Science Shows There's Only One Real Way to Listen to Music
Steve Jobs, the man who invented the iPod and ignited the digital music revolution, never listened to MP3s.
Instead, he only listened to vinyl. He felt there was something vacuous
about listening to music in a digital form and was surprised at the
success of his own product — that so many people had willfully traded
quality "for convenience or price." He had good reason to be skeptical.
Digital doesn't hold up:
Nothing
about the way we listen to music these days comm ands attention like or
yields the quality of a physical record. Though there is a movement back
towards vinyl, there's an even bigger movement towards streaming — and
with it, a whole new paradigm for how we hear music.
But it's clearer than ever before that
the digital revolution has changed not only how we consume music but
what music can do for and to us. Expert scientists have begun to explore
the possibility that listening online might totally neuter music's
power over listeners.
Their conclusion? It does. Powerfully.
Source: Getty Images |
Skipping and skimming:
Poppy Crum, senior scientist at Dolby Laboratories and consulting professor at Stanford's CCRMA school (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), spoke with Mic about the psychological effects our digital music habits are having.
"True love or appreciation for a piece of
music ... comes with depth of knowledge of that music," she said. She
cited three important factors in creating a genuine experience with
a piece of music — "repeated exposure, iterations and intent" — which
can be short-circuited in a "taste and go" environment. To her mind,
though, the benefits of streaming in terms of access and broad music
appreciation far outweigh the potential negative effects of streaming
habits on our emotional experience.
"Those sorts of heightened emotional responses of
pleasure and enjoyment and satisfaction come in a way that is counter to
rapid, quick streaming and constant exposure to a lot of different
things," Crum said.
Skipping and listening inattentively, then, can
get in the way of building those connections: "[It] wouldn't be
experienced initially, and would bypassed very quickly in a sort of
'taste and go' streaming environment."
But that's exactly how we listen now.
Recently collected Spotify data
illustrates how short our musical attention spans have become. There's
only about a 50% chance we'll actually make it to the end of a song. If
people are barely listening to a song once all the way through, they're
likely not returning to build those emotional connections. If they do,
they might not have a foundational experience on which to form them.
Many music professionals have also discussed this lack of connection, and they blame
the dwindling quality of audio files for it. When record companies
digitally convert recorded music, which consumes a ton of data in its
original form, they turn it into the much smaller MP3 format.
But this compressing process strips
about 91% of the actual musical data and fills in the gaps using
algorithms. The volume is then jacked up to make up for this lack of
distinctiveness, and the resulting waveform is barely recognizable. Not
only that, it can actually exhaust your ears to listen to it. It ends up
looking like a solid brick of noise, as the following portion of the
infographic "A Visual History of Loudness," created by designer Christopher Clark, shows.
Source: NPR / Christopher Clark |
Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer,
believes this is one of the chief reasons people don't engage with
albums as deeply anymore. "When you're through listening to a whole
album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued," he told NPR. "You may have enjoyed the music but you don't really feel like going back and listening to it again."
Research shows that musical quality has a huge effect on emotional response. A recent study performed by audio researchers at DTS
divided a group of listeners into two groups — one that watched a video
accompanied by standard stereo 96-kbps sound (Spotify's default audio
setting) and the other group listened in 256-kbps audio format. The
responses in the brains of the group listening with the 256-kbps audio
were 14% more powerful on metrics measuring memory creation and 66%
higher on pleasure responses. And this was just 96 to 256 kbps.
Vinyl records are estimated
to play at a whopping 1000 kbps. Music might not just have lost its
revenue when it switched to digital; it may have lost its emotional
power too.
What the future will hold:
Though our ability to
respond emotionally and intellectually to music has taken a hit in the
move to digital, it's clear that music still holds a tremendous amount
of power for people. We wouldn't need an unlimited streaming service if
it didn't.
However, music's function may change as we move deeper in our increasingly digitized, technology-dominated world.
"Music may have been something we were more focused on in
the past, an event we could allocate more attention to. It still exists
in that way in some sense. Now it's becoming something we distribute our
attention across," Crum told Mic. She
believes that ubiquitous music enabled by streaming may actually become a
vital tool in keeping us focused within a world that continues to fragment our attention spans.
But something will still be lost — not just the cover art on
a vinyl, or the existence of a platinum album. What we lose with our
new formats and habits for listening to music is a piece of ourselves;
the musical part you keep in your heart, not your pocket.
Author / Source: Tom Barnes for Mic