Some days he wasn’t even sure why the RIAA had hired him. So much music could be had by so many for so little that Toshi should have long ago been driven into honest work, say eclectic format disc-jockeying for Starbucks. There was pay what you want and genetic taste matching and music by statistical referral. Customers who liked Radiohead also listened to Slipknot. If you like Slipknot, you may also like the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus. The vendors had your demographic, and would feed it to you in unlimited ninety-nine-cent doses or even free squirts that vanished after three listens. He owed his job to saltwater syndrome. Drinking made you thirsty. Buffets bred hunger.
And some kind of strange musical hunger had bred this virus. Whoever had made the payload had made something beautiful. Yukawa had no other word for it, and the way the thing worked scared the hell out of him. Three days into his hunt, he discovered that four other computers behind his firewall were now infected. These boxes had gone nowhere near an illegal download site. The virus had somehow uploaded itself back up to shared music service software, and was spreading itself through automatic synchronization onto innocent bystanders.
A sick and brilliant mind: that’s what Toshi Yukawa was fighting. He felt a wave of disgust for anyone who couldn’t put such gifts to better use. Then he remembered himself, just four years ago: a collector so obsessed with liberating music that he’d all but stopped listening to it.
FA
Marta Mota woke up in her economy hotel on the Schönstraße near the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof with a tune in her head. Not a tune, exactly: more like a motif. She couldn’t altogether sing it, but she couldn’t shake it, either.
It lasted through her hot shower—a marvelous indulgence, after Iraq. It persisted through the heavy black breads and sausages of German breakfast. It was still there as she handled her e-mail and filed another story with Folha on the Diyala campaign. She had contracted what the Germans called an Uhrwurm, what Brazilian Portuguese called chiclete de ouvido: a gum tune stuck in her relentlessly chewing brain.
As earworms went, this one wasn’t bad. She’d spent an hour yesterday listening to the testosterone storms that the American soldier had copied for her. She’d needed two hours of Django Reinhardt and Eliane Elias to drive that throbbing from her mind. What she hummed now, she felt sure, was nothing she’d heard in the last five days.
She Skyped her mate Andre at the appointed hour. He was consulting, in Bahrain. The world was insane, and far too mobile for its own well-being. She only thanked God for dispensing Voice Over Internet just in time.
Andre asked about Iraq. There was nothing to say. Everyone knew already, and no one could help. She told him about the earworm. Andre laughed. “Oh yes. I had that for three months once. Kylie Minogue. I thought I was going to have to check into a hospital. You see? The Americans will get us all, one way or the other.”
She told him she thought Kylie Minogue was Australian.
“Alabama, Arizona, Australia: it’s all a World Bank thing, right?”
He asked how the tune went. She tried to describe it. Words were as effective at holding music as smoke was at holding water.
“Sing it,” he commanded.
She swore colorfully. “Sing it! Here? In public?”
The man seemed to do nothing but laugh. Wasn’t there grimness enough, out in Bahrain?
“The Internet is not public,” he told her. “Don’t you know that? Everything you do on the Internet instantly disappears.”
She tried to sing a few notes, but it was hopeless. The earworm wasn’t even a motif. It was more a harmony, a sequence of magical chords that receded when she focused on them.
“Where do you think you heard it?”
She had no clue.
“I read an article about why this happens, but I can’t remember it. Would you like the garbled version?”
She said yes. That was the beauty of free communication. They could be as silly as if they were lying next to each other in bed. Andre recounted his jumbled article, something about a cognitive itch, some combination of simplicity and surprise, the auditory cortex singing to itself. He thought he remembered something about the most common stuck tunes coming from the first fifteen years of a person’s life.
“You need an eraser tune,” he told her. “A good eraser tune is as sticky as the original, and they cancel each other out. Here’s the one that worked for me.” And into his tinny laptop computer microphone in Bahrain, in a frail but pretty baritone she hadn’t heard for way too long, he sang a few notes that rematerialized in her Frankfurt hotel as the theme song from Mission Impossible.
It didn’t help, and she went to bed that night with the phantom chords taunting her, just out of reach.
FI
Jan Steiner sits in his windowless office, listening to his life’s work. It isn’t bad, as life’s work goes. But all these sounds have become so achingly predictable. He can’t listen to anything for more than thirty seconds without hearing political agendas. Somebody preserving their social privileges. Somebody else subverting them. Groups of people bonding together with branded tunes that assert their superiority over everyone with different melodies.
He has recorded hundreds of hours of what people now call “world music,” and written about thousands more. He always paid the performers out of his modest grant money and gave them any rare recording profits. But he has never taken out a single copyright. Music belonged to everyone alive, or to no one. Every year, in his Introduction to Music lecture, he told his freshmen the story about how the Vatican tried to keep Allegri’s Miserere a trade secret, refusing even to show the score, but insisting that, for the full mystic aura of the piece, one had to come to Rome and pay top dollar. And the protectionism worked until the fourteen-year-old Mozart, in Rome for a concert, transcribed it perfectly from memory, freeing it for performance everywhere. And every year, Jan Steiner got his freshmen cheering the original bootlegger.
