Postdigital music, sound and listening

I’m writing while listening to Time Out, an album of jazz music recorded in 1959 by The Dave Brubeck Quartet. The music, and its 180g blue vinyl pressing, are more sophisticated than the words that will follow.   

I’m listening to Time Out on a Lenco LBT-188 turntable, connected by BlueTooth to a Marley Get Together 2 Mini speaker. 

These audio technologies are resting on a mid-1960s sewing table that I picked up from a local charity shop, before polishing and repurposing it as a suitably hip space (in my eyes) for playing records. 

Why did I bother to arrange this audio set-up when I can listen to Time Out and just about every other album through streaming services like AppleMusic and Spotify? Streaming would be cheaper, and it’s not as if I can listen to records while walking to and from campus.  

The answer is that the value of music comes foremost through the pleasure it brings, and perhaps we lose sight of this by celebrating the convenience and efficiency of listening. Music performs many roles, but it’s there to be savoured, not simply accessed. That’s my take, anyway.

Some of this pleasure comes from the ritual of lifting stylus onto vinyl and then eagerly anticipating the music starting: compare with the soulless touch-screen operation of a streaming service. There’s also aesthetic pleasure in the carefully designed record sleeve and set of liner notes, something that can’t be found in the thumbnail artwork of the digital version. And when I lift my gaze above this laptop screen, there’s pleasure in seeing the rotating record: the music is ‘happening’, literally and figuratively.

Admittedly, this is an expensive way of listening to music. I’m fortunate in being able to afford the cost of a fortnightly trip to Thorne Records, and then an annual pilgrimage to Crocodisc in Paris, and Portsmouth’s Pie & Vinyl. I don’t own a fancy watch or car, but I do have a small collection of beautiful records, and I’m happy with that.

To be clear, my approach to music-listening isn’t a rejection of the digital. How could it be when the music I’m listening to right now is coming through a combination of digital and analogue technologies? And, although it wasn’t the case in this instance, if my copy of Time Out had come with a download code, the same songs would also be stored in the iTunes folder on the laptop that I’m using to write these words. At other times I listen to music via my iPhone.

In my view, one of the most productive aspects of postdigital thinking is that it helps us to see beyond the hype that accompanies the emergence of new technologies. We instead greet the latest ‘breakthrough’ digital device or service as something that will probably exist alongside, and merge together with, pre-existing objects and practices (see for instance my combination of analogue and digital audio technologies described above).

Relatedly, with a postdigital outlook, we are sceptical of claims which proclaim that digital technologies are going to revolutionise our educational or everyday lives, as super-efficient and sophisticated devices or systems sweep away what currently holds sway. The portability and sound reproduction of the compact disc was supposed to have killed off vinyl, but here I am listening to a repress of a record made 65 years ago. The same charity shop that sold me the sewing table pictured above won’t accept donations of my CDs, such have they lost their worth.

Since the point that it was first conceived, postdigital thinking has combined with critical work around music, listening and sound. In 2000, electronic music composer Kim Cascone used ‘postdigital’ while arguing for the productive value of glitches in music production, and postdigital ideas have since been used to explore the changing nature of the music industry, learning soundscapes, the politics of sound, and beyond.

This work and more is discussed in an entry I’ve written  for the Encyclopedia of Postdigital Science and Education, covering the subject of ‘Postdigital Sound’. You can access the encyclopedia entry here. You can listen to Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet on AppleMusic, Spotify and YouTube music, or even better, buy a vinyl copy for around £15.

Cascone, K. (2000). The aesthetics of failure: ‘Post-digital’ tendencies in contemporary computer music. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 12–18. https://doi.org/10.1162/014892600559489.