Resonance and Diffraction

Sound waves are delicate and fragile things. They need a medium simply to exist at all, and any variations or interference in the ether can change their whole character.

Ever since 33.3 LPs started coming out in stereo, we’ve had an obsession with recording accurate sound. You can spend anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of million dollars setting up just the right acoustic space, you can position the baffles and mics just so, isolate and eliminate residual hum…you name it, just to get the exact right sound on tape (or these days, disk).

Some folks are just obsessive, and they don’t realize one simple truth: real life is noisy, hissy and generally out-of-tune. You can get it all perfect, down to the last detail, but know what? 99.98794% of the general population is going to listen to it on sub-par equipment anyhow.

Picture your masterwork being dumped to a TDK AD60 and crammed in the tape-deck of an ’85 Fiero with a 10-watt system as the owner barrels down a gravel road. With a bad fan belt. And a tire coming loose. Now you’re getting closer to reality.

I am something of a bush-league audio geek. I use Vorbis instead of mp3 because I can tell the difference. I can hear the inherent “warmth” in vinyl. Trained ears and all. I’ve worked in studios. I know my stuff. And still, strapping on a pair of Big Serious Headphones and isolating the soundstage completely inside my head just creeps me out. It’s accurate, sure, but it’s also claustrophobic and a little disconcerting. Why? Because there’s no place for the sound to go.

Sounds are meant to live in open air. This is where they propagate. They depend on it as much as we do. This is why I’d much rather go see a performance in a concert-hall than listen to it on a nice set of Grados. There’s a sense of space and room, and to get that, you have to live with a compromise on fidelity.

Which is just fine, really. Birds, the horns in traffic outside, the sound of the audience coughing…those are all part of the music, whether you realize it or not. This is what John Cage was getting at with 4’33”.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the score consists of three movements, all one one page, each marked “Tacet.” What that means (at least in David Tudor’s initial performances) is that the pianist sat down at the piano, opened the lid, and sat there for four minutes and 33 seconds. That’s it. That’s the piece.

Far from being an intellectual joke (Cage had little tolerance for that), the purpose of the piece was that the audience was forced to listen to the incidental sounds around them, and that those were what comprised the performance. Because the environment would be slightly different each time, the piece would never be heard the same way twice. In a way, that’s true of any performance, but 4’33” took the idea to its logical extreme.

Once you’re attuned to that line of thinking, you can walk down the street and hear music in anything. Try listening to birdsong sometime. Not those silly New Age albums, but real birdsong. It’s immensely complex and after a bit, you can pick up patterns, not just in the individual birds, but in their interplay. Same goes for the rhythm of a bus engine, the overwhelming drone of cicadas or the clattering machinery on a factory floor.

Music is everywhere in a raw form. All the composer and the musician do is set boundaries and generate a controlled, fictional structure within them. To paraphrase the late Frank Zappa, a composer is a guy who sets air molecules wobbling.

So, what is music, then? There is no right answer. No matter how painstakingly recorded, a piece of music is never truly “finished,” since the listener’s circumstances will inevitably color the experience in ways the performers cannot predict.

Brian Eno accepted this, and even embraced it. In 1978, he released Music for Airports and coined the term “ambient music.” The idea was to make music that rewarded close listening, but wasn’t so intrusive that it couldn’t be allowed to fade into the background. The concept was very influential, and like it or not, it lead to the whole New Age genre, as well as the late-90s trend of ambient electronic music. There’s also a subgenre called “installation music,” which is composed to accompany a piece of architecture or an art exhibit, usually composed of simple repetitive motifs and meant to be more of a placeholder than an entity unto itself.

Such music takes a certain discipline and patience to create, and no small amount of humility. After all, artists are supposed to make the Big Grand Statement that Changes Your Life, right? There are several such records that affected me that way: Revolver, Bartok’s quartets, Candy Apple Grey and Murmur all spring to mind. So does Music for Airports, though in a more modest way.

Growing up, my father worked in the airline industry, and I spent alot of time in airports. I’ve always been struck by the fact that airports may very well be the most lonesome places on earth. I used to wander these huge artificial structures we build for the sole purpose of departure. There’s something so sterile and unlived-in about them. Thousands of people pass through each day and leave absolutely no indication behind of who had been there. It’s weird thing to think about as a kid, but hey, I was a weird kid.

So, when I found a record called Music for Airports, I was convinced that this was the record for me. Somebody understood me! I expected songs about airports. Instead, I was confronted by the sound of stillness and stasis. Somehow, Eno had captured the very essence of these places and expressed it in sound. It left an indelible impression on me, and still does to this day.

So, what does this all have to do with anything? Well, it all comes down to a cheap little Chinese plastic box.

A friend of mine got ahold of a Buddha Machine and sent me one. I don’t know any Chinese, so all I knew was that it was a red plastic box with a speaker and a couple of switches, packaged in a garish box with flowers and Chinese writing. I threw some batteries in it and when I turned it on, I was greeted with a nasally looping drone.

This may very well be the coolest thing since the Killbot 2000. Except that there’s no thing as the Killbot 2000. But if there was…well, you get the idea.

The Buddha Machine was designed by the Chinese ambient group FM3 to mimic the loop-plaing boxes used in Buddhist temples. They’ve recorded nine short drones on it that can be cycled through by toggling a two-state switch on the side. Once a drone is queued up, it loops forever, or until you switch to the next one, or until the batteries drain.

As I mentioned, the construction is cheap commodity plastic, and it feels like a flea-market AM radio (apparently, there’s even a little plastic Buddha inside it, though I’ve not ventured to disassemble mine). Some folks have mentioned that it vaguely resembles the iPod, though this may just be coincidence, as the iPods haven’t gained the kind of popularity in China that they enjoy here. I’m also reminded of the Chu Moy headphone amplifiers.

Still, it’s hard not to compare the two. Both are cute little devices, but unlike the iPod, which is an on-demand music library, the Buddha Machine limits your choices to one of nine samples and offers only the option of how long. Sound-reproduction through the tinny mono speaker is thin, hissy and distorted at all but the lowest volume. There’s a line-out jack if you want it, but these are six or eight-bit samples, so it’s dubious what this offers.

If that sounds like a liability, it isn’t. This isn’t a hi-fi music player, it’s a thing, like an esoteric crank-fed calliope box that’s meant to be warmed up, left in a corner, and forgotten about as it sinks beneath awareness. In the words of the Big Lebowski, it ties the room together.

And that it does. Heard from different angles or in another room, the sounds bend and diffract, sounding somehow different each time. You’re fooled into thinking you’re hearing variation or development. In many ways, I’m reminded of Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, except that while the Basinski recordings could run for hours, you know that they’ll end at some point. They’re finite, restricted to the space of 80 minutes, during which the composer eventually feels compelled to make something happen. It’s human instinct. On the other hand, the Buddha Machine could conceivably run forever if left on its own. I could picture one of these being left in some desolate place, echoing off forever into the black.

This is the ultimate distillation of Cage’s idea: the democratization of the composition process. The artists have set a few sketches down, hard-coded them to a box, then sent it out into the world with no idea of how it’ll be used or experienced. I imagine some enterprising folks will end up using the source-material as the basis for something else, but in a way that would be corruptive. These things are meant to hang in the air just as they are, static and motionless.

Oddly enough, I’ve found myself listening to this more than anything else lately. Rather than suggest or assert, it simply lets the mind wander and imply its own possibilities. Whether or not it qualifies as music is debatable, but sometimes the question is the whole point.

(You can get one of these from Forced Exposure.)