ProSoundWeb: If you’ve been able to survive in the live music production business over a few decades as I have, you would certainly have to concede that the 2000s and the years leading into it have been a fascinating ride for our industry.
If you were to fly up high enough and gaze down on it all you might likely fall in line with one of two mindsets: “Awesome industry! Incredible people! Incredible technology! We’ve have never experienced better results. Shows have never sounded better.”
8 comments:
This author makes some good points about music technology and the changes within it. I found it especially interesting how they connected it to human nature and generalized human tendencies. The way they described the process by which the sound technology industry rediscovers and revitalizes old technologies was also fun to read, especially because I have witnessed similar situations. I also loved the way they describe our tendency to “love, romanticize and argue voraciously about it.” That, in addition to just being a very satisfying sentence, is a great way to describe the atmosphere and culture of sound technology rediscovery and reuse. I think their point about the choices we’re required to make playing a large part in this dialogue is also a very good one. Every decision about equipment, software, process, etc. changes how the product will sound. So the decision tree is endless, and you can make an argument for almost every choice depending on the desired outcome.
Change is hard. There are some people who love change, and some who hate it. I err more on the side of disliking/resisting it, because things seem to be doing just fine as is. I think that in terms of technology and an industry, it's difficult to make big changes because of the large scale. When you want to make something be the "new thing", that means a lot of changes dealt out to a lot of new areas. There is also a large delay in doing such a thing. A lot of smaller places don't have access to brand new technology, and will have to wait years before they can get it. It's very difficult to change something and create a new standard. It causes an awkward transition period where people are using both, and sometimes the concept of this is enough to deter an industry from making big changes.
It has always interested me how hard it is for people to change their ways. Growing up around people who worked in constantly changing and shifting workfields it was always interesting to hear them talking about the new innovations that were changing their work flow. Some of them were so interested in them and wanted to learn more as fast as they could and then others would not even entertain the idea. It is so fascinating to me to see people who will not even entertain the idea of a new way or working when it could be more efficient or just better. Something I grew up hearing is “People are all for change until it inconveniences them” which the article also stated. I have seen this statement proven true in many portions of my life, I can only hope that as I grow older I continue to be open to change and do not oppose it solely on the basis that that is not the way I do it.
I think we feel this way about a lot of technology. We’re not willing to change the way we've been doing theater because we’ve been doing it like this for so long, and it’s worked so far, so why change it. But I think that’s not a valid reason. Just because it’s been workling doesn’t mean there’s not better ways of doing it, and also new types of technology we can bring to theater that haven't been seen before. Think about all the things we could do if we used technology in a way it hasn't been used before. Just as the article mentions, things age. I do think that you need to keep up with tech or you will get left behind. In the same way that video/media has gotten bigger and bigger even within the time that I’ve been doing theater. It started off in the sound department, then lighting, and now it’s its own thing in a lot of places.
This article is very interesting to me because at first I had no idea it would be about sound. But the more I think about it it actually makes a whole darn a lot of sense. The dichotomy of opinions at the beginning was really funny and honestly true, but I think people's attitudes are most definitely somewhere in the middle like most things actually are. But i think the truth is that the only person who can decide this other than the production companies buying this sound equipment, is you and your own opinion. Though we may not always want or like change it is simply inevitable, which is an issue and general part of the human experience and condition we all have to come to terms with. I just think we should focus on simply what sounds best. And whatever executes the designer or artists vision to its best.
The entire theater industry is sort of based on the backbone of ‘this is the way things have always been done’. I'm well aware that this is a gross oversimplification, as we do change and develop with time just like any other industry, but because the theater industry is so much more based on real world applications and experiences then a lot of the other industries that have the same rapid technological advancements that we go through here, I think that the way that we are trained to learn and to grow is so much more based off what we have seen in the past, then what we know to be coming in the future. I think another way in which the theater industry complicates this is because it's a relatively small industry, a lot of the technology that we receive isn't technology that was initially meant for us, meaning that any new technology we adapt we have to adapt. it doesn't come ready for us to use or in a format that we already know how to use.
I thought that this was a really interesting article to read. It’s honestly really true, we are so resistant to change, and especially in theatre and the entertainment industry, we really really love to be settled into a reasoning of “this is how this thing has always been done, and so this is how we always will do that,” while the rest of the world is constantly changing and updating it’s technology. I think that the recent release of the ETC Prodigy Balance is a particularly good example of this. It is undeniable that that device is pretty revolutionary, and it is also undeniable that counterweight rigging systems haven’t had the biggest changes and developments over their lifetime. One of the biggest selling points of the prodigy balance is that students “still get to pull a rope,” but I’m curious as to why we feel like pulling a rope is such a necessity.
I find this article very interesting because it takes a holistic approach to examining why humans are resistant to change, and it makes claims using that approach that actually have some scientific truth to them. My behavioral science class just wrapped up our unit on decision making and something I found really interesting was just how resistant we really are to change. We tell ourselves we like change- there is this perception that young people are more open to change- but the truth is is that we all hate it. None of us can stand it on an inherent level. So much so that it has been shown in study after study that people will stay in worse situations that do not require change over better situations that do require it because the upset of environment is so distressing to us in and of itself. I think our approach to decision making and changes would be better well rounded if we didn’t approach it as a generational resistance, and just a general resistance.
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