LAST CALL
JOhN BOhLINgER
JOhN BOhLINgER
Stealing Our Music Bit by Bit
By virtue of the fact that you’re reading this,
you fall into a very specific demographic: music
geek. Have you ever wondered why music
means so much to us? Why do we spend countless hours listening to music, playing music,
buying gear—essentially chasing the dragon
of a music addiction? Sure, you’ve read those
moronic interviews with rockers who claim, “I
started playing guitar to get girls,” but these
flippant clichés ring false; she doth protest too
much. We play guitar because of the way music
makes us feel. We heard The Beatles or Zep
or Green Day and wanted to get closer to that
feeling, so we picked up the guitar. You can
blame our addiction on our limbic system.
maintains that there is a threshold of sound qual-
ity that stimulates our limbic system: poor-quality
sound will be heard but will not give us the
emotional response that high-quality sound will.
Oxford maintains that the music business has
stalled since the heyday of the LP because MP3s
do not have the content to stimulate our limbic
system. Because an MP3 contains less than 90
percent of the information, our bodies notice
even if our ears do not. We hear and even enjoy
the lyrics and the melody, but we do not get the
because music videos—depleted of the
emotional content of music—could not hook
their audiences for long periods of time. It’s
no surprise that MTV rejoined the music busi-
ness by purchasing Harmonix, the creator of
Guitar Hero, for $175 million in 2006.
Where does this leave us? Oxford has designed
incredible speakers that make you feel like
you’re in the room with the music as it’s being
made, but they are still limited by a poor
The limbic system, one of the oldest parts of
our brain, manages our “fight or flight” chemi-
cals. Sound is one of the strongest triggers for
the limbic system, moreso than sight. When
our primitive ancestors sat in their caves and
heard a twig break, their limbic system kicked
in, asking “threat or no threat?” assessing
the world to insure survival. Through natural
selection, those with a more highly developed
limbic system lived to breed and pass along
those genes to us, their guitar-playing great,
great, great, great grandchildren.
Because an MP3 contains less than 90
percent of the information, our bodies
notice even if our ears do not. We hear and
even enjoy the lyrics and the melody, but
we do not get the high.
In addition to “fight or flight,” the limbic system
supports a variety of functions, including emotion, by influencing the endocrine and autonomic nervous systems, which interconnect with
the brain’s pleasure center (think sex and recreational drugs). In short, sound can slip through
the back door of our brains through the limbic
system and stimulate us in a way that sex or
drugs would, which explains why sex, drugs and
rock ‘n’ roll are so often linked together. When
we listen to music, we experience something
that affects us on a profound chemical level,
straight into our limbic system.
high. Although music is more available than ever,
people don’t listen to it like they used to, sitting
around the old hi-fi for hours, because our bodies are not reacting to this emotionally depleted
content. Modern technology gives us an imitation of music while stealing the emotional subtext of music bit by megabit.
One could argue that part of the phenomenal
success of games like Rock Band and Guitar
Hero may stem from the fact that players
are listening to music at 24 bits rather than
16 bits for CDs, or a tiny fraction of that for
MP3s. (an average of 33 megabytes compared to an MP3’s 0.94 megabytes). Guitar
Hero I and II have grossed $360 million since
the first game came out in 2005, much more
than any album released in the same period.
Ask Metallica. The word is they much prefer
the sound of their work at 24 bits from a
game compared to 16 from a CD.
source. He’s now working on a device that will
re-imbue lackluster MP3s with the missing data
that will trick our bodies into feeling music
again. Other companies are joining the race
to make music feel right. Interestingly enough,
with all of the technological advances, many
of us are stepping back rather than forward
for our music buzz: LP sales are up and more
people play guitar than ever. Personally, I’m
going to reward myself as soon as I finish this
column (and possibly torture my sweet wife),
with a long, self-indulgent guitar jam all by my
lonesome, chasing the dragon of a music buzz
that first hooked me in my parents’ basement
when I was in eighth grade.
Why does this matter to gear geeks like us?
Neurotransmitters only respond after stimulus
reaches a certain threshold. For example, the
rods in your eyes, which are responsible for
seeing shapes, have a lower threshold than
the cones, which see color. That’s why when
it begins to grow dark you can still make out
shapes but can’t recognize color. A friend of
mine, Craig Oxford of High Emotion Audio,
Look at MTV and VH1. They were built solely
on music, with the added bonus of a visual
stimulus; however, the audience lost the lim-
bic stimulus because of the poor music repro-
duction of television. Today, these formerly
music networks rarely play music videos,
John Bohlinger
John is a Nashville guitar slinger who works primarily in
television, and has recorded and toured with over 30 major
label artists. His songs and playing can be heard in major
motion pictures, major label releases and literally hundreds
of television drops. Visit him at: youtube.com/user/johnbohlinger
or facebook.com/johnbohlinger
