Chapter 5: Start With The Sound
10 Insights from the Super Connected Tour: Rebalancing Digital & Analogue Life. Tool Five in the 'Super Connected Toolkit': Sound!
My obsession with sound and it’s devaluation in the digital space is all covered in the song Start With The Sound. What we found on the tour was fascinating though.Â
Obviously, our shows are attended by a lot of parents who are in the difficult bind of what to do with their kids and smartphone addiction. Music is a huge part of this.Â
Listening to music isn’t the carefree, spontaneous activity it used to be. For most platforms you need an account with the streaming service, which means you also need a digital identity. For kids, you often need parental permissions. Check out this article about ‘Kids losing their love for music’ by Oliver Keens.Â
They say ‘music is everywhere these days’. What they really mean is ‘music is everywhere when it’s advertising something’. Just switching music on and listening to it is not as simple as it used to be.
As a musician who started writing and recording music when I was ten years old, it doesn’t compute to find so many barriers in the digital age. Here are some of the issues I talk about in our Super Connected workshops:
1.    Infinite distribution
2.    Mute Buttons and Captions
3.    Music Creation software not encouraging creators to close their eyes
4.    No music possible without a password being involved.
All these points deserve more exploration an need to be addressed by tech companies.Â
Infinite Distribution
Infinite distribution means we never run out of a song on a streaming service. No one gets to grab the last copy.  You can always stream a song on Spotify. As long as you’ve signed up and created your account. Like everything Buddhism never taught anyone about impermanence, infinite distribution give the customer 100% guaranteed music 24/7 from across the globe until the day you die.
Which makes music as common as water out of a rusty tap.
But where is the water coming from? At the source, it’s coming from the musicians who make it. And only a tiny percentage of them benefit from infinite distribution. Most of us benefit from limited physical distribution. And this is a good point to mention Bandcamp. If you’re a music lover, want to hear cool music that isn’t always in the mainstream, and you don’t have an account on Bandcamp yet, start now.
Big tech got between parents and kids. It also got between musicians and music fans. If we can live without the convenience, the future of music will prevail in the sacrifice.
Mute Buttons and Captions
Facebook is currently clocking up 20 years of rewiring our individual behaviours in numerous ways, including making a mute button for sounds and giving ‘captions’ a lease of life that means we can experience everything in the app without every using our ears if we want. That’s just one social network. But it has the industry standard.
‘Mute’ is another world for ‘Block’. Which is why Facebook,
like many other social media platforms is an Experience Blocker
Notice anything? All these endless possibilities and there isn’t even an option to add an audio note to a post on Facebook. So unprofitable is sound for Zuck and co. that they’ve kept it like that for 20 years. With around 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is responsible for a digital norm that means the role sound plays in our communal communications, is one that has no value. And we’ve all just followed the norms as we fall over each other to get to the next piece of digital eye candy.
I often wonder what it would have been like if there had been a mute button for the images and videos on Facebook. Instead of a mute button for all the sounds. What kind of global shift in our attitude towards sound would that have created? What development of our appreciation of sound and music could that training have built over 20 years? How would it have impacted our day to day relationship with music?
thought about it a lot during the tour every time I sung Start With The Sound.
Listening with your Eyes Closed
I have to address Apple (again). They are the leaders in empowering people of all ages to create music with their products, yet they still cannot find a shortcut to switch off the display whenever we’d like to listen back to a song without looking at the screen.Â
It’s almost as if the designers have been instructed to make sure that, unlike the great age of recording from the 1930s until the late 1990s, we should never sit back, close our eyes and activate the space between our ears, unless it’s being guided by what we are looking at. Please Apple, give Logic Pro a dark shortcut
Why Does My Kid Need A Password To Listen To Music?
I don’t have solutions for the other points above, but I do have a solution for listening to music without a password, account or internet connection.
I recommend brilliant pre-digital identity Apple devices: ‘iPods’. These still work and are available on eBay at affordable prices.
