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Steven Brown and Ulrik Volgsten
I. Manipulation by Music
We can think about two senses in which the notion of manipulation can be applied to music as a social communication device. They form a hierarchy. In the broadest sense, all music can be said to be manipulative to the extent that it influences a person’s emotional state and tendency to act. This is the everyday view of music as a powerful modifier of people’s emotional responses and manner of behaving.
In this very broad view, music can only be looked upon as non-manipulative to the extent that it fails to impact on a person’s emotions or motivations. Be that as it may, all music is produced with the intention of being manipulative (i.e., affective and motivating). The strength of this perspective for sociomusicology is that it highlights certain fundamental conditions for understanding the cognition of music. Its weakness is that it encompasses virtually all music and therefore makes little functional distinction between different categories of use of music.
Contained within this global view is a narrower way of applying the notion of manipulation to music. In crude terms, the idea of manipulation in communication implies that the sender’s intentions are both selfish and concealed. In this regard, manipulation is a type of deceptive communication in which the receiver falsely believes that he will achieve benefits by acting in the interests of the sender. In general, the social rewards of such a use of music are highly asymmetric between sender and receiver. In the sociology of music, a canonical example of this is propaganda music. It is a use of music which is designed to achieve compliance and social control through deception.
This focus on deception allows us to distinguish manipulative from non-manipulative uses of music. If manipulative uses are defined as deceptive (whatever that may entail), non-manipulative uses of music must represent honest forms of communication. In such cases, music is often used to signal something socially positive for both the sender and receiver, and it is done so in an open (though not necessarily conscious) way. It is a cooperative arrangement in which the social rewards of the musical experience – be they at the levels of emotion, motivation, or action – are shared more or less equally between the sender and receiver. Good examples of this consist of the many "folk" musics that are performed and appreciated at the level of small cohesive groups or subcultures.
Our equation of musical manipulation with deceptive communication raises many questions. Let us consider two of the major uses of music in the audiovisual media: 1) music in television commercials, and 2) musical underscore in film and television. In both cases, we can clearly see musical manipulation in the first sense: music as controller of emotions and motivation. But what of manipulation in the second sense of music as a deceptive device? Let us consider that the uses of music in commercials and film differ in several fundamental respects. First, music in commercials is used to sell commodities whereas film music is used to enhance the narrative properties of the film or their associated ideologies. Second, music in commercials very often makes use of well-known music (thus parasitizing upon previous positive evaluations the listener may have for the music), whereas film music usually involves original music. Third, music in commercials involves short sound-bites, whereas music in film very often involves long segments, sometimes extending the full duration of the film; music in commercials is designed to create an instant and instantaneous effect whereas film music is designed to steer the temporality of the film’s narrative as it unfolds. For all these reasons, the uses of music in commercials and film represent fundamentally different applications of music in the audiovisual media.
How do these different cases map onto the distinction between honest and deceptive uses of music outlined above? In the case of television commercials, the sender's intentions are basically selfish: the primary goal is to sell a product. Music is a device for enhancing affinities for the product, and the use of well-known works is a clear attempt to capitalize on previous positive associations to the music. During this process, the receiver is made to believe that the product is something that can benefit him or her even though the major beneficiary of the commercial is the group of people profiting financially from the sale of the product.
In the case of film music, economic profit is much less of a factor since the principal consumer activity is completed by the time the film begins. Film music, then, provides a broader spectrum of uses that span the range from honest to manipulative. Relatively "honest" uses of music include music’s capacity to create an atmosphere, recall a time period or geographical location, heighten emotions during a scene, temporally link disparate events, motivically tag particular characters, and so on. Where film music can be viewed as deceptive, however, is in its supportive role in conveying certain ideological perspectives about the subject matter of the film. Film-makers are in a very public position to promote social ideologies that extend well beyond the film, and music is an important accomplice to this act. These messages sometimes benefit certain groups at the expense of others. Again, in thinking about film music, we must consider a broader spectrum of uses than in the case of television commercials, one that varies with the film itself and the uses of music therein.
A third example is that of ambient music. This example provides something of the interface between music in commercials and music in film. Like music in television commercials, ambient music has a clear underlying economic motivation, and works by creating associations between music and some commodity, the commodity being the consumer goods for sale in a given establishment. It makes exclusive use of well-known music for this purpose. However, like cinema music, ambient music is about creating an emotive atmosphere that supports a certain kind of narrative, the narrative (in this case) being your own personal interactions in that environment. Music is manipulative in that it serves as an important contextual variable influencing how people feel and behave in a given environment. It biases behavior in certain directions ("act drunken and wild here" "act calm and refined here" "act sensual and sexy here"). There is no sign on the door saying "act drunken and wild here"; there is only music telling us this. So here again we see the two meanings of musical manipulation: on the one hand, music is socially manipulative simply by virtue of the fact that it is affective and motivational, but on the other, it is deceptive to the extent that it is used to promote economic benefit for certain parties.
