Style lifespan + perception

centuries from now humanity as we know it will not exist

boo

also important to consider that centuries from now the technology used to play back music will no longer exist either, so knowledge of 20th century music is likely to be restricted to what has been encoded in a format that endures (ie, carved in stone) or has been passed down through a tradition of performance (ie, live music).

CDs, records, tapes, MP3s will not exist. just look at the pace of technology - we can't even keep a given medium extant for more than a couple decades.

(my initial post not meant to be nihilistic btw - there will be people of some sort, but I don't think they'll resemble us much)

well, as far as technology, i would bet cheap media and consumerism will have been in and out of fashion a few times again, so it could be that whoever is walking around the planet by then would be interested in getting some old music. but in any case, I guess I'm most interested in how differing styles, especially in pop music, are actually different -- and the pitfalls someone unfamiliar with any of what we listen to would fall into trying to describe it.

i always liked when they joke about this in time travel stuff, like in somewhere in time when christopher reeve buys the suit from the vintage shop but gets laughed at in the 20s because its 2 years out of style

http://cyberliterature.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/time-machine.jpg

lol http://cyberliterature.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/time-machine.jpg

or marty mcfly with his hollywood-ized western garb

this sorta question is interesting but since i don't have shakey's crystal ball (hard to believe that an advanced technology would be befuddled as to how to replay our music, considering I can listen to mp3s of early 20th c stuff), it's unanswerable. without knowing how music and culture will change, impossible to say how samely-different our music will or won't sound then.

The pace of fashion and style

they did it on the futurama where they go back to roswell in 1947 - farnsworth is in a zootsuit & leela is like 'yo, homes!'

'leela, you really don't cook enough roasts'

also I don't think the variations in Bach's composing styles are really analogous to the differences between yr example of 21st century hip hop and 1940s swing. For one thing, no matter what the stylistic variations (scales used, melodic phrases, compositional structures, etc.), Bach was operating within the confines of a particular set of instruments and their accompanying melodic and harmonic limitations.

Whereas hip hop and swing are completely different rhythmically, produced with different instruments, and reproduced on vastly different technology - the difference is clearly audible to the untrained ear. Its not like Bach switched from harpsichord to an amplified drum machine when switching styles.

x-post

in the future, Sir Mix-A-Lot will be classical music

Any kind of music that you're unfamiliar with sounds "all the same", i.e. orchestral music, or techno. (and vice versa - this question reminds me of the beginning of that Lily Allen video when she's in the record shop and she's like "do you have something like dubstep, but like grime, with a kind of 2-step feel, but more 4-on-the-floor than that" and the guy's like "yeah, yeah")

All recorded music sounds the same, because it comes out of the same speakers

hard to believe that an advanced technology would be befuddled as to how to replay our music, considering I can listen to mp3s of early 20th c stuff

only because someone has bothered to update that old technology (wax cylinders or what have you) to MP3s. But what gets updated and encoded into current technology (which is constantly changing and at an ever-increasing pace) is very difficult to predict and it shouldn't be taken for granted that everything we have now will for some reason still be available in the future. Look at what's left to us of Roman literature, for example (ie, a lone complete novel and a bunch of fragments).

same speakers

maybe so! i kind of expect music to come out of the air, 360-degree sound in the near future. so by the year 2500, maybe peoples' hearing evolves extra dimensions, and if we went there, we wouldn't even be able to hear any of their music.

haha MAKE IT SO

we will have brain chips that will create the effect of us hearing a piece of music without us actually having to hear it

Look at what's left to us of Roman literature, for example (ie, a lone complete novel and a bunch of fragments

yeah but the technology of preservation now vs then is incomparable, not to mention the heightened awareness of the importance of preserving past culture now vs then. any comparisons between ancient time-to-now vs now-to-future doesn't hold much water IMO. the trend of history is more and more preservation of the past, and i see no reason why that should reverse.

yeah but the technology of preservation now vs then is incomparable

I dunno about that - our technology is so totally disposable. computers don't last 10 years, audiotape disintegrates, no one uses floppy discs anymore, etc etc

I mean yes its true the tendency is to preserve more and more, but we stupidly preserve that stuff on mediums that aren't designed to last past the next decade (thus my not-entirely-joking "carved in stone" aside upthread).

true but there's now a bazillion decentralized places where stuff is stored as opposed to one library in Timbuktu or wherever. Up til the present, an active choice was needed to preserve things or update them to the newer preservation format. who's to say that in the future all of the updating won't be done automatically. obv you could be right, all or most may be lost, but seems to me like a slim to none chance of that.
xpost

shakey youre talking out of your ass here - compared to the countless films and wax cylinders and early television shows that nobody even bothered to preserve, what important cultural artifacts have been lost in the last 30-40 years? i cant name one

the american novel

compared to the countless films and wax cylinders and early television shows that nobody even bothered to preserve, what important cultural artifacts have been lost in the last 30-40 years? i cant name one

lolz "important cultural artifacts" of the last 30-40 years. highly subjective term there. tons of stuff is out of print, or not available in digital format.

