Dry Creek Chronicles

In this third installment, I pass on from pitch correction but stick with the subject of tradeoffs in performing and recording music, pointing out that whether or not a compromise is justified depends very much on circumstances and very much on the ultimate goal—which may not be what you think it is.

Does music ever come in a relatively pure form? I think it does, to the degree that it is made for no other reason than to bring pleasure to someone, either the singer or the listener. I’ll admit that this definition aligns with my own preferences, but I recognize that the value I find in such purity is just a preference—I’ve learned to appreciate performances that are raw and unadorned, execution that is imperfect but heartfelt, words that convey meaning simply and directly.

But I won’t deny that equal beauty can be found on the other end of the spectrum, in careful composition and perfect execution and subtle meanings. And I think that purity as I define it can be achieved there as well. But it’s harder, because the added complexities require the musician to resist myriad additional temptations to make music for impure reasons. It can be done. But as complexity increases, so must an awareness of the new pitfalls that have been introduced.

Consider the example of harmony singing. It is a hallmark of bluegrass jamming; however informal and whatever the collective skill level, singers will usually give it a go. Some folks, Chris among them, are naturally gifted at working out the tenor or baritone part on the fly, as they sing a song for the first time. Many of the rest of us will take the trouble to learn harmony parts for popular songs so that we can contribute when they come around. The result can be ragged, but the pleasures are many—not just from the musical sound, which can be pleasing in its own way, but from the joy of tackling a challenging task, of singing with your friends, of helping others learn something new, and on and on.

There are ways to eliminate various sorts of raggedness, but each one comes at a price. Mismatched phrasing among the singers is a common source of raggedness. Chris is quite adept at matching his phrasing closely to that of the lead singer just by watching and listening and coming in just the tiniest bit late with his own vocal; the result is all benefit and no drawback, as it simply improves the overall sound.

The more common way to fix the problem is for the singers to practice together until they’ve settled on a common phrasing and memorized it. This is not such a bad thing, but it introduces an artificial note. Practice? Settle on? Memorize? These are performance techniques. It is true that jam sessions rise to the skill levels of those who are gathered, and when highly skilled performers gather to jam the result can be equal to a polished performance. But something can be lost as a result, the informality and openness and welcoming atmosphere of a ragged jam. You may like one better than the other, or you may be able to appreciate both for their own strengths.

Polished execution in a jam session can also have a distancing, even alienating effect. Chris and I sing the songs we know in a polished manner, and even when working with unfamiliar material our phrasing and harmonies are much tighter than normal, simply because we  have spent so much time working with each other. Which means that in an informal group we have to be very sensitive to the impression we are making. Our own singing and playing can inspire others to unusual levels of excellence. Or it can put people off by seeming showy, or it can simply turn them from participants to listeners, preferring to hear our playing instead of their own.

We are fortunate enough to get plenty of air time outside of jamming situations, so we use our polish sparingly and carefully, only when it makes a positive contribution. Not everyone is as sensitive to this as we are, or as committed to controlling our individual impulses for the sake of group success. Often a skilled player will use the alienating potential of polished playing as a bullying tactic, to dominate a jam or even to force less skilled players out. The resulting sound may have improved in a narrow sense, but at the price of community.

My intent is not to condemn polished playing, but just to illustrate some of the costs it incurs. And for some folks the cost may be well worth it. The invention of bluegrass by Bill Monroe is an excellent example of such a tradeoff. Monroe took a music that was largely intended to accompany dancing—and as such didn’t need to provide more than a steady beat, with further polish being appreciated or ignored by the dancers as they saw fit—and by speeding it up and changing its structure to feature solos by the various instrumentalists and striking vocal harmonies, he made it into a performance art, something for an audience to appreciate rather than participate in. The result is excellent, something that has enriched my own life greatly. But it is not better than ragged jam sessions or unpolished dance accompaniments, just different, and different in ways that sacrifice some of the joys that were there in the earlier forms.

Chris and I gravitate towards the roughness and lack of polish of Appalachian mountain music. We do as much as we can to preserve it in our own performance. But it is a calculated thing—we practice very hard to get a properly unpolished sound. And it’s probably not accurate to call the sound unpolished; rather, it very deliberately recreates a sound that was originally produced by a people who were not deliberate at all in their music, but simple and direct and unadorned.

And it tries to do so in a way that is considerate to the audience, providing a warm and gentle introduction to a kind of music that can be forbidding when approached directly. In the end, we are engaged in popularizing mountain music, and we cannot accomplish that unless we can get the uninitiated to listen to us. And they won’t listen to us unless we take their own very valid concerns and preferences into account.

In the end, our sound is very carefully crafted, employing many of the tools that are used to produce modern industrial music but aiming for a quite different product. We are confronted with the same choices that confront any recording musician; in some cases we choose very differently than is usual, and in others we choose no differently at all.

