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Immediacy as an invisible undercurrent in the evolution of music
“We have been trying to see how far it is possible to eliminate intuition, and leave only ingenuity. We do not mind how much ingenuity is required, and therefore assume it to be in unlimited supply” - (Turing, 1939, p. 215)
The 20th century was a time when music underwent an onslaught of mutations: the role of the musician, listener, technology and the consumer were constantly changing. We often talk about this being a result of innovations in technology, and that these ideas were technologically determined; this centres the technology as the thing which acts as a catalyst for change, rather than the people using technology. It seems to be presumed that there is some sort of innate ‘intelligence’ within the technological system itself.
Through a historical study of key moments of reconfiguration in music practice, from the early 20th century through to the present, including early commercial radio, Jamaican sound system culture, the assembly line studio practices of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and the rise of the internet based, home studio musician, I will argue that this narrative of technological determinism paints an inaccurate portrait of the history of musical progress from the 20th century. Tying technological determinacy into Jaron Lanier’s concept of a ‘locked-in’ technological system (Lanier, 2010), and Jaques Attali’s ideas surrounding repetition (Attali, 1984), I will suggest that there is a greater but underlooked force at play, immediacy, which is actually the dominant active ingredient in modulating how we perform and consume music.
Part One: Defining Technological Determinism
The idea of technological determinism gained popularity during the second industrial revolution and is still one of the dominant ways of understanding the relation between technology and society. In the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Ronald R.Kline describes two strands of Technological determinacy in this way:
“(1) an internal, technical logic determines the design of technological artifacts and systems; and (2) the development of technological artifacts and systems determines broad social changes.” - (Kline, 2015, p.109)
This is what this essay defines as technological determinacy (TD). Kline goes on to describe the pervasive nature of this idea:
“... the two meanings are often conjoined in the claim that an autonomous technology (in both its development and use) shapes social relations. Other claims are less strong and express the belief that technology is a major cause, but not the sole determinant, of social change. Although scholars have argued for many years against the strong version of technological determinism, the general belief that technology is a major force shaping society, which dates to the early nineteenth century, still pervades popular culture in the United States and Europe” - (Kline, 2015, p.109)
You can see this technologically determinist mindset in how we think about the history of musical progression in the West. Changes in music culture are assumed to come about as a result of innovations in technology: changes in music’s society and industry are technologically determined. For example, if you were to say any of the following statements then you would be using a narrative of technological determinism:
The invention of the phonograph creates the recorded music industry, changing society's relation to music and culture.
The invention of the radio transmitter changes people's relations with musicians and the site of music consumption.
The invention of the music synthesizer, drum machine and music computer, changes our relation to musicians, authenticity and performance.
The invention of the MP3 and downloading/streaming music changes our relation to the value of music, the definitions of what albums are, and problematizes the value of recorded music and the role of the recording artist.
These statements express this idea that the technological artifact brought about the change in society. I think that this argument misunderstands the full nature of systems and technology. Looking at a history of changes in music culture in the 20th century will often read like the following formula, repeated.
Technological INNOVATION (the invention of the technological artifact)
+
Technological determinism (the innate ‘logic’ of the artifact acting change on society)
= PROGRESS
However, I would counter that the artifact itself does not contain the logic system that enacts change, but instead people with the lateral thinking to apply the technology in a new way within their own society create the change. For example, in the first example of the phonograph used above, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, which could record soundwaves, and Charles Cros separately invented the paleophone which could play back recorded soundwaves. However, it wasn’t until Thomas Edison claimed these two ideas combined as an invention of his own and marketed it as a commercial product with a use outside of a laboratory, that the idea of recorded music changed society. One could argue that the internal technical logic is not contained within the invention itself, but is instead contained in Thomas Edison’s 1878 article in the North American Review, The Phonograph and its Future (Edison, 1878), which outlines a number of possible uses for the phonograph, including the recording of music. As hard as it is to imagine, the concept of using a soundwave recording and playback device as a device for capturing and listening to music away from the original performance was a piece of lateral thinking in 1878, and the existence of the device did not automatically afford it. Instead, the affordances of the technology were released by Thomas Edison’s application of it.
