Essay: The Anxiety of Listening (In the New Media Age)

12 June 2014

This short essay touches on the shifting trends in music listening thanks to technological developments, and how such shifts have led to listeners feeling overwhelmed and oversaturated with material. This is a topic that has weighed on my mind as of late. I decided to research and pen this essay after a self-reflexive moment screenshot above; after listening to a number of songs on youtube, I realised I had listened and/or watched close to 10 different videos in no more than 10 minutes, and had opened up another half dozen in new links still to be listened to. Butterflying (a term lifted from Richard Dawkins) from one video to another without giving more than a minute’s of my time- and in many ways listening peripherally while completing other tasks- I came to realise I hadn’t really digested any of the music of the past 10 minutes…

In reading and researching for this essay, I quickly came to realise there exists a wealth of thoughts and ideas already on this top by people far smarter than me. I have only been able to touch on a few of these ideas. This essay is not in any way meant to be an comprhensive analysis, but instead a thought provoking discussion. A reference list for those that may be keen to check out any sources or ideas. I would also like to add that some of what I write could be flatley dismissed as mere cultural pessimism. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t - I dunno, really. 

//

Literary critic and theorist Harold Bloom is considered the forefront authority on the socio-science of influence. His seminal 1973 work ‘The Anxiety of Influence’ outlines his theory of the influence past poets had on those present. In brief, Bloom theorised that ‘poetic influence always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation’ and is ‘a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion…’  (Bloom, 1973). Decoding the above, Bloom suggests poets struggle to balance the influence of the greats before them in search of their own poetic voice, with many works merely misguided reproductions of the poetic canon. Whether you agree or disagree with Bloom’s theory, we can agree art is an additive and evolving phenomenon, as artist’s reaction to one another’s work- whether it be in a dismissive, imitative or even misinterpretive way- a mutation takes places that ensures progression. 

And although Bloom was focused on poets, it’s no stretch to superimpose his theory on all artistic endeavours- jazz included. In the same way a poet interprets a stanza through reading, a musician digests a piece of music through listening. Listening is the vehicle to which musician’s become influenced, and so as a student of music it is the quintessential pedagogical tool. Whether it be King Oliver’s influence (and mentorship) of Louis Armstrong; Keith Jarrett’s sonic resemblance in Brad Melhdau’s music; the less explicit influence of Lee Morgan in Ambrose Akinmusire playing (something he frequently notes in interviews), or even Bloom’s literary example of the influence of Nietzsche’s musings on the writings of Fraud. It doesn’t take Bloom’s book to realise that for every great artist there is another great artist who influenced them.

Focusing in on music here, the above examples span across the century of recorded music, and in that time the way music has been disseminated- more specifically, the way musicians have digested the music of their “influencer” has changed dramatically. The great majority of listening Armstrong undertook was on stage with his mentor. With the growth and the strengthening of the music industry and continual advancements in music technology, the past half a century has seen music change from an art form primarily digested live to one consumed through recordings.

But in the past decade and a half the music-sphere has faced its most dramatic shift since the very invention of recording technology (Boone, 2008). We have entered the age of information- also referred to as the ‘new media age’ -an era of connectivity and rapid globalisation where instantaneous gratification has become the norm thanks to contemporary technology. The way we consume music has shifted massively. Terms such as ‘music saturation’ and ‘data overload’ have been coined in the past decade as a direct response to this changing media landscape. And so I set out to answer the question:

 ‘Has the way we’ve come to listen to music in the “new media age” led us to become influenced by it differently?’

In researching for this essay, I came to realise this is a topic that encompasses more than socio-musicology. It not only encompasses the world of media and cultural theory, but also psychology and neurology, namely neuro-plasticity. With this in mind I have broken down this core question with three slightly more reasonable questions I’m keen to shed light on:

1. How are we listening differently today?

2. Do our changing listen habits place a lesser value on music today?

3. How are these differences affecting the way we are influenced as music students?

So, let us rewind back to the years before the proliferation of the Internet, where the world was a larger place…Since the invention of the phonograph- the first recording/playback device invented at the cusp of the 20th century, music (at least in certain popular spheres)  became in many ways more a physical entity than sonic- as Marshall McLuhen famously states the “medium is the message.” (McLuhen, 1964)

Although written in 1964, with the phonograph his musical subject of analysis- whether it be wax cylinders, LPs, cassettes or CDs, this physicality of music has meant over the greater half of the twentieth century that listening was a spatial affair. To share music you had to lend a physical copy to someone, meaning their worth was directly linked to their physicality. Even in the 80’s and 90’s with the invention of the Walkman and a new wave of portability, Sony’s device relied on the user having CD’s with them. Further, your ability to collect music was constrained by your access to physical space.