This is how I listen to music. I get an impulse to listen to a song, album or playlist and I simply press play. And listen. No updates, upgrades, interruptions, ads, passwords, distractions or anything inappropriate for kids if you’re looking for something your children can listen to music on, that doesn’t have them switch to behaviour-modifying apps between tracks, if they aren’t already bored looking for the Wifi password that mum and dad hid in a safe place that no one can find.
Technology is thrilling, exciting and magical. ‘Pervasive Technology’ is dull and dangerous.Â
The pre-‘digital identity’ iPods are one of the most beautiful and harmless designs Apple ever made.  Apart from music, nothing is getting in or out of the device. It literally promotes uninterrupted music experiences, free from distraction for a developing mind that yearns to listen to music.
I’m confident that when enough parents make the case for their children listening to music without having all the information on the planet available at the same time, Apple will revive the iPod. Music is too important an experience to a developing mind for Apple not to bring back the internet-less iPod.
When it comes to solving digital problems for kids, one of the most important factors to change is the digital norm that says ‘Everything on ONE device’.
If you’re in a treacherous terrain where your survival is under constant threat and your life is on the line, then you will benefit from having a Swiss Army Knife in your pocket. Living at home with your family and going to school every day? Not so much.
In 2024, we have the most inspiring evolutional story about music that we can share with kids. Many of us couldn’t hear that story when we were young - the digital revolution has yet to begin. The story of recorded music and music players starts in 1888 with the gramophone and goes all the way up to 2008 with the arrival of Spotify.
Giving kids music devices in the order that they were invented, is not only a safe way to develop a young human’s relationship with technology, but it’s also an exciting way to raise a human being with recorded music, in the same way the whole of humanity was raised with recorded music. Why would anyone want to let a young person miss out on the giant leaps that tell the universal story of our relationship with music?
None of this is exact, and music has to be present way before we reach the ripe old age of seven, but here’s an example of progression, rather than all at once.
Listening At Home
7 Years old: VINYL - listening to records and understanding how ‘live music’ can be recorded and returned to for special occasions, with parents taking the length of a song or album to sit and just listen with the child, and talk about it halfway through.
Learning that like a play at the theatre, music can also have an interval designed to help us reflect on the experience of Side A before we start Side B. Learning what an ‘album’ really is. Learning to look after the ‘thing’ the music has been recorded on. How to put it back in it’s protective sleeve. This step is crucial.
9 Years old: CASSETTES - Playing tapes and discovering how you too can record one. Learning to make mixtapes and maybe record a few with your own voice!
10 Years old: CDs - Savour the moment you realise music doesn’t have to take up lots of room. Physically, it might fit onto something smaller, paving the way for…
Going Portable
11 Years old: use a Walkman
12 Years old: Learn about mp3 files on a computer
13 Years old: use an iPod
14 Years old: Use a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) on a laptop and use everything you’ve learnt over the last seven years to start experimenting with your own music.
Going Online
15 years old: use a portable device that CAN connect to the internet
16 Years old: stream music online, and discover that advertisements can play a part in listening to music. By which point a kid has developed a healthy value system for music (and the people who make it). A value system that would never have been possible if they started off with streaming, infinite distribution, ads and passwords.
Kids raised like this wouldn’t accept the digital norms that tech companies thrust at us today, when it comes to music and the way we are meant to interact with music. The norm that ‘access’ is more important than ‘experience’.
Music is a delicacy. The food of love. Not the Fast Food of love.
Summary
The litmus test to ascertain how deep your connection with music is can be simple. Just measure the time you listen to music when you are looking at something that has nothing to do with the music, against the time you are listening to music with your eyes closed. If you always have your eyes closed when you listen to music, then I would love to meet you and learn how you got there. That’s the gold standard.
Super Connected explores many theories and experiments to better understand how to navigate digital overwhelm, and our challenges are so many that it’s hard to know where to start. But if in doubt, Start With The Sound.
Musician and Filmmaker Tim Arnold has researched screen addiction and social media’s effects on mental health since 2017, culminating in the critically acclaimed album, film and theatre show, Super Connected - Nihal Arthanayake, BBC 5 LIVE
Listen to the album here and be among the first to see the film by signing up here.