Undergrounds

Stephen Graham has just written an interesting article for The Journal of Music, "Where is the Underground?". It's an insightful socio-musicological look at the nature of the "the underground" as a culture in itself, irrespective of its specific musical content. He says;

The underground is essentially a practice, a cultural philosophy of music that exists outside of the mainstream. This philosophy, rather than being extinguished, has actually been invigorated through new innovations in social media, digital technology and audio culture.

As I was reading, a couple of things occured to me as extending a tangent from Stephen's line of thinking: this is not necessarily just the musical underground, I'm thinking in terms of the "underground" as a resistance to the mainstream, be that music, software, or inner-city bee-keeping.

The internet means you can now "find" the underground and observe it, but taking part is still the true ritual of entry. That is to say, it's easier than ever for anyone to be cognisant of the underground, to explore it, even to talk about it with a level of understanding, but only the experience of "doing" marks you as a member.

The underground has always valorised action. "Practice" is in some ways the political article of the underground, antithetically positioned against the passive consumption of the mainstream: an earlier manifestation of this is clear in the iconic punk graphic below:

But the internet has upped the ante by removing more and more practical barriers to joining the underground, and the removal of these barriers perhaps reveals even more sharply the tribal leap required. The internet is awash with forums, how-tos, and help-sites that say "here are the tools, now take part", and perhaps there is also a lingering sense of "what's stopping you?" behind this that makes this is a social change rather than just a passing fancy. Because with most things in the underground, commitment is the essence, commitment to an individualism that's not mediated by "stuff". It's true that the underground has its own styles and cliches, and by choosing to take part there is an element of trading one set of passive consumptions for another, but I believe there's a greater continuum of possibilities beyond that, and the more one is part of the "practice", the more they develop their own voice: and in turn the greater amount of contributing voices enriches the whole scene, which eventually spills back into the mainstream.

Action and commitment, the gateway to the tribe, you don't become a member until you commit to action, and to sharing the results.

authors outside perceivable time

A lot of thinking out loud below, feel free to comment/correct/extemporise.

This Justin Bieber time-stretch thing has been doing the rounds today, and it sounds fantastic for sure: that said, again I'm a reverb-freak so anything time-stretched sounds good to my ears. But issues of quality/integrity aside, it raises fascinating questions of authorship for me, is an 8x time-stretched Justin Bieber track still a "owned" by the original singer (in terms of identity more than legality) now that it's largely unrecognisable?

J. BIEBZ - U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

I'm guessing the law would presumptively side with the rights-holder here, but an 800% stretch is massive alteration to the original (regardless off the simplicity of the technique). When placed side-by-side it's easy to hear the similarity, but without prior knowledge that this was a slowed down version of an existing song I doubt that anyone would guess; much less guess that it was a slice of mainstream commercial pop. The drums now sounds like huge slow-rolled timpani and bass drums, and long cymbal washes, the voice and piano have morphed into slide guitars, feedback, distant clarinets and more.

The pitch content of the two pieces is obviously still the same but a melodic contour completely loses its identity when it's stretched like this. We memorise melody based largely on short term memory, and a sequence of long notes like this presents a serious challenge to memory, but more importantly to melodic "chunking", how we assign the identifiers such as "melody" and "phrase" that help us both as structural markers in the piece and in memory.

The classical repertoire has plenty of long meandering melodies, but Wagnerian soliloquies and Berlioz' idee fixe are supported by a motivic construction and underlying harmonic logic that allow them to be memorable. A time-stretched melody on the other hand is much more difficult to retain in memory, and the granular synthesis that does the stretching tends to add surface level artefacts ("grain") that distract from the overall contour. Simply put, the human brain is generally not equipped (without training) to listen to extended passages of long notes in the same way as pop songs, we don't "chunk" the information the same way. [I'd be interested to hear from neuroscientists/acousticians/psychologists/etc. here].


As far as I know, in copyright dispute cases, the question before the court is whether the conflicting songs sound similar, I think in this case, even though we all "know" that this is a time-stretch, I think there's a strong case for this being a separate piece of music to the original (the source material). To be clear, I'm not suggesting fort a second that this has any special artistic merit. It sounds great, but as I said above, most things sound great slowed down. There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing from electronic music pioneers to people who first get their hands on a DAW, although I imagine we'll see a slew of "Slowed Down Classics" in the next few days. I'm more interested in where the line is that this stops being a Justin Bieber track. And this does not necessarily beg the question "if not Bieber's then whose? Time-stretching is a simple and widely available tool, Shamantis of course gets the credit for the creation but wonder would it be meaningless to ascribe him/her authorship. Does authorship require a specific level of alteration of the source material? or is re-performance enough?

In my 1st-year composition classes I sometimes ask the students if a piece of Beethoven is still the same piece of music when the parameters of performance are stretched beyond what is culturally acceptable, or perceptually normative. Most students agree that the 5th Symphony is the same piece of music when the key is changed, but are less sure when it's performed at an impossibly slow tempo such a 0.5bpm: I don't mean audio time-stretching here, I mean performing the piece on an instrument extremely slowly. At what point do changes to the global parameters of the piece become a new piece?

Does playing a Justin Bieber track at a specific volume count as a new piece? probably not. What if it's played at a volume that distorts the source beyond recognition, and where's the line of "recognition"? This slow version can be mapped very clearly on to the original but such a linearity/simplicity of reverse engineering doesn't change the fact that it's very different upon hearing.

UPDATE: as predicted, there's an 800% soundcloud group :)