It can seem that Technology and Music are at odds with each other, but it is precisely through new technological tools that spontaneity and life can return to the contemporary monolithic music scene.

Today, Art (e.g. Music) and Technology appear as opposite poles in the field of human endeavor. A divisive distinction between them has been made in our education and work environments.

It was not always this way. In the ancient world, technology and science were part of the same "Art" as music and sculpture. The modern dichotomy between the technological arts and the fine arts has its roots in the western industrial revolution, and has continued to widen as the value placed on the tools of mass-production and automation increased during the twentieth century. Like every child in Huxley's Brave New World, an attempt has been made to condition us to love those things that accelerate industrial production and hate everything else that impedes, or is irrelevant to, driving the machinery of mass-consumption.

The mass culture has reduced music to an accessory for various kinds of graphic presentations, be it T.V. commercial, video game, movie, or multimedia experience. Music has become just another part of the packaging that consumers expect to get with the products they purchase. Even in the R&D industry, music product is marketed by putting the emphasis on image and fashion, rather than the musical content of the CD (as evidenced by the close relationship between fashion and the "music" video).

Because of the prevailing commercial application of music, the artist must fit what the industry considers to be the ideal image of mass-acceptance, i.e., what holds most people's attention. In most cases this is the perception of sex appeal. It doesn't matter whether an artist is really appealing or not, because the industry will invest huge sums of money in mass-promotion of their amalgamated image. Wealth and popularity can in themselves be sexy and can easily be bought; reproducing the image throughout the media ad infinitum eventually results in some degree of mass-acceptance. The image for a successful artist eventually becomes a formula, applied to new artists it becomes the modern-day equivalent of a movement. But there is no real movement apart from the cash traffic on Madison Avenue or the grinding on MTV. So far, this has been an self-reinforcing process causing an ever-narrowing inward spiral toward the common denominator of bland non-musicality.

In the music market, a few entertainers dominate the multi-million dollar CD sales, and tour the largest performance venues. But bottom-line business considerations (the formula) constrains musical diversity -at least as far as music distribution is concerned. The promotional investment necessary turn concert tours into advertisement campaigns for completely irrelevant corporate sponsors (such as the beer industry).

In a typical retail CD store there are only so many bins. The increasing number of chain stores (with exact replicas of each other's inventory) limits the number of viable commercial genres even further, and there can only be as many genres as are allowed by the available bin space. Within each genre, a mere handful of demographically-suitable artists are marketed by each label. Introduction of new categories and genres happens approximately once per decade; 50's rhythm&blues, 60's:hard rock, 70's:disco, 80's:rap, 90's:grunge rock. To minimize risk, record labels market the same categories over and over in 30-year cycles and one would expect heavy promotion of discotheque music as we move toward the next decade. This is happening now as the industry seeks to appropriate the underground rave scene and turn it into a commercial re-run of 1970's Disco.

Update 2000: Disco is back, under the moniker "Electronica." Look for the return of funk music marketed as an "alternative" music later this year.

In the case of any music genre, the ideal of mass-acceptance will necessarily lack any real substance and is incapable of taking a stand - either social or artistic ("this Bud's for you"). Even music outside the center of the musical spectrum, commercial music suffers from the sameness today's consumers are conditioned to expect from their pop music product. For example, competition for the fringe of radio air play has lead to the virtual elimination of musical dynamics; audio is compressed and limited up to the very top of the digital decibel window for maximum volume (market penetration) over the air waves.

Update 2000: Consider the interesting case of the hard-core/hip hoppish band-with-message 'Rage Against the Machine' who promote an anti-corporate message and at the same time reap profits for those self-same corporations. Keep an eye on this group to see how a corporate organism tries to expel a foreign body.

Is there anyway to back out of this cull-de-sac? How can true music, with its ever-changing nature, regain access to the airwaves and channels of mass-distribution?

The near-term restoration of the Music to the music industry does not look hopeful. The most realistic scenario is that listeners may ultimately get annoyed at the way the industry manipulates and exploits their sensibilities. Music has a purpose higher than simple corporate profit. Music is for us.