For example, the CDs that Chris and I have made are very underproduced—we record our performance live, and if we’re not happy with it we record the whole thing again. An extremist might say that even this is too calculated, that we are conveying a level of perfection on the record (by picking the least error-prone of a number of takes) that we are unable to provide in real life. Beyond that, when in the studio we use individual microphones for each vocal and each instrument, and afterwards we will adjust the balance and equalization to get something that sounds good to us, even if it isn’t exactly how we sounded as we recorded.

Worse, on our first CD, we had a good take of one song where I flubbed one word on the chorus; rather than do another take, we let the engineer copy a section from another chorus where I sang the word properly and paste it over the offending word. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with reasons that I did not think that this was cheating.

Something we have not tried out yet is multitracking, where each instrument and voice is recorded onto a separate track so that the individual tracks can be added, left out, or manipulated at will. Part of the reason is that we aren’t skilled enough yet to make this work, since it does require specific skills (e.g. ability to play along to a metronome track) that are otherwise useless to us.

In principle, I have nothing against multitracking—since just about everything recorded after 1965 was done that way, many of our favorite artists use that technique. And we are thinking about using it in the future in a minimalist way, recording the vocals separately from the instruments, because we have noticed that on a capella tracks our singing is better—presumably because we don’t have to split our concentration between our singing and our playing. So we’ll try it, and if the result is noticeably better we will move to that, otherwise we will stick with recording everything live.

Many of our favorites artists never used multitracking, since they recorded before it was possible. And the lack of multi-tracking as an option required a band to be sharp enough to do a record-quality performance in one take, often around one microphone, a level of proficiency that carried over into live performance. It is astonishing to watch the old Flatt & Scruggs tv shows, where the band grinds out stellar versions of their songs one after another without breaking a sweat. I’m not putting that forward as an ultimate standard of professionalism, but it is something you can enjoy for its own sake—and something you don’t see much anymore.

Likewise, the use of pitch correction is nothing I object to for its own sake, any more than I object to putting frets on an instrument for the same reason. My only concerns are practical ones: what do you gain? what do you lose? is the tradeoff worth it? In the case of frets, with a guitar and mandolin they seems to be a net win, while frets make banjos different but not better, and a fretted fiddle would lose much of what makes a fiddle distinctive.

In the case of pitch correction, the advantages are obvious but perhaps overvalued, while the losses are subtle but perhaps more important, especially as they accumulate. A sour note is called sour for a reason, and having it enshrined on an otherwise good recording for the listener to encounter again and again is not a good thing. Whether that note should be fixed with a particular piece of technical wizardry … well, it depends. Is it a particularly important part of the song? Do you have the time/money/energy to do it over? Is the singer likely to ever get it right? Will fixing it with technology make the overall result less pleasing in some intangible way? Can we live with it if we leave it alone?

Although I can’t always keep my voice as steady as I would like, I can usually sing on pitch to my own satisfaction. But there was one spot on the studio CD we just recorded where my voice went noticeably sharp at the end of a phrase. It bugged me, but not Chris or Kevin. In the end, we decided to leave it alone, and it doesn’t bother me as much as it first did. And just about anyone who buys a copy will never notice it, or care much if they do. Fixing it would have been solely for my sake, which is not nothing but is nowhere near the most important thing. All that said, if Kevin had been able to adjust it quickly using pitch correction, I probably would have had him do it; sparing other folks potential irritation, however small, is worth something.

I could go further and use pitch correction to give my voice the steadiness I wish it had. But for a number of reasons I prefer to leave it alone. For better or worse, that is what I sound like, and I want our CDs to honestly reflect that sound, shortcomings and all. Further, I’m not always the best judge of what people like and don’t like about my singing; my unsteadiness may be more appealing to others than it is to me, for any number of reasons—it lends character, or humanizes me, or adds expressiveness, or just has a pleasing sound. And finally, I take the fact that my singing doesn’t yet satisfy me as a challenge to be met; it keeps me thinking about the quality of my performance and how people respond to it, and trying different ways to improve the situation.

I also want to avoid pitch correction because I think it presents certain subtle dangers to the kind of music I perform. Chris and I don’t listen to modern bluegrass much. Occasionally when we are in southwest Virginia we will tune in the NPR station out of Johnson City, which plays modern bluegrass most of the day, but after awhile we will shut it off because it all sounds the same to us. I used to think that it was due to the narrowing of styles that commercial music inevitably undergoes, where everyone tries to sound like what they’re hearing on the radio—in order to get on the radio.

But after studying up on pitch correction, I’m beginning to think that it is in fact the real culprit. I think modern bluegrass all sounds alike to us because the harmony vocals have been tuned, whether through technology or long hours of practice, until the pitches are razor sharp—and sound just like everyone else’s razor-sharp harmonies. Every song has professional, polished, striking harmonies—and as a result they become indistinguishable. Even when pitch correction is not being employed, the singers have learned to aim for a certain sound that became available to most everyone because of pitch correction.

