Ratliff - Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

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To Kate, Henry, and Toby

who else?

We are listening in the time of the cloud. First there was a person making up a song, as ritual or warning or memorial. Then there was a person singing an old song that someone had made up. Then there was music in the church and the concert hall and bar and bordello; then the wax cylinder, gramophone, radio, cassette, CD player, downloadable digital file. And then there was the cloud. Now we can hear nearly everything, almost whenever, almost wherever, often for free: most of the history of Western music and a lot of the rest.

We know all that music is there. Some of us know, roughly, how to encounter a lot of it. But once we hear it, how can we allow ourselves to make sense of it? We could use new ways to find points of connection and intersection with all that inventory. We could use new features to listen for and new filters to listen through. Even better if those features and filters are generated more from the act of listening itself than from the vocabulary and grammar of the composer.

* * *

The most significant progress in the recent history of music has to do with listening. How we listen to music could be, for perhaps the first time in centuries, every bit as important to its history and evolution as what the composer intends when writing it.

By how we listen to music I am not referring to a change in our neural processing of music. (This is not a scientific book.) I mean a change in how we build a conscious framework or a rationale to listen to all kinds of music. Culture is built on ready availability, and we have suddenly switched from being a species that needed to recognize only a few kinds of songsbecause only a few kinds were readily available to us, through the radio, or through record stores, if we were lucky enough to live near oneto a species with direct and instant access to hundreds of kinds, thousands of kinds, across culture and region and history. Listeners have become much more powerful. Perhaps we should use that power to learn how to listen to everything.

Heres an image from real life. A teenage boy, on a bus in the Bronx, in a puffer vest and bright kicks and a close haircut, just old enough to have figured out how to dress with authority, listening to a song by Jeremih, phone to ear. Maybe he bought the song; more likely he found a way to download it for free, or is streaming it from YouTube or Spotify. The song is about luxuriant sex, as are most songs by Jeremih. The teenager listens with near boredom and absolute confidence. The position of the phone in his palm, the angle of his hand and wrist, the focus of his eyes as he surrounds himself with the songs informationthis is all part of his creativity. He is engaging, identifying with the song; he has a sense of dominion over the song and the medium. He can take that song or leave it. There are a million others like it. Hes got the power. Hes the great listener of now.

He can listen to more, or he can listen to less. He can hear a musician perform twenty times without paying admission or traveling anywhere, through live streams on screens. If he finds his way to the right free software, he can time-stretch a song while keeping it at the same pitch, and turn its emotional experience upside-down, as has been done to records by Justin Bieber and to the Jackson 5. He can fuse elements of two different songssay, a Biggie Smalls rap and a childrens television-show themeand can learn, when boomeranging it through social media, that a lot of people (mostly young people) really, really like stark musical juxtapositions.

In the store where he bought his sneakers he might have heard a digital playlist on shuffle, playing a Don Omar reggaeton track after a Latin freestyle hit from the 1980s. On the bus, he can stream the same five Drake mp3s from the cloud without owning anything hes hearing, or he can listen just as easily to recent field recordings of Saharan music, possibly made on a cell phone. At home, he can watch television shows that use recorded music pulled from any tradition of the last hundred years in order to give extra meaning to a scene or a character; if he likes what he hears, his cloud-based playlists might appear to follow no associative logic of sound or style. Later on, if he becomes more engaged with music, he canlets saytrain as a violist and feel moderately sure that he will work with electronic-music composers or singer-songwriters or Berklee-trained guitar improvisers or rappers from South Africa. He can walk out of whatever styles of music raised him, and into others as yet unknown to him, where he has complete access because listening gave it to him. He doesnt have to wait for music to define him. He can define it.

Music is everywhere. It has gained on us as our waking life turns into one long broadcast, for better and for worseoften for worse. But we have gained on it, too, learning how and when we want to absorb it. The unit of the album means increasingly little to us, and so the continent-sized ice floes of English-language culture that were Beatles and Michael Jackson records are melting into the water world of sound. (For efficiency well download just one song and ignore the other twelve, but we could likely have them all for free: we have a new assumption that music is ours to take, just as soon as it is ready to be sold to us.) We might get our cues about what to listen to from our Facebook feed, or from sources that use music as almost neutral content in a mediated environmenttalent shows, talk radio, football-game ad spots. Background-music services have been vastly improved, thanks to the information yielded by our online listening activity. Pandoras so-called Genome recommendation model reminds us that there is more to be heard within a similar style, based on that styles small or large characteristics. Other sophisticated music-data algorithms, such as those created for Spotify and other clients by music-data companies like the Echo Nest, profile your taste in music as a condition related to who you are in generalwhere you live, how old you are, how you are likely to vote. With these advances we can essentially be fed our favorite meal repeatedly. We develop a relationship of trust withwhat? Whom? A team of programmers? Our own tastes, whatever that means, translated into a data profile?

This all sounds very bad. It probably is very bad. Infinite access, unused or misused, can lead to an atrophy of the desire to seek out new songs ourselves, and a hardening of taste, such that all you want to do is confirm what you already know. But there is possibly something very good, too, about the constant broadcast and the powers of the shuffle and recommendation effects. There is a possibility that hearing so much music without specifically asking for it develops in the listener a fresh kind of aural perception, an ability to size up a song and contextualize it in a new or personal way, rather than immediately rejecting it based on an external idea of genre or style. Its what happens in the moment of contextualization that matters: what you can connect it to, how you make it relate to what you know.