Music and humanness

Pollyanna

Platinum Member
From Andy's triggers thread:

I'd rather hear human inconsistencies over studio perfection every day of the week. Music is losing it's humaness and we are slowly being conditioned to be more like machines, just my opinion. It's sad to me.

I feel roughly the same and, like Larry, I confess to old fartdom. In fact, I think this dehumanising of music has been going for a long time, starting with the electrification of instruments in my lifetime. Bob Dylan and Miles both got in trouble for moving away from the warmth of acoustic instruments.

During the 70s and 80s a lot of music started sounding more perfect/consistent and less organic.

Now people gather in clubs to dance to recorded music performed by machines (with a human driver, admittedly ) and many of them take E's and speed to keep up with the machines that never tire, never have breaks, never stop ... when I was young that idea would have seemed like sci fi. You'd have the homely good guys under threat from the wicked robot doof doof people etc ... Hayden Christensen and Angelina Jolie to play the main robot person villain and his girlfriend :)

Seriously ... this trend looks like continuing. How far do you think it will go? 100% robot music in the mainstream? (accepting that there will always be renegades who prefer organic music).

Or will there be a rebellion against mechanised pop art? Matt once used the term "artificial music-like product" to describe musak and it seems to describe a fair bit of music in the Top 40 today too. Will people eventually say "enough is enough!" and embrace organic humanness again or are we evolving into cyborgs?

Big topic, eh? :)
 
Although I haven't been around long enough to see major change, I wholeheartedly agree about the drifting of popular music from a science-based art form based on direct human input to an economics-based formula based on appealing to a target demographic.

Popular music is moving away from expressing ideas, feelings, and pure creative outlet and further and further into the realm of creating an instruction book detailing the ways in which one can buy into mainstream consumer culture.
Instead of a song expressing someone's joy, sadness, or whatever and allowing the listener to draw meaning from the song or relate it to their own experience modern popular music is set up as a means of informing one's experience: listen to the top 40 pop hop---bottles up, take your clothes off, check out how cool I am because of _______.

Everything has its time and place and I do enjoy an occasional listen to the hits on the radio, but I sure think a revitalization movement bringing some creativity and novelty to ears the world round is well due.

Rant out!
 
We are already very close to the point where the only people who care how music is made, are musicians. In mainstream pop, we reached that point years ago. Only the vocal has some degree of appraisal applied, and that's because some non musicians can tell the difference. We now live in a so called talent show driven world where karaoke dance acts or singers are called bands, simply on the basis there's more than one of them. A band used to describe something with a collection of instruments, so even the language has changed to suit the shift in expectation. We live in hope of the backlash against this sterile manufactured crap. In my lifetime, I doubt I'll see it.
 
This is interesting to me. I just finished recording an album and the producer (who is brilliant at what he does) insisted that everything be played to a click. The band leader wasn't happy with that, because, he says, some of the songs have their strength in the changing feel throughout the songs. Certain parts of the song are just a little slower than other parts - that's what makes it musical. In the end we had to programme the click to change tempo at the right bar, and then try and change with it. 6 times in one song. Very interesting session!

But it seemed the band leader associated metronome and perfect timing with robotic un-humanness (if that's a word). He would rather play as a band without a click and simply let it go where it goes.

Now I don't think a metronome equals robotic lifelessness. It simply measures the bars. But I always think of the Classic Album DVD's of all those great albums by bands like Deep Purple and Fleetwood Mac, and in most of them somebody always says: 'we took the take that had a mistake, because it felt so good'.

And so when I think of modern, fashionable music, this is the first thing I think of. Most of the stuff on radio don't have real drums, or they are heavily backed by electronic drums. And to me, there is no feel there.

Sure, the computer can put out a serious bass line that makes people dance, but when I think of musicality and feel I think of wavering volume levels (that snare shot was slightly softer, and off-center, compared to the last) and that occassional note played too fast. It gives the music soul, because we, humans, are not perfect, and so it connects with us.

And so I am not that surprised when the average non-musician enjoys these electronic beats. To the, it does have feel. They can dance to it. That is enough for them.
 
To try and program Bernard Purdie's drums would be close to impossible.
Computers will not catch up with humans any time soon.
This discussion is about music as a product, isn't it? There are a lot of inferior products out there at the moment. The monopolisation of production has brought quality, and price, down in all things, and then the price goes up again once it's at the retail stage and somebody puts their 100% markup on it. This is true in whatever you look at. But there remains a carefully hand-made alternative somewhere, because nobody really like mass-produced things. The only comfort they provide is familiarity.

I think it's all going to change soon. How unlikely is it that we are the only people in the world who feel like this, really? Would you be willing to bet on that?
 
I think it's all going to change soon. How unlikely is it that we are the only people in the world who feel like this, really? Would you be willing to bet on that?

Well, there's five of us on this thread and ... how many DW members? Not sure what portion of the population we organic types represent :) Age brackets matter with this one too.

