The other day I visited a hole-in-the-wall music store in my area, just an upstairs bedroom or office that was converted into a music store by stuffing it wall-to-wall with crates of vinyl and racks of CD’s, with barely enough room in the isles for two people to pass without getting physically intimate. Although it was a bit of a claustrophobic experience, I did enjoy having the chance to flip through a random assortment of records and CD’s, examining the album covers of obscure metal bands. Even in the age of the algorithm there is something to just rifling through a collection of music that fate has seen to assemble in a particular place and time and seeing what pops up.
Having that old-school music browsing experience reminded me of when I would bring home a new album, one that I might have been looking forward to for months, or possibly one that I picked out based only on cover art and a band name that caught my attention, and listening to it track by track, pouring over the artwork, liner notes and lyrics. Today, much of my music consumption is in the form of a stream of music playing in the background, usually something chill and electronic, that I don’t pay much attention to but enjoy having on to fill in the sonic space. While there are artists who I am a fan of and will get anything they put out, much of what I listen to now just sort of drifts by, driven by algorithmic selection.
You can put those two modes of music enjoyment on opposite poles of a spectrum, with the album at one end and the stream at the other. Of course, albums are released on streaming services, and any track you hear in a stream was likely released on an album, but the point here is not to assert a clean line of demarcation between the two, only to do some musing on how the technology of audio recoding and transmission changes the way we enjoy music.
Music and Technology
Each new innovation in audio recording, storage and playback provides a new variation to how we can experience music. I remember listening to the audiobook of David Byrne’s How Music Works, and being struck by an observation he makes—which I’m sure has been made elsewhere, but this was the first time that it had occurred to me—that it was only after the invention of recorded audio that a specific recording of a song could be considered the definitive version, the standard against which any other rendition would be heard as a variation.
Prior to recoded audio, music was experienced as it was performed, each performance unique and ephemeral. If you wanted to hear a certain piece, you either needed to know how to play it or know someone who did. With recorded audio, you could now listen to a song whenever you felt like it, if you could get a hold of a recording, but it would always be the same performance, and every other listener would be hearing an identical version.
The limited storage of the various recording distribution media, vinyl record, tape cassette and compact disc, meant that recordings came in discrete packages. From the phonograph record we got the standard set of recoding lengths: single, extended play (EP) and long play (LP). Radio was the closest thing to a stream that was possible before the internet arrived, although my recollection of that medium is that there tended to be a fairly limited set of hits that were in rotation at any time. Music television brought the innovation of pairing music with visuals, and the music video became its own art form, but was also limited by the low granularity of television at the time, when everyone was watching the same dozens of channels and whatever was broadcast had to have a wide appeal.
With the CD-R/W, you got some more control over your listening by putting being able to put together your own playlists, a kind of make-your-own-album. The iPod expanded that into the ability to randomly shuffle hundreds of tracks. With the internet, once all of the legal and technical issues were worked out, we got the stream, the endless flow of music that might be seeded by a user selection, but then rolls on and on by algorithmic motion.
The Album
While there are compilation albums and greatest hits albums and all kinds of variations, the prototypical album, for me, is a collection of songs written and performed by one artist or band, recorded around the same time, usually at the same studio with the same recording engineers and equipment. All of these parameters give an album the ability to capture a moment in time, to have a coherent, self-contained quality, a little world that you get a peek into when you listen.
A really good album, in my opinion, works as a whole. There is enough variation between songs to make them distinct, but enough similarity to the sound, the musicianship and the themes to make them parts of a whole. Some albums are explicitly meant to tell a story, concept albums where each track contributes to the overall narrative, but even for those not created with a single concept in mind, you know that the artist put a lot of thought into the order the tracks would follow, and a narrative structure can emerge from that ordering.
The album experience is all about the specifics, about the band name, the logo, the song titles and the lyrics, about how the tracks compare with each other, how the whole compares with the band’s previous albums, or how it compares with albums by similar artists. For a music nerd like me, all of these connections are part of what the album means to you.
The Stream
An album can be physical or digital, but the stream is inherently a thing of the internet age, of massive storage, fast connections and algorithmic intelligence.
My wife has recently discovered the Lofi genre, the ever-flowing stream of chill tracks that you can dip in and out of whenever you need something unobtrusive playing in the background. While the album is all about the details, the stream is about the vibe. The songs could come in any order. There is an artist, title and album displayed for each track, but you are barely aware of that while you listen. You just let it wash over you. Like Heraclitus’s river, it is a different stream each time you enter it, but it is always about the same temperature.
AI and Lofi
Technology changes our relationship with music, and nothing is bigger in the tech world right now than AI, which is turning out to be useful in innumerable ways and is seeping into every crack of digital life. We don’t know just what the future holds for us in regard to AI, although there are plenty of people making confident assertions about exactly that, as there always is. But we can speculate about how it might effect how we experience music, as it has effected just about everything else.
Certainly, it will be used for the computational intelligence applications that you would expect, like auto-generated playlists and making better recommendation engines. What will really be interesting will be to see how it is applied to music generation. It is not hard to imagine music channels in which each song is generated while it is being played by some model trained on millions of hours of lofi. If you take a look at the classic lofi hip hop radio channel at the moment, the one with the iconic girl in the green sweater and red scarf, you see a disclaimer assuring you that all the music you hear was created by humans with no AI input. The fact that they have to assert this may be because it is easy to imagine this kind of thing being the product of an AI model rather than a music producer.
Currently it seems that most AI generated music is either a joke or a novelty, but with new advances we are likely to see more serious use of it in music production: AI DJs who can select songs based on the vibe of a crowd; virtual bands like the Gorillaz but with AI band members.
We’ve already seen hologram Tupac, although from what I understand that was done with a well-understood magician’s illusion and nothing with the sophistication of AI. What if a multi-modal model could recreate the experience of a band that is no longer together, a performer who is no longer with us, or a supergroup created by picking your own band members? There are legal issues with all of these scenarios, certainly, but no reason to think they could never be settled in such a way as to make this kind of thing possible.
You can imagine being able to generate new albums by using the right prompt: I want to hear what Metallica’s Black Album would sound like with Taylor Swift on vocals; I want to hear a parody of a song by some obscure Shoegaze band a la Weird Al. If you want your favorite band to cover a certain song, you don’t have to start a social media campaign, you can just ask AI.
The Vinyl Revival
Even with all of the exciting, and maybe somewhat frightening, possibilities that AI brings, I think that there will still be a place in the music lover’s world for the physical embodiment. There is a certain connection we can make with physical objects that doesn’t translate into the digital world. An album collection takes up space on your shelf, true, but on the other hand there is something to having your personally curated collection of music right there in front of you, of being able to take out a favorite album and looking at the cover art and reading the lyrics while it plays.
Although it is only the medium of transmission, the physical artifact of the CD or vinyl record, and the packaging it comes in, all become part of the listening experience, just as the decorations on the walls of a restaurant and the music playing while you eat become part of the eating experience. The fact that vinyl record collecting has made a comeback certainly has to do with the retro appeal, but I think it also has something to do with the physical artifact itself, the big round record and the album sleeve with ample room for cover art. All of these seemingly peripheral aspects make for a different experience, even if it sounds identical when played on a digital streaming service. Physical media has its own kind of UI/UX.
Conclusion
I didn’t write this to be nostalgic about a past when music was better, neither to declare a winner between the album and the stream as ways to consume music. New technology does obsolete old, in most cases, but I think there are some in which the effect is cumulative. New ways of listening can be added to the old and allows us to interact with the music we listen to in new ways.