COMM620/Playback

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Contents

Introduction

The pop music marketplace is a confusing place. P2P filesharing, CD sales, and ringtones are down. Vinyl production and blank tape sales are up (Buskirk, 2007; Smith, 2009). For the first time since the days of the wax cylinder and player piano, the market for pop music playback lacks a clear technological hierarchy.

First destabilized by college students' surprising preference for fuzzy mp3s and desktop PC speakers, the 20th century's succession narrative of ever-increasing convenience and fidelity is utterly turned on its head by an apparent resurgence in "obsolete" playback media such as the 12" LP and audio cassette.

To attribute these changes to mere nostalgia or subjective aesthetic details (like the oft-debated "warmth" of vinyl) is a mistake. From a diverse marketplace of available devices, listeners critically select playback technologies to meet the unique needs of their preferred listening habits. These habits rest on the interrelated influences of the market, culture, policy and and technology (Lessig, 1999, 88). Shifting trends in format preference are not simply market or technological phenomena but symptoms of a larger, multi-faceted cultural shifts in popular listening practice.

To better understand the rising relevance of older pop formats amid widespread digital media capacity, this paper begins with a comparative platform analysis of several audio storage technologies. The findings of this investigation suggest two aspects of popular music listening practice in need of further consideration. First, "paticipatory listening" involves an active engagement with the expressive potential of pop artifacts. Second, the contrasts between several preferred platforms indicates that "sequence" is a convergent point of tension among different groups of listeners. Finally, the relationship between these phenomena indicates that the pop song may not be as coherent an entity as is implied by processes of commiditization and exchange.

Comparative platform analysis

The use of the term "platform" in this paper draws on the theoretical "platform studies" model developed by Montfort & Bogost (2009). For any given technological phenomenon, "platform" refers to a collection of fundamental abstractions that precede implementation. As the technology is made material, these abstractions govern its form, function, and use. Platforms are always developed within a cultural context and they reproduce the structural characteristics of that context through use (Fiske, 1996).

levels.gif Figure 1. Montfort & Bogost's platform studies model (2009). Retrieved from http://platformstudies.com/

For the pop music technologies considered in this paper, platform is characterised by a unique combination of playback, storage, and transfer possibilities. As market circumstances change over time, a platform may be implemented in a variety of material forms. For example, though they differ in form, function, and interface, the tape decks in a car, boombox, and recording studio are all instantiations of the same cassette tape platform. By aiming its critical attention at the level of platform, this paper can discuss cassette tapes without having to enumerate every possible implementation of tape technology.

Listening practices and platforms are interrelated phenomena. Some pop platforms may be better suited to certain listening practices than others but platforms do not determine practices. When microcomputer engineers in the began to use cassette tapes for data storage in the late 1970s, they did so because the tape platform enabled a solution to their problem, not because of some inherent characteristic of the cassette as a platform. Pop music listeners make similarly strategic platform choices. To investigate trends in platform popularity requires a parallel investigation of listening practices.

This paper is not an encyclopedic catalog of music playback technology but an exploration of popular culture. The four platforms discussed below were chosen because they occupy significant discursive space among pop music industries, artists, and fans. Though the platform characteristics of vinyl records, cassette tapes, compact discs, and mp3s overlap in as many ways as they diverge, each one enables a different set of listening practices. As people adopt and enact various listening platforms and practices, they are also expressing values that will shape popular culture.

Vinyl

This comparative analysis begins with the vinyl record, the oldest platform under consideration. The 12" discs manufactured and sold today are the latest instantiation of a platform that was introduced in the 1890s. During the intervening century, the vinyl record has enjoyed a "rich symbolic career" in the social lives of listeners who routinely "confounded" the expectations and intentions of the platform's inventors and manufacturers (Gitelman, 2003, 62). The apparent "resurgence" of the vinyl record in this decade is not novel. The platform has risen and fallen in relevance several times - a stubborn counter-example to linear narratives technological progress and obsolesence (Sterne, 2007).

Sound is stored on the surface of the vinyl disc in the form of tiny variations etched into a uniform spiral. To playback the sounds, the vinyl record is first placed on a flat, spinning platter. Next, a needle is lightly pressed into the etching. As the needle passes along the spiral, the tiny variations cause it to vibrate.By amplifying these vibrations, air is moved and sound is reproduced. Conventionally, discs are manufactured in 7, 10, and 12-inch sizes designed to be played at either 33 or 45 revolutions-per-minute. The length and detail of the stored audio is constrained by how tightly the spiral can be etched and how fast the platter spins. Tighter spirals at a slower speed mean that it will take longer for the needle to travel from the outside to the center of the record.

