The Fredösphere

First, I should stipulate that I subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast, and enjoy it a lot.

A recent episode looked at phone app called RJDJ that produces "reactive music". It's part of a movement toward augmented reality: based on your location, the sounds in your environment it hears, and even the speed at which you are moving, it chooses sounds and music loops and composes them into a soundtrack to accompany your life. They call it augmented reality; I call it processed silence.

Now, there's no way I'm going to fall into the curmudgeon's trap of declaring some experiment as non-art, according to some constantly patched up definition of art. I'm not going to pull a Roger Ebert here. So, let me stipulate that I think this is a cool idea, and—yes—I'm very happy to live in a world where we have freedom to experiment, try things, blah blah blah. The truth is, I've encountered many attempts to create computer-generated music, and they always fall flat for me.

The atmospheric, minimalistic music that is inevitably produced by these experiments (with pentatonic scales as a frequent crutch) are profoundly shallow in exactly those attributes that I most listen for in music. I want progress: I want chord progressions, I want a romantic arc, a beginning, a middle, and end; I want music written by some man with a plan, some guy (or gal, naturally) who's going places and knows how to get there. My creed: Music Is A Destination, not some post-processed, algorithm-generated, multi-layered airbrushed / autotuned / de-essed Journey.

Whew!

Finally, let me stipulate that Roman Mars (producer of 99 % Invisible) has one of the coolest names in podcasting.

Labels: Composition, Culture, Podcast