bug juice

When you ask people (as I often do) what kind of music they listen to, you get all kinds of answers. On a scale ranging from ‘I listen to everything!’¹ to ‘Oh, I don’t have time to listen to music’², people are usually listening to something, intentionally, or recreationally, or whatever-ly.

Now, exceptions notwithstanding, the general subtext is what are you listening to on your headphones; i.e. ‘what’s on your Spotify?’ (or streaming service of your choice, I’m not biased³). These days it means what’s your favorite album? What playlist are you building, what music do you have ‘saved’ that you pull up in times of relaxation, or stress, or focus?

This is a very modern subtext, in the scheme of things. Until fairly recently, the subtext was more along the lines of ‘what music do you leave your house to hear?’ or ‘what performance/opera/concert/show have you seen recently that you enjoyed?’ Mind-blowing, if you think about it; this is, clearly, a massively critical shift in the way we enjoy music as an artform, and has fundamentally altered the way we interact with music on all levels. Now, does it matter? Well, I think so.

I think most people, be they audiophile or casual listener, will instinctively understand the difference between a live performance and a ‘produced’ or ‘recorded’ track⁵. There’s something about that show we’ve seen, in that quiet room, or bar, or church, or stadium, with the lone guitar, or the decked-out set, or the full orchestra, that sends shivers down our spine. What is it about that show that can’t be captured on our headphones? We may not be able to quantify exactly why, or how inherently the two differ. Enter, me; as a historical musicologist, I’m always interested⁶ in the twists and turns which shaped our listening habits today, and in this post I’ll be writing about why you should make the effort to go see live music.

. . .

As music is so ingrained in so much of our lives, religions, and habits, such drastic changes in its creation and culture should give us pause. Scientifically, we know music and sound has profound effects on our psyche, and we all instinctively recognize the power of music to unify, heal, create, and even destroy. One of my favorite historical examples of the power of a song is ‘La Marseillaise’, written in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, which became the anthem of the French Revolution (and eventually France herself). The hymn was so influential during the revolutionary period that it was in fact banned, first by Napoleon, and then by King Louis XVIII, because of its insurrectionary power and symbolism.

If a song can (help) tear down a monarchy, it’s wild to imagine what music does to us on a daily basis. It’s even wilder to think about how our subconscious and emotional patterns (and whatever other million minutiae which are affected by music) have changed as a collective whole because of how music changed over the past hundred or so years. If we were affected a certain way by experiencing music a certain way for hundreds of years, and then over a historically minute period literally everything changed, well…that gives me pause for sure.

How did everything change? Well, live music is a medium which has been drastically remolded over the past century due to the development of technologies which allow us to amplify and record⁶ sound. The ‘genre’ of live performance also had to adapt to the creation of the new music industry as we know it. If we consider the critical shift in the movement from live to recorded music, and if you think about it from a purely logical perspective, live music technically shouldn’t exist anymore. 

Honestly, why does it? Produced music is, from a qualitative standpoint, almost always better. ‘Better’ is obviously super subjective, but for now, let’s just say it means it literally sounds better.⁷ Not necessarily the composition, or lyrics, or harmonic progression or arrangements or anything like that, but the music itself sounds better. This has to be true because recorded/produced music is made in a controlled environment. (Ah, but what about recordings of ‘live’ performances? I’ll come back to that, but for now, let’s just say even those recording processes are intricate⁸). This is besides the fact that recorded music is cheaper, and way, way more convenient to access.

First; some context. The history of recorded music is a massively interdisciplinary topic, but here’s a few main points before we continue. As I’ve mentioned, recorded music is brand new (relatively speaking). Only about 140 years have passed since the invention of the phonograph, and the radio came a few decades after that. Once again, before the radio was introduced, the only kind of music was live music⁹. Another point is that parallel to the development of recorded music was the development of the genre we call ‘pop’ or modern popular music; Top 40 charts were created because suddenly everyone was listening to the same exact, accessible thing. That’s not to say the music of Beethoven wasn’t popular; but there was never a point before the age of streaming where music was so easily and widely consumed.

It seems strange to separate them, but running alongside the concept and development of ‘recording’ was the idea of ‘digital’ or ‘electronic’ music (and musical instruments), like the all-important modular synthesizer. A little noodle of thought for you- how interconnected was the invention of amplification and the development of recorded sound? Not very, actually.¹⁰ Amplification was first used in telegraphy, radio broadcasting, and eventually motion picture- amplification just means increasing the power of a signal. For our musical purposes, the greatest repercussions of amplification were felt in live performances. Suddenly you could perform for thousands, even millions. Robert Greenberg, one of my favorite music historians, talks about this in greater detail in this episode of his series Music History Monday.

So you have two parallel phenomena- recording technology, and amplification technology. So much changed so quickly, it’s hard to keep track. Genres that recorded better on the early phonographs boomed, perfection in performance suddenly became tantamount, listening to music alone suddenly became a thing…for more on this, Clive Thompson wrote an excellent and readable article on this whole timeline for the Smithsonian Magazine that you can read here. 

