Mark Katz is Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as Founding Director of the hip hop cultural diplomacy program, Next Level. His books include Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (2004, rev. 2010), Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (2012), and Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World (2019). He is currently writing Music and Technology for Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series.
If you ever want a good laugh, read past predictions of the future. Optimistic or pessimistic, utopian and dystopian, they are often wildly wrong. Darryl Zanuck, the famous film producer, envisaged a bleak future for television, saying in 1946 that ‘People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night’ (Szczerba, 2015). In 1970, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Ehrlich projected that life expectancy in the United States would drop from 71 years to a mere 42 by 1980; instead, it rose to nearly 74 years, and continued to rise (Perry, 2019). We see similar misfires in prophecies about the future of listening. In an 1878 article, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, Thomas Edison foretold the most likely uses of his invention. At the top of his list was ‘letter-writing and other forms of dictation’. He saw these as ‘the main utility of the phonograph’, and imagined business-people sending recordings to each other instead of letters (Taylor, 2012). And yet, more than 140 years later, we still use our hands (though sometimes just our thumbs) to compose our correspondence. To be fair, Edison did foresee music as a potential application of the technology, though he listed it fourth and didn’t, at that point, predict a market for music made by professional artists.
Of course, I say all this in an essay about the future of listening, and I too will venture my thoughts on what has yet to come. But instead of positing specific new technologies and attendant ways of listening, I predict a return to the past. You’ll notice, though, that the title of this essay ends with a question mark. I did this not to hedge, but to acknowledge that the return I describe will, if it comes, likely come with some differences. Prior experience tells us that the future never wholly replicates the past.
From its very beginning, the recording industry feverishly sought out every avenue for improving the quality of sound reproduction. This ideal was often captured in a single, fraught word: fidelity (Thompson, 1995). An advertisement at the fin-de-siècle for the Berliner Gramophone claims that its product ‘does not imitate, but actually reproduces with lifelike fidelity […] everything within the range of sound’ (Cosmopolitan, 1896). More than half a century later the word gave its name to the long-running magazine High Fidelity, founded to serve ‘A cross-section of America, united in a common interest: music, and the improved reproduction of music’ (Fowler, 1951). Fidelity was (and still is) a striking way to describe the ability of an audio component to reproduce humanly audible frequencies, for the word infuses an objective measure with ethical overtones. Fidelity suggests loyalty, allegiance, obligation; on the other hand, infidelity is a sin. For more than a century, and well into the digital age, fidelity remained a powerful tool deployed by the recording industry and its marketing arm, suggesting a moral imperative to produce and consume the most technologically advanced systems.
By 2001, however, MP3 and file-sharing technologies were opening up the possibility of enormously expanded access to music. Collectively, we started to care more about availability and convenience and less about sound quality, to the extent that we now live in what has been called a post-fidelity age of listening (Guberman, 2011). Sometimes it is the signal that is compromised: we listen to countless watery, compressed MP3s or low-quality YouTube videos. Or an otherwise high-quality recording is sullied by the inadequate speakers supplied with our phones, computers and cars, or the competing din of our environment. We have come to expect instant musical gratification, whether through streaming platforms or wireless earbuds supplied with our mobile phones, and, I suspect, simply don’t notice or care very much about the degraded sound quality. Of course, plenty of people do care about sound quality, but collectively it is not the priority – for listeners or the industry – that it used to be. I probably care about sound quality more than most people, yet I, too, am willing to forego it for the sake of convenience. I have expensive equipment that sits unused because it’s easier for me to record interviews on my phone. When I don’t feel like walking around with my excellent but bulky noise-canceling headphones, I’ll also use my phone, holding it up to my ear to hear the music like my father might have done with his transistor radio in the 1950s.
This convenience comes at a cost. When we listen to music in sonically-compromised situations, what we’re experiencing is more a taste or a suggestion of the music than the music itself. I’m reminded of a peripatetic man in my town who wanders miles upon miles every day, whistling loudly and tunelessly, accompanying whatever is playing through his headphones. I once asked the man, Mr. Whistler, as I call him, what he was listening to. ‘Pavarotti’, he said proudly, rolling the ‘r’. I was shocked, because never once have I recognized any of his atonal emanations as music. To me, he symbolizes the depressing potentiality of post-fidelity, where what we hear is so corrupted by its mode of mediation that Maestro Pavarotti becomes Mr. Whistler, when music becomes noise.
We live in an age of post-fidelity because we have largely chosen convenience and access over quality. In the future, we may not have to choose. It may be widely possible to hear the highest-quality sound in the noisiest environments as we move about the world, and to do so cheaply and easily. If this happens it will not be simply because the technology makes it possible: we humans are too stubborn and independent-minded to do anything just because technology makes it possible. It will be because we will yearn it. And what we seek is not new, but quite old, something that everyone listening to music in pre-phonographic times experienced as a matter of course: sonic immediacy. In a post-fidelity age many of us have become unused to this immediacy, but I believe, through a combination of technological advancements and listener demand, fidelity and convenience will no longer be strangers to each other.
But how faithful will this new fidelity be to its historical forbear? Not too faithful, I hope, because I’d like to see us move away from the moralistic overtones of the term. Fidelity, in its twentieth-century technological usage, often had more than a whiff of patriarchy and sexism about it. Fairly early in its history, sound recording came to be understood as a masculine technology, and as high-fidelity gear grew in popularity, particularly in middle-class U.S. homes in the 1950s, the ‘hi-fi’, as stereos were often called, frequently served as a means to exclude women, not to mention anyone outside of the comfortable middle and upper classes (Keightley, 1996). I hope, then, that the return to fidelity will mark a future in which high-quality recorded music is plentiful, accessible and cheap, open to us all.
References
Advertisement for Berliner Gramophone, Cosmopolitan, 21 (1896), un-paginated advertising section.
Fowler, Charles. 1951. ‘As the Editor Sees It’, High-Fidelity, 1/1, 8.
Guberman, Daniel. 2011. ‘Post‐Fidelity: A New Age of Music Consumption and Technological Innovation’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 23/4, 431–54.
Keightley, Keir. 1996. ‘“Turn it Down!” She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59’, Popular Music, 15/2, 149–77.
Perry, Mark J. 2019. ‘18 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions Made Around the Time of First Earth Day in 1970’, Carpe Diem, 21 April. Retrieved 10 September 2019 from http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-3/
Szczerba, Robert J. 2015. ‘15 Worst Tech Predictions of All Time’, Forbes, 5 January. Retrieved 10 September 2019 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2015/01/05/15-worst-tech-predictions-of-all-time/#651b26061299.
Thompson, Emily. 1995. ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–1925’, Musical Quarterly, 79/1, 131–71.
Taylor, D., Mark Katz and Anthony Grajeda (eds). 2012. Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Sergio Ospina Romero, incoming Assistant Professor at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, Bloomington, reflects critically on the principal scholarly narratives about the creation and dissemination of jazz, its U.S. appropriation and its resonance with local Caribbean musical styles.
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