Afternoon, y’all! I keep forgetting how self-righteous music critics can be when it comes to the term “indie,” which was coined as shorthand for “independent music,” or music that is made and released independently of the Big 4.

But as with other words–”gay” no longer means thrilled to be alive, and “damn” will no longer send one straight to hell–the meaning of indie has changed to connote, as often as not, an aesthetic.

No one really agrees with me on this, besides Carles, who agrees ironically. But I firmly believe that this word, if it still exists in five years, will no longer mean what the tofu-eating, burlap-wearing, coke-snorting Amero-Zapatistas  had in mind when they coined it in 1812 1968 the late 1970s.

Remember when CNN had that special report called “Inside the Indie Scene”? Yeah. That actually happened. In a 2006 article, CNN wrote, “According to critics, indie is now nothing more than a branding tool: a highly commercial and money-driven movement, more concerned with marketing a particular image instead of culture with a truly independent nature and passion for its art.”

When was indie *not* concerned with paying the bills? When has indie never been about selling shit? Did all these people play every show for free? Give out all their merch for free? Give away their music for free? If they did, and if that was how we defined indie–an extreme allergy to sustaining yourself financially–isn’t it a good thing that’s come to connote a profitable aesthetic?

I was hoping that some of the people who responded to the  Monitor Mix survey question, “What does ‘indie’ mean to you?” would agree with me on this. Or, at least agree somewhat that cultural evolution is OK.

But no. The dinosaurs all share a hatred for Kidz Theze Dayz and their insistence on using “indie” to describe the way music sounds or the way people dress or anything other than Fighting the Power.

My own survey question would be: Isn’t it a good thing that a bunch of stodgy critterpoos have absolutely no control over how Kidz Theze Dayz uze wordz?

If you want to mellow out a monkey, play him some Metallica.

That’s the surprising result of a new study by Charles Snowdon, a
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor. The researchers played clips of music— including Metallica’s
“Of Wolf and Man,” Nine Inch Nails’, “The Fragile,” Tool’s “The
Grudge,” and Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”—for cotton-top tamarins.

Humans generally find the Nine Inch Nails and Barber pieces to be calming, with their slow tempos and descending pitches, like sighs. The Tool and Metallica songs, in contrast, tend to make people feel excited, as a result of their faster tempos and machine-gun bursts of
notes.

The monkeys, however, barely responded to any of the pieces, though they did seem to calm down and relax a bit while listening to Metallica and Tool.

“I don’t have a good explanation for that,” says Snowdon. “They are usually very active animals, and their movement got minimal after they heard those two pieces.”

The practical upshot? Monkey keepers may want to play heavy metal rather than classical music to calm their colonies. However, they’d do even better if they played “monkey music” — pieces composed specifically for tamarins by study co-author David Teie, a University of Maryland cello instructor and member of the National Symphony Orchestra.

Teie mimicked the contours of tamarin calls and wrote songs that had a muchbigger effect on the animals’ behavior than human music did. One piece, with a slowly rising whistle-like melody, caused the monkeys to groom one another and engage in other leisurely, social activities. Another, with short, staccato notes, sent the animals into a frenzy of anxious behavior including scent marking and head shaking.

But yeah, I had to pinch myself just to be certain that I was awake and that the event wasn’t really taking place in Baltimore.

The festival will be taking place September 25-27, 2009.

List after the jump.

2009 FESTIVAL ARTISTS:
Faust
Jandek
Andrew W.K.+Chris Grier+Ulrich Krieger
Health
Elliot Sharp
Annea Lockwood & Tom Buckner
Marvin Aryes
BLK w/BEAR
Nine Strings + Pilesar
21st Century Ensemble
This Bag is not a Toy
Even Parker & Ned Rothenberg
David Daniell
Bicameral Mind
Janel & Anthony
Pekka Airaksinen
TL741
Luigi Archetti
qfwfqduo
ayyoko confidential
ige*timer
Jeff Carey
Tim Hecker
Gunter Hampel
Fckn Bstrds
Soft Pieces
Olivia Block+Tomas Korber
Pilesar
Ergo
Never Work
Kotra
Kohoutek
Alexei Borisov & Anton Nikilla
Blue Sausage Infant
Dead Violets
Dr. Bibber
Second Land
Sean Peoples

In my previous post on the future of listening to music, Futurist Magazine senior editor Patrick Tucker commented on how rapid advance of technology would ultimately lead to an evolution of cochlear-implant-like devices, and that content would be directly beamed to these devices in your head. During a WFS Annual Conference session on the End of the Written Word, Mr. Tucker referenced similar devices, and how they will eventually supplant the optic exercise of reading.