Chris and I often focus on singing harmonies so that our voices blend, and I don’t think that the adjustments we make are simply a matter of getting the pitch exactly right. Those who trust in pitch correction to polish their harmonies are avoiding the hard work of learning to blend, and thereby missing out on many non-pitch-related possibilities for improving the overall sound of a harmony.

Vocal blend not only used to be an important part of bluegrass music, it used to be distinctive—Bill Monroe’s harmonies were different from those of Flatt & Scruggs, which were different from the Stanley Brothers, which were different from the Osborne Brothers, which were different from the Sunny Mountain Boys, and on and on. Now there seems to be one dominant style of blend, if it can be called that; some may be better at it than others, but in general if you don’t like it there is no place to turn for something different, like in the old days.

I’ve dwelled on decisions we’ve had to made while recording—just a few of them, really—in order to illustrate how rapidly issues multiply once you move even a small distance away from the purist extreme. There is something special about folk music in an extremely pure form, heard on a front porch as an unpolished performer plays or sings a song for you, one that is experienced in the moment and then gone forever. But there is also something to be said for loosening the very strict limits that such purity imposes. At a public performance many more people can share something close to your front porch experience. A recording of a live performance loses more, but can be shared much more widely. Efforts to smooth rough edges and eliminate the less important idiosyncrasies can broaden the superficial appeal of the music, catching the attention of the uninitiated, some of whom  may go on to a deeper exploration of it.

Wisdom does not choose a particular approach and champion it over the alternatives. Instead, wisdom works to understand the pros and cons of each individual choice. It looks to understand how particular choices interact to produce results, sometimes unexpected ones. It considers how wishful thinking can lead us to make poor choices, hoping that things will somehow turn out for the best. It distinguishes between practical matters and pragmatism. It recognizes that when no perfect path is available and knowledge is incomplete, it is often helpful to reserve judgment on what appear to be poor choices that others have made. Most important, it does not refuse to participate in projects that are less than ideal, but applies itself to bring whatever improvements it can to whatever circumstances present themselves.

In the next installment I plan to move on from music to another creative activity that presents some of the same basic difficulties, namely writing. I hope that by looking at another activity through the same lens, I can clear away some of the surface clutter and get a clearer look at the basic issues that are troubling me.

I’m absolutely uninterested in sports, and am not as interested as I probably should be in early North American Indians, but I sure am glad I glanced at this article on the subject, from of all places the December 1986 issue of Sports Illustrated. The more sports-oriented will want to read the whole thing, but it was the first few paragraphs that caught my attention:

There may never have been and may never again be a culture in which sports so obsessed individuals and communities, produced so many sports nuts, both participants and spectators, as that of the American Indian, a fact that, among others, scandalized early white explorers.

When the Baptist minister David Jones arrived in the Shawnee lands in 1772, he was ill and weak from hunger. He admitted grudgingly that he ate well among the Indians, but he was otherwise generally outraged by the Shawnee culture. Among other signs of their savagery he noted that they had no jails, no proper laws nor government. But what seemed to aggravate the Reverend Jones most was the uncivilized frivolity of these people. "It appears as if some kind of drollery was their chief study," he wrote indignantly. "The cares of this life, which are such an enemy to us, seem not to have yet entered their mind." These merry people were forever singing, dancing and playing games.

Time and again early white observers would make the same essential point: It was the infernal, incessant playfulness of these people that made them so weird. Whites looked at North America as a howling wilderness that had to be quickly and drastically improved if its potential wealth was to be developed. Indians saw it as wealth in place, a providentially created storehouse. Food, shelter and clothing did not, of course, fall on the Indians from the sky. They had to work in their fashion to get what they wanted, but generally they did not have to labor in the imperative, unremitting way the whites did. In consequence they had a lot more disposable time on their hands.

A few more advanced white thinkers (Benjamin Franklin for one) found there were certain admirable aspects to the Indian ways. For example, it was occasionally noted that most Indians lived as only the richest and most powerful whites did, which is to say, in pursuit of their pleasures. However, the mainstream view was that the native Americans were lazy louts whose idleness was an affront to the laws of man and God.

Indians seem to have held equally low opinions about the whites. They found them to be a grim, joyless, heaving and grunting lot with not much more style or gaiety about them than mud turtles. The bottom line was that white societies were organized to produce work and wealth, and Indian ones to provide leisure and freedom—that is, to allow individuals to do whatever they damn well pleased most of the time. [Emphasis added]

At this late date, when drudgery is a prerequisite for—but no guarantee of—survival, it’s hard to imagine that things might not always have been this way. And it’s hard to summon up gratitude for the thinkers and teachers who not only saw leisure and contentment as an affront to God, but persuaded us all that the Bible tells us so.