Fortunately, rapidly developing technologies present new opportunities we can take advantage of to create an alternative foundation for musical production and distribution. At present, Second Sufis' method is to personally take on, with appropriate technological boosts, all of the necessary activities and roles necessary toward becoming a self-sufficient force in musical evolution. Side-stepping the established R&D industry, we are in position to re-establish an essential channel between music and listener.

Recording-Then and Now

Update 2000: The following section was written before the advent of the MP3 music file format used for distribution on the Internet. Considering the ferocity of the established music industry's attack against this technology, it is clear that they view the new technologies as a grave threat to the status quo. Second Sufis embrace MP3 technology and favor a liberal interpretation of copyright laws with respect to the new paradigm of distributed media on the Internet. Like radio air play, MP3 distribution will help music find listeners who will pay for longer and higher-fidelity versions of their favorite songs. Moreover, MP3 distribution will give listeners greater choice in music as new genres of music, formerly disallowed by the monolithic industry, appear and find an audience -- Especially if they support artists distributing MP3 by buying their products.

The modern recording studio is a digital, multi-track recording environment. In most cases, a musical production consists of dozens of recording tracks layered over each other during many discrete recording sessions. The performing musicians may never have been in the studio at the same time and could be complete strangers from each other. Up to now, an all-digital production like this (including digital mixing) meant expensive studio time that could easily restrict the creative flow for artists investing their own money. Less expensive studios claiming to have digital multi-track facilities have generally done their mixdown and track bumping in the analog realm. This approach sacrifices a great deal of sound quality because it involves repeated analog-to-digital conversion on each sound source. Even with the best converters (upwards of $2000 for each A-D, D-A stereo channel) this makes digital sound more brittle. Up to now, quality, digital multi-track has remained out of reach for small enterprises.

A reexamination of the recording process, which includes questioning what we want to record, and why, can make alternative recording approaches self-evident. Originally, a recording was designed to reproduce a live musical performance. As recording technology advanced, innovators like Les Paul realized than multiple-track recording could be used to stack-up several performances on the same tape, i.e., by over-dubbing and bouncing tracks. This meant that one musician could now sound like an entire band. The number of tracks increased from eight to sixteen, and then to twenty four, thirty six, and beyond. While new, this technology was very exciting, and gave rise to special audio effects and freedom to experiment with different recording techniques. But, if the intention is to record a live performance, multi-track capability is not needed and, with sufficient care, a high quality digital stereo recording can be achieved without using multi-track techniques. This recording need not be an austere rendering either. With modern digital-signal-processing technology, special effects and live sampling can be accomplished in real-time. The same technology that typically allows studio-quality performances in live concert conversely allows recording of live performances (in real time) that are also of studio-quality.

A significant savings can be realized by adopting a two-track stereo recording method, but this requires careful pre-mixing and real-time performance skills. Programming digital-signal-processors then becomes a part of the artist's performance, not star dust added on by studio engineers during the post-production process. The applicable point here, though, is that multi-track recording is not an absolute necessity given today's technology and a certain level of musical competence. With the elimination of the unnecessary overhead comes a tremendous amount of creative freedom. Risking studio time on composition and improvisation means risking lots of needed resources (money).

Very recently (spring 1997), new products have come online that bring multi-track digital in reach for the "cottage" recording studio. These 8-track recorders and 8-bus mixers have eliminated approximately half of the cost by removing the SMPTE-sync capacity required for mixing down sound with video. These products are equivalent in price to the rates for the analog-equivalent 8-track reels and 12 track mixers ten years ago (see the Tascam DA38 recorder and Yamaha 03 mixer). The digital multi-track studio presents unique possibilities and can make ultra-clean recordings easier to achieve - even for live recording situations preferred by Second Sufis. With the streamlined recording methods outlined above, the musician can honor his craft and ignore dictates of the corporate music monolith.

