In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a bandit preying on travelers between Athens and Eleusis. He had an iron bed and compelled people to lie on it. No-one ever quite fit so for those who were too tall he amputated the extra and those who were too short he stretched to fit. Theseus, on his way to Athens, solved the problem by serving Procrustes with his own medicine. As commentators like Fil from Wings of Pegasus and Nick Beato have been pointing out, commercial pop music has become something of a Procrustean bed. Let's listen to Fil:
I think this is enough to get the idea. From different angles Fil is pointing out that much of what we see and hear in these kinds of videos is processed or, to be a little more blunt, fake. Rick Beato was making a similar point in the video I just put up yesterday. Here it is:
Now let me connect this to R. G. Collingwood, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford. His essay "Good Art and Bad Art" is found on page 536 in Art in Theory. Here are some quotes:
Art is community's medicine for that worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness.
...a work of art is an activity of a certain kind; the agent is trying to do something definite, and in that attempt he may succeed or he may fail. It is moreover, a conscious activity; the agent is not only trying to do something definite, he also knows what it is that he is trying to do; though knowing here does not necessarily imply being able to describe, since to describe is to generalize, and generalizing is the function of the intellect and consciousness does not, as such, involve intellect.
A work of art, therefore, may be either a good one or a bad one. And because the agent is necessarily a conscious agent, he necessarily knows which it is. Or rather, he necessarily knows this so far as his consciousness in respect of this work of art is uncorrupted; for we have seen that there is such a thing as untruthful or corrupt consciousness.
A bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails. This is the difference between bad art and art falsely so called. In art falsely so called there is no failure to express, because there is no attempt at expression; there is only an attempt (whether successful or not) to do something else.
To give some examples: if Paul McCartney were to sing "Hey Jude" very badly, out of tune and poorly phrased, that would be an example of bad art. If his performance of "Hey Jude" were to be pitch-corrected and rhythmically quantized, that would be "art falsely so called" because it would not be the truthful expression of emotion.
A bad work of art is the unsuccessful attempt to become conscious of a given emotion: it is what Spinoza calls an inadequate idea of an affection. Now, a consciousness which thus fails to grasp its own emotions is a corrupt or untruthful consciousness.
In my view, music that is pitch-corrected, autotuned or quantized is the product of a corrupt consciousness. A lot of what J Dilla did with his beats was an attempt to insert human expression into otherwise mechanized rhythms.
A person who is capable of producing bad art cannot, so far as he is capable of producing it, recognize it for what it is ... To mistake bad art for good art would imply having in one's mind an idea of what good art is, and one has such an idea only so far as one knows what it is to have an uncorrupt consciousness; but no one can know this except a person who possesses one. An insincere mind, so far as it is insincere, has no conception of sincerity.
Art is not a luxury, and bad art not a thing we can afford to tolerate.
I recommend reading the whole thing. I'm something of an Aristotelian myself and from the first sentence of the Collingwood I got the sense that he was one as well. So when you read him, do so slowly and carefully.
I suppose that we can thank the purveyors of rhythmic quantization and pitch-correction for showing us exactly what a corrupt consciousness in music consists in these days.
Just a footnote: every good singer I have worked with has intentionally bent the pitch of certain notes in one direction or the other for the sake of emotional expression. And phrasing, of course, is nothing but the pushing of rhythm in one direction or the other for the same reason. I learned these things from my first voice teacher.
altering notes for expressive purposes reminds me of Anton Reicha extolling quarter tones in his Treatise on Melody back in the early 1800s. It's a counter to bromides from blues and jazz bros who say that their preferred styles "broke all the rules" of classical music. Treatises from the Baroque era may have suggested microtonal inflections but scholars and historians debate whether these were buried in loose usage of categories of "trill" or ornaments.
ReplyDeleteWhich would be why it would be important for theorists and music historians to keep digging into those questions.
Btw I thought you'd have written a bit more about the Dilla book than you have.
The Beato video was funny, "That one's free" particularly. Quantization does explain a lot. A friend of mine who's an audio engineer said the bane of his existence is hearing how many people rely on dynamic range compression so there's no real contrast between textures and volumes.
Yes, the idea that classical music is somehow governed by a set of rules is rather overturned as soon as you know something about it!
ReplyDeleteI had planned on writing much more about the J Dilla book and, for that matter, about the Husserl book, as I was reading them both side by side. As it turned out, after a couple of opening chapters which were quite interesting from a technical point of view the J Dilla book became largely a biography. The Husserl book I couldn't understand enough of to really come to grips with. Hey, not every avenue leads somewhere.