But, cue the 21st century and the rise of the mp3. Music, in the span of a decade, transformed from a physical entity to that of a virtual one. From the first commercial digital music player, MPMAN in 1998 (which could hold a grand told of six songs) to the release of the 5gb, 1001 capacity Ipod three years later, digital music portability quickly became the norm for listeners. The same leaps in technology also saw the popularisation of the hard drive and the invention of the cd-burner, allowing us to share, expand and duplicate our music libraries like mitotic cells.

But technology is not the only shifting factor. Another consideration is distribution. Owning a piece of music relied on a distribution channel that between you, the consumer, and the producer included a number of intermediaries such as wholesalers, distributors and retailers. If you wanted to purchase Wayne Shorter’s latest CD all of the above channels would need all the link in the distribution chain to meet for you to find it in your local music store. And, if any part of the chain was delayed e.g. printing was delayed, supply was low etc. you had to wait. Getting your hands on Shorter’s hot new record could be far more onerous than it is today. From first reading the review in Downbeat to holding it in your hands could take a good handful of time and effort. It wasn’t as easy as hopping from one online retailer to the next, clicking some buttons and having it on your computer, just like that. There was a far greater sense of delayed gratification in hearing the album you had read or heard about.

Today, not only are we spoiled for choice, but we are gifted with instant gratification. If we seek something, within a couple of clicks we own it. In many cases intermediaries are being omitted from the distribution channel as more and more we see ourselves buying music directly from vendors (Burkat, 2006). In fact, we don’t even need to even buy the music we listen to anymore- and that’s not even considering illegitimate P2P [peer to peer] file sharing a.k.a torrents. Sites such as Youtube and Soundcloud allow music to be listened to anywhere, at any time, for free.

More comprehensive than these sites are the increasingly popular music streaming services or ‘stream-on-demand’ that have risen to prominence in the past half a decade. The most well known of these services are Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and Grooveshark, although it seems every company wants a piece of the music-on-demand pie with heavy-weights Google, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung recently launching services among smaller companies such as Australian retailers JB Hi Fi, highlighting just how large the pie must be…

Streaming services allow subscribers access to upwards of 20 million songs for a nominal fee [around $5 to $10/month); some even offering an ad-based service for free. Discourse surrounding the ethics and economics of these platforms has risen to a fiery apex in the past 12 months with musicians both big and little discontented that they are receiving an average of $0.008 cents per play. In an attempt to quell recent backlash, Spotify created spotifyartists.com at the start of the year, a website defending and explaining in equal measure its business model (where the above figure was taken from). Although a bold attempt at transparency, it only solidifies how fundamentally flawed the streaming platform is. It’s worth a read nonetheless.

Although discussing the effects of this new music movement is an entire essay in itself, one opinion too critical to be left unshared is that of a blogger and David Byrne who wittingly compared this cyberutopia of free and legal music to that of diminishing natural resources.

“Streaming-on-demand services…allow one to play exactly what you want, when you want it—as if you own the record…for consumers this is a pretty amazing deal—it’s like Napster, but legal! The government tends to view things that way too—what’s good for the consumer is theoretically encouraged and supported. Sadly, consumers and businesses that cater to their demands don’t often take the long view; they’ve been known to overfish huge swaths of the oceans, spill oil over and over, chop down all the trees in a forest and then wonder why the topsoil that would support reforesting has washed away. So, I wonder similarly if streaming-on-demand might be similarly a business model that will deplete the resource—we who create music—that it depends upon. Many industries have depleted the resources they depend on, it’s not like it hasn’t happened before.”
http://davidbyrne.com/how-will-the-wolf-survive-can-musicians-make-a-living-in-the-streaming-era

The impact of these services aside, such changes in volume and consumption invariably equates to a shift in consumer’s relationship with music. Firstly- and for me the crux of this entire issue- people today own and/or have access to an exponentially larger body of music and able to amass a larger personal music libraries than music owners of the pre-internet era (largely exacerbated by illegal downloads in the last 10 years). What is the affect of continually discovering new music having on us? What does it mean to have an obtusely large music library, or more so, to have access to the entire catalogue of recorded music? The idea of data overload is one that has only come to forefront of analytical thought since the rise of the Internet. This overwhelming catalogue of material has, in the eyes of many, altered the very way we approach information.