How We Do It

Second Sufis is a live performance duo; all playing is done in "real time." Real-time samples, recorded at various points during the same performance, are played back in order to accomplish a track-layered effect. The samples can be looped back on themselves (regenerated), edited on-the-fly, and downloaded to secondary samplers at any time--all while real-time playing on the "actual" instruments continues.

This digital "tape loop" principle is not necessarily applied to all of the instruments all of the time, in fact many sections have no looping at all. But it's possible for as many as five loops to operate simultaneously. the following figure shows an example setup for drums, stick, and guitar.

Composition

In the 1986-1993 period, Second Sufis maintained a triple-set repertoire of composed pieces. Most pieces incorporated some improvisational sections, more so in the electric compositions than the acoustic guitar pieces. With time limited by economic constraints, the rehearsal required to maintain the repertoire was getting in the way of developing new material.

Another approach, more appropriate to the situation, would be to focus exclusively on recording new compositions. Competing in the recording industry requires heavy investment in production values, usually starting with 24-track multi-session recording facilities. However, Second Sufis focus on live performance and the emphasis on coordinated group improvisation are corner stones of their approach. The question of "how to resolve these issues?" was answered by employing the multiple tape loop method described earlier in this article. Rather than overdubbing and bumping tracks, two people can make a real-time recording that is, in its essence, live.

What is Composition?

Understanding this possibility depends on distinguishing between 'Listening' and 'just listening.'" The experience of 'just listening' to music cannot compare with the actual experience of Listening to music. For example, someone who can listen attentively for one minute will not appreciate eight minutes of continuous music. For the last seven minutes they can be said to be 'just listening.' Most commercial music recognizes this fact and structures music into short repetitive patterns that only need to be heard once before they can be ignored. Commercial music trends can themselves accelerate the shortening of the average "listening span," as generations of ears are progressively underchallenged.

Outside of dancing and movie going, many people have little use for music. Being told that music must be important, they at one time or another may have exposed themselves to various recordings and attended concerts, but the musical experience still eluded them. Was there really something more to music than dots on paper, or was music some kind numbers game worked out by 'guys in tweed suits working off foundation grants?'

Well, highly theoretical numbers games like the twelve-tone composition system compare well with theoretical physics and molecular biology at university budget sessions. The pre-Modern culture had a vested interest in its post-atomic machismo and positivist pin-headedness. Music schools primary interest was staying solvent, not wafting on musical breezes. The answer to "Why can't I appreciate this stuff (i.e. 12-tone)?" is simple. Only twelve-tone composers appreciate twelve-tone music. Twelve-tone is an exploded-view technical diagram of sound--not music, and is simply the extension of the physics lab's atomic spectrograph.

For a student of music, detection of the boundary between sound and music can occur when exposed to the concept of "major" and "minor" scales or chords. Besides a change in sound, most people can detect a change in mood between striking a major chord and minor chord. The major is strong and solid, the minor is sad and yielding. The major is clear sky, while the minor is partly cloudy. Try to remember the first chords in the theme to the movie 2001, a Space Oddesey, "Also Spracht Zarathustra." A crescendo of trumpets spell out the I and V and octave followed by a triumphant major (I, III, V) chord that subsides to an awe-inspiring minor as the III note is reduced by one semi-tone. Heavy metal bands like Metallica exude long minor chord sequences, while pop Satriani sports about in majors. The capability to detect these differences, and the differences between any of music's countless moods and modes, is perhaps the prime medium of musical transmission. While these differences can seem unremarkable, the vast range of possibilities allows for powerful contrasts and, combined with other musical elements like dynamic expression and timbre, makes for a powerful means of expression. There are hundreds of possibilities within the western system of minor / major, far more when non-western modes are included, and thousands of synthetic modal possibilities (any seven of the thirteen semi-tones). Of course this doesn't broach the issue of microtonal systems -- which formalize what rock & blues refer to as bending, or slurring, a note between two adjacent semitones

Even with such an explanation, some people still experience difficulty tuning-in on music. Their ear is not yet open. How can someone who knows and loves music communicate their enthusiasm to someone whose ear is not opened to music? Is tone-deafness something we are stuck with like color blindness? Color blindness is based on a physical deficiency of color-detecting cone cells in the eye. Unless someone fails a hearing test, they do not have a physical deficiency that prevents them from appreciating music. Tone-deafness suggests that the cause is non-physical, perhaps emotional. Rather than get engrossed in psychological theories, we can call that interference simply "noise."

