music week: plainsong or bimmeln

The nearly viral nature of communications—especially found in the musical jingles, incidental, errant and intentional peeps and beeps and tones that seem to occupy that real estate between recognition and interpretation, has always been a fascinating subject for me that I think becomes more of a study once one reflects on the auditory cues that one chooses and those refrains that become entrenched and inseparable. What’s memorable and well-marketed went viral long before the term even came about, and it is really a remarkable thing how an idea, offensive, campaign can recreate itself in thought in just about any medium, humming, the catch of a tune, from some flawless orchestral arrangement to something misremembered, tapped and tinny, and even the most abstract of associations.
It’s funny to observe the reactions of people, who of course have an ear for their own personal alerts, and yet when there is some discordant clang, they’re sent digging in their pockets and handbags to eliminate heralding fanfare. Sometimes the beckoning, when positively identified, becomes impossible to ignore and I wonder, unpackaged, what responses people really do have. Does it matter if the alarm is over a ring, pulse or fully-formed melody, and is a song easier to ignore for some since it is not cued for resolution, but rather just stopping? Distraction and abstraction is nothing new—perhaps just in terms of proximity and portability (we can announce the coming of any mood and disposition but our internal soundtracks are rarely made public accessories to communication beyond the signals that we’re about to turn inward and away from our immediate audience). Those associations established over the long-term, commercial jingles, are the same species of transitional siren that can take up residence anywhere, just a bit receded into the background and have the stubbornness of seniority. I remember an misunderstanding that elevated into a tiff over being told to use i-ask to clean the bathroom—properly. What the hell is i-ask, I thought, since there was none in the janitor’s closet, before realizing the that was the European way to pronounce Ajax—which there was not any either but rather a bottle of Meister Proper, the German name for Mister Clean. Fine—but I think the whole matter could have been settled much easier by whistling the Mister Clean song. I wonder about people who grow up with a different (but parallel set) of commercial culture and those without the benefit of bells and whistles and advertizing executives. Likewise, it’s not facial tissue, a handkerchief or a Taschentuch but Tempo or Kleenex, which in fact, does say bless you.

music week: ohrwurm oder before I put on my make-up

Designing to write a bit on the theme of music—pop music, really but we shall see, becomes a bit challenging in a muted landscape. Of course, the internet has propagated and shaped the language of music significantly, until or unless one runs up against a copyright patrol and the recordings are available at one’s home of record or there’s no reciprocal agreement between clearing-houses. That’s a bit frustrating and I wouldn’t what to try to base a composition on a leitmotif that would be eventually scavenged altogether by the copyholders.

So I was looking for stories to share without the proper instrumentation for accompaniment. One recurring episode that comes to mind—in fact, whenever I wake up—is the phenomenon of starting the day, like some sleep-grit in one’s eyes and dreamy residue, with the cobwebs of some highly-random and usually brash and grating song in my head. There’s a German term, Ohrwurm (ear-worm) for having a song stuck in one’s head that’s hard to shake. Usually I refrain from belting out into song but the lyrics trudge through my mind as I brew the coffee and brush my teeth and don’t fade for quite some time. It’s happened since adolescence and I used to be afraid that I was channeling a radio station, that I had some kind of receiver for this expansive repertoire, but it’s persisted almost every morning and on both sides of the Atlantic. I don’t understand, weird but no original nor exceedingly rare compositions and yet nothing I have heard recently neither, and I hesitate to commit the words to any of these tunes to paper for fear that they might be contagious and infect someone else’s waking up ritual.

meinungsfreiheit

While the first through the fifth estates in Germany are wrangling with the question of what it means to curtail freedom of opinion and expression—surely too a sacrosanct right but not without limitations, over whether to allow a public-viewing of that repulsive trailer smearing Islam the discussion keeps returning to America’s founding axioms and the sanctity of the First Amendment. It is a difficult matter to essay and presents dangerous and weighty precedents on either side—mostly, I believe touching on the fact that the role of the state is not perfectly defined and such guarantees, in any pluralist society, are neither a perfect system nor perfectly enforceable.