Seriously, you could be right but then again it's possible that we're just playing the role of reactionaries in a (technically) inexorable march forward. If people can't tell the diff between us and drum machines then why would they care? Maybe the wish to preserve organic nuance is a conservative notion like the folkies who booed Dylan when he used an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival ... a scary thought.

Is there really something intrinsic to us that requires "humanness"? "Organicness"? Seems to be that the flight from the organic has been a consistent trend over eras, with the occasional backtrack.

Maybe the trend will continue as we increasingly embrace the scope that technology brings and bypass the depth and subtlety of meatspace. The movie blockbusters are often now mostly CGI things. The top selling musics are increasingly synthetic. Kids are driving cars and shooting people on a screen instead of kicking footballs outside. And we're chatting on the web rather than over a cup of tea :)

Maybe it's a phase and people are just being like kids with a new toy as technology does increasingly cool things. Or maybe we'll continue to be like kids with new toys since technology is hardly going to stop, slow down or even slow its rate of acceleration in the foreseeable future ... my guess is that in 20 years' time we will hardly know ourselves.
 
The current generation of young listeners are definitely more accepting of low talent and mechanized music, but on the other hand music programs in schools are, generally speaking, getting stronger and continue to get funded in most quarters during lean times. So the public accepts that real music has value.

Maybe I'm out of line for saying this, but I think Futureman sounds like a cheesy drum machine. There, I said it, and I meant it.
 
We are, as a society, in a way, going through a sort of technological adolescence. Technology is permeating every aspect of our lives. It's changing life as we knew it faster than we as a society can absorb it all. Since music reflects society, naturally our music will become quantitized. I do hope that after enough time has past, people as a whole will miss what has been "refined" out of music and a retro movement will come into vouge that tries to recapture the real reason for music, human emotion.

Yea right. You can't stop progress, and imperfect human music, the kind before the digital age hit, will likely go the way of the Dodo Bird.
 
I do hope that after enough time has past, people as a whole will miss what has been "refined" out of music and a retro movement will come into vouge that tries to recapture the real reason for music, human emotion.

i think that is actually happening today with the "indie" movement. a lot of those bands are fairly organic, or at least not purely electronic. but i generally agree with you that organic, human generated music is going the way of the dodo bird and that 20 years from now it will probably be relegated to a tiny corner of the music world.
 
Keith Richards sort of talks about this in his new book. BTW, you all need to read it. He discusses more about recording equipment and that technology got better but recording is still very hard to get "right". He likes the original sound of a few mic's in the room and let her go -vs- perfection. I like that.
 
i think that is actually happening today with the "indie" movement. a lot of those bands are fairly organic, or at least not purely electronic. but i generally agree with you that organic, human generated music is going the way of the dodo bird and that 20 years from now it will probably be relegated to a tiny corner of the music world.

I don't think that's true at all. I work a lot with avant-garde music and musicology and there are various movements at the moment that are exploring the idea of the post-digital.

However, the non-electronic music needs something new to survive and I don't actually see an awful lot of innovation at the moment either. It's up to the musicians to create new, exciting music and it's just not happening.
 
I, of course, agree with the premise.

The Who is one of my favorite bands of all time, and of course, their time could be all over the place.

I love early U2 when it was very organic. Later U2, they introduced loops and drum machines does nothing for me.

On the flip side, I own plenty of good albums where the drums are programmed. But what makes them interesting is the human element of a passionate voice and guitar over the rigid drums that creates an interesting mix.

And I've been in bands where we used loops, sequencers, and a click on stage. I called it keeping up with the times.

But the fact is most of the non-musician public doesn't care. We now live in a world where DJ's are considered musicians. Dance clubs playing electronic music pack in more people than venues with live bands. I know people who flat out have never seen a live band, and/or would much rather go to a club with a DJ than see a live band.

I would say we have already passed the point of 100% robot music being the norm in the mainstream.

And even in "live" music, people expect perfection. Every thing has a click, everything is put up on a grid and compared to the lines on the screen. People expect the bass drum to be quantitized, and sound perfect. Any deviation from the click is considered sloppy rather than feel.
 
I, of course, agree with the premise.

The Who is one of my favorite bands of all time, and of course, their time could be all over the place.

I love early U2 when it was very organic. Later U2, they introduced loops and drum machines does nothing for me.

On the flip side, I own plenty of good albums where the drums are programmed. But what makes them interesting is the human element of a passionate voice and guitar over the rigid drums that creates an interesting mix.

And I've been in bands where we used loops, sequencers, and a click on stage. I called it keeping up with the times.

.


I loved the Dan but then later listening to their music. I realized one could say it was a bit over tempered. Tey were a studio band as were The Beatles in the later 1960s; even the production of Martin cleaned up the rawness of their sound. I've been listening to a lot of The Who lately. One of my students had a death in the family and I gave him some Who to listen to. I thought it would help him get in touch with his anger. I don't know if it were the music; but the next week he was in better spirits.

Seems like an old question. I remember a band sang. "All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted. " That's what I loved about Hemispheres and it's sister Farewell to Kings, as well. Prog fundamentally dealt with this issue as a metaphor for culture as a whole and the bifurcation of man as spirit and matter or heart and brain, or spirits in the material world to quote another well known artist. Maybe that what we miss, the satirizing of modernity more so than the feeling of loss of something. But even the loss in and of itself should be enough fodder for any descent artist.

