Brian Eno is a tireless champion of music technology, having worked at the bleeding edge of electronic music for five decades.
But while he embraces innovation, he remains wary of its pitfalls. In a recent radio appearance, Eno reflected on how modern production techniques might, if used unimaginatively, be homogenizing music.
Eno recently joined hosts hosts Brian Cox and Robin Ince for an episode of the BBC Radio 4 radio show Infinite Monkey Cage - billed as a “witty, irreverent look at the world through scientists’ eyes” - alongside Sam Bennett and Trevor Cox, two leading academics working in music and acoustic engineering.
In the episode, the hosts walk listeners through the history of music technology and recording, drawing on insights provided by their trio of educated guests. It’s a fascinating and informative listen for anyone even remotely interested in the science of sound and music.
After the conversation touches on the flexibility afforded to musicians and producers by modern multitrack recording, Eno points out how few records are now made that faithfully capture a singular performance by a musician or group, without editing or overdubs.
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“It’s really quite unusual to have an actual performance recorded now - and I don’t see anything wrong with that,” he says. “Nobody would expect every painting to be done on the same day it was started. We’re quite used to the idea in other media that you do something over an extended period of time, and that you can retract steps as well.”
While Eno values the convenience offered by contemporary recording techniques, he questions whether our modern methods might ultimately be draining the soul from the music we create: “The problem with all of this is that you end up with super-pasteurized music where everything has been nicely finished and ironed out, and there’s no fiber left at all,” he adds.
Eno singles out Auto-Tune, the vocal tuning plugin, as an example of this, suggesting that thoughtless use of the popular vocal production tool can strip the unique qualities of an artist’s voice away, rendering them unrecognizable.
“I love the sound of Auto-Tune when it’s used for what it can do that human voices can’t do; I hate the sound of it when it just turns a voice into every other voice,” he admits.
Earlier in the episode, Eno reflects on the first electronic music gear he ever purchased, a test oscillator that he picked up all the way back in 1967. “I was fascinated by trying to make an electronic instrument,” he says.
“I bought a signal generator, which was just a way of producing a sine wave from 0 to 40 kHz,” he continues, before doing a crude impression of his test equipment: “I was quite pleased with that“. Did this rudimentary set-up feature on any of his records? Yes, Eno says: “It gave me a musical career”.
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