Music in a world of noise pollution
One of the great privileges of working at NYU is having access to the state-of-the-art Dolan Studio. Listening to music on top-end Lipinskis through an SSL console in a control room designed by Philippe Starck is the most exquisite audio experience I've ever had, and likely will ever have. Unfortunately, it's also very far removed from the circumstances in which I listen to music in my normal life. It isn't even an issue of the speakers or amps, though of course mine are nowhere near as good as the ones in Dolan. It's more about the listening environment.
I live in New York City. My usual life is accompanied by the sound of cars and trucks and trains and airplanes and ventilation and construction equipment and people talking and car horns and ambulances and fire engines and home appliances. But even when I'm not home, when I'm staying with family in the suburbs or the country for example, there's always something humming or buzzing or whooshing or thrumming. I'm so used to noise pollution that I find the extreme quiet of the studio to be unnerving, in much the same way that I find total darkness unnerving.
Noise pollution is as big a problem for musicians as light pollution is for astronomers. We have to go to extreme technological or geographical lengths to avoid it. An ideal listening environment is as far out of reach for a normal person as the peak of a Hawaiian volcano. Most people do their music listening in their cars, where there's about 70 dB of engine and wind noise to compete with. On the streets of New York, the only way to hear your music clearly is to blast it at a volume that can permanently damage your hearing. Some of the loudness war can be attributed to producers trying to one-up each others' tracks, but some of it is an acknowledgment of the basic reality that the music has to cut through a lot of ambient noise.
So, as musicians, how do we deal with this reality? If we're making music for the idealized conditions of the concert hall, we don't have to. But if we're making recordings, we should expect cheap speakers and headphones in bad listening environments. Rock music has tried to address the issue through blunt force, which is why all the rock musicians and fans I know have severe hearing loss. Hip-hop uses a smarter approach: clarity and minimalism. The sonic profile of a good hip-hop track adapts very well to the street: there's a lot of energy in the bass and treble, and an empty midrange where the background noise and talking mostly sits. The use of silence as an attention-grabber in hip-hop is a good adaptation too. In a noisy environment, sudden quiet is more surprising than the buildups and fills typical of rock.
Electronic music sometimes uses the blunt-force approach of rock, and sometimes goes the hip-hop minimalist route. But electronic music has another strategy it can use, which is to blend seamlessly in. When I'm listening to Aphex Twin or The Orb, background noise isn't necessarily an intrusion. Sometimes it's an enhancement. If a fire engine goes by or a cell phone rings, it can shatter the mood of a classical piece, but it's likely to make perfect sense against ambient electronica.
I started this train of thought because I was listening to some of my more textural and experimental Disquiet Junto music. Marc Weidenbaum is a great lover of the urban soundscape in all of its clamor, and his compositional prompts very often engage with the noise of the world. While Marc likes noise more than I do, I have to admit that all of my Junto music works very well within my sonic environment. Until we as a society decide that noise pollution is an issue, maybe Marc's accepting and adaptive attitude is the best one.