How Technology Changed Music | Science Goes to the Movies

did technology change music of course it did and look at how up next on science goes to the movies [Music] welcome to science goes to the movies a look at the stories of science and how they change our culture i'm lisa beth kovetz today we've got mark katz a university of north carolina music professor author and former director of the unc institute for the arts and humanities we're talking about two of his very interesting books build the power of hip-hop diplomacy in a divided world and capturing sound how technology has changed music hello mark hello thanks for having me in rocketman the musical film based on the collaborations of elton john and bernie toppin the viewer is treated to a behind the scenes glimpse at the spectacle of an elton john concert and we've become so accustomed to the technology that allows us to separate and recombine the audio and visual components of music that we no longer see that as anything remarkable but in his book capturing sound how technology has changed music professor katz considers the changes that occurred when technology first invaded music what was the technology that first separated music from its visual component well there had been technologies for centuries like music boxes for example that had separated sound from sight but it was really the phonograph which was introduced in 1877 that separated the human body from its voice and from its sound and that was something that was really disconcerting for people well it's hard to imagine now what was so shocking about this new technology well one of the things i i talk about my book and and the approach that i take is that i want people to think about this technology when it was new as if they had never experienced it before it's it's a hard imaginative leap but if you can do that you can get inside the heads and minds of people who first encountered it so try to imagine that any time you had heard uh music live music of any uh let's say performance of any type of music you had been in the room with the musicians so that's how it'd be if you were at a concert if you were outside listening to music if you were in a church or a house of worship so you always had a visual component so when people started hearing music particularly the human voice when someone would sing without seeing the body it really was disconcerting people would would look around where is the you know where is the person singing and they did some really interesting things at least at first to try to compensate for it some people would look at photographs of performers while listening i read of of one opera enthusiast who created little cutout sets for all the operas he listened to so he could look at the sets while listening to the music so it took a while before people could really learn how to listen to the phonograph and that's that's something i really want to emphasize that what seems so natural to us we listen to music disembodied music all the time that that was really strange and and novel a hundred or so years ago and people had to learn how to listen to music that way did it all it must have also changed how music was made it did this technology didn't just capture these sounds it didn't just record things and preserve them it it actually had an effect on how the music was made for so many reasons i mean one reason in the early days was that the recording horns these gigantic horns that that people had to play into before their microphones did not receive sound in a very efficient or sophisticated way so people would have to play differently or they would have to play different instruments even sometimes they would substitute an instrument for a tuba instead of a base or wood blocks instead of a drum and then in the studio itself it was so strange for people because for example there might be someone that they called a pusher who would stand behind the performer and hold on to them and literally push them towards the horn or pull them away from the horn if they were getting too loud or soft because if it were too loud it could blast the needle out of the groove if it were too soft it wouldn't be captured so people had to learn how to perform for recording just as people had to learn how to listen well professor katz shares fascinating details in his book but because of time we're going to focus on how that technological separation of visual and audio affected the jazz community how did recorded music affect first off the popularity of jazz well one thing about recording is that it travels differently than live music so it has a different kind of portability to it and there's so many great stories of of people listening to recordings in very remote places when they couldn't have heard the music otherwise and in terms of jazz what recording allowed was for people to hear and then learn jazz who were not in the big cities who were very far away from any place they might hear live jazz so there's a story of bix beiderbeck who is a famous early trumpeter who who is really nowhere near all the greats that he would have liked to hear but with the recording he was able to listen to people like louis armstrong and other other famous jazz artists in iowa where where that was his only opportunity and what he would do is he would just play the recordings over and over and over again so what we see is two aspects of this recording technology the portability of it and the repeatability of it that had a really profound impact on jazz but without the music without the visual did it also affect how they were learning the music how you know if a young artist is hearing this the first time he's not seeing the bow string he's not seeing the physicality did that make a difference to them it did because because of just what you're saying that they couldn't see the the gestures they had to come up with their own ways of playing and there's a funny story that i relate in the book where someone a bass player was listening to um a recording and wanted to um one to be able to play it himself so he spent hours and hours days and days listening to over and over again and he thought it was nearly impossible but he finally mastered it and turned out that it was actually a duet so there were two bass players and that's the fact that he couldn't see it he didn't know that there were two bass players and so that's in an interesting way a deficiency of this technology allowed him to do something that no one would have tried otherwise which is to play a duet as a solo he became extraordinary because of the lack of of of of understanding it's actually an amazing story and that's that's something that fueled a lot of a lot of performers is all they had was recordings in their basement they would gather around with their friends and they had to figure it out so it was very different from the kind of classical training where where you would be in the same room you would be reading music people had to fill in the blanks themselves you know a lot of jazz fans want want just the music coming at them and nothing else but but jazz has a significant social context did this separation of audio and visual change the social context of jazz it did and it did this for jazz and rock and a lot of different kinds of music one one thing about the technology because of its portability it travels across racial lines so people could listen to music particularly african-american people could listen to music at home that they couldn't listen to in public because they would have been barred from entering