IntellectualMusician.com

The band Radiohead recently (2007) offered music for free on the Internet. This initiates an entirely new view of recorded music. Not in the obvious sense. Such a move is one towards the gradual dematerialization of society. It won’t be long before it happens. And it will still cost to consume over the Internet. But the object is leaving for good. The earth’s resources are dwindling and there is no reason to make what can be translated into a form that can be sold electronically.

When the object is removed from music, what remains is the sound. This tends to make listening more of an acute experience because there are no reference points except in memory and in the choice to repeat the experience through hearing the recording again, wherever it is lodged.

As a writer about music, without intention, I have collected too many cds and some vinyl. Storing these objects baffles the mind sometimes, not so much for me as for other reviewers who have commiserated with me. The point is that the music is finding other ways to inhabit a world that constantly transforms in terms of the emanation of sound waves. And those ways have to be accepted as a sign of a huge all-important transition.

This subject brings to mind a question: What does it mean to listen? Sound is hard to grasp. It is evanescent. However it hits the brain in the listening determines its flavor. Listening means coming as close as possible to whatever the musician is doing. For some, that might entail paying attention with eyes open. Others it may require closing eyes and completely zoning out. Still yet for others, it could be a combination of the two.

Depending on the knowledge of the listener, music’s flavor can blossom within the construct of the music. A musician could hear every note, every key change, every rhythmic change, the patterns that arise, musical references and perhaps imagine playing what is being heard. But it won’t be played the same way. Musicians reminisce about imitating their idols off records. Sometimes they were happy with what they could do; other times, they realized that they, in no way, had the ability to do the same thing that they heard on the record. Moreover, when it comes to spontaneously improvised music, there is no chance in the blue moon that a recorded piece can be replayed, even by the original musicians.

As a non-musician, I can say that when I listen to recorded music, it rolls over my head at first but I take note immediately of the music’s interesting aspects. With a recording, I have the opportunity to re-assess those aspects and give them more appreciation in the context of the whole. Ever since I started writing about music, I listen in ways that sometimes takes the flow out of what I am hearing because I am mentally stopping to analyze it. But generally, the analysis parks itself in a second row seat. The meaning of the music sits in the first. Meaning rests in the personal experience of the listener/musician. Meaning indicates the relationship that the listener has to what is being perceived. Meaning endows the music from one end to the other with a reason for its mysterious nature.

Recordings are really like performances. Even though they physically do not change, they will inevitably change in the listening. And that can come through any kind of hardware that exists.

So get ready for receivers being hard-wired into the human brain. When that happens, everything I have said will be irrelevant. We will be on a new plane of a ‘software only’ existence. One that only science fiction propounds, but which is close to becoming a necessity. We will all turn into radioheads.

more articles by Lyn Horton

• How a Non-Musician Thinks About Music