To take next the example of the radio transmitter: much like the phonograph, the technology for broadcasting commercial recorded music existed for a long time before anyone thought to implement it in Europe and America. Radio waves were seen as a medium of municipality, and any kind of advertising or promotion of goods and services (including music) was strongly legislated against in Europe and America. It was not until the conception of illegal ‘border blasters’ by the medical charlatan J.R Brinkley, and later, Radio Luxemburg’s pirate radio stations, that the idea of commercial radio changed culture in the west.
The same can be said for synthesisers, music computers, and digital music formats; most of the components of music sequencing and synthesis are formalised by Raymond Scott in the 1950s, but it’s not until Bob Moog and Don Buchla’s commercial synths in the 1960s that electronic instruments and sequencing change society and music.
The human catalyst at the centre of the affordances of a technology feels like something which is rarely discussed in discourses about music and technology. I believe there is an alternative phenomenon present at the site of reconfigurations of music, which I am defining as Immediacy. A term borrowed from John Thomlinson’s book The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy (2007). Thomlinson describes the emergence of immediacy in the 21st century as something that will change how we think about and experience media culture, consumption practices, and the core of our cultural and moral values. Focusing mainly on communications technology and political organisation, he suggests that this emerging immediacy differs from the ideas of speed and acceleration that emerge from the industrial revolution and modernity, claiming that while accelerationism wants to bridge the gap between now and the future: Immediacy
"... by contrast involves as its core feature the imagination that the gap is already closed. [...] immediacy - closure of the gap - is therefore most generally the redundancy or the abolition of the middle term." (Thomlinson, 2007, p. 91)
This difference between reaching aspirationally for a future position and already imagining the future is now is a subtle, but vital difference. Described as a
“Cultural principal in relation to the technological [...] connotes ideas of a culture of instantaneity and ubiquitous availability [...] a sense of directness, of cultural proximity [...] a close of the gap that has historically separated us between now and later [...] which could be taken to signify the end of the era of mechanical speed in two senses of the term ‘end’ - as a goal and as a conclusion” (Thomlinson, 2007, p. 74)
It is the difference between inventing the phonautograph and inventing the phonograph, and the difference between working on increasing the fidelity of a radio signal and working on using the radio as an international communications device. Thomlinson describes immediacy as a phenomenon emerging in the new millennium in communications technology and media, citing the increasing level of connectivity to people and media as the conditions that allow the emergence of immediacy as a new force. However, I think if you apply his theories of immediacy to music practice, it can be traced back much earlier, to the beginning of the 20th century. Jaques Attali writes about music’s potential to foreshadow political and social movements, suggesting that the politics of future generations are almost entirely present “in embryonic form in the music of the previous century” (Attali, 1985, p. 4) and the same could be said of Thomlinson’s idea of immediacy - it seems to occur with increasing frequency from the 1900s up to the present in music practice, and then appear more formally in the instantaneous nature of communication and hyper-mediation of the new networked millennium.
In the next chapter this essay will look at key moments in the reconfiguration of music culture from the 20th century through this lens of immediacy and will argue against the technologically determined narrative ascribed to these moments in music history.
Part three: Historical examples
While much of the writing about pirate radio begins with the story of American and European ‘pirate radio’ stations of the 50s and 60s, many of the concepts that these stations operated on originate from the culture of ‘border blaster’ radio stations, which began on the Mexican border in the 1930s.
J.R Brinkley was an early pioneer of many of the concepts of radio as a medium of mass communication. Brinkley made some of the first pre-recorded radio shows, was an early adopter of having live bands and playing records on the radio, the idea of the phone-in, and using advertising as a funding model for a radio station, something which was frowned upon at the time in America. He is also the father of the pirate radio broadcast, broadcasting to America from the Mexican border at a time when commercial radio broadcasts were not permitted in America.
