When I was in grade school, I saw a skit put on by some older kids from a different school. I don't really remember the context of the event, but the skit was a futuristic version of War of the Worlds. I had no idea of it at the time since I hadn't heard the Orson Welles version yet, but the kids who put it on stuck to the radio show's format of storytelling, with news reports of an alien invasion repeatedly breaking into a music program. While the original had a ballroom orchestra being interrupted, these kids took the idea of "futuristic music" and ran to an extreme, almost to the point where it overshadowed the story they were trying to tell.
Every time a news report would finish, the music show would kick back in, and by that I mean that a couple kids wearing amorphous masks and holding armloads of painted egg-crate material shaped vaguely like guitars would jump around while lights would flash, and a random barrage of electronic sounds came out of the speakers they were using.
For some reason, that spectacle has stuck with me, and it's turned into a running self-dialogue about what music is, what it's for, and how it's defined in general compared to how we define it for ourselves. In particular, I think this singular musical experience (which wasn't even designed to be one!) started pushing part of my tastes to look for sounds and structures that I'd never heard before... to look for the sound of the future.
Often when I hear a new song, or a new artist, I ask myself, "Is this something that couldn't have existed ten or twenty years ago? If I heard it back in 1983 what would I have thought?" I guess I'm trying to figure out if music is really progressing. And I'm finding that while fringier styles come and go (and are always more interesting than the Top 40), pop music stays pretty much the same. Now there's thumpier drums, less ballads and kookier sound effects, but the general style is pretty much the same. It's been amazing to see how hip hop has taken over, been blended into EDM, and had the resulting mixture draped across the same melodic structure that pop music has had for fifty years now.
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We all talk about how music is such a personal thing for us, even though I'm guessing that just about everyone my age has at least a 50% overlap in the breadth of music that we're familiar with. Ironically, it's that commonality that makes it so personal. For folks my age, we all heard this overlap music at roughly the same time, when it first was new. We paid attention, we bought mostly tapes and CDs that we knew about from the radio/MTV (back when those things were almost the same). Granted, a fair amount of it wasn't good, but it's become a touchstone for us. It defines a time, a place, and the people we hung out with. It plugs us back into another time, and that's the purpose it serves, a shortcut to emotions -- often simpler and stronger ones -- that we want to relive.
With the modern ability to distribute music for free to potentially everyone in the world, it's now possible to grow up side-by-side with someone and have virtually no overlap in the music you're both familiar with. So maybe the "music of the future" isn't defined by how it sounds. Perhaps it's better defined by how you experience and assimilate it. There are be many less common cultural touchstones, but sharing your personal playlist with someone can be as intimate as sharing your most guarded thoughts.
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I've recently heard about what's being discovered about the nature of memory. It seems that memories aren't actual packets of information stored somewhere in your head. When you recall something, your brain re-fires the same pattern of neurons in your mind that went off the first time you experienced something. You're actually re-creating the memory each time you recall it, and then it's gone again. Not only that, but subsequent experiences and random noise can color the memory each time you do. In this sense, the purest memories you have are the ones you'll never recall again.
Memory, it turns out, is extremely malleable. There are things that I recall very clearly that I simultaneously know didn't happen quite the way I remember them. We all have stories that we've been told so many times that we think we remember them, although they happened to someone else, or if it's something we didn't even witness at all. Memories don't come from a storehouse that we revisit. They're conjured anew each time we bring them to mind. So in a sense, there really is no past. (As a side note, this also means that your most influential memories -- the experiences that make you *you* -- are only stories that you tell yourself anew every time you recall them.)
Music, though, is the same every time, and that might be the key to the power it has. Songs from our past might be the only memories that haven't changed due to the passage of time, haven't dimmed or been altered in even the slightest way.
With music we love, we can see songs almost from outside time itself, knowing full well what's coming, what's happening now, and how it changes what's come before. (Personal examples: when I hear Nine Inch Nails' "All the Love in the World", the pleasant but broodingly nondescript first half is all anticipation for the shift in gears that comes at the midpoint, where the whole thing reboots and a soft, thudding bass drum and piano slowly build layer upon layer toward the titanic wall of sound at the end. Similarly, the soaring, convergent harmonies in the chorus of Hot Chip's "Take it In" wouldn't mean nearly as much if the verse that came before wasn't so discordant and almost atonal.)
I know you probably don't know these songs in particular, but maybe you get the idea, and have favorite examples of your own that you turn to over and over again, because of this intimate knowledge of their structure. In this way, music has the potential to be even better, more mentally engaging, than our own memories. (And, now that I think about it, these thoughts about being outside of a linear work of art and seeing the whole in a way that can't be done in life can be applied to storytelling of all kinds, can't it?)
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I recently read a fun book called Year Zero by Robert Reid, a sci-fi tale in which the plot hinges on the fact that humans turn out to be the best songwriters in the Universe, and have unknowingly charmed all alien races with this fact. Every non-Earth being has a personal device on which has been downloaded every piece of music that humankind has ever recorded (some 25 million, in case you were wondering how many that was), and can potentially spend their entire lives combing through our terrestrial back catalog.
This got me thinking, though, about what aliens would really make of our music. What would someone with no context get out of this semi-standardized set of chords and song structures? Wouldn't it all sound pretty much the same, on a cultural level?
And that, in turn, made me realize how ingrained in us music is. The fact that we can tell the stylistic difference between singer-songwriters, when there are really only a dozen different notes and about fifty chords they typically play, is really amazing. It seems so limiting when you think about the sheer number of tone combinations that are possible. But we're so finely tuned to it. When we hear a song for the first time, we're immediately assimilating it into this vast library of archetypes... major chords are happy, minors are sad... uptempo connotes excitement, downtempo can mean somber or contemplative. And those are just two of the near-infinite shadings of meaning that music can convey, simply by comparing it to all the songs you've ever heard before and what you have learned that they represent.
So the question then becomes... do minor keys really make us feel sadness at the cellular level, or have we just been conditioned to think that they do? Does the four-note simplicity of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" really lift our spirits, or is it just the context it's been presented to us in? Is it maybe the way the human performers make it sound, telegraphing their own interpreted emotions to us? How much of the emotion we hear in music is really there, and how much of it is caused by collective emotional shorthand that we've created over time?
There's a physical aspect to it, too. The way our body registers musical vibrations and transfer them to the brain has so many steps: ear canal to eardrum, to tiny bones, to the liquid of the inner ear, to little hairs that shake and send electrical impulses to deep recesses of our brain. The patterns that those impulses form are either harmonic or dissonant. Any being with different physiology wouldn't even hear the same things we hear. How could we hope to get them to understand all the emotional associations that go with it?
So maybe music -- at least our version of it -- is a singularly human art form. It's only in the human body that it will register the way it's designed to, and all the memories it recalls will be called up from the particular arrangements of neurons, and then go back to nothing. It gives the whole process a very ethereal, magical quality.
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