Potent Portables

I remember exactly where I was when I got the music in me.

There were a couple of small lakes—ponds really—near my college dorm. I’d often take the path around one of them on a late afternoon walk. This time, I was alone, but I brought along a new friend: a box the size of a small book with a belt clip and slot for a cassette tape. The Walkman ran on a couple of AA batteries and played music through lightweight headphones that looked like earmuffs made for a Cabbage Patch Kid. For my test run, I brought along Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon. I still remember the jolt I got when I pressed PLAY.

“Morning Morgantown” is a quiet song, beginning with some gentle, plucked acoustic guitar. Then Mitchell sings, her voice almost childlike. I had listened to music like that on a nice home stereo and heard songs like it in the intimacy of coffee houses or small clubs. But now I was in the midst of a wooded path at dusk, moving through space, the guitar clear and chime-y in my ears. No musicians or boxy speakers in front of me. It was as if the music was beamed directly into my brain—blood-borne and mystical.

Enrico Caruso.

Old hat, I know. Today, little white sticks poke out of everyone’s ears—like antennae or stems that once fastened our heads apple-like to tree branches. People pay up to $700 for earbuds that transport them “to a place that’s harmonious and pure,”—even while they’re standing on the sidewalk waiting for their dog to poop.

The wonder of miniaturization is all around us. But it’s all relative. When I was poring through magazines in search of the perfect stereo system 30 years ago, I came across an article by Fred Kaplan, a writer known both for his political insight and his audiophile acumen. It opened with a quote from a music lover from early in the 20th century who marveled that the recording of Enrico Caruso was so lifelike it felt like the great tenor was in the room with him. Here’s what it might have sounded like.

All hail, Enrico! But that old scratchy 78 doesn’t quite have the oomph of the roaring DTS system booting up at the cineplex, does it? Time marches on and our ears seem to adjust along the way. And there’s more innovations to come. Today, I not only can take my music anywhere, I can take any music anywhere. Streaming services bring me music from times and locales ancient and obscure. And one has to wonder: “What’s Next?”

Hsu Hits the Spotify.

Spotify CEO and Co-founder Daniel Ek.

For a deep dive into how we got here, look to Hua Hsu’s New Yorker article on the checkered history of streaming and the particular audio world that surrounds us today. “Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?” traces streaming back to the good old Napster days. But the meat of the piece explores the way streaming has changed our listening habits. The Spotify gurus promise to find new “songs that you’ll love,” but, as Hsu writes, “Spotify’s algorithm with our likes and dislikes, the platform seems to be training us to become round-the-clock listeners.” And artists are responding, throwing up all manner of ambient-ish tracks that keep the music going. And by “artists,” I don’t necessarily mean humans. In the forthcoming book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly argues that many Spotify playlists are full of “ghost” music, anonymous, often AI created fill that doesn’t require any royalty payments. You can read an excerpt in the latest Harper’s Magazine.

32 Sounds

Director Sam Green in the documentary 32 Sounds.

Scratchy audio aside, it’s still a marvel to hear Caruso’s voice decades after he died. Director Sam Green explores a host of similar miracles—the metaphysics of sound recording in his heady and fascinating documentary 32 Sounds, now streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Through the course of the film, you’ll meet an avant-garde composer whose most notorious work was lighting a piano on fire (she now records sounds in a marsh behind her house using an underwater microphone), a Hollywood Foley artist who supplies simple movie sounds in surprising ways, the inventor of a 3D microphone that records spatially, and a segment about Don Garcia, famous for driving around New York City blasting Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” from his souped up Mazda.

Green is also fascinated with the way sounds can transport someone through time. In one of the films most touching segments, Princeton professor Edgar Choueiri (the 3-D microphone guy), listens to a “message to myself” he recorded as an 11-year-old boy in Lebanon. A note on the reel-to-reel box instructed him not to listen to it until the year 2000. Green’s camera stays tight on Choueiri’s face as we hear the message: “Edgar, you might not think about your past. But this tape will remind you of it. Although you exist in a different time, I am talking to you through this machine….I hope you have remained like you were in the past….And also, I hope you have made my dreams come true. I would love it if you’ve become…something that the world sees as good.”

The Work of Art

I’ve been meaning to write about Adam Moss’s doorstopper, The Work of Art, for a while, so I’m glad to get a reminder from Friend of The Friday Five, Barack Obama, who recently picked it as one of his favorite books of 2024. Yes, it looks good on your coffee table, but you’ll want to keep a copy in the breakfast nook, as well. Why stare at the latest cereal-box exploits of that Lucky Charms fella when you can peruse the brainstorming diagrams that were the genesis of Samin Nosrat’s iconic cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Hunkering down over today’s New York Times Crossword Puzzle? I recommend Moss’s Chapter 36, in which Will Shortz takes you through his puzzle-editing process. And if you’ve got Ol’ Blue Eyes under your skin, you can eavesdrop as Gay Talese talks about the creation of his celebrated 1966 magazine profile, “Frank Sinatra has a Cold.”
But wait, there’s more! David Simon reflects on writing the second season of The Wire. Director Sofia Coppola reveals what Bill Murray whispers in Scarlet Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost in Translation. Painter Amy Sillman takes you through all 39 iterations of her painting, Miss Gleason. There are chapters on the creation of opera arias, poems, novels, plays, songs. There’s even a visit with the editor and designer of an iconic (and tragic) front page of the New York Times.

Happy New Year

To the New Year
by W. S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning 

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

See you next time.