Or the decaying beauty of books?

“Books smell - musty and rich. Knowledge gained from a computer has no texture, no context. It’s there and then it’s gone. If it is to last, the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be smelly.” GILES in ‘I Robot, You Jane’ (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER)

The materiality of books, making them subject of decay and so clearly showing the decades of neglect, also makes them beautiful. Their use (if still possible) becomes a pleasure beyond the mere reading of the text, and the insights thus possibly gained. A book is with us, perceivable through all our senses, it not only smells but sounds, feels, and looks. It’s layout and design tell us about the book, too; the feel of its paper, rough or smooth. And so it is with the means to store and retrieve books. Books stacked in a bookshelve are a promise of easy access and abundance, and the shelves themselves can have just as many forms as the books. Libraries display a tradition, certain ways of reading, the esteem in which the knowledge of the books is or is not held. Their way of sharing access might just be as outdated as the beautiful card-index I found in that library. All this running around, carrying and touching leaves its traces.

Yet I still get excited when entering a library I’ve never been to before. I don’t get excited when booting my computer. There where times when I did, but now I’m mostly annoyed. But why, when my computer means access to more texts than those stored in even the biggest library I’ve ever been to?

Where’s the pleasure in digital texts?

I can only read those digitized texts, not sense them. Their form is rather uniform. They don’t live with me in this world. They only exist for a tiny fraction of my sensory apparatus, and nothing of this world has an impact on them. They don’t age. The point is - they lack pleasurable aspects beyond the text itself. I like my computer, I feel okay using it, but its screen is no Augenweide, the keyboard doesn’t caress my fingertips. And those two stay the same for every single text I’m reading.

Modern user interfaces, although heavily optimized for ease of use and accessible to many people who wouldn’t be able to read a book in its conventional form, don’t seem to care much about beauty. From the most powerful tools like GOOGLE, WIKIPEDIA, AMAZON, and JSTOR, it’s neither fun nor exciting to use any of them, per se (that is, without the stuff found). Don’t be fooled by all the graphic design talk surrounding the web and the gadgets with which we access it. Compared to other objects they are still ugly. Even something as sleek as the macbook air isn’t actually that good looking. It is just good looking compared to other computers.

But there is no reason why it should stay that way.

A new Cathedral of Knowledge

Back in the days when paper, papyrus and parchment were expensive and books had to be copied by hand, people used memory techniques to keep track of stuff they wanted to remember. They linked them to the memories of real or imaginary places, building sometimes magnificent peg cathedrals all in their minds, places that were fantastic in themselves, filled with strange items (because you remember something better the more curious the association). We don’t have to do that in order to be able to retrieve the information we need. But I want our new tools to be at least as magnificent. There is no reason why our working with and access to information should be dull compared to the Middle Ages. Quite the contrary - I think we can easily outdo them not just in efficiency, but in beauty, too.

I want displays where I can’t count the pixels with my bare eyes, maybe displays that aren’t pixelated at all. I want to feel my through a lively discussion thread, literally. Technology is capable of more than just copying reality - video calls aren’t the end of it. It is not about rebuilding something we already have - it is about making use of all the abstraction and distortion we’re allready used to handle and taking it to a new level. Why? For all the fun that can be had. Fun isn’t just stupid things. Fun can be cerebral, your neurons having a party. I’m waiting for holographic displays we can walk through, building our own information cathedrals, yet not in our mind but projected through our computing devices. Individual places where we can perceive the beauty of our abundance of information, using all our senses to gain knowledge and understanding. This is not ‘cyber space’. This is the future library.

This is not about painting your mobile, or beautyfying your blog. It is about thinking beauty and information together, from the ground up. And there is still a lot to be learned from the non-electronic world.

Further Reading:

Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

is still the classic text for thinking about what happens to stuff when it becomes mechanically reproducible. ((If you haven’t read it yet, give it a try - ground breaking theoretical texts usually don’t come that short.)

In ‘The Aura of the Digital’

Michael Betancourt tries to extend Benjamin’s approach to analyse what effect the loss-free digital reproduction of information has on its importance, perception, and storage.

The Beauty of Books

The ‘Breaking the Rules’ exhibition at the British Library gives a glimpse of a time when print was aesthetically radical. The non-temporary exhibition of the treasures of the British Library is an opportunity to explore the beauty of books from different times and places. There are also several blogs and flickr pools dedicated to finding, collecting and discussing book design:
xx, xxx, xxx

And Bookshelves

bla,
blablba,
blabla,
blub

Book Architecture

A poetic architectural pairing of fading cultural goods vs architectural consequences of its storage explores BLDBLOG. The latter refers at the end to Anthony Grafton’s thoughtful piece about the

Future of reading

from a historical (and historian’s) perspective. A dive in the digital sources treasure trove by the same author. The technical future of reading might develop from some e-reading devices as explained in this (German) talk at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress; actually useful is Life Hacker’s guide to preparing one of the free texts from project Gutenberg for, erm, actual reading. social bookmarking services like diigo make the web a bit more usable like a book in extending the possibilities for annotation. But none of these attempts come yet near to the ultimate e-reading phantasy that is Neal Stephenson’s ‘Diamond Age‘.

The future of information display

can be glimpsed in the graphical programming language processing, the data coffee table and Shaun Inman’s experiments with simulations of age in his blog’s designs, while Annalee Newitz explores the combination of plaything and display.

Ben Fry’s works

(among others) gives us hints at how digitization might be useful not just for access to, but even for actually understanding information.

