Music that Escapes

Models, Problem Practices, , , , , , ,

A walker’s personal space is about four feet. But a motorcyclist with a radio blasting has usually claimed most of a city block for himself.

The noise of music blasting from speakers in an open window usually ends at a college dormitory when the beer runs out. If we are lucky the same habit is not a part of an older neighbor’s routine. Music in public can be a wonderful thing, but it needs to be curated through known channels and with the blessing of the neighborhood or municipality where it will be heard.

Cases range from the alarming to the delightful. A ride on a bus or train is no guarantee that calm will prevail. There are riders who listen on headphones that leak thin and brittle noises into the space. Worse yet, a rider’s noisy boom box on the subway or city bus shows is its own weird kind of narcissism. The assumption that one’s own “entertainment” is OK for everyone ignores the diversity that exists in personal musical tastes.

In the 1930s some German towns were filled with the Nazi Party’s recorded “patriotic” music blaring from speakers tied to utility poles. Music then was simply politics through other means. Less fearsome is Disney’s habit of putting music into its outdoor park spaces in an area where there are particular movie tie-ins. The music soundtrack is essentially a scene-setting experience for what follows. As with all “escaped music,” there is really no option to avoid exposure other than sequestering oneself inside.

This inability to avoid music not intended for you is also seen near outdoor theaters. For example, there are nearly 5000 homes within earshot of the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. But the site is a cultural favorite in the city. Most residents have made peace with the sounds that drift outside the valley it sits in. And some love the sound “spillage.” That’s less the case in Queens New York with concerts at the Forest Hills Stadium, which used to be the site of the U.S. Open.  At the opposite end of the scale is an offer of made in Sweden to provide free cabins in the woods for anyone who will keep their noise levels down to 45 dB (the level of a quiet conversation).

On a very different scale, my own town’s “porch concerts” are a delight. Maybe 11 or 12 groups might be playing when residents of my community of 4000 are ready to stroll down some neighboring streets to hear both the accidentally microtonal efforts of a garage band as well as real talent worth hearing. And then there are funny anomalies from all over. In Australia, some convenience stores placed speakers in their parking lots to drive away young loiterers. It’s the young listener’s loss that they will not hang around to hear the baroque music. But, of course, that’s the point.

My  town also shares one of its main streets with a “scenic highway” passing through and out into the woods and fields along the upper Delaware River. The road and a parallel canal path are nice escapes. It also helps that the pedestrian-heavy town is careful to create walkways everywhere. But the problem of overwhelming noise also comes into focus there. In the summer, any number of motorcyclists use the route to escape the less pleasant roads of nearby cities. That’s their right. But a minority have found some demon retailers who has figured out that listening to audio should not be limited to an enclosed  a car. Bikers with stereos blasting are annoying—perhaps a vestige of some Easy Rider fantasy. A motorcycle is usually and often intentionally loud. Google estimates a Triumph Daytona rises to 107.2 dB when accelerating, about 20 dB louder than it is safe to be around. Add on speakers and fellow riders, and you might as well be standing on an airport runway rather than a city sidewalk. It all amounts to a passing noise parade forced on anyone with a working set of ears and two good feet.

A walker’s personal space is about four feet. A biker with a radio blasting has usually claimed most of  a city block for himself. Am I showing my age to be amazed at the lack of shame? I suppose men should be ready to argue about the size of their amplifiers. But I sometimes wonder if these folks may be defeated by life, inadvertently using their equipment as a pathetic stab for attention from others. Interestingly, a Reddit discussion of riding with music varies. Some bikers like “the music blasting.” Others note that they want “a peaceful ride” through the countryside. None I could find expressed any concern about intruding on anyone else’s space.

Media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz notes that our interest in some types of media create what he calls “the association factor,” meaning that others may find significance in media we have picked out to be seen or heard by others. We may not associate with a television commercial, but a person carrying a specific book or listening to music in a public place has assumed the burden of signaling who they are, at least slightly. If I carry around a hard copy of Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, it is a fair assumption that others will assume I’m interested in the author’s crime story. So it is with music that we carry with us that escapes. However indirectly, the association factor represents a marker about our character.

As an avid music listener I would like to be buried with my Walkman. But I will concede that the muffled sounds of music coming from a new grave might empty out a cemetery.

The Record Industry Can See Itself in the A.I. Mirror

Problem Practices, Reviews, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The record industry (RIAA) officially opposes the use of copyrighted music for artificial intelligence, but industry practices are now firmly in the same business of reinvention.