He also, rather ominously, declared that a major challenge to this process would be the ability of marketers to blast unlimited sales pitches for products to your brain in perpetuity. The only defense could be to simply turn the device off. Not the most efficient model. I asked Mr. Tucker if hitting the off switch was the only option, how could you be marketed to for the products you actually wanted, like a new album from you favorite band?

We would have to make conscious choices about what data streams we wish to subscribe to, pretty much the same way make decisions about what RSS feeds we like today. This means you would have to know a great deal about what you wanted to listen to in order to learn more about it, which is a Catch 22. However, I’m sure service-providers will pop up offering to find music for you in accordance with a list of stated preference.

The more interesting question might be, what other stuff will slip through the filter? Take the failure of the do-not-call- registry. I’m on it, but I still receive solicitation calls all the time. It used to be just nonprofits I had given money to. Today I get calls from banks looking not to “sell” me something but to “inform” me that my time is running out to act on some special offer. The idea of Bank of America, the Sierra Club, and the DCCC all talking in my head while I’m trying to listen to music bodes well for future musicians that can deliver music the really old-fashioned way, live [my emphasis].

So while constant touring is a major source of income for many acts, in the future, it will also be their most trusted marketing effort. Good news for DC fans and venues alike.

I attended the World Future Society’s annual conference this past weekend at the Washington DC Hilton Hotel. Seminars and panel discussions ranged on a variety of topics (PDF of the conference program), from examinations of emerging energy technologies to the future of the religious right. One panel in particular, the End of the Written Word, was especially interesting. Four experts discussed the recent shift away from traditional writing, and its implications for, well, the future.

Since the digital age has transformed how we seek and consume music at least as much as it has impacted the written word, I contacted one of the panel members. I asked Futurist magazine senior editor and WFS Communications Director Patrick Tucker his opinion on the future of music consumption. His generous and insightful response is below:

Within the next thirty years, we’ll become more comfortable incorporating wireless technology into our biological functioning. The success of the today’s cochlear implant provides a great example of how willing we already are to explore electronic enhancement related to auditory stimulation. Cochlear implants are small devices that doctors surgically insert near the skull to improve hearing in the impaired. Today, Cochlears are used solely for medicinal purposes, but there’s no reason why a similar gadget couldn’t be wired to receive phone calls, email, or download music. Because most of what we call hearing occurs not in the ear but in the brain this music wouldn’t have to pass through the ear, it could be directly targeted to new neuron groups [my emphasis].

In the future, we’ll become more adapt at targeting our sound (music) neurons and getting them to fire and spark in all sorts of interesting ways. The notion of making “music” by sending sound waves from radios, through the air to peoples’ ear drums will come to seem as quaint as using a coffee can and fishing wire to make a telephone call. Instead, we’ll send sound or music over a radically-improved version of what we today call the Internet in the form of data. In other words, future downloadable music will contain notes, sounds, and rhythms that would be imperceptible to us today.

We literally cannot even imagine what it might sound like, but some recent neuroscience breakthroughs may give us a clue. According to a study performed by Lizbeth M. Romanski and Patricia Goldman-Rakic, there are three types of auditory neurons. One type (phasic) responds only at the onset of noise and then resets; on a line graph this would look like a spike. Another type of neuron (tonic) has a long sustained response to stimuli; this would look like a wave. A third type of neuron (phasic-tonic) has a strong initial response, followed by a less intense, wave response. Most classical music, unbeknownst to the people that composed it, primarily affects the second type of neuron. If it’s successful, it creates a modulating emotional response in the listener. Dance music targets the third neuron type. What is the 4 on the floor beat pattern, after all, except a series of high intensity jolts re-arranged into rhythmic wave? Now imagine being able to hear, distinguish, and appreciate a dozen different types and pieces of music all at once, along with liner notes and visual displays. In terms of what the liner notes might look like, the outtakes and bonus features that come packaged with todays DVDs will serve as an ancestor.

Curing a hearing disorder, however, is entirely different than improving upon otherwise perfect hearing. For all our technological cleverness, we understand very little about the miracle of the thinking organ, least of all how to augment a design that’s far superior to anything humankind has ever come up with. We are, however, learning more all the time and in the next thirty years, we may finally be able to put our vastly improved neurological understanding to the test.

Heady stuff indeed. And Phasic-Tronic is just lying out there for an aspiring DJ or group to appropriate as a band name…album title…

Soon, I’ll post our conversation regarding the future of music marketing.