Nahat ouds can be especially big. My arms have to travel more in order to move up and down the longer neck; the muscles around my shoulders become engaged, as they do when I’m playing the guitar. Moving this way, I become aware of the world beyond the small instrument I’m swaddling; I start to play more for others than for myself. The cello also makes me feel this way. You have to use your shoulders—your whole back—to play a cello. But cellos summon a different set of feelings. Playing one, you’re still bound up in a slightly awkward way, bent around a vibrating entity—not a baby, not a lover, but maybe a large dog.
Later, I learned that my instant style was completely unrelated to what goes on in Laos. It emerged, I think, from how the khaen works with one’s breathing. On a harmonica, as on many instruments, the note changes when you switch between inhaling and exhaling—but on a khaen, one can breathe both in and out without changing pitch. Breathing is motion, and so the khaen and its cousins from Asia, such as the Chinese sheng, are liberating to play. I’ve been lucky enough to play khaen with many great musicians—with Jon Batiste and the Stay Human band on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” for instance, and with Ornette Coleman. When I played the khaen with George Clinton and P-Funk, Clinton stood facing me, leaning in until we were just inches apart; he widened his eyes to make the channel between our beings as high-bandwidth as possible, breathing ferociously to transmit the groove he was improvising. It was the most physically demanding performance of my life.
If playing the khaen turns me into an extroverted athlete, then the xiao—which is held vertically, like a clarinet or an oboe—invites me to explore internal dramas. This isn’t just a mind-set but a physical sensation: while playing xiao I feel a rolling movement in the air just behind my upper front teeth, and a second area of resonance in my chest, and I seem to move these reservoirs of air around as I use the instrument. I’m not the only one to have this kind of sensation: singers often say that they experience air in this way, and flute teachers I’ve known have talked about “blue” or “yellow” air flows. I’ve had long conversations with wind players about how we seem to be painting the flow of air inside our bodies. I have to suspend my skepticism when this sort of talk starts—I don’t think we’re really doing what we describe, but I do think we’re describing something real. It’s possible to shape tone by adjusting the mouth, tongue, lips, jaw, throat, and chest. When I find my tone, I even feel the presence of a structure in the air between my lips and the flute—a tumbling, ineffable caterpillar, rolling rapidly on its long axis. The caterpillar collaborates with me, sometimes helping, sometimes pushing back, and by interacting with it I can explore a world of tone.
Did the xiao players of the past perceive invisible caterpillars like mine? Maybe they did. Xiaos have come in many shapes and sizes over the centuries, but, judging by the illustrations that have been preserved, they’ve all been recognizably xiao. On the other hand, there are many ways to play a flute. Perhaps xiao notes used to end in elegant calligraphic rises; maybe the breath was emphasized so that the sound of the flute seemed continuous with nature; or possibly ancient xiao tones were lustrous and technical, with perfect stability. Perhaps the sound that xiao players sought was deceptively transparent but filled with little features, or maybe they were show-offs, playing high, fast, and loud. These descriptions fit contemporary flute-playing styles, and it seems possible that historical styles resembled them—or not. (...)
As a technologist, my work has often focussed on the creation of interactive devices, such as head-mounted displays and haptic gloves. It’s sobering for me to compare the instruments I’ve played with the devices that Silicon Valley has made. I’ve never had an experience with any digital device that comes at all close to those I’ve had with even mediocre acoustic musical instruments. What’s the use of ushering in a new era dominated by digital technology if the objects that that era creates are inferior to pre-digital ones?
For decades, researchers have been attempting to model acoustic instruments with software. Simulated saxophones and violins can sound impressive but only within an artificially constrained frame. Listen to one note at a time and the synthetic instruments sound good. Connect the notes together and the illusion fails. This may be because the experience of interacting creatively with such models is sterile, vacant, and ridiculous. One is usually clicking on little dots on a screen, or pushing buttons, or—in the very best case—adjusting variables with physical knobs and sliders. From a commercial point of view, this doesn’t make simulated instruments useless; embedded in the mix, splashed with reverb and other effects, they sound just fine. But physical instruments channel the unrepeatable process of interaction, a quality lost with modern production technology.
Human senses have evolved to the point that we can occasionally react to the universe down to the quantum limit; our retinas can register single photons, and our ability to sense something teased between fingertips is profound. But that is not what makes instruments different from digital-music models. It isn’t a contest about numbers. The deeper difference is that computer models are made of abstractions—letters, pixels, files—while acoustic instruments are made of material. The wood in an oud or a violin reflects an old forest, the bodies who played it, and many other things, but in an intrinsic, organic way, transcending abstractions. Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.