You may have tried a quiz offered by several different social media sites inviting you to choose if a particular song is the work of A.I. or the real deal:  a recording with real musicians. So far my few attempts to sort out fake from authentic pop songs has been no better than chance. Do I really have a tin ear? Why was I so easily fooled? It’s not impossible. But something else is at work. For years, almost all pop music has been run through so many “tools” and alterations that it’s unrecognizable from its original forms. Overproduced tracks that have been around for years are nearly indistinguishable from A.I.-generated tracks.

One cue is to listen to the bass-heavy beat that drones along unaltered.  For a long time even “real” music has been using drum machines or “loop tracks” that lock onto a song and never change. Musicians don’t usually play that way. But synthesizers do, faking other instruments from digital samples that automatically repeat. And then another set of black boxes go to work on a singer who has a natural range that requires skillful adjustments at the top or bottom end of their musical range. No worries now about natural variations in a voice. Any less than perfect vocalizing can be tuned with pitch correction software. And we haven’t even talked about the extensive A.I.-like sampling used in hip-hop and other genres.

My point is that modern music has been so overproduced with studio effects that a singer’s natural performance has been obscured by endless “intelligent” circuits that have altered it. Modern producers and audio engineers can’t help themselves in their desire to make someone’s or some group’s natural sound even “better.” But that also makes them part of the problem. Pop music today is not simply a record of a single performance, but the result of labored audio construction that takes place in different places and at different times.

The twist  here is that while the record industry (RIAA) officially opposes the use of copyrighted music for artificial intelligence, it’s practices are firmly in the same business of electronic reinvention.

Where We Came From

All of this more or less started with Les Paul. His tape-delay overdubbing and “looping” were early applications applied to a particular pop standard, “How High the Moon” (1951). This novel recording gave his partner, the singer Mary Ford, a performance twin heard just a fraction of a second behind Mary’s first pass of the song. New and novel Ampex tape recorders adding tape-delay pleasantly thickened Ford’s voice and did the same for the new pick-ups that Les used on his guitars. To reproduce the track on television a few years later Paul proudly revealed these new recording tricks of multi-tracking and tape delay that would change the course of modern music. I can still recall being among the millions of Americans being mesmerized by the sound when I first heard it, in my case, coming from a jukebox in a café in Leadville Colorado.

Paul and Ford were an amazing and creative performers. But I’m afraid Paul paved the way for music to begin its long downward decline to being radically reshaped by circuits in a box: a harbinger of what A.I. does. No longer did recording engineers try to faithfully capture what was captured by a microphone. They soon became participants in augmenting the sounds of a performer with all kinds of electronic add-ons. This continued with Elvis Presley using various an effect called slap-back delay. And nearly every record producer started using the kind of added ambiance, especially reverberation, pioneered by Motown  and other labels. Today most pop singers also use Auto-Tune or pitch correction: producing real alterations of the natural variations common to even great singers. For some reminders of how straight “dry” recordings of performers sound like, listen to Frank Sinatra from the Capitol years in the 1960s, or, more recently, the pop-jazz singer, Laufey, who shuns most production add-ons. In the 1970s singer Karen Carpenter had an amazing voice and a broad range that was sometimes uselessly altered by unnecessary add-ons.

There are obviously many kinds of synthesizers that can add effects and sampled instruments on tracks: some “musical,” others uselessly intrusive. But the use of all mean that most pop recordings have been “enhanced” by layers of electronic devices that apply their own logics to a recording. The robotic line seems to be crossed when an engineer can preset an effect and simply allow it to alter the original acoustic sound.

In addition, all of the software and hardware needs to be duplicated on prerecorded tracks to be used when a group goes on the road. Audiences usually want to hear the studio experience rather than what the logistics of live performance would normally allow. For this reason concerts are often a mix of live and prerecorded segments, a sore point for some fans who notice the contributions of musicians who are not even on stage.

We can marvel at the electronics that can be patched in to alter recordings. Few engineers seem to be able to resist. My point is that those temptations make the complaints of the popular music industry about A.I. uncomfortably close to their standard operating practice.

A final example. There is something a bit sad about accounts of how the classic Paul Simon album Graceland was put together. There are some wonderful tracks on it that replicate the experience of a live performance. But as Ashley Kahn recounts in Days of Miracle and Wonder (2026), individual songs were not assembled in a studio in South Africa or on a stage in Zimbabwe in 1987, but a few years earlier in studios and mastering suites in New York, London, and Johannesburg.