Previously, I gave an overview of what pitch correction is and how it has become ubiquitous in modern commercial music. Below I try to put this latest technical innovation into context.

I’ll admit up front that I am not a fan of pitch correction. When it has obviously been used I do not like what I hear, and when something about recorded singing puts me off I will start looking for telltale artifacts that will let me blame it on pitch correction. But that is just personal preference. To conclude anything objective about pitch correction, good or bad or mixed, it’s necessary to spend some time thinking about the nature and purpose of music, of recording, and of sound modification techniques.

I’m guessing that even the most technology-averse music listener is comfortable with what is probably the oldest form of pitch correction, namely frets. And as with most technologies, the use of frets opens up new possibilities while closing off others; in this case, you gain the ability to play notes at precise intervals while giving up all the notes in between those intervals.

The balance of the tradeoff shifts with the importance of playing chords on the instrument. On the guitar they are vital. On the violin they are a hindrance. On the banjo the style of playing becomes more chord-focused when they are present, less when they are not.

Given this background, are frets a form of cheating? To ask the question in that way is to miss the essence of what has happened. The addition of frets changes the ecology of an instrument; the result is not simply the old instrument with frets, but an entirely new instrument.

And we need to ask ourselves: Is there any value to this new instrument? Perhaps it retains nearly all the good qualities of the old instrument while opening up new possibilities; in that case the new should supplant the old. Or perhaps it jettisons too many good qualities of the old to justify what new things it brings to the party, in which case it should be abandoned. Or perhaps the balance lies somewhere in between, and both instruments should continue to exist, choosing one for use in contexts where its particular strengths outshine its weaknesses.

Let’s move a bit further into the future, into the late 1920s. Beginning with the Carter Family and continuing on with duet acts such as the Delmore Brothers, the Monroe Brothers, and the Blue Sky Boys, country music singing underwent a dramatic shift of emphasis towards close harmonies. Alton Delmore points out that the shift was possible only because of the electric microphone, which was able to pick up the quieter, more delicate singing style and put it on a record or through an amplifier.

What exactly has changed when a roomful of people can comfortably hear harmonies that before only a small group could hear up close? For one thing, to the extent that such singing is intimate, before amplification the emotional intimacy corresponded to actual physical intimacy. With amplification, it is now possible to communicate “intimately” with people who are a hundred feet away. Moreover, the intimacy now only flows in one direction; the listener cannot communicate with the performer because the performer cannot see or hear them. Is the tradeoff worth it? It’s tempting to think that the history of musical performance responds with a resounding “Yes!”, but in fact I don’t think anyone thought much about what they were giving up in order to gain artificial, almost voyeuristic access to this intimate activity.

There are endless questions of this type that can be pondered. What did we give up and what did we gain when we introduced the idea of a recorded performance, frozen in time to be replayed and studied at will? When Bill Monroe took mountain music and, by speeding it up and adding instrumental solos, turned it from dance music to performance music? When it became possible to record instruments and vocals individually, to be cut and pasted and layered in myriad combinations? When someone figured out how to adjust the pitch of a sung note?

It’s much easier to consider these questions in retrospect, looking at exactly how a particular innovation fared as it matured. But I think we can also do some preliminary thinking about new and largely undigested techniques like pitch correction.

When evaluating the promise and danger of a new technique, we need to be careful not to dismiss it because of superficial flaws, because it is quite possible that further work will eliminate them. When electronic reverb was first introduced it sounded gimmicky, not very much like the resonance it was designed to imitate. Worse, it became a fad, and many otherwise good recordings from the 50s and 60s are almost unlistenable because of the huge amounts of echo that were applied.

But the technology got better, eventually engineers figured out how to use it, and now it is an accepted and even desirable way to enhance a recording. We use it on our own CDs, exactly because it tends to smooth out flaws in our performance. A similar progression is likely in store for pitch correction, and so we need to be careful to distinguish problems that plague early versions of the technology from problems that are inherent in the concept.

Let’s take another listen to the Dixie Chicks clip mentioned earlier. I assume because this group is so popular that the budget is there for extensive engineer labor on each song, and so the pitch correction here is as unobtrusive as an engineer can make it at this point. So it is not the telltale artifacts (on the phrases “parents” and “but I”) that I am interested in; those too will disappear with time. Instead, I am thinking about the sharp, buzzy, synthesizer-like quality of the phrase “I could never follow” at the end. It sounds like so much else that is on the radio these days. Whether or not this is an artifact of pitch correction that will eventually go away, it also represents a quality that people are actually aiming for; I think it is the same buzzy precision that makes Dailey & Vincent-style harmonies so popular.

