GET ME OUTTA HEAR

Isn't it about time for the Audio Implant? What with pacemakers and fuel injection "brains" and kids' toys that almost think, I've been toying in my devilish mind with a brilliant thought--a module implanted inside the body which would provide wall-to-wall music, for those who must have it, with absolutely no external impact, visible or audible. What an idea! Out of sight, out of mind, as they used to say. Not to mention out of hearing. What a boon to the rest of us.

Well, it was a good idea, but Time has scooped me. I mean Time, the magazine. A while back, in the January 7th issue, a Time writer, Lance Morrow, produced a Time column, "Essay," called "In One Ear, in the Other." Just recently, while I was incarcerated in my local automobile repairman's waiting room, I fell upon this "Essay" by accident. Might that catchy title indicate audio? Indeed it did, in a certain dire way.

When I was let out of the shop, I quietly filched that copy for further study. Yes, I am scooped. My own fault.

Lance Morrow proposes an aural implant, precisely like mine. Morrow, like myself, detests what I tend to call wall-to-wall music. It is a drug, an abomination, a deadly perversion of otherwise healthy ear sensitivity. He thinks, just as I might, that an aural implant would at least sweep things under the rug, inside where it won't bother anybody.

You carry your own music with you, day and night, every day, all the time, and so our hotels, banks, supermarkets, our walking Walkmans from Sony, would be freed from their never-stop task of lining the world with the sounds of meaningless music, or even music with meaning--just so there's never a moment of SILENCE. Morrow is really more preoccupied with the iniquities of wall-to-wall music than with the Audio Implant. But like me, he thinks it is a cute idea and good for a laugh in a dismal situation. I'm always looking for laughs; humor is the way to get over pessimistic thoughts.

So I had fondly ruminated on the Audio Implant as a way to lighten up another sermon on audio evil. But as we all know, humor takes work. I worked and I worked, hoping maybe that in the end my Audio Implant might aspire to the highest honor this magazine bestows, a place in its famous Lirpa line of products, launched each April. But too many Aprils came and went, and Lance Morrow scooped me in January.

So I have to give him credit for hitting the nail right on the nose, so to speak.

And, in detail, too.

"It could be done," writes Morrow of an aural implant. "The technology exists ... perhaps a pulse monitor so that the music would follow the body's beat." Phew, just what I was going to suggest, but there are a few complications involved.

Yes, the body pulse, the heartbeat, is just fine in theory as a control, even if it may come in turn from an implanted pacemaker. The body's heartbeat, speaking philosophically, has always been an arbiter of music and mood, right along with that other sort of body pulse, the dance. Mood music-do you think we invented that? It harks back, for one thing, to the old baroque classics, to Bach, and to early opera.

The Germans called it Affekt, I forget the Italian opera equivalent, but the thing absolutely ruled vocal music for centuries.

In opera, it was the familiar aria or "air" (breathing across the vocal cords?), in which a set piece is performed expressing the situation at the moment-the mood-while the entire opera stops dead and simply waits. Using this idea, the Germans did precisely the same for church music, as in Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Stop and go music.

Each stop a different mood.

That's why so many opera near-corpses are able to sing vigorously from a prone position on the stage floor before expiring with a groan! Some floor-bound arias go on for minutes at top volume. Even death stops cold to wait for an Affekt to spin itself out, minus action. Jesus himself on the cross does an Affekt at length ("It is finished") before he gives up the soul, in Bach's and others' music. A very serious business, you see, long before our own mood music.

As to technical complications with the pulse control, it's a different story. Morrow evidently is not quite a classics man. He proposes a programming for his implant that would begin with an overall self-theme, suitably heroic, a la Star Wars. Then additional items for moods, according to pulse-romance, sorrow, shopping. These are each obviously standard mood music. Automatic transmission, of course, as pulsed by the heart. How about music for "Winning an Important Contract"? Morrow suggests Chariots of Fire.

Some might prefer the Hallelujah Chorus. But my concern here is the auto-shift, from one mood to another.

How about going-upstairs music, or hill climbing? Jogging music? And does each selection begin at the beginning and play through to its rightful ending? doubt it!

Morrow, I think, goes right along with one of the saddest aspects of wall-to-wall music-the turn-it-on, turn-it-off principle, as in telephone "hold" music or elevator music. Your pulse monitor in the aural implant would simply switch, I'm betting, from one file (memory) to another, with every change of pulse. And what if you did build in a return-to-start, for each channel? Would it also hold on until the music finished what it had to say, if anything? It gets more and more complicated.

