Keep Music Auto!

Music technology is divisive. On the one hand, there are the early adopters: the musicians who take up new developments to develop new sounds. On the other hand, there is the old guard: the traditionalists who regard technology as cheating. For them, new music machines don’t represent progress. They are instead a means by which ‘real’ musicians are deprived of honest work.

            The invention of sound recording was a major cause for complaint. In 1906, John Philip Sousa railed against ‘the menace of mechanical music’. He thought that if people had records they would no longer feel the need to make music of their own. Sousa fretted, ‘vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?’ Musicians’ unions have campaigned along similar lines. The British MU and the American AFM have both fought to ‘keep music live’. They too have seen the ‘ever-present menace’ of recorded music, claiming that, if it becomes dominant, ‘the musician may well become extinct and music may cease to be written’.

            And now we have auto-tune. This device invites similar vitriol – just look at its name. It is telling us that it will automate voices and it will automatically write tunes. To use auto-tune is to cheat, replacing humans with machines. Some musicians are angry about it. Christine Aguilera has a t-shirt that says ‘auto-tune is for pussies’, Death Cab for Cutie have worn ribbons to mark their disgust at the use of the device, Jay-Z has recorded ‘D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)’.

            Those who spring to auto-tune’s defence cite its use as a creative tool. It is part of a lineage of treated vocals. Artists as diverse as Kraftwerk, Neil Young, Cher and Kanye West have used machines to reach places beyond the human voice. Conversely, auto-tune and vocoders are viewed as having a particular humanity. They can highlight both the loneliness and the funkiness of the soul. Auto-tune is also credited with being a democratising instrument, one that enables non-singers to express their full emotional range.

            What is less regularly remarked upon is the ability of machines to improve musicianship. Looking back at the early years of the phonograph, for example, we can see that sound recording helped to develop rhythmic control. Early recording artists were distinguished by their strict sense of time, a skill fostered by the limits imposed upon their work. The maximum duration of cylinders and discs in the 1890s was roughly two minutes. Artists recorded directly onto master records; if any mistakes were made these would have to be scrapped and the piece started over, literally, from scratch. Consequently, the tempo and the timing of performances were worked out prior to recording. The early recording artist Billy Murray commented, ‘We are taught to keep perfect time. Stage performers are not held strictly to the limit as we are’.

Sound recording also helped to improve rhythmic fluency. The introduction of electric recording in the mid-1920s provided steps in this direction. There were now motorized record players with standardized speeds, a development that further heightened the awareness of being in time. Electric recording also enabled the rhythm section to be recorded properly: the microphone had the ability to capture both the bass and the drums. These developments could be seen as well as heard: the steady pulse of the rhythm was visible in a record’s grooves. It is in this period that we gained the verb ‘to groove’. Groups were becoming as tight and as rhythmic as a record’s spiral scratch.

            I think that something similar has happened with auto-tune. It hasn’t made singers lazy; it has stretched their abilities. Auto-tune may have its roots in the human voice, but the human voice is now mimicking this machine. It has provided an example of what it means to have perfect pitch, and it has inspired singers to have wide vocal ranges and to master complicated riffs. Auto-tune has also encouraged songwriters to compose songs that demand outstanding vocal performances. Of course plenty of ‘cheating’ still goes on. Vocals are digitally manipulated so that they are perfectly in time and in tune. However, a singer will not make it these days unless they are almost perfect on their own. There is a feedback loop too. These corrected vocal performances only heighten expectations; each new vocal generation ‘naturally’ adopts the quantized characteristics of the last. The gymnastic bar of singing is constantly being raised. We needn’t lose sheep about machines replacing musicianship. In fact, if there is a nightmare scenario, it resides in the reverse. It may well be musicianship that is out of control. The singing is taking over the songs. 

