99% Invisible - 269- Ways of Hearing

Episode Date: August 2, 2017

When the tape started rolling in old analog recording studios, there was a feeling that musicians were about to capture a particular moment. On tape, there was no “undo.” They could try again, if they had the time and money, but they couldn’t move backwards. What’s done is done, for better and worse. Digital machines entered the mix in the 1980s, changing the way music was made — machines with a different sense of time. And the digital era has not just altered our tools for working with sound but also our relationship to time itself. Part of the new Radiotopia Showcase, Ways of Hearing is a six-episode series hosted by musician Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi), exploring the nature of listening in our digital world. Each episode looks at a different way that the switch from analog to digital audio is influencing our perceptions, changing our ideas of Time, Space, Love, Money, Power and Noise. In the digital age, our voices carry further than they ever did before, but how are they being heard? Plus, we have a little bonus, classic episode of 99pi, featuring Sound Opinions. Ways of Hearing

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Here's someone you should know. Julie Shapiro, I'm Executive Producer of Radio Topia. And we're going to talk about Showcase. Showcase is a new project from Radio Topia and the first series in Showcase, and really the whole concept of Showcase,

happens to make a good 99% Invisible story. So I asked Julie to come talk to me about it. And this is very much your project that you're experiencing. So can you tell us a little bit about Showcase and how it serves the mission of radiotopia? Sure. Well, Showcase directly came out of our experience with PodQuest, which we ran about a year ago,

where we invited anyone and everyone to submit podcast ideas about whatever they were interested and are wanted to make a podcast about. And we got over 1,500 entries and we chose one. It was called Ear Hustle. It's now a show in radiotopia. But it's the thing that I'm- Incredibly popular show in the video talk.

Yeah, it's a show we're very, very proud of and amazed at the response it's been getting, et cetera. But the point was we had so many great ideas, but they weren't all necessarily sustainable long-term show ideas and thought, well, what if radio topia could get behind a podcast that featured all of these different ideas one after another? Without them being separate podcasts that had to go out and gain their own audience and

live on their own, how could we use the radio topia name and reputation to help support even more producers with different kinds of ideas that wouldn't be ongoing shows. And so what showcase is, is one podcast that has limited run series one after another, with short breaks in between. And these will be shows of all stripes. We're really going to play with form, play with topics, push boundaries, give new producers a chance and really see how we can provide really high quality listening for our audiences.

How do you conceive of something that sort of sticks together, holds together enough to be a radio-topia show or kind of represent our values in a certain way, but also be disparate enough to make this an experiment worth having? I'm just looking for ideas that I know, like I'm interested in automatically. I haven't heard anything like that before, but the producers kind of fit the radiotopia profile. They're independent, they're highly ambitious.

They have big ideas about the subject that they're bringing to my attention, but they have a sense of humor and they can play a little bit, and they're sound inclined. I think every pitch I'm considering right now has a lot of sound involved because that's really a hallmark of a lot of radio topia shows. This is careful crafting, again, how to experiment with the form, how to hear from new voices.

So part of it is like what are topics we haven't heard yet, you know, go in those directions and also just encourage people to like really come up with something brand new original. Something we can take a bit of a risk on because the reward is going to be in trying something new and giving listeners a new listening experience. Yeah, so this is going to be the type of podcast for the adventurous listener and will reward that type of person. And so I'm going to just do this in put my 9.9.pi hat on

as it, from a design perspective. Why all one podcast, like through this format, what type of experience are you trying to shape and cultivate with the audience? It's a really good question because we also talked about all of these series just being separate podcasts. There's some liability here.

Will people stick with it from one to the next? But I really hope, you know, the through line for all of these series is going to be an original radio topy and sense of surprise and quality, and no matter what the topic is, hopefully people will tune in. And, you know, people thinking of it as a showcase experience, not just thinking about the series that comes up next, but really having this like comprehensive sense of what this offering is from radio tovia. Right, I mean, that's the thing I like about it,

because there's something about this where, you know, hopefully you get a little further into it to judge, you know, because you trust the idea of the channel. Like, it means something to be a listener to showcase. And so, I'm just really intrigued by the new type of listening that might come out of that that isn't based around building a hit around a single podcast.

