the tragedy of recorded music

music is one of my great passions. at the end of 2022, after having spent the better part of my life regretting not picking up an instrument as a child, i realised that if that's how i feel, then i have no choice but to pick up an instrument immediately — as they say, the best time was ten years ago, the second best time is right now! thankfully, i acted on that. and so ever since then i've been on a musical journey, trying to pick up instruments, trying to learn composition. i will surely not achieve excellence, let alone stardom, but that's not the point. the point is that the ability to create and play music is a source of immense joy to the soul. the point is to free the spirit, to be able to be to express the multitudes within through the fingers and, well, simply to have fun.

and goodness what incredible fun one can have by diving into the music. i am so incredibly terrible at this, i have barely any skill or knowledge, i fail to practice in the correct ways, and yet nonetheless its magic does not escape me. to create the sounds by making one's fingers dance along the keyboard or glide upon the fretboard, to summon the colours of a harmony, to feel the rhythm flow through you, to immerse oneself in the sheer immensity. even in the humble primitivity of ancient digital instruments, even with the least skilful playing, even in the worst listening conditions, even with anxiety clouding the mind and closing the ears, music has this overwhelming beauty that nonetheless reaches the heart.

so i am convinced that learning to play music is one of the best things you can do for yourself, that everyone should learn if they feel the calling, that all should be able to participate in this great dance

and so it kills me that we as a culture are forgetting we even can.

when i say “the tragedy of recorded music”, i'm not attacking recording. recorded music is one of the great miracles of industrial civilisation! it is something we neither can nor should wish to unmake. that one can capture a performance in all its nuances on disc or tape, let alone as an intangible series of bits, and later reproduce it, is a wonder. that anyone born in the past four decades has never known a world where lossless digital audio indistinguishable from the original to human ears did not exist is even more incredible.

no, the tragedy of recorded music is that recording is wonderful. we live in a world offering instant access to one hundred years of musical history, in crystal-clear quality. we live in an age of a universal luxury that would have been unknown even to the most powerful rulers of ancient times: access to incredibly skilled musical performances without the physical presence of their performers. a world where everyone can spectate upon the music.

the flipside is that it's a world where almost nobody can participate.

historically, music was a thing that required proximity to its performer. without the ability to record music, it was not media; it could not be duplicated, let alone mass-produced. this did not mean, however, that music was necessarily massively less accessible. certainly, the abundance and quality we enjoy instant access to now could not exist. but music has always been a folk activity. anyone with a voice can sing, anyone with a foot can tap, and there are many simple instruments that are easy to construct. music could still be found anywhere, but it had to first be found in the self, because live performance was the only performance. there was a time when the “folk” in “folk music” was redundant.

with the development of literacy, music became slightly less folkly. it still had to be performed to be heard, but it became possible to communicate musical ideas without hearing them. in time, with the advent of printing, it became possible to communicate very complicated ideas, and mass produce them cheaply. this led to predictable stratification between publisher and reader, but also a literate democraticness: anyone could buy sheet music and learn to perform it.

but once musical performances could be recorded, replayed, and mass-produced, suddenly the incentive to become literate in music starts to fade somewhat. if you simply want to listen to music, for yourself or with others, a mechanical player is all that is necessary. slowly but surely, the skilled performance of music becomes separable from listening to skilled music.

…and to be clear, that's not a bad thing, but didn't we nonetheless lose something in that moment?

i realise it's probably just an occupational hazard of my amateur musicianship and cynical outlook, but it really feels to me like the world is becoming ever-more hostile to the idea of music as an activity rather than a product or a passive object of consumption.

for instance, i've long been bothered by how, apparently, musical instruments and audio equipment suitable for real-time music applications are now a specialised category of thing only of interest to musicians, sold primarily in specialty stores; on the other hand, equipment for playing back prerecorded music in poor quality with latency that would make it impossible to enjoy playing an instrument are ubiquitous and the expected default.

i guess it's also obligatory to mention that we live in the age of hell social media that drip-feeds everyone engaging but ultimately meaningless content. it's not an environment that fosters the inner stillness needed to practice music or the context needed to understand it.

but what upset me enough to get me to write this was the realisation that we are starting to forget what live music actually sounds like. modern popular music is so horribly overproduced that it starts to make every natural imperfection seem out of place. there's many examples of this, but the most tragic is probably the way pitch correction is applied to human vocals. the voice is the one instrument almost all of us are born with and thus have a natural affinity for, and yet in 2025 the sound of natural human singing is so embarrassing that artists resort to faking spontaneity just to avoid it, afraid to let through even the nuances that are the hallmarks of skill. if all you've heard is roboticised vocals, you'll never find the confidence to let others hear your real voice. if roboticised vocals are your ideal, you'll always consider performance inferior to produced final product.

it made me start to wonder when the average person is likely to actually hear or participate in live music, especially live singing. it made me realise that the only reason i'm any good at singing at all is probably because i spent my whole childhood having to go to church every sunday, singing as part of the congregation. and in this i found a remarkable clarity: about how unusual this must be in today's world, about how it represents a kind of cultural practice that feels like it is on death's door. i won't proselytise (i'm in any case an apostate), but i look at it in awe nonetheless. for hundreds if not thousands of years, believers of various kinds have gathered to sing songs of worship. perfectly ordinary people have regularly united in song, each one a part of the whole, as common people, for the beauty and, yes, religious purpose of it. and this kind of mundane, vulgar involvement with music was considered, perhaps, music's purpose. that feels hard to imagine today.

i don't think music is going anywhere. but i am sad it is becoming rarer to not be passive.

i apologise, i'm sure this rant was not completely coherent. i hope it communicated something at least. and uh, if you ever feel the itch to get into music, then i would like to point out that for less than €90 you can get an incredibly comfortable little keyboard that lets you immediately discover the joy of playing (#notsponsored). i can also recommend getting a solid body electric guitar, a truly heavenly instrument that exists in a completely different musical world, but purchasing one of those is more involved to say the least. in any case, i wish you a long and rewarding journey.