Technology and The Muse (or The Art of Exercise) David Knopfler © David Knopfler January 1998 As the alchemy of the chemist gives way to the approach of the new millennium and the aphrodisiacs of the virtual reality designers, ramble through the fuzzy logic of Knopfler-space, as he writes music via the Internet An abridged and fully revised version of this article is published in Acoustic Guitar Magazine (San Anselmo CA) July 1998. That shorter version can be read by clicking here Six thousand years ago, a Chinese book of divination, known as the I ching, or Book of Changes, noted that ‘the ancient kings made music in order to honour merit and offered it with splendour to the Supreme Deity, inviting their ancestors to be present.’ Confucius said of the great sacrifice at which these rites were performed: “He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand”. When I pick up a really beautiful, individually crafted, guitar, everything about it still informs me that this idea is essentially correct. By reverse analogy, anyone who’s heard the tunes emanating from China these last few decades can be left in little doubt that their leaders have utterly lost the plot. Shakespeare with his classic line “if music be the food of love play on”, though unfortunately a cliché now, knew only too well, four hundred years ago, from witnessing it from the stage of his Globe Theatre, the transforming effect of music. As the Millennium approaches and the Twentieth Century says “that’s a wrap”, we might today think by a different analogy: In the age of Gene manipulation, DNA spirals, and computer code, our generation’s thinkers approach these issues somewhat differently. Just as the 18th and 19th Century spoke in terms of ‘the Celestial Clockwork’ and the human brain and body as a sophisticated machine, the tendency now is to analogize in terms of the Computer, where our minds are viewed as being like advanced, individuated microchips, capable of receiving instructional code to modify our responses. The phemerones of love, the testosterone of violence. Tinker with the system folder of the mind and we can excite the urge to possess, reverse the aging process, re-instruct the body of a sixty year old woman to conceive. As the alchemy of the chemist gives way to the aphrodisiacs of the virtual reality designers, notions of cyborg futures threaten to make their sci-fi pedigrees redundant. It’s all open and it’s all possible. I say all this, because in my own modest way I’ve seen the future and it is unquestionably, in the vernacular. “too cool”. This is how that story goes: Someone recently wanted some lyrics for a tune they’d written and generously asked me if I could assist. There was a slight snag. They needed the finished song, complete with lyrics, in two hours and we were separated by a physical distance of nine thousand miles. Now imagine telling those I Ching authors that these days we solve this problem without even leaving our desks and I’d like to think it would slightly blow their minds. The information I needed was a tune, played with passion and conviction, on a hand crafted guitar, by a blues guitarist called Johnny V in Calgary Canada. Well, of course, many of you, replete with email and web addresses will already have guessed what happened next. Johnny sat down at his computer pointed his guitar at the mic’ and strummed the tune into the Hard Disc via a piece of software called Sound Edit (www.macromedia.com) - he then compressed the file and converted it into a text based binary code so it could travel over telephone wires to my computer in England a few seconds later. Remember the Bard’s aforementioned quote? Well this is a sample of what I received: fHApE3hDHDmc@9,rqYMIhDcdYKcRIQ4E0V rb6YLC2h-mD'"J!2i+NlJ!2q3!1AF[LZ%A0UBaa("p[FZk38Ma%f%9f*B+5b[MkH !&ITL&(I+hT!!HL%'`eQf5XBVTVFVj)GB"Pq`Y!HK%XpSH1!a$T2b[ldpcVriccQ &AAR0h&S`Y6mjI&B1c#BZiUcHF!j(j$rlji'T6DjKGmLerfI6(ZcpdhpHp,lb914 r$6PqrZqMTVES2G+X9F*&FXjrRBSc461QV)D&$GGT0r!#ZAq`-DZjd@H2-EBP#'d Doesn’t immediately present as Ambrosia for the spirit does it? However you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, well at least, not unless you can’t read. Believe me, like Johnny said, “this is too cool” - miles and miles of this stuff unravelling, like strands of DNA, into my Hard Drive at speeds that the ancient scribes would find incomprehensible and that, to our generation, makes a Star Trek Warp Drive seem a snap. So I then decode this file using a well known AppleMac utility called StuffIt Expander™ 4.0.2 and open it into my copy of SoundEdit. Joy! A Canadian voice is talking to me through my speaker - “Hi David this is Johnny here. The tune goes something like this: One, two, you know what to do” ... clang etc. So I listen a couple of times - scribble some ideas - refine the ideas - put them into my computer as a text file and manipulate the lines around - cutting and pasting until I’m more or less satisfied that I’ve got something that might move a few hearts and minds. Then I convert it to html and post it up to my website (www.knopfler.com) using a web authoring application called VisualPage 1.0.2 (www.symantec.com). I then send Johnny the message by email that he can collect the lyrics at his leisure anytime he likes. Johnny gets the lyrics from www.knopfler.com and dumps them onto his original audio track. Boom boom - finito. Job done... Well not quite: I then write an article about it and post it to a rather celebrated Guitar magazine via email. The fact that I’m writing this in January 1998 and you won’t read it until July 1998 is a curious bottleneck in the methodology, but I guess you don’t get everything in one package. Bearing in mind that when my father was born, they hadn’t yet invented an aeroplane, it’s still going to be interesting to see what happens next don’t you think? And the next time you are looking in the mirror, thinking you might need to lose a couple of pounds, pick up your guitar, strap it on and jump around a bit. It may sound archaic but someone, somewhere, might just, some day, say you are 'reprogramming your body to be a lean sex machine'. Until we figure a way to directly input the code to the system folder we call the brain, to instruct it that we’re getting younger and thinner, brighter and smarter, we will have to rely on the tried and tested methods of utilizing the six senses. Call it the art of exercise, oh and when next you are romancing that listener (reprogramming their code to fall in love) by strumming a tune or three, you might want to also invite the ancestors to be present. Play on.