Pamela Anderson's Breasts (What's on the Boob Tube)

Ok. You are right.
This title was a completely selfish attempt to subvert internet search engines and gather greater hits for my blog. I could have called it "The State of Canadian Award Shows" or "The Juno Awards" but really, would you be reading this now? However, since Pam's jublees are front and center of every CTV ad for this year's music festival, I figured the post is actually deserving of the title.

If you haven't seen the ad, watch CTV for about 30 minutes in the next day or two. It features Pamela in a bikini, answering the call from Canada to come and host this year's Juno Awards. Having Pam as mistress of ceremonies is concurrent with CTV's other attempts to boost ratings for the show (performances by wonderful Canadian acts such as Coldplay and the Black Eyed Peas). CTV seems to have missed the fact that the Juno's are about Canadian Music. I'm not saying there won't be a lot of Canadian music featured and awarded at the show. However, CTV's drive to get ratings has meant that the marketing and advertising for the ceremony has been primarily focused on things that advertisers think get ratings (Pamela Anderson's breasts). In a year where Canadian music has been getting fantastic press around the world, it's disconcerting that CTV resorted to titillating viewers with tits instead of tunes.

As an aside, I attended a talk last night which featured Pierre Juneau, the incredibly important Canadian media figure from which the Juno's draw their name. Monsieur Juneau has held influential positions in a variety of Canadian media institutions, including the NFB, the CRTC and the CBC. He is credited as the architect of the Canadian content regulations that laid the very foundations on which Canada's current and past success in the music industry now rest. Listening to him recount his experiences and the hard-fought battles he engaged in to protect Canadian music and film from the corporate media's overriding interest in profits, I didn't have the heart to ask him what he thought of CTV's advertising campaign.

Transactions with Sound Banks

While the visual aspect of music is interesting (see earlier post), sounds are still a necessity for making music. Computers may have become increasingly adept at reproducing real instrument sounds, but a key component of new recording software is their sampling and looping functions. Programs like Acid, Reason or GarageBand (included on most new macs) provide users access to huge libraries of instruments and sounds they may not be able to create themselves. If a user cannot play violin or cello, they can simply purchase a CD with samples of renowned string players and begin creating. Rather than relying on instruments to create the sounds they need, musicians search for pre-recorded sounds from which to create music.

This represents, as music scholar Paul Théberge argues, a new form of practice where “the process of selecting the ‘right’ pre-fabricated sounds and effects for a given musical context has become as important as ‘making’ music in the first place”. The line blurs between reproduction and production as the search for sounds becomes as important as playing an instrument. Popular music producer Brian Eno notes that “what has become interesting is the idea that artists are people who specialize in judgment rather than skill”. Eno’s quote underscores the realization that when musicians increasingly rely on a shared bank of sounds; the true task becomes one of differentiation. If these programs offer standard banks of pre-recorded loops, audio software users need to find unique ways to present similar sounds.

In this light, much of this new software encourages musicians to produce through reproduction. It's not that sampling and looping are somehow revolutionary or new practices, but the fact that new recording software has incorporated these practices and made them central features to music production means that users are increasingly relying on them as an integral part of the production process.

Whose Space is MySpace

MySpace.com has received a lot of attention in the press as of late. With over 60 million users, most of them teens or youth, most of the concern has been focused on safety and security. Like most social networking sites, blogs or any other forms of share-yourself-to-the-world media, there are overblown fears about how dangerous sites like MySpace are for the young and naive users who use them. Kudos to people like Danah Boyd and Kevin Lim for looking beyond the over-reactions and considering the important social implications of the site, the practice of social networking, and the interesting identity issues at play on MySpace.

However, there's an interesting aspect of MySpace that still remains overlooked in these socio-cultural analyses. The economics of MySpace have barely been talked about, short of the fact that the site was recently purchased for $580 million dollars and is now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Renowned media scholar Dallas Smythe, discussing the economics of television, argued that TV's main function was to produce an audience: the audience commodity. Like Coca-Cola produces pop for sale, TV produces audiences that can be bought by advertisers. The concept is much deeper than that but easy to transplant to considering other media. MySpace, for example, is now a great place for advertisers to hang out to get at the ever-lucrative youth market (the audience commodity MySpace has built). Users get access to free content (music, text, video) in exchange for having to look at a few banner ads. Sounds reasonable enough.

The difference with MySpace (and many other advertiser supported social network sites for that matter) is that the very content of the sites is being created by users. In television, there's an entire industry of paid workers devoted to creating content. At MySpace, there's 60 million users who are giving their content, not just their eyeballs, for free. Granted, users benefit from advertising themselves and from all the benefits that come along with social networking and identity management (see Danah and Kevin for more on this). However, there are some underlying economics to the site which warrant discussion. I do not mean to sound as if I am advocating against user-created content. I'm all for it. Rather, I think a more critical look at the kind of commodities produced by MySpace, who is producing them and who is benefiting is a needed complement to socio-cultural analyses.

Seeing Sound

Since the invention of recorded sound, music and the technology with which it is recorded have been entwined. Currently, new digital recording technologies are facilitating changes to the music making process. Sophisticated software programs such as ProTools and Nuendo offer near-professional song recording, mixing and mastering abilities while Reason, Acid, plus a host of other programs encourage the manipulation of original or sample-based sounds. Apple's GarageBand (now included in most Mac purchases) makes audio production as easy as clicking, dragging and dropping.

While we typically think of the effects digitization has on the sound of music, there are also important changes occurring to visual aspects of music. As the computer gains a more prominent role in audio production, new visual representations of sound evolve (see the above pic). Arguably sound has been visual since musical notation, but visual representations of digital audio differ in their malleability. Visual representations of sound waves become, like much other digitized data, a string of zeroes and ones that can be manipulated endlessly through algorithms. Verses, choruses, melodies and harmonies can all be drawn and sequenced based on sight, just like paragraphs or sentences cut and pasted in a word processor. Through visual means, sounds can be sonically altered. Whereas audio engineers of the past relied on their ears to create, newer musicians and producers are increasingly relying on their eyes. They must not only hear music, they must see it as well.

As an extremely amateur music producer, seeing sound has changed my approach to music making, allowing for some new possibilities while limiting some older ones. I've just finished producing 6 songs for a friend (Joan Smith) using some of these new technologies. It was as much a sonic production as it was a visual one. You won't hear these tracks on local radio anytime soon, but they're worth both a listen and a look.

See. Hear. Joan Smith