In 1934 the American government had legislated against the idea of using radio waves for personal financial gain, with the Communications Act. Radio technology was thought of as a municipal communications device, and Brinkley was one of the first people to realise that radio could actually be a networked communication tool with the potential to make massive amounts of money and create entire industries by itself. A quack doctor by profession, his main priority with radio was to use it as a platform to sell various fraudulent medical procedures and medicines and aid his political career. The inclusion of music and talk radio and pre-recorded shows came about mainly as a tool for ensuring a constant stream of broadcast, and attracting members of the public to his business. Rather than being an inventor who created new technologies for radio, he merely repurposed older ones on a larger scale: the radio transmitters that he built on the Mexican border in the 30s and 40s were some of the most powerful ever made to facilitate his international broadcasts. (Brock, 2008)
I would argue that the revolutionising of music through radio was not down to the innovation of radio technology changing society through technological determinism, as for many years radio was not even considered an adjacent industry to the music industry. Radio was actually the reconfiguration of an existing technology with a new ideology, pioneered by J R Brinkley and the Mexican ‘border blasters’, and later in the offshore ‘pirate radio’ stations in Europe, Radio Mercur and Radio Caroline. The power of these stations was in their ability to think laterally about the use of a currently existing technology, rather than being a futurist or accelerationist experiment and reaching for the inherent wisdom of a new technology. Instead, border blaster and pirate radio’s practice is one of immediacy, using current technology to modulate politics and society.
In Kingston, Jamaica, during the 30s and 40s, radios and record players were prohibitively expensive, making listening to records and broadcasts a much more communal activity. Pioneering musicians and businessmen like Tom the Great Sebastian and Duke Reid began loading PA systems and turntables onto trucks and hiring them out for parties, playing imported rhythm and blues records, which had become popular in Jamaica through the aforementioned border blaster radio station’s signals reaching Jamaica. The design of outdoor sound systems changed to suit their new environment. In Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora, Paul Sullivan writes:
“As the wattage increased, more emphasis began to be placed on lower frequencies and a whole new scale in speaker design emerged [....] speaker cabinets that were literally the size of wardrobes. [these systems] became a prototype or the larger type of sound system that emerged soon after” - (Sullivan, 2014, p. 3)
What followed was a massive reconfiguration of live and recorded music: sound system technology was radically changed by entrepreneurs like Tom the Great Sebastian improving speaker and amplifier technology to deliver a better live sound experience. Some of the most important developments in live sound were invented here: the first high powered PA amplifiers, crossovers, bass bins, some of the early sophisticated mixers, equalisers and the first solid body electric guitar were invented in Jamaica at this time. The interest in American rhythm and blues then turned to an interest in making records of their own, records designed specifically for being played on these outdoor sound systems. This in turn led to a massive revolution of how records were made and performed. Dub plates and remixes came into being, and the creation of MCs and DJs who blurred the lines between music, music performance and recorded music, and the lines between the producer and the artist, with experimental uses of tape and recording techniques. (Sullivan, 2014)
There are two key things happening at once here: incredible technological innovation in music technology, but also great lateral leaps in terms of redefining the social and political structures of music making. However, what is crucial is that the technical innovation is made in the name of serving the social and political structures, rather than the other way around.
It's interesting to note that around the same time, there were some similar technological experiments happening with Europe and America, with WDR in Germany, the Radiophonic Workshop in Britain, and the works of Pierre Schaeffer, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. It could be argued that these experimental works, often operating in a counter-cultural context, haven't had anywhere near the wide-ranging cultural impact of Jamaican sound system culture. One could read music concrete, minimalist and avant-garde musical movements as having a technological determinist approach to their practice, looking at technologies or techniques as being the source of modulation of the political and social systems of music, whereas Jamaican sound system culture could be read as having an immediate approach: they are modulating technology for the benefit of the political and social systems of music.
In the mid 80s, London record label PWL changed the face of pop music. Made up of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman (SAW), PWL was notable for bringing Hi-NRG and Euro disco elements into pop production, and employing a streamlined ‘Assembly Line’ process to their songwriting, recording and production process. Together they produced 140 top 40 hits between 1984 and 1997.
