Records

Tangibility has been on its way out for a while now.  Rotary dial telephones were supplanted by touch-tones, which over time gave less and less tactile feedback to users.  Some car steering systems moved toward drive-by-wire, introducing electrons and silicon chips between your hands and the rack and pinion gears that turn the wheels.  Doctors starting using robots to move the scalpel and suture the incision.  Dials and gauges were replaced by digital readouts on LCD screens.  Cameras no longer expose physical film, movies are no longer shown by projectors whirring their way through reel after reel of celluloid.  Heck, even the future of one of humankind's greatest inventions, the book, is in question.  Not all of these changes are for the worse.  Doctors can achieve greater stability and precision with a robot arm than with their own hands alone.  Drive-by-wire steering systems have great feedback so they feel just like normal.  Modern phones and computers allow people to connect in ways they couldn't have imagined even twenty years ago.  But there's certainly something being lost as something is gained here. And one area in which I feel the pang is music.  There is a fundamental and qualitatively different experience inherent in plugging headphones into an iPod versus setting the needle into the groove on a vinyl record.  For one thing, you can see the energy that is turning the record grooves into sound.  You can turn the power off and spin the record by hand and hear, very faintly, all the sounds you would hear if the amplifier were turned on.  You can't plug into an iPod and try--what even, shaking it?  Letting it sit there?--and hear a thing.  You can't witness bits of information transforming into musical reproduction before your very eyes.  For another thing, it's become very natural to pick and choose single songs to play on your computer or MP3 player, and to start and stop them in the middle, or to skip ahead to that rousing chorus.  On vinyl records, it feels natural to just let the record play, to hear the entire album as a unified artistic creation, to lose yourself in the musicians' imagination.  I could go on at somewhat greater length, but this is already absurdly longer than any of my prior posts.  I am by no means a vinyl purist.  I listen to most of my music digitally, as MP3s pumped through my car speakers or through tiny headphones.  And I still enjoy it and it still makes me feel a tremendous range of emotions, and it still inspires me.  But I also have a few records and an old turntable.  The counterweight is made of pennies duct-taped together and one of the feet is missing.  And when I get those pennies taped back together and set a record down, I feel a special kind of joy.  In the music and the tactility, the tangibility.