Endless Options and the Listening Mind
- How streaming music services impact the listening process for musicians -
I went to college with 3 shoe boxes of carefully chosen CD’s. 6 years later In the early 2000s I was one of many music lovers excited about the expanded functionality afforded by the MP3 player. These new audio devices came in many forms and played all different kinds of media formats, such as mini discs, recordable CDs loaded with compressed audio, and music in data form that was held directly on what was essentially a flash drive. The main benefit of such audio players was portability. Where many of us used to bring music along on travel via small books of CDs, we now could have much more music in a single device that was not much larger that a tin of mints. In the case of MP3 players that played CDRs we could now hold 3 times as much music on a single recordable CD than before. My main interest in this technology completely sidestepped any problem associated with compressed audio and lossy sound formats. As a musician, I wanted to have all the music in my collection that was relevant to my current learning cycle in one place at all times, ready for study and review anywhere I happened to be. As I made my first 35-song playlist on a recordable CD I wondered to myself how this would change how I listen to and absorb music. The practical implications of this “technology of availability” was greatly accelerated with the advent of streaming services, and now 20 years since I first wondered what effect this would have on me, not just as a listener but as a musician, I am taking stock.
I spent the first 10 years of my structured student-hood with relatively few resources to collect recorded music, in contrast with todays listeners. Furthermore, some of my areas of study were highly specialized and not widely recorded. Aside from my collection in the shoe boxes under my dorm room bed I had the university's library that contained a lot of music, although only some of which pertained to my specialties. To expand my ability to listen to as much new music as possible in the area I was curious about I met with the director of the college radio station to create a position for myself as the what was then known in the industry as “world music” director. Immediately upon taking that position I went through the process of getting our station on the promo list for all of my favorite labels and I was soon getting a steady stream of great new music as soon as it was available and doing my part to make sure it had representation on the station.
During this time, using all the resources I had available to me to absorb as much music as possible, I was still listing to the same recordings repeatedly over relatively long periods of time and developing a familiarity with them. I remember that there would be songs or entire albums that I thought were only OK but had something special about them that I could mine from repeated listening. I stuck with these recordings because, the chances of finding the same unique combination of influences on another record was rare due to lack of algorithmic categorization, since there were no apps to recommend a similar record. All of this meant that if I thought that a record could have taken some of its elements to a more developed place I would have to use my imagination to find it most of the time. Recordings that were truly important to me as a musician would get high priority during listening sessions because the time to hunt for new music was always limited. If a label hadn’t sent something as irreplaceable as a favorite record to the station, there were only so many places to look and listen for the kind of music I really loved. This left a lot of time to listen and fewer records to listen to.
The overall effect was that I knew my influences very, very well. I knew who they were and I knew what they sounded like. I knew the sections of pieces that I thought sounded like they were nearly mistakes and I knew where the noise and pops were on the old recordings that were remastered. The personality of a performance took shape over hundreds of listens, and instead of wondering what else there was like it I wondered what else I could find in it. This relationship to my record collection did a few important things for me as a musician trying to assimilate the inspiring qualities of my chosen influences.
During the period of my life when I was listening in this way I would naturally gravitate towards the musical choices that my influences might make when I was playing music myself. Absorbing style from a recording, or any teacher, in a way that is musical requires repeated and focused listening. Any rudimentary research into how the brain learns will show that repetition strengthens connection. The stronger the connection, the more insight becomes possible. Initial listening makes an impression that conveys texture, quality, and dynamic fairly easily. Think of the first time you heard a truly revolutionary record that was in some way exceptional in its field compared to everything that came before it. Maybe you had never heard a single, simple repeating phrases used as the only compositional element, or perhaps you had never heard an instrument make sound that was entirely atonal and sculptural while still utilizing conventional song forms. You can describe the influence those pieces had on you the way I just described them and later that day you might be able to imitate those musical choices in a performing or composing session. This would probably only get you so far in terms of accessing what was really compelling about the recording of these techniques. In the first example you might create a piece that uses a simple motif as the main compositional element, but since your relationship to that concept is relatively new you might not have a well formed sense of what the purpose of that technique is, what is meant by it, and why you are doing it at all besides the fact that it caught your attention. You might not have a very well formed sense of the intended effect of that technique, and so you would not have a mindset that is prepared to utilize it to make a convincing musical statement, no matter how open-ended. In the second example, you could go to a session with other musicians and use sculptural sound in your solos, but you may not have taken stock of the fact that the recording that influenced you arranged this technique to offset it against other elements that support its use in very complex ways.
These are examples of the surface elements of exceptional choices that conceal larger, less perceptible aspects of what makes a recorded performance compelling to you. In these examples it is easy to separate out intake of surface elements because they are set apart in some way—but what about compelling performances that reside within well established norms? A version of a classical guitar piece that has been recorded hundreds of times, for example: At first listen you hear might hear virtuosic speed, but later realize that the speed is actually not the hard part; it is the clarity between registers that makes the speed really speak to you. Or a jazz guitar soloist whose tone is beautiful, full, and rounded. You might find that what is really happening is that this lyrical tone is also amplified by incredibly song-like and singable phrasing, so even though they are playing an instrument that does not require strategic breathing, they somehow phrase like a saxophone or a singer, which is rare in your experience. These realizations that come from long-term relationships to recorded performance only go deeper, and many of you know this feeling, when your impression of a recording or an artist’s style takes on a mythology of its own. These are the times when you begin to imagine a whole story around the style, when you know a solo so well that you can hear the last note in the first note, and the reason for everything that happens in your favorite recordings becomes a chain of cause and effect that you understand perfectly. At this point you are able to arrange your instrument practice to realize this chosen influence in your own style in a way that transcends mere imitation. This is the point where you are able to take this gift that this influence has given to the world and continue its work with integrity in your own living dynamic musicality.
The recording arts have preserved for us so many amazing performances, and it is always tempting to hear as much as we can when given the chance. I did, and from the very first day I did I told myself I would pay attention to the effect it had, because to me the benefit of a well curated, relatively small collection was clear and had proven itself, whereas the benefit of nearly infinite choice had not. The benefit I received from spending more time with fewer records was inversely realized when I began using streaming services in an attempt to improve my musicality by exposing myself to as much music as possible. I even made playlists in streaming service apps to track my listening, and at the end of the year I could barely remember listening to some of the music on the list and most of it I couldn’t tell you much about. What was really interesting was comparing my playlists on streaming services to music I actually bought. The streaming services did help me find a few things; however, most of the music that I purchased I discovered via journalists, time I spent searching, or other invested friends and curators.
Streaming services have been a very hot topic over the last few years, mostly for their economic implications. I am suggesting that for musicians in particular the implications for how we absorb chosen influences on platforms designed for scrolling through content in search of passive discovery should be observed and considered. We know from the hours we have spent practicing that we become more efficient at what we practice. This principle also carries over into how we use our minds, as passive discovery begets a fleeting benefit, just as engaged discovery builds a mind that can creatively find and assimilate the most effective traits of art that we love.