Last night I played my bongos for a rhythm and timing workshop with the salsa crowd. We gave a little spiel on the conga, the bongo, the clave and how they interact in the music and with the dance. I was relieved that I wasn’t rubbish, as I’d had a quick run through the previous night and found myself to be thoroughly dyspraxic.

It sounded absolutely great! We had no amplification, just bits of wood, metal, plastic and hide, and our hands. When the three parts were playing together, it sounded like the real thing! (because it was!)

This brings me to a bee I have in my bonnet about what music has lost since the invention of recording and amplification.

Though what we were playing was quite complex and involved, if people wanted to understand what an individual player was playing, they could stand closer to that player and hear that instrument louder. You also directly understood that a louder sound comes from hitting something harder, and even as an audience member, on some level you are physically connected to the music, part of your mind knows what it must be like to be making that sound, and it’s exciting.

When music is amplified, these two elements are lost. The sound coming from the speakers messes up the sense of location so you cannot focus on individual players, at least not without training yourself much more consciously; and the association between volume and physical exertion is lost. When you can have a human voice speaking over a big band, the sheer enveloping magnitude of a horn section is belittled.

In the nineties there was a fashion for ‘unplugged’ sessions, a backlash against the falsity of acts miming on Top of the Pops. But the technical issues of getting the unplugged act transmitted through the medium of TV meant that really the acts were still DI‘d and not even the studio audience got a real “acoustic” experience.

I’ve had a few discussions about this with John since our Scarborough gig where even a hardened electronic musician like John agreed that a lot of the work was inaccessible and hard to relate to. The question of whether Art (note capital A) should be hard to access is for a separate post. But by contrast to an evening of groundbreaking sound experimentation with laptops and circuit -bending, one of the musical memories that will stay with me the longest is that of hearing a gamelan in a field at Glastonbury. The big gong seemed to make the hillside ripple, and there were no loudspeakers in sight.

The big problem for this cause is the economics. If you are playing genuinely acoustic music there is a limit to the number of people who can stand close enough to hear it, and as soon as you record it or amplify it, you kill it.

This is why I don’t have much sympathy for the music industry’s bleatings over MP3s killing Music. MP3s are only threatening the Industry part of the Music Industry, the Music part was squeezed out years ago.