produce. (Admittedly a vanishingly fine line these days.)

But maybe the richness of the elements was actually part of the problem. So many Beatles songs, even individual parts from songs, are so familiar and interesting that you can't help hearing echoes of the original version, and all those echoes mixed together may make a mess in the mind of the listener. At a certain point, interesting + interesting ≠ more interesting, but confusion. (Kind of like what happened to the show Lost.)

But why not try it yourself and see? A demo version of Live, the best music-mixing-mashing-making software in the world, is available here for free. You can spend months digging into its creative possibilities, but you can also start making interesting mixes of your own pretty quickly. Of course, Live won't make you a great composer/producer/arranger/musician like Sirs George, Paul et al., but it can help you to become a more creative dj. And we're all dj's now.

Don't be a hater

"Here is what is wrong with the British pop industry.  You've had people writing songs who don't give a shit about the people that buy them and you've allowed that to happen.  You should all be hung, drawn and quartered."

This friendly advice courtesy of everybody and nobody's favorite music production team, Stock Aitken & Waterman. Read the 1987 Smash Hits interview and substitute "advertising" for "pop music". Oooh, creepy!