Evolutionary biologist and atheism’s very own Star of Bethlehem Richard Dawkins admitted the internet to be the most radical change in the way we think in his lifetime. In John Brockman’s 2010 collection of essays Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? Dawkins asserts we have turned to ”a habit of butterflying from topic to topic rather than attending to one thing at a time.” (Brockman, 2010).  This is what I am seeing happening to my own listening habits, as I jump between a multitude of tabs, albums and articles, obsessed with consuming everything, while not really meaningfully consuming anything. Further, it seems this oversaturated music landscape means we value the experience of listening to music less - and so in turn are happy to listen in a non committed state- to let tunes drone on in the background as we complete, or be distracted by, other tasks. Even though we are purchasing, downloading and playing more music than ever, we seem to be listening less. Something that would dismay the late McLuhen, who in describing the improvisational element of jazz said “such performance insures maximal participation among players and dancers alike.” 

More than just our decaying attention, we hear how our memories, perceptive to this new technological age of connectivity and instant gratification, is retaining less of what we digest because it knows we can so easily retrieve the data again if needed. A 2011 study labelled such a phenomenon ‘external or transactive memory.’ It has since been labelled the ‘Google Effect’. Ryan Wittingslow of the University of Sydney, worded it well in a conversation.com article where he said: “In the face of this transition, the imperative to remember information has instead been replaced with the imperative to remember where information is located.”

These observations that our attention spans and memories are being altered and diminished in many ways seems to validate speculation that extended musical works are becoming less common as artists and industry alike realise consumers are more attracted to smaller bits of information. In an interview, Pat Metheny disclosed the inspiration behind his through-composed 70-minute epic ‘The Way Up’ as “a reaction to a world where things are getting shorter, dumber, less interesting, less detailed, more predictable.” (Adler, 2005) Admittedly Metheny is no sociologist; whether correct, or Pat and I just incidentally share a heavy bout of cultural pessimism, the studies are yet to confirm.

So, to answer my final question and hopefully come full circle in this discussion, what does this all mean for students of music? Well, without clinical studies examining the role of listening as a pedagogical tool there isn’t no definitive answer but if we compare the above against what we already know we may shed some light…

As stated earlier, listening is the quintessential tool for acquiring knowledge, authenticity and artistic integrity in the jazz idiom. The emphasis placed on the jazz canon, and one’s knowledge and understanding of it by teachers and peers alike only exemplifies the significance of listening. All the celebrated jazz pedagogy textbooks, including Dave Baker’s Jazz Improvisation and Jamie Aebersold’s Jazz Handbook devote entire chapters to listening, with Baker even go to such a length to confer each exercise with prescribed listening. (Baker, 1983)

Listening as a pedagogical tool is more than digesting music casually though, as NY pianist Fred Hersch points out in a recent master-class where he discussed the necessity of ‘dedicated listening’ (Sun, 2013). An idea also discussed in both Baker and Aebersold’s textbooks. Hersch explains ‘dedicated listening’ (also known as active listening’) as doing so with your full, unadulterated attention. He provides an example of listening to a single track for each instrument in the ensemble, so a track featuring a quartet would be listened to actively at least four times. Hersch said he prescribes one to two hours of dedicated listening a day for his students.

We also know that the greats of the past, far more limited in resources than the privileged listeners of today, would listen to a single album on repeat. I hypothesis not only were they not gifted with the phenomenon of instant gratification but there were less records bidding for not just their attentions, but wallets- a commitment to music that we are now far too often able to circumvent- shifting the value of music.

So, in short the anxiety of listening in the age of new media is such: we are faced with an obtusely large, every-growing, library of music as well as constantly berated with what’s “new” and “fresh”. Research in neuro-plasticity is confirming that our attention spans are shrinking as our brains adapt to the lighting-fast speed of the internet- ever-perceptive and ever more keen for new information, making it more and more difficult to digest media and music thoroughly.