One of the reasons for the success of bland popular recordings is they allow people to fill their heads. This is sometimes to replace one kind of noise with another, or to fill up something that feels empty. Commercial music targets its product to various markets and panders to this population's biases. It panders to the mindset of its particular target market. This kind of sound can act as an ipecac for the venting of emotional bile often mistaken for the musical experience, e.g., country & western's 'cry in your beer' and the punk's 'death and vomit.' This pandering does not benefit the consumer...

Note that all country music consists of the same three chords, while the punk movement substituted a simplified I-V power chord for the major or minor triads found in other western musical forms. In the commercial recording industry nothing new is ever introduced, musical progression is seen as an endless wheel replaying the forms of thirty years past.

Opening the ear begins by reducing noise when we want to experience music. Being awake, relaxed, and without expectation is a good start. Imagine that you are turning on short-wave radio to tune-in on some exotic broadcast from the other side of the world and check out the viewpoint over there. To truly appreciate the significance of an opened ear, it is necessary to understand that hearing mood in sound is still unexplainable mystery. We can measure the frequency difference between the red and blue light, but cannot relate this to the experience of color. Colors often stimulate the intellect and have emotional resonances. Similarly, we cannot explain why dropping the third tone of a scale by a half tone makes a triumphant fanfare suddenly more eerie to the western ear. Still, whatever connections people make between sounds and their emotions cannot be assumed to be anything more than subjective. My color red may not be your red, what is music to me might not appeal to you. Cultural background shapes our musical sensibility to a great extent. Is the artistic content of a combination of colors or a cluster of notes objective or subjective. In the case of music, we can look to the physical structure of organized sound for a more objective answer.

Music is typically an organization of sound (I'm excluding aleatoric music--people who appreciate aleatoric music do not have a problem hearing music within sound -- they often appreciate music where none was ever intended). The earliest music was sung or performed with simple instruments. If there is anything to this idea of "music" within sound, it must have been present in the simple beginnings of human music or we would never have spent the last million years play and listening to it. The first musical sounds had three basic elements: timbre, rhythm, and pitch. Timbre is just the quality of a sound, shrill, raspy, smooth, percussive, etc. More on rhythm later. But where did the notion of discrete pitches come from? What kind of objective basis might the western seven-tone diatonic (e.g., C, D, E, F, G, A, B) scale system have in the origins of music? Let's imagine a Cro-Magnon who's bored with the atonal hide-drum and vocal-grunt minimalism prevalent during the old stone age. He picks up a broken conchshell and blows with no result. A hundred thousand years go by and a hundred thousand failures, but finally somebody blows and a tone comes out--the first trumpet. He blows harder and a polyphony of different harmonics come pouring out -- the first scale! Man has discovered the natural harmonic series, perhaps before he's learned to count to ten, but in the physical reality of sound rather than the abstraction of numbers. The shell produces a fundamental pitch (frequency) inversely proportional to length of the air cavity within the shell. Additional pitches (harmonics) are inversely proportional to this length divided by any small integer n. where n = 1, 2, 3, 4,... and V is the speed of sound (331.70368 meters per second) If our conchshell's air cavity is 0.753872 meters long, we get the following fundamental tone and harmonics:

