More On The iPod Sensibility

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 2:43 PM Eastern on 18 Oct. See below.]

[Note: This post has been edited as of 7:59 AM Eastern on 15 Oct for clarity, and to correct certain infelicities of expression.]

My friend (and friendly foe), urban design professional and blogger David Sucher of City Comforts, writes:

I rarely link to my friend AC Douglas anymore ... because ACD has very wisely taken to eschewing commentary on urban design and is posting almost exclusively on music....

ACD disparages something he calls the "iPod sensibility" but oddly distinguishes it from the physical iPod itself. He says (and I may be misunderstanding him) that the problem is that the iPod is emblematic of "... an entire generation walking about out there that imagines what they're hearing through their iPod headsets is what music — genuine music; classical music — really sounds, and ought to sound, like."

OK. The idea is that if you don't hear music in the physical context for which it was originally written/performed, then you are not getting the correct program. Maybe so. But wouldn't that mean that, for instance, listening to any music on a record or CD also partakes of this horrible "iPod sensibility"?

First, and parenthetically, ACD commented at length and contra David on urban design in but a single post, in which post he (in)famously declared David a "sensible-shoes bourgeois." All other contretemps concerned architecture, not urban design, which latter domain is David's field of expertise but which expertise he perversely imagines extends to the domain of the former.

But to address the principal subject of David's post in response to this post of mine (which at the time of this writing has accumulated four updates, one of them expanding at some length on the content of the original post), he's not quite got the point of my remarks concerning what I've termed the iPod Sensibility. As David correctly understands and quotes me, the iPod Sensibility is one wherein one imagines that "what [one is] hearing through [one's] iPod headse[t] is what music — genuine music; classical music — really sounds, and ought to sound, like." David, however, misunderstands that the physical iPod itself is simply emblematic of that sensibility, as I took care to point out, not its substance.

David also doesn't seem to comprehend why that sensibility is so egregiously pernicious. It has nothing whatsoever to do with purist notions concerning music being performed "in the physical context for which it was originally written / performed" as David apparently thinks it does. It has entirely to do with, first, the inarguable physical (physical as in physics) fact that acoustic instruments — the type of instruments for which all classical music is written (and I here exclude entirely from consideration 20th- and 21st-century "classical music" written in whole or in part for electronic instruments as such music is neither of interest nor concern) — can never, at the present state of the art at least, sound like the live, electronically unprocessed thing no matter how good the electronics. The sound of acoustic instruments electronically processed, even at its very best, can be merely a simulacrum of the real thing, and, as I've described in detail in my post of August 2004, The Classical Music Concert, results in a musical experience markedly different from the musical experience of the sound of those instruments in live concert in a natural acoustic.

In the case of recorded music, that's true even when the electronically processed sound and the reproduction equipment (i.e., the equipment receiving the electronically processed signal, and converting it back into audible sound) are of the very highest accuracy, and the listening environment acoustically designed to best realize that reproduced sound, also as I've described in detail in my above linked August 2004 post. It's doubly true (and I was here tempted to say infinitely more true, but resisted) when the electronically processed sound is passed through reproduction equipment as risibly crude audio-wise as, say, an MP3 player and computer speakers, or worse — much worse — an iPod and its headset which, audio-wise, is the most risibly crude creature of the lot.

So, nothing at all to do with purist notions of "hear[ing] music in the physical context for which it was originally written / performed," or "listening to a string quartet or any chamber music [written to be performed and heard not in concert halls, but in relatively small private rooms] in a large symphony hall," or "watching a movie designed for a theater on a 27[-inch] screen," as David also put it, but rather to do with the physics of sound and of sound reproduction and reception, and our musical experience of heard music.

David concludes by writing,

I don't have any particular opinion about what they are doing at Zellerbach [Hall] but there is a larger issue at hand. It seems to me that it cuts across all media and arts. ACD objects to an "electroacoustic architecture system" not because he has heard the results there but because it will change (as it must, I assume) "the sound" and thus our experience of what the composer wrote. [...] But wouldn't the better test ... be whether it enhances the performance?

To which my answer is: quite impossible, almost by definition.

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Update (6:29 PM Eastern on 16 Oct): Composer Steve Hicken of Listen wrote here concerning the planned electronic enhancement of Zellerbach Hall, and my and Kenneth Woods' posts here and here, respectively, the following:

[On this matter,] Scott Spiegelberg has the authoritative last word [in his post here].

Excuse me? Is that supposed to be some sort of joke? Dr. Spiegelberg almost wholly miscomprehended both my and Kenneth Woods' objections to that planned electronic enhancement, and so his response was almost entirely non sequitur (the objections had nothing to do with HIP-like complaints), and didn't speak to the objections raised. I suggest that Mr. Hicken reread what both I and Mr. Woods wrote, and then reread what Dr. Spiegelberg wrote in reply.

Update 2 (2:43 PM Eastern on 18 Oct): On the Classical Music & Opera Forum, poster "Calvert" writes:

A propos the "Ipod Sensibility:" I heard a funny example of that, as reported by one of the quiz participants on a Met broadcast about a decade ago. The panelist had been at a performance of Elektra when Nilsson sang it in 1979 after her return to the Met. On the way out from the performance, he heard one young audience member say to his companion, "I was a bit disappointed in Nilsson. She sounds so much louder on my stereo at home." There's the Ipod Sensibility in a nutshell.

Indeed.

Perfect!