but seriously the key thing is we aren't talking about the past few decades (which have seen an explosion in technology that in all likelihood is not sustainable) but CENTURIES from now. Granny's point that preservation sites are now decentralized is a good one (no repeat of the fire at the Library of Alexandria, or of the massive loss of information/technology that was the Middle Ages), but I can't help but wonder how much that decentralization is worth when its also accompanied by a technology that makes reverse engineering anything nigh impossible (ie, there may be digital libraries backed up all over the globe, whether anyone will be around in the future who has the skills and knowledge to retrieve that data is another matter)

and come on ethan what's with the stupidly paradoxical question - if an important cultural artifact had been lost in the past 30-40 years, how would I know about it? Its been lost! But I can think of lots of great stuff (records, comics, movies, books, tv shows) etc. that are either out of print or not in digital circulation and may never be. Whether or not those are "important cultural artifacts" is debatable.

But I can think of lots of great stuff (records, comics, movies, books, tv shows) etc. that are either out of print or not in digital circulation and may never be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library

http://www.museum.tv/

http://www.library.yale.edu/humanities/media/comics.html

it seems like you're assuming there'll be some mass near-extinction level event that will disconnect people of today from people of the future. which yeah, may occur but hardly seems inevitable. like 3200 A.D. man will come out from his underground sanctuary and be all gah i can't figure out how to play this shakira mp3 single, what foul creature created this!?

lolz - yes more or less that's what I'm thinking

it just seems to me if you look at history there's not a straight line of preservation - there's always huge gaps (for whatever reason). I am not so in the thrall of our current technology that I believe in its immortality.

consider that all our current preservation techniques require electricity, air-conditioning, petroleum products, etc. Couple that with dwindling energy supplies and impending ecological disaster gee do you think global society is gonna put preserving MP3s and comic books at the top of its "to-do" list.

no but some nerd in Idaho will

so, the world is ending, mass extinction, oceans are boiling, dogs and cats sleeping together, financial market meltdown. . .

and you're worried about some Sun Ra mp3s and pdfs of Silver Surfer comic books.

haha! well no I'm not really worried about it (all things must pass n all that), I'm just saying their preservation is not a foregone conclusion.

Do you think in 50 years much cultural artifacts will be lost? No? In 100? No? 200? Yes? What happened in that span of time to cause such a loss? I suppose it comes down to you believing complete societal collapse is inevitable and me, y'know, not.

back more to the orignal topic, I'd guess and say that the biggest discernible differences to future ears will be acoustic vs electric and styles within the two will mostly seem like variations on one theme.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I'd guess and say that the biggest discernible differences to future ears will be acoustic vs electric and styles within the two will mostly seem like variations on one theme.

sounds reasonable

"what kind of music do you like?"
"oh lots...mostly zarbogoid, fleshburn, sheentongue, and some pre-apocalyptic stuff, too. hard to find, though."

and come on ethan what's with the stupidly paradoxical question - if an important cultural artifact had been lost in the past 30-40 years, how would I know about it? Its been lost! But I can think of lots of great stuff (records, comics, movies, books, tv shows) etc. that are either out of print or not in digital circulation and may never be. Whether or not those are "important cultural artifacts" is debatable.

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, July 17, 2008 2:16 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films

i find it fascinating that we can listen to, say, donna summer's "love to love you baby," roxy music's "love is the drug," paul simon's "50 ways to leave your lover" and linda ronstadt's "you're no good," and easily lump them together as coming from a very specific place and time (1974/75, the american/british empire), and hear them very clearly as part of a single culture and even a single basic style. you could even throw some vintage 1975 fela kuti, and easily play that as part of the same set. back in the day, they were perceived as two or three very different cultures that hardly intersected at all, and would quite possibly never meet. today it really does all sound kinda the same (in a good way!).

and that's only 30 years later. 300 years or more later, it seems obvious to me that while people will of course be able to hear basic differences in timbre, rhythm or whatever, they'll find it a lot easier than we do to hear the similarities. it will sound as if it's very much of a piece with each other, and with 1980s house music and 1990s hip-hop and 2000s metal and 2010s whatever.

also, if history preserves ILM, i take it for granted that every thread ever will look exactly the same.

i think we'll all be dead in 60 years time, so yeah.

As for 'lost' stuff - I have a copy of 'Altered States' that I found on laserdisc the other day. I don't suppose I'll ever be able to watch it. Salvation Army is always full of laserdiscs.

most threads already do like exactly the same

If you think back to the teens and 20s, the very early recordings, it seems reasonable to say that they are probably harder for us to differentiate stylistically now than they were at the time (talking more about casual listeners here, not so much music geeks that follow reissues closely). I think the sonics of the recordings (hiss, crackle, warbling), and the technology used to capture it, are a much larger part of what we hear now than they were then (when it was just the current, accepted state of the art-- and was often thought to be more or less ideal). Which could have something to do w/ that fact checking cuz is saying, too, since part of the reason those acts sound more similar to us now is because of the technology used to record them. So, to go back to the original question, I could easily see the various strands of pop music today sounding almost the same to someone in 500 years.