Tuesday Thought Experiment

No Screens For Music

Apr 27, 2021

A week ago, I made a small information-intake change: No screens when music is present.

With every audio encounter that brings music – whether it’s something I’ve sought out on YouTube, or more passively when watching TV or on a Facebook browse – I’ve attempted to avoid taking in whatever visual goes along with the sounds. Purpose: To see if my attention changes when just listening. To learn just how much “listening with the eyes” goes on, undetected. To filter out all the mangling that happens with music in advertising.

Of course these days it’s fairly easy to avoid music videos – those strange concatenations of sound and story that “illustrate” songs with a literal narrative, sometimes involving hundreds of line dancers. Who besides MTV executives thought this was a net win for music, anyway?

Still, there are many instances of music licensed for advertising, and more are inevitably on the way given the recent mega publishing deals cut by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and others. Are you ready to take in an ad for Headspace, the meditation app, that uses Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” as the backdrop for placid nature videos? This note’s for you: Start girding now.

I allowed one extra-large exception: Live performances. Sure sometimes they’re as “scripted” as the videos, but there’s a ton to learn from watching an artist contend with the unforeseen randomness that can happen on a stage in front of live humans. (One example in a zillion: Over at the excellent Coda Collection site, I recently wrote about Leonard Cohen’s transfixing set at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.).

This unscientific experiment was likely prompted by the necessity of live streaming during the pandemic. With a few exceptions, most of what I caught – whether free or behind a pay wall – felt stilted. An enactment of something that was once natural and easy, a performance of a performance. For the record, didn’t like the fixed-camera (or multi-camera) visuals either: No matter how animated the sounds were, some feeds felt like they were captured on security cameras.

Ditto for Facebook Live, the feature that allows artists to “broadcast” to the FB omniverse. Here and on YouTube, however, there was a great simple hack: Start the video and minimize the page, letting the audio play on. The other night I stumbled upon a solo piano improvisation by the prodigiously talented Eric Wortham II. The visual was a closeup of the keys, and the audio was great, enough to make me forget my “no screens for music” rule.

After like 30 seconds, I banished the video and just listened. It was transformative. This one simple change drew me into the logic of the chord sequence, and the ways Wortham was altering his attack to emphasize certain ideas, to group and shape his thoughts. The level of engagement was dramatic. I learned that for me, the visual information was a static distraction, something that prevented immersion in the sound.

In the heyday of music video, lots of people wrote about how video imposed a fixed narrative and set of concrete images onto an artform – music – that thrives best when it fully activates our abstract thinking. Music isn’t instant. It doesn’t always turn on a “this sound equals that image” equation. It calls to the neglected corners of the imagination, and lures our attention away from the mundane into the magical. Getting there demands the opposite of compartmentalized thinking; I found it only works if I avoid distraction and immerse. Stop looking for sound and listen instead.

Try it!

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