Fast forward to the music studio of 2023. All these these different cultural and technological changes came together to create the art and practice of what we call ‘music production’. Nothing about the development of the modern recording studio can be described as linear (I haven’t mentioned any of the outside influences, like war and politics, which affected the advance of sound manipulation as we know it¹¹) but if you were to connect some dots, they might be labeled ‘acoustic’ – ‘analog’ – ‘digital’. Digitalization of the musical process was the last piece of the puzzle, as it were.

The modern recording studio is a wondrous thing. Every part of it is designed to capture and recreate sound as ‘well’ as possible. The ‘well’ is the part that really gets me. I invite you to think for a moment about what makes a recording ‘good’. Is it the clarity of the recording? No background noise? Is it about capturing as many frequencies or overtones as possible, even the ones that are not naturally heard by the human ear? Is it about getting the most ‘human’ performance from the musician or vocalist, or should the music be as close to perfection (whatever that means; flawless?) as possible?

So, let’s try and tie all these various threads together:

1. Up until around the 20th century, music was created and enjoyed purely ‘acoustically’. Over the last hundred years or so, (an extraordinarily short period of time for the total turnover of an ancient artform), our ears and brains have accepted and adapted to music in a wildly different way.
2. With the development of recording, amplification, and production technologies, we (humans) have began to listen and create music in an entirely new way. First we had broadcasted sound, then we had music we could play over and over from the comfort of our living rooms, then shit started to get weird¹². The avant-garde composers of the 20th century who explored the new vistas of synth and modulation paved the way for hitherto-undreamt-of combinations of sounds and instruments and what-have-you. 
3. Much of what we listen to today is produced in an incredibly controlled environment. We can do almost anything with sound now, and the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. These experiments were the inspiration of, and possibly the stepping stone for, many genres we know and love today.

Item number 3 is a neutral fact. It isn’t bad that we do this; nor is it essentially good, though. Having an immense amount of control over the recording process is just a fact. I do think it behooves us however, to take a close look at what it means for us, the listeners. We mentioned that even ‘acoustic’ performances are incredibly elaborate- the technology and sonic wizardry which goes into recording something like, oh, the Tiny Desk concert series takes years to master. I don’t even have insight into the consequences; I’m just asking the question.

. . .

If you’ve made it this far, I’m impressed¹³. Okay, so new genres were created, we perform live music in a far more acoustically intricate way¹⁴, and the concept of a ‘produced track’ was born. HOWEVER. Though we carry vast libraries of beautifully produced music in our pockets, we still know that attending a live performance is a completely different experience to hearing the same music recorded.

According to statista.com;

Having experienced a steady decline since the turn of the century, the global revenue of the music industry has had a resurgence in the last three years, growing from 14.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 to 17.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2017. In 2017, over 66 million music tour tickets were sold worldwide, marking the highest total in recent years. Additionally, the global revenue from live music tours amounted to approximately 5.65 billion U.S. dollars. U2’s tour was the highest grossing concert tour worldwide that year, with their Joshua Tree Tour bringing in revenue on 316 million U.S. dollars.

In addition to all that, the revenue of the live music industry is still predicted to rise. As history is cyclical, it seems to me we are experiencing a wave of musical development similar to the overhaul which began the previous century. Just as recorded music and amplified performances created a new music industry, the technologies of the 21st century seem to be “bringing back the primacy of live shows”, as Thompson puts it.

This is why musicians still go on tour, why there are thousands of music festivals every year, etc.; we instinctively know that they must. So what is it that pushes bands and songwriters to perform live, and what keeps audiences coming? And why should you care? I hope to cover that in Part II, so stay tuned (lol).

footnotes:

1.  My least favorite answer. return
2. An interesting answer; do they mean the music they enjoy listening to requires time and dedicated listening, or that all music requires time and dedicated listening, or that they just don’t need music enough in their lives to think about it?  return
3.  I am. Hot take: Spotify FTW. return
4. I’m going to stop putting these in quotes now, but what I mean is essentially two separate things that are often interchangeable. I’m defining the terms here thus: recorded music refers to a live performance that was recorded and produced music means music that was produced in layers, so everything was played or sung separately, with the possibility (and probability) of many takes and edits. These are two ends of a spectrum, and much of what we hear today is a mix of the two. I am not focusing on electric vs. acoustic instruments here either, but let me just say that recorded music doesn’t only mean acoustic instruments. return
5.  See: weirdly obsessed. return
6. and generally fuck with, return
7.  You may protest, especially if you’re a musician, but for the sake of argument, just give me a minute.  return
8.  This is an interesting concept- it connotes that what we create in an acoustic environment can almost always be ‘improved’. We’ll discuss this later. Just give me a minute. return
9. Read that again. return
10.  In fact, the first phonographs actually didn’t have volume control, so listeners would stuff the horn with socks to deaden the sound. I love that- true analog vibes.. return
11. For instance- a piece I recently researched, George Crumb’s Black Angels, is incredibly sonically avant-garde, and was written in direct response to the Vietnam War (I know Mr. Crumb would have an issue with the wording ‘direct response’, but…c’mon). An argument can be made that the sounds of the piece were directly influenced by current events…  return
12.  See the Beatles’ later albums, or the OG Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, or anything by John Cage. return
13. I’m barely getting through, and I’m writing the damn thing. return
14.  Before microphones, you only ever heard a singer’s ‘naked’ voice, no effects, no amplification, nothing. THINK ABOUT THAT. return