Music Matter?
September 19 2009

When you wake up. When you're in the shower. When you eat. When you drive.

At your desk. At the café. While you walk. While you work out.

The music is on. Still on. Still on. And still on.

Throughout history, music has been the exceptional intruder into nature's soundscape. Birds tweet-tweeted, wheels trundled, voices rose, and silences fell. The world was otherwise quiet.

Music was a disruptive act of will. Someone would do something. Play an instrument. Spin a record. Sing. Without the act of will, the world revolved onward with its noises, but no music.

An act of will. An act. Active. Activity. Activated. Music was all of these.

Now music is passive. A generation ago, the change began. Muzak. Pervasive radio. Affordable sound systems. Walkmen. Easy compact media. Home recording.

These and other atoms bonded, producing todays aural molecules of always on / everywhere on music.

Music pervades not only indoor controlled environments like cafés, restaurants and malls. Outdoor shopping areas, subways, boom-boom cars drive by, visiting friends- music music music music music music.

We are passive recipient aural vessels. Music no longer requires an act. It merely requires existence, and that someone press a button.

Music has evolved into a fungible state. A symphony, a song, a soundtrack, a serenade- one is as good as another. We value it no longer like individual stones in a jewel box. More like an inexhaustible vein of diamond- valuable but indistinct. Like oxygen, we both need and take little notice it.

Silence is now the act of will. The activity. It intrudes only when we do something to create it. We've inverted the soundscape. Silence survives as the exceptional intruder.

Do not assume the Pianobabbler is ranting here. Abundance need not equate atrocity. And an overstock of supply supplies the supplier a superficially satisfying circumstance. Superficial because oversupply can lead to under-demand.

For now though, the Pianobabbler can predict neither where music's new ubiquity will go, nor where we will go with it.

Maybe if I turned down the classical music that's been streaming while writing I'd have a better idea. I'm not sure who the composer was, but the last piece was quite nice.

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