Hacking Music

by Dr. Zoltan  (drzoltan@drzoltan.com)

The essence of hacking is exploration, led by curiosity.  It is about figuring out the rules and then bending those rules to make something new.

Hackers are people who are just not satisfied with how a system seems to work from the outside.  They find backdoors, flaws, and secret passages which expand the capacities of technology.  They are always asking questions, pushing buttons to see what happens, stretching their understanding, taking things apart, and putting them back together.

In a similar way, many arbitrary rules of music can be broken.  The fundamental act of doing something new with music is to ask the question, "Which of these supposed limitations can I dispose of?"

What has drawn me towards the hacker community is their desire to break the limitations of a system.  Yet in the field of music, I have found that even among the fringe composers, there is an extreme fear of breaking those traditional limits.

But why?

At least in music, if you insert a sour or dissonant note, the rest of the composition will remain intact.  No big deal.

This is not always so with technology, as there can be serious malfunctions.  A computer system may cease to function if you remove any of its parts.  In an art so seemingly arbitrary, why are composers so preoccupied with reinforcing the status quo?  No one is going to die, no one will be injured, and no property will be damaged if some rules are bent.

In the mainstream culture of the United States, music is viewed with an anti-intellectual prejudice.

Yet it is not only an art; it is also a science.  The majority view music as an intuitively magic pill that makes them feel better on command.  They avoid learning its rich vocabulary in the same way that a Luddite refuses to learn how a circuit board works.

Just as with electronics, there is a science behind the art of music.

You don't just throw electronic components together at random with no rhyme or reason and expect them to work, so why apply this blind method to music?  Because consumers just want music on in the background while they are doing something else, the same way that they want their computer to function like a toaster or a car or other single-function appliance.  Music just is not something they want to tinker with.

And that is fine.

Not everyone wants to be a car mechanic; they just want to drive to work and leave the details to the mad scientists.

Yet a small handful of us are the mad scientists who need to point the microscope at some certain area of life.  The hacker ethic of exploration and curiosity can be applied to music in very specific ways.  Here are some examples...

The majority of the music heard on the radio is an endless series of measures (spaces of time) divided into two or four parts.  What about dividing them into five?  Or seven?  What would that sound like?

Further, what if you leave out some of those beats within the five or seven?  These have very distinct and striking sounds that can become part of everyone's musical vocabulary.  You can learn to recognize them just the same as a four-count measure, and you can do some very fascinating things with them.  There are very few bands doing this sort of thing!

When programming music using sequencing software, why restrict yourself to the limitations of a human performer?  When you are watching a sci-fi or fantasy movie like X-Men, you probably do not complain that real humans could never do that!

With the help of computers, we can create incredible performances and combine sounds in ways that we previously could not.  Yet, everyone is still stuck with guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, churning out the same old sounds.  Again, very few people bother to use computers to create challenging music.

Did you know that almost all musical instruments are out of tune, due to equal temperament tuning?  The harmonic overtones that occur in nature do not line up with a strict ruler of measurement that equally divides them into twelve divisions, which is how we have been dividing them since the time of Bach.

Our entire vocabulary of consonance and dissonance was created by arbitrary rules based on this system.  Yet we have the ability to program computers to break that barrier and arrange just-tempered harmonies that few people have experienced.

What the world needs is more people applying the hacker mentality to music, because just as there is more to a computer than porn, there is more to music than banging on a guitar.