To develop a deeper understanding of all these examples, we need a sociomusicological analysis rooted in the dynamics of communication: who sends what message to whom? what are the sender’s intentions? to what extent do the receiver’s responses conform with the sender’s intentions? what are the conditions influencing the receiver's interpretation? what kinds of costs and benefits are involved in this type of communication? Among the problems in applying the standard "sender-message-receiver" model to musical communication are concerns about the extent to which it is possible to identify either a single coherent sender or a fixed message.
II. Manipulation of Music
The manipulative uses of music can be contrasted with the manipulative control of music. Music is socially controlled at many levels. We mention three areas in this regard: the music industry’s control over the production of recorded music, the re-use of well-known music in new contexts, and the governmental suppression of musical expression. While the previous discussion of manipulation in music focused on selfishness and deception, the current discussion includes yet a third sense in which the term manipulation can be used in sociomusicology: manipulation as control.
What are we to make of the fact that 85% of all the CD’s in the world are produced by five mega-corporations? Clearly that is an unprecedented level of artistic control of music (at least in the CD-dominated culture of the West) that applies to many genres of music. The music industry of the last four decades has flourished by creating a system of larger-than-life superstars generating profits from big-selling recordings. This clearly occurs at the expense of diversity and free choice. To the extent that recordings are economic commodities, stars become the puppets of the big corporations which maximize their investments by having one CD sell big rather than producing a large assortment of less profitable recordings. Manipulation of music in this case clearly involves control: control over the means of production, a type of control that places severe limitations on the styles of music that are accessible to people.
We have already made mention of the re-use of music in our discussion of music in television commercials. This point applies not only to the re-use of complete works but to a diverse assortment of sampling and rearrangement techniques. This is one of the major moral issues in the sociology of music not least because this kind of re-use occurs on a rampant scale and because well-known music occupies an important place in any society’s cultural heritage. In the same way that people don’t want their Bibles used as paper weights they don’t want their most beloved pieces of music used as associative symbols for commodities to which they assign no positive value or performed in a manner that betrays the original feel of the music. However, should audiences have "moral" rights to the music of their culture? This question raises the complementary and controversial issue of intellectual property rights. Rights of authorship are designed to protect the interests of composers and performers, but to what extent can we talk about "original" versions of musical works or the composers of such versions? Despite the seeming perversity of hearing a Tchaikovsky symphony played during an automobile commercial, there are strong historical and cross-cultural precedents for the re-use and re-fashioning of melodies in new contexts. This is especially true in the case of ritual practices in which words take precedence over music. Thus, the notion of the musical work as an object, one which is vulnerable to theft, turns out to be historically and culturally contingent.
As a final example of the manipulation of music, let us consider the concentration camp Theresienstadt. Here was the ultimate act of deception, an almost cinematic backdrop that permitted the Nazis to convince a visiting delegation from the Red Cross that there were no extermination camps. We know in retrospect that this ploy worked, and that music was a major player in this deception. Manipulation of music in this camp occurred such that a group of predominantly Jewish composers and musicians was encouraged to express themselves musically in ways that were completely prohibited in the "real world" of Third-Reich-dominated Europe. However, this latter prohibition of the real world was a type of honest, socially-negative control of music (the Nazis never hid their disdain for the music they labelled as "degenerate") whereas the Nazi incentive to compose and perform music in Theresienstadt was a deceptive tactic to use the composers and musicians as pawns to fool the Red Cross inspection team. The device worked; the Red Cross inspectors left satisfied and the composers and musicians died in gas chambers shortly thereafter.
Theresienstadt allows us to see a tie-in between our discussions of the use and control of music. Regarding use, the music composed in the camp served as an important symbol of hope and cohesion for the prisoners of the camp, and yet this same music was used as a manipulative device by the Nazis to dupe the international community into believing that the world was a different place than it actually was. At the level of control, the Nazis imposed a global ban on the "degenerate music" of the Jews, Blacks and atonalists in the countries ruled by the Third Reich, and yet permitted and even encouraged performance of such outlawed music in the make-believe world of Theresienstadt.
III. Conclusions
We have mentioned two ways of thinking about the notion of manipulation in sociomusicology, one which views all musical expressions as manipulative (by virtue of their emotion- and behavior-controlling effects) and the other which sees only a subset of these expressions as manipulative. The latter focuses on deceptive communication, although it provides no clear criterion for determining what is deceptive and what is not with regard to the uses and control of music.
At the experiential level, we hear music all around us, everywhere we go. The magnitude of this exposure only increases with time. The roller coaster rides at Disneyland now come complete with John-Williams-style orchestral scores supplying crescendos at just the right moments. People walk away from these rides feeling exhilarated. What was in the olden days merely a visual-kinetic experience has, in our time, become an audio-visual-kinetic experience in which a musical composer has carefully designed a correspondence-map between the contours of visual space and those of the melodic line. The German comparative musicologist, Erich von Hornbostel, called this type of correspondence between music and space "melodic dance" one hundred years ago. Nowadays we seem to go through life experiencing a type of melodic dance wherever we go. The real question, from the standpoint of this conference, is whether we dance freely or whether, like wooden puppets, we come with strings attached.
Steven Brown is a biomusicologist working in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Ulrik Volgsten is completing his doctoral studies in musicology at Stockholm University. This paper slightly adapts their opening address at the Music and Manipulation conference..
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