A New Musical Experience
I posted this over at the blog I’m keeping for my new media course, but it fits over here as well.
I’ve been meaning to read City of Sound’s post, A New Musical Experience, for awhile now, and finally found some time this weekend. It’s rather long, but an excellent collection of thoughts on music and technology. It’s undeniable that technology has hugely changed how, where and when we listen to music. How else is technology, miniaturization of players, an explosion in data storage and the loss of the physicality of music changing how we interact with music?
And while the personal curation of music will always be valuable when received, what are we losing by removing personality? What disappears when the physical wrappers around music fade away? Are the tracks alone enough?
The post highlights the diminishing amount of metadeta, or contextual information, associated with music. Buy a CD and you might get a booklet with liner notes and a pretty small cover. Sometimes the “booklet” is merely a single piece of cardboard. Purchase a track on iTunes and you get a 300 pixel by 300 pixel piece of cover art and 8-10 pieces of information about the album. Obviously, album cover size has been on the decline since the age of vinyl, and artist/album information must fit cleanly into the fields demanded by ID3 tags.
There really does seem to be more music available to the consumer than ever before. This is surely A Good Thing. But how much music can one discover, experience and how much does it actually mean without context?
Grab some coffee, tea or your drink of choice, and spend some time reading the rest of the post. At the very least, it forces you to think about the way that you interact with that iPod in your pocket loaded with your entire music collection.
Though not discussed in the article, the question of today’s youth deserves further research. What happens to music when a population grows up without that context (detailed record sleeves, band lore, stories, etc…)? How do myspace, blogs, websites and other digital media fit into all of this? Are they filling the gap opened with the loss of physicality, or is something else happening?
For further reading, check out the City of Sounds post on the rise of “shuffle” culture.
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