Katz, M. (2022). Music and technology: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

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Katz traces the relationship between music and technology from ancient times until today in his book, Music and technology: A very short introduction. The music technology is examined under three main areas: (i) instruments, (ii) notation and printing, (iii) sound recording and broadcast. There are several cases in the book from all over the world, from different times. The author does not limit the book to specific musical genres, but in this post, I’ll mostly focus on the parts related to electronic music.

The book starts with a quote from a DJ: “I’m so thankful I was a DJ before technology took over”. As being a DJ is interacting with several musical technologies from the first step, this statement does not rationally make much sense. However, it underlines the anxiety and the rejection towards the newness and intrusiveness of technological change. Throughout history, there are several examples of this downright rejection, Voltaire’s condemnation of piano being one of the famous ones. Katz mentions, how these once ‘new’ and hypervisible technologies become mundane and invisible in time as they are put into regular use. 

For electronic music, the instruments that had a significant impact were synthesizers and drum machines. Katz equates these two instruments with harpsichords and bongos as similar examples of music technology: “An influential form of electronic music technologies is the synthesizer, a class of instruments that generate sound through a variety of analog and digital means. Synthesizers are commonly thought of as keyboard instruments, but early examples—such as the RCA Mark II or the Moog—were massive devices with rows of knobs and miles of cable, some of them resembling old-fashioned telephone switchboards. Synthesizers have been deployed by composers and performers of every stripe but came to be closely associated with Western pop music. Synthesizers became so influential in certain genres and subgenres that their sound nearly defines them, for example, the Moog and 1960s and 1970s psychedelic and progressive rock or the Yamaha DX7 and 1980s power ballads. Cousin to the synthesizer is the drum machine, an electronic instrument that generates percussive sounds and rhythmic patterns. Drum machines, too, have come to define the sound of popular music genres, including techno, electro, and hip hop. As novel, complex, and occasionally otherworldly as electronic instruments seem, there are more similarities than differences with their acoustic predecessors. Bongos and drum machines, harpsichords and digital keyboards are equally technologies of musical creation.”

In the ‘Time’ chapter, Katz discusses the machinic qualities of the metronome, a supportive device for musicians, and gives two examples of metronome used as the instrument: “… two twentieth-century works, Japanese composer Toshi Ishiyanagi’s Music for Electric Metronomes (1960) and Poème symphonique (1962), a work for 100 metronomes by Hungarian György Ligeti. The “proper” use of a metronome demands that they be operated singly, that they support musicians but are never heard by audiences. These pieces, however, call for metronomes without musicians, multitudes of them unleashing a chaotic soundscape that undermines the device’s disciplinarian function.”

As digital audio workstations (DAW) and musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) become more common practice during music production in general, the quantization feature of the DAWs and other tools help music producers to quantize their audio/MIDI files automatically so that the rhythmic inconsistencies are cleared and perfect synchronization with the metronome is a very easy goal to achieve. Katz touches upon this ambivalent matter of being inhumanely precise as follows: “Music created with MIDI starts out inhumanly precise. Most digital audio workstations now have a function designed to counteract the effect of relentless precision and consistency. This is the so-called humanize function. It allows for a randomization of different parameters of the music, slightly changing a note’s length, position, or emphasis. This function can be applied automatically without the need to nudge individual notes; just set certain parameters and let the software do the rest. The humanize function is now such a staple of recording and composing sessions on DAWs that there seems to be no irony intended in the video tutorials that promise to teach viewers “how to automatically humanize” MIDI-made music. Yes, a great deal of computer code has been written to automate the process of making music sound more human.” He also quotes a study that compares the rhythmic consistency of Western pop songs made between 1955 and 2014, which demonstrated that the consistency of the songs increased significantly as we arrive at the 2010s.

Again in the ‘Time’ chapter, Katz gives two genre examples of slowing down and speeding up the music as cases of the entanglements of technology and culture in terms of musical speed.

Chopped and screwed

“Chopped and screwed (a clear predecessor to slowed + reverb) is a form of hip hop that rose to prominence in the southern US city of Houston in the early 1990s. The name comes in part from DJ Screw, who introduced the genre. His innovation was to use the pitch adjust control on the analog turntable against its intended use. The pitch adjust is typically a slider that allows DJs to make subtle alterations in the speed of a rotating disc. Changing the speed of a record affects its pitch, raising or lowering it depending on whether it is accelerated or slowed. The control is typically used to create smooth, barely noticeable transitions between songs by aligning the tempos of successive tracks through slight adjustments. DJ Screw shone the sonic equivalent of a spotlight on this control, drastically slowing rapped vocals from 90–100 beats per minute (bpm) to 60–70 bpm, which pushed them down into a baritone or bass range. (He also employed tape recorders to help achieve this effect.) In addition to slowing the music, DJ Screw “chopped” sounds, fragmenting and repeating them so as to draw attention to certain phrases. The effect is striking, imparting a languorous feel and hypnotic sensibility to the sound.

