Editor’s Note: This story is inspired by side two of Abbey Road, the Beatles final album. Abbey Road has a long suite of songs – many brief and segued together. The reason for using the suite method was to include various short and unfinished John Lennon and Paul McCartney compositions. The collection forms a valuable part of the album. We encourage you to play the album while reading this article.
24:55 Here Comes the Sun
It feels like years since you’ve been here
John Lennon told us, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” The same, it seems, could be said about music.
Music is what happens when you’re busy walking to class, doing your homework, washing the dishes, eating a meal, or having a conversation.
Music has become the background noise to our lives.
College students – Generation Y – have gotten so wrapped up in the technologies and devices they use that they’ve forgotten the point.
It doesn’t matter that you were the first person to introduce your friends to a new band. It doesn’t matter that you have more than 20,000 songs in your music library. It doesn’t matter that you only listen to music produced before the 1970s. And, it really doesn’t matter that you can make the best party mix on the block.
The only thing that matters is the music feels and sounds right to you, because, when it comes down to it, experiencing music is not a competition. It’s personal.
Regardless of medium or mantra, people are drawn to diverse music. For every genre, there are as many enthusiasts as there are critics.
But different music brings different joy to different people.
We’re as unique as our tastes.
When you strip away your iPod and the 18,000 songs you don’t actually listen to, what do you have left?
Pure joy.
28:00 Because
Love is all, love is new
When we experience music we love, our brain reacts in the same way as it does to food, sex, and drugs, according to a study done at McGill University in Montreal.
Biologically, all humans respond to music in the same way. It’s the actual song or melody that varies.
Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, professor of music theory, says different music speaks to us.
Though Kielian-Gilbert listens to symphony music and owns books on Stravinsky, she appreciates new, popular music because it gives her a fresh perspective on the compositions she has studied for years.
“Good music shouldn’t have anything to do with if it’s popular or classical,” she says.
It all depends on how individuals identify with music, such as how a person was raised or if he or she has previous musical training.
“It’s about what personalizes something for somebody,” Kielian-Gilbert says.
Music is an individual experience and many factors play into a person’s favorites.
“Because you’ve grown up a certain way, you have certain associations and memories,” Kielian-Gilbert says.
“Don’t Stop Believin’”—the first catalog track to sell more than 2 million digital downloads—is going to have a different effect if you’re scrubbing the dishes as opposed to screaming at the top of your lungs in a bar.
It’s all about context.
THE MEDLEY
30:45 You Mever Give Me Your Money
Oh, that magic feeling
Glenn Gass thinks Kurt Vonnegut said it best.
“The goal of an artist should be to make people happy they’re alive,” the professor of music says, paraphrasing Vonnegut. “And he said that the Beatles did that. He recognized that they had a positive universal appeal that nothing else has touched in our lifetime, or several lifetimes.”
In 1964, Gass heard The Beatles for the first time. His neighbor told him that a friend down the street had the “I Want To Hold Your Hand” single on vinyl, and they had to listen to the record immediately.
“We ran over to his house and looked at it, looked at them – the picture, the name – it was all so weird,” Gass says. “The first 20 seconds we were like, ‘Oh, I’m not sure,’ but then, it was like, ‘That’s great.’”
Gass was 7 years old at the time and has been a Beatles fan for more than 40 years. He’s listened to the band in all mediums.
“I admire the purists, but I’m not one,” Gass says. “I love the feel of an album. I love the look. I love album art. ... But iPods are just so convenient.”
To a trained ear like Gass’, the difference in quality between mediums is noticeable, but the ease in finding a song, artist, or album makes the compromised sound quality tolerable.
“When I go from a cassette to a CD, it goes from warm to shrill,” Gass says. “And now everyone says that MP3s sound like pickaxes to your ears ... and they do when you compare them to a really good LP.”
However, Gass says he is a purist in that he listens to full albums, be it the Beatles or another group.
“What bugs me the most is the sense that everything is just one big random shuffle,” Gass says. “iPods can easily become background music.”
He says people are so consumed with singles and shuffle that the concept of an album is almost extinct.
“The whole sense of what an album is ... I don’t have to explain it yet, but I think in about five years I might,” Gass says. “Songs need to be heard the way they were meant to be heard.”
34:37 Sun King
Everybody’s happy
A song changed Craig Shank’s life, and the Bloomington resident can remember the moment exactly.
The programming assistant for WTTS and former WIUX DJ had skipped school, pretending to be sick. It was the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death.
“I was listening to X103 in Indianapolis, and Nirvana played their cover of David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World,’” Shank says. “I just remember hearing that song and thinking, ‘I have to own everything this band has ever done.’”
The song strengthened Shank’s fascination with radio.
“It connected with me at the right time, and being home that particular day when that particular song was being played, and me having my radio on ... it just all felt right,” Shank says. “I’m constantly thinking there could be someone out there that’s listening to radio right now, and a song is changing their life.”
Shank says he believes the context and timing has everything to do with how a person experiences music.
“If you select the right records and put them in the right order for the right people at the right place and the right time, you can make an entire room fall in love for one night,” Shank says.
In elementary school, Shank listened to radio because he was interested in the medium. His love of music didn’t come until later.
Now, music is Shank’s life.