Much of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s early success was dependent on bringing elements from club culture (specifically the Hi-NRG scene) into pop production, this required a quick turnaround time to keep their music up to date. The name Assembly Line is borrowed from Berry Gordy’s Motown record label, whose in-house band and utilitarian recording techniques afforded a high production rate, at a time when studios were increasingly becoming a site of experimentation and fidelity, rather than efficiency. In an interview in Sound on Sound magazine, Waterman says, “We record quickly, spending days on singles and a few weeks on albums” (Buskin, 2009). The SAW assembly line could be seen as an extension to this ideology, augmenting Gordy’s Fordist approach with the affordances of synthesizer and MIDI sequencer technology.
The Motown idea of a house band was replaced by the idea of house synths: almost every record that SAW produced used the same drum machine and bass synth (a Linn 9000 drum machine and a Yamaha DX7 playing the bass parts). Both of these instruments had features that helped facilitate working quickly: the Linn 9000 is one of the first drum machines with a MIDI sequencer, which meant that instruments like the DX7 could be easily synchronized to the Linn 9000 and rhythm section parts could be quickly made on the spot without having to rely on session musicians. The DX7 is also interesting - one of the first commercially successful digital FM synthesisers, it had a very different, user-friendly layout to the traditional subtractive synthesisers which had gone before it, specifically, it had factory presets, with a range of different simulated instrument sounds, which meant that bass sounds, and organ sounds could be quickly conjured up. This is a completely different operation to using an analog synth, which requires a more time-consuming workflow to build up sounds from scratch. The sounds being generated by the DX7’s FM synthesis are also very different to those generated by analogue synths: they are much more suited to emulating sounds like brass and organ sounds. This meant that SAW could, with these two instruments alone, build complex arrangements on the spot, without extensive programming of synths to get the desired sounds. This fast and user-friendly operation was radically different to how synths had been used in a studio recording environment in the past, as previously the synthesiser had been primarily used for making abstract, experimental sounds. It’s also interesting to note that the Lin 9000 is one of the first drum sequencers to incorporate sampling, which SAW used to quickly incorporate drum sounds from contemporary dance music into their work. Roger Linn, its inventor, went on to develop the Lin 9000 into the more well-known Akai MPC, which became a key instrument in electronic music and hip hop, genres where many of these ‘assembly line’ uses of synth technology re-emerge.
This utilitarian attitude to technology and arrangement can be seen throughout SAW’s work. Interviewed for SoundOnSound Magazine PWL engineer Mark McGuire talks about how they recorded all their vocalists using the same microphone, saying
"As far as the guys were concerned, the [microphone] was a good mic that worked and they didn't have the time to go to the trouble of trying out any others. I remember someone once asking them why they used the same 707 conga pattern on every song, and basically their answer was because it works. It did for them what a conga pattern should, and that applied to a lot of things.” - (Buskin, 2009)
With these affordances, SAW could write songs very quickly in a studio environment with no demo process, often arranging and recording a song in the morning, booking in a singer in the afternoon, and sending the finished song off to be mastered in the evening. The singers, despite being the named artists on the records, were only brought in after the track had been written. This sense of Fordism, with people focusing on specific parts of the process, was carried through to mastering. SAW would send songs off to be mastered, but would not listen to the resulting master, trusting it to be sent straight off to radio stations.
This is a clear example of an immediate music practice affording a laterality in the music industry, sidestepping a lot of the conventions of the recording industry of the time and reconfiguring how we think about music. This evolution of the assembly line method, which prioritises efficiency and producing ideas quickly, operates on an ideology of immediacy. Stock, Aitken and Waters, used the conveniences of the technology for their own goals, rather than being defined by the technology they used. This ideology of the affordances of convenience has been continued in the practice of many current musicians, as we will see below.
