With Qualia Louder than Bombs

by mennis
23 November 2005

As a young child, I distinctly remember feeling that the most important invention of the amorphous future would involve the ability to record my conscious experience and play it back VHS-style (hey, it was the early 80s!). Now, admittedly I was a rather strange kid, but I was fascinated with the possibility that others could be privy to my perspective (including my wild imaginings) and that I could sit and watch the world through someone else’s eyes. My invention was to be the REAL Truman Show—reality TV taken to an entirely different level.

The observations that fueled my odd obsession were off-putting at the time. They were quite similar to the feeling that many of us still can’t get over when you hear your recorded voice played back for the first time, realizing that the sound you hear doesn’t correspond exactly to that heard by anyone else. After all, the sound waves that constitute your voice are traveling at a very different angle and through a very different head, neck, and shoulders than the listener standing next to you.

But if one extends this line of thought to its logical limits (is it still cool to be “pomo”? or po-po-mo?), it becomes a miracle that we find ourselves in agreement about anything at all—whether it be art generally, music specifically, or the fact that I can walk around inside my reality and coordinate it to have tea time with yours. The notion that we each have our own narrative can be cozy, but the real terror erupts in the deduction that if my experience of red may not be the same as Jim-Bob’s experience of red, how can our individual experiences of a new album be similar enough that we can speak of it in an orderly way at all?

The common, cynical, and characteristically scene answer would probably involve snarking about being helpless victims of hype, a lemming-like state to which everyone except the most elite are bound. We snort our contrarian remarks of how albums and artists are deemed worthless when excessive amounts of hype surround them. We seem to operate on an inverted u-function of merit—as popular excitement increases, overall value of an album increases with it until the point at which it plunges into the wastebasket because it broke into the mainstream, became so popular that its secrecy and novelty had been rendered obsolete, or it was simply impossible for the work to live up to THAT much hype. However, we are not necessarily living in an entirely detached splendid isolation, listening to our own completely different experiences connected only by the thin thread of the judgment-day-style ruling of the scene gods. Thankfully, hype is not the only index or determinant of musical greatness.

While there is little doubt that my experience does not map point-for-point with yours, the real magic is in the interplay of the constancy AND the variation of our perceptions. We all have our own histories and experiences—different exposures and influences, and distinct episodes of triumph and heartache for which very particular and individualized patterns of vibration have served as the soundscapes that anchor and heighten significant life events to our ongoing sense of being. Yet despite all of the individual differences, we often manage to retain a collectively “intuitive” sense of what makes a musical piece of work particularly strong. What is it in the human condition, similar histories that have produced similar artistic tastes, and the music itself that give rise to agreement that a particular album is head and shoulders above the others?

In light of the conviction that these types of questions can be answered, my aim for my little corner of The Big Takeover is to push an analysis of relatively new recorded and live music somewhere beyond “THIS is good!” and “this is good because it sounds just like…”, towards an examination of the relations between musical structure, artistic creativity, and the psychological phenomena generated by the overlapping behavior patterns of artist and listener.

Despite such lofty quasi-intellectual goals for a blog, when it comes down to it I just want the simple things in life really—like reassurance that you’re hearing the same thing I am, and that I’m not going to die alone without anyone ever really knowing me. Although those reassurances are not likely to materialize and I cannot break from my own narrative, there is some comfort in the realization that this is partially what language and art are for—catching a small secondhand glimpse of someone else’s experience. With the good fortune of being exposed to such a wide array of brilliant new music that results in intensely vivid and emotionally powerful qualia, who could resist copping a “raw feel”?

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