Digital Audio Workstation Criticism

This is a companion to my "Argumentative Essays Done Right" Hub, and although the topic reflects my personal views of the state of the music industry, it exists only to provide a concrete structure for an "A" essay at the collegiate level (please forgive the nonacademic conjecture meshed with the scholarly research).

“Comrade! A terrible vision besieged my dream late last night. I have seen the future. I have witnessed our end. There is a day, creeping over the horizon, where our tuneful selves will quietly fail to exist anymore. The ease of accessibility to digital sound will eradicate the musician. None exempt! No one musician spared! Put to their deaths will be The Innovator, Icon, and Savant alike; miscarried, The Prodigy. But before cursing and condemning whomever you’ve given the title of monster, know that the blame is entirely ours. We, the musicians, who let technology harvest our melodious souls, and package them into Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs); who granted this ease of accessibility to digital sound in the forms of Pro Tools, Acid Pro, and Garage Band to the layman; yes, we are the ones who have brought the slaughter upon ourselves. And it is your fate to ignore my warning, this I accept. Like a cannibal you will exploit the DAW to compliment your ability, but only at first. Soon after, you will rely on it solely in place of your musical aptitude, transforming yourself into The Sound Organizer; a discordant zombie. Finally, you will find yourself lost amongst a crowd of inferior talent, bereaved of your identity. They will eat, doing what you had once done better, and you will lay their brick, humming throughout your chores as if you had once sonically mattered.”

(Note that this introductory paragraph is quoted, not because it was cited from another source, but because I chose to take a fictional approach in drawing the reader's attention. The quotes discern the fictional character's voice from my own.)

The Digital Audio Workstation, if you have yet to cross its path, is a computer-linked program proficient in recording and manipulating digital sound. Unlike its predecessor’s use of analog tape, which utilized magnetic impressions to document sound waves, the DAW uses basic digital code (binary). Not only is digital code advantageous in its ability to edit the actual recorded sound, but it is also proficient as a language, for creating sound through digital representations of musical instruments. This great equalizer, which goes by the very specific acronym MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), is what gives the DAW its power over the musician.

To better explain, Larry Meuth states in Midi Technology for the Scared to Death, “MIDI is not sound; it is information about sound. MIDI activity can be seen--with MIDI message lights on sound modules or on a computer screen through programs like MIDIScope and MIDI Terminal--but not heard. When a MIDI instrument is connected to headphones or an amplification system, then the performance can be heard” (50). With this, we can deduce three basic principles, to be mindful of when approaching the overall argument:

(1) Music is only music, when perceived through the hearing of sound.

(2) MIDI is information about sound, but not sound itself.

(3) MIDI is not music.

It is very crucial that we distinguish musical sound from 1’s and 0’s, in that the former is executed by directly manipulating an instrument, causing its subsequent sound waves. The performance has musical merit. The latter is executed through programming; information which, in turn, can later become sound, but has no worth outside a series of computing devices. At face value, they are merely whole numeric values that lack any aesthetic meaning to the human ear. There is no musical performance merit in their arrangement. The lesser we view the two as being separate entities, the further the musician falls into the dangerous company of The Sound Organizer.

Birth of The Sound Organizer

But who is The Sound Organizer? What makes his/her existence so dangerous to the livelihood of the musician? “Even on the amateur level, making a recording once required enough mechanical and electronic proficiency to assemble or build equipment, but with the advent of computer-based recording programs anyone with the basic computer skills and the money to afford a ‘studio-in-a-box’ can make recordings of reasonable quality” (704-705), explains Susan Schmidt Horning in Engineering the Performance: Recording Engineers, Tacit Knowledge and the Art of Controlling Sound. It is with these words, that an authoritative definition in describing who to classify as The Sound Organizer, can be established. Anyone who possesses basic computer skills and owns a DAW is a culprit. Note that “anyone” can possesses these skills, and not just those from a musical background or musicians themselves. This is where the danger lies. The recordings of trained musicians are being diluted by “recordings of reasonable quality”, without an audience to discern a difference between the two. To compete, musicians are being forced to master DAW techniques. Would-be musicians are abandoning their musical training for pursuit of those basic computer skills. All while “anyone”, The Sound Organizer, records and releases music in every level of the recording industry; doing so, with the same held arrogance of any individual who would argue, “anyone” can perform open-heart surgery or that “anyone” can fly a commercial airplane.

