The Music in our Minds
Created | Updated May 2, 2010
My favourite place to talk to people – h2g2, of course – is full of happy posts right now, just the way I like to see it. In spite of the assertion in some quarters that our little web community exists only to write, write, write, and disseminate breathtakingly important information the world wide web cannot live without, we all know that our most satisfying moments have come at 3 ack emma, GMT, when we've shared a laugh, a tear, or a valuable insight with a brother or sister on the other side of the world. We don't think "social networking" is a dirty term – we just think "Facebook" is. So there.
Okay, okay, we also write up a storm, and are pretty darn good at it, so we figure we've sung for our supper sufficiently that the more travel-oriented and less terminally shy among us actually go meet each other. Er, in the flesh. (Usually in pubs.) Without using a computer. What a notion.
Bel assures me they had a great time in Germany, and the Belfast bunch managed to overcome the vagaries of Irish transport and get to Carrickfergus. Which has me singing that bad, bad song about Carrickfergus...which they knew it would, which was why the evil things mentioned it to me...
Actually, music has been on my mind lately, and not just the earworms that you can't get out of your head. (I don't really have a problem with those, because it never bothers me when somebody says, "Don't think about a frog." I immediately think about an elephant instead...)
Life without music is not good. I've always got something in my head...(quiet in the back there)...in the music line, and I hate it that talking on the computer is basically a print-only activity. I think that's why we all love Youtube – we can share the notes in our heads if we can find a link.
Brendan Behan and other notable Irishmen – such as, for example, his brother, who wrote part of that awful song about Carrickfergus – seem to have continued the, to me, delightful habit of bursting into song whenever they felt like it. In my lifetime, I've seen that habit totally die out, to the point where it has become an offence punishable by mandatory psychiatric visits. I think I know why.
I love it when somebody sends me a link to a folk lyric, or even a tinny midi version of the tune, or a Youtube of somebody singing. But more and more, the music is "unique" – meaning commercial. So homemade doesn't sound as "good" as polished and studio. The notion that the value of the tune is in the tune and not the singer's ornamentation seems to have got lost in the copyright shuffle.
It's the old digital/analogue question. You see, kids, once upon a time there were watches. They had springs and other stuff in them I didn't understand, like gears. The gears went around and the hands went around, and you wound the watch up and knew the time, or you forgot to wind it and didn't. Then somebody invented the digital watch, and we didn't know what to call the old watches. You couldn't just say "watch" – if nothing else, that term was now politically incorrect. So we came up with "analogue:. The analogue watch became analogue because the digital was digital. Problem solved.
Exactly the same thing happened with acoustic music. Acoustic music – such as just singing when there are no microphones (or critics) around, or banging the spoons on your knee – is "acoustic" because electric or electronic music is electric or electronic. So you have to say "acoustic guitar". Big deal.
Trading songs is fun, in the "what are you listening to now?" vein, or just because an event, an idea, or an analogy might occur to you in the form of an old song lyric. When somebody says, "Write about the Great Depression," the first thing I think about is "God Bless the Child", and the second thing I think about is "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Then I remember I'm supposed to be working, and get down to research. But I hum when I google.
I love my computer. I love to communicate digitally, electronically, preferably at light speed, with the entire universe. And I'm too reclusive to go to meets.
But I love that analogue, acoustic sound. Let's always remember that we're using the medium to trade our very undigital thoughts – you tell me yours, I'll tell you mine. We have these big analogue computers in our heads, you see, and some of us are very fond of the sound cards that go with them. Even if, like me, you need hearing aids in your USB ports. We may be high-tech, but we're pretty well grounded still. And what's in our minds is music – no matter how measured or far away.
Oh, and I have it on good authority that that big yellow ball outside your window is the sun. I believe it's analogue, even if NASA has digital pics of it. May it ever shine on you hootooers and all your travelling thoughts, no matter which volcano explodes next.
Fact and Fiction by Dmitri Gheorgheni Archive