However, the Art in Theory book is proving immensely valuable. For instance, Clement Greenberg described in precise detail the problem of the avant-garde in an essay dating from 1939--before much avant-garde music was even written!
The Hatchet: Dynamic range compression aka The Loudness Wars stems from most people using the mobile device as their listening source, often in places with higher levels of background noise. So it will not go away until people no longer do that. In limited ways some vendors like Apple Music are starting to offer different masterings to select from. Also this has been driving the return to vinyl since cutting vinyl has considerably more physical limitations/guardrails which preclude digital levels of loudness and compression.
ReplyDeleteBryan: Isn't Dilla reinserting asymmetries into rhythmic quantization producing doubly art falsely so called?
J Dilla was using a feature of drum synthesizers to un-mechanize the rhythm. He was also doing other things, but I think the general idea was to make drum synthesizers more interesting. Which is not fakery.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the ubiquitous use of autotune as a default is lazy and un-artistic. And it’s definitely causing us to lose melodic flexibility. There’s an old 60s hit song by The Lovin’ Spoonful - “Daydream”. Singer John Sebastian constantly bends the pitch of the notes in the melody. Some notes are “blue” notes, some words are semi-spoken, and so on. The fluid pitch is arguably the most interesting thing about the song. It’d be a shame to lose that kind of expression.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think some pretty extreme uses of autotune can be very artistic and, in an unconventional way, expressive. In no particular order:
1) Burial’s song “Archangel” creates something truly moving out of vocal extracts he sampled from R’n’B records, then manipulated with autotune to create new melodies distinct from the originals.
2) Charli XCX has a song from maybe six years ago called “Lucky”. Almost every sound on the track is vocal (in origin, at least), while Charli’s lead vocal is manipulated in autotune almost to the point of complete breakup. She also does that very modern mumble thing, where consonants are as quiet as possible.
3) Sega Bodega and Dorian Electra performed a “live over Skype” lockdown cover of the song “Teenage Dirtbag” back in 2020, with both musicians singing into autotune to create multiple overlapping harmonies. I really like it.
All of the above are easy to find on YouTube.
If these songs have one thing in common, it’s their awareness that the human-machine, hybrid sound of voice-plus-autotune is strange and unreal. These artists make intentional use of the resulting feeling, of a human soul trapped in an inhuman grid, trying to break free. If any of the three were re-performed - even by great singers - without autotune, that spooky quality would be lost.
Bryan:
ReplyDeleteYou raise an interesting philosophical question. If Dilla adjusts the mechanized exact repetition of a drum machine to make it less mechanical, is that any less fake? It's still not an actual drummer and doesn't sound like one even if it is more subjectively pleasing. But if the programming software gets to the point where it sounds like a human drummer on actual drums what then?
M. de la Tour, yes, I take your point about the creative use of autotune and can even provide an additional example. There is a Kanye song from a few years ago "Lost in the World" mostly for voices, that uses autotune very creatively. What Fil and Nick Beato are criticizing is not creative use of these things, but rather the mindless use of them to produce music like a factory product.
ReplyDeleteJ Dilla discovered that the older model drum synthesizer he was using had features that no-one took advantage of. He could move, say, the high-hat to be just slightly delayed or the snare to be just slightly early. In essence he was "de-quantizing" specific sounds on specific beats. This is to use a digital musical instrument in a creative way. However, from reading that book and in my own experience, a drum synthesizer, no matter how sophisticated will never actually sound like a human drummer. Exactly why this is so might be an interesting philosophical question, but it likely has something to do with intentionality. Machines don't have consciousness nor intentions.
I don't think the terms "real" and "fake" are useful ones in understanding Dilla. This idea that he "humanized" the drum machine is misleading too. Dilla used the same hardware and software as every other hip-hop and pop producer of the era; he was just better at it. His rhythms were always precisely quantized, but he overlaid multiple different quantization schemes. His "wonky" rhythms are meaningfully expressive exactly because they are reproduced precisely across many repetitions. It's one thing to hear the Detroit Emeralds play with a loose and dragging feel; it's another thing for Dilla to sample a bar of the Detroit Emeralds and then overlay programmed drums that variously align or conflict with the sample. Dilla is not the only computer-based producer to take advantage of all the microrhythmic subtleties that the technology affords, though.
ReplyDeleteBeyoncé's new(ish) song "Texas Hold 'Em" has some conspicuous blue notes, sung right in between the major and minor thirds. Given that every syllable of her vocals get treated and detailed in the studio, it's intriguing how specific those in-the-cracks pitches are - she repeats them in multiple phrases. Auto-Tune is like any other musical tool, you can use it with creativity and wit or not. Most Auto-Tune users get boring results, but then most pianists do too.
ReplyDelete