All I can say is with every dead bird and every dead fish that comes afloat, I feel ourselves closer to Judgment Day. That otta be something to wrote about.:)
 
I loved the Dan but then later listening to their music. I realized one could say it was a bit over tempered. Tey were a studio band as were The Beatles in the later 1960s; even the production of Martin cleaned up the rawness of their sound.

Well, in regards to the Dan, we've already been down that road before. LOL.
I just don't get the comparison between them and the Beatles.
The Dan used the studio to do 101 takes with 101 different studio musicians until they had something they felt was perfect. The Beatles used the studio to create sounds and textures that couldn't be created live at the time. I never got the impression the Beatles cared about being "perfect" as much as they wanted to be "different".

"A Day in a Life" is the perfect example. It's almost a prog-epic, and uses over dubs and layering in ways a 4 pc band could never pull off live (without modern day synths anyway). It is perfect? No, it even has tempo changes.


I've been listening to a lot of The Who lately. One of my students had a death in the family and I gave him some Who to listen to. I thought it would help him get in touch with his anger. I don't know if it were the music; but the next week he was in better spirits
The Who certainly got me through a lot in life.

Seems like an old question. I remember a band sang. "All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted. " That's what I loved about Hemispheres and it's sister Farewell to Kings, as well. Prog fundamentally dealt with this issue as a metaphor for culture as a whole and the bifurcation of man as spirit and matter or heart and brain, or spirits in the material world to quote another well known artist. Maybe that what we miss, the satirizing of modernity more so than the feeling of loss of something. But even the loss in and of itself should be enough fodder for any descent artist.
Good one Ken. I'll have to chew on that.
 
I just meant that the Dan like The Beatles did not play live after a while and were a band that lived in the studio.
 
Last friday I went to see a "band" at a bar near my house. I had never heard of them but it was friday and I had seen the flyers around town. There was no band!!!! There was one guy with a guitar and backing tracks. And it was really bad. He was controlling the sound himself. So his guitar was way louder that the backing tracks he was playing.
 
Or will there be a rebellion against mechanised pop art? Matt once used the term "artificial music-like product" to describe musak and it seems to describe a fair bit of music in the Top 40 today too. Will people eventually say "enough is enough!" and embrace organic humanness again or are we evolving into cyborgs?

Big topic, eh? :)

Hmm. The way I see it, it seems like society goes back and forth. If you look at the history of rock n roll, Chuck Berry and is music spurned the first railing: progressive rock. Then as those groups got really popular, society rebelled again and punk was born - supposedly getting back to the roots of the matter and even disdaining learning how to play. Then the two lived together for a bit with punk beginning the new waves of synth bands and dance bands out of England. What happened in the late 80s then? Grunge came on because people wanted to get back to what was real. Apparently, this was (again) ugly lads wearing plaid calling themselves Nirvana in a post-punk environment because it was no longer in the background, it had become mainstream. Fast forward 20 years beyond that and you have Jojo Mayer with Nerve, playing music that sounds like it was produced by machines, and they call it the new jazz. Ironic, huh?

I'm sure I left alot of holes in that theory. Somebody correct me. But like anything, the human condition dictates what's popular and where we're going with this music stuff. Give them too much of one thing and then they go for the other just because.
 
The current generation of young listeners are definitely more accepting of low talent and mechanized music, but on the other hand music programs in schools are, generally speaking, getting stronger and continue to get funded in most quarters during lean times. So the public accepts that real music has value.

Maybe I'm out of line for saying this, but I think Futureman sounds like a cheesy drum machine. There, I said it, and I meant it.

Strange that you mention music in schools because from my experience it is one of the first things along with art that is cut. And having a degree in physical education the cuts there are plentiful. I never taught because by the time I finished school there were no jobs available. Save The Music is a program designed for that very reason, to save the music programs from being axed. With computers, synthes, Rock band etc, more people may be exposed to music but not in a structured or educational way.

As for the electronics, I can see the need for amplification since crowds seem to get bigger or at least they did from the 60's on. I can't imagine an acoustic Woodstock. but as far as using all electronic derived sounds to make music, I am totally opposed. I don't act because I have no skill. If you have no singing skills, you shouldn't pretend to sing and have Auto Tune help you along the way. Just my nickels worth.

From Bing:

The VH1 Save The Music Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to restoring instrumental music education in America's public schools, and raising awareness about the importance of music as part of each child's complete education. To date, the Foundation has provided more than $47 million in new musical instruments to 1,750 public schools in more than 100 cities around the country, impacting the lives of over 1.6 million children.
 
Last friday I went to see a "band" at a bar near my house. I had never heard of them but it was friday and I had seen the flyers around town. There was no band!!!! There was one guy with a guitar and backing tracks. And it was really bad. He was controlling the sound himself. So his guitar was way louder that the backing tracks he was playing.

God I hope nobody says that about me.
 
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