The sounds of tomorrow

By WILLIAM THOMPSON

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg pushes a button on the CD player before him. "Listen to this. Maybe you've heard it before." World Music-like sounds occur, along with the inevitable dance drumbeat. Rothenberg examines his fingertips as if he has philosophic reservations as to their existence; he's the kind of guy who says things like, "Why does World Music have that name? Isn't all music made in the world?"

We've all heard the track he's playing; it's instantly recognisable, having been ubiquitous some years ago.

The "song" - Sweet Lullaby - was recorded by Deep Forest, and has been used as a pop ditty, then as an advertising jingle for cars, shampoo and soft drinks.

Rothenberg then plays another track. The melody is the same but unaccompanied by high-tech confections. The voice sounds alien, yet more humane.

"Where does that come from?"

Someone suggests Malaysia, another China. A fool suggests New Zealand. I can promise you it is not a waiata. There is a theatrical pause, of the kind that teachers have given since it dawned on Socrates to question his students.

Rothenberg reveals track two is in fact the melody from which track one was made. It originates in the Solomon Islands, and is a lullaby recorded by a Unesco ethnomusicologist.

Deep Forest, Rothenberg says, never got permission to use the track; it had permission from Unesco to use some African music for charitable purposes, and that was all.

"Deep Forest has never admitted they took this melody," says Rothenberg, "and as far as I know, no one has ever taken the Deep Forest track back to the Solomon Islands and played it ... I don't think what happened is a good thing."

As you may know, computers (and those who use them) have long had the ability to re-record songs and to break them up like pieces in a jigsaw. At issue is just how the sample, or jigsaw piece of a song, is affecting music today. In this room at New York's New School, the prognosis for it and for humanity seems bleak.

Ann Marlowe, an author who also writes for Salon.com, foresees the creative process will diminish. To Marlowe, "digital technology plays havoc with innovation".

She's right, given the music industry's belief that if two songs are good (or from a commercial standpoint, popular) then combining them as one song is better.

One of the biggest hits in Britain is Freak Like Me, a splicing (or mash-up, as they're called) of songs by three artists: electronic new waver Gary Numan, R&B singer Adina Howard and girl pop band the Sugarbabes.

But these unholy unions must be sanctified - at least - by publishing companies. Christina Aguilera's music publisher, Warner-Chappell, served a cease and desist order on a London radio station playing a mash-up of the Aguilera hit Genie in a Bottle over the grinding guitars of New York band The Strokes.

Samples, Marlowe says, demolish cause and effect and weaken linearity. Her argument is a more elegantly phrased configuration of the anger in the voice on another of Rothenberg's tracks: an interview with Ray Phiri, a South African musician who performed on Paul Simon's Graceland album.

Phiri says Simon "helped expose the evils of apartheid and cleaned our pockets". Not content with this, he calls Simon, in effect, "a stealer of souls".

Evan Eisenberg (whose latest book, The Ecology Of Eden, on humankind's role in nature, has been widely praised) believes the internet has robbed listeners of the ability to reflect.

"Being on line is like being a dog with its nose out the window of a moving car," he says. "It's not Nipper waiting patiently for His Master's Voice."

Eisenberg notes that in 1877, with the invention of the phonogram, music became a thing. Now, he says, music has become information. His implication, unspoken admittedly, is that it's being treated with the same disdain we might reserve for a column of numbers. "Music will be reduced to hooks," he says, "like rap."

Neither Marlowe nor Eisenberg is expressing a horror for popular forms of music, but rather uncertainty over what they will produce. The problem, as I understand it, is that the technology we use will begin to shape the way we receive music. The medium will dictate our understanding of the content, and that understanding will be denuded of what the content once contained.

Put it a different way. Joan Acocella, who writes for the New Yorker on dance and books, describes the response of the great choreographer George Balanchine on watching a video of a dance.

Balanchine put his head in his hands and said of the dancers on the screen, "They don't go forwards or backwards, they just get bigger and smaller."

A musical equivalent of this is offered by another panellist when he recounts how friends who own a music shop overheard some sales assistants talking about the artist Moby. Moby uses numerous samples on his CDs; not that the sales assistants could guess. They were saying what a wonderful singer he is.

Such rank ignorance is encouraged by the contextless realm of the sample, and it poisons the imagination. One has sympathy then for Acocella when she says, "I hope you understand me when I say this, but if this is the new world, then you'll have to kill me and my friends".

Yet as the discussion continues, some of the pessimism seems to pass. Cultural movements travel through certain phases, just as humans do. What is happening now is a kind of bumptious adolescence. Tastes swing back and forth, and the plasticity of the sample may well be replaced by a desire for veracity.

Already interest in the internet is declining; fewer websites are being hit, less surfing is being done. Thus the plethora of hooks and parallel worlds that now exists in cyber space may be dispersing. Or, as Eisenberg says, "the creative mind has a way of protecting itself".

And know-how may be a friend. Rothenberg relates the development of what he calls "mpeg 7", a technology that will contain who wrote the music that is being downloaded, what kind of music it is and its origin.

That future, in some form, is already here, at least for one member of the audience.

"Sampling for me is a godsend," says Joshie Armstead. Armstead is a singer/songwriter who began as one of the Ikettes, the band that supported Ike Turner.

Later she tells me she has licensed her samples to New Zealand bands, although she's vague on the names. Armstead tells us sampling has allowed her to retain her publishing rights. "Songs I wrote that didn't do well in this country are being sampled in Britain. It's my bread and butter."

Mentioning that the songwriter Otis Blackwell, who wrote Fever (made popular by Elvis), Great Balls of Fire and Breathless (ditto Jerry Lee Lewis), had died the day before, she says, "I was at sessions with Otis and Sam Cooke and they weren't recorded. I wish I had recordings of those times.

"When we say the sound is lost, through sampling and new technology, there's two sides to that."