Other

decaying books on flickr, illuminated books, A new look on Aldus Manutius Typography

From the beginning electronic music attracted technicians and/or technically minded musicians, and sometimes their works where not less moulded by the wish to check out the technical possibilities than by musical criteria. They profoundly changed what it means to ‘be a musician’ or ‘make music’ - the image of the ‘music nerd’ working alone on his sound with his synthesizer/sequenzer/computer at night has its very first roots in these early days. In between there lie decades of development of recording technology and electronic instruments, the emergence of the modern recording studio, and with it the role of the modern ‘producer’ as the one to mediate between musicians and technology, the one ­responsible for the ’sound’.

The importance of ’sound’ for popular music is still going hand in hand with the development of new musical instruments, today mostly in the form of computer programs - specifically designed to produce new sounds or rather to give the artist/producer the possibility to create those new sounds themselves. Where the promise of recording technology was to catch every sound and render it manipulatable, the promise of electronic music instruments has been to be able to generate every possible sound. Both tendencies converge in the modern studio, and made ’sound’ an important musical category of its own, comparable to ‘melody’, ‘rhythm’ etc. But it differs from these traditional categories in the immediacy in which it is perceived. To a large extent, sound ‘works’ without context.

It’s like the body of a note, its presence, not really denotet by any sign, and hardly summable by one. Not only electrically generated bass is immediately perceived through the body (and not just the ears), chirping and buzzing, clapping and crashing don’t need much context to be ‘understood’, at least on a low level. At the same time is the production of ’sound’ a much less bodily endeavour than the production of music has ever been before. A conventional musicians knowledge borders on the instinctive; years of practice have given him a ‘feel’ for his instrument; he feels what he has to do in order to get this or that sound, and he immediately hears if he has succeed or not. Electronic music production, in most cases, is just about the opposite.

The understanding of sound as a wave that can be mathematically described, that is manipulated through changing some parameters, often represented by numbers, and the graphical representation of sound, which seems to be the ‘thing’ that is manipulated, are of an altogether different quality. It’s not just the change in the way of working - doing something, listening, doing again, listening again -, a mode that is becoming less important already as computer performances continue to rise and real time manipulation of music becomes a more realistic option. It is the objectivation of ’sound’ the way melody, harmony and rhythm have been objectified by notation. Sound itself, the most elusive aspect of music, has become tangible as an artifact, an artifact that can be ‘touched’, looked at, turned this or that way, be compressed or drawn longer, even mirrored/reflected, as has been the case with melody for a long time.

Exemplary and anachronistic at the same time seems to be the activity of the DJ, playing prerecorded sound and at the same time being dependent on his ears to controll the manipulation his hands are doing. Those immediate manipulations, hands on the records themselves, give back some of the qualities of ‘live’ to the music being played. But maybe I should write ‘gave’, because this manual djing, this dependence on the ears is itself vanishing as music analysis and manipulation technology become more advanced. The media that made music into a ‘thing’, those physical recordings, are vanishing, leaving music to the binary states of the digital realm, not a thing anymore, but a discrete mathematical description of analogue sound. Not a thing, but cut up in myriads of little ones and zeros.[2]

1. Rob Young, Pioneers – Roll Tape: Pioneer Spirits in Musique Conrète, in: Peter Shapiro (Hrsg.), Modulations – A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound, New York 2000, p.12
2. Michael Betancourt, The Aura of the Digital

The following is the description of a lecture I’m going to give at the 23. Chaos Communication Congress - Who Can You Trust?, which takes place in Berlin from December 27th to December 30th 2006. It extends some things I’ve allready mentioned in this posting: Distributing Soundwaves - Radio.

Abstract

The introduction of radio in the USA and Germany is compared, the role amateurs played and how the respective authorities reacted to them. Questions arise as to how those reactions were models for the treatment of younger communications technologies, and the different approaches to uncontrolled communication will be sketched out. Is “everybody can listen in” a scary thing?

Submission Notes

Radio was one of the first technologies to provoke that obsessive play that later resulted in the ‘geek’ stereotype/reality. It was empowering communication through self built & played with appliances like nothing before. In the reactions of the governments of the time models for the reactions to new communication technologies were established. In fact, the two-way communication possible through amateur radio likens it way more to modern networking technologies than to any of the other ‘big media’ that have evolved in the meantime, TV as well as the different incarnations of music recording and playback, video etc.. But the reactions to radio in the USA and Germany in the early twentieth century were completely different. In the former, the amateurs were accepted, organised, listened to in regards of legislation issues, and found to be a handy resource to rely on in WW1. In the latter, the amateurs were only produced by WW1, educated in the army, and had a brief flowering through the ‘Mißbrauch von Heeresgerät’ (’misuse of military property’) afterwards, but were illegalised after the failed November Revolution of 1918. Radio in the Weimar Republik was controlled by an huge censoring apparatus. Nobody thought of extending the freedom of the press to radio.

In fact, the introduction of organised radio broadcasting was hindered by the slowness of the german authorities in deciding on which kind of control to rely on: somebody checking the material before it is broadcast, somebody being present in the studio while it is broadcast, or somebody personally controlling every single receiver in the country. Later, the amount of radio control allready established made it extremely easy to take hold of by Goebbels after the ‘Machtergreifung’, and amateur radio only got legal after WW2. So, while in the USA a private radio industry developed, with all the characteristics a private culture industry has, in germany it stayed a government controlled medium; whereas in the USA the uncontrolled communication of amateurs was taken for granted, nothing could have scared the german authorities more.

Content Description (redundant to submission notes)

The role of radio amateurs in the introduction of radio and the development of radio legislation is sketched out, as well as the ways in which they were treated (by this legislation). The First World War serves as an important point of reference in making clear the differences between the two countries:

The american army could allready access a significant number of self-educated amateurs, while in Germany many radio operators where educated during the war for the military, and only became effective as independent amateurs after the war, when they seized military radio equipment in great numbers (the phenomen whose name gave this talk its title). While in the USA self-organised amateur organisations where listened to by congress regarding radio legislation, and their interest actually considered, in Germany the involvment of many amateurs in the November Revolution scarred the authorities so much that they became obsessed with the control and taming of radio, cencorship and elimination of ‘Funkerspuk’ - these aims shaped radio legislation in the Weimar Republic. It was noticed how well radio is suited to broadcasting news, but nobody got the idea that freedom of the press might apply to it, too. One of the consequences was that Goebbels did not so much have to build a new control apparatus for radio than seize an existing one. Later the german quest for control boosted the development and spread of magnetic tape, while the economic interests of the commercial radio networks inhibited its use in the USA. More details in the lecture.

The one reason, why all the industrialized nations, […] “put huge amounts of money and energy into scientific radio research” and as “the biggest improvement” “pushed the development of more sensitive amplifiers through the use of vacuum tubes” was WW1.

The new weapon systems (motor vehicles, airplanes, submarines) were pressing for such a wireless communication over big distances.[1] Kittler’s focus lies solely on the German Empire/Deutsches Reich where after the war a broad number of educated radio operators looted military property and produced ‘Funkerspuk’; Théberge describes the american amateurs between the turn of the century and WW1 as “one of the largest independent non-commercial amateur fads” of their time.[2] As different as their respective grasp on the origin of the diffusion of this technology is, as different do they describe the rest of the story: In Kittler’s account, the creation of civil broadcasting in Germany appears as a means not only to new revenues and entertainment of the population (the german word is ‘Erbauung’, having a much more moral/ethical connotation, but the only translation I can find is ‘edification’, which doesn’t quite get it) but a way to (re)gain control of the airwaves:

What the civil broadcast, with the help of inbuilt handicaps, made impossible was ‘Funkerspuk’ or rather misuse of military property.

‘Funkerspuk’ had frightened the German government, because the educated radio operators that had come out of WW1 joined the workers’ and soldiers’ councils during the November Revolution, using their skills to spread the word. Kittler further sees a connection between the development of encryption technologies and the introduction of civil radio broadcasts in Germany - ’simple’ radio was no danger to military communications anymore. The standpoint of the Reichspostministerium, the institution responsible for radio matters, in 1919:

There are serious objections against the general legalisation of the use of receiving apparats for reception of arbitrary messages, like it has happened in particular countries in which the state doesn’t concern himself with the conveyance of wireless messages in national communication, because it would make it technically possible for everybody to listen in to all the messages in the air.[3]

It is quite telling that the ‘newsletter’ character of radio and its exceptional potential to distribute news was clearly recognized, but the consequence that freedom of the press applied to radio, too, was not. The resulting (non-private) radio programm was marked by a multitude of rules and subjugation under a (censoring) inspection authority. Entertainment and official news were allowed, politics, widely understood as party politics, were not.[4] Amateur radio operators were illegalised.

According to Kittler, VHF radio was 1934 developed for military purposes, in attempts to make radio ‘tank-friendly’. This might well be true for germany, but it contradicts the common version of radio-history, in which Edwin Armstrong developed and patented FM radio in 1933 while searching for a method to transmitt sound with less static interference. The two terms are used almost interchangeably, because VHF radio is usually FM as well; german literature mostly uses ‘VHF’, english ‘FM’, and this makes it hard to really sort the facts on this one.

Apart from this chronological questions, Théberge shows just how different radio culture in the US has been right from the start; there too the military tried to intervene against amateur radio, allready before the first world war. But this was less about questions of control, more about practical problems: the density of amateur radio had become so high that communication at see was affected. The result was not a prohibition of amateur radio, but a subdivision of the frequencies between amateurs, navy and military. The amateur radio operators organised themselves, for example in the American Radio Relay League, which after WW1 was heard in congress on behalf of the interests of amateurs in questions of radio legislation. And in WW2 amateurs were an important resource the American Army could access.[5]

Here is a place to tell again the tragic story of said Edwin Armstrong. Although he found a solution for the problem he was working on and tried to put it into practice, his employer was more than unhappy with it - the spread of FM radio would have meant a loss of its AM business for RCA, and necessitated investments in a new technology. So they blocked it through lobbying, and they blocked it through patent law suits, which went on and on and on. Armstrong, ruined and dispirited, killed himself after he had lost at another instance in 1954. It would take his widow thirteen years more to win at the court of ultimate resort.[6] So, although invented in 1933, FM radio was really established only as late as the 1950′ies. Ironically, Germany seems to have been a little faster on this one, because in - rightful - fear of getting just a small part (as all of the european losers of WW2) of the spectrum used for AM in the Kopenhagen conference ::: of 1949, radio receivers after the war were mostly sold with FM capability.

The first big boost for radio was the worldwide economic crisis of the late 1920′ies. For the expensive pianolas it was the end, and for the recording industry a really hard time, but radio as free music delivery flourished. But of course this delivery in commercial radio has never been ‘free’, people pay with their attention which is sold to companies for playing ads. No need to lose many words on this, except for one of maybe the deepest ‘phonographic effects’: The way in which music produced for radio-compatibility is not mainly produced to please anyone, but not to drive away listeners. It’s not about popularity, but about minimal unpopularity. There’s only so much variation the listeners don’t fall asleep. Of course you all know this, and it is very easy to hear but still I think it is worth thinking about what this kind of negative selection criterium means for music. Oh, and of course the modern (though outdated?) compartmentalization of popular music as rock, pop, r’n'b etc. is an effect of this attention selling, too, because advertisers seek to play their ads to the ‘right’ portion of the population. Format radio is less an ordering of musical styles, but an ordering of listeners - it is less about characteristics of the music in question, and more about what people of a certain demographic like to hear (mashups are proof of the extreme musical similarity of products usually ascribed to different styles of music). [7]

1. Friedrich Kittler, „Rockmusik – Ein Missbrauch von Heeresgerät“, in: Shortcuts, edited by Peter Gente & Martin Weinmann, Frankfurt am Main 2002, p.14ff, here quoting William R. Blair, „Army Radio in Peace and War“, in: Irwin Stewart, Radio, p.87
2. Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine – Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover 1997, p.134ff
3. Quoted by Winfried B.Lerg, Die Entstehung des Rundfunks in Deutschland – Herkunft und Entwicklung eines publizistischen Mittels, Frankfurt am Main 1970, p.94
4. Lerg, p. 139ff
5. Théberge, p.133ff
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Armstrong, as of 15.11.2005
7. Peter Wicke, Jazz, Rock und Popmusik http://www2.hu-berlin.de/fpm/texte/pop20jh.htm, as of 28.10.2005, printed in: D. Stockmann (Hg.), Volks- und Popularmusik in Europa, (= Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft Bd. 12), w.l. 1992, p. 445-477

(the title translates to ‘His Master’s Voice - A History of The Record’)
(I have used the first part extensively in Music Caught and Saved and it has been my source for these pictures.)

This book, already wearing the signs of the times, has proved to be a fruitful source of insight into the early days of the music biz. Not that any of the accounts given in it can be trusted fully. The introduction says:

In the first section you will get to know audacious inventors and studious musicians, royal merchants and bourgeois cylinder factory owners; men with feature-length beards as well as some quite pretty misses in the front desk.
In the second section, then, some ambitous chansonettes and graceful primadonnas, unforgettable men with piano and violin, singing evangelist and fearless imitators of animal sounds.
…
We lead you through theaters and boudoirs, pubs and factories, huts and palaces, whereas everything is free to tour. To allow the truth, some words also have to be made about shady backrooms, vicious ludimagisters, impostors, patent thieves and - sadly - episodic drinkers. The insightful reader knows anyway that music gives off not just sweetness and light and harmonies and therefore can’t do without cacophonic side noises.
..
At the same time with the appearances of such prominent figures we communicate a comprehensive method, easily understood in the smallest amount of time, of penetrating the

Secret
Of The Black Disc

We shed light on the labyrinth of phonography and look bravely into the pharynx of the tube gramophone.

When I had gotten this far (page 9) I already loved the book.
It starts out with a lively description of Edison’s proceedings in inventing and making public of the phonograph, including the test of bishop Vincent of New York: This Bishop had his voice recorded while saying all the names of the prophets, and was convinced of Edison’s truthfulness when all the names were played back at him, because he believed there was nobody in the world who could say them as fast as he himself in a row. It tells about the unlucky frenchman Charles Cros, a friend of poet Paul Verlaine, who conceived of a similar mechanism, but was not able to pay the costs of filing for a patent. Edisons’s 10 point programme for the phonograph is documented, the early critics of the phonograph are quoted, lively descriptions of the sound quality are given. All without telling about the sources, of course.

The unforeseen and rather accidental development of the very early music industry - namely the industry of music boxes in public places - is described; not the goal, just the last resort for some people who tried to sell phonographs to the government as dictating machines, but failed miserably. Never before have I spent a thought on the times when each record had to be recorded separately, making the record itself unique when the sound recorded could already be played back. Musicians had to be much more like production-line workers, playing the same piece over and over again on days on end, and even more so, if it sold well… And I didn’t know about the early star of the cylinder Len Spencer, who had “the whole nation excited” with his interpretation of “The Last Speech of William McKinley”. Since most people had never seen or heard their former president in person, they believed it was a recording of himself giving that speech.

Through this book I have learned about the blonde epileptic secretary Ada Jones, singing her way into the hearts of fans even ten years after her death, the wars between cylinder and disc, the origin of well-designed labels in the predilection of the russian aristocracy and the personal resolution of one of the first big ‘copyright’ affairs:

Because intellectual property has never been taken as seriously in Russia as in other nations, people soon switched to dishonest business practices: Schaljapin-records were forged!

But this was not about copying the records, but about copying the labels and sticking them on records of other singers. Before the spread of the radio, who could tell the difference?

The pages 90ff feature “The Big Patent War”, still being fought between cylinder and disc, the former being advertised with the possibility of ‘home recording’ - a player could be used as a recording device as well, and it was possible to record directly on the wax cylinders - the latter insisting that “the gramophone has never discredited itself through amateurish recordings or bogus discs”. We’re still in the first decade of the 20th century when the - maybe - first DJ appears (the first german DJ?): Police lieutenant Schaefer, the owner of 5000 records, playing some three days before through leaflets anounced pieces of music to his neighbours. Through his window.

Later copyright problems are touched, again in a way tellingly different from today: The sound engineer of a german record company has to write down the sheets of an orchestra piece of Strauss, because his music publishing company wants more money than the company is willing to pay to reveal them for recording. Writing them down means getting a seat in the opera where the piece is performed the night before it shall be recorded, and listening really well! (With a little help from the piano score for said piece)

The pianola and other music automata have a guest appearance:

Those ‘automatic concerts’ [featuring pianolas and special record players, amplified with compressed air, called ‘auxetophone’] were very popular for some time and filled even big halls to the last seat. The german courts were crazy about such concerts for small audiences. The noblesse wished to show the people [holprig, vielleicht: seek to demonstrate to the common people] that it was keeping up with the time. But the most phono-firendly ruler was Mosaffar od-Din, shah of Persia, of the Kadshares. He had gotten himself a giant gramophone at the Paris world fair, which then had to be transported by camels from Batum to his harem in Teheran.

Tango is described as the first music style to cross big distances with the help of recording. The unsuitability of early recording technology for most instruments made acapella records the norm for some time, and “It was held as pleasure to accompany one’s own favourite artists”. Jazz was made popular by records, and record collecting by Jazz. The microphone is introduced, and the first records of sounds of “nature” are marketed with the slogan:

The voice of nature in one’s own home
Our recordings of bird’s voices seek to conjure the delightful air of spring into the house of the friend of nature with the wonderful songs of the best singers of forest and grassland. < [entflechten? zu viele of the]>

Another war is fought, this time between disc and radio, and one about royalties. The musicbox comes back as jukebox, and a two year strike of the musicians unions in the USA helps ‘Capitol’ get big fast. In 1958 58 mio records are produced in Germany, one per capita.

Every step of technical refinement is described as an adventure, and most company formations, merges and bankrupts as dramas. The first part of the 20th century appears as a mixture of detective novel and soap opera, all in the pursuit of high fidelity. What was actually recorded, or how good the music was, is less important than the question of who bribed/cheated on whom. It’s strange to see Germans write about this time as if, besides the quest for higher record sales, nothing happened. Record sales are, of course, the perfect measure of technical triumph, good music and the happiness of everybody. Or so it seems…

Today authors as well as record companies have modulated themselves out of the damped minor of the thirties. For them - knock on wood! - there is no more black friday. Their present is in major!

• The development of Jazz as a music which was from its beginning onwards deeply shaped by recording technology; he writes about aspects as specific as instrumentation, playing technique (slap bass as a possibillity to make bass audible on early records), and circulation - a record could penetrate the strict race barriers of the time much more easily, get into the hands of whites who would rarely visit black bars, and Jazz reached many parts of the world before any Jazz musician had set foot on them. He also mentions the importance of records for the education of Jazz musicians, depending on repeated listening and replaying of records instead of notation as is the case with interpreters of classical music.
• The spread of an intense and heavily used vibrato on violins in the 1910s, in spite of the prevalence of strict warnings against overusing it until then. The massive use of vibrato solved two problems violinists faced with early recording technology: At first, with strictly mechanical recording, the sensitivity of the recording devices was very limited, and vibrato could make sounds more clearly audible without the violinist having to actually play louder. Then, with electric amplification and the hyper-sensitivity of microphones compared to concert halls, they had to avoid any additional, unwanted sounds like loud scratching of the bow. But a strong forte cannot be produced without such scratching - the vibrato helped to add intensity where the strong forte could not be used. [2]

Such consequences of recording technology on musical practices can be found in abundance, but there are more general, sometimes more subtle effects, too. One example is the realigning of gender stereotypes regarding private music enjoyment at the beginning of the 20th century: Until then making music as a dilettante had mostly been thought of as a female pasttime, think of the obligatory parlor piano, and musical additions to magazines (like music sheets of popular songs etc.) used as an incentive for female readership. Even the pianola had been marketed mostly to and with pictures of women in their role as hosts for example, the splendour it would add to their parties etc., but with the introduction of the gramophone these notions changed. Confronted with an apparatus they could shop talk about, and records they could collect, men soon made the gramophone their own. The new, technical aspects of listening to and being occupied with music seem to have freed american white bourgeois men from the fear of disclosing themselves as ’sissies’ by doing something as ’sentimental’ as immersing themselves in the study of an instrument or going to classical concerts - things considered too emotional for a ‘real man’. This change is mirrored in the gramophone advertisements of that time, changing from the woman-host as the user model to notions of self development, mastery and achievement.[3]

1 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound – How Technology has changed Music, Berkeley – Los Angeles – London 2004, p.9-47
2 Katz, p.72-97
3 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine – Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover 1997, p.95-106, & Katz, p.57-61

The history of music media in europe starts with the invention of notation. Originally only used in christian religious music, notation made it possible to fixate and store music independently from a person making or knowing that music. Notation, in the beginning being especially coarse concerning rhythm and developed as an aid to better remember things allready learned, grew into a complex system of symbols capable of defining in detail most elements of the then practices of ecclesial music performance. More precise: Notation makes it possible to define the exact pitch of a note in relation to a certain organization of pitches (modes, scales etc.) as well as its relative length. Symbols to mark emphasis, loudness, tempo and several other aspects were added. Before music had been something flexible, each performance being customized to its specific setting, the abilities and preferences of the performer and the audience - now it became possible to define and control if somebody played ‘right’.

This aspect of control, which soon was taken as granted, was a not so unimportant factor for the use of notation in early ecclesial music, because it could be used to outfence elements of secular music which had slipped into ecclesial performance again and again before. This helped to establish a clear distinction between the sound outside and inside of the church, the sacred and the secular.

The impact on music itself went deep: Notation as a spatial/optical representation of music ‘freed’ the perception of music from the perception of time. Before, you could only listen to one moment of music at a time - music depends on the progression of its elements in time as much as no other art form does. But now you could ‘oversee’ a whole piece at once, and go back and forth at will.This fact is mirrored by the course of development of european ecclesial music from unisono singing to polyphony, with its weight on pitch relationships marked through numbers, as well as by the emerging separation of composer and musician, and shapes european art music until this day:

„If the advent of complex, multi-voiced music organized through notational art can be regarded as a critical step in the creation of the role of the composer in Western music, it can also be described as the first step toward the devaluation of the performer as well. […] Indeed, from the standpoint of contemporary musicology, theory, and analysis, the score defines what is, and is not, significant in Western art music.“[1]

How much this process has switched control from the musician to the composer is evident when one considers a classical orchestra: the individual musicians task is to subordinate himself smoothly to a musical project, which is controlled by the conductor. The conductor’s task consists mostly of coordinating the musicians according to a score written by a (often already dead) composer, and the audience has to adjust itself to the performance, not vice versa.

The tendency towards ever more precise notation (culminating in the notation of the microintervalls of modern art music) and ever bigger orchestras demanded ever more disciplin regarding their technique from the musicians. With it came the craze for ‘virtuosity’ we see in the 19. Century.

1 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine – Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover 1997, S.179f

The first mechanical instruments/music automata (of course almost every instrument depends on some kind of mechanics, but the instruments I will talk about now were more than any before them perceived and described as ‘mechanic’) have not left as much a mark on music as notation: music boxes and hurdy-gurdies, in use since the late 18th century, with their cylinder technology and small reservoire of sounds and pitches, didn’t have a big impact, in spite of being far spread. On the one side they didn’t need a musician anymore to produce music, but on the other their simple mechanics were easy to hear, and their possibilities limited. But at the end of the 19th century a further development of this cylinder technology became important: the pianola or electric piano. We are not talking electronic sound production here, but a piano with an added mechanism, controlled by punched tape and driven by manpower or later a little motor. This extension could be bought separate to an already owned piano, or was integrated into a new one. The punched tape is exchangeable and makes it possible to ‘play’ practically every piece of piano music. With these aspects, the pianola was an amalgamation of instrument and music medium which still produced the sounds in a conventional way, but didn’t necessitate any special skills from its users.

Mechanics and ‘Democratization’

Until it was replaced by the gramophone in the 1930s, ca. 2 mio specimen were produced. The pianola didn’t establish the first demand for music media (of course music sheets were sold before), but it turned music into a commodity like nothing before could. Paul Théberge has described how in the US the pianola was marketed with a mixture of emphasis on ‘democratization’ (”Everybody can play”) and appeal to the individual achievement of making music:

“The tension between the belief that acquiring musical skills requires concentrated effort (a work ethic) and the marketing requirement that all music-making be seen as a form of entertainment (a leisure ethic) has become one of the more enduring ideological and economic conflicts for the musical instrument trade during the twentieth century, both in its internal and external market relations.”[2]

Of course, all this was a very bourgeois thing, not everybody could afford a piano. But it was the first step towards listening to music not just independent from occasion and public places, but independent from one’s own capabilities.

Catching Soundwaves

In 1877, Thomas Edison developed his ‘phonograph’, a device that can capture sound waves with a membrane and inscribe them on a rotating wax cylinder. Replay works exactly the other way round: A needle picks up the engraved vibrations and transmits them to a membrane which kicks the air around it and gets it moving, this way reproducing approximately the original sound (a ‘loudspeaker’, you know). The original cylinders could only hold 90 seconds of sound. According to Haas/Klever, one of the visitors who had a look when Edison first showcased it in the editorial office of the Scientific American was bischop Vincent of New York. He tested it by calling on all the names of the prophets in a row; after they were played back at him, he was covinced that this was not a hoax, but indeed a new machine, because nobody could say all the names of the prohpets as fast as he could. A little later, when Edison had assured himself of scientific recognition, he founded the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company and put up a ten-steps program about the possibilities of the phonograph:

1. Recording of letters and all kinds of dictations without the help of a stenographer
2. Phonographic books, offering the content of books to the blind without further help
3. Language education
4. Music playback
5. Audible familiy archive: a collection of quotes and memories of family members with their own voices and the last words of the dying
6. Music boxes and playthings
7. Clocks telling with a distinct voice when it is time to go home, have a meal etc.
8. Documenting different languages with the right pronunciation
9. A help for teaching: the teacher’s explanations can always be at hand for the student
10. Assistance for the telephone, in order for it not so stay only a device for instant delivery, but for storage of important messages, too [1]

Only the 6. point should soon be a success (his own writing about this program can be found here: The Edison Papers).

In 1886, Alexander Bell calls his enhanced version ‘graphophon’, Emil Berliner substitutes a little later the wax cylinders first with hard rubber, then shellac plates and calls it ‘gramophone’. These early recording devices depend completely on the mechanical energy of the original sound for recording & reproducing it, because they don’t use electric amplification. A very quiet reproduction follows from this, and several mechanical means are employed to amplify it ‑ mostly resonating components. But because such mechanical amplification systems do not resonate as much with each frequency, this leads to distortions and makes a lifelike reproduction impossible:

“In the beginning of music reproduction the devices are seldomly used for serious musical ends and the weight lies on the popular music genres. >>For a dime everybody could listen to mediocre tenors or pianists, who earned themselves an extra income with cylinder and plate recordings. The bulky playing devices with their horns and headphones-like sound tubes stood in beer gardens and fun fairs. After money input they started to squawk dreadfully.< <"

Orchestras could not yet be recorded:

“The bigger part of recorded music is arranged for piano or brassbands, because the frequenzy spectra of these instruments are especially suited for mechanical recording.”[3]

And the recording of speech has its difficulties, as the english critic Sir W.H. Preece notes:

This device is far from being able to record the voice of a Patti, more exactly spoken: it can only reproduce the parody of a human voice. Especially some consonants pose a problem. D and t sound exactly the same, also m and n. While one can barely comprehend an s in the middle of a word, it disappears completely at the end or beginning.[1]

The Sound of Truth

In Prussia one of Edisons promoters has to flee a mob trying to burn his tent, in which he has to sleep because nobody wants to give him lodging. The people think trying to reproduce the human voice is a sacrilege. Later, one of Berliner’s first hits is the ‘Our Father’, overcoming the bad quality of the sound exactly because everybody knows allready how it sounds, and think they understand clearly every word.

After some further advancements (the records themselves had to become reproducible…), the gramophone, which cannot be used anymore as a recording device as the wax cylinders still could, prevails. The actual playing time of the shellacs rises from originally only once one minute to two times five in 1907. With the help of a focus on popular music the growing recording industry reaches a turnover of $106 mio in the US in 1921. One of the first stars of recorded music is a Ada Jones, a blond, blue eyed epileptic. Around the world men fall in love with her, without having ever even seen a photograph. Nobody knows about her condition, and even her death (5/2/1922) is concealed by The North American Phonograph Company. For her fans she is alive way into the 30ies.[1]

Instruments are manipulated according to their sound characteristics to sound as ‘natural’ as possible on records. An example is the ‘Stroh-Geige’, the ‘Strohviolin’, developed by the electrical engineer John Stroh, on which

“every resonating wood part is removed and the quiet sound of the string system is radiated over two horns, one being turned at the recording device, the other in the direction of the musician, making the instrument audible for him.”

Contrabasses are usually not recorded at all, because their frequencies cannot be contained in the recordings of this era.

1 Walter Haas/Ulrich Klever, Die Stimme seines Herrn - Eine Geschichte der Schallplatte, West-Berlin 1959 (bigger versions of these pictures can be found inthis flickr set)
This book is the gossip version of the history of the record until 1959…
2 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine – Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover 1997, p.31
3 Heiko Wandler, Elektronische Klangerzeugung und Musikreproduktion – Einflüsse auf die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main 2005, S.80ff, zitiert hier M. Janitz und C. Römer, Radio-Platte-Band als Hör-Erlebnis, p.82f & p.16

For me it started with 2/5 BZ, an artist who’s record ‘no turistik, no egzotick’ ( ‘tracks from the john peel bbc radio 1 session 06/05/03′) I own rather by accident than anything else. It had appeared somewhere on the site of some mailorder, and because the description sounded good I decided to give it a try. It’s a big record though, mutating bellydancing beats that end up chopped up at high speed. It manages to make this sound natural, like bellydance music had to evolve to breakcore at some point. And that hits the nail on the head for me. My mother has been a bellydancer some time ago, and I always missed that kind of rhythmic diversity in contemporary ‘dance’ music of all kinds. I understand that it is easier to mix if a tracks bpm number is constant, and that with most music soft- and hardware that loops you have to make an extra effort to slowly change the speed etc. but I miss the energy a skilled drummer can provoke by more or less subtle speed changes (Filastine made me happy that way, later that night).

But 2/5 BZ didn’t start out as I had expected, instead it all began with some truly ingenious mashups, hiphop, r’n'b and heavy metal all together making me want to dance my ass off. Which I would have done, if I had been able to take my eyes from the projection behind the stage. I still don’t no what to make of it, and I don’t feel like dancing at all if Ahmadinejad is looking down at me all the time. Maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t understand what the words ‘Ethnik Paranoia’ under Ahmadinejad’s face are trying to tell me. I would be afraid of anybody calling for the destruction of Israel with nuclear weapons not so far out of reach. After some time of not being able to relax I went to the other floor and had a look at Gustave. I liked what I heared, it was beautiful music, but I was too excited to really listen to this woman, so I wandered around a little, checking out the books and records that were sold in the basement (luckily I wanted to buy so many that it would’ve clearly exceeded my budget, and bought, well, just one the next day, but that is a post of it’s own).

Doddodo, which I had missed in Berlin earlier this year because of being sick. As some of the other artists that made this night so special she absolutely does the right thing, whatever that may be. She stands on the table, seems to just play around, push some buttons and rejoice in the effects. Everything from folklore to gabberish whatever-core comes out. Some of it sounds like the pervert little brother of ‘esoteric’/’spiritual’ ambient music, all ethno kitsch playing with bodyparts it’s parents said it shouldn’t. After Ove-Naxx took over I skipped out again to have a look at mnk_toktek, but I guess I came a little late, I only heard some not so interesting unstructured noise, and was soon back with the last of the crazy japanese, DJ Scotch Egg.

His set felt like coming home after I had listened to his album KFC Core a lot lately. It makes me feel insanely happy, I start to jump around and stuff, but at the same time somehow it hurts. It’s all plastic, but maybe plastic is the new real. Maybe not pretending to be serious is the most serious thing to do right now. Maybe I’m writing nonsense, but hey, I’m just trying to describe something really strange, exciting and wonderful. You can hurt yourself with a sharp piece of plastic, too, you don’t need a knife. Through all this time the crowd was completely freakin’. There seemed to be no few breakcore people (my subculture can kick… t-shirts and stuff), but there was no clear distinction between the people who seemed to know this stuff and those to whom it was new. The room was packed from very early on, and people were loving both the known stuff and the surprises. It was a nice crowd, people respecting each other (the security was not so polite).

Somewhere in between Nettle started. I was standing next to the speaker-tower, touching it, sometimes leaning on it, trying to soak in the sound of the strings and the huge bass. This was completely different than the japanese crazyness, more something deep to get lost in, but I didn’t, because rupture’s laptop fucked up and they had to stop.

The one-wonderwoman-show show of Planning to Rock seemed interesting, especially nice projections going hand in hand with her costume, but when I had a look her music was simply going too slow for my amount of excitement.

The grime set of DJ Sheen and Shadetek with Jammer and Ears also couldn’t hold my attention for long. I’m simply tired of men bragging about how hard, big, strong etc. they are, and how weak their rivals. People say that grime developed in a certain way because after the garage party shooting thing many London clubs were closed or didn’t want to take the risk of throwing garage parties anymore. According to this story, grime is what became of the garage sound that was forced out of the clubs, into the airwaves, where listening became all and danceability lost it’s importance. But I’m a dancer. I don’t really get dubstep, too. But it was nice to see how many people new Skreams ‘Request Line’, demanding a rewind more than once this night.

I retreated to some place above the stairs and decided to take a nap which would allow me to be awake & alert until the end of the party (which still was not in sight), but was kicked by a security person who couldn’t be bothered to talk first. Talking to me would have required him to bow down to me, lying on the floor as I was, which of course is too much to ask from a cool manly man like this. This kind of fucked me up for the next half hour or so, cursing and thinking about what to do. I was not able to appreciate Vex’d.

In the main hall it was The Bug & Ras B now, and as much as I love The Bug’s beats, Ras B is increasingly annoying me. I simply don’t want to burn down Babylon, I don’t think Bush is particularly evil (at least not more as any other politician), and even if he was, that would not be ‘the problem’. Americanization, as far as it went, is maybe the best thing that has happened to Germany since it came into existence in the late 19th century (more on why I say this). So everybody but me was dancing to mutant ragga beats. The crowd-pictures are also taken during this set, and at the bottom you can make out Aaron Spectre watching/preparing.

DJ/rupture, No Lay & G-Kid clearly hit me on the right spot, though. Maybe just because I didn’t understand much I could be taken in by the flow, but it’s hard to resist two people spitting simultaneously anyway. And after this picture of No Lay was on the cover of the german electronic music magazine De:Bug most people I know had at least a small crush on her (me included). Rupture’s take on grime was very welcome, especially it’s ‘impurity’, even throwing in some d’n'b at the end, knowing that No Lay has started as a d’n'b MC. Poor girl. She and G-Kid were allready showing strong signs of exhaustion, talking about how tired they were, (at least it looked like they were) asking Rupture to finish and then he puts that d’n'b on and of course she can’t resist.

Ghislaine Poirier was good, but too minimalistic for me this night, I skipped out on Hrvatski, and was completely taken in by Filastine’s rhythm art. Rhythm can be so much more if one doesn’t let oneself be bound by the restrictions of the drum computer. Rhythmic diversity still has to have a comeback in bass music. And electrified as it is today, it will be bigger than ever. Luckily, Filastine is able enough as a musician to overcome those restrictions. What a joyous dance!

(Outside)

P.S. Here is DJ/Rupture’s artists link list, and here is a more detailed description. For more and bigger versions of my pictures check out this flickr page; even more pictures (taken with a better camera) by drop the lime. What happened before.

While books were getting cheaper, the following copyright legislations valued the author higher and higher, leading to a concept of intellectual property and an author’s ‘Natural Right’ on his creation much influenced by German Idealism. Until this day ‘the common good’ and ‘the author’s natural right’ have been the two main justifications for copyright, often being muddled together.[1] I won’t delve into this much deeper now, but I highly recommend the anthology “Music and Copyright” edited by Simon Frith and Lee Marshall to anyone who wants to understand how we got to the messed up state of copyright we have now, and why those concepts aren’t working anymore.

The Birth of Popular Music/What Makes a Hit

When copyright began to be applied to music it was applied to the written score, being the only music medium of that time. But ecclesial ceremonies which had borne notation, and european art music that depended so much on it, of course didn’t have a monopoly on music. Folk/”traditional” music didn’t depend on notation, and kept some of the spontaneity and improvisation necessary to entertain a moody crowd. With the process of industrialization, the resulting explosion of big cities and the ‘homogenisation of large population groups’, as Prof. Wicke puts it, ‘folk music’ became ‘popular music’. Wicke describes the waltz-craze of the 19. Century as one of the first examples of popular music (although being written down), because it mixed the bourgeoisie with the noblesse, and happened in public ballrooms, not at the court of some noble man. Access wasn’t restricted by birth, but by money, and this kind of partying wasn’t confined to a certain occasion. I suggest something similar was happening in cheaper bars for the not so lucky parts of the population.

Music became much more accessible and (omni-) present than it was before. Songs and pieces weren’t written so much for special occasions like birth, marriage and death anymore, but to function in any kind of enviroment, with any instrumentation that was at hand, being it two people at a street corner, a girl on the parlor piano, a small or a big band in a café or a bar, at day or night, for listening or dancing. This was the way pre-recording ‘hits’ worked. The bond that had tied as much everyone to ‘his place’ as music to it’s own and the communities that still gave special occasions their meaning in rural areas lost their impact in the big cities.[2]

1 Kretschmer/Kawohl, The History and Philosophy of Copyright, in: Frith/Marshall (Hrsg.), Music and Copyright, Edinburgh 2004
2 Peter Wicke, http://www2.hu-berlin.de/fpm/texte/pop20jh.htm, read 28.10.2005; Prof. Peter Wicke in the lecture „Geschichte der populären Musik“, held at the Humboldt University in Berlin, SS 2004