CONVENIENTLY?

WORDS BY CHRIS LIPAPIS

Music has been around since humans developed the capacity for rhythm and tonal composition. Through its inherent sonic properties, music is a fundamental medium for universal communication. Its popularity is attributed to the fact we are social creatures, feeding off shared worldviews through vibrating air molecules.

In modern life, we are still attached to music more than ever, with a plethora of genres and subgenres articulating features of self-identification and resonance. Musicians, artists, bands, film composers, DJs, and all other transmitters of music have poured their hearts and souls into sharing their messages with the world. Some of who, created certain instrumental sounds revolutionising the art-form over the decades. All was going great, until something came along.... convenience.

Philosophically speaking, we have adapted to a new standard of living which streamlines almost every aspect of our lives, including music. Since technology enabled unprecedented access to music, it has become a daily expectation to listen to whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want. The caveat to this is the original sonic impact has been reduced to facilitate the gigantic storage challenge of online music. All major music streaming apps are forced to compress each song for the listener to achieve convenience.

Consequently, it has changed the way humans perceive, understand, and appreciate music. Although many believe the impact isn’t noticeable, physical and psychological science says otherwise [1]. We are complicated organisms with exceptional abilities to understand the world around us, and our perception of music is no different. We interpret the collaborating properties of sound that forms the music we listen to. These properties stimulate nerve impulses, triggering skin and body changes with subsequent neuron activity relative to specific frequencies. This neuron activity is perceived using mechanisms of bottom-up and top-down processing which are features of learned behaviour. These features are so specific, that any change in sonic characteristics can subsequently translate unintended messaging to the brain. As a result, prominent artists have explicitly questioned why they spend so much time in the studio if half their track is lost through compression. These sentiments were corroborated by the likes of Snoop Dogg, Linkin Park, Slash, Quincy Jones, Hans Zimmer, plus more in a short film titled “The Distortion of Sound”.

This is not a condescending message, nor is it a discriminatory sentiment - it is a simply an attempt to raise awareness. If it matters enough, listening to a whole album from your favourite artist, from start to finish, uncompressed, may just help reignite the resilience of music as a universal language. Prominent vocalist, Adele, recently took a preliminary stand on this, making Spotify agree to disable the “shuffle” feature on all of her albums.

As you can tell, I have a deep passion for music and would also like to take this opportunity to express interest in establishing an AUU club for underground music. It is my belief that non-popular music is at the heart of originality and passion. If this is of interest, please contact me to discuss.

Contact: christopher.lipapis@student. adelaide.edu.au

REFERENCES

[1] Passer, M. W., Smith, R. E. (2018). Psychology: The science of mind and behaviour, 3rd Edition. [[VitalSource Bookshelf version]]. Retrieved from vbk://9781760422820

[2] https://www.openculture.com/2014/10/ distortion-of-sound-musicians-explain-inshort-film-how-weve-created-a-mcdonaldsgeneration-of-music-consumers.html