Chopped and screwed music did not simply reflect the aesthetics of its creator. Its tempo also reflected the slower pace of life in the US South and the aesthetics of a segment of Black, urban youth in Houston. Its laidback, woozy vibe resonated with and facilitated activities enjoyed by those who listened to this music: cruising in cars rather than racing them; relaxing while listening to music rather than dancing to it; and consuming substances to mellow one’s mood, such as alcohol, marijuana, and, most famously, “purple drank,” a mix of prescription cough syrup and soda. Whether intentionally or not, this music and lifestyle also represents a form of resistance to cultural norms that prioritize speed in all aspects of life. Chopped and screwed music can be seen as part of a global “slow movement”: it resists sensory overload; it promotes relaxation over hyperactivity; it opposes the homogenization of modern capitalist culture by focusing on the hyperlocal. Despite its distinctly regional roots, however, the sound of chopped and screwed has come to have a global influence, suggesting that its exploitation of music technologies to reflect the values of slowness resonates well beyond Houston.”

Drum and bass

“Like chopped and screwed, drum and bass is a genre that arose out of a Black urban musical community in the early 1990s. However, it is not just an ocean that separates them—drum and bass arose in London—but also about 100 beats per minute, with most tracks clocking in between 160 and 180 bpm. The spare, reverb-laden sound of drum and bass points to the influence of reggae and dub and the Caribbean roots of early practitioners,“but its most notable attribute is its sheer London-born speed. Drum and bass tracks are largely instrumental (though they often feature brief, repeating vocal samples), typically built around a short percussion solo digitally sampled from an older funk, soul, or rock record. By far the most frequently and famously sampled song in drum and bass is “Amen Brother” (1969) by the US group the Winstons, specifically a four-bar, seven-second slice of syncopated funk that appears a bit after the halfway point. The break is already fast, at about 135 bpm, but early drum and bass DJs used the turntable’s controls to alter the speed of the original, first by changing the default record speed from 331⁄3 to 45 rpm and then pushing the pitch adjust to its highest setting. (Some DJs hacked their turntables to double the amount by which they could adjust tempo.) Drum and bass reflects the culture of acceleration of its early years, a time when the Internet was emerging as a global force and the rapidly increasing flow of information was experienced as simultaneously exhilarating, frenetic, and overwhelming. The ways in which people often dance to drum and bass literally embody the genre’s complex response to acceleration. Some use slow, controlled movements evoking the graceful, deliberate motions of Chinese tai chi and Brazilian capoeira in a style often described as liquid dancing. Another dance style, x-outing, features more percussive footwork in which heel and toe taps alternate in rapid succession.”

Pioneered by Daphne Oram, the tape looping, or looping in general is also mentioned as an alternative way of playing with the time in music. An example from Beatles: “The high-pitched squawking in the beginning of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” often described as the sound of a seagull, is a sped-up tape loop of Paul McCartney laughing.” After Oram, looping becomes one of the major techniques employed by music producers, “[a]s Chuck D, the rapper and leader of the group Public Enemy, has said, “We put loops on top of loops on top of loops.”

The ‘Space’ chapter has some nice discussions on public/private listening with the contrast of the boom box and the walkman but we’re skipping those. Those who are interested in it can read the book. Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing is in it. Also, El Paquete Semanal of Cuba has a good introduction there.

The ‘Community’ chapter mentions some interesting cultural formations during the early years of music broadcast technologies but does not particularly touch upon electronic music per se.

Chapters

1. Music as technology
   1. Defining music technology
   2. A very, very short history of music technology
   3. Culture matters
   4. The lure of technological determinism
2. Bodies and senses
   1. Unseen music
   2. Feeling sound: musical haptics
   3. Androids, Vocaloids, and holograms: old and new forms of musical embodiment
3. Time
   1. Ordering time
   2. Limiting time
   3. Stretching time, accelerating time
   4. Looping time
4. Space
   1. Caves, cathedrals, and concert halls: architectural acoustics
   2. Notation: tonic sol-fa as a tool for education and empire
   3. Music in public and private spaces: the boom box and the Walkman
   4. Fugitive music: X-ray records and El Paquete Semanal
5. Community
   1. Telephone concerts, phonograph parties, and radio exercise
   2. Radio exercise in Japan
   3. Karaoke
   4. Online musical community
6. Noise
   1. Noise as music
   2. Noise as menace
7. Five theses about music and technology
   1. All music is technological
   2. Our relationship with music technology is fundamentally collaborative
   3. All uses of musical technologies reveal power relationships
   4. The mass mediation of music has not eliminated cultural differences
   5. The study of music technology is the study of people