Technological advances not only change the way we go about our lives, but also affect our thinking process as well. A small example of this is found in the smartphone, an item that a good portion of the world’s population owns and uses on a daily basis. Going back a mere 25 years, I remember carrying around a daily planner filled with phone numbers, a pager, business cards and various scraps of paper with information that had yet to be copied into the annals of my daily planner.
Finally, the smartphone arrived. I was finally freed from the bonds of carrying around a bulky book (held together with rubber bands) that contained all the numbers and scheduling information I required to manage my busy work and social life. It was liberating to condense all my heavy and bulky information into my phone, but funny as it seems, that inconvenient planner was only a backup, because most of the information I required was stored in my own memory bank. Because the planner was bulky and often inexpedient, phone numbers, locations and even future appointments were stored in my head for quicker retrieval. Once I transferred all that information to my smartphone, the biological data bank in my head emptied and my memory was free to remember bigger and better things.
Unfortunately, there weren’t any bigger and better things to remember other than the geography and directions to of all the places I was going or to where I had been, but this information also drained from my internal memory bank as Global Positioning Services (GPS) became a perfected tool. Back in the day my geographical memory served me well as we planned our own routes for direction and timing. Things usually went according to plan, but despite our well-made strategies, there were often delays and detours that would unexpectedly arise to create havoc and send us back to our crinkled maps for rerouting. Thankfully, GPS has changed all that, and while we can now easily get to even the most out-of-the-way gigs with a foreknowledge of any obstacles or detours, my geographical overview has diminished to the point where I cannot even navigate my way out of a place that I have gone without the help of my phone.
Getting into Balance
It’s my perspective that everything balances. This is an outlook culled from reading philosophical and religious literature as well as observations of my personal life. Buddhist literature teaches the Middle Way, which, in short, is a path to enlightenment by avoiding the extremes of self-gratification and self-denial. Aristotle’s Golden Mean, although a philosophy rather than a religion, is also about walking the path between excess and deficiency. Karma, while often perceived as retribution or reward for actions committed, is — in a truer sense — a balancing of the universe large and small. Our universe is one of duality, and the challenge is to navigate between the two points in a benign manner. Planets are in a delicate balance to each other, and if that balance is disrupted, life, as we know it, would change.
Imagine a scenario where the sun moved either a little bit closer or just a bit further away from earth, and how that lack of balance might alter our world.
Gain Structure as a Life Lesson
As an engineer/musician, I’ve spent my whole life trying to maintain a balance between instruments, levels and frequencies as well as a personal life that has often veered off the middle path on to one side of an extreme or the other. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), I do not think I am qualified to tell anyone how to balance their personal life, so instead I opted to explain gain structure to some of my younger audio colleagues. I was telling them that before one even gets to the mix, one has to balance the main speaker system’s high, high-mid, low-mid and low fields to make for a speaker system with a flat response. Of course, that process has changed, and most speaker systems now come with internally balanced fields, which alleviates the need for an external crossover with which an engineer might manipulate the system.
The ability to be able to load a saved file from a flash drive is a great time-saver for engineers traveling without their own system. The trick is to have a file for each console one might encounter, but being able to bring up a mix template has eliminated the old school way of marking a board, patching various effects and dynamics and then recording the settings so they can be recalled after the next engineer programs their show. Just as the smartphone freed us from our daily planners, the flash drive has liberated us from charting paper, Polaroid cameras and mini tape machines with which we needed to ensure a return to our mix.
It’s not like we don’t have things committed to memory, but as more and more RAM gets packed into smaller spaces, the balance of memory changes. I used to have all my passwords committed to memory, but they are now saved on my computer and phone. I actually used to have more knowledge locked into my human memory bank, but now I have the Internet, which frees up my memory for more important things such as thinking great philosophical thoughts regarding balance, and balance as a concept.
Before file storage was available, I had committed to memory a template of a basic mix and a concept of how I wanted to shape sound that could be used in any setting and on any system. This concept of balance has carried over into my personal life as well as my professional life, and I try to pass this profound knowledge on to my younger compatriots. I appreciate that they listen politely, but I can sense that they are as bemused by my archaic grasp of current reality, as I was when my grandfather lectured me about the virtues of a good book compared to the vices of the moving picture.
It’s a fine line we walk, but while technologies may alter the way we perceive the world around us, it’s important to avoid focusing on the minutiae and to keep in mind a broader concept with which to ensure equilibrium and balance.