those those spaces there are some famous examples of multi-racial bands playing and how much trouble they had and in the recording studio there was less trouble uh inter in doing that because you couldn't see and and there are lots of interesting examples of how people made assumptions about the race of of a performer and although this isn't jazz that happened with elvis people people uh many people hearing him for the first time in the early 50s when he started recording thought he was black and one story i think it's true is that the radio announcer would say this is elvis presley from such and such high school and because the high schools or who went to this high school because the high schools were segregated people knew immediately that he must be white oh oh really in rocket man and the freddie mercury biopic bohemian rhapsody we see artists creating music and recording studios in the 1970 and oh my god the 1970s were forever ago but in these scenes we can see clearly that even in the 1970s there are multiple microphones and isolated tracks how can you record music without multiple microphones and isolated tracks i mean how could you do that well from the very earliest days it was really just often a single horn in someone playing into it there there was there was no splicing no overdubbing no ability to do different tracks if you messed up you just had to start from the beginning but after world war ii these new technological possibilities came on board splicing for example where you can put together two two recordings that were done at different times so that they are sound as if it's one seamless recording or over dubbing where you hear multiple voices sounding at the same time when they didn't perform at the same time so these were still relatively new in the 60s and the beatles did it did so much to capitalize that and then in bohemian rhapsody there are some great scenes where you see them playing around with the technology and i love those scenes because they show you just how much that the recording studio played a very fundamental role in the creation of music are you talking about that scene and where would they keep trying to sing the word galileo again and again yes and in fact there are two scenes that are both great one one in earlier scene where they're actually swinging a a speaker from a wire to create a panning sound and they're throwing pennies on the on the drum heads and and you could see the experimentation and then and then later on a few years later when they're doing bohemian rhapsody and you see they're asking the poor guy to sing galileo at ever higher pitches and one of the remarkable things about that song is just how constructed it was it was there were only three people singing but it sounds like a chorus of dozens so i can do that at my desktop now you're saying that they didn't even in the 70s have the ability to to to make the sound feel like it's moving across the room well you could but in the uh in the early years people experimented in different ways and using speakers uh but but in terms of the the over dubbing they had to they had to put it on tape on actual physical you know tape and there's one mention that i thought was interesting in um in bohemian rhapsody where they talk about wearing the tape thin and that's something you had to worry about because you were putting you were recording something on top of the same tape over and over again and it was going through the tape heads and it really could do damage to the tape and that was it you didn't have the backups you had to record it over again right before the magnetic tape avant-garde artists in pre-nazi germany were using technology to manipulate recorded sound so what is gramophone music so um this is i mean literally if you think about it it's music made from the gramophone so the phonograph the recorder so there are these incredible experiments that uh people like aaron stock did in in the in the 30s where they did all the things that later became possible with tape like over dubbing and splicing but they did it with with records which is almost impossible to conceive because uh because these weren't really re-recordable very easily so they would have to record something you'd have multiple multiple phonographs you would record something and then then play it back and then record something onto another phone and graph a separate one and then get a third one and play these two and record it on that one and if you want to have four um things sounding as if they were um playing at the same time then you would have to start three playing and record that and and and so on and so on so it was kind of crazy but it was but it was it anticipated a lot of the technological developments that came decades later so the art came first or the desire to manipulate the sound was really deep in us before we got the technology to actually execute it yes and that's a really important point because a lot of people make assumptions about about musical change and technology that it's the technology that drives it well you had splicing so suddenly you did this or you had over dubbing so you could do uh bohemian rhapsody but in fact it's always been an interplay between the artists and the technology where sometimes the artists are way ahead of the technology and try to do things that the technology doesn't yet allow and sometimes the technology has capabilities that the artists haven't yet conceived of so it's always this uh this kind of dialogue between the technology and the and the users it's a push me pull you it it brings one one drags the other forward again and again exactly and and it's really important to understand that that we don't fall into kind of wonky academic turn uh technological determinism which means the technology made me do it essentially because that is often the way we think and it's actually hard to get away from that for example my iphone i feel like my iphone makes me not listen to my family at dinner um but in fact it's not it's you know it's that it's that relationship between me and the technology that creates that but when you apply the technology to art do you think that that more is better do you think you know more technology makes for more interesting art or or are there pitfalls there are always pitfalls and in fact i've i take a different view of technology and music because i have a very broad view in which technology is pretty much everywhere and it's always been part of music so i consider instruments musical instruments to be technologies sheet music to be technology most of the time we just think of technology as electronic or new but the piano is an incredibly complex machine and and it's funny when it first came came on the scene several hundred years ago people said oh it's this monstrous contraption it's like a you know it's like a furnace with you know i mean people compared it to machines very um there was piano hate people hated pianos when they there was a lot of piano hate because uh because it replaced the um or was seen to replace the more genteel harpsichord and and people looked at it and said oh this beastly machine but then what's so funny is a 100 or more years later say in the 20th century where you start to have player pianos people said oh the this horrible technology the player piano is replacing the beautiful natural piano so it's always these cycles where where an instrument or some kind of tool when it's new is seen as a technology and as inauthentic or as some kind of invader but then when it becomes part of the musical landscape