The vinyl platform remains relevant in part because of the relative durability of vinyl discs. Much of the contemporary commercial activity surrounding this platform is in the trade of second-hand materials (Buskirk, 2007). The simplicity of the playback method means that even discs that have been scratched remain playable. Listeners can manually advance the needle past the corrupted passage.

Along with the reproduction of sound, vinyl playback yields a tremendous amount of visual information. The position of the needle on the surface of the record offers a rough estimation of the ratio of time elapsed to time remaining. Furthermore, variations to the etchings on the surface of the record are visible to the naked eye. Quiet passages or silent gaps between songs appear thinner than the louder arcs nearby them. As a result, listeners can manually lift the needle during playback and move it randomly to any other point on the record's surface, where playback will immediately resume.

Radio and nightclub DJs, whose listening practice is characterized by the precisely timed sequencing of multiple recordings, took advantage of the vinyl platform's combination of rich visual information and random-access playback. In 1975, hip-hop DJ Grandmaster Flash exploited these affordances when he began to mark the surface of his records. By watching the movement of the marks, Flash could count rotations during playback and manually "rewind" to specific parts within songs (Chang, 2005, 112-113). Two decades later, Rietveld finds that such use-value is one of the chief reasons that the London-based DJs she observes continue to prefer "12-inch dance singles" to more portable digital alternatives (2007).

Cassette

Like the vinyl record, the audio cassettes sold today are an instantiation of a century-old platform tradition. Rather than attempt to capture sonic vibrations directly, as is the case with etched vinyl discs, cassettes contain a spool of magnetic tape with a magnetically-sensitive surface. By electrically stimulating this tape, sonic information can be stored in the form of magnetization. To retrieve the sounds stored on an audio cassette, the tape is unspooled at a regular rate and drawn past a device that can translate changes to the magnetic field into an electric signal. This signal is next filtered, amplified, and used to drive speakers.

Information on a cassette must be accessed in sequence. There is no analogue to the vinyl "needle-drop" in the cassette tape platform. To address this limitation, the mechanism for unspooling the tape is usually driven by a variable-speed motor. Along with switches to start and stop playback, most cassette players include a knob or set of secondary switches to speed up ("fast-forward") or reverse ("rewind") the motor. Although sequential-access is poorly suited to a DJ's time-sensitive listening practice, longer spools of tape can store much longer recordings that a 12" vinyl disc.

When people speak of the two "sides" of an audio cassette, they are referring to a clever industrial convention but not to any essential characteristic of the platform. When information is stored on a cassette, most recording devices divide the tape into four separate "tracks." By logically treating these tracks as two pairs of left and right channels and only playing back two at a time, the storage capacity of a given length of tape was instantly doubled. On a typical tape deck, the device that reads the magnetized tape is aligned with one-half of the tape's width. In order to read the other half, the listener must manually flip the tape over. This inconvenience would have have been minor for listeners who were accustomed to the two-sided design of vinyl records.

In spite of its plastic shell, the magnetic tape in a cassette is surprisingly fragile. Over time, exposure to moisture or an electromagnetic field will damage the tape and add noise to the recording. Furthermore, the the mechanical components required to wind and unwind the spool of tape weaken and break down over time. Motors fail, springs come loose, and hinges break. From the warbling old cassingle to the boombox that "eats tapes", entropy and instability are now accepted costs of engaging with cassette tapes. This sense of decay may be one reason that cassettes are yet to be revered or collected with the same furvor as vinyl records.

The discursive slip from "four tracks" to "two sides" highlights an important distinction between the cassette tape as a platform and its various rhetorical and technological manifestations. When the "four track" Tascam Portastudio was released in 1979, it offered a context in which the familiar cassette tape could be made unfamiliar. Designed to access the tape's entire width simultaneously, the Portastudio radically expanded the editing, mixing, and layering possibilities for home studio engineers. By offering an alternative implementation of a familiar platform, the Portastudio enabled new practices for listeners of audio cassettes.

In the introduction to a collection of essays about "cassette culture", Moore primarily remembers the cassette tape as a highly-portable medium for recording custom mixtapes for friends (2004). Given the comparatively greater portability and broad adoption of digital formats, its unlikely that these characteristics are driving the recent rise in blank cassette sales (Smith, 2009). Some observers believe that owners of older cars are continuing to purchase cassettes rather than upgrade their car stereos in a depressed economy (Null, 2009). Comments to an article on the Pop Matters website about "the revival of cassette tape culture", however, indicate that an increasing number of independent "tape labels" may be a more significant explanation (Marsh, 2009).

