‘Digital Signatures’ Finds a World of Sound in a Handful of Songs

Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Modern Music Sound is an investigation into how digitization has affected the crafting of the contemporary pop song. The authors, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Anne Danielsen, have deconstructed a handful of a few key pop songs from the last 30 or so years and dissected how each one illustrates a facet of a digital signature. The ideas illustrated throughout the book are framed to show us how specific barriers were broken down by studio experimentation and ultimately accepted by the wider pop audience.

While most books and articles tend to focus on digital music’s economic impact against the old analog paradigm, Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen have taken an academic approach to the emergence of ideas within digital music, and stick strictly to the music with only a nod to the economics of the music business.

To make their point on digital spatiality, Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen use Kate Bush’s standout track “Get Out of My House” from her 1982 record The Dreaming. The track was inspired by Stephen King’s book The Shining. Over two years Bush had produced the record herself using early samplers like the Fairlight CMI. This chapter goes deeply into the recording process and how Bush had attained the layers of depth to simulate the creepiness of King’s classic horror novel. It made me think about how far reverb technology had come in 30 years, since the “slapback” technique developed by Sam Phillips at Sun Records in the mid-’50s.

Prince’s classic 1986 song “Kiss”, from Parade, was pioneering in what the authors call “modern and color free manifestations of funk”. Kiss is used as an example of the expressive capabilities of MIDI protocol, digital synthesizers and samplers. This chapter is enjoyable, as it tells the story of how Prince and his producer, David Z., figured out a way to use the drum sampler to make it sound “humanized”. Kraftwerk always had an ironic distance in their work, whereas Prince’s use of machines feels anything but ironic. Those readers who have a deeper understanding of MIDI and production techniques will get a lot out of this chapter.

“Digital silence” is a term that can be defined by contrasting the true silence of digital recordings against analog silence that was full of tape hiss or record distortion. Portishead’s 1994 track “Strangers”, from Dummy, explores the “pre-digital media signatures while simultaneously positioning themselves as avid practitioners of digital mediation”. This track took the analog inconsistencies of tape hiss and record pops and made it into an aesthetic choice by placing it within the framework of a digital composition. When listening to “Strangers”, a simulacrum of analog silence emerges in your mind. “Strangers” is a clever play on the position of the current recording technologies of the ’90s and a key example of retro-futurism.

The digital glitch fully emerged in the early ’00s as the happy accident of digital technology. The authors say of the glitch: “Since glitch sounds have become ubiquitous in music, they are now seldom mistaken for unintended ‘natural’ glitches, but are recognized as a musical effect”. To show this the authors have chosen Los Sampler’s “La Vida es Illena de Cables” and Squarepusher’s “My Red Hot Car”. The easiest way to explain this idea is using a CD skip as a percussive effect. Both songs do this to great effect, and we even see it in contemporary visual arts.

Cory Arcangel’s glitch GIF installations come to mind. Glitches seem like the 21st Century equivalent of William Burroughs and Brian Gyson’s cut up method of writing, or the record scratching in the early days of hip-hop. Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen argue that the skips and stutters “both constitute and disturb the music”. I’m not fully aware of all the academic writing on glitches in music, but I’m inclined to agree that on an aesthetic level it’s pleasurable.

Another facet of a digital signature is the “seasick groove”. To illustrate the concept of microrhythmic manipulation, the authors chose two tracks from Snoop Dogg’s Rhythm and Gangsta album: “Can I Get a Flicc Witchu” and “Bang Out”. The manipulation of microrhythms creates a woozy sound. The authors claim that this is a result of experimentation in the “age of endless undo”. I know from editing films that when you have a timeline of your footage and you make an edit you don’t like, you can always go back and “undo” it from the drop down edit menu. This is called nondestructive editing. In the old days of editing on tape, it was a huge process to reassemble your edits after you spliced the film.

The last component of the digital signature concept is the digital pitch corrector: Auto-Tune. While pop music has generally become accepting of Auto-Tune, it’s a subject of great controversy especially within hip-hop. I found it interesting to learn that Auto-Tune software was originally designed by a research scientist in the geophysical industry named Andy Hildebrand, who was working for Exxon at the time. It was developed to detect seismic data ostensibly for the business of oil mining.

After Hildebrand left Exxon he began studying music in 1979 and realized his software “could be used to analyze and correct pitch in audio signals”. The authors raise the point that Auto-Tune is so despised because it sounds human enough that it makes the listener uneasy. The human voice is the first thing we hear when we are born, so Auto-Tune brings out strong psychological reactions in certain listeners.

The academic tone throughout Digital Signatures can be challenging at times if you’re not familiar with the technology. There are several illustrations of musical timelines taken from the music software itself to help you see the authors’ points. At a slim 150 pages, the points are delivered as clearly as possible, given the highly technical nature of sound engineering.

Digital Signatures reads like a dissertation that has expanded into a book. It posits the idea that a song’s digital signature is a DNA that unlocks the relationship artists have with their tools. It’s easy to get lost in the technical writing, but it’s imperative towards understanding the concepts.

Digital Signatures is not an argument for digital within the tired analog vs. digital debate, nor is it a history on the emergence of digital music. This book is a concise yet dense exploration into the digital studio processes and innovations that brought us to the point we are at now, and how our ears and minds have become conditioned to experiencing the binary codes that shape contemporary pop music.