Why Music Is More Than Background Noise

A writer I have great respect for once wrote Music “has two uses..to drown out people eating and drinking noisily”, and “a decent numbing effect on the mood…After all, it is not easy to think properly when you have someone chanting and wailing in your ear.”

Most people I would say, disagree with this outlook on the whole. A lot of people have a favourite band or song that ‘means something’ to them. Sentimentality, you could say, is music’s saving grace. Sentiment, or fanaticism, is what sells T-Shirts, Arena Tours, and ill devised come-back albums. It is this same emotional tie that causes people to have lyrics tattooed on their skin, and posters of people they have never met on their wall. So some people feel music significant to them. It gives them identity, a voice for feelings they could not themselves express. However, this isn’t the sole reason why music is a valuable Art form.

When it comes to emotions and music, the connections are well established and well manipulated. Want to feel upbeat? Four to the floor. Want to wind down? Something featuring an acoustic Guitar. Want to ‘forget about tomorrow’? There are a thousand factory made dance tracks to make you feel that way.

So if a cynical song-writing team can make you feel empowered, or heart-broken, like a cheap novel or a throw-away Rom Com, does music really have any lasting Artistic value? Is it really just ‘background noise’?

I recently attended a casting call, the brief being that they were hoping to find the next Mega-Stars of Pop-Rock. And it got me thinking. If a Record Label put together a band of people who have never met, and give them songs written by a team of people guessing what the general public want them to sing about, and they dress how the label think they should dress, then this defeats the whole point. Allow me to explain what I mean; Art, in my opinion, whether that be literature or sculptures or cave paintings, is a two pronged thing. The one side is the message or emotional content. The other key ingredient is the historical authenticity.

Jane Austen didn’t write about 19^th Century Society because a publisher thought it would be a good idea. She did it because that is the world in which she lived. The same can be said for any truly great Artist. Zora Neale Hurston, a hugely influential writer of the Harlem Renaissance, once said- “I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”

The rattling wagon of wishful illusions is a nice way of describing the music industry. If everything currently being played on the radio is what labels think we want to hear, what they have had written and found people with pretty faces to sing, then we are not getting art of true value. I would argue that music is valuable so long as it is created in the spirit of authenticity. That way, it gives us a historical, contextual gem, a glimpse into what someone, somewhere, truly thought and said. Nirvana were not a great band because they were made up of perfect instrumentalists, or because they wore fashionable clothes. They were a great band because at the time, they encapsulated exactly what it meant to be a teenager, to be an outcast, living in a bleak town in America. We can listen to their music today and know in a little bit more detail what life was like for people at that time. The same is true for most musicians, Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday, all the way up to bands like Radiohead.

Understandably, the ‘Meghan Trainor’ style of music can perceived to have little value other than as a meaningless background noise. However, it is worth remembering that it is the lowest form of it’s art, it is what Fifty Shades is to Literature. But authentic music, music that sums up a way of life, has the power to change the world. Just look at the birth of the teenager with Rock n Roll. The Punk Movement. Protest songs during the Vietnam war. Perhaps, then, I agree with the notion that a lot of music is ‘background noise’, but rather than covering our ears to the whole art form, we should be searching for a sound that has meaning. For those sounds give us a rich cultural history akin to that of the fields of Literature, Fine Art, or Drama, and it would be wrong to under-estimate the importance of that.

Alan Turing- A War Against Ignorance

I will prefix this post by saying that if you can, go and see ‘The Imitation Game’, a biopic on Alan Turing. It is inspirational, devastating, and most incredibly, a true story.

Alan Turing was a mathematician. In 1936, as a Cambridge graduate, Turing published ‘On Computable Numbers, With An Application To The Entsheidungsproblem’. (That’s decision problem in German). This paper put forward the notion of a ‘Universal Machine’, a machine that could be used to compute any computable sequence. The idea for the modern computer was born.

Turing got the chance to build on this thesis while at Bletchley Park, the British War time base of code breaking. The focus at Bletchley was cracking the German Enigma machine, which Turing relished tackling “because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself.” Turing worked alongside Hugh Alexander, who said that Turing’s mind and unique drive was largely to thank for the success of the project- “The pioneer’s work always tends to be forgotten when experience and routine later make everything seem easy and many of us in Hut 8 felt that the magnitude of Turing’s contribution was never fully realised by the outside world.”

Like many intellectuals, Turing was eccentric in character. Known around Bletchley simply as ‘Prof’, Turing rode his bike wearing a gas mask to avoid hay fever, frequently jogged all the way to London, and even “chained his mug to the radiator to prevent it from being stolen”- Jack Good, Bletchley Cryptanalyst.

Turing’s work at Bletchley, and outside of the war, shows a pioneering drive seen only in the rarest of individuals. He was not hugely political, his central motivator was discovery and innovation. Purely through creation of a new machine, a new idea, Turing shortened the second world war by an estimated 2 years, thus saving roughly 20 million lives. His name stands alongside that of Churchill as a war time hero.

The story of Alan Turing’s life does not have a happy ending. It is a story of one battling with big questions, determined to make the future a better place than the past. However, Turing was also at war with ignorance, firstly the evil of the Nazis, and then the evil of his own country. It is rare for one person, one mind, to be truly instrumental in saving a country from destruction, but Turing is such a figure. Being a good person, being a brilliant person, did not save him from the base human ignorance and hate that leads to prejudice. In 1952, a short 7 years after Turing’s heroic war effort, he was arrested for gross indecency. Turing refused to be ashamed or lie about his homosexuality, and claimed ‘guilty’ in court only on the advice of his family. He was defiant until the end. Preferring to continue his work, he turned down prison and instead accepted injections of a synthetic oestrogen (this is known as chemical castration). This, in a country that had just spent years denouncing the shameful sterilisation of Jews by the Nazis.

Turing’s work was greatly affected by the rumours of his homosexuality, and he was cut from certain circles. Such a ruling was not spoken about in those days, despite police actively persecuting homosexuals at the time. Two years after the ruling Turing killed himself, cyanide poisoning. A half eaten apple was found by his bedside, perhaps an allusion to the poison apple of Snow White. The scientific community published heartfelt obituaries, but his work at Bletchley was unknown and his homosexuality had darkened his name. Turing was lost in history, just another victim of blind prejudice.

It is only recently that Turing’s name has emerged as the founder of the modern computer, the hero of WW2, gay icon. The Queen posthumously pardoned Turing in 2013. However, like many people throughout history, it is too late for Turing. His unknowable contribution to winning the war and beyond that, in scientific development, directly affected all of our lives. It just goes to show that prejudice, discrimination, ignorance, and hate paint in broad and thoughtless strokes. We must continue to fight for equality in all areas, so that there are less stories of great people, doing good things, and being punished for the simple act of being who they are.