Marsh suggests that sequential-access might be the platform characteristic that appeals most to the cassette tape revivalist. They valorize the awkward imprecision of fast-forward and reverse as disciplinary functions. In this sense, the lack of random-access is an advantage for listeners that prefer the "cohesion" of an artist-sequenced album. Although the cassette has been historically linked to the mixtape customization remembered by Moore, there is nothing inherent in the platform to preclude the revivalist's preference for rigid sequence.

CD/CD-R

The primary distinction between the CD/CD-R platform and the platforms we have discussed above is software. The vinyl record could be encoded and decoded without electricity and the cassette tape represented a kind of electromechanical paradigm, but the compact disc represented a complete transformation of vibrating atoms into discrete bits. The spinning CD is phenomenological point of transition from the mechanical pop music platforms discussed above to the fluid and digital platforms to follow.

The data on a compact disc is encoded as a series of indendations ("pits") and flat areas ("lands") that spiral outward from the center hole. The pits and lands do not correspond directly to zeros and ones as is often believed. Instead, a laser traces the path and looks for changes between pits and lands. A change registers as a "1" and no change registers as a "0". This data sequence must be decoded according to an error-detection and -correction algorithm before it can be read. The details of this process are outlined in the "Red Book", a proprietary document produced in 1980 by Sony and Philips (BBC News, 2007). Although the Red Book includes all of the information needed to define a compatible playback device, it is not a public document and interested developers must order a copy from Phillips.

In the abstract, a compact disc collects up to 99 tracks of audio, each a minimum of 4 seconds in length. In playback scenarious, the listener is usually provided with two sets of fast-forward and reverse controls. One set moves frame-by-frame through the audio data in the current track in a manner similar to the controls on a cassette deck. The second set "skips" forward or backward to the start of an adjacent track much like the practice of "dropping the needle" into the gap between songs on a vinyl record.

In addition to the "Red Book", Sony and Philips developed the "Yellow" and "Orange Book" standards for reading and writing data CDs. In spite of these standards, compatability issues plagued recordable CDs. This problem was exacerbated by technological constraints demanded by music industry lobbying organization, the RIAA. Fearing that CD-Rs were about to become the "tool of choice" for "music pirates", blank CDs were initially divided into "music" and "data" varieties, the latter of which would not play in a conventional CD player (O'Malley, 1998, 2). The distinction was not clear and many listeners were left frustrated by inconsistencies in the implementation of the new platform.

Although the implementation of CD-R was imperfect, it succeeded in coding the personal computer as a pop music listening device. The promise of exact audio duplication gave people a reason to insert an audio CD into their computers. Once inside the machine, they might discover the strange experience of opening CD audio track in an audio editor and seeing it translated from sound into a pixelated on-screen wave. For others, the CD-ROM might have been the only CD player in their home and they grew accustomed to sitting in front of a screen as they listened to music.

The compact disc is a theoretically significant platform though it ultimately failed as a popular technology. With the CD as a contrasting foil, the affordances of other pop music technologies come into sharper focus. The CD ofered semi-random access but it remained inferior to the wildly random possibility of dropping a needle onto vinyl. The CD also promised exact replication but interference from the music industry prevented this from being properly implemented until its relevance had passed. Finally, the CD was simply not digital enough. It was a wink and a nod toward the flexibility and fluidity of digital formats like the mp3 but was always essentially tied to the interests of the hardware manufacturers that designed it.

mp3

In this paper, "mp3" is shorthand for a swarming collection of competing formats that compressing digital audio in preparation for networked exchange. When people talk about the music collection in their iPods, they often refer to "my mp3s" regardless of whether those songs were compressed according to the MPEG Layer III standard or some other scheme (Katz, 2004). Mp3 is trademark gone wild like "kleenex" and "xerox". Just as only a very few listeners could explain the differences between Type II and Type III Dolby Noise Reduction cassette tapes, so too are the distinctions among lossy audio formats beyond the scope of this discussion.

The above description of compact discs is divided into two parts: the hardware and software specifications. Compressed digial audio platforms like mp3 make no such demands. The mp3 is a protocol and a format for generating one type of file from another. It exists on the assumption that there are also several layers of system software and some apparatus for the production of sound nearby.