A sense of utilitarian immediacy is clearly seen in the work of Billie Eilish and Finneas. Their multi award-winning album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019) breaks many of the rules of contemporary pop production, sonically, organisationally and infrastructurally. Paul Tingen, in SoundOnSound Magazine describes the album as
“...Going against the grain of almost all current trends, apart from its big bass. The productions are sparse to a fault, the minimalist arrangements often decorated with Foley effects illustrating the dark lyrics [...] In a big departure from mainstream pop production, the album is almost devoid of high-frequency content and reverb, both in the arrangements and vocals. The latter alternate between the fairly natural and the heavily distorted, while the Auto‑Tune effect ubiquitous in modern urban music is audible here only on a couple of tracks. Equally striking are Billie Eilish's idiosyncratic, almost whispered vocal style and the distinctive visual imagery that surrounds her.” - (Tingen, 2019)
Organisationally, rather than the large teams that traditionally work on every step of the songwriting and production process, the whole album has been written, performed and produced by Eilish and her brother, Finneas, and finished by mixer Rob Kinelski and mastering engineer John Greenham (Tingen, 2019). Infrastructurally, the duo chose to record the album in a small bedroom studio in their house, using budget music equipment, rather than using a professional recording studio, citing lack of natural light and a lack of immediacy as reasons for favouring a home studio: “To me it’s all about immediacy. The way I want any home studio to function is [...] as fast as I can think of an idea, i want to be able to articulate it” (AWAL, 2019). Like SAW’s Assembly line, the immediacy afforded by this setup allows the duo to draw influences from more esoteric and niche cultures, microgenres like Mumblerap and Cloudrap, and SoundCloud musicians like Låpsley, whereas working in a more traditional studio pop environment, with its multiple songwriting teams, and benchmarking against a more maximal production style, would potentially hamper this.
What separates Eilish and Finneas from a DIY artist working in a marginal subcultural scene is that their lateral practices pull them directly into mainstream contemporary pop music, winning multiple industry awards while operating outside of its infrastructure.
Their trajectory seems to be part of a larger movement of internet based immediate bedroom musicians as modulators of popular music. Artists who begin producing content independently, from a home studio environment, build up an audience on social media making niche music, before intersecting laterally with the mainstream music industry. Artists such as Mono Neon, Louis Cole and Marc Rebilet. Mono Neon is an American bassist who gained a large fanbase and the attention of the mainstream music industry through his YouTube channel, which mostly consists of low-fi videos of him playing the bass guitar in his home, miming along with the speech patterns of politicians and YouTube stars. Louis Cole generated mass appeal by working from his home studio, writing and producing his own videos, broadcasting music directly to YouTube, building a fanbase, releasing records and touring without the reliance on a record label. YouTube musician Marc Rebillet, whose improvised home loopstation live streams have given him a sustainable career completely independent of the music industry. Their practice is immediate because they are using their surrounding affordances rather than reaching out to other technologies and industries to create music.
Part 4: Technological Determinacy, Repetition and Lock-in vs Immediacy, Composition and Reconfiguration
All of the above moments are examples where technical, infrastructural and societal ideologies are reconfigured. Brinkley completely reconfigures the received wisdom about the municipal uses of radio, Jamaican sound system culture reconfigures the ideologies of recorded sound and live music, SAW reconfigures the ideologies of fidelity, experimentation, the authenticity of the artist and good studio practice, and Eilish, Cole, MonoNeon and Rebelliet employ a strategy of reconfiguration in a time when consumer grade music equipment affords the short-circuiting of music industry's studio and record label infrastructure. The word reconfigured is being used here rather than a word like rebelled against, turned away from or accelerated, or developed on, as they are neither trying to create a completely new ideology separate to their surroundings, or to embody or step in line with the institution, but rather something in-between.
The idea of technological determinism could be seen as a valuing of technology over humanity, or equally a diminishing of the value of humanity beneath technology. In You Are Not A Gadget Jaron Lanier writes about the problem of technological determinism in computing:
“People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.” (Lanier, 2010 p. 32)
Lanier goes on to talk about the idea of ‘lock in’ in computer and network programming: the idea that once interlocking programs reach a certain point of standardization and ubiquity in everyday life, it makes it hard to change systems, or imagine new ones. He uses the example of the standardisation and ubiquity of the computer music language MIDI leading to a simplified understanding of how a musical note can be expressed, and music technologist’s failure to introduce any kind of innovation beyond MIDI, due to the lock-in effect. Like technological determinacy, lock-in impairs people’s ability to create new things, but also to even imagine the possibility of the new thing. Each of the historical examples of key moments of re-configuration of music could be seen as someone employing strategies of immediacy to counteract a system’s lock-in effect, by re-imagining the system, then actualising that imagination. In the early 1900s, the system of radio was technologically locked-in in American law and culture, until it was reconfigured by J R Brinkley. Jamaican sound system culture escaped being locked into a culture of passive consumption of American rhythm and blues records. SAW’s assembly line counteracted the locked-in record industry of the time, with its laborious turnaround time for artists, and disconnection from the subcultural club scenes of the time. And the modern online home studio based musician bypasses the lock-in of a modern music industry, with its decreasing creative risk taking and reliance on large songwriting and production teams.
