The Ecology of Media

After our in-class presentations of media autobiographies, I noticed how connected we all were by music. Because I was one of the many that chose music as the dominate medium in my life, I was really able to look at its impact on me, and on our past and present cultures as a whole. McLuhan spoke of an oral culture and how it was more balanced than the print based lives we’ve come to know (Norden, 6). I believe that a large part of losing that oral culture is what has made us all so drawn to music; it’s as though we’re compensating for its loss. Because at one time we were all so connected through our phonetic sense, we need something to fill the gap that formed when that culture was lost. Though our print-based society may set dominance on the eye, we balance it through music.

Music has always had diverse uses and roles as a medium. We can look back on a time when we used music as a form of direct communication, an example of this being war drums (War Drums). Now, we use music more as a form of entertainment, but we also use it to tell stories, share our opinions, and to connect with one another. Because music reaches such diverse audiences, it’s often interpreted differently than the artist intended. Many artists make use of metaphors and similes that can be taken literally by the listener. Also, artists tend to write on what they know, and if a listener is ignorant to that situation, it can misconstrued to mean something else. After reading through “Semiotics for Beginners: Encoding/Decoding” relating it to how one might interpret the meaning of one lyric to another, we can begin to see that David Olsen may be right about “what is ‘meant’ is invariably more than what is ‘said’” (qtd. in Chandler). I think that Olsen is trying to explain the relationship between intent and content; the words are content, but intent is the meaning behind those words. We discussed this briefly in class, and I identify this relationship with sarcasm, or the common "it's not what she said, it's HOW she said it". Depending on the context, words take on different meaning, just as lyrics do.   
Defining music’s purpose and function is difficult because it varies so widely from culture to culture, person to person, and verse to verse. There is a reason that songs are written, and listened to. As listeners, what are we trying to get out of that song? Sometimes we get more from it than we were expecting. It may be a realization, a memory, goose bumps, or even a shiver running down our spine. That’s a lot more than entertainment, but was that the purpose? The function of the music? Musicians decide what we hear and listeners define what they interpret.

So the question "is it the artist, or the listener?" is really saying is it the content or the intent? The medium or the message? Where is the defining point? I believe the artist does the best he or she can with their particular message, but if that content carries an entirely different message when perceived by the listener, it becomes out of the artist's hands. 

Works Cited

Chandler, Daniel. “Semiotics for Beginners: Encoding/Decoding.” (1995): 1

Norden, Eric. The Playboy interview: Marshall McLuhan. March 1969. McLuhan, Marshall.  Interview. 20 September 2008.

Media History Project. "Who Used War Drums?" 18 May 2007. 20 September 2008.