You know, we talk about radio topia as a kind of music label a lot. And so this is kind of like a compilation record, LP, CD. Like our seven-inch series. And so, you know, you've obviously have a few lined up. Like, I don't want to spoil anything, but can you sort of talk, you know, generally, about the types of shows that are going to be on? We're going to kick off with a very sort of essayistic, sound-rich series about listening

in the digital age. How listening has shifted for us through analog technology, changing into transforming into digital technology. And this was proposed by musician Damon Krakowski, who was in a band that I used to love, Galaxy 500, and then Damon and Damon. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, so I had to get over that to begin with when we started talking to him. But, you know, I have an ex-girlfriend who's going to be very impressed by that.

Oh, I can't wait for her to hear this. Make sure she gives us a rating on iTunes, please. So, so Damon, this is a perfect example. He's actually wrote a book about this in the past year, and we were talking about how it had to be a podcast. It was about listening, shifting from analog to digital culture. How would you represent that through sound? And in a way that people could understand it wouldn't be too technical, wouldn't be too intellectualized. But how does he convey how lives are changing through these

technological shifts? And so he came up with six different episodes. They're sort of based on the book. But it's really departed from the book and become its own engines called Ways of Hearing. And that's what we're gonna kick off the showcase with. And I think there couldn't be a better starter series because it's really about how we listen,

how we listen in this age. And I really wanna get people engaged with their ears and thinking about, you know, what is it about podcasting that they respond to? This is Ways of Hearing, listening in the digital age from radio topia showcase. The first record I made was all analog. It wasn't a choice. That's just how it was done in the 80s.

My friends and I lived in an all-analog world. There were no computers in our lives. That didn't feel weird. It would have been weird if there had been. At the time, computers were something you saw on TV during a moonshot. You saw people sitting at computers at NASA mission control. Making a record wasn't anything like a moonshot. It didn't use numbers.

It didn't use data. Not that there was no technology involved. The tape decks, mixing board, microphones, they all seemed very magical. But they were made of magnets, gears, motors, electricity, like all the mechanical objects in our lives then. And so, my bandmates and I set up our instruments in the studio. We counted off, and we played our songs. In many ways, it's simply nostalgia to think that it was so different. People are people, sounds or sounds, and our technology is always changing. Still, there's something particular about that analog experience, which seems hard to conjure

back up in the digital present. And for that very reason, which seems hard to conjure back up in the digital pressup. And for that very reason, there was a feeling when the tape started rolling, that this was the moment we would capture, a feeling of time moving both more slowly and more quickly than usual. Like when you're in an accident, each split second is suddenly so palpable as if you're living in slow motion. Yet what do we say when it's over? It all happened in an instant. Analog recording is like an accident in other ways. On tape, there was no undo.

You could try again if you had the time and money. But you couldn't move backwards. What's done is done for better and worse. Today, life as a musician is very different. In the digital studio, and I'm using one now, everything you do is professional. That is, it can be redone, reshaped, rebuilt. There's no commitment, because each element of recording can be endlessly changed. It can even be conjured from digital scratch, as it were, and entered into a computer directly as data

without anyone performing at all. This means there's no moment from lived experience that is captured forever and unalterably so in the digital studio. Which is why it's more than nostalgia that makes me remember the analog studio as different than what we know today. Because the digital era has not just altered our tools for working with sound, or image, or moving images, it is changing our relationship to time itself. This is Ways of Hearing, a six-part podcast from videotopias Showcase exploring the nature of listening in our digital world.

I'm Damon Krueckowski, a musician and a writer. In each episode, we'll look at a different way that the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, of space, of love, money, and power. This is about sound. The medium we're sharing together now. But I'm worried about the quality of that sharing, because we don't seem to be listening to each other very well right now in the world. Our voices carry further than they ever did before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard?

