Classical Convert

iPod Sensibilities and “Improvements” to the Concert Experience

Over at Sounds & Fury, ACD is critical over a somewhat anonymous posting discussing alternatives to the standard concert-going experience. While I am actually somewhat proud of my iPod sensibility (although I’d prefer a more generic mp3-based title, as I cannot stand the cult of Apple) I find myself basically agreeing with ACD.

The author of the original article (which is itself a response to this piece comparing popular and classical pieces) suggests things such as multiple annoyance tiers (of course, this isn;t what the author calls them) for concerts. That is, different rooms in which people can “attend” a concert performance - such as one in which the audience is free to drift in and out and talk amongst themselves, albeit only up to a certain decibel level (god knows how that would be policed).

I’m all up for natural selection of ideas, so someone should give that one a go… but I’m pretty suspicious of it’s potential for success. I suspect it would end up as a bunch of people standing around, not really discussing the piece, and than leaving after a few minutes because the whole experience is kind of uncomfortable.

The next idea discussed is even more bizarre: that there should be an alternative means of attending the concert which consists of sitting alone in a booth with a pair of headphones on and some sort of video screen. There would be controls to pause, rewind, etc. Now… how is this different from just watching a DVD of the performance? In your own home? A much better implementation of this idea would surely be just to provide high-quality video and audio versions over the internet, for a small price. I’d love it if the major orchestras regularly did this.

I think the concert hall listening experience is distinct. You are experiencing the music without any pauses, and perhaps more importantly, without the ability to pause it. You necessarily relinquish your control. No replaying is allowed, you simply have to experience the music as it comes to you. Contrast this to recorded music, in which you can skip sections, or replay movements or fractions of movements as the music moves you to do so. These two approaches are complementary, and trying to shoehorn one into the other seems to be tricky, and probably less than ideal.

What I would much prefer to see is not only the orchestras putting their performances up online, but also making it so that these recorded performances can be discussed and analyzed by the devotees. For example, how about a system in which people can comment along the timeline of the video, meaning that each section can be separately discussed.

Visual/Aural Separation

The BBC have an article up about some new research examining how the brain diverts attention away from the visual analysis areas when you are concentrating on solving an auditory problem. Particularly of interest was that conductors “switch over” to a lesser degree then non-musicians, when faced with more difficult auditory problems.

This doesn’t seem terribly surprising, given that the job of a conductor requires an excellent balance of visual and aural analysis, but then that was probably the point in choosing them as a group for the research. You want to see something with a strong correlation. It would be interesting to see if a not so explicitly qualified group are as good at maintaining mental balance. I wonder if musicians are better or worse then the conductors.

One of the researchers is quoted as pointing out that this is related to closing your eyes when you listen to music. When I do that it does almost feel as if I am seeing the music. Well, not exactly seeing it, some sort of brain activity related to seeing but a bit further up the nervous system chain. It’s a vague kind of visual recognition. Kind of.

It’s a bit like GPGPU, which is where the graphics card in a PC is used as a general computing unit to solve, for example, protein folding problems. In both cases, something designed for a visual task is being used for a different problem. I wonder though if in the brain case it really is an odd crossover, or if the visual part always is playing a role when listening to music. Perhaps one of the differences between sound and music is the extent to which the other sensory parts of the brain contribute.

Oh glorious speculation!