The Future of Music May Sound Too Finished

The distance between a rough idea and a plausible recording has become easier to cross. You can make a singer present, clear a bass part in a mix and repair a technically loose entrance without hiring a room full of people. There is real freedom in that. Someone who would have been laughed out of a professional session can make a thing with enough presence to be heard in their own terms. I would be unhappy to lose any of those possibilities.

Yet a sound can have a degree of finish the music underneath it has never earned. Each individual part seems to belong. The first two sections could have been made from a reasonable set of references. Closing your eyes makes it surprisingly difficult to think of a decision the recording could not have afforded to make differently. You can listen all the way through without receiving news about the person who placed these sounds together.

What polish smooths away

Some of the most revealing moments are joins. The voice may tug against the accompaniment. A drummer’s tone can turn the most formally correct section into a disturbance. A composer can inherit a sound from a cheap instrument and discover there is something about it which a more expensive approximation would resolve too quickly. These are opportunities to build, and they can register as flaws at the stage of production concerned with making the whole thing appear credible.

There is a version of this argument that romanticises poverty. It gives a poorly recorded singer more status for a problem the singer would have gladly solved. The work has to survive a tougher question. How much of the difficulty is doing something musical? An indistinct word can force the ear productively toward the rest of a phrase. It can also deprive the listener of the one thing they need to know. A clean pop record can leave the right difficulty intact and destroy the accidents around it. Achieving that distinction takes an ear and an argument about which part of the piece anyone should protect.

Cheap generation makes the problem sharper. A safe ending and a persuasive vocal can be supplied before somebody has worked out what they want from either. The resulting sound of adequacy may prove less dangerous than our willingness to circulate a completed answer because we can hear no reason to reopen it. A future full of obvious failures gives critics something to discuss. A future where everything sounds reasonable asks for more demanding listeners.