Episode 1, A ton. Musicians know time is flexible. Classical players call this tempo rubato, Italian for stolen time. You steal a bit here, give a bit back there. Jazz players call it swing. Rock and funk players call it groove. This flexibility of time is something we're all familiar with, whether or not we play an instrument. There's the time it takes for dawn to arrive while you lay awake after a nightmare.

And there's the time it takes when you're out all night with your friends. What musicians terms like rubato, swing, and groove acknowledge is that time is experienced, not counted like a clock. And our experience of time is variable, it's always changing. Even if our eyes look at a clock and see 12 equal hours, our ears are ready to steal a bit here, give a bit back there. In the analog media we use to reproduce sound, records and tapes reflect this variable sense of time, a time that's elastic.

The first turntables, Vectrolis, were hand cranked. You wound up a spring which spun the platter as it wound down. The speed was hardly steady, at least never for long. At the opposite end of the 20th century, hip-hop DJs used speed controls on turntables to change the tempo of a record, to match it to another and keep the groove going, or in the studio to pile up samples from older records and make a new one. In 1990, a tribe called Quest sampled the bass from walk on the wild side, along with the surface noise from the LP, added it to a drum loop from Alonni Smith LP and made a

new hit out of it. They also had to give up on collecting any royalties. One of the biggest samples that we were able to clear was the walk on the wild side by Lou Reed and by clearing that he just took 100% of that song. Wait, really? He did. Wow. What you're saying, Lou Reed gets 100%.

That's Ali Shaheed Muhammad from a tribe called Quest and Franny Kelly. They host a podcast about hip-hop called Microphone Check. Yeah, that's his song. Ali, I always thought, you know, my band Gax 500, we ripped off the Velvet Underground way more than you did. We didn't have to pay them a dime. I asked Ali how Tribe used the variable speed of turn tables to make their own records. No, sometimes we would change the speed on a turntable

because the staple hip-hop turntable is the techniques 1200 and so that has a pitch control when we would sometimes pitch it high there. Sometimes a 33 RPM record, you put it on 45. And one thing with Tribe, we layered certain sounds and so you kind of had to pitch them because often they weren't in the same key. Layering these sounds, a Tribe called Quest discovered something else about their samples. The records we were recording, they might not have been playing to a metronome, and it were free-flowing, so there are moments within, let's say, even a two-bar phrase that maybe a drummer or a bass player, like, were aligned in the first two bars, and the tempo seemed

to be consistent, and then the last three beats of a bar, it sped up a slow down. In 1988, the songs my bandmates and I recorded slowed down and sped up just like Ali Shaheed described. I know because I was the drummer. We played as steadily as we could, but this was a performance. We were nervous and excited and we sped up at the chorus. You might find that a flaw in our recordings, or you might feel it's a part of their charm. Musicians have been speeding up at the chorus for as long I'm sure as there have been choruses. Our experience of time is flexible. I'm sure as there have been choruses. Our experience of time is flexible. But not long after we recorded that first Galaxy 500 album, the commercial music world, for the most part, decided that this was most definitely a flaw. Bands on major labels,

even bands who came out of our DIY indie scene started recording to a click track that is a metronome. Fashions in music come and go. At the time everyone was also using the swirling effect called a flanger. No one remembers why. But the click track proved more than a fad. It was a change that stuck. Because what truly changed in popular music during the 1980s was that digital machines entered the mix for the first time. And machines have a different sense of time. The first drum machines to be widely used in commercial recordings were introduced in 1980.

And MIDI, musical instrument digital interface, the language machines used to share musical information with one another, was launched in 1983. Together, these tools can lock musical time to a clock, which doesn't speed up at the chorus. course. When Galaxy 500 recorded, we played our songs in what audio engineers now refer to as real time. Real time, as the name implies, is lived time. Time is we experience it in the analog world. Digital time is not lived time. It's machine time. It's locked to a clock. And that clock, a time code, makes everything more regular than live time. Time in the digital studio is stored in discrete cells on a grid, like figures on a spreadsheet.

