HYPERREALITY:

EPISODE 23 MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. Individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world.

Origins and usage

Baudrillard believes hyperreality goes further than confusing or blending the ‘real’ with the symbol which represents it; it involves creating a symbol or set of signifiers which represent something that does not actually exist, like Santa Claus. Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science” (already borrowed from Lewis Carroll),the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape.

Hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. “There is an implosion of the message in the medium, and then the implosion of the medium itself in the real, in a sort of hyperreal nebula. Umberto Eco suggest that the action of hyperreality is to desire reality and in the attempt to achieve that desire, to fabricate a false reality that is to be consumed as real.

Significance

Because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one’s wealth),Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to Consumerism, as it could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions. Happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than interaction with “real” reality.

Individuals may observe and accept hyperreal images as role models when the images don’t necessarily represent real physical people. Star trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, “We come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great. The dangers of hyperreality are also facilitated by information technologies, which provide tools to GAME A that seek to encourage it to drive consumption and materialism.

Simulation

Simulation no longer takes place in a physical realm; it takes place within a space not categorized by physical limits i.e., within ourselves, technological simulations, etc. Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives.

Simulacrum

Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original. Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right. He created four steps of reproduction: (1) basic reflection of reality, (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretense of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever”

Olive Garden restaurants are a good example, as are some of the “themed” casinos in Las Vegas. Jeans with a pre-made chewing tobacco ring to look country, pre torn clothes held together with safety pins to look punk, leather jackets to look hard core, etc. $200 jeans that are made with holes in them so as to suggest that the wearer is, shall we say, less than affluent; likewise, a week’s growth of beard, suggesting the same.

America’s infatuation with pumpkin spice everything. What started as a simple fascination with pumpkin spice lattes is now a culinary thing. Pumpkin spice” is a mixture of spices (nutmeg, allspice, etc) that go into a pumpkin pie. But that’s exactly the point: it doesn’t matter whether “pumpkin spice” actually has any correlation to reality. I always thought “pumpkin spice” was just a magical extraction of pumpkin essence gracing my caffeinated beverage. Nutmeg and allspice are also available year-round, as is canned pumpkin, meaning we could clearly sate our desires at any time.

Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Writing in 1976, Baudrillard claims that, “in fact, hyperrealism must be interpreted in inverse manner: today reality itself is hyperrealist preferably through another reproductive medium such as advertising or photography.”

Here, Baudrillard seems to contend that the ‘nesting’ of media and translation of reality through so many media screens is responsible for the “the collapse of reality into hyperrealism.” He argues that during reproduction through multiple media the real becomes unstable. Technical reproduction lead to a decline in the rarified aura that clings to original objects.

Drawing power from its own destruction the reproduction becomes “real for its own sake, a fetishism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation. The real is not only that which can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: the hyperreal.” The tension between mediated and unmediated access to reality has thus become subsumed.

Degrees

Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra.

1. First order, associated with the premodern period, where representation is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality.
2. Second order, associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution, where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity’s ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as “real” as its prototype.
3. Third order, associated with the postmodernity of Late Capitalism, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept. In the third stage, the equivalential and measurable values of the second stage of simulation disappear. Signs, instead of goods, now become equivalent. The code does not offer signifieds in which to invest. Instead, it offers the equivalence of all signifiers, thereby deterring them from signifying anything. The system of interpreting signifiers overgrows its referents. It develops with no relation to whatever it signifies. The system is based on reproduction because it exists primarily to produce sign-value. In a system of signs, everything is exchangeable — anything can in principle be a sign of anything else. This has the effect of suppressing the symbolic. Life is emptied of emotion and intensity. Language is now without contradictions, because its intensities are purely superficial.

Phenomena

Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra originates in:

1. Contemporary media which are responsible for blurring the line between products that are needed (in order to live a life) and products for which a need is created.
2. Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money (literally denominated fiat currency) rather than usefulness, and moreover usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms in order to assist exchange.
3. Multinational capitalism, which separates produced goods from the plants, minerals and other original materials and the processes (including the people and their cultural context) used to create them.
4. Urbanization, which separates humans from the nonhuman world, and re-centres culture around productive throughput systems so.

Baudrillard rejects the view that capitalism today is aimed at producing something, or satisfying some need or desire, outside itself. Instead, he argues that the system is today a pure system of reproduction. For Baudrillard, capitalism has now completed itself. It has perfected its own reproduction. This is why social substance has disappeared from it. It no longer needs an external support for its claims. It has completed itself because it has escaped the determinacy of production, which rendered it dependent on labour. We can’t tell real needs from false needs any more.

