Are iPods Antisocial?

 

A Short History of Recorded Sound and Practice: Part I

 

Let’s face it. Until the middle of our last, wonderful century listen to music was a social activity. Cheap radios, Walkmen, and iPods have changed that. Now we listen alone. What have we lost?

 

Of course people have always sung to themselves, whether in the shower or the brook nearby, while musicians have sat alone and played only for themselves. Music as a solitary experience was not unknown before the 20th century. It was just rare. Edison invented the first working device to record sound in 1877. His cyclinder gramophone was designed as an early answering machine – for telegraphists unable to take down multiple incoming messages at once – but, as is so often the case, its revolutionary power was felt elsewhere. Indeed it wasn’t until more than 10 years later that a bright manager of his in San Fransisco decided people might enjoy listening to sounds for entertainment that its possibilities for music were even explored. In these so-called “sound parlors” one could pay a small fee to sit around a phonograph outfitted with five listening horns and hear the sound of animals, human voices, and music too. To these earliest of recorded media listeners the novelty and strangeness was the point. A player piano was comprehensible as a mechanical device that activated the keys, but how sound was captured on a small cylinder of cardboard and wax was a pure wonderment at the turn of the century.

 

Within a decade or two of the first sound parlors cylinder and disc gramophones became public commonplaces. Found in cafes and living rooms people quickly developed a taste for listening to Caruso or Bessie Smith – the world’s finest entertainers and musicians – in the comfort of their locales. But listening still remained a social activity. Slowly replacing the piano that had been the center of social activity, people were accustomed to gathering together for musical entertainment, sharing in the experience, and, presumably, singing and dancing along.

 

What began to change this was the invention of the transistor. Building on “borrowed” 1925 patent papers from the physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, researchers at Bell Labs created the first working model in 1947, and production began soon thereafter. The transistor is, in essence, just an amplification circuit, but one much smaller and durable than the vacuum tubes it replaced. This allowed for the miniaturization of electronic devices which continues to this day. But its immediate impact was on the radio. Radio had taken off during the 20s and become a major source of entertainment, especially during the years of the Great Depression. Much as they did with the piano and gramophone, people gathered together for entertainment, dancing, and socialization in homes and cafes listening to live concerts broadcast over the air waves. But, as we all know from antique stores, vacuum tube radios were large, heavy devices that needed to be plugged into the wall. Transistors allowed radios to be made small, light-weight, and battery-powered. Listening was becoming a more solitary activity.

 

Not just for stealing away to one’s room or listening in the park on a sunny day, the portable radio had a significant role in the development of a separate youth culture. When only one device was in each house and families listened together there was a tendency towards compromise. Everyone listened to the same things, and you’ll bet the elders had more say. The transistor radio circumvented this necessity allowing the younger generation to listen to their own music and radio shows, whether the parents and grandparents liked it or not. It was no longer any of their business. Be it in pairs or huddled under the bed sheets late at night, listening to music had moved out of the living room, out of the larger social realm towards the private.

 

In the next part we’ll move on to the Walkman and the iPod. Certainly though if anyone has any comments I’d love to hear them.

Does Music Disclose the Temporality of Being? Part II

In the last post I introduced the extremely basic concept of temporality as experienced by human being, what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called Dasein. In this post I want now to turn to this concept as applied to the experience of music. It is Heidegger’s wish that we return “to the things themselves.” A rudimentary understanding of phenomenology – the method used by Heidegger to uncover the nature of being – is that it claims we too often miss what is right in front of our noses. In this case not a set of keys we’re looking for, but the very nature of our experiences. His ultimate goal was to uncover the nature of being, but not by any active means, but by letting being disclose itself to us. The process of phenomenology is one of letting things speak to us as they are in themselves. Being, as simultaneously highly abstract and yet ever-present, is extremely difficult to attend to for precisely those reasons. It is my claim, then, that at least this temporal aspect of being – that of the past and future as immanent in the present – is most easily disclosed in our experience of music.

 

Let’s think about an example. Imagine listening to a piece of music, or playing one yourself. Whether you’re familiar with the piece or the tradition your ears attend to it as its patterned sound reaches you. (I’m assuming here that you’re listening to it as music, and as such you’re assuming that it is intentional and patterned.) You note as many aspects as you can, sounds, timbres, rhythms, phrases, anything that might be recognizable as an entity. When you find it you note it mentally. As you build an inventory of object in the sound you have a database against which you can reference the sound of the present, and given the successions heard in the past you hear new sounds and make guesses about where the music is going, what a phrase will do, how a rhythm will end. Thus, even in our brief example we see how, in listening to music, our experience may remain in the present – it can’t do otherwise – but our attention is split between the past and the future. The past gives the present meaning, tells us what we’re hearing, and allows us to listen for the future. But the future remains always unsure – at least until the piece ends – and thus we keep guessing what will come of our present.  

 

The usefulness of this aesthetic attention to music, then, is that is listening to music and letting our temporal experience of music speak to us, we gain insight into the way Dasein always already is. We are better attuned to how our lives are always in the present, but always constituted by the past, and oriented toward a future. Just as music is a pleasing tension between the known and the unknown, ever on a knifes edge, so is our being at once sure and unsure. Perhaps music lets us hear our being more clearly.