Does the state give tacit licence by suffering such demonstrations or is a free public necessarily a responsible one?  To exacerbate the situation, the message and controversy is being championed by some right-wing elements that have urged (or submitted) to the idea of having one hate and hellfire preacher come from Florida to officiate. This preacher formerly tried to dictate the US president’s foreign policy and priority by holding holy books ransom. The actual video clip is of course marginalized by the vitriol it represents and the genie is already out of the bottle, so it does not matter so much anymore if the trailer itself is spread or censored further for the public-good. Unlike the clip, which is intent without content, the permission or restriction—more broadly, is intention that reaches far beyond any one disputable statement. While these American standards are being enshrined in the German media and government, and difficult questions are being ricocheted, it seems an even bitterer irony that the steadfastness of the internet hosts, that communication æther that fills the voids left by bureaucracy, &c., &c. may not be choosing to defy the wishes of the US government and majority of public and let the clip remain on-air and in circulation out of noble ideals—the speech should be free even if repulsive, but rather because such a policing (even at the behest of another) might make the hosts liable for policing all contributions and enforcing everyone’s rules and not just their own. If the guarantors of liberty are now the mechanisms for avoiding for lawsuits, then we are all in trouble and the United States certainly seems like not example to follow.

music week: turning to the horoscope and looking for the funnies

Digital audio pioneers at the University of Erlangen and the laboratories of the Frauenhofer Institute helped early on to make music (and later video files with standardized formats like AVC) more manageable by figuring out how to compress inherently huge files by diluting the depth of the data without sacrificing the sound. A raw music file, a bit of time and vibrations digitized, would still be a huge thing and impossible to work with on most platforms—even given how personal computing has advanced, and sadly not predicting this kind of progress in storage capacity and the ever increasing detail of photography, I ruined few good pictures from the beginning of the decade, convinced I needed to apply a lossy space-saving routine to them if I ever hoped to keep them all.

 Engineers had one favourite test track, familiar and catchy so programmers would instantly hear how a changed parameter affected the recording—which was the 1984 release of Tom’s Diner (which in reality is Tom’s Restaurant on the corner of Broadway and 112th Street in Manhattan and portrayed in fiction as the diner in the television series Seinfeld) by Suzanne Vega. The same talent that produced the mp3 file format is also currently overseeing piecing together a monumental puzzle, which will have ramifications on how any archive or collection of sibylline leaves are organized in the future. From the partition into the East and West until the reunification of Germany, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, also the Stasis) swelled to a network of over a quarter of a million operatives and informants keeping watch over all citizens and amassing some fifty million pages of dossiers. As the dissolution of the DDR became imminent, there was a rush to dispose of these files—which was more volume than any mechanical shredder could handle, so many people in the office resorted to rending them by hand. These torn pages were relatively easy to recover, but this low-hanging fruit only accounted for a fraction (about two-hundredths of the total documentations) that could be reassembled by hand by a team of specialists over the past twenty years. Frauenhofer Institution is now aiding the reconstruction efforts by cataloguing each scrap of paper and the text on it (even the ones that made it through the shredder), producing a virtual jigsaw, mosaic that may eventually fall into place... When I'm feeling someone watching me and so I raise my head. There's a woman on the outside, looking inside—does she see me?

music week: soundtrack

As far as prequels go, especially those whose backstory involves time-travel that usually raises more paradoxes than can be explained and whose formula would probably rejected out-of-hand for division by zero and makes one wonder that studios don’t retain logicians since no movies would ever get made, the in the latest in the Men in Black (MiB III)  franchise was, I have to admit, pretty good. The theme music was pretty catchy as well, though it was the only title song in the series not performed by the Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, a rap that tries to reconcile nostalgia with said time-travel and samples the guitar riff from the 1956 Mickey and Sylvia hit Love is Strange. Although I guess the song was included on the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing—though only a snippet—I remember hearing it first played on the television show Designing Women, where Suzanne Sugarbaker was sidelined from the decorating firm’s talent show entry because she insisted on performing in black-face, so she and Anthony Bouvier had their own lip-syncing number.