The mp3 is the final confounding counter-example to the narrative of linear succession in pop music technology. Whereas each of the previous technologies came to market on the strength increased convenience and higher fidelity, the mp3 emerged out of a void left by the the empty digital promise of of the compact disc. It was designed to accompany digital video files and only came to its current station by a series of curious coincidences (Katz, 2004). There was no marketing campaign to hype the mp3 nor a consistent enforcement of the various patents implicated by the format. The circulation of mp3 through market, machine, and culture is driven by first and foremost by its popular relevance.

Mp3s always start as sampled soundwaves. In a typical CD-ripping scenario, the CD audio is duplicated into a lossless audio format such as WAV before it is compressed into an mp3. The actual compression of mp3 is computed according to a "mathematical model of human auditory perception" (Sterne, 2006). If the model believes that you do not or will not need to hear something, then it considers removing that data. Depending on the quality settings you have set for the encoder, the resulting mp3 may be as small as one-twelvth the size of the original WAV (Katz, 2004).

It is essential that some data is lost in order to achieve the mp3's small filesize. However, once encoded, an mp3 files can be replicated repeatedly without further data loss. Unlike dubbing a favorte album onto a cassette to listen to it on a long drive, the mp3 is portable across devices. At this point, writes Katz, mp3s become "nonrivalrous resources" that can be shared with others "like ideas" (2004).

As bandwidth and hard disk capacity continue to grow, a new hierarchy of digital compressed formats has emerged. Within the big tent of mp3s, there is a broad spectrum of quality, determined in large part by bitrate. DJs speak to one another about "320s" and "192s"; the former suitable for a club sound-system, the later restricted to headphones. Likewise, online retailers of digital music differentiate price accordingly: the same song as a 192 will cost less than a 320.

Thinking through Attali's argument in Noise, Sterne wondered if the nonrivalrous character of the mp3 "liberates recorded music from the economics of value" (2006). The rhetoric of bitrates reflects a persistance of use-value as a governing characteristic of pop music exchange. Whether among DJs building social capital or online venders trying to turn a profit, the hierarchicalization of compressed audio is always in relation to its utility. The DJ can play the 320 in a club, therefore both its worth and value increase.

Mp3s rarely circulate in isolation from one another. They clump up in folders, on flash drives, and attached to random emails. Albums and mixtapes are often distributed together as a compressed folder. Unless one is a critic, these accumulations of unheard music do not tend to happen with the previously discussed platforms.

Sequencing functions differently for mp3s as well. Random access is possible not just within a given song but across an entire library of songs. Some listener/users exploit this capacity to create complex playlists to meet every possible mood and circumstance (Doctorow, 2008). But many opt to simply "shuffle" among their whole collections. The result is that the coherence of any individual song starts to erode as whole folders are dumped into to the enormous shuffling horde.

The mp3 platform succeeds in capturing several of the favored characteristics of the vinyl record, the cassette tape, and the compact disc. It enables the continuance of existing listening practices while accompanying the emergence of new ones. Despite considerable fear, hope, and confusion in the marketplace, the mp3 has neither destroyed the pop music industry nor liberated pop music from commiditisation and exchange. Instead, the mp3 underlines the importance of relevance and utility among pop music listeners.

Theoretical implications

The comparative analysis of the four dominant storage and playback platforms in pop music discourse suggests three phenomena worthy of further inquiry. The first concerns notions of "collectibility" and accumulation among listeners. The second refers to anxieties surrounding the sequencing of pop music. The third is an investigation in to the centrality of participatory listening practices. A lingering fourth issue that nips at the heels of this project concerns nostalgia: when?, with whom?, and how much? This concern seems less related to the characteristics of pop music platforms than to socio-psychological notions of perpetual decline; a topic worth noting but too unwieldly to be addressed in any meaningful way in this paper.

Collectibility, Stackability

In her observation of London DJs, Rietveld wonders at the collecting habits of the "real vinyl junkies" she encounters in dance music shops around the city who adhere to the ethic of "giving up food for funk" (2007, 98). Sterne insists that the mp3's small filesize lends it a collectibility as "an entire collection can fit in a relatively small space" (2006, 832) How do these two descriptions of collecting and collectibility match? Would the "vinyl junkie" be satisfied with a beautifully organized hierarchy of files and folders? Likewise, do iPod junkies think of adding music to their devices as "collecting"?

