The Future Of Music

The future. It’s here already. In fact the beginning of this blog is the past. During those three short sentences, a beam of sunshine from our very own sun has sped nearly a million, million kilometres across the void. Christ knows where it’s got to now. But the real headbender is where will it end up? What atoms will it next touch? Will it cast its dim gleam on the rocky surface of some distant moon, or will it land square in the pupil – or whatever passes for pupils out there – of some extra-terrestrial cosmos-watching scamp? Even more pertinently, will we ever find out what that extra-terrestrial scamp looks like? And will we ever get to shake him warmly by the tentacle?

Well, this week Professor Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute (the Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) has been discussing how we should change tack in our search for alien life forms, seeing as 40 years of blasting ‘The Archers’ into deep space has turned up precisely sod all.
“What I’m trying to say,” Shostak says in the audio clip here, “is that our conception of what ET might be like is important to think about, because it could affect our search.”
Shostak goes on to explain that the extra terrestrials may not actually be humanoid: they might be robots.
“I think the conceit that’s leading us astray is the assumption that they will be biological. That they’re on a planet that has a thick atmosphere and an ocean, similar to the earth, so we aim our antennas and our search for signals at those star systems that we think might be cousins of our own. I think that’s wrong. The reason I think it’s wrong is that if we look at the timescales for development of technology; at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and we have a chance of finding you. But within a few hundred years of inventing radio – at least if we’re any example – you invent thinking machines. We’re probably going to do that in this century. So you’ve invented your successors, and only for a few hundred years are you a biological intelligence.”

I think that this idea that we are only temporarily “biological” is fascinating. Particularly to my impressionable brain, which absorbed Terminator 3 on TV the other night. Thus, the idea that humans will be superceded by a race of shiny warmongering androids seems fairly plausible. But, if the future really is a Skynet-ruled dystopia, what will the red-eyed destructobots of tomorrowyear be listening to? Will they have iPods? Will they like Jean Michel Jarre? Perhaps he will be their god. More importantly, us tissue-based life-forms who refuse to die, living under the piles of human skulls and driving around in pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted on the back, what will we be listening to? We’re sure to be humming something or other. Music has been a part of human culture for time immemorial. And although it’s sad to have three billion people wiped off the face of the planet in a nuclear shitstorm, look on the bright side, it’s a great opportunity to have a purge of the International iTunes. Sure, your nearest and dearest have been whisked into fine powder by the single worst catastrophe in the history of mankind, but at least you’ll never hear Barry Manilow sing ‘Mandy’ again. Not a bad trade, really. Rejoice. Might nip back to the bunker and treat myself to another tin of Condensed Milk.

The business of predicting the future of music is – obviously, in lieu of a time machine – just a bunch of guess-work. Some things will definitely still be playing, like Longplayer, a musical project of The Pogues’ Jem Finer that is designed to play for a thousand years, and the last Magic Numbers album, which seems to go on for twice as long. Whatever noises the tin-foil suited people of tomorrow decide to make, I hope it sounds half as good as this: