Photograph by Craig Dennis
Done another essay for Dummy, this time on the pros and cons of personal mp3 players (click here to read). Forgot to add that many of these issues go back to the eighties with the Walkman, though I say this only because unless they make reifying assurances to the contrary, practically any online music piece is often misguidedly feared to be shouting "OMG THIS IS SO NEW PLZ RETWEET" between the lines - this one isn't.
Something that I had always known on a philosophical level suddenly became very obvious: an MP3 player is a musical instrument...
We don’t normally think of an MP3 player as being a musical instrument. We tend to almost think of it as the opposite, something that you use to listen to other people performing with instruments, with the listener being the subject and the instruments on the recording the object. But an MP3 player is interactive just like a musical instrument is – like an instrument, its operator has considerable control over the sounds the device produces, including how loud those sounds are. If you count a DJ as a musical performer and her/his equipment as a musical instrument (and you’d be pretty old-fashioned not to), then it’s only a short leap to see MP3 players in the same way. Using an MP3-player is not an entirely passive activity, and the recordings it performs are not heard entirely objectively. The key difference, of course, is that much of the time the performances given by an MP3-player-as-musical-instrument, together with its operator-as-musician, have an audience of only one...
The personal MP3 player with earphones is the Tea Party candidate of human music-making. “Total freedom for the individual! No one should make choices but me.” The reason we don’t see this as isolating and even antisocial is because we’ve come to believe, bit by bit since rise of the record industry, that the individually-owned, individually-experienced collection of music-playing commodities (records, CDs, MP3s, and the machines that play them) is the one true paradigm of musical experience, or at least its ideal form...
Not only does the sound of an MP3 have a slightly poorer quality, but all kinds of multisensory, flexible and interactive modes of music-making are beyond its programming, its modest bouquet of track selection, album artwork, shuffle and volume control. And yet, with the help of marketing departments and advertisers, we continue to regard MP3 players as the ultimate site of musical interaction, a prospective encyclopedia encompassing all there is and could ever be in music-making...
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I suspect this argument needs a technology update. Those of us who collect and curate big music collections are a steadily vanishing breed as the industry tries to shift us all towards real time streaming and subscriptions. On that basis, we are becoming consumers of randomised and personalised radio stations not collectors. Hard to see how the radio can be played like a musical instrument except in terms of context and location in space and time.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, however much disk space you have it's never enough. And nowhere is that more true than with the iPod. Where's my 1Tb iPod Classic, Apple? 160Gb is absolutely not enough any more. And since I half expect Apple to discontinue even that at any moment, I' not entirely sure what I'm going to do when mine inevitably reaches the end of it's life.