Here’s an example from a group that is more or less on the same rung of the professional ladder as we are. I won’t mention their name for risk of embarrassing them, but it’s nothing they should be embarrassed about, any more than one should be embarrassed by releasing a CD as a short-run CD-R if the budget isn’t there for making a thousand manufactured CDs. It is just an example of what pitch correction is able to give you right if you don’t have the money to pay an engineer to painstakingly fix each note carefully. But given the decision to use pitch correction, I think the results are not bad, but simply the best that the money available could buy.

The only thing that bothers me about this example is that I’ve heard this group perform this song live, with no pitch corrector involved, and they sound perfectly fine to me, much preferable to this recorded version. But there are many things I don’t know that might factor into their decision to use it. Is their audience so accustomed to autotuning that not using it would make a group sound amateurish to them? Was there a problem with getting a good take in the stressful studio environment, making it preferable to autotune an existing take rather than trying again and again (at much expense) to get a better one? Is the singer overly concerned about her vocals, and unable to live with a recorded performance whose flaws are mostly noticeable to her? Do they simply like the sound of an autotuned performance better? Any of those reasons would be legitimate ones for deciding to go with it.

Finally, an example from a group that is several steps above the ladder from us and experiencing a good amount of success, even scheduled to give a showcase performance at IBMA this fall. Here is a video of a song that they perform very well; I assume autotuning was not involved, partly because I don’t hear it and partly because they are singing around a single microphone. It sounds good to me. I am sure if I carefully studied a soundboard recording of this performance I would be able to pick out flaws in the vocals, but as I watch the video I don’t notice any. And I am personally grateful for the absence of razor-sharp harmonies, although others might miss them.

Here’s a clip of the same song as it appears on their CD, with obvious pitch correction. Notice the fluttering of the lead singer’s held notes; I think that this is an artifact caused by correcting her vibrato. And after the instruments kick in, her first line (“When troubles seem to overcome”) sounds particularly robotic, especially the word “overcome.”

Now, I vastly prefer the live version to the recorded one, but not because I think that pitch correction is cheating. To my ear, using it was just a bad and unnecessary decision. And there may be some behind-the-scenes factors I don’t know about which justify the decision. But I suspect that what is actually happening is that pitch correction has taken on a life of its own, a trend where expectations both real and imagined are pressuring performers to use it.

Part of the reason that most modern bluegrass music sounds more or less the same is that with respect to airplay it is a very bad thing to sound markedly different from the song before and the song after. Listeners don’t like it, and DJs don’t like it. Pitch correction is now so pervasive that I’m guessing performers feel pressure to use it just so they don’t raise a red flag with those folks.

At this point I am going to move on from pitch correction to some more general matters. But I think it is a fascinating technical innovation that is worth studying, for these reasons:

• It is new enough that the concept still unsettles people.
• It brings out the purist in many; somehow it seems like cheating.
• There are many valid reasons for using it, none of them fraudulent.
• Our specific objections tend to evaporate when we think them through.
• And still, in the end, its use strikes us as vaguely problematic.

In the next post, I will describe some of the technical choices that Chris and I have been confronted with as we continue to play and record music, choices that have forced us to think much more deeply about our initial purist reactions to them.

This is the first in a series of posts, probably four of them, which intends to end with a look at the worship wars. But it begins with an extended look at an aspect of modern recording technology that is simultaneously marvelous and disturbing: the ability to adjust the pitch of a sung note.

I’ve been studying up on an odd social phenomenon lately, namely pitch correction. I’ve known for quite awhile that it existed as a studio technology, but I remember being quite surprised a few years back when I heard Pete Wernick mention that there were now devices that could correct a singer’s pitch in real time, and that they were commonly used in just about all types of pop music performance.

Then last year I was talking with one of Pete’s camp assistants, an accomplished professional musician, about a new bluegrass group, Dailey and Vincent, which was causing quite a stir because of their razor-sharp harmony singing. He told me that he listened to their debut album, all the while thinking that there was something odd about it—and finally he realized that it sounded weird because the producers had gone overboard in applying pitch correction.

But I forgot about both those things until recently, when I stumbled across some articles and internet mentions that described how pervasive the use of pitch correction has become. I began listening more closely to recordings, by famous artists and by local unknowns, and after I learned to detect the sound of it, pitch correction really does seem to be omnipresent. And now I’ve started to wonder what it means, at least culturally.

As I’ve looked around, I’ve discovered that there hasn’t been much written on the subject, and only a bit of what has been written discusses the cultural implications. Mostly the subject has arisen because of a small fad in hip-hop music that uses pitch correction software with extreme settings to give vocals a robotic, synthesizer-like quality. It began with a single recorded by Cher in the late 90s, and has been carried on by various singers. You can read a short version of the story in this Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker piece; I also recommend this short audio interview with Jones which has examples you can listen to, including a section where an engineer applies various amounts of correction to Jones’s singing.

