Federico Andreoni - Synthesis Essay

Will Music Continue its Transformation

into Something that Accompanies a Visual Element?

This question in the title suggests that music today is becoming—in its totality or in part—an element of support to visual objects. But is it true that music is dependent on images? If so, in what sense? Moreover, is it music that is in a phase of transformation or is it our perception of music as an art form that is undergoing some sort of transformation?

Looking back in time, the fusion of music with visual elements has always been part of human history. Opera and Greek tragedy are perfect examples of how music and visual/performing arts have been bound together for centuries. I don’t think that anyone among us can dispute that, today, music and images are also very often bound together in complex artistic forms such as TV, cinema, and videogames. Music and images work together to create products of great social interest and intellectual stimulation; the role of music in these products is to enhance specific aspects of the visual element and to help guide audiences through the plots, atmospheres, and/or emotional qualities of these products. Today, however, music and images are also bound together in many other ways in our everyday lives, not only in purely artistic forms. Commercially, genres of music are used to identify specific types of products; inside and outside of cafes, music invites people to connect with product styles and images (especially by stimulating the imagination of potential customers walking down the street). In other words, music has been—and to a significant degree—sucked into the sphere of business and commerce, and has become one of the strongest and most reliable advertisement tools directed towards selling products and making money.

The styles and habits of people have changed over the centuries, and along with it so has the use that peoples make of music; in other words, the capacity to listen to and understand music has changed. Each day, we witness and participate in the progressive transformation of the general perception of music and, more interestingly, of the purposes and functions of music. As Karen Collins has explained, programming slot machines in casinos to play specific jingles allows managers to make gamblers feel like winners even when they are losing money. In a similar way, music has become a fundamental aspect of videogame creation; Collins described the highly complex studies conducted to determine the positioning of speakers and the creation of the optimal soundscapes in table videogames.

Moreover, Donald K. Donald explained how, before the “big shift” of the 90s, live music events were an “excuse” to attract people and gather them together in order for organizers to have a platform of thousands customers to whom they could sell products that may even have been completely unrelated to the artistic production unfolding on the stage at the time; for instance, just how related are The Doors and hot-dogs?

If the fusion of music and images was a rare and complex thing to realize in the past (think of what the staging of Wagner’s operas meant in terms of costs and technical/artistic/workmanship preparation in the 19th century!), today such fusion is created with relatively few problems, if any. YouTube videos are a perfect example of how people can easily achieve this: users can easily download for free a number of music programs that allow them to create, modify, and arrange all sorts of music (the software Audacity is a great example of this) and adapt them to images and videos that can then be posted and made available to the world.

The tendencies summarized so far have produced two main outcomes. On the one hand, music—thanks to the help of better technology—has become so popular, widespread and easy to make and manipulate that people are becoming progressively better acquainted with near-professional standards, while professionals in the music field have to constantly improve the quality of their products in order to remain at the top of their field (for instance, Guillaume was telling the class how nowadays film scoring orchestration is no longer obtained through digital creation but rather through the use of real orchestras).

On the other hand, almost all music-related businesses incline towards the mass production of music of (mostly) very low quality content and sound (an aspect that George Massenburg, Richard King, and Martha de Francisco have pointed out during their presentation), a phenomenon related to the need to attract and feed the constant and never-ending desire of millions of potential customers for perpetually new and easy-to-consume products. The music business plays with the delirium of omnipotence that strikes our society today, and with its desire for freedom at any cost, and helps to transform that desire into reality; thanks to all the music making programs available for free through the web, people can dream of becoming producers and businessmen in the music field from the comfort of their own home.

I strongly believe that, for most people, and for a long time, music will be considered in connection to images, yet not as a factor dependent on images. The quality of digital technology applied to music has progressed very rapidly in recent years, and will continue to do so in an exponential way in the future, thereby making music an exceedingly efficient (probably the most efficient) support for what is still imperfect image technology (think of cinema: we need something more than the flat screen...the next challenge for the movie business will be the 3D and I just heard on the radio that Avatar is being screened in “4D” in South Korea…with smell/tangible effects: maybe a joke, but a significant signal of the desire of the audiences...). In this context, the notion of individual pieces of music will tend to disappear, as our objective seems to be more to participate in “the cloud” of information that surrounds us. What kind of stimulation that will produce, I have yet to find out.