10.3.06, Montreal: Music Models, Daniel Levitin, Under Byen, Joanna Newsom
Music models — scientific and financial
Scientific quotes:
“When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”
— Lord Kelvin, 1883
“How satisfying for the human spirit to contemplate these laws, so beautiful and simple, which may be the only ones the Creator and Ordainor of things has established in matter to sustain all phenomena of this visible world.”
— Pierre de Maupertuis 1745
He goes on to identify action with evil [inertia being matter’s default state according to him] so that the principle of least action becomes the principle of maximum goodness….and says that God ordered the universe to maximize goodness. (From a NYRB article by Freeman Dyson.)
“Nature’s great book is written in mathematical symbols.”
— Galileo
Montreal
“The Royal Mountain” — the mountain that dominates the city park — was visible from the hotel window. The trees have turned yellow, orange and bright red.
I did a talk at the Future of Music Policy Summit here. My talk was called “Record Companies: Who needs Them?” My manager, David Whitehead, drove up from his home in Woodstock and joined me, helping out and answering some questions.
The answer to the question was too simple: some people do and some don’t. Not a very satisfying answer.
Most of the talk, however, was about how as record stores disappear — and CDs too, eventually — the ease with which artists can make more money by doing it themselves (or with a small office) increases rapidly.
In my talk I went over some of the various possible record distribution deals and models, some of which might have been familiar to the audience, which was largely music-oriented digerati. But some parts of it were new, and rather than focusing on one aspect I was pulling as much as I could together and examining what to me were the obvious repercussions. Maybe Whitehead and I can do it again at SXSW?
Afterwards the Arcade Fire gang showed up and I told them I had previously talked to Daniel Levitin, author of “This Is Your Brain On Music”, and a McGill professor of cognitive (music-focused) neurology, about visiting his lab. Many of the band were up for it, so we walked over and Daniel demonstrated and talked about some of what they were doing. Susan Rogers, who worked as recording engineer with Prince, and worked on one of my records and also with Geggy Tah, has been here for 3 years doing graduate studies in this lab. Tommy from Geggy Tah was there too, which was a surprise.
There were a number of what looked like small project recording studios, and we settled into one with an upright piano in it. A young woman demonstrated that the piano was actually a Disclavier, a piano that “records” the performance of anyone who played it and then plays it back with the keys moving exactly as they had been played. One of the lab’s projects aims to get a sense of where the emotion, the feeling, lies in a performance. To do this they had a classical pianist perform a piece expressively and with feeling — we heard part of it played (or performed) back. They then used a program to remove all the feeling from the performance. It sounded like an early digital sequencer; all the notes were of the same length and volume and the rhythm — the timing — had been “squared up” as well. Regine, who has some musical training, said it sounded like a 4 year old after a few piano lessons. To me this “dead” performance was also a faithful transcription of written music with no expressive markings. Much of Bach is like that, I believe, the expression left to the interpreter, but if played exactly as written it would sound like a machine. The limitations of musical notation.
Then the expressivity dial was turned to 50%. It still sounded pretty mechanical, but a little better. At 75% there was feeling there, but not played very well — “a promising student”, said Regine. But it took until 75% for the performance to begin to have what we would call feeling, expression, and humanity.
Then we heard the same performance with randomized expression — notes and time held and accented at random. We laughed, though some in the room thought it sounded eccentric, but good. Daniel said he thought only musicians would think it was interesting, because they have an acquired sense of how it’s supposed to be played, and confounding and surprising those expectations can sometimes make a piece even more interesting. I thought it sounded a little like Thelonious Monk.
One of their more involved projects involves wiring an audience while they attend a performance by the Boston Symphony. Some audience members had EEGs strapped on, others had their brainwaves monitored and others had sliders that they would use to rate the amount of emotion imparted by the performance at any given moment.
Furthermore, later these performances were played back on High Def video to other similarly wired participants (to see if they reacted at the same points and with the same intensity). Others watched the performance without sound and other groups listened without the picture. Interestingly, many of the emotional cues seemed to be visual — body language, facial expressions and eye movements would be tells about whether a performer was struggling, about to hit a high note or winding down. All of which would help explain why sometimes a live performance is often more moving — even with all its faults — than a recording.
The Arcade Fire gang and I agreed to meet later at a Ukrainian Hall where a performance that was part of the music festival Pop Montréal would be happening. Tonight was a Danish group who someone said was good and the harpist and singer Joanna Newsom.
….was the Danish group, and they were good, as rumored. A cellist sat in the center downstage and a blonde woman in a pink dress sang in the semi-darkness further upstage. To the left was a keyboardist — there was also a bass player, two drummers (one in a Betty Page doo) and a fiddler/saw player also stood downstage. Lights like frilly wallpaper patterns played over the whole stage. Their sound, as you might imagine from the instrumentation, verged on lush sweeping melodic lines from the singer or the strings over pulsing meticulously arranged beats from the two drummers. Unfair to say, but a bit like Sigur Ròs, but with words, songs and more aggressive and fractured rhythms…come to think of it, there might be a little Arcade Fire in there as well. The interplay, the spaces left out by one instrument, into which another player would insert a sound, seemed carefully arranged, and this sort of socket approach grabbed me instantly. The mood is one of beautiful desolation and melancholy. The words were in Danish.
[Photo by Vincent Ferrane]
This Ukrainian Hall seems to be a new venue here, so I was told. It’s a lovely place. Holds maybe 300, with a nice proscenium stage, a balcony and beer and wine served in the side hallways. Hope they keep this venue active. As someone who gets around NYC on a bike I was happy to see about 100 bicycles locked up along the entire perimeter fence.
Joanna Newsom was the headliner. The Globe and Mail ran a large piece on her upcoming CD, describing epic-length tunes, orchestrations by Van Dyke Parks, recording by Steve Albini and mixed by O’Rourke. Who’s left? Sounds like something new.
[Photo by Amy Cobden]
The set, however, was her solo with harp…and yes, some of the songs were epics, at least 12 minutes long, not repetitive but like a series of suites — melodies and song structures strung together. The audience went pretty nuts, even with just her and harp….imagine if there had been all the other instruments the recording promises. The tunes sounded like little novels — too much to absorb on first hearing.
