How architecture helped music evolve - David Byrne

[Music] [Applause] This is the venue where, as a young man, some of the music that I wrote was first performed. It was remarkably a pretty good sounding room, with all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere. It actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. This is not Talking Heads in the picture. Anyway, [Music] the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent, and there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room, so the rhythms could be pretty intact—pretty concise.

Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was, in some ways, different, but in structure, in form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same—and so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough. The volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out, and doing whatever else they were doing.

Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that, and it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself, do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue or context in mind?

Okay, Africa. Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa, and the music there, I would say, the instruments, the intricate rhythms, the way it's played, the setting, the context—it's all perfect. It all works perfectly. The music works perfectly in that setting. There's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms. The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification, etc., etc. It's no accident—it's perfect for that particular context, and it would be a mess in a context like this.

This is a Gothic cathedral. In a Gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect. It doesn't change key; the notes are long, and there’s almost no rhythm whatsoever. The room flatters the music; it actually improves it. This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for. This is the organ. It's not as big as a Gothic cathedral, so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate. He can, very innovatively, actually change keys without risking huge distances. [Music]

This is a little bit later. This is the kinds of rooms that Mozart wrote. I think we're in like 1770, somewhere around there. They're smaller, even less reverberant, so he can write really freely—music that's very intricate—and it works. It fits the room perfectly. This is La Scala, built around the same time. I think it was around 1776. People in the audience, in these opera houses when they were built, used to yell out to one another. They used to eat, drink, and yell out to people on the stage, just like they do with CBGB's in places like that. If they liked an aria, they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore—not at the end of the show, but immediately. And well, that was an opera experience.

This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself, and the size of the room is not that big. It's smaller than this, but, well, Wagner in his minute innovation—he wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast, so he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there. [Music]

Okay, this is Carnegie Hall. Obviously, this kind of thing became popular. The halls got bigger. Carnegie Hall is fair-sized; it's larger than some of the other symphony halls, and they're a lot more reverberant than La Scala. Around the same time, according to Alex Ross, who writes for The New Yorker, this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet—no more eating, drinking, and yelling at the stage or gossiping with one another during the show. They had to be very quiet.

So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kinds of halls. It meant that there could be extreme dynamics, which there weren't in some of these other kinds of music. Quiet parts can be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting. But because of the reverberation in those rooms, like Carnegie Hall, the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural.

With Mahler, it looks like Bob Dylan, but it's smaller—that was Bob's last record. Yeah, popular music coming along at the same time. This is a jazz band, according to Scott Joplin. The bands were playing on riverboats and in clubs. Again, it's noisy. They're playing for dancers, and there's certain sections of the song that the dancers really liked, and they say, "Play that part again." Well, there's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers, so the band started to improvise new melodies. And a new form of music was born.

These are played mainly in small rooms. People are dancing, shouting, and drinking, so the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that. The same thing holds true for—okay, that's the beginning of the century. For the whole 20th century, popular music—whether it's rock or Latin music or whatever—doesn't really change that much. It changes about a third of the way into the 20th century when this became one of the primary venues for music, and this was one way that the music got there. Microphones enabled singers, in particular, and musicians and composers to completely change the kind of music that they were writing.

So far, a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music, but singers like Frank Sinatra could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone. Other singers after him went even further. Funny. [Music] Sweet Chet Baker, man! This kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone. It would have been impossible without recorded music as well, and he's singing right into your ear. He's whispering into your ear. The effect is just electric; it's like the guy is sitting next to you, whispering who knows what into your ear.

So at this point, music diverged. There's live music and there's recorded music, and they no longer have to be exactly the same. Now there are venues like this, a discotheque, and there are jukeboxes and bars where you don't even need to have a band. It doesn't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever, and the sound systems are good. People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems. And as with jazz, the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others, so the early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections. [Music]

PMC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies, and another new form of music was born. Live performance, when it was incredibly successful, ended up in what is probably acoustically the worst sounding venues on the planet: sports stadiums, basketball arenas, and hockey arenas. Musicians who ended up there did the best they could. They wrote what is now called arena rock, which is medium speed ballads. [Music]

They did the best they could, given that this is what they're writing for. The tempos are medium, it sounds big, it's more a social situation than a musical situation. And in some ways, the music that they're writing for this place works perfectly. So there are more new venues. One of the new ones is the automobile. I grew up with a radio in a car, but now that's evolved into something else. The car is a whole venue. The music that I would say is written for automobile sound systems works perfectly on it. It might not be what you want to listen to at home, but it works great in the car. It has a huge frequency spectrum—big bass and high end—and the voice kind of stuck in the middle. Automobile music you can share with your friends.

There's one other kind of new venue: the private MP3 player. Presumably, this is just for Christian music. You, in some ways, just like Carnegie Hall or that, when they were told the audience had to hush up, because you can now hear every single detail. In other ways, it's more like the West African music, because if the music in an mp3 player gets too quiet, you turn it up, and the next minute your ears are blasted out by a louder passage, so that doesn't really work.

I think pop music, mainly, that's written today, to some extent, is written for these kinds of players—for this kind of personal experience, where you can hear extreme detail, but the dynamics don't change that much. So I asked myself, okay, is this a model for creation, this adaptation that we do? And does it happen anywhere else? Well, according to David Attenborough and some other people, birds do it too. The birds in the canopy, where the foliage is dense, their calls tend to be high-pitched, short, and repetitive.

And the birds on the floor tend to have lower-pitched calls so that they don't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor. Birds like this Savannah Sparrow tend to have a buzzing type call, and it turns out that sound like this is the most energy-efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the field. And Savannah, other birds like this can injure have adapted within the same species. The Tanager on the East Coast of the United States, where the forest is a little denser, has one kind of call, and the Tanager on the other side, on the West, has a different kind of call.

So birds do it too, and I thought, well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music primarily the form at least to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls and museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah, I think it's evolutionary; it's adaptive, but the pleasure and the passion and the joy are still there.

This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional romantic view. The romantic view is that first comes the passion, and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion is still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into is important to that. It is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going, but this conflict of views is kind of interesting.

The writer Thomas Frank says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests—that voters, like a lot of us, assume that if they hear something that sounds like it's sincere, that it's coming from the gut, that it's passionate, that it's more authentic, and they'll vote for that. So that if somebody can fake sincerity, if they can fake passion, they stand a better chance of being selected in that way, which seems a little dangerous.

I'm saying the two—the passion, the joy—are not mutually exclusive. Maybe what the world means now is for us to realize that we are like the birds: we adapt, we sing, and like the birds, the joy is still there even though we have changed what we do to fit the context. Thank you very much. [Applause]