Comment by diydsp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diydsp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is just a one-time reminder that this whole magilla is about one kind of music: the recorded, mass-produced consumer object.

Although it may seem large and important due to its ubiquity and market value, there's really much more to music than this. Music can sound good and be valuable 100% live with no mics, outdoors with no special architecture. The mastering engineering in the article espouses the virtue of unique equipment, but in a live band, nearly every instrument and every performance quickly becomes a unique one.

Ask yourself, who does it really serve, to experience music as a lithographic impression rather than a unique experience? I'm not even arguing about musician's pay or anything like that. I'm talking about qualia of richness: diversity, local character, dynamic range, interplay with your mood, involvement, movement.

My comment here is really to just break up the spontaneous hierarchy of dollars + equipment + mystery -> ideal studio product. Now that technology has empowered us all to make more music faster on our own I feel it's especially important to ditch the last century's mindsets of scarcity and monoculture with respect to music.

"Ask yourself, who does it really serve, to experience music as a lithographic impression rather than a unique experience?"

A recording allows me to share a specific performance with someone else. It's like a painting, but in audio. I can tell someone how much I like the song Heart Shaped Box on Nirvana's In Utero album, and introduce them to that particular version I like. If my only option is to introduce them to the song at a concert, then they might end up with something like the version on Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah, which is a different experience. (In my opinion, an inferior one.)

Live & unique performance of music has value too, and it's nice to have those fleeting moments that are only shared with the people who were with you at the time. But recording can be a great way to appreciate and enjoy the art itself.

There are lots of musicians for whom the studio is their instrument. Arguably, everything the Beatles did post 'Revolver' wasn't even possible in a live setting. There's certainly something to be said for the organic interplay of live musicians, but making consumer artifacts isn't necessarily 'bad' – Warhol built his entire career on making art out of them.

I seldom see such hippie bullshit espoused on HN outside of Bitcoin/Ethereum threads.

Music can sound good and be valuable in any setting: it can sound better with good audio engineering.

It serves everyone to have a high quality artifact.

> technology has empowered us all to make more music faster on our own

That's not what I want; that's not what any of us wants.

> such hippie bullshit

This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in arguments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The comment would be much more substantive without the first sentence. Please edit such stuff out of your posts here.

I would bet a few shekels that the parent just finished reading the recent "Records Ruin The Landscape" by David Grubbs and is making it count on the internet.

I hadn't heard of that until you mentioned it. I'm familiar with many of the works listed at [1], but considering the reported theses for a moment "new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s actively thwarted the form of the LP" and

"listeners coming to know a period through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians that largely disavowed recordings." [1] I think is interesting and ironic. But, my argument isn't about the mismatch of recording technology and artistic activity, but of mass reproduction and especially the optimization of recordings for profit.

Even without creative performances such as the Fluxus movements and sound artists of that era, pop music can flourish without massive lithography. The beautiful thing is it perpetuates itself through continuous reinterpretation by musicians and listeners, resulting in an accelerated, rich evolution. That's how we got dance steps like the Tango.

[1] https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/records-ruin-the...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com