[Rumori] the medium is the message

[Steev Hise]

on Tue, 13 May 2003 Tim Maloney told me:

->>silly but classic.  the production's very dated with all that smooth (cool)
->>jazz music.  or is that (hot) jazz music?
->
->Apparently "hot" jazz is mostly improvised (think Bix Biederbecke)
->and "cool" jazz is written on charts (think Be Bop) - or so I'm told.

quite apart from jazz musicology, mcluhan had his own conception
of "hot" and "cool" which he blathered on about continually. it
sort of makes sense sometimes.

'One of the grandfathers of the theory of transformative
technology, McLuhan wanted to find a systematic way of accounting
for regularities in media. His answer was to describe them as
"hot" or "cool" according to the amount of information provided.
Orality is a "cool" or "low definition" medium because it
presents very spare information. It therefore requires a lot of
participation on the part of the listener. Writing, and
particularly print, is "hot" because it presents a lot of
information in high definition. Television is "cool" again
because of the low resolution of its grainy picture (and, Postman
might add, its "Now...This" information structure). Thus for
McLuhan, television is not a passive but a highly involving
medium. It requires high participation on the part of the
audience, who must fill in the gaps in its low resolution
universe...'
		--Doug Brent, Faculty of General Studies, University of Calgary


i'd posit that by McLuhan's definitions, all music is pretty
cool, being rather underdeterminate (low information content)
compared to most other art forms (with the possible exception of
things like dance and abstract painting). some music is of course
relatively hotter than other music. like we might say that Billie
Holliday is hotter than Coltrane just because there's lyrics in
the former, hence more information. And Merzbow would be cooler
than the Stones, who would be cooler than Momus.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything.  maybe
i'll try to bring this around into relevance by positing
something else: Collage music might be considered a rather "hot"
form, at least the kind of collage that plays with the meanings
and symbolisms of its sources, or the kind of collage that is
extremely dense. Refer to John Oswald's comment that "Plexure" is
a lot more music than your standard 20 minutes of listening.
McLuhan might have said that Oswald is in the business of
"heating up" music.

smh

Steev Hise, Nervert
steev at detritus.net	   http://detritus.net/steev
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