Today’s reality equals representation because reality is actively remodelled in the image of its representation. It is constructed from the model. The model plans or anticipates the real — it does not represent or transcend it. For example, the blueprint precedes the building, the code precedes the computer programme, the operational plan precedes the military or police operation. The model turns ideology into a self-fulfilling prophecy: people and things become what they are imagined to be. This is sometimes called precession — the model or ‘simulacrum’ precedes, or comes before, the object.

Increasingly, the system puts aside most of its product to simply reproduce itself — through functions such as education, health and research. Much of this investment is actually just patching up the effects of the system’s own dysfunctions — health treatments for system-created ailments, responses to stress, compensatory coping mechanisms such as drinking, cleanups of pollution, petrol use to reach out-of-town amenities, police and military spending and so on. Yet it is made to seem like a rising standard of living.

With most of the budget going to keeping the system functioning, the population is left once more at a minimal level of survival. National statistics and the like become ‘accounting illusions’, which serve as a kind of magic or bewitchment. The immeasurable is left out, damage and obsolescence are either ignored or treated as gains, and so on. Each item produced is sacralised by being produced. In fact, production has become a system of useless waste.

THE PARABLE OF THE CAVE

For Plato, the everyday world that we perceive though it is not absolute reality, functions like the shadow world experienced by those chained in the cave. Although the external world does not represent reality, the understanding of absolute reality is possible for the philosopher in the realm of Ideas or Forms. In Plato’s thought, the true Forms, rather than discrete incidents of these Forms in the world, are the most real. Objects in the world present an incident of the Form mediated by the specificity of materials, etc., while artistic representations are yet another step away from absolute reality as further re-mediations of the Forms.

Science is often used contemporarily as an example for those seeking to defend basic notions of an objective empirical reality. Resting on a conviction that reality’s nature and rules can be apprehended through experimentation and observation, classical science forms the ideal model for unmediated perception of reality. However, new branches of science, like quantum mechanics, have suggested that notions of reality are always constituted and mediated by the presence of the scientific observer and instrument.

Skeptics like Berkeley and Hume argued that the exterior appearances of objects were merely an effect of the observer rather than a quality inherent in the objects themselves. This theory of perception as a layer of mediation has also been analyzed in science, particularly, as already discussed, in quantum mechanics. Scientific puzzles like Schrodinger’s cat or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle suggested that simple observation alters the external world. In this argument reality is located not in material things, but rather in our changing perception of them. Perhaps even more skeptically than Berkeley or Hume, Lacan describes the Real only in terms of lack– “what is neither symbolic or imaginary.

SOUND HYPERREALITY IN POPULAR MUSIC: ON THE INFLUENCE OF AUDIO PRODUCTION IN OUR SOUND EXPECTATIONS

JORDI ROQUER GONZÁLEZ

If you compare Billie Holiday’s 1936 version of Summertime with the one that Angelique Kidjo recorded more than half a century later (Island, 1997). The difference between these two recordings seemed quite evident: Kidjo’s track, with its (then) modern production tricks, achieved a sound so clear, crystalline and close. Most of the objects that shaped the piece were presented in an exaggeratedly close plane, and the multiple voices — treated with compression and equalization — were whispering in your ear, their crystalline brightness as real as an illusion… In Holiday’s 1936 version everything was also audible with absolute clarity. Holiday’s recording was the result of a mic capture necessarily influenced by the acoustic response of the room, and the sound perspective in Kidjo’s version was not only radically different, but totally unreal from an acoustic point of view.

The truth is that technology has substantially conditioned our perception of sound reality: we have been seduced to participate in an audio virtual reality experience that we now accept as natural. We have become accustomed to enjoying a sound perspective created, on many occasions, by means of technological devices that radically influence our aesthetic judgements.

So, what is sound hyperreality?

On various occasions, Baudrillard’s ideas on the notion of high fidelity lead us to a vision that, links to the usage of audio equipment as some kind of denaturalization act:

We are all obsessed with high fidelity, with the quality of musical ‘reproduction’. At the consoles of our stereos, armed with our tuners, amplifiers and speakers, we mix, adjust settings, multiply tracks in pursuit of a flawless sound. Is this still music? Where is the high fidelity threshold beyond which music disappears as such? It does not disappear for lack of music but because it passed this limit point; it disappears into the perfection of its materiality, into its own special effect. (Baudrillard, 1994: 5)

Baudrillard uses high fidelity as a “metaphor to illustrate how we have gone beyond the vanishing point into the era of secondary over direct experience, digitally created collaborations over live ensemble playing, the triumph of represented experience, in all aspects of life” . He proposes that “an obsessive focus on the

[…] perceptual artefacts of reproduction technology virtually guarantees a non-musical experience” moving us away from the “real music” to the realm of the “other music”, the hyperreal.