Today, tech companies promise to create algorithms that can analyze old music to create new music. But music is ambiguous: is it mostly a product to be produced and enjoyed, or is the creation of it the most important thing? If it’s the former, then being able to automate the production of music is at least a coherent idea, whether or not it is a good one. But, if it’s the latter, then pulling music creation away from people undermines the whole point. I often work with students who want to build algorithms that make music. I ask them, Do you mean you want to design algorithms that are like instruments, and which people can use to make new music, or do you just want an A.I. to make music for you? For those students who want to have optimal music made for them, I have to ask, Would you want robots to have sex for you so you don’t have to? I mean, what is life for?
If playing the khaen turns me into an extroverted athlete, then the xiao—which is held vertically, like a clarinet or an oboe—invites me to explore internal dramas. This isn’t just a mind-set but a physical sensation: while playing xiao I feel a rolling movement in the air just behind my upper front teeth, and a second area of resonance in my chest, and I seem to move these reservoirs of air around as I use the instrument. I’m not the only one to have this kind of sensation: singers often say that they experience air in this way, and flute teachers I’ve known have talked about “blue” or “yellow” air flows. I’ve had long conversations with wind players about how we seem to be painting the flow of air inside our bodies. I have to suspend my skepticism when this sort of talk starts—I don’t think we’re really doing what we describe, but I do think we’re describing something real. It’s possible to shape tone by adjusting the mouth, tongue, lips, jaw, throat, and chest. When I find my tone, I even feel the presence of a structure in the air between my lips and the flute—a tumbling, ineffable caterpillar, rolling rapidly on its long axis. The caterpillar collaborates with me, sometimes helping, sometimes pushing back, and by interacting with it I can explore a world of tone.
Did the xiao players of the past perceive invisible caterpillars like mine? Maybe they did. Xiaos have come in many shapes and sizes over the centuries, but, judging by the illustrations that have been preserved, they’ve all been recognizably xiao. On the other hand, there are many ways to play a flute. Perhaps xiao notes used to end in elegant calligraphic rises; maybe the breath was emphasized so that the sound of the flute seemed continuous with nature; or possibly ancient xiao tones were lustrous and technical, with perfect stability. Perhaps the sound that xiao players sought was deceptively transparent but filled with little features, or maybe they were show-offs, playing high, fast, and loud. These descriptions fit contemporary flute-playing styles, and it seems possible that historical styles resembled them—or not. (...)
As a technologist, my work has often focussed on the creation of interactive devices, such as head-mounted displays and haptic gloves. It’s sobering for me to compare the instruments I’ve played with the devices that Silicon Valley has made. I’ve never had an experience with any digital device that comes at all close to those I’ve had with even mediocre acoustic musical instruments. What’s the use of ushering in a new era dominated by digital technology if the objects that that era creates are inferior to pre-digital ones?
For decades, researchers have been attempting to model acoustic instruments with software. Simulated saxophones and violins can sound impressive but only within an artificially constrained frame. Listen to one note at a time and the synthetic instruments sound good. Connect the notes together and the illusion fails. This may be because the experience of interacting creatively with such models is sterile, vacant, and ridiculous. One is usually clicking on little dots on a screen, or pushing buttons, or—in the very best case—adjusting variables with physical knobs and sliders. From a commercial point of view, this doesn’t make simulated instruments useless; embedded in the mix, splashed with reverb and other effects, they sound just fine. But physical instruments channel the unrepeatable process of interaction, a quality lost with modern production technology.
Human senses have evolved to the point that we can occasionally react to the universe down to the quantum limit; our retinas can register single photons, and our ability to sense something teased between fingertips is profound. But that is not what makes instruments different from digital-music models. It isn’t a contest about numbers. The deeper difference is that computer models are made of abstractions—letters, pixels, files—while acoustic instruments are made of material. The wood in an oud or a violin reflects an old forest, the bodies who played it, and many other things, but in an intrinsic, organic way, transcending abstractions. Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.
Today, tech companies promise to create algorithms that can analyze old music to create new music. But music is ambiguous: is it mostly a product to be produced and enjoyed, or is the creation of it the most important thing? If it’s the former, then being able to automate the production of music is at least a coherent idea, whether or not it is a good one. But, if it’s the latter, then pulling music creation away from people undermines the whole point. I often work with students who want to build algorithms that make music. I ask them, Do you mean you want to design algorithms that are like instruments, and which people can use to make new music, or do you just want an A.I. to make music for you? For those students who want to have optimal music made for them, I have to ask, Would you want robots to have sex for you so you don’t have to? I mean, what is life for?
by Jaron Lanier, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Michael Turek