The findings of this study suggest that collectibility might be broken down into two different measures for a given platform: stackability, and accumulation. Stackability refers to the presentation of collected materials. The stackability junkie takes pleasure in a home that is lined with shelf after shelf of records, books, CDs, DVDs, and videos. A nicely organized harddrive simply does not enable the expressive collecting practice that the stackability junkie practice desires. For accumulators, on the other hand, presentation of materials is not important and stackability may actually be undesirable. For them, accumulation is a gathering and hoarding instinct though not necessarily pathological. The accumulator is a cultural Hoover, vacuuming up interesting materials as they float by in the etherial web.

Sequence

Sequencing provided the sharpest contrast between the four platforms considered above. It should not be surprising that sequencing is also a locus of anxiety, anger, and concern among pop music fans and critics. A Google search for "death of the album" turns up dozens of blog posts debating the relative merits of singles versus "cohesive" album sequences versus a DJ-directed mix. Yet none examine sequencing at the technological level and few acknowledge that the mp3 platform enables listeners to select a relevant sequencing strategy given their needs, desires, and circumstances.

Sequencing is also a key point of contention in the discussion of "revived" platforms like the vinyl record and cassette tape. In both cases, the specific operationalization of platform characteristics enables a radically different kind of sequencing. With the integration of mp3 into the conventional DJ set up, "needle-drop" random-access sequencing is now used as an abstract interface device for the manipulation of digital files. In a parallel inversion, the cassette tape, once a symbol of listener control, is now considered the premier platform for disciplining the listener of strictly-sequenced recordings.

Participatory listening

The appropriation of vinyl platform characteristics as interface devices is not just a matter of sequencing but evidence of a larger shift toward more participatory listening practices. The vinyl record, as used by radio and nightclub DJs, remained relevant for its functional properties long after its storage and playback characteristics were eclipsed by more convenient platforms. Rietveld identified the CD turntables (CD-Js) as functional hybrids of the affordances of vinyl records with the economic advantages of compact discs (2007). The promotional video for Pioneer's latest iteration of the CD-J indicates further decline in the relevance of compact discs amid mp3-like platforms. In spite of the product's name ("CDJ-2000"), the voice-over makes no mention of compact discs, favoring instead the USB ports, memory card slots, Ethernet jacks, and laptop interface software (Pioneer, 2009). In a participatory listening paradigm, listener/users favor platforms that enable material engagement with pop music songs as expressive tools.

Participatory listening is not limited to direct manipulation of pop content. It builds on a tradition of mobile listening in which pop music is used to mark territory and re-code public spaces. This use of sound may be loud and expressive, as is often the case with teenagers blasting loud music out of their cars, but it may also constitute the construction of an intensely personal "soundworld" through the use of headphones (Bull, 2005; Douglas, 1999). An intermediate kind of participatory listening involves the public presentation of music via mobile phone. This may be enacted through the strategic selection of a ringtone or by using the phone's speakers as a kind of micro-boombox.

Industrial and legislative implications

These trends in listening practice have immediate implications for industrial and regulatory institutions engaging with pop music in the U.S.

Relevancy is not something that media industries should attempt to predict. Rather than attempt to persuade listeners to adopt new habits, an ethical industry will design products to better meet the needs of listeners' existing practices. For example, needs that were once met by local radio (licensed and unlicensed) are now being satisfied by streaming listening technologies. Though they were not designed as distributed, on-demand music libraries, YouTube, MySpace, and imeem now provide random-access song selection for users who have do not wish to accumulate thousands of mp3s. In addition, musicians and DJs turn to Ustream, Qik, and other webcam communities to host impromptu performances, chat sessions, and music broadcasts. Right now, information about these events is distributed at random via Facebook and Twitter updates. These circumstances suggest an entrepreneurial opportunity for the creation of a dynamic service that can connect these two groups of people.

In addition to simply recognizing listening practices, policymakers should work to engage critically with members of various listening communities. At the moment, laws such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are working against the flow of popular culture. It is the responsibility of legislators to learn about the popular listening practices of their constituents and shape policy to reflect and protect them.

Future research

Contested prioritization of sequencing and a widespread investment in participator listening habits indicates a need for theorizing a new understanding of the pop song. Just as playback technologies like the vinyl record and audio cassette have been destabilized and re-coded by a changing cultural context, so might the nature of the pop song itself be changing. The pop song is more than a file on a hard drive. If it is not a discrete, cohesive object, then how do songs circulate in a participatory listening environment? As tools? Components? Raw materials?

References

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