More interesting, though, than its use as a novelty is its use to improve a singer’s performance, both on recordings and live. To see the Antares autotune program in action, look at the first part of this YouTube tutorial which shows how the pitch of individual vocal phrases can be adjusted. Another program, Melodyne, seems to have an interface that is much easier to grasp intuitively.

(And if you want to see something jaw-dropping, take a look at this demonstration video of a new version of Melodyne, which is able to take a recording of multiple simultaneous notes, e.g. a strummed guitar chord, and break it up into its component notes, each of which can be changed independently.)

This post rounds up ten examples of overblown pitch correction, what the writer calls “autotune abuse,” into a single short mp3 file that is worth listening to. Some of the examples are intentionally obvious, but some (as with the opening Dixie Chicks fragment) are not meant to be noticed.

According to the folks that make the recordings, the use of pitch correction to improve a vocal is standard practice these days.

Of the half a dozen engineers and producers interviewed for this story, none could remember a pop recording session in the past few years when Auto-Tune didn’t make a cameo–and none could think of a singer who would want that fact known. "There’s no shame in fixing a note or two," says Jim Anderson, professor of the Clive Davis department of recorded music at New York University and president of the Audio Engineering Society. "But we’ve gone far beyond that."

Some Auto-Tuning is almost unavoidable. Most contemporary music is composed on Pro Tools, a program that lets musicians and engineers record into a computer and map out songs on a visual grid. You can cut at one point on the grid and paste at another, just as in word-processing, but making sure the cuts match up requires the even pitch that Auto-Tune provides.

"It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it’s very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck." Like plastic surgery, he adds, more people have had it than you think. "Let’s just say I’ve had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you’ll just run their voice through the box."

Why would singers not want it known that pitch correction had been used on their singing? The simple answer, I suppose, is that pitch is an important aspect of singing—perhaps the only aspect that is obvious to a non-singer—and so an inability to sing on pitch can be taken as an inability to sing. Neko Case is pretty hard on singers who resort to pitch correction:

Pitchfork: You seem like somebody who would be especially annoyed by the "American Idol"-ization of modern pop.

Case: You mean the horrible singing?

Pitchfork: Yes.

Case: When I think about Jackie Wilson or the Platters and then I think about modern, Top 40 music that’s really horrible, it makes me mad. Singing isn’t important anymore. I’m not a genius– if I had been around during the time of Jackie Wilson or Rosemary Clooney or Patsy Cline, I would be s—. I would be singing in some bar somewhere for $5 a week and that’s as far as I would ever go. But I’m living now and I write songs, it’s different. There’s some part about the craft of singing– craft is too important of a word, I hate that word but I just used it anyway– in a lot of places, it hasn’t really made it. It’s not to do with the people who are doing it as much as the people who are producing it. There’s technology like auto tune and pitch shifting so you don’t have to know how to sing. That s— sounds like s—! It’s like that taste in diet soda, I can taste it– and it makes me sick.

When I hear auto tune on somebody’s voice, I don’t take them seriously. Or you hear somebody like Alicia Keys, who I know is pretty good, and you’ll hear a little bit of auto tune and you’re like, "You’re too good for that. Why would you let them do that to you? Don’t you know what that means?" It’s not an effect like people try to say, it’s for people like Shania Twain who can’t sing. Yet there they are, all over the radio, spewing saccharine all over you. It’s a horrible sound and it’s like, "Shania, spend an extra hour in the studio and you’ll hit the note and it’ll sound fine. Just work on it, it’s not like making a burger!"

Pitchfork: She’s pretty busy making videos though.

Case: It’s rough, I know. She’s so rich she could get somebody else to do the other stuff while she spends that extra hour in the studio. Or Madonna! Just hit the note! Don’t pretend it’s William Orbit being crafty– we know you’re not hitting the note because you have other stuff to do. You can do it, I have faith in you. But don’t leave the studio before you hit that note. And you know what? When you do hit it you’re going to feel so much more valid that it’ll come through in all the other stuff you’re supposed to be doing later in the day. Seriously!

And if Celine Dion is supposedly the great singer that she says she is why is there auto tune on every word in her songs? Can’t you just hit it, Celine?  What are you doing that you can’t be singing in the studio? It’s your job!

Pitchfork: Anyway, I take it you’re not a fan of auto tune.

Case: I’m not a perfect note hitter either but I’m not going to cover it up with auto tune. Everybody uses it, too. I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, "How many people don’t use auto tune?" and he said, "You and Nelly Furtado are the only two people who’ve never used it in here." Even though I’m not into Nelly Furtado, it kind of made me respect her. It’s cool that she has some integrity.

[Edited for profanity.]

