Music journalist Rikky Rooksby considers the effect technology is having on music, and tries to extract some of the digit from digital.
The last 40 years have seen staggering advances in the ability of technology to shape, replicate and record sound, and one of the aims of this process has been to stimulate and assist creativity. Technical advances in amp design, effects and recording have enabled us to achieve sounds that were previously either out of our reach or didn't exist at all. The benefits and freedoms resulting from this cannot be underestimated. In the mid‑'60s, bands were making albums on 4‑track tape. Within 20 years, technology had created the 4‑track cassette, putting multitrack recording within most people's reach. Never in the history of demos had so many tracks been recorded by so few pairs of hands onto such narrow tape.
But technology can also have a negative effect on music‑making. George Martin was recently quoted as saying that the problem today was that technical advances meant people could make impressive demos of sub‑standard material. Half an hour spent listening to Radio 1 is enough to convince anybody that there is a lot of lazy songwriting going on. All too often, technology facilitates laziness, blunts sensibilities, and distracts people into a futile and sterile quest after perfection. The result: repetitive, soulless music. How many records are you hearing on the radio that you know will be played in 10 or 20 years time?
Take the humble click track. Can you imagine the HamburgerPlatz Symphony Orchestra being told to play with a click? Laugh? They'd nearly sue. But then, of course, a symphony has tempo changes in it. Can you imagine a Chopin Prelude played absolutely strict, with no rubato? You'd kill the music straight away. So why has recording with a click become so common? If the band you're recording speeds up slightly because they get excited, so what? Why remove the excitement? When was the last time you heard a hit single with a tempo or time signature change?
Let's take another example that relates to music being 'soulful' — and by that I mean expressive; being 'ensouled' by the performer. Consider the role of intention in music. When a drummer lays down a drum track in 'real' time, the sound is the result of a human being physically hitting the drums with a stick. The act is intentional in duration, time, rhythm and force, and above all, intentional in expressing an emotion. The human being wills and physically creates an acoustic event in the environment via the medium of a tool, an instrument; in this case, the drumkit. The purest expression of intent in this sense is the one that needs no tool: the human voice, where the body is the tool.
As human beings, we are equipped to sense such an intention. Where does that leave drum machines and sequencing? Okay, let's concede that a drum machine is programmed by a human operator; programming is a creative and intentional act. But when you push the start button, the machine is working by itself; the link between the human being and each snare hit is no longer there. There is nothing behind each of those sounds — they are not expressive or ensouled. The intention lies in the program, which is at another remove. If this is so, the essence of music has gone. We have a facsimile of music‑making, or what might be termed 'virtual music'. This is why a sampled vocal phrase triggered repeatedly (as in much dance music) sounds so jarring and unnatural: it is human emotion overridden by technology.
Another cause celébre is the 'perfect', no‑mistake recording. When I first started listening carefully to records it was the glitches, the spillage of sound and snatches of people talking on fade‑outs that added to the fascination. Take the intro of The Police's 'Roxanne', with its false piano chord and laughter, or the ridiculous amounts of amp hiss at the start and end of Oasis's 'Cigarettes and Alcohol', or Marc Bolan saying "Once more" at the end of 'Metal Guru'. These touches are aural fingerprints, evoking the human presence and realities of music‑making. Such things add enchantment.
Then there's the effect digital recording has on music, in contrast to recordings made on tape. It's interesting to note those recent SOS ads by a certain company pushing digital hard disk recorders. In no uncertain terms, they declare tape to be as dead as a very extinct animal. Not for me, it isn't. I'm in the market for an 8‑track, just at the moment that Fostex and Roland have launched their digital 8‑tracks on the market at a fraction below the cost of a reel‑to‑reel machine, complete with CD‑quality sound, 'virtual tracks' and non‑destructive editing. And yet I've decided to go down the reel‑to‑reel route. Why?
First, it's a fair cop, constable: I confess a sentimental attachment to the medium upon which all the music I love has been captured. Second, for many people, digital may be a more 'transparent' medium, but not necessarily a more musical one. Is it technophobia that makes people describe CD sound as 'clinical and cold', and analogue as 'warm and comfortable'? How many times have you heard people say CDs are more tiring on the ears? If digital is so great, why are companies like TL Audio inventing units like the VI‑1 valve interface to put 'warmth' back into the signal?
But it's not just the technical impact that digital recording has on music; consider also what people do with the music as a result of the freedom digital recording offers them — things nobody could be bothered to do with tape as it was too time‑consuming. 'Effortlessly cut and paste that perfect chorus throughout a tune', go the ads for digital recorders. If you listen to any great song, each chorus will be slightly different in the way it's performed, and those differences are important. What's the point of repeating for the sake of it? Picture the scene — Engineer: "That first 'Baby!' was great, Otis. We'll sample that through the rest of the song." Tape is dead? Or is digital the perfect medium for a revolt into monotony?