This isn’t to say the art of dedicated listening is dead, but it is up against the growing zeitgeist of ‘short and fast’. I have witnessed first hand music saturation leading to a listening burn out. I fear the internet and the current thought trends surrounding music dissemination in the new media age will establish a paradox where more music means less listening out of data overload and saturation; which is a shame as without listening we are stunting our development as musicians and inturn diminishing the power and prevalence of one humanity’s most sacrosanct tools.

References:

Adler, D. (2005). Pat Metheny the advancing guitarist. Retrieved May 10th, 2014, from http://jazztimes.com/articles/15294-pat-metheny-the-advancing-guitarist

Baker, D. (1983). Jazz improvisation: A comprehensive method of study for all players. Bloomington IN: Frangipani Press

Bloom, H. (1991) The anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry: second addition. New York: NY: Oxford University Press

Boone, W. (2008). Composing playlists, conducting streams: The life of classical music in the internet age (Doctoral thesis) Available from ProQuest Disseration and Theses Global (Record No. 304536859)

Brockman, J. (2010). Is the internet changing the way you think: the net’s impact on our minds and future. New York City, NY: Harper Perennial.

Burkart, P., & McCourt, T. (2006). Digital music wars: ownership and control of the celestial jukebox. Maryland, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefild Publishers.

Byrne, D. (2012). How will the wolf survive: can musicians make a live in the streaming era [Web log post] Retrieved from http://davidbyrne.com/how-will-the-wolf-survive-can-musicians-make-a-living-in-the-streaming-era

Cowen, T. (2013) What is Art in the Internet Age. Retrieved May 4th, 2014, from http://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/what-art-internet-age

Excerpter. (2006). Marshal Mcluhan on recorded sound. Retrieved May 16th, 2014, from http://excerpter.wordpress.com/2006/10/27/marshall-mcluhan-on-recorded-sound/

Ford, S. M. (2002) Are we to be forever trapped between the two? The internet, modernity, and postmodernity in the early 21st century. Social Thought and Research, 25(1), 85-110. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/info/23250007

Gredley, R. (2014) Musical Shares and SheerKhan – How social media is helping us listen to the music. Retrieved May 4th, 2014, from http://vibewire.org/2014/01/musical-shares-and-sherekhan-how-social-media-is-helping-us-listen-to-the-music/

Kramer, L. (2011). Interpreting Music. California, LA: University of California Press

Lawson, S. (2012). I’ve got enough music: finding an audience in the age of saturation [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/11/ive-got-enough-music-finding-an-audience-in-an-age-of-saturation/

Mathis, M. (2003) On Re-reading Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence [Web log post] Retrieved from http://mileswmathis.com/op23.html

Mcluhen, M. (1964) Understanding media: the extension of man. New York, NY: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press

Naughton, G. (2014). The Devaluation of popular music. Retrieved May 10th, 2014, from https://medium.com/media-studies/61929ab751f5

Ross, J. M. (2009) Three paradoxes of the internet age: Part 1,2 & 3. Retrieved May 4th, 2014, from http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/11/three-paradoxes-of-the-interne.html

Rothman, J. (2011) Harold Bloom on the study of canon and creativity [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2011/05/harold_bloom_on.html

Sanspoint. (2013). You can devalue music. Retrieved May 14th, 2014, from http://www.sanspoint.com/archives/2013/11/08/can-devalue-music/

Schramm, H. (2006). Consumption and effect of music in media. Communication Research Trends, 25 (4) 3-21. Retrieved from http://cscc.scu.edu/trends/v25/

Styvén, M. (2007). The intangibility of music in the internet age. Popular Music and Society, 30(1), 53-74. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.library.usyd.edu.au/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1339751?accountid=14757

Sun, K. (2013). Anxiety of jazz [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.thekevinsun.com/2013/12/one-joe-henderson-lick-anxiety-of.html

Sun, K. (2013). Fred Hersch masterclass [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.thekevinsun.com/2012/09/fred-hersch-masterclass-found-chords.html

Sydney Morning Herald (2013). Spotify fights royalties criticism with new site. Retrieved May 10th, 2014, from http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/spotify-fights-royalties-criticism-with-new-site-20131203-2ypfs.html

Walters, C. (2012) Connect or digitally altered. Retrieved May 4th, 2014, from http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/connected-or-digitally-altered-20120405-1weu4.html

http://theconversation.com/outsourcing-memory-the-internet-has-changed-how-we-remember-10871

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1179201/business-matters-75000-albums-released-in-us-in-2010-down-22-from-2009
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.short]