Theme: Rhytms of work
By: Niels Bonde Jensen
04.05. 2023
Crossoverfrequencies.com
In collaboration with:
DJ Spincycle, Second To the Left, WORT 89.9 FM, Odense Musikbibliotek & Resonator.
Imagine a hunter sneaking through the grass on the African savanna thousands of years before our time. Or a worker on the assembly line at a Ford factory in the early 1900s. Or imagine a nurse thrown into an understaffed ward in a modern super hospital.
What sounds characterize these widely different forms of human labor throughout history? How would one translate it into music? "Through rhythmic repetitions," is the obvious answer. Sound fragments from bodies and materials in motion, synthesized and finding a common pulse. A patchwork of everyday sounds, gathered and woven in and out of each other.
This is the basis of music tied to all kinds of work - music that, like work itself, has followed humans from the first hunts to today's open office landscapes.
In the third episode of the podcast Crossover Frequencies, Ankur Malhotra AKA DJ SpinCycle delves deep into work music and highlights examples from all over the world of this musical processing of the rhythmic repetitions of the working human body. He explains his own fascination with the sonic universe of work:
"I'm a mechanical engineer, and I worked at one point in an aircraft engine factory in India, surrounded by about 900 machines - each with its own rhythm. I think that's where I also found my love for techno. And when you think about percussion and rhythm, I think the earliest sounds have been the cutting of a tree or even the making of fire, where two stones hit each other and create a rhythm. So I think it's something deeply embedded in humans meeting with natural world."
He goes on to talk about the musical detective work that the podcast has thrown him into:
"There are some very surprising discoveries, because when you dig into the nature of the sounds, you end up at some very specific sources. Take harvest music: maybe you've heard of harvest songs in general, but harvesting mushrooms, for example, who would have thought there would be a song about harvesting mushrooms, but yes, there is."
But what about today's disconnected, digitized work? If the rhythmic pulse that is the basis of work music comes from active bodies and the kinetic processing of materials, what does inactive work sound like? How is music created over documents that are circulated in a ministry? Or investments from online bank accounts flowing in time with the fluctuations of stock prices? Or what about the sound from the creation of this article? Will the future of work music be composed solely of keyboard clicks and notification dings? Malhotra gives his answer:
"Work forms are always transforming themselves, so music naturally evolves as well. Kraftwerk could be an interesting example, where robots make music. Even machine music is always music made by humans. So I don't think humans will be replaced by AI or anything like that. But I think, and that's also what makes this collection fascinating, that parts of the nature of the work itself disappear. So there's, for example, a song about cabin building, and it's not because people are particularly busy building cabins these days," he explains and continues:
"Such things are interesting to think about, how the nature of work will change, and how the nature of this music may be less and less concerned with people walking around performing their daily activities."
Work music is thus moving towards new forms, which, like work itself, is largely adapted to technological development and the fusion of everyday physical life and digital life. What rhythmic pulse, what pumping beat, what musical expression will this produce in the future? Only time will tell.
