The State of the Art Part 1: The Domestication of Aesthetic Experience

I’ll tell you what’s ugly, when the contents of my bong are such I low grade I can’t be content with my musical experience. Now that is a real issue. (Bust out your ipod and listen to your favorite Cypress Hill song now.)

It seems that you may be neglecting that the strength of digital distribution is not necessarily the quality of the art but the sheer exposure. That sublime experience in more traditional forms of distribution have typically been limited to elitists who had wealth in both money and time to experience the art. Traditional forms of distrubution cost a great deal more to produce which meant owners of the distrbution chain controlled that release of the art not necessarily the artist. With digital distribution the art can now easily distributed to the masses by the artist himself for all to experience. With that experince, the consumer can now seek out the artist to further enhance that encounter where in the old model the artist is likely to remain unknown. Some is better than none.

By the way I was one of those seventies kids with earphones on listening to vinyl, woe was the day the horrid cd became the new media, what destruction it would wreak upon the music world. Ooops, I must have been wrong about that. :)

Good points, Galdrysyll. I always forget about the potential that internet distribution has for exposure for an artist. Whether “exposure” translates to any kind of secure profitability for artists remains to be seen.

And I’m not trying to say that the CD should be the one and only format for people to listen to music. There have been a bunch of standard formats in the past, like you alluded to, all of which were “state-of-the-art” for their time.

I’m really just saying that actually sitting down and listening to a CD is more rewarding for me than a lossy, disposable single as a ringtone. But it’s frustrating to watch an industry emerge, valuing convenience and “gee-whiz” over the sound of the music itself.

When I see what new devices the consumer-side music technology industry has to offer, I have to say–”Is that all you’ve got?”

Like I said from the outset–I’m a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to this stuff. I know I’m probably in the minority here.

I’m not sure what devices you have been underwhelmed by, but the iPod is really a slick piece of technology. Paired with iTunes (and, IMO, preferably a Mac) you get a really nice listening experience that just works. And if you are concerned about music quality you can rip your CD’s to lossless AAC’s (one of the file types that plays on an iPod). These files are about ten times the size of an mp3, but you can still fit over a thousand on a 30gig iPod (or a lot more on an 80gig).

btw, to sort of define lossless music files: they are lossless the same sense that a zipped Word Doc is smaller than the original file yet hasn’t lost any information. Lossless AACs will sound exactly like the CD version.

To change the topic… What are your thoughts about the possibility of the Internet and digital music (using lossy and/or lossless files) killing the music industry as we know it today. To me the RIAA has always seemed like a middle-man that ends up taking an unfair cut of the artist’s profits. As a musician, would you see the death of the traditional music industry as a good thing or a bad thing?

It seems a little bit unfair to target the “technological circles” for word choice created by and virtually imposed by “Tha Man.” “Content” and “content provider” came to use by the masses from CEO’s and marketers. Those entrepreneurs thought they saw new means of distribution; with a new form for reproduction of most all forms of art it was time for a new term. Mass communication wise: in the “old” days, a current event article was limited to newspaper, magazine or word of mouth; in the “old” days, a song was limited to radio, tv, record stores; in the “old” days, a 2-d art piece was limited to an art store in the mall, the gift shop of a museum, a catalog received in the mail. Today, we have the possibility available for all of this “content” via the same medium. If there is a complaint about semantics, please condemn “tha man” rather than “technology circles;” they are only in charge of the creativity of modeling the next distribution model.

If there is a complaint about the reproduction quality, that falls at the feet of time and market forces. The Dot Com bubble and bust created huge conduits for data flow (which allows for outsourcing of jobs and music/movie streaming). Unfortunately, the conduits are not big enough yet to handle the masses to transmit “lossless” reproductions (anyone you’ve heard say MP3’s were lossless…they were only involved in an urban myth…a part of a MP3’s definition is music information that has been stripped of lesser noticed sounds). If the masses create a demand for higher quality, the CEO’s and marketers will check with their statisticians and fortune tellers to see if they can recover their expenses to supply that demand. If so, they will depend on the technological circles to invent the possibilities.

With out the technological circles to invent those possibilities, the masses will disappoint the audiophiles much of the time. The better quality of the BetaMax lost out to the VCR because who wants to split up watching a movie in hour chunks. The better quality vinyl record lost out to the formats that would play in their car (there was an in dash vinyl player, but it didn’t have enough sales). The higher quality 8-track lost out to the cassette.

When the CD came to the masses (thanks to decades old technology from the technology circles, Sony, Philips and the band Dire Straits w/ vox by Sting in “I want my Mtv”), I read several articles that interviewed big name artists that complained about the distorted sound of CD reproduction. Is there a complaint that the masses don’t buy their music on reel-to-reel, nor vinyl, nor DAT@48000Hz?

The real complaint of your article seems to be that the masses are becoming less interested in a swaddling experience of art and/or that the masses are treating some art forms as commodities. To the first count, I doubt it, I’ve never thought of the masses to be that interested in an enveloping art experience. My experiences tell me that it is a minority that is regularly willing to spend the costs of “money and time” for a stronger experience of art.

To the second count, I agree. Our culture has accepted entrepreneurs’ attempt to commoditize the experiences of our lives.

