- Fundamental to this study is the question
of how instruments and media become marked as "old" or "obsolete"
in the first place. Perhaps in music above all, age does not have to
imply obsolescence or inferiority, as in the case, for example, of a
300 year old Stradivarius or a 30 year old Stratocaster guitar. While
it is clear that technologies develop and change, the linkage of older
technologies with the idea of obsolescence is not self-evident but is
created by economic and social factors, the power of advertising, and
shifts of fashion that are at least partly uncontrollable. Yet music
is not limited simply to reflecting these more general narratives concerning
technology and progress. An example from Pink Floyds 1975 album
Wish You Were Here, illustrates how individual pieces canin
their own materialinscribe, produce, and in some cases even transform
these progressive narratives linking technological change to stories
of power, innovation, authenticity, and expression.
- Technology figures significantly in Pink
Floyds music, marked by the early virtuosic use of synthesizers,
elaborately recorded and produced albums, and lavish stage shows. Many
songs explicitly reference the world of machines, significantly adopting
modernist techniques of musique concrète such as "Money"
from the album Dark Side of the Moon (1973), with its rhythmicized
sounds of cash registers and change, or "Time" with its clock-store-gone-berserk
sound effects. As is evident from these examples, the images of technology
in Pink Floyds music often lean toward the dystopic. But at the
same time, these representations ultimately operate within an essentially
modernist teleology.
- This is brilliantly staged in the transition
between "Have a Cigar," a bitter attack on the corrupting
influence of the music business, and the song "Wish You Were Here"
from the album of the same name. As if to enact the threat of commercialization,
the raucous hard rock jam that concludes "Have a Cigar" sounds
as if it is sucked out of the speakers into a lo-fidelity AM radio broadcast.
The radio is evoked first through the cramped, tinny sound quality and
static, and then confirmed as the radio is retuned through several channelsin
what is itself a striking trajectory through newscasts,
discussions, and excerpts of symphonic musicbefore settling down
on a station broadcasting a mellow guitar accompaniment. As the radio
continues to play, we become directly aware of the person in the room
who has been tuning the radio, as he clears his throat, sniffs, and
then starts to play along on an acoustic guitar.
- This intimate private
moment enacted for us on the public stage of the record, no doubt is
meant to evoke a host of responses. Clearly to some degree the peculiar
thin scratchy sound of the radio is meant to be nostalgic, reminding
listeners of a certain age of a similar experience of listening to the
radio. And the qualifying "listeners of a certain age," is
important, because the particular sound quality created here would only
be recognizable to someone who had listened to a portable AM transistor
radio. In keeping with the modernist framework, the historical location
of the old technology is clearly marked both in place and time by the
sound quality and the range of sound materials that are assembled. Similarly,
Brian Eno notes how the characteristic limitations of a medium such
as "grainy black and white film, or jittery Super 8, or scratches
on vinyl," communicate "something about the context of the
work, where it sits in time, and by invoking that world they deepen
the resonance of the work itself" ("The Revenge of the Intuitive").
Many striking examples of this process were aired as part of National
Public Radios series of reports entitled "Lost and Found
Sounds," which used a range of old recordings to explore both personal
and national pasts.6
- Enos remarks
suggest an understanding of the function of mediaone more limited
than media theorist Marshall McLuhansthat is particularly
useful in this context. The Pink Floyd example demonstrates how media
shapes its message, comparable to the way language shapes a communication
ranging from the addition of an accent to outright translation into
another tongue. When a technology is current we are trained to overlook
its limitations and believe the promises of transparency and fidelity.
The story has been dominated by the dialectic of music and noise, with
the battle lines drawn over frequency range, distortion, scratches and
pops, hiss and rumble. Yet rather than a battle, it was more of a cold
war: reducing and eliminating these imperfections was a major concern,
but it was never possible. Listeners have always had to learn to listen
past these sounds, to filter them out, to keep the medium distinct from
the message. At each stage of the development we are told that we are
finally being given the truth: the authentic sound and performance just
as if we were in the concert hall, or the musicians there in our living
room. But when technology is replaced the limitations come to the fore;
the veil of transparency is lifted and we are forced to start listening
to the accent as all the repressed characteristics of the old emerge
with shocking clarity. Before color television came along most viewers
probably learned to not notice that they were watching black and white.
The hype around high resolution TV promises a similar revelation of
a whole sphere of detail, depth and reality we dont yet know that
we are missing. In musical terms, this process has been repeated over
and over again in the progression from wax cylinders to Digital Audio
Tape.7
- In "Wish You
Were Here," the hierarchy of technologies and the march of progress
are by no means questioned; indeed the special sound quality of the
AM radio serves to underscore the immaculately recorded acoustic guitar,
engineered to sound as if it were immediately before us. The clarity
of the sound, together with the conjuring up of the body through the
sounds of breathing and the physical act of tuning the radio, all combine
to offer us an authentic human presence. Thus the song presents the
old technology of the AM radio as limited and implicated through the
link with the previous song as corrupted by commercialism. By the same
token, this passage depends on and even fetishizes the capabilities
of current recording techniques; the particular sonic effects of old
machines used here demand in turn the new technologies of FM radio and
high-end stereos. In other words, much of the effect of this passage
would be lost if you were only able to hear it on the AM radio it represents.
Yet in "Wish You Were Here" this framing technological dimension
is disguised; we are not meant, I believe, to be aware that we too are
listening to a recording or to think about the record executives who
helped to bring it about, but rather to imagine ourselves there in the
room playing the guitar.8
- The lyrics of the song deal directly with
the problem of presence and absence, authenticity and artifice, asking
us to distinguish "heaven from hell, a green field from a cold
steel rail." Yet the doubts raised in the lyrics are countered
by the sonic narrative of the song which clearly locates its technological
materials in a developmental plot, which places the listener in a specific
temporal and national space, and which mystifies its own technological
apparatus.
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