And if you've ever worked with a spreadsheet, you know those cells can be sorted any which way, and re-figured to most any desired outcome. What this means is that a given experience of digital time is only one among many equally plausible experiences. Take this podcast you're listening to. Since this is a digital medium, you could choose to hurry me up without changing the pitch of my voice, seemingly without changing any of my words or pronunciation, which means I can be equally fast speaking at 1.5 times my normal pace like a manic, or I can be equally slow speaking at three-quarters normal pace, like I'm drunk. Neither need be how this happened in real time.

In fact, none of this need ever have happened in the sense that we understood that term in 1988. That's a track made entirely by software. The singer is a program made by Yamaha called Vocaloid. Vocaloid tracks have been cropping up on the Japanese pop charts for a number of years and are now making their way into other forms of music around the world. As for podcasts, Adobe is developing a program called VOCO that will read text aloud for you in your own voice. What could possibly go wrong? Making time conform to machines, making it regular, would seem to make it more unified,

like a standardized timeline that any of us can tap into at any moment. But there's a surprising twist to digital time. It's actually very difficult to synchronize. It's a challenge in digital recording to line up the different layers that make up a song. If you play a guitar into a digital recorder and then play it back and add singing,

your voice won't line up with the music exactly the way you performed it. The reason is what's called latency. Latency is the lag in digital communications introduced by the time it takes a computer to process them. Computers move very fast. That's what computers are good at. But analog time, it seems, moves faster.

Let's consider an example from outside music. Come on, way back! It is gone! A cramped slam of a radio voice of the Boston Red Sox, Joe Castiglione. I don't have a signature home run call because all the good ones would take it. Well, Alan going, going, going.

Going, going, going. Bye-bye, baby. Russ Hodges. Bye-bye, baby. At times, I've used forget about it because you know it's gone. Some fans didn't like this. We don't forget about it.

It's a big home run. This isn't the number one fight that goes it. The role of broadcaster is to describe what you see and what is happening as it happens. That's why we broadcast in the present tense. It's my ideal and it's in there for a call strike. You can't be too soon anticipate because you can get burned that way. Sometimes the ball doesn't carry as far as you think it's going through or sometimes it carries farther. You can always tell if a broadcash is behind the action. If the crowd's cheering and you're still building up to what's happening, you have to be quick,

you have to be current, you have to be right on time. Joe is such an important voice here in Boston. it used to be common practice to watch baseball games on TV, but with the sound off and the radio on. So we could watch the game, but listen to Joe. And then a strange thing happened. On June 12, 2009, Joe started calling the plays before we saw them on TV. That's because on that day, every TV station in the US switched from analog to digital transmission. And that lag in the digital television image,

the gap between it and the real time of the game as Joe was calling it, that is latency. It takes time for computers to translate the world into data and translating data to analog so we can perceive it, slows things down, enough to put the tag after the call by when you read it its history, when you hear it its news. And right ahead of this satellite picture on TV, so we are first. And I think the immediacy of radio is something that is so critical and so germane to it.

Back before digital broadcast, that immediacy was audible in the city. You always knew when there was a home run at Fenway because you heard a simultaneous collective cheer all around Boston from every open window and passing call. Today those shouts are staggered. We get a splattering of cheers like scatter points on a graph. on a graph. That's because latency is different, slightly different, but different, on each digital device receiving its own particular stream of digital information. Professional music producers and engineers in the digital studio, worry about latency all the time. The lag it introduces can be very, very small, and yet it's always there, and always threatening

to knock the different layers of a song out of sync with one another. If a young drummer today manages to cast a wide net around the beat, perhaps that's not so different from my own speeding up and slowing down on Galaxy 500 recordings. It may be a flaw or it may be part of the charm. Yet there's something very distinct about an experience of analog time, time that flexes slower and quicker. Tempo Rubato and this feeling of blurred time from latency. For one, I can't think of a musical term for latency, perhaps because it's not like anything we experience in lived time.