For him, it is enough to “read audio magazines and note how we have developed parallel definitions of real sound that apply only to reproduced sound, without thinking it unnatural in the least to do so. This should indicate that, as listeners, we have been somehow bewitched by all this audio production trickery, ignoring the fact that real and reproduced sound “are not the same thing, […] that hi-fi and music exist in a state of tension such that one denies the other when you really get down to it” (ibid).

Hyperreality is, therefore, a fictional pact between artists and consumers; a process mediated by industry and, obviously, by all the technical tools involved in its production.

MACRO PROSCESSES:

Stereo, multitrack recording and mic improvements

the appearance of stereo, multitrack recording and mic improvements as especially influential because they form a foundational basis for other creative procedures. A good example of this is the idea of the stereo field, which, adapted to our natural condition of binaural beings, also enables us — through various panning techniques — to treat spatial movement in ways that can go far beyond our ordinary binaural experiences .

The technologies that tried to reproduce sound as a form of movement — like Edison’s phonograph or Bell’s telephone — devised transducers to reproduce the functioning of the human tympanum. Due to this connection between the physiology of the ear and the technology of sound reproduction, Sterne refers to this type of reproduction as tympanic.

The concept of tympanic reproduction has been quite successful it would not be until the arrival of stereo that sound reproduction would aspire to a certain spatial realism through binaurality.

Throughout the 50’s decade, multitrack recording would become established and the progressive increase in the number of tracks were accompanied by some crucial improvements like the sync-head by Ampex or the inclusion of EQ and compression in each of the desk channels.

In the stereophonic paradigm the instruments had to “negotiate” their position in the mix because the new possibilities in terms of field location were absolutely revolutionary. Thereupon, there began to emerge a huge amount of creative panning ideas to work in that area. On the other hand, some instruments (e.g., kick and bass guitar) found in their low frequency responses a strong reason to (usually) stay in the centre of the stereo field. And those weren’t necessarily the closest representations to sound reality, they were just new — and maybe more attractive — representations of it.

MULTITRACK

It is said that Bing Crosby was the man who first used tape recording as a solution for coast-to-coast broadcasting, thus avoiding the hassle of having to broadcast the same program twice but it was Les Paul and Mary Ford recorded “How high the moon” live, which is an iconic example of this textural overlaying that the market would slowly accept to the point of naturalizing it . The overdubbing of the same timbre material (from the same voice) implied a re-contextualisation of sound that had never been heard until then.

As Les Paul himself recalls: The unwritten rules stated that the vocalist should be placed no closer than two feet away from the microphone, but I wanted to capture every little breath and nuance in Mary’s voice. So I had her stand right on the mic, just a couple of inches away. Then, what happened? Everyone started to record vocals in that way!

In terms of sound hyperreality, multitrack recording enabled the overdubbing of several takes by the same performer; this allowed us to hear the voice of a single singer overlaid four, five or as many times as desired. This is now such an innocent thing and yet it was so controversial back in the 1950s; probably because of the perceived technological mediation that limits the artist’s spontaneity and distorts communication with the public” (Adell, 2011).

Rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the romantic concept of art as an individual expression, original and sincere emphasizing instrumental skills and performance, while in the Pop music, more attention is given to technology and studio creativity.

These new close takes not only generated new forms of listening, but new ways of singing. Whispered and broken voices transmitted (or invented) new emotions via new parameters. If you look at the relationship of the singer to the band from 1925 to 1935 in American jazz and pop, the vocal part seems remarkably short as opposed to the longer instrumental parts. Over a period of the next 10–15 years, the singer became more dominant, because their voice could be heard: the microphone was louder, and they could use their voice as a much more emotional instrument, parallel to the other musical instruments.

Some micro processes

1) those related to the alteration of volume (e.g., compression, limiting, expanding, envelope modification…),

2) those related to the alteration of time and/or space (e.g., reverberation, delay, echo, panning…),

3) those related to alteration of timbre (e.g., EQ and all kinds of filtering, pitch shifting, autotuning, vocoding…).

Keep in mind that many of these effects are often overlapped and mixed and, in some cases, alteration of multiple key parameters (volume, time, space and timbre) may be present in more than one of the proposed effects. In fact, during the last forty years we have not only naturalised each one’s isolated presence, but also the effect of merging them. This way, we can see how our habitual conceptualization of a recorded voice in a pop song is usually the result of a blend of “science fiction” dynamic compression, a creative equalisation and a spatial location that — in terms of architectural acoustics — has nothing to do with aural reality.