Case claims that pitch correction is primarily a means of covering up lack of singing skill, which stems either from laziness or sheer inability. This is a common criticism leveled at pop singers, particularly country singers, namely that what makes a star is more a matter of packaging and marketing and studio wizardry than it is artistic quality. This 2004 article on the use of pitch correction in country music, from a Nashville newspaper that is largely sympathetic to the country music business, agrees somewhat with that assessment but brings a bit of depth to the usual caricature of the pop music machine:

The late Owen Bradley, the Nashville producer responsible for some of country’s greatest recordings, once was introduced at an industry panel discussion with a flowery speech that listed the great singers he’d worked with, among them Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells,Conway Twitty, Brenda Lee, k.d. lang and Mandy Barnett. To start the questioning, Bradley was asked what it was like to work with a great vocalist like Patsy Cline, who had such perfect intonation. He replied that Cline not only sang flat or sharp on occasion, but that they often worked like hell to get those classic performances out of her; she often fought with him about having to sing lines over until she got them right.

But Cline was a great vocalist, and her pitch wavered less than most singers. Her voice also had an amazing richness, and she brought a preternatural depth of emotion to a lyric.

Still, Pro Tools undoubtedly would have made recording her easier and faster. Would the results have been as good?

At the same panel, Bradley was asked if he ever worked with a singer with perfect pitch. He said yes, and named the singer. Few in the room recognized the name. As Bradley explained, the singer had a great voice, but she just didn’t convey much personality or charisma. She didn’t have what it took to become a star.

Therein lies the debate: What makes a good recording? What makes a good entertainer? What makes someone a star? Is it talent and timing? Money and the right marketing campaign? Some combination of the above?

This begins to bring out the fact that there is a tension that needs to be recognized, between an individual’s artistic skills and the resulting product that is packaged and marketed. Which is the more important factor in judging the quality of a particular recording?

One producer mentions working with a singer who had performed a song at least 10 times in the studio and still wasn’t getting it quite right. "It was a complicated song, and it was hard to sing," he says. When asked to try it again, the artist said, "Man, I’m tired of this damn song. Can’t you just use that machine I’ve heard about and fix it for me?"

Another producer recently worked with an artist who had never used auto-tuning, but the singer had pitch problems. For the session, the producer used pitch correction on the first round of vocals, then played it back for the artist. The singer was delighted. Only the producer thought the performances needed more emotion and planned to bring the singer back into the studio to recut the vocals. But the singer was busy with a full concert schedule. Eventually, he said he was happy with what he’d already cut and thought it unnecessary to redo his parts.

"The record ended up not selling as well as the record company had hoped, and it was because the emotion wasn’t there," the producer says. "That wasn’t the fault of Pro Tools. It was because the singer was too lazy to take the time to work on getting a stronger performance."

And then there is Neko Case’s point, that pitch problems are something that can and must be overcome by working harder. It may not be true that every singer can achieve perfect pitch this way, but study and practice can do much to remedy pitch problems as well as making for a better overall singer—and the easy availability of pitch correction is a tempting excuse for avoiding such work.

There are indisputably talented singers—LeAnn Rimes, for instance—who have trouble making the most of their talents. There have been strong, on-pitch performers with stunning voices like Jason Sellers, Shannon Lawsonand Sonya Isaacs who slipped through the major-label system because they weren’t given the right opportunity or didn’t hook up with the right song or the right producer. The reason one singer soars while another struggles is a conundrum in which vocal ability is only one part of the puzzle.

Patty Loveless, revered by many as one of the best country singers of her time, often has struggled with pitch; on occasion, it’s on record for all to hear. One Nashville producer says he can’t listen to Loveless’ records because of her pitch problems. Another Nashville producer responded by saying that the producer who said that "needs his ass kicked. Nashville needs more singers with as much feeling in their performances as Patty Loveless."

The last third of the article compares Faith Hill, a very successful product of the country music machine, with Shawn Camp, a promising and very talented musician who was considered but passed over by the machine and has had much less success as a result. The easy answer is to say that Hill is just a slickly packaged commercial product, marketed to people who are much less discerning than you and me. But it’s closer to the truth to acknowledge that Faith Hill does a very good job of being a country star, with all that implies, and that many people are willing to shower their money and attention on a good country star.

With Faith Hill, many on Music Row emphasize how hard she’s worked to overcome her initial limitations. She’s devoted an immense amount of energy to working with vocal coaching, to understand her voice and make it work for her. Listen to her albums, and it’s apparent how she lowered her register and began using a breathy delivery that covered up her shortcomings. She’s also learned to open up and go for notes that early in her career she never could have reached.

But Hill also is cited whenever people debate whether Music Row is interested in great singers or just beautiful creatures who are willing to submit themselves to a rigorous process that banks more on charisma and sex appeal than on talent. […]

So is it cheating that Hill’s career relies on studio fixes? Is it a sham that she, like so many modern music stars, uses auto-tuning in her live performances? Or is it just a good use of the latest of studio technology to take an ambitious and dedicated young woman with an appeal beyond mere vocal ability and, with the right packaging and investment, help her become an international superstar?