“It’s the one thing that never disappoints me, no matter what’s going on in my life,” Shank says. “There’s always that one song that can turn it all around.”
Shank remembers a time he was extremely late to a wedding and missed the entire ceremony. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones came on the radio and made the situation almost funny.
“In a way, it seems like sometimes the songs choose us,” Shank says, “not the other way around.”
37:13 Mean Mr. Mustard
Only place that he’s ever been
Assistant professor of music Andy Hollinden says Generation Y has both the history of music at its fingertips and the desire to learn about it.
“This whole notion of buying music that your parents listened to when they were young ... in my generation was practically unthinkable,” he says.
The Beatles made the Billboard 200 Albums of the Year Chart a total of 18 times. Ten of those years were before 1977 and the rest were between 1995 and 2009.
“The music that you listen to in your formative years, that music will be like your home base,” he says.
“Now kids say the music I grew up with is way better than the music they grew up with.”
Hollinden heard “Machine Gun” by Jimi Hendrix when he was 9 years old, but it is still his favorite song.
“It’s as good of a performance as any music made by anybody anywhere.”
38:19 Polythene Pam
News of the world
Music informatics graduate student Yushen Han is combining his love of music with his electrical engineering degree to help other musicians.
He is aiding in the Music Plus One project, which uses computer software to provide real-time accompaniment to a musician.
The software puts the musician in control of tempo.
Han plays the guitar and enjoys classical and popular music equally.
“I don’t think there is much of a difference between the two,” Han says.
In the future, Han says it will be easier for amateur musicians to create songs using simple computer software.
“People love music as much as they always have,” Han says. “But this generation is more interested in making music.”
39:31 She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
Didn’t anybody tell her?
Time stopped for senior Megan Hanna when she first heard “Paperback Writer” in her “Music of The Beatles” class sophomore year.
“Everyone was silent in the room, and all of a sudden no one else was there,” Hanna says. “It was both amazing and overwhelming, and I knew it was my favorite instantly.”
Hanna traveled to London the following summer to study the Beatles. There, she visited Chiswick Park, where the Beatles filmed the music video for “Paperback Writer.”
Now when she hears the song, she revisits the garden and vividly remembers the flowers, mazes, and statues.
“Being where they filmed the video, something that highly influenced them at that time, it just came alive and made it even more personal,” Hanna says.
It is the one vinyl album that Hanna can’t find at any record store.
“I’m always looking for it,” Hanna says. “But, as long as I’m listening to the Beatles, it doesn’t matter too much to me how I’m listening, because I’m happy no matter what.”
41:28 Golden Slumber
And I will sing a lullaby
Jason Nickey, co-owner of Landlocked Music, is happiest when he’s listening to vinyl.
“I like the process of putting on a record, and turning over a record, and dropping the needle on a record ... and how it focuses you on the music and creates a world in which you listen to it,” he says, pretending to go through the steps.
As a child, Nickey listened to music on his alarm clock radio.
Now, the time spent putting on a record is what makes the experience worthwhile.
“It’s weird to me that some people think that vinyl is a hassle,” he says. “That’s what I like about it.”
After purchasing his first record, a Twisted Sister album when he was 8 years old, Nickey fell in love with the tangibility of vinyl.
“I feel sad for people who never experience records. It’s like envisioning a world without books,” Nickey says. “What a depressing existence.”
42:59 Carry That Weight
Carry that weight a long time
With software such as GarageBand, music is getting easier for the untrained musician to produce, says John Gibson, assistant director of the Center for Electronic and Computer Music in the Jacobs School of Music. However, there’s only so much you can do with computer-generated sounds.
“It’s a little bit like painting by the numbers,” Gibson says.
Gibson is a composer and writes his own production software, something he never imagined when he was playing guitar with his band in the 1970s.
“I didn’t start out with the idea that I’m going to be an electronic music composer who writes all his own software,” Gibson says, smiling.
When working with notation software in college, Gibson noticed a similarity between the sound of electronic music and his old electric guitar.
“I think that happens to most everybody,” Gibson says. “Something they do when they’re really young, even if they turn away from it and go some different places, it’s still there.”
44:35 The End
And in the end
Christopher Raphael, a classically trained oboist and director of the music informatics program, has heard his share of both classical and popular music.
He says that once he began taking his training seriously, classical music eclipsed everything else.
“I guess I thought the right opinion was that it was the only music worth listening to in the world,” Raphael says. “It was everything to me.”
After playing the oboe professionally, Raphael went back to school to learn about computer science.
Still, he wanted more than anything to be an oboist, and now it’s a part of his research for the Music Plus One project.
“I finally found a way of forcing people to listen to me play the oboe,” Raphael says, laughing.
Raphael has been working for more than 18 years to help musicians practice with Music Plus One, which he says is his biggest professional success.
However, he acknowledges that a computer can never listen to music the way humans can.
“Maybe it’s impossible at some level to get the computer to understand something about the essence of music,” Raphael says. “But it’s not impossible to get the computer to do something that a person will have an ascetic response to. That’s the goal.”
46:40 Silence
46:54 Her Majesty
I’m going to make her mine
“Just take the music, the goodness, because it’s the very best, and it’s the part I give most willingly,” George Harrison said.
To the Beatles, music was everything.
For the rest of us, it is joy.