This fact leads us to suggest two concepts that we consider crucial:

SPATIAL RECONTEXTUALIZATION

Spatial recontextualization refers to the ability to place a recorded sound in a radically different context in terms of acoustic perspective,

The use of different types of reverb in the same mix would be a prototypical sonic hyperreality based on the spatial recontextualisation principle. As Zagorski-Thomas points out in an interesting analogy with medieval painting, “figures and objects are often scaled according to their importance” , and that’s precisely what happens in popular music records: through a process of spatial recontextualization, some instruments are in exaggerated close-ups while others adapt to a second, third or even a further plane. Some of these elements are built step by step, while, on other occasions, these procedures can be executed live, giving way to two more concepts, also of great relevance: performative mixing and performative editing.

Moving on to the time and space category, the spatial recontextualization:

Spatial simulation

is undoubtedly one of the greatest generators of sound hyperreality precisely because, technology allowed musicians to invent new acoustic/sonic environments. If with stereo, panning allowed us to move the elements on the horizontal axis, with reverberation and all its related effects we can create all kinds of depths, both real and unreal .

Actually, from an anthropological perspective, we could even speak of an ancestral perception of the reverberated voice: the fact that, for millennia, almost the only place where humans could hear a reverberated voice was the temple, could explain our tendency to apply this effect to all those voices to which we attribute divinity, sacredness, spirituality… It wouldn’t be nonsensical to think that we imagine divine voices with great amounts of reverb simply because historically their messages have been transmitted to us in reverberating places.

“It seems […] reasonable to state that some vocal staging was deliberately created and used in ritualistic contexts (probably mostly shamanic) as early as the upper Palaeolithic” (2000: 37) . So, musically speaking, it would be difficult to date the moment when musicians started simulating space in their compositions, but by the end of the 16th century, Giovanni Gabrieli had already conceived his choral compositions taking into account the effects of the architecture of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice; the so- called Venetian polychoral style.

DELAY

In this way, the (now) genuine mid-fifties slapback sound applied to vocals is a very good example of this spatial recontextualisation that simultaneously acts as an agent for retexturing. The sound of Elvis Presley’s voice is probably the clearest example, with its peculiar slapback echo, which has become an identifiable sound. When Sam Philips picked up that trick, the market seemed to quickly understand its potential in terms of sonic aesthetics. Good evidence of this is the fact that when RCA bought Elvis’s contract, they could not figure out “how to get the Sun sound, and they eventually recorded Elvis singing down a tall stairwell” (Trent, 2014).

Therefore, voice recontextualisation in popular music is perhaps not so trivial and — beyond those possible ancestral connections — has some obvious technological reasons. In these procedural actions, audio production can lead to some interesting processes of signification. While the metaphor of reverb can truly contribute to add some tranquillity and spirituality to Enya’s voice, Elvis’s voice connects us to a particular aesthetic that we also have completely internalised. Neither in the first nor in the second case are we really aware as to the extent to which we are receiving technologically mediated sensations and meanings.

DRUM KITS

The historical evolution of drum-miking techniques from the classic room-sound drums in the seventies to the artificial mixtures of real parts with electronic or sampled elements, those historical multiple combinations show us how some of these formulas have become especially prototypical. This is the case of the kick-snare binomial that, in terms of acoustic space, has often been presented to us — especially during the mid-eighties — located in separate places. We are really used to listening to songs in which the snare sounds as if it were in a cathedral while the rest of the elements (especially the kick) remain completely dry, as if they were almost in an anechoic chamber. It is probably one of the most naturalised hyperrealities in pop music, although quite unnatural in terms of acoustic reality.

TIMBRAL RETEXTURING

refers to any timbral modification which has a new texture that becomes familiar to the audience, even if it is totally unreal .

Timbral retexturing (when we strongly and consciously change the harmonic content of an original signal),

PERFOMATIVE MIXING

It’s worth ending with a concept that has already been proposed by other theorists before: the notion of performative mixing which implies the use of hardware such as the mixing board as a musical instrument. In this sense, the comparison between mixer and keyboard is common, understanding some of the basic elements of the mixing console (e.g., faders, pan, mute, filters, etc.) as “keyboard keys”.

This practice may have stemmed from the passage from four to eight tracks in the Atlantic Records studios, where engineer Tom Dowd adapted the new console so he could use it as if it were a keyboard. “Tom had a longstanding issue with the hand-me- down radio equipment they had been using, and their large rotary knobs. Being a piano player, I liked the idea of having control over multiple channels at once.

He sourced some slide wires, and decided to use those instead. This was the first time sliding faders were ever used on a recording console” . As Silverstein recalls, this is an historic moment that to add another layer of hyperreality director Taylor Hackford immortalizes in one of the scenes in the film Ray, when Ray Charles tells the backing singers to leave the studio, so he can record all their parts himself.

This is a scene in which we can see how three of the innovations described in this article join together: the paradigm shift that involves the consolidation of multitracking, which, as a macro process, allows the generation of other important changes such as the retexturing of a choir recorded by a single person, or the work with technical machinery as creatively as with traditional instruments.