But aside from training purposes, basic computer programs do not exist to mimic the actual results of commercial flight or open-heart surgery, and had they, a doctor of a “Digital Surgical Workstation” would hardly be compensated the same as a traditional surgeon, especially if the ease by which one can mimic musical sound with a DAW, and lack of training necessary to attain that sound, is any indicator as to how a “DSW” would operate. An example of how little skill The Sound Organizer actually needs in the execution of musical instrumentation, is found in the Pro Tools Score Editor. Chapter 31: Score Editor, from Pro Tools 8.0 Reference Guide states, “The Score Editor window lets you view, edit, arrange, and print MIDI from your session as music notation. MIDI notes are transcribed in real-time whether you record, import, draw (with the Pencil tool), or Step Enter MIDI” (631). Instead of the rigorous task of learning an instrument, rehearsing musical parts, and then executing those parts in real time, the DAW allows one to edit, arrange, import, and even draw those parts as “music notation”; proof that our musical ingenuity has superseded our musical integrity, which was certainly not the original vision of The Innovator.

Death of The Innovator

The original vision of The Innovator was to record musicians as they sounded during live performances, but with the clarity to distinguish between each skilled instrument played. Horning concludes in Engineering the Performance, “The urge to develop greater mastery over sound led to efforts to design, build, or invent new means to improve the sound of records” (725). These original Sound Organizers were highly skilled mechanical engineers, who invented recording devices and instruments to realize this vision. There was a valued relationship between the innovative engineer, and his counterpart, the innovative musician. Both borrowed from the other’s trade to achieve milestones in their individual fields without The Sound Organizer becoming a musician, or musician becoming an engineer.

In 1964, the engineering physicist Dr. Robert Moog offered one of the great examples as to how The Innovator achieved a “greater mastery over sound”, in the development of his Moog Synthesizer. His background in electronics helped bring synthesized sounds to mainstream pop and rock music, which would not only foreshadow the DAW, but the genres of electronic music to follow. “It is also often surprising: now that digitally synthesized sounds have become almost taken for granted, it is worth being reminded how unconventional and quirky synthesizers--namely, analog devices--were when they first appeared” (778), states Richard Beyler in his Isis Book Review: [Untitled]. These “unconventional” and “quirky” synthesized sounds, true, were new and exciting at first, as were they viewed when they eventually culminated with the Digital Audio Workstation; its programmed numbers replacing actual sound producing/recording inventions. But the “unconventional” soon became conventional, changing The Innovator, once master of sound, into The Sound Organizer, a slave to the DAW. With a database that can conceivably mimic every comprehensible sound (with the assistance of a built-in equalizer), the final creation of The Innovator has become his own demise; a plague spreading death to all skilled denizens of Musicdom.

Death of The Savant

Certainly, those most immediately affected by the DAW, and therefore, the first to suffer attrition, are those individuals who have contributed most to music. The Savant and The Prodigy, respectively the learned elder and latent youth, are examples of the highest extremes possible in our human ability to execute musical sound. Though, as humans have found expansion in their limitations through machine, the birthright of innate musical ability has been succeeded by the birthright of technological accessibility.

In May of 1747, the accomplished organist Johann Sebastian Bach improvised for King Frederick of Prussia, a rare six-part fugue on the recently invented piano. To attain an understanding as to how unique this performance was, American academic Douglas R. Hofstadter explains in Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, “One could probably liken the task of improvising a six-part fugue to the playing of sixty simultaneous blindfold games of chess, and winning them all” (7). Justifying why Bach couldn’t have improvised for his majesty, an eight-part fugue as several legends declare, “An eight-part fugue is really beyond human capability” (7). And to Hofstadter’s credit, this is an exceptional example as to how the human element has limited our sonic progress. Only through the Digital Audio Workstation can an eight-part fugue be methodically improvised; seemingly, a glorious feat and privilege to hear. But the question then emerges: would a Johann Sebastian Bach existing in 2009, spend his entire existence refining his musicianship with such precision, mastery, and articulation as he had up to 1747, if it wasn’t necessary? And even had he still, why would his musicianship matter in a world where an untrained, unpolished ear could attain the same resulting sound?

Aside from the impact the DAW has had on The Savant, there is also much concern in the nurturing of The Prodigy. Without the learned musician’s guidance, there is reason to believe that the musically gifted child will cease to develop. Even more immediate, The Prodigy will fail to be identified amongst his/her bracket of peers, with future sonic achievement being judged by one’s DAW proficiency, and not overall musical understanding. In Musical Prodigies: Perilous Journeys, Remarkable Lives, Claude Kenneson explains, "Prodigiousness in music appears at widely different times within the years normally encompassed by childhood, the timing affected, in part, by the culture's ability to respond to extraordinary talent" (257). But with a DAW culture incapable of responding to “extraordinary [musical] talent”, and as the latent youth are starved of musical nourishment, the time for the musically prodigious child to appear, is neither here nor there, but consequentially, at an end.