it's naturalized and then it's something new that threatens that old technology so it's this continuous cycle where people are adopting rejecting and adapting technologies well just it sometimes seems to me as a lay person that the biggest thing to hit music was electricity that that electrifying music change there's no rock and roll without electric guitars and that really made the a huge change in our musical landscape once we got electricity well that's absolutely right there's no there's no doubting that elect electrification changed everything um the electric guitar is really its own instrument it's it's quite different from an acoustic guitar um you can't really play in an electric guitar without electricity and think of the giant stacks of speakers that you see at rock concerts i mean that volume of sound that power the distortion that comes from electric guitars from speakers which makes your body feel exactly and and that is it has a direct physical impact on us um if you go to a club a dance club you feel the bass in your chest it's uh it's almost uh resonating with your heart so so there's no doubt that electrification and these technologies that allowed for amplification just changed everything it made music a really visceral experience and not just an audio experience well in a different way because one interesting thing to think about is that before all this you had to be in the presence of the performers so it would have been visceral and in fact so interesting even earlier on before things got specialized and there were performers that just performed and listeners that just listened everyone made music so um so every every family every every institution every grouping had a musical component to it is that what you're saying yes but also just that music was part of everyday life it wasn't separated into a class of musicians you you know if there was a ritual and people sang you probably sang too or if there's dance you would dance um of course there were specialists but um but there wasn't the uh the kind of the the same kind of dedicated audience where they would just be silent and sit and listen that's actually a fairly recent development in in history really that's so interesting yeah the uh the idea that we would be in comfy chairs like this and sit quietly maybe look at a program clap at certain points and not at others is actually a fairly recent development i mean even in the 20th century and it used to be much more uh freewheeling where people would get up and and eat oranges or throw oranges or and i'm just talking about classical music here really yeah italy was particularly rambunctious they have a lot of oranges yeah in his book professor cass describes how artists changed recording technology even as recording technology changed artists especially as it applies to hip hop what did hip hop bring to this technology and and vice versa so hip-hop is fundamentally at least historically a technological genre because the way it started was in the 70s in the early 70s djs young djs in the bronx made a discovery which is that dancers really liked certain parts of the record where it was just just the drum just the drum beats there was always a little solo called the break and and people some people called it the get down part because that's where people really got down and some enterprising djs like cool herc and african bambada grand master flash grand wizard theodore others like that would isolate those drum breaks and and play them over and over again and then people really went wild and um popular um and uh sort of the popular term for that is break dancing because they were dancing to the breaks now to be really correct most people that we would consider break dancers prefer to call themselves b boys or b girls or breakers but in any case the story of hip-hop is the birth of hip-hop is really about the relationship between djs and dancers and it was it was technological and then the rise of rapping came because you had mcs the master of ceremonies who served in a the traditional mc sense of announcing things telling people someone you know the lights car has its lights on or i found some keys but but then started to be serve as hype men or hype women for the djs and then would throw in some rhymes and and really that's how hip-hop came to be was this this real kind of exploitation of available technologies recording technology microphone and and and it was enterprising teenagers who did this that's something that's really incredible to remember is that this multinational global multi-billion dollar industry was created by teenagers that is extraordinary yes we we do forget that how young people were when they were creating these things when they were inventing these things for the first time that's that's fascinating and on september 4th 2019 hulu premiered the first episode of wu tang and american saga and early on in the saga you see a young bobby diggs in the music store looking at a two thousand dollar drum machine yes so we're talking about all this great technology but it's really quite expensive is the financial burden of the technology affecting art it does um but but artists always find a way um so there are great stories of people like grandmaster flash who would just walk around the bronx and he would he would find abandoned cars and pull out the stereos he would create sound systems from from whatever he could find there are people who would would just save up for months and months would borrow equipment would use their families equipment and then there are some famous anecdotes from the the great blackout in new york in 1977 when uh there was a lot of looting that went on and a lot of people acquired expensive uh musical gear and and i've interviewed some djs who say well that's how i got my mixer was when all went dark in 1977. that's extraordinary but it also made them force them to be artists in a different way you know it forced them to be mechanical artists mechanical wizards putting all of this stuff together exactly they had to know how to fix the equipment for one thing sometimes they built the equipment and i've interviewed djs who talk about these incredible things that they did and how enterprising they are one dj said that he couldn't afford disco lights so he uh he took an umbrella he punched holes in it he hung it upside down and put christmas lights in it and spun it and those were his disco lights very artistic right and very enterprising so sometimes the um the cost of this technology when it was out of out of reach just forced people to be even more industrious well it must have it must have changed the type of artist that could be a dj it did and um and or it forced people to learn but but one thing that we're seeing now and really in the last 10 10 or so years as digital equipment becomes cheaper and cheaper is that it lowers the barrier to entry for people to become djs producers beat makers composers and so on because now people can afford can afford laptops and can use free software and can create music so there are often these cycles where a new technology is introduced it's way too expensive people figure ways around it and then it comes down and a new new group of people comes in my ex-husband called called midi musicians in debt indefinitely yes in the early years yes but now this technology is a lot cheaper right mark thank you so much for spending time with us and best of luck on the book well thank you it's been a pleasure [Music] you

2022-01-16 06:44

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