Life in a Vacuum (Tube)

So you're sitting around with friends one evening, and amidst the beer nursing, one of them suddenly becomes compelled to announce a new addition to their vinyl collection. So you start really thinking to yourself, "didn't that medium phase out in the late 80s?" Well it did, for the most part, then it came back didn't it. And many are now getting a piece of the warm analog charm.

The anecdote has ceased and frankly, this post really isn't about record players. What I'm getting at here, is that by understanding each subsequent medium in a string of developments as 'progress', we're entirely ignoring the fact that people, for numerous reasons, go back to old technologies. Actually to really drive my prior anecdote home, for a society that often embraces this progress, isn't it a bit hypocritical for us to be using a thirty year old technology; CDs, from which most of our mp3s are extracted from?

So before that music gets pressed into vinyl, or CD, then spread about over the internet, someone has to make the music, which is where I am going to take my aforementioned point here.

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That's me playing guitar. When your audiophile friends are not debating about listening formats, they're probably disagreeing about whether solid state or tube is superior. Wait what? This isn't a lecture on electronics, so let's just simplify things by saying that at one point in time, amplifying an electric guitar required a set of vacuum tubes to amplify the electric current going through it. As technological developments happened, this process could be done with transistors and chips soldered onto a circuit board, know as solid state. The latter method is less expensive to do, requires less maintenance, and is significantly more efficient (The concept of entropy from this week's readings fits perfectly here), think about how much heat a light bulb produces. But solid state architecture is rather unloved in the music world.

Some argue that solid state amps sound too 'digital', others much prefer the natural, warm gain of tube amps. The CD versus vinyl is really coming through here! The progress we've made, from a technological standpoint, on amplifying an instrument is losing out to century-old technology. Even with the sound of vacuum tubes quite accurately simulated by their solid state counterparts, it has become almost common sensical to use the older technology these days.

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Inside solid state technology. This device, known as a stomp-box, creates heavy metal guitar distortion through this complex circuitry.

Newer isn't always better. It is amazing how seemingly archaic the music industry can be from a musicological sense. Yes studios can be as high tech as can be, with effects produced through sophisticated computer software and peripherals, but not always. For example, to get a nice echo effect in my guitar, I simply play in my unfinished basement, where the sound chaotically bounces off the hard surfaces. By contrast, simply adorning walls with egg cartons allows the reverberating sound to be absorbed. There are newer ways of doing things, but sometimes the old, archaic methods result in a preferred sound.

On to guitars: Really this technology has remained unchanged for the past century. Hollow body acoustic guitars look and function much like they did centuries ago. Take your typical symphony orchestra arrangement as a side point. They aren't using fancy electronic effects (for the most part) are they? Electric guitars employ the same passive magnet setup they did from their introduction. Newer technology uses solid state components to shape the guitar's tone, known as an active pickup system, but the passive system  remains dominant amongst musicians. Guitars are often constructed of carbon fibre rather than wood, as the material resonates much like wood, but this also has yet to enjoy mainstream popularity.

We need to step outside this notion of new technologies rendering past ones obsolete. In cases such as the music realm, older methods of making music seem to win against newer and more advanced ways of doing so. Media archaeologists will identify that such technology does not form a progressional line of development to the present forms, but often skips back and forth, where older technologies enjoy a renaissance of their usage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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