However, this experience of latency is typical of life online. For all our seemingly instant and global digital communications, life online is in practice filled with chronological confusions. Social media like Facebook and Twitter, shuffle posts, according to various algorithms, most obviously popularity. The net result being that yesterday's news bulletin can interrupt today's string of think pieces about it. Texting too is often tripped up by cross-posts, or mist posts, or abrupt silences, followed

by ten beings in a row. Temporal hiccups and information exchange that would never happen face to face. In conversation, in real analog time, we can gauge reaction to our statements before anything further is said. We can pause without lapsing into silence, and we can fall silent without ending the conversation. Digital time is time designed for machines. We benefit in all kinds of ways from the convenience that makes possible. But those conveniences come at a sacrifice. Because when we trade broadcast for podcast, we give up the opportunity to experience time

together in the same instant through our media. And when we trade real-time for machine-time in music, we lose the ability to share our individual timing with one another. Musicians use rubato, swing, and groove to move us together, not locked to a machine, but to one another. Analog time is flexible but unified. We share it so easily, without tinkering with technology, without even thinking about it. Maybe that's why we seem to be surrendering it so quickly. But without it, it's harder to share a moment

in tone together. Like those moments I once shared with my bandmates in a recording studio, in a particular place at a particular time on West Broadway just south of canal in New York City, 1988. This is Ways of Hearing. In the next episode, I'll take a trip to today's New York and look at the effect of digital sound on a perception of Showcase from Radio Topia and PRX, produced by me, Damon Krueckowski, Max Larkin and Ian Koss, with sound designed by Ian Koss. Thanks to Julie Shapiro and Alex Braunstein, recorded at the PRX Podcast Garage in Austin Mass. Our theme song is Trichle Down by Robert Wyatt.

Find out more about Ways of Hearing at radiotopia.fm slash showcase. I've been your witness. This series, Ways of Hearing, reminded me of one of my favorite and the night of the I episode about music and design. And if you're one of the people who never go through the back catalog, I thought I'd just present it to you here. It's short and fun. But first, I should pay some bills because thanks to these fun sponsors, we're allowed

to listen to all this for free. So this is a very old 9-9-PI and you can tell because I sound very young and much less exhausted, but it's an all-time favorite so I had to share. Enjoy. Gertis said that architecture is frozen music. That's lovely. Of course, that was before audio recording, so now for the most part. Music is frozen music. It's only very recently in the history of music that we've been able to freeze music into

an object. And in my life, the form of this object mattered a lot. I once bought vinyl albums and cassette tapes, and there were two first songs per album, Side A and Side B. The energy of a first song made it stand apart from the other songs, at least in my head at it. Then the CD came along and eliminated Side B and there was only one first song, and the actual number of the track that you can see prominently displayed on the CD player U.I.

That became my index for sorting songs. Then MP3s jumbled my sense of track order and albums began to feel more like a loose group being of individual pieces rather than a conceptual hole. I could do this all day and you're welcome to chime in. Let's just let's totally hash this out on the website. But my point is this, when it comes to music the form of the thing matters. But no effect has been as world-, as the original innovation, freezing music in time onto a recording, where a single version of a song, a single performance of a song, became the song.

This inherently mutable method of communication was fundamentally changed. Songs are astonishing things and I also don't think most people really even know what they are. That's the songwriter composer, Ampereiser John Bryant. Now I didn't talk to John Bryant, but I know people who did. Jim DeRigadas and Greg Cot are the hosts of a radio program I'm a huge fan of, called Sound Opinions. It's a rock and roll talk show. And if certain niche-y, snarky corners of the internet have darkened your concept of music journalism, well, Sound Opinions is your beacon of light, my friends.

Anyway, John Bryan came to WBZ in Chicago to talk to Sound Opinions in 2006. And at the time, Bryan had just co-produced Kanye West's album Late Registration, and he was also already well known as a film composer of a lot of really great movies, many by Paul Thomas Anderson. I heard the show broadcast on WBZ while I was sitting in my car and a parking lot of Atakaria and Logan Square, and I've thought about this section of their interview about songs versus performances, at least once a month since then.

