ISLAMABAD: An Islamabad Literature Festival (ILF) session titled ‘Will Technology Influence Music?’ alternated between a history lesson on how technology has influenced music as a commodity and musicians’ lamenting the use of auto-tune in popular music.

Held on Sunday, the panel featured Noori’s Ali Noor, Rakae Jamil, Masuma Anwar, Akbar Yezdani and moderator Taimur Rahman.

Starting off the session, Laal spokesperson Mr Rahman said technology has always impacted the arts and music.

Mr Yezdani, former CEO of Fire Records, gave a short presentation on the evolution of music as a commodity, starting in 1877 with Thomas Edison invention of the phonograph to incorporate and store music. The LP vinyl was another technological leap, followed by radio, which made music publicly accessible and was when music “really started to explode”.

Mr Yezdani said the digitisation of music allowed it to be transmitted over phone lines and meant large devices were no longer needed to listen to music. He explained that the Empire group standardised this and named the format ‘MP3’, and believed that while decoding music was simple, encoding music would be so expensive that music would be protected from piracy.

However, an Australian student using a stolen credit card bought the encoding software and made it freely available which inspired “the Dark Ages of music” and led to peer-to-peer sharing of free music, and musicians and record companies lost money.

Mr Yezdani explained that the American music industry was rescued by iTunes and that in 2005, the largest music revolution came in the form of Pandora, the first streaming platform, which pays artists and labels and acts as music distributors.

However, he said, those controlling platforms also control how much revenue is generated and who gets how much of it.

The conversation then shifted to how technology has influenced music as an art and if it has led to a fall in the level of skills musicians must bring to their performances.

Vocalist Masuma Anwar, said: “I think technology has a very positive role as well, but the biggest negative role is that it is propagating auto-tuned music.”

Mr Noor said technology has become paramount for live performances which are complicated, because artists need to be able to hear themselves to play well.

“For me, the biggest problem was the people who were providing sound and technology in Pakistan had nothing to do with music. They were people who were doing car rentals and began new businesses renting sound equipment,” he said.

This meant he had to “reinvent and create” the whole process. “We had to go as far as building our own guitars,” he said. He said they had to take into account the electricity situation in Pakistan and how climate affects instruments.

“We play to a metronome, [which] helps us stay in tempo and also be on a timeline where we can know when the sound of the guitar has to go from clean to distorted. We have to automate the whole process and programme it all in such a way that the spirit of music doesn’t die,” he said.

When asked whether this setup encumbers the spontaneity of live performance, Mr Noor said the setup it not supposed to kill the spontaneity but create room for cohesion and spontaneity.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2017