Dr. Korby–

I was thinking of other music playback devices like those I see advertised ad nauseum while I’m trying to watch muthaf#$%in’ MythBusters, things that double as phones and play mp3s as a side-feature, etc. These little gadgets represent our culture’s fascination with the portable and disposable to me like none other.

The key word in the loss-less comment is “hyped.” I think I’m going to go back and edit that sentence.

I know that there are truly lossless formats out there. (Well, I know this by word of mouth, I’ve never actually HEARD one for myself.) But aren’t they still the exception rather than the norm for downloaded files? Will the public ever catch on to their superior audio? I agree with Raverabbit in saying, “I doubt it.” Why only fill my iPod with 1000 songs when I CAN fit 10,000?

However, you just made my world a lot more sunny by letting me know that I can go out and buy that iPod and be able to play CD quality music with it. I will remove iPods from my list of ire. :-)

As far as how internet distribution is changing the music industry–well, that’s the REAL issue, (and I’m going to talk about it next issue.)

I have no stats to refute your comment on the RIAA’s profits. I haven’t seen any numbers that back it up, either. Anyway, as an independent artist, the RIAA doesn’t even exist for me or for thousands, maybe millions of other people not on a label.

In some respects, I welcome the potential equalization that could come with the death of record companies. It would be really easy to say “screw the record companies and RIAA and the old-school business models they represent.”

But as their ability to market artists better than the artists themselves has diminished with things like MySpace and YouTube, there is still one thing they are good for: paying for an artist’s first record.

It’s still a miracle for an unsigned artist to get together the scratch, (at LEAST $10,000), to self-finance studio time for a competitive-sounding album. But established artists, (those already selling records and out on tour), don’t really have much to lose by taking the record label out of the equation.

I’ve obviously still got some thinking to do on this issue, so thanks for the questions.

RaverRabbit-
Got to admit, you kind of lost me for the first two or three paragraphs there.

What it seems like you are saying is that the pervasiveness of crappy-sounding audio is really the fault of the end-user who doesn’t really demand a lot as far as quality is concerned.

I instead blame the manufacturers of the products for making a quick buck off lower-quality technology. There’s probably truth in both scapegoats and somebody with an advanced degree in economics is going to need to come silence us both.

The evolution of playback methods is an interesting one to me. For with some of the steps–wax cylinder to vinyl and cassette to CD, you got better portability AND better fidelity at the same time. My HOPE is that after physical media die, and it most certainly looks like they will, that increased fidelity will return, i.e. become popular to “the masses,” as you put it.

But the idea that manufacturers need to wait for the technological circle to “invent the possibilities” for better audio in the new age is what’s troubling.

The “possibilities” already exist. Lossless audio is available. Are you saying that the truck that is the internet is not big enough for it?

You were asking RaverRabbit, but I thought I’d chime in…

The internet is NOT a truck, it’s a series of tubes.

And yes, most of those tubes are not big enough to make downloading a 35meg lossless file worth it (at least from the provider’s cost stand point). When people are willing to buy 3 meg files why bother offereing 30 meg versions that cost 10 times as much to transfer and that don’t sound much different on most earbuds.

Maybe in 3 to 5 years the tubes will have grown to a point where a 3 meg file and a 30 meg file cost virtually the same to transmit. At that point “media” (is that a better word than “content”?) providers might start selling lossless versions of songs. Also, hard drives in mp3 players will soon hold 10,000 lossless songs as well. So I think there’s a good chance that we will see a return of high fildelity in digital audio.

I agree with Dr. Korby. As much as I would like for technology to be driven by pure science, it is almost always driven by the market. The MP3 format has been around for many years (since 1991). It was popular initially only in the nerdy crowd, since many computers didn’t have the horsepower to play MP3s, and the nerdy crowd tended to have the more powerful machines. Once processing power came to the point that any run of the mill desktop computer could play MP3 files without much system performance degradation, there was increased popularity not because of the size benefits, but simply because the files could be stored locally ond one did not have to keep CDs laying around. But still, there wasn’t a small, portable technology up to snuff to play MP3s. The key positive features for a portable device are size and battery life. Both of these properties come at a price – size and capacity usually are at an inverse proportion to each other, power consumption goes up as processing power goes up. What had to happen was threefold:
1)CPU technology needed to advance to the point that it could be small, and use less power, and generate less heat.
2) There had to be innovation in battery technology to get them small enough, yet still maintain a decent energy capacity
3) Storage technology had to advance, decreasing in size, and power consumption, while at the same time increasing capacity.

Once the “sweet spot” for these varibles hit, the current craze was bound to happen.

All that said, I still can’t fathom why in the heck someone would want PDA/cell phone/camera/video camera/MP3 player… And I consider myself a technophile.

Writer’s Note: I removed the comment about lossless file formats.

What is so great about “disposable?” Why is that better? Why should I go out and spend $500 on a device, plus an additional $50 on software just so I can practically use my new toy, just for the sake of “disposability?”

I don’t see any benefit in this. All this new technology is fixing something that clearly isn’t broken. I wish I could sit down with all the tech-heads and their corporate CEOs and tell them all, “I don’t want this. Don’t make me buy it.”

It’s not that I don’t need the ability to download a movie and watch it on a 2-inch cell phone screen. It’s that I don’t WANT the ability to do that. I don’t want to be forced to “download” anything. I don’t want to be forced to “install software.”