For six years, but only recently did it on me that this is a perfect 99% invisible story. So here it is. John Bryant on Sound Opinions in 2006. I distinguish between what for lack of better, I call songs and performance pieces. And what most people like are specific performances. We've grown up in an era of recording. And you know, the very thing, one of the very things I love recording has killed people's ability to hear songs purely as core change, melody and lyric.

It's a very strange and beautiful art form because when it's right, boy do you know it. But what we have sort of lost is, I don't know, the best example I could probably give would be Led Zeppelin. Those things are the ultimate performance pieces, and I'm a big fan. I think they're just absolutely astonishing and

the sort of dynamics they had are sorely lacking in music today. Record making is great. A true band in the sense that you really could tell who the individuals were. Remarkable thing. And I don't consider most of those things songs. And the way I can sort of prove my point is, have you ever listened to anybody else play Led Zeppelin song and gone, oh, that was a great satisfying experience. Except for Dread Zeppelin, who I'd love.

What people like is that specific guitar sound, that specific performance in concert with that specific drum sound, with that specific drummer playing that specific part, and it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. There are all different types of art and creative expression. However, if I were to sit and go here over on the piano and go, this is the melody to a lead sepulence off. And I could play, you know, 30 others, that's the thing. You know, I know it could sound like a snobbishness, it's not. I'm telling you, I love these records. Sure.

They're great. However, there's a difference between that and a song, say, a Gershwin song, you could actually play in the style of Led Zeppelin and have a completely satisfying experience. I do it all the time. I want to hear that. But when you start playing Zeephyl and the style of like 1920s music, it suddenly, it's laid bare that it's like, oh no, it was about those people

and those people were in a room and it was great. And I love it, but I consider it a performance piece. And I consider a lot of rock the people listen to be performance pieces. They're not necessarily songs. I heard you had Tom York here recently, and there's a guy who's a songwriter. Comes into the band and goes, here's the thing I've got, and then they rock with holy hardness and all the greatness they've got with them getting in a row. That's part of what makes a band like Radiohead stand out. When that second record came out, we all collectively went, oh my god!

Somebody who actually has songs in this guy's an amazing singer. It isn't extinct yet. Yeah, and... Or Cobain, right? Right, exactly. And I mean, okay, here. Let's uh... The little musicology course?

Okay, if you just go, yeah, it was cool. It was, you know, punk rock. It was popular. He had it factor for days. But if you take the average punk rock song, it is that same lead Zeppelin Meldy, even though they hated Zeppelin so much. You know, but bet it's like... You beat, you know, one of a thousand punk songs. Sure. There's a big difference between that and... I mean, I can sit here on Grand Piano, play an unaffected version and we can all go, oh my god, yeah, that's the best thing ever. Yeah, my spine tingles anytime. I play that melody over those chord changes That to me lithium is no

Different it's in the same realm is being able to go, you know You know, where, you know, probably like most people, I remember exactly where I was first time I heard lithium. I remember back of the friends car and it came on and I just freaked out. I mean, I was nearly in tears. I'm like, oh my God, that guy is better than everybody's. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Oh my God, that guy's better than everybody's life. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it was so palpable.

Like, that's one of the best core changes I've ever heard. It's absolutely as good as, you know, Gershwin or Thelonius Monk or any great thing that's existed. That was John Bryan talking with Jim DeRigadas and Greg Cot on Sound Opinions in 2006. Sound Opinions is produced by WBEZ Chicago and distributed by PRX. Find out more at soundopinions.org. 99% of visible is Katie Mingle, Planey Hall, Sharif Usif, Emmett Fitzgerald, Kirk Cole Stead, Avery Truffleman, Terran Mazza, Sean Riel, and me, Roman Mars.

We are a project of K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in Beautiful, Downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible is part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Night Foundation and Coin Carrying listeners. Just like you. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org or an Instagram Tumblr and Reddit too.

But our fabulous home on the internet with more design stories than we can ever manage to tell you here on the podcast is our website, 99pi.org.