Death of The Icon

As The Innovator, Savant, and Prodigy fall prey to the Digital Audio Workstation, disappearing forever, so then too, will the musician as The Icon. For it is the innate and learned musical talents of The Savant and Prodigy, the inventiveness of The Innovator, that have lead such individuals to their iconic statuses. This isn’t to say that products of the DAW will not be looked upon as idols, only that their iconic status will derive from anything but their musicianship. As this new breed of “performer” steals the stage from the musically adept, he/she will corrupt the musician’s audience in two fashions: one, as a false musical prophet, an auto-tuned pinup; and two, as an integrator of performance and audience, who undermines the line of division between the two.

Concerning the false musical prophet, one important property that has won the DAW popularity among studio engineers and producers is its ability to refine the human voice through the auto-tune feature. By mechanically altering the pitch, tone, and key of one’s singing voice, auto-tuning can either sharpen the proficient vocalist, or turn any individual who lacks vocal talents, into a “singer”. Whatever the level of talent belonging to the vocalist, there is a growing concern throughout the music community that once the voice is augmented by auto-tune, the voice then belongs to the augmenting program. Essentially, the machine becomes the vocalist, and the human, an instrument. In ‘Sing It for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music, Joseph Auner explains:

“In many areas of recent music, the unaltered human voice has become an endangered species. Manipulations and simulations of the voice appear in several different forms in popular music, paralleling the introduction of new technologies or new ways of using old technologies...while the digital modulations of vocal pitches with the Autotuner (as in very successful recordings by Madonna and Cher) has become so prevalent as to be called ‘one of the safest, maybe laziest, means of guaranteeing chart success’” (100).

The fact that an aspiring musical performer is no longer required to be a talented vocalist, has opened wide the musical entertainment platform. Future musical icons will not derive from musical inclination, but how well their image sells to their specified market.

Though, there does exist a demographic that isn’t lulled by the DAW icon, but instead, is lulled by The Sound Organizer, who has integrated himself completely with the audience, stripping the iconicity from the performer. Ben Neill in Breakthrough Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Electronic Music explains:

“One of the key ideas to come out of recent electronic pop culture is the “rave” sensibility in which the traditional notions of performer and audience are completely erased and redefined. In this type of event, the artists are not the center of attention; instead it is the role of the artist to channel the energy of the crowd and create the proper backdrop for their social interaction” (389).

Termed loosely as a “DJ”, this type of Sound Organizer is glorified not by lending himself as an instrument from which the DAW can perform through, but by manipulating past musical compositions through the Digital Audio Workstation. The “DJ” strays from the preeminence typically associated with a musical entertainer, and relies solely on the audience to collectively act as the performer, thus completely nullifying The Icon in some musical sects. Though, the “DJ”, like all Sound Organizers, will fully take credit as being a musician.

“In the aftermath of the Musician Holocaust, there will be those who claim that the musician lives! In their rejection of death, they will tell you the musician has not only survived, but multiplied. They will say that a musician is anyone who chooses to exist as one; playing his Digital Audio Workstation like that of a skilled instrument. That their musical Savant exists as one who has an innate realization of the DAWs potential, mastering it obsessively like Bach on his organ. And their musical Innovator exists as one who develops programmed patches, to create even greater accessibility to digital sound. To those future optimists, may I offer my final warning: the musician isn’t born from a resulting sound, but the means by which he executes that sound; musicians produce sound to be interpreted directly by the human ear, while Sound Organizers put it in its place using numbers. The DAW will always be numbers first, and numbers will never be sound.”

(See Introductory Paragraph Note)

Although the DAW has strengthened music production universally, it has done so at the cost of the musician. With a limited amount of market to share among recording artists, there is less demand for musical talent (The Savant), less demand for originality (The Innovator), and more of a demand for iconicity in The Sound Organizer. Simple techniques executed through the DAW to openly compete for that market space (such as the auto-tuning of a poor vocal performance), and its accessibility of digital sound to the public, have diluted the talent pool of career musicians. Moving forward, an effort must be put forth to acclimate musicians, not for their record sales, but for the process by which they achieve their overall sound. Otherwise, the ears of our time period will suffer an ultra-competitive race to musical mediocrity, and its holocaustic results.