In an age of media convergence and consumer overload, a new generation has grown up with Walkman devices as a constant fact of life. And with our electronics stores stocked with every type of matte-black appliance to turn your living into a surround-sound interstellar war zone of deep swooshes and thunderous gunfire, the genre of musical creations that you can live seems to have achieved widespread appeal.
Musical ideas centering around aural immersion are dipping into artificial sonic worlds. Soundtracks for imaginary movies, even soundtracks from immersive videogames, are coming into their own. Not only is there a resurgence of interest in actual soundtrack composers such as Italian composer Ennio Morricone, but the past few years have seen many releases of music that are soundtracks in name only - most famously U2's Passengers disc with Brian Eno. The whole notion of creating imaginary worlds suffuses the realm of ambient music, where more recent artists have further mined ground that Eno broke in the '80s [Real Audio or MPEG3 sound sample].
While there has been a steady stream of avant-garde musicians working in this vein throughout the century - Sun Ra, Roland Kayn, composers of musique concrète, even the faux-Polynesian Martin Denny - never has the appeal, both concretely and conceptually, seemed so strong, the idea so self-evident.
It's no coincidence that this appeal for immersive soundtracks comes at a time of epidemic lust for powerful stereo equipment - a lust that's not just a status quest, like buying a watch or a pair of shoes: it's about acquiring the most convincing world-altering machine you can get, to transform your humble dwelling into whatever throbbing mindscape you wish to tune in to.
Sure it's technological self-hypnosis, but that's what storytelling is. Just as our bodies are usually our baggage but sometimes our escape, so too have our machines, too often our shackles, become the tools for our minds' release. And once you've got the equipment, why just listen to music that functions only on the level of a pleasant, catchy tune?
The sudden appreciation for the immersive approach to music is no doubt linked with the directions humanity is heading with its highest technology (naturally driving expectations from our art and experience). Cloning, nanotech, and computer simulations of real-world events have all started to reach interesting levels. It's logical that - in anticipation of a world in which microscopic engines might be zipping around inside and outside of us, and in which organic embodiments of our desires are grown - our notions of appropriate musical experience would run toward creations so dense that they almost achieve a certain autonomy.
Going beyond concerns with constructing evocative landscapes through sound, some musicians are busy giving life to their creations. Generative music allows composers to set up the musical life forms through the coding of rules of behavior, which can then be set free to wander though a soundscape. Why create a world in stasis, which will always work the same way, when you can take the chance that your piece might suddenly misbehave or surprise you with its brilliance?
Whatever else it might be, calling music "soundtracks" or "worlds" is also simply a good way to approach listening. In a compositional landscape featuring few traces of the standard elements of song [.ra or .mp3], it's easier to gain entrance without the baggage of musical expectations. Random elements might put off a more traditional listener, but if it's called a soundtrack to another world, it might be understood more easily. And after a few listens, what we expect from music becomes broader, and soon a special name is no longer necessary.
In their book, The Media Equations, Stanford researchers Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass describe tests in which viewers of media didn't mind at all if what was on their screens was low-res and fuzzy. But if the soundtrack was not deep and rich, they were not at all swept up in the media illusion. Good sound is a fundamental grounding to convince participants of a world's believability.
Though they may be quite similar, fireworks have a lot more fans than abstract art does. They've got two things going for them: a lack of pretension, and a good, convincing boom.
The desire to escape our box, to visualize our way out of our daily grind - not to mention our evolutionary tunnel - and slither and zoom along the screen to a different realm, absorbing more unique and rich experiences, is manifested, if not most consistently, then most convincingly, in music. And now that humanity is beginning to construct artificial worlds through everything from virtual reality to cinema, a concern with soundtracks is natural.
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