Everything in its right place
Yesterday, my youngest daughter bought a couple of CDs in Derry. Admittedly, they were a bargain at £2 for three but who buys CDs these days? Why would you?
The answer is for the sensation of holding something in your hands, a case, a CD, a paper inlay with photos of the artist/band and liner notes telling the story of the album. It’s the physical, tactile experience that connects you to the music you’re holding before you even start playing it. More than that, it’s something that reinforces our corporeal being.
The music itself, however it is being played, comes to us over the air. We might not be able to touch it and the physical engagement we have with it comes through our ears, but if we’re placing the CD, cassette or LP containing that music into something that will play it, we’re still touching it more or less up until the point it starts to play.
Compare that to the digital music universe that most of us inhabit now. We search for a song, artist or album on a digital streaming platform, we click play, the music starts. That’s it. That ease and simplicity makes it easy to understand why the process of moving music from the physical analogue world to the digital has been so successful. It has helped to place a huge range of music at our fingertips, a selection that is far wider than would have been available to any of us – even the most dedicated music aficionado – before digital formats emerged.
The other side effect of having so much music so easily to hand is that many hard to find ‘long lost masterpieces’ championed by various music critics over the years have become readily available to anyone who wants to listen. It’s fair to say that some albums that may have benefited from the mystique conferred by obscurity have struggled to retain their elevated status when heard by a wider audience.
The other thing about the digital music universe is that it’s incredibly neat and tidy. In the digital world, there are no LPs or CDs lying around, no empty album sleeves or open CD cases or, worse still, LPs and CDs in the wrong sleeves or cases. You don’t have to worry where to store them, how to play them or even how to actually find the album you’re looking for.
There’s very little detritus in the digital music universe. I say this as someone who has spent the last couple of days transferring music from old cassettes to my laptop. Enduring the hassle of trawling through old tapes, not being able to locate a tune by scrolling through a list of songs but having to rewind or fast forward the tape, stopping it here and there, cueing the track and then importing it onto the laptop.
I was surrounded by boxes of cassettes and stray tapes, some with labels, some without, working my way through them bit by bit, trying to see if there was anything worth preserving. It was time-consuming, irritating – and rewarding. I’m not saying I enjoyed the almost constant physical engagement with cueing up the tape on the tape deck and getting the settings right on Audacity on the computer, but the fact the process placed more demands on me than anything I encounter in the digital music universe forced me to be more engaged with it.
The time and the effort I expended also meant that I paid more attention to what I was doing. I listened to the music which I would not have had to do if I was just moving digital files from one device to another. I was more actively involved in the process, more physically engaged. I cared more about what I was doing. I had a role to play.
Without me, the cassettes would have languished in the attic with the music never to be heard until, perhaps, someone else stumbled upon them in the future and tried to play them. They would have rested there in a state of splendid dishevelment, untidy souvenirs, along with all the other debris and mementos of our existence, attesting to the unruly messiness of our memories and lives.
In the digital universe, there may come a time when that never happens anymore. A time when everything is clearly defined, searchable, catalogued, genred and algorithmed. A time when the mess, debris and clutter of the analogue world has disappeared. But that will also signify a further step away from the undisciplined, uncategorised, uncatalogued, spontaneous nature of our corporeal existence in the physical world in favour of the structures, processes and confines of the digitised world.
As with music, there are likely to be many elements in our daily existence that will be converted to a more digital friendly format. After all, most of us already live in a world where, to adapt the immortal words of MC Hammer and despite my daughter’s recent purchase, the music may still touch us but we can’t touch it.
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