How I would like to experience music in the future?
Although I have not been a big music fan from my childhood ( honestly I didn’t even listen to songs on my own before 12th). But after becoming an undergrad, music has become an integral part of my life. It’s one of the very few things that I can say I truly enjoy and Spotify feels like my own personal therapist ( more so after I started paying a yearly premium for it lol ).
I usually use Spotify for music, depending on it and people in my close circle for recommendations. I also love listening to different versions of the same song ( covers ) on Youtube, sometimes I spend hours just listening to music late at night, and I never regret “wasting” that time, however much of a productivity freak I might seem to be.
However, an interesting thought crossed my mind a few days back, “How would I like to experience music in the future?” Now I don't know the answer to the question or the fact that why do such questions come into my mind when I have tons of other questions to find answers to, but I thought it might be interesting to think about, and well, that’s pretty much the blog.
Let’s discuss some of the ways I think we may be able to experience music in the future, I am allowing myself to think as wild as possible, and not think about the technological constraints, cause hey, it’s the future, who knows what might be possible :P
Connection
With the increasing rise of Augmented reality and Virtual reality, I think it is quite possible that we might be able to attend music concerts in a virtual space. I always feel sad when I watch concerts on youtube and think that I cannot attend the concert of an artist from another country, because I cannot simply be physically present there, in another country. But I hope in the future, artists might be able to hold virtual concerts, liberating us of these physical boundaries and enhancing one of the major purposes of music — “connecting people”. I recently made a friend out of a stranger, solely based on our common interests in music, and I heartily believe in the power of music to connect people.
However, I am not excited about just looking at my laptop with my earphones attached and roaming around in a VR avatar in a VR concert, with the help of my keyboard. I want to be able to actually experience the physical experience of a concert with other people, virtually. I want to feel the soundwaves shaking the air around, and the sheer madness of the crowd’s energy, not some digital shit. Lol sounds crazy I know, but hey again, it’s the future. With the rise of haptic tech and AR/VR who knows what the future holds. Maybe the day will come when we can experience the virtual world physically and surely that will change the way we experience music, amongst other things.
Customisation
We live in an era of customised content, all of the things we see on the internet are customised for us by a myriad of algorithms. I am sometimes amazed and downright scared by the fact that we all experience our world in such a personalised fashion to the extent that we practically live in separate realities ( through personalised content, people might be exposed to different interpretations of the same thing, thus leading to their different views and thus leading to increasing differences in the society )
But I am not talking about some music recommendations, I am talking about being able to customise the experience of music itself. Imagine how cool it might be to be able to change the instruments in the background of a song, automatically converting it into a lo-fi version, or a jazzy version lol. How cool would it be to be able to change the singer of the song, and hear any song in anyone’s voice? And hell, how cool it would be to automatically translate a song into your own language. Maybe instead of attending a virtual concert, we can create our own virtual concerts, maybe I can experience Michael Jackson dancing to Billie Jean in a virtual world of my creation, and maybe I can change the location/set anyway I want. Maybe for Billie-Jean, I can have a jazz club environment, and for “They Don't Care about us” maybe I can have a dystopian environment, kind of like a WW2 scene. How awesome it would be to able to experience these legends, customizable at our fingertips…
Creation
Everyone has a particular taste in music. I know what kind of beats I like, what type of voice I find good and what words I want to hear according to my current mood, what response different sounds induce in me. But ah well, I am mostly unable to produce them for myself …..yet ( I will surely learn at least one instrument soon, already working on my guitar skills, but again, the experience will be quite limited by my own talent). But what if in the future, music creation is so greatly simplified, that it becomes possible for “normal” people like you and me to create music we like, ourselves, without being a musical maestro.
Maybe I can just think about what type of music I want to listen to and the rest is handled by some software that creates exactly the type of song that I want to hear out of thin air. Maybe a machine can just interpret my thoughts and estimate my mood and create music that would be best suited for my current state, although this does sound a bit out of an authoritarian post-apocalyptic dystopia of the likes of George Orwell’s 1984, but well, maybe it's not so bad if limited to music lol?
Sensation
Now I love listening to music, but there’s always been a tradeoff of sorts associated with listening to it. I can either a.) Wear a headphone/earphone and keep my music private to myself, but deal with the health consequences of wearing something around your head all the time/ having sound directly being fed into your ears or b.) Turn up the music on a speaker, losing both privacy and audio quality lol, so well I usually go with the headphone/earphone option, but they are leading me to lose my hearing ability a bit ( even if it’s not significant enough to be noticeable at the moment ).
But what if I can directly get music transmitted to my brain? After all, music is in the end just brain-signals, created by our brain’s interpretation of variations in pressure. Why not directly create those signals somehow and be able to experience music, without listening to it? I always find background noise disturbing, so it might be great to somehow remove all background noise by temporary disabling your hearing and just being able to focus on the music. And with techs like NeuraLink and stuff on the horizon, maybe this idea is not too wild lol. Or maybe I can artificially enhance my sense of pitch, and give myself perfect pitch, and be able to experience music with amazing clarity.
Now I know most of these are way too farfetched technologically speaking to be realised, at least while I am alive. And the way we experience music has more or less stayed the same for centuries ( although there has been a rise of new genres and listening to music has become more portable, and recommendations have given it a sense of personalization ) it has more or less been the same, in its experience and I hope there’s some awesome innovation in the way we experience music lying somewhere around the corner, which might make it more enjoyable, cause hell, I don’t know what I’ll do if I ever get bored of music.
Anyway, that’s it for this one, as usual, feel free to contact me if you have any feedback about my blogs, or if we haven’t talked in a while, let’s talk! Maybe we can just share a few music recommendations lol, if not much :P
Until then, Stay safe!