Pop Modernism

Pop modernism operates as a lobbying body within popular music. It is not the mainstream, but can enter the mainstream at periods of peak activity. For some, it is pop’s preferred state. It embraces the spirit of modernism outlined by Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New, expecting ‘cultural turmoil’ to foretell ‘social tumult’. Here, ‘music heralds’, fulfilling the purpose that Jacques Attali outlined for it:

Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.

Pop modernism first surfaced in the late 1960s, as rock music attempted to splinter from pop. Although it inherited characteristics from fine art philosophies of modernism, it rested primarily upon ‘low theory’, as Simon Frith terms it, theory that was

developed out of day-to-day practices of pop itself . . . confused, inconsistent, full of hyperbole and silence, but still theory, and theory which is compelled by necessity to draw key terms and assumptions from high theory, from the more systematic accounts of art, commerce, pleasure and class that are available.

From the higher theorising of art, pop modernism has taken ideas of onward progress, originality, formal experimentation and technological fascination, a belief that you should reject ‘the current state of things in favour of the new’. It has also inherited an occasional snobbishness, a belief that progressive art should stand above ‘the realms of mass culture and everyday life’. Rock ideology, for example, included a rejection of the singles charts, as its ‘artists’ put their faith in albums instead. Speaking in 1967, Eric Clapton believed:

Singles are an anachronism. To get any good music in a space of two or three minutes requires working to a formula and that part of the pop scene really leaves me cold. I hate all that rushing around trying to get a hit.

There were technologies and institutions that helped rock artists to achieve these ends. Vinyl albums operated in a different manner to vinyl singles, both as objects and in the way that they functioned in the marketplace. Radio also helped to uphold the rock/pop split. In America the former genre was found on FM stations, while the latter remained on AM. In Britain, meanwhile, rock was the preserve of ‘specialist’ shows, broadcast in the evening hours. The two forms of music were also written about in different forms of print media, and there were different conventions when it came to playing live. It was not possible, however, for rock music to make a complete break from pop music. Unlike modernist fine art, rock music had been born within mass culture. Moreover, it was not always desirable to stay removed from the singles charts. Financially, rock artists needed to release singles in order to promote their albums. Artistically, some of them welcomed the challenge of bringing diversity to the charts. Marc Bolan declared, ‘me getting into the Top Twenty – as a musician alongside the pop stars – opens up a great thing’.

            A modernist spirit has been present in popular music at several times since the late 1960s. It has not been consistent, however. There have been particular periods when pop has become more openly questing, and there have been times in which the conditions have been ripe for this impulse to be maximised. Technology has been one driver for pop’s expansion. Synthesisers, sequencers and samplers have each helped to push the music forwards, as have new recording formats, notably the 12” single. Drugs have been another prompt. LSD and MDMA are among those to offer enhanced horizons. Pop modernism can arise when the interplay between the major labels and the independent sector is in productive tension. Separate sales charts for alternative music and dance genres have helped to foster scenes; dedicated radio support has also been essential. 

            Many of those who complain about a decline of innovation in popular music have been involved in pop’s modernist spurts. Simon Reynolds is a prime example. He has stated:

When I started taking more than a passing interest in pop, as a teenager in the post-punk seventies, I immediately ingested a strong dose of modernism: the belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future. It was there already in rock, thanks to The Beatles, psychedelia and progressive rock, but post-punk drastically amped up the belief in constant change and endless innovation. Although by the early eighties modernism was thoroughly eclipsed within art and architecture, and postmodernism was seeping into popular music, this spirit of modernist pop carried on with rave and the experimental fringe of rock.

Pop modernists such as Reynolds hark back to the vital periods of their youth; they are nostalgic, as Svetlana Boym puts it, ‘for a prenostalgic state of being’. They yearn for an era when neither they nor the music they loved were retrospective. One of the prompts for this nostalgia is that it feels as though we should be experiencing radical musical innovation: we are living through a period of major technological and infrastructural change. However, we do not appear to have many new styles of music. Contrary to Jacques Attali, it is not music itself that is heralding a new economic order; it is instead the economic organization of music that is operating in advance of other markets.