Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don’t know, I think it’s a good question, and it’s puzzling. The dynamic compression — we understand this is competition to be heard in public spaces, to be heard in the jukebox, to be heard on radio, to be heard on streaming. Although, I understand that Spotify and other streaming services now, basically, equalize all the sound of everything, so there’s now no longer any competitive gain from dynamic compression and trying to make everything super, super loud. Maybe Spotify, for all its faults, will fight against this, but it’s not what I would expect. What I would expect is more improvisation because the technology allows many more experiments at much lower cost. And you can pick what you like out of it. Talking to Brian Eno, as I did for the book — the great producer, ambient composer, worked with Bowie and many other people — he was emphasizing how much easier it has become to experiment. You just record digitally and see what happens, and if it doesn’t work out, you do it again. But doesn’t that elevate the relative influence of the Taylor Swifts? Because we’re drowning in experiments. There are so many, we’re confused. We watch Disney movies, and we listen to Taylor Swift, and messiness is diminished by competition. Or it’s possible that we don’t. There was an incredibly messy process, but we don’t perceive it as messy because the outputs can be edited until it absolutely is perfect, even if what was going on in the studio was just unbelievably chaotic. Hollywood comedies have lots more improvisation than they used to. But it’s not clear that they’re perceived as being more improvised. That’s because you could just do a take, do another take, do another take — just keep busking, keep making stuff up, see what’s funny. It’s easy to edit it all together. Whereas in the days of expensive film stock, you couldn’t afford that process. You couldn’t afford all the film. You couldn’t afford all the editing. So you would try and be as funny as you could on paper, and the actors would read the script. But do we perceive Hollywood comedy as being more improvised? I’m not sure that we do because we see —…

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