When asked for a blog post on how digital media is changing the way we tell stories, my mind immediately gravitated towards music.

The great composers are also master storytellers, and always have been. Clearly, the classic works of opera tell timeless stories, be they comedies such as Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, or epic myths such as Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung. Moving into the 20th century, Woody Guthrie has told us stories of working class people struggling for survival, while Hank Williams has told us stories of despair and heartbreak. Nick Cave has picked up Williams' mantle, while Bob Dylan has updated Guthrie, and the best hip-hop artists have updated him even further. Tom Waits has brought us stories of life on the streets, while everyone from Britney Spears to Kiss have documented the difficulties of life as a rich and narcissistic pop star. Progressive rock has kept Wagner's spirit alive, with bands as famous as Led Zeppelin frequently weaving Tolkienesque tales into their songs.

The best way to tell more complex stories within contemporary music is the beloved (and simultaneously derided) concept album. Perhaps first inspired by the The Beatles' legendary Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the idea of composing an entire album's worth of songs that link together to tell a cohesive story first took flight in the late 1960s. We can point to Tommy by The Who as a famous case, even while snickering at later works like the 1983 sci-fi anachronism Kilroy Was Here by Styx, and encouraging hip hop artists like Outkast to carry the torch. On these records, each song tells one chapter of a bigger story. The best example of this paradigm is The Wall, which was composed in 1978 by Roger Waters, and recorded by his band Pink Floyd. Clocking in at just over eighty minutes, The Wall tells the story of a man so unable to confront the world he lives in that he builds a wall around his psyche and withdraws completely into himself.

Although the stand-alone short-stories of Dylan, Spears, and Williams easily translate into the current world of iPods set to shuffle mode, more ambitious works, from The Ring to The Wall, seem doomed. In our current mobile digital landscape, fewer and fewer people are listening to complete recordings from start to finish on home hi-fi systems, while more and more are downloading selected tracks and jamming to their favorite singles on the go. This trend is driving the concept album, the symphony, and even works in which the songs crossfade together — such as Sgt. Pepper — into obsolescence.

As originally released on vinyl (and later compact disc), the recorded applause that ends Sgt. Pepper's title track fades smoothly into the opening bars of "With A Little Help From My Friends," which in turn segues nicely into "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." On shuffle mode, these songs end jarringly as the sound abruptly cuts off mid-fade. Not only is the integrity of the suite of songs completely lost, but the artful transitions now sound like discordant mastering errors.



Why take the time to compose Tommy or Figaro when the listener will only choose to obtain selected chapters of the story, listening to these selections hours or weeks apart, and will never experience the full story as it was meant to be heard? This is like buying a book, ripping out half of the chapters, and reading the remaining chapters out of sequence. This technique may have worked for experimental artists such as writer William S. Burroughs or composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, but I am not sure that Roger Waters or the ghost of Richard Wagner would be too happy about this deconstruction of their work. Many composers have struggled with this issue during the past decade or so, and a lot of them have come to the conclusion that these ambitious works are no longer feasible in the new mobile digital millennium.

Technology has always placed constraints on the way that composers and musicians tell their tales. This is nothing new. For decades, the time limit of a vinyl record was something like twenty-two minutes per side, and this same medium also placed limits on the dynamic range and frequency response of the recordings. The introduction of the compact disc eventually expanded playback time to eighty minutes, and expanded the range of both dynamics and frequency. Although still imperfect, this medium was a step forward. In fact, one of the chief architects of the CD, Sony's Norio Ohga, insisted on the format's (original) 74-minute length so that Beethoven's symphonies could be heard uninterrupted. And now, the newest method of enjoying music, via digital files, removes a lot of the time constraints on a work, and it is possible (although currently rare) to exceed the sound quality of a compact disc in a distributed digital file.

This would seem to be another step forward, and it is. But what we are discovering is that the users of this technology have been given more choices than ever before as to how they will utilize it. Interestingly, perhaps disturbingly, listeners are making choices that are countering the desires of the artists creating the content. Whereas audio playback systems have spent nearly a century imposing very rigid experiences upon the listener, the past decade has flipped the script and let listeners experience a fully customized and endlessly malleable playlist. Thus, from a consumer perspective, the new technology is a win, but many artists are now feeling like Renaissance painters: their patrons are dictating the content, and their own artistic drive is secondary.

Music fans have rejected the musical equivalent of a novel (...and a trilogy? Forgetaboutit!), and are instead embracing the short story. Not that there's anything wrong with that; some fantastic stories have been told in ten pages of text, three minutes of pure pop magic, or eight minutes of film. The unfortunate part, however, is that in many cases, this is becoming the only choice.

Former Gang of Four bassist and frequent music biz blogger Dave Allen concurs: “I suggest that we are now seeing the end of the album-length work as the permanent work, the everlasting body of work that represents the pinnacle of an artists’ creativity.”



So.

The challenge for the very near future is not necessarily in redesigning user interfaces so as to make epic works of music flow seamlessly; that technology is already in place. Shuffle Mode has an “off” switch, but turning it off is for the listener to decide, and what this boils down to is entirely a matter of attention span.

The cynical thinker might point out that attention spans are growing shorter, it seems, by the moment. However, we can also point to organizations like the Long Now Foundation, “established in 1996 to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” They've bought real estate in the deserts of Texas and Nevada, where they plan to construct clocks designed to function for 10,000 years. Long Now has also developed The Rosetta Project, which is an archive of all known human languages. We can also look to the Slow Movement, and its cousin the Slow Food Movement, as further examples of people trying to throttle the pace of 21st-century living.

Bringing this back to music, John Cage created a piece of music called "As Slow as Possible" in 1985. A performance of this piece was begun on a pipe organ in Halberstadt, Germany on February 5, 2003. The music has now been playing continually for over eight years. Projected completion date: 2640 a.d....

... and I am sure the completed work will be available for download immediately upon completion. You'll need just a few yottabytes of hard drive space on your iImplant if you want to bring it on the rocket-L with you.



As educators, as parents, as artists, as learners, as professionals, and as a society, we should all have a vested interest in encouraging younger (and older) people to develop longer attention spans. Without commitment, patience, and attention to detail, no large project is ever completed, no worthy skill is ever mastered, and no great work of art is ever truly appreciated.

Maybe, just maybe, the first little step towards building up this sort of focus is by turning off Shuffle Mode for a while (literally or metaphorically), living in a “now” that is as long as you want it to be, and savoring the whole story.

Pay attention, this is about to get good!