Sound Geographics

 Where you are born is probably the second biggest determining factor for what you'll be able to experience in your life. The first biggest is when you are born- and not the relatively local periods that happen repeatedly such as a month or star sign- but years, fortyears, centuries and millennia. A life nowadays is as different from one in the 19th century as a 19th century life was from a life in the classical era. This is something that we even see reflected in nature but at much grander time scales, for instance, we live in an era closer to when the Tyrannosaurus Rex did (67 million years ago) than the T-Rex to the stegosaurus (150 million years ago).

And what have those terrible lizards done in the mean time? They live on in my backyard as poultry whose eggs I pirate.

As the marches of time and technological progress heightens their paces, this effect- the mutations of forms, be they organic or ideological- only becomes more drastic. But the connectedness of technology is creating a dangerous sort of homogeneity within art and artistic movements.

Before lightspeed electrical communications,  ideas were spread through word of mouth and other analog, physical conveyances. This isolation is the seed of different cultures, values, and languages. But people from foreign lands don't just speak differently- they sing differently too. Because across the globe the "rules" for what is music, and how do we play it are very varied. Structuralists know it is the systems which we establish that create our experiences, i.e. people from other cultures may have finer hearing and be able to perceive more, different intervals than us westerners because their octaves have more notes e.g. the 24 TET system, which has found widespread use in the Middle East as a nice common ground between the western music system and more traditional ones in the region, by accommodating for the pitches in between the West's atomic half-steps. Another example would be how Homer, an ancient Greek author, had no word for blue- since the ancient Greek language focused more on the brightness or lack thereof for colors- so he described the sea as the color of wine. The limits to our own reality are not what the true limits are, but are twofold: 1) what we can perceive, and 2) what we can recognize. An article I found very insightful on this (that also talks about synesthesia) was The Wine-Dark Sea: Color and Perception in the Ancient World by Erin Hoffman.

Imperialism is entirely responsible for the rise of the 4/4 time signature as common time, the globalization of the 12 tone octave, the frequencies we have chosen to pitch our notes at, and the scales we choose to play. The Europeans carried with them the traditions and rules of their sounds as they conquered continents and imposed them onto the cultures there. And while there have been a multitude of movements seeking to reintroduce, reinterpret, and rediscover old motives and ideals, too much has already been lost in the name of nation-states. These artificial limits set up by those settlers, multiplied by the modern explosion of technology has been scientifically proven to reduce creativity in music. <- That article also mentions how familiarity is a key component to enjoying music. That factor can help explain why western standards continue to thrive. Because people don't want to be left puzzling over what they are listening to; they want music they can understand.

Once capitalism took ahold, and artists ascended to a high enough socioeconomic class to travel by choice, a period of familiarization happened across Europe.  Much like how time was standardized when trains began to travel across country and had a hard time being on time when times were set to whenever the local clock operators felt like it was, the pitches we associate to notes were buried in their localities and had to be reset. Across Europe, today's standard A = 440 hz had not been invented, and we have historical records to suggest that A has been as low as 373 hz and as high as 567 hz. 

Another wave of standardization was how their instruments were tuned to capture intervals between notes. As musical movements moved towards modulating between keys, the players would have to tune mid-performance in order to avoid sounding out of tune. This lead to the creation of equal temperament, which is still in use today. Equal temperament sacrifices getting intervals just right for specific keys for the versatility of always being in tune. In regions where they use nonwestern scales, the intervals are more perfect, but they typically use only certain keys and intervals, like with maqams.

In Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia, we learned about the specific rules of recitation. These rules are not in place only to beget familiarity between reciters and listeners, but bring structure to the format in such a way as to please God. This ideal of musical appeal to the divine is a convergent, cross-cultural phenomenon.

But what is lost when we increase the familiarity of music? Complexity? Experimentation? While I enjoy that technology lets me listen to music across the globe, I fear that across the globe there is a growing convergence of certain ideals, especially in pop music movements. When I look at the top 100 songs by country on Spotify, my heart breaks seeing the repetition of hit singles, and my spleen swells like it has mononucleosis at the global lack of diversity in taste. While I personally wish to combat these trends, I am but a snowflake trying to go uphill in an avalanche.