The idea was simple: put your song out in the world, free of all motives, and see what other people do with it. When his scandalized colleagues asked how musicians were supposed to make a living, he pointed out that musicians in hundreds of countries had eked out a living for millennia without benefit of copyright. He said that most music should be amateur, or served up like weekly cantatas knocked out for the Glory of God alone.
He sits on his green padded office chair, tipped back on the cracked linoleum, under the humming fluorescent lights, listening. He listens to a traditional Azerbaijani mourning song, as personal a lament as has ever been put into tones. He found it gut-wrenching when he first recorded it, two decades back. Now all he can hear is the globally released feature film from a year ago that used the song as its novel theme music. The movie seemed to be mostly about potential residuals and the volatile off-screen escapades of its two stars. The soundtrack made more money in six months than any Azerbaijani musician had made in a lifetime, and the performers on his track—the one that had brought the haunted melody to North America—had seen not a penny.
Just to further torture himself, he switches to his other great recent hit: an ecstatic Ghanaian instrumental performed entirely on hubcaps and taxi horns that only six months before had been turned into an exultant commercial for global financial services. This one also made a mint as a cell phone ring tone.
He has no one to blame for these abuses but himself. All music was theft, he has maintained over a lifetime of scholarly writing, since long before sampling even had a name. Europe used to call it cantus firmus. Renaissance magpies used to dress up millennium-old Gregorian Psalmodic chants in bright polyphony. Whole musical systems—Persian dastgāhs and Indian ragas—knew nothing about ownership and consisted entirely of brilliant improvisations on preexisting themes. The best songs, the ones that God wanted, were the ones that someone else transposed and sang back to you, from another country, in a distant key. But God hadn’t anticipated global financial services jingles.
Back in the 1970s Steiner had predicted that the rise o
f computing would save music from death by commodity. Armed with amazing new ways to write, arrange, record, and perform, everyone alive would become a composer and add to the world’s ongoing song. Well, his prediction had come true. More music of more variety was being produced by more people than any ethnomusicologist would ever be able to name again. His own illiterate grandson was a professional digital musician, and Jan Steiner finds the boy’s every measure unbearably predictable.
He works his way through the towering stacks of offprints, pitching mercilessly. While he works, he leaves the player on shuffle, letting it select his life’s tracks at random. By the time he leaves, hours later, he has thrown out two large garbage bins, and it’s made no visible dent on the office. He stashes the player in his coat pocket as he leaves the building and heads back toward the snowy quad. Outside, it’s night, and silent, the only track he can bear.
But as he rounds the corner of the Georgian psychology building, a tune comes back to him. Comes back isn’t quite right, since this one is nothing he’s listened to this evening. He can’t quite say whether he’s ever heard it before, or even what scale or mode or key it wants to be in. As far as he can tell, this track—if it is a track—has gotten away safely, innocent, never repackaged, let alone heard by anyone.
SOL
In Sydney, Mitchell Payne felt a song coming on. It had banged around his head since deplaning. This was dangerous: when melodies came to him out of the blue, it usually meant he was ripping someone off. He wasn’t alone. There were only so many notes—twelve, to be precise—and they could be combined in only so many sensible ways. Someday soon, a garage band out in Cos Cob was going to string together the last viable melody, and music would be pure plagiarism and mash-ups, from then on.
The industry was already pretty much there anyway. Covers and remakes, quotations and allusions, homage, sampling, and down and dirty five-fingered discounts. A Korean kid covering a Taiwanese kid whose arrangement imitated the video game Pump It Up whose soundtrack mimicked an old Brian Eno performance uploads an electrifying guitar video of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, already the most hacked-at piece of the last three hundred years, and immediately, people from Panama to Turkmenistan post hundreds of shot-perfect recreations, faithful down to every detail of tempo and ornament … .
The melody nibbling at Mitchell’s brain as he set up his loopers, shifters, sequencers, and MPCs on the stage of the small Haymarket theater might have come from anywhere. It was at once oddly familiar and deeply strange. He cursed the snippet, even as it haunted him. He couldn’t afford Stuck Tune Syndrome just before performing. He had to settle into the chiptune groove, that quantized trance that the children of Mario demanded.
But by the time he finished testing the gear, Mitchell was flipping. He stood inside the circle of banked electronics, his Mission Control of waveform generators, wanting to pull the plug on everything and crawl off to a Buddhist monastery until the monster tune scratching at his brain either came forward and said what it wanted from him or left him for dead.
While the house filled, Mitchell sat backstage in the green room answering questions from an editor of New South Wales’s most prestigious online chiptune zine. What was the most influential mix he’d ever listened to? What would be the most important developments in the eight-bit scene over the next few weeks? If he could put only one video game soundtrack into an interplanetary spacecraft, which would it be? He could barely hear the questions over the stunning harmonic tension in his head. The stage manager had to call him twice before he heard.