Worst of all, I figure that in my Implant and Morrow's, the control would have an awful time following any normal pulse, which is irregular and often speeds and slows. Nature's virtue! Not music's. The thing would tend to "hunt," to jump from one channel to another, frantically, from upstairs-going music to shopping music or romance, an uncontrollable (musically speaking) oscillation. This would be background-music hysteria! What is required in our wall-to-wall sonics is regularity, smooth nothingnesses with never a jolt, lulling pacifiers for the addicted nonlistener. Anything that suddenly attracts attention is OUT. Just listen to hotel music, washroom music, and so on, or maybe even, as Morrow notes, Japan's music-to-cross-the-street-with. So you see, his implant isn't so simple. Maybe it's just as well I held off my own for a few years or so. Lirpa would have turned me down.

Once the aural implant is discussed (and rejected), Morrow's Time "Essay" piece goes on to make some memorable and important points. Unfortunately, Morrow uses the term "canned music" to describe what I'm calling wall-to-wall music. Jimmie Petrillo's famous words against the recording art are not particularly relished in audio circles today. We do not produce canned music anymore. But we do denigrate our hi-fi by recording wall-to-wall, in digital or what have you. Morrow is okay-just substitute one term for another. He still has a lot to say.

For instance, when he compares canned music to Legionnaire's disease that seeps through every corner of a hotel and spreads to every corner of the earth, he gets my bravo-for this is exactly the way I feel, and why it is good to think of an improbable remedy such as an Audio Implant. As Morrow says, "Canned music settles over the mind like a terrible exhalation of 'air fresheners.' Noise becomes sinister when it ceases to be episode and becomes environment." Better read that one, twice. By episodic, Morrow means irregular, changing, always noticeable, the sounds that nature's ears were designed to detect--as warning, as information.

For you must understand that, in contrast, the advanced arts of our civilization have built themselves directly on nature's sensory abilities, not to dampen and lull but to stimulate them.

As Morrow says, sound, noise entering the ears, "ought to be random, as life is random. If noise is programmed, deliberate, even institutionalized, it had better have a good reason. It had better be Bach." You see how some of us think alike on these matters. Edgard Varèse, violent musical radical of the '20s and '30s, called music simply organized sound. If you pour Bach out of an audio faucet (we often do), you are destroying that organization--and you are equally destroying the ear's special mechanisms. Drug-like. It is, alas, just another part of our culture.

Frankly, I understand that the aural implant--the Audio Implant--would be no more than a panacea, a very superficial remedy for a major sonic evil.

Reminds me of New York City's latest way to solve the incredible problem of the homeless, the people who sleep in subway stations, over street ventilators, on park benches. The park near me has a new set of benches, and the problem is solved-if you can say as much. The sleepers have departed.

These benches have heavy steel "armrests" every couple of feet, solidly anchored to heavyweight wood. If you sleep, it must be sitting up.

As a technological challenge, the Implant is a cagey and interesting idea to, er, noodle with and to write about.

There are so many aspects for amusing engineering argument. Equally for musical argument. I do not expect that we could contradict the basic idea of wall-to-wall music, for instance, by organizing the Implant memory for musical relevance, both start and finish preserved intact, or by diversification into categories, classical instrumental, wall-to-wall opera, disco forever, round-the-clock bank music. No point! What I think, myself, is that any implant we design should follow the established background principle set up by the audio cassette (and now the programmed CD player), just one whole piece after another, like those our equipment customers set up for themselves to play at parties or maybe just to sleep by, and none of this pulse stuff. Much too irregular. Radio has long been into this sort of thing, as reproduced in a zillion public areas. I do not know where bank music comes from, but I bet it's a programmed player, under a desk. Same for the supermarket. Let's upset no music apple carts, please! Just transfer all this nothing-stuff directly to your Audio Implant's capacious memory. That'll do it.

Never tamper with a drug.

It remains merely to wonder about a last technological bit. How do we hook up the Audio Implant to the inner hearing sense? Surely not via 'phones! There must be a more direct route. I suspect Dr. Lirpa might have some ideas here, not to mention other more serious researchers into the mechanisms and psychology of hearing.

Contact certain nerve synapses? Hook onto the fibrilla and the tibia or maybe the mastoid? When somebody bops us on the head, we see stars. Might we get to hear sounds similarly, though minus the bop? Please, then, go to the nearest dentist's office and scrounge a copy of Time from January 7th so you may have all of Lance Morrow. Worth your thoughts.

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Jun. 1991)

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