The first five distinct tones that occur, when placed in alphabetical order, form the pentatonic major scale: A, B, C#, E, G. The first six distinct tones, in alphabetical order, are: A, B, C#, D#, E, G. These are perhaps the first scales known to man. So early man had an assortment of notes in his experience, and varied the relationships of these five or six notes to his liking as instruments developed. Interestingly, the fundamental note, its first harmonic, A, (the octave), and the second harmonic, E, (the fifth) are the intervals forming the basis of all traditional music systems. These are the notes found not only in Beethoven, but also in power chords of the Sex Pistols and the gamelan of Micronesia. As the conch player tried to blow an even higher note than the fifth, he was returned to the original fundamental tone, only an octave higher. He had to improve his skill to play a G even higher than this, after which he might even play a fundamental even another octave higher. It's not clear when the minor sixth interval (F), nearly three octaves above the fundamental, was ever hit on this primitive instrument. Perhaps ancient numerologists, fascinated with the mystical properties of the number seven, decided that the scale had to have seven notes and added the F to smooth the transition between E and G. The first seven distinct tones, in alphabetical order, form the natural harmonic scale: A, B, C#, D#, E, F, G. The sharped fourth interval is known as a 'tri-tone' because it is three whole steps above the fundamental. Medieval musicologists considered this note to be 'of the devil' and constructed the western modes without it. Traditional eastern-European music favored the tri-tone, as exhibited by the folk music of Hungary and the compositions of 20th-century composer Bela Bartok. These notes form the western music system's major scale, except for the D# and F. Our harmonic scale's D#, also known as the tri-tone has been replaced in the western system by the more harmonious fourth, D. Western composers often make use of the sixth by sharping this note (F#) in ascending passages and playing the naturalized note (F) when descending (both F and F# seem equally notes pleasing to the ear). These scales were later subdivided further -- into thirteen semitones in the western system and even more in microtonal systems.

Of course few of the notes in this natural harmonic scale precisely match "equal tempered" notes of modern western music. Over the centuries, the frequency relationships between the notes of a scale have been artificially manipulated to facilitate key-modulation within keyboard-based compositions. Thanks Johan Sebastian! In addition, the conchshell will theoretically produce other notes such as G# and C when the harmonic series is expanded for even greater values of n. These high-order harmonics, however, were probably impossible to hit on a primitive conchshell trumpet, and even if played they were too soft and high-pitched to hear well. What this dissection of the musical scale means, however, is that the notes of the scale are not arbitrary, but have an objective physical basis -- the harmonic series. The harmonic series is a mathematical tool used to describe much of the mechanics that occurs in nature and even in our own bodies. Harmonic series describe the oscillations of a pendulum, the compression of a spring and the physics of all wave propagation. When we hear the harmonic series in the form of sound, our own bodies resonate to the intervals. But the harmonic relationship of intervals is at the same time an idea that finds resonance in our psyche. The series of tones seems 'right' and suggests an ultimate resolution as exhibited in a trumpeted 'taps.'

Music provides a continuous spectrum between the physical and the world of ideas. My first experience of finding something more in music than just 'sound' was listening to the Screaming Eagles drum corps. The experience was of a ticklish sensation between my throat and chest resonating to the incredibly dense drum frenzy. This sensation penetrated to my physical heart. This was something more than just the sound of the drum. The incredible thing was the continuous way that the players kept generating this feeling and their excitement in turn at creating this effect.

The repetition of rhythm can motivate people to dance or send someone into a trance. Western dance music is primarily in common time, i.e., four beats to a phrase. This is related to the fact that people have two feet. A variation is the Waltz, with three beats per measure, with its characteristic shift in direction every other phrase. Analysis of music considered hypnotic or trance like reveals proportions related to fundamental mathematical/physical proportions such as pi, e (the natural logarithm), Fibonacci series (1,1,2,3,5,8, ...) or the golden section. But we should not expect music to communicate thought with some kind of rhythmic Morse code. All of the physical attributes of music discussed so far have merely been those that we can relate to on a physical level. The net effect of these elements is an effect on the physical body, bringing the body into resonance with the music and the player of the music. With the performer and audience drawn closely together by these physical principles, it is then possible for more subtle communication to occur. What had perhaps might have been thought of as a paranormal experience (extrasensory perception) can become one aspect of a heightened sensitivity between individuals or even a shared (however temporarily) group consciousness. This is a new world that offers the possibility of solution for many of the most intractable problems through the ecstatic experience of music.