Nerves almost doubled him over as he jogged out of the wings in front of a restive crowd already clapping in frenzied, synchronized downbeats. He had that sick flash of doubt: Why do I put myself through this? I could retire to something safe, write a music blog or something. But as soon as he got the backing tracks looping, the MSX emulator bumping, and his Amiga kicking out the MIDI jambs to the principal theme from the old blockbuster game Alternate Reality, he remembered just what Face-to-Face was all about, and why nothing would ever replace live performance.
SI
By the time Toshi Yukawa realized he needed help from coders beyond himself, it was too late. He’d taken too long to isolate the virus and even longer to break-point and trace the logic, trying to determine exactly what the multiple payloads meant to do to the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of music players already infected. The code was so idiosyncratic and original that Toshi couldn’t understand it, even as it stared him in the face. The weapon was cryptic, evanescent, awful, awesome, protean, full of fearsome intelligence and unfathomable routines: a true work of art. He isolated a subroutine devoted to hijacking the player and beaming out music in subaudible frequencies. Yukawa didn’t get it: why spend such incredible intellectual effort to take over millions of devices, just to play a tune no one could hear? That had to be just a private amusement, a warm-up act for the headline show. Yukawa dug deeper, bracing for the real mayhem. A person who could write such code could sow destruction on an operatic scale.
Then Toshi stumbled onto a portion of the initializer that made his blood run cold. It checked the host’s time zone and adjusted another routine that made continuous calls to the music player’s clock. A timed detonator: the code was going to launch a synchronized event to go off at a single moment across all the world’s time zones. But what event? The code was inscrutable assembly language. Deleting songs at random? Scrambling the firmware or flash memory?
Yukawa logged in to the best professional discussion board for tracking the thousands of viruses, worms, Trojans, and assorted malicious code in the wild. There it was: growing chatter about something already code-named counterpoint. Yukawa posted his discoveries, and four hours later, one of the big boys at Norton found the trigger date for Yukawa’s detonator routine. A day obvious after the fact: counterpoint was set to premiere on December 21, the winter solstice. The day after tomorrow.
Time had run out. In two days, many, many people were going to be walking around earbudless, their billions of dollars’ worth of portable media centers bricked. Personalized music would never be safe again. People would be thrown back on singing to each other.
A South American journalist reporting on the eternal hackers’ arms race had once asked Yukawa what would happen if the white hats lost. He’d laughed her off, but here it was. Toshi sat back in his Aeron chair, gazed out his window down the glens that hid the unsuspecting venture capitalists along Sand Hill Road, and gave up. Then he did what any artist would, faced with imminent destruction: he turned back to study the beauties of the inscrutable score. He worked on without point, and all the while, unconsciously, under his breath, in the key of hopeless and exhilarating work, he hummed.
LA
São Paulo did not help Marta Mota. In fact, the relative safety of home only worsened her earworm. It got so bad she had to take a few days’ leave from Folha. Andre actually suggested she get help. Only the fact that several friends were also suffering from a barely audible chiclete de ouvido running through their minds kept her from losing hers.
More confirmation awaited her online. She turned up hundreds of posts, each one plagued by unsingable music. A reporter to the end, she traced the blind leads. She found herself in ancient backwaters, Krishna’s healing flute, Ling Lun’s discovery of the foundation tone, Orpheus raising the dead and animating stones, the Pythagoreans with their vibrations the length of a planetary orbit, the secret music that powered the building of the Pyramids, the horns that felled Jericho, the drumming dance of Ame no Uzume, the rain goddess, luring the sun goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, from out of hiding in the rock cave of heaven. She read about African maloya, outlawed because of its power to stir revolution. She found a fantastic article by an old Czech-American musicologist tracing the myth of sublime sound, from Ulysses, tied to the mast to hear the Sirens, through Sufi mystics, Cædmon’s angel-dictated hymn, and on into songs on all continents that yearned for the lost chord. God’s own court compos
er seemed to be baiting her for a libretto.
On the solstice, Andre was consulting in Kamchatka. Marta worked late, too wired to sleep. She drew a hot bath, trying to calm down. Her player was docked in the living room, whispering soft, late Vinicius de Moraes, one of the few human-made things capable of temporarily curing her of the human-made world. Right at a key change, the music stopped, plunging her into the night’s silence. Then another tune began, one that, in four measures, lifted her bodily out of the water. She sprang from the tub and dashed into the living room, nude and dripping. By the time she reached the player, the harmonies were done.
She fiddled with the interface in a naked daze, but the tune had erased its tracks. Whatever had visited was gone faster than it came. She shut her eyes and tried to take down that sublime dictation before it faded, but could make out only vague hope, vaguer reassurance. What was left of the tune said, Keep deep down; you’ll hear me again someday. She stood on the soaking carpet, midway between bitter and elated. The song had ended. But the melody lingered on.
LI
Mitchell Payne was deep into a smoking rendition of The Last Ninja that was burning down the house when the music died. The backing track piped out by his 160 GB classic simply quit. The iPod brought down the master sequencer, which in turn crashed the Roland, a chain reaction that pretty much left Mitchell noodling away clueless on a couple of MIDI controllers in the empty air. The silence lasted no longer than it takes to change a track, an onstage eternity.
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