Back in elementary school, I remember teachers giving us an important"" test designed to determine whether we were ""visual learners"" or ""auditory learners"" (I can't quite remember if there were also touch, taste or smell varieties). For some reason, I became convinced that if I ended up on the auditory end it would be my ticket to easy street, so I attempted to rig my test favorably and prepared myself for a life of listening leisure. Of course it didn't end up mattering much, as I ended up as a visual learner after all. The funny thing is, artistically, I've actually always connected more with what I can hear than what I can see.
Recorded music is the most mercurial and elusive art form that exists - at its heart completely lacking a physically tangible or visual element - yet in its mere sound waves it easily has the same awe-inspiring potential of any art that relies on vision, the most primary sense.
One can drive a car, stare out at a sunset or read a book and all the while still process melody. A band practice can be heard as it permeates through a wall into an adjoining room. Nowadays, you can download song files completely removed from their packaging. DJs can even mash two or three different songs together into a unified whole and call it original (pirate) material. Actual music is an invisible and, therefore, somewhat abstract notion.
Some sort of visual representation is usually present of course, working as an anchor to situate the music. It's almost as if the void of natural musical imagery has been over-compensated for with every conceivable supplement: album art, live concert performances, music videos, magazines, posters, etc. - all seeking to bring one closer to an artist making an invisible art. As popular music has progressed from its inception, these avenues of visualization have only expanded, and music in general has become more inextricably linked with the images that represent it.
What started out as televised broadcasts of Elvis performances in the 1950s had, by the 1980s, turned into a whole multimedia empire with MTV, which created a novel new way to contextualize a hit song. Even that era now seems like a far cry from this year's seizure-inducing MTV Video Music Awards circus, with Justin Timberlake repeatedly dropping the most absurdly apt words of the night: ""I want to challenge MTV to play more videos.""
Album cover art has always been the most primary music visual, though that notion is slowly fading away. Our facets of visual media seem stretched way too thin for anything to be so singularly striking nowadays as, say, the Beatles' definitive 1967 Sgt. Peppers cover, but modern times have provided us a plethora of new, busy ways to add sight to sound and given some artists grounds to reconsider how they package their albums.
Beck's latest, The Information, provided nothing but a blank grid-paper booklet and a massive sheet of stickers for self-decoration. Radiohead's new album, In Rainbows (available in its first incarnation next Tuesday!), somewhat like the latest New Pornographers release, will provide multiple packaging options ranging from normal to very elaborate (a ""diskbox"" containing CDs, vinyl, stickers, a hardcover book, etc.). It's basically becoming our job to sort through what an artist offers and customize it for ourselves.
Now, visuals have also caught up with the intangibility and portability of the music itself, as every new generation of the iPod and iTunes offers more prominent ways to look at cover graphics and digital booklet liner notes via computer.
Ultimately, I've found the greatest gift is the power to ignore it all. At the end of the day, all I want to do is push away every image, disregard what some elementary school test told me about how I process information, and bask in pure, unadulterated sound. After all, everything else is just icing on the cake.
If you want Ben Peterson to create custom album art for every CD you ever buy, make him a monetary offer at bpeterson1@dailycardinal.com.
