Devachan Music - Mark Simos

Technology always brings its doom-sayers and its zealots. Perhaps both these voices are needed to drive it along. But just as important are those who try to steer a middle course. I believe this middle course means using a certain caution in our embrace of the new technology. There is a darker side to the waves of new technology assaulting us these days. Running from or avoiding the technology won't help solve these problems. But neither do I think the answer is to plunge in with reckless abandon.

The Pro-technologist says: look at all you can do. The Anti-technologist might say: don't do it. What I call the middle path is when we listen very carefully, observe ourselves and our reactions very carefully; observe what's changing; observe the character of the technology itself.

Why Musicians Need to Think About This

How do we stay awake to the effect of the new technology on ourselves, on our communities, on our artistic voices? I see this as a sacred task for artists, songwriters, musicians in the coming years. It is a particular challenge for musicians; but because of that, their struggle can help in many other fields and walks of life.

When you use technology, you are both using and creating an instrument. When I use an 8-track ADAT, when I'm able to edit, enhance, cut and splice music in a direct analogy to clip art or word-processed text, my experience of music, as an artist, changes in profound ways. This shift communicates itself to listeners, even if right now what we mainly hear is the glossy perfection we're able to attain. Is this what we want? Should we use it? Should we worry?

I think musicians have a special part to play in helping us find the right approach to technology as human instrument. I encourage musicians to be pro-active and to assert their rights to continually challenge the aesthetics, and the ethics, of technology. Big words that mean: Is it beautiful? Is it good? Does it have good affect on people's lives, on individuals and communities? We need this attentiveness to be not victims but conscious and artistic owners of technology, using it as ally in our becoming more, not less, what we choose to be. This takes willingness: to embrace the new technology at its root, instead of at its edges; to make choices and apply stylistic constraints in what to use and what not to use; to pay constant attention to both light and dark effects of the technology.

Stay Awake!

Normally, one attraction of a new technology is that it allows us not to think about things we've thought about fruitlessly before. Word processors let us write blocks of words, then move them around like Scrabble tiles. Digital editors, samplers, let us work with musical materials as pure (read purified, hence something removed) information. To make new technology human, an instrument and not just a tool, we need to use the technology as inspiration to pay more attention to certain things than we did before, not less. We have to wake up in, through, our encounter with the technology.

In a way, we go through courtship and marriage with each technology we embrace. There's the infatuated romantic stage; then the stage of disillusionment, when all the warts suddenly become annoyingly visible. Hopefully we pass beyond this stage as well, to see the technology more objectively for what it is and isn't. We can then use it, consciously, and, in some sense, safely—knowing its effects on us and those for whom we create, and willing to live with it.

This is damn hard work. It may even seem, at first, like it would be easier not to use the technology at all, rather than pay attention this way.

Also, this is sad work. When we listen this way we find out there are things missing. There is a price to be paid for all that technology. We have to grieve for the qualities that are lost in the shuffle.

The alternative, though, scares me: that as we use the technology, it lulls us to sleep. As we sleep, we are changed. Technology reshapes us, silently, subtly, in its own image. Some spiritual traditions would claim the technology becomes a tool of certain powers that prefer humanity to be asleep. I can't speak for that. I can say that computer programs have insinuated themselves into my dreams, that I've succombed to the lure of a kind of mechanical perfection that technology offers and forgotten about the music. If we don't pay attention, we are changed and don't know we've been changed.

A Fable

I wrote a fable about this a long time ago. A couple of years ago I told it to Jody Stecher, and he turned it into a song—the first song he ever wrote, I'm proud to add—called "Henry and the True Machine".

It seems a man got obsessed with making a machine that would exactly reproduce the sound of the human voice — Vox Humana, as the name reads on the stops of the old pipe organs meant to sound like a human voice. He worked and worked on this machine in his garage, while the wife got more and more disgruntled. Every night he'd call her out, play her the machine and say, "Does it sound like my voice yet? Have I got it right?" And the longer he worked, the closer he got it, it was true. But at the same time, the less he used his own voice to talk to anyone about anything else- and the scratchier and more metallic his voice became. Till finally one night, when he called out his wife to listen, she said, very sadly: "Well, I can't tell the difference any more." And that night she left him, and spent the night at the Shelter for Spouses of Obsessive Nerd Audiophiles.

Now here's the part that didn't make it into Jody's song. When the man finds out his wife left him, he's very sad and creeps into the garage, where he hears the machine congratulating itself: At last! At last I've succeeded in making this man in my own image! And, in a fit of rage, he smashes the machine and melts it down into wire, out of which he makes numerous sets of bronze-alloy guitar strings which he donates to all the young up and coming bluegrass pickers in town. Will his wife forgive him and come home? Maybe I'll have the next installment the next time we meet.

Comment? Use the Tag "Moral Effects of Technology"

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