So, immediacy could be seen as a way bucking trends, and moving on from a reinforcement of the status quo. Attali writes in Noise: The Political Economy of Music about the beginning of the 20th century being locked into a state of ‘repetition’:
“The advent of a power establishing, on the basis of a technocratic language, a more efficient channeli-zation of the productions of the imaginary and forming the elements of a code of cybernetic repetition” (Attali, 1985, p.83)
This could be read as a problem of both Lanier’s lock-in, and of a strong technological determinism. In the final chapter of Noise, Attali describes the possible emergence of a new form of organisation, Composing. He describes composing as
“...a negation of the division of roles and labor as constructed by the old codes. [...] to listen to music in the network of composition is to rewrite it: to put music into operation, to draw it toward an unknown praxis.” (Attali, 1985, p.135)
I think the idea of a ‘network of composition’ describes the ideologies of Thomlinson’s immediacy discussed here, emerging in the music of the 20th century, and foreshadowing the political organisation of networks of the 21st (Attali, 1985).
In this essay, I have looked at immediacy as an alternative way of looking at how we interact with music. We live in a time where innovation in technology is perceived as the thing which drives innovation, and in a world where new technology is marketed as a solution to all of our problems. It can be easy to become an accidental technological determinist - you might find yourself asking ‘I like the guitar that I have, but is it the best possible guitar?’ or ‘what equipment do I need to make better music?’, and you might spend time trying to answer these questions which might have been better spent playing the instrument you have. Part of why it's difficult to conceptualise immediacy is because there is no set qualitative measure to what counts as an immediate practice. The definition is a constantly changing relation with politics, technology and society. Your guitar will have the same number of strings from one year to the next, but its context and relation to music culture is constantly shifting. Its value as a tool for immediacy is constantly changing.
Perhaps because of this, an analysis of the immediate properties of musical structures is often hard to find. There is an abundance of information on music technology, both in books, media, and in education which describes technologies determined qualities: what equipment offers the best fidelity, volume, durability, or what equipment matches perceived ‘industry standards’. But we are living in a time where increasingly these factors are becoming less important. The gap between industry standard and commercial musical equipment is closing to the point where the bedroom musician’s music and the industry's studio recorded music is becoming indistinguishable, and the pathways for a career as a creative are constantly changing and being redefined by outsiders. And yet many courses teaching popular music and music technology lean heavily on the idea that applying yourself to the inherent wisdom of technological infrastructure is a pathway to sustainability and participation in the politics and society of music, either through training in the use of otherwise un-accessible, un-affordable ‘high end’ musical equipment and studios, or through learning an understanding of the algorithmic requirements of digital music platforms, and shaping your music to fit it.
While there are still people making sustainable careers through these more traditional means, they are positions which are becoming increasingly precarious and small in number, and the values of these technologies and platforms are constantly shifting. It’s worth noting that almost all of the historical examples of massive reconfiguration mentioned above are happening outside of the traditional infrastructures of the music industry and music education. There is a risk of educational facilities becoming cargo cults for already dead industrial standards, becoming locked-in to technologies which have already become irrelevant. How does one learn, operate in and teach immediacy? How does one learn to identify locked in technologies, to move laterally through technological determinacy, to move to Attali’s unknown praxis? The answers to these questions might not be clear, but a strong first step would be to create and normalise a language of immediacy to compete with the all too easy common speech of technological determinacy.
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