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On most Fridays, Michael Carlisle examines the world “outside” sequential art to find… more sequential art. Expect mathematics and a dash of pessimistic optimism.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the difference between sequences of things and the “time series” those things make. I’ve been straying somewhat from the standard ideas of “sequential art” in what I talk about on this blog; I’m not about to stop now.

Even though I’ve already stated that music, as a temporally-based art, isn’t a sequential art, I firmly believe that the careful construction of a sequence of pieces of art is an art in itself, regardless of the type of art being sequenced.

As a species, we’ve been recording sound for about 130 years. From the beginnings, the wax cylinder and gramophone record^A1 allowed the rich, then the public, to have recordings of audio in their homes. It also allowed, with radio, the evolution of a societal position – the Master of Ceremonies – to move from the religious meeting or performance hall into ever-shrinking boxes in people’s homes. The MC could also become the DJ, gaining the power to sequence acts from their recordings instead of collecting them into one room to perform live. The little discs could be swapped in a two-turntable setup which allowed a predefined (or on-the-fly) sequence to be constructed. The art of the DJ is not the music; it is the sequence of music.

I got two turntables and a microphone
I got plastic on my mind….^A2

Clubs started having turntables for live song-swapping. Mixers allowed the power of crossfade (a gutter that can blur two audio panels together) during live shows. DJs could modify the songs themselves – enter scratching. Now the gutter isn’t holding the panels apart at all anymore; tracks are being modified and mixed together. Track components became the new panels; the sample became the new unit of musical art, repeated as a riff, but prerecorded by someone else. The periodicity of a fixed art comic‘s panels, in time.

… meeting promising women was partly what the DJ-ing was supposed to be about. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention… and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, … oh, there are loads of rules.^A3

Personal recording technologies like the cassette tape democratized the new art: the compilation tape (or mixtape) allowed anyone to sequence their (and others’) music. Of course, we typically copy via CDs and smaller, lossy digital formats now. This copying, along with unlicensed samples ending up on sold recordings, caused audio companies to fight back by (a) suing remix artists, (b) suing consumers, (c) suing websites that link to copies, (d) spreading misinformation, (e) levying taxes on recording media, and (f) reducing the average quality of available material so people wouldn’t feel the need to infringe on their copyrights.^B1

Computers add their own dimension. Sampling is as simple as recording an audio track, snipping a bit out, and repurposing it as you wish. When I first played with this tech, it was in SoundEdit on a Mac. As far as digital audio is concerned, a sample isn’t a chunk of sound, but one point on the wave. Much easier than gene sequencing finds the list of A, C, T, G from a strip of DNA, we can look at and manipulate the sequence of samples in a piece of digital sound. Software as easy and free to use as Audacity allows anyone with a computer to do this.^B2

We can also construct sound mixes from algorithms. Friends of mine built their own loops with trackers like FastTracker, structuring sequences of notes, loops, etc. Adaptation in the musical realm has never been easier.^B3

For the past ten-plus years the average person has been able to mix at the track level and at varying sample levels, without loss of audio signal quality (if they choose). We’ve had DJ Danger Mouse and Girl Talk make press because their mashups are too license-threatening. More and more music is being made freely available, outside of conglomerate licensing constraints, in the control of the artists. Where can we go from here but up?

The bottom line is that a DJ is an improvisational musician. It just happens that in place of notes he has songs, in place of piano keys or guitar strings he has records. And just like a musician, the DJ’s skill lies in how these are chosen and put together.^B4

[A1]Gramophone (commonly known now as “vinyl” because they’re made of PVC), which won a format war of the early 20th century, only to lose to cassette tapes later, which would lose to CD, which is currently losing to MP3, which may yet lose to Ogg Vorbis….

[A2]Beck, “Where It’s At”. Odelay, 1996.

[A3] Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, 1995.

[B1] Don’t get me started on copyright issues, public domain, artists’ rights, etc. I’ll rant too much; let’s leave that to people like Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, shall we?

[B2] Audacity is superb as free software. However, just like in the graphic design industry, if you’re a pro, you use the pro tool. For design, it’s GIMP for free at home and Photoshop for the office. For the audio industry it’s, um, Pro Tools.

[B3] Geez, why don’t I just say sheet music is an art sequence, since that’s where I seem to be going with this. We get it: Biology has gone from manipulating full lifeform to organ to cell to gene to raw DNA sequence. Music has gone from full song to sample to the byte level.

[B4] Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, 2000.

Michael Carlisle is a mathematics Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York’s Graduate School and University Center (”Graduate Center”), where he earned a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. When not teaching or researching probability or rambling about dystopian films and surrealist animation, he volunteers with the Sequential Art Collective and New York Center for Independent Publishing. He has more data than you.

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