Feature

Audio Visual, part 1

2 Robb Ogle

Going blind, audio and abstinence. The abridged version for cheaters and skimmers:  
- Does music still need covers?
- Digital vs. physical. 
- Self-imposed limitations. 
- Graphic designer shoots himself in foot. Damns division of labor. Plays general spoilsport.

I have just told my iPod not to display cover artwork. The notion of “cover” is now unique/antique, almost like the continuing use of “record” as a synonym for “album.” Also, how to physically cover a MP3 file? What is the package? Is a package necessary? Isn’t the download folder or .zip icon the package? Anyway, the iPod’s “Cover Flow” displays a long monotonous swipe of gray music notes. I own (license) no music videos. I do not have cable, satellite TV, nor TiVo. I am no Luddite, only cheap. I now operate musically blind. The technology at hand is not being used to its impressive potential in an ascetic approach, but I listen better, I like my music more.

I’ve been thinking about audio+visual lately. A switch to a solely digital library two years ago brought certain musical preferences into focus, then my buying and listening habits were brought into tabular specified view(s). The first inner debate was whether to keep my proud library of CDs, a monument to my greatest personal indulgence (no international travel or luxury gadgets or fine wines for me, give these ears new sounds) or sell the horde for a more lithe and uncluttered life, especially before a big move to cramped brooklyn living?

Unloading a sizeable library of CDs meant losing a biographical history of album art packaging, liner notes with varying degrees of insight and reference, and some lovingly handwritten labels on mixes. The last cut would not be severe. I’ve abandoned personalized mix tapes one technological generation ago, the experience would not be new. Sentimental value be damned. A technological or format shift is standard, but generally from one physical object to another as formats go vinyl to magnetic to optical. But to sell off what became a piece of personal architecture or furniture for data stored on a harddrive the size of a paperback was new, an entire side of my room gone, a visible collection erased. I sold it back to Newbury Comics in duffel bag increments. There were stages of panicky grief, scalper’s remorse, from mourning to guilt at leaving my inanimate behemoth baby on the the doorstep of the orphanage. No, worse, the workhouse to be parsed out and sold in chunks, unloved as a unit, many unwanted albums to be left behind and bargain binned. Newbury was a comfort, I knew as a former employee they would be filtered out to good homes. Back at home, last of the CDs exorcised, it looked as if I’d been burgled. But, I kept the music, the vital audio of it all. It was the worst intellectual property laundering low I’ve ever sank to. However, the sale funded moving truck fees and some of my deposit.

Since, I’ve recognized the late adopter’s revelations long since obvious to most of the MP3’d digital population. There is the small buyer’s joy of internet purchases democratizing the distribution channels for small labels and self publishers (hello artist-direct selling, hello eMusic, hello Tunecore, hello Bleep, hello beatport, hello UndergroundHipHop, hello Boomkat, hello Discogs.) The cuts to the production cost of so much manufacturing, middle management, and gasoline wasted on pushing little pieces of plastic product around is an improvement, right? I feel for you delivery driver, whose wage I’m ignoring, likewise print press operators, and dust inspectors keeping CD factories’ clean room conditions, and distribution comptrollers, and all the water cooler suppliers they employ… but you don’t make the music. You are inessential to the musical process, just like me, the graphic designer who makes the cover. Band photos, CD packaging, the unique visual identity of each album labored over and considered by the musicians, managers, and labels’ publicity folks now gone. Cherished padding and fluff. Fat to cut. Inessential. Here is my gun, here is my foot, bang.

And here’s the traitorous portion: the art is a distration. And it swings back from my weepy sentimental collector loss to my bright space-age portable MP3-only existence, to the iPod in my pocket: I am artless and happier for it.

Even as my music collection became artless, packageless, and intangible, certain habits maintain. They get precision-tuned. Prior, the newest CDs staid out in a stack atop the stereo. Four to seven piled high till gravity toppled the thing over or its disorder screamed at me to clean for once. CDs rotated often with the dustiest ghettoed back to the shelves when new blood was unwrapped. Now, digital sorting defaults to “date added” for similar effect. Enthusiastic saturation to a single album was measured loosely in length of time it sat in the stack. How much I would play out and kill the new was vague, and known only to my poor neighbors. Now last.fm shows me my music in vivid cold heartless math, not art (oh, there’s more of this to come… pretty pretty data visualization). My embarrassment at listening to too much La Roux is quantified, my dirtiest listening laundry (that much Bad Religion? really?... well they have a lot of short songs so that disproportionate number is misleading) is aired for the world to see. I’m focusing on different kind of visuals now, a big honking playcount number attached to the artist’s name, or the disproportionate bar graph data of this month’s artists. Imagine the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” not as a zipper’d erection but a quantity. Visualize the Velvet Underground not as a banana but an integer directly related to your devotion to them. A pathetic waif “0” for the Magnetic Fields if you hate them, not a giant “69.” This abstract and artless representation of music makes me appreciate the sound and not be persuaded by historically necessary exterior packaging (or even anti packaging… more later). The system avoids interpretation or coloration, it’s a little truer and more direct. The difference is kind of important I’ve realized. MP3s and playcounts shame me from burning out on one person/group. The ability to walk about with a wall’s worth of music in my pocket guilts me into taking advantage of its variety. My past’s unsightly pile of discs led to laziness. Avoiding returning discs to cases then back into alphabetized shelves discouraged nimble listening, easier just to cycle through the short stack and ignore the larger library. More dust gathered, I greedily killed new songs with sloth. Like I said, I like my music better now, and moderation improves it all.

There are things I’m missing, cover-less, but the failings have more to do with reference and organization as so much of my head seems wired to assign images to content rather than parsing out bits from lists of text. Another thing to delve into later, but not Oliver Sachs territory. I feel honest and pure now. iPod storage space and RAM is not sacrificed for pixelheavy images. I am performance enhanced and minimally streamlined with audio only and an RGB screen displaying grayscale blankness. I remember a highschool coworker marveling at a parts catalog for a stick shift Honda CRX vs its automatic twin. One was so much simpler, affordable, and direct because there were, simply, fewer components. The manual driver knew what he wanted from his technology. “So much more can break on an automatic…” So there’s an illustration of my distrust of multitasking devices. However, I want my music colorful and blended and utterly unsure of itself, mix my genres and purists be damned. Give me import (another dying notion there) hindi trip hop-along the prairie two stepping death crunk remixed by a cumbia DJ’s accapella moniker, make my head think about sound in new ways, but don’t make me solely identify the music with packaging cooked up by a graphic designer’s interpretation of it as voiced through their fetish for Cooper Black and sepia-toned aerial photography. That’s too limiting and too precise.

I’m not done. But I’m stopping here. Must head back to the lair and think a bit.

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