It’s easy to get distracted here and begin railing against commercialism in general, but I think we need to take the commercial nature of music for granted. As soon as listeners are involved you have to take their concerns into account, even more so if they are paying to hear you. An audience that comes to hear you is entitled to go away from a performance happy that they came, and it is the performer’s job to provide that happiness. On the other hand, there are good reasons, both ethical and practical, not to pander to an audience or to give in to laziness.

In between those two boundaries lies a wide range of permissible options, and it takes wisdom to choose well among them. In the next post, I will give a short tour of some of them, focusing especially on choices that have confronted me and Chris in our own brief and modest recording career.

Sometimes the most valuable observations are made by someone who doesn’t quite “get it.” And by “get it” I mean a willingness to fill in unstated details.

Getting it can be a good thing. The case for agrarianism, for example, cannot be fully made in an article or book or series of books, or even a life’s work. I don’t think that Wendell Berry’s books taken together make an airtight or even a strong case for agrarianism; it’s perfectly legitimate to read them all, understand and agree with his observations, and yet find oneself a fair distance from understanding agrarianism as a coherent whole, much less persuaded of it. In the end, Berry can only point to deep truths and show how he thinks agrarianism explains them; it is up to the reader to fill in the details which Berry can only hint at, having arrived at them more through life experience rather than study, and then decide whether it all leads to agrarianism, or something else that overlaps agrarianism, or something else entirely.

Getting it can also be a bad thing. I’ve been in many situations where I was caught up with enthusiasm for someone else’s vision, and it always happened because I was too willing to assume that the unstated details led to the conclusion being advanced. Too often it turned out to be wishful thinking.  Not only was I wrong in assuming that the details led to the conclusion, I was wrong in thinking that there were any such details at all; the person casting the vision was just as guilty of wishful thinking as I was, having selected their vision more for its marketability than for its soundness. Some of the more notable delusions I subscribed to included approaches to church growth, discipleship, homeschooling, child rearing, corporate worship, authority, courtship, and antithetical Christian living. In all these areas I could have done better by thinking things through thoroughly before embracing an idea; my saving grace was that embracing the idea didn’t keep me from trying to understand it more deeply, and under such scrutiny the unworthy ideas eventually showed themselves to be tattered and threadbare. And fortunately a few of the ideas have continued to withstand such scrutiny and have ended up foundational in my current thinking.

Kelefa Sanneh has just reviewed Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft for the New Yorker, and he does not get what Crawford is saying in the way that I get it. For various reasons I know several things  that Crawford wasn’t able to say or chose not to say in his book, things that go a long way towards completing his case. In some sense Crawford’s book is aimed much more towards me, and the other folks who are likely to get it, than it is towards Sanneh. But because Sanneh is a fair-minded and observant reader, the fact that he doesn’t get it makes his review particularly valuable, because he makes note of several weaknesses in Crawford’s case that an enthusiast would be likely to gloss over for the sake of the greater good.

I call Sanneh fair-minded and observant because, even though Crawford is making a case that is a direct challenge to the kind of urban, knowledge-worker lifestyle that I assume Sanneh lives, he points out the weaknesses without using them to destroy or dismiss Crawford’s position. This is good for those of us who are strongly sympathetic to Crawford, since it forces us to face up to those weaknesses and think them through, to come up with explanations or to acknowledge that there is more thinking to be done.

One difficulty that Sanneh zeroes in on is the fact that whatever our principles, the life we lead must be lived in the midst of a society thoroughly devoted to consumption:

But how do you serve craftsmanship without serving the market? How can an independent artisan insure that he doesn’t become an entrepreneur—and, in time, a corporate executive? This question haunts Crawford’s book, and it helps explain why he takes pains to present himself as merely an aspiring craftsman with “execrable” skills; a professional mechanic who still feels “like an amateur.” These disclaimers are meant to assure readers that, in a society afflicted by hyperspecialization, Crawford isn’t some technical wizard; he’s just a regular guy who happens to be handy with a seal puller. The idea is that we can become him, and that he won’t become someone else—he won’t build a bigger shop, hire more mechanics, expand into Maryland and then Delaware, create a lucrative line of Shockoe Moto leather jackets, and, finally, collaborate with BMW on a gleaming series of R69S replicas. He won’t, in other words, end up like Gene Kahn, the organic-farming pioneer who appears in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” as a vexed figure: Cascadian Farm, which he founded in 1971, has thrived and grown and joined the corporate food chain; Kahn is now the vice-president for sustainable development at General Mills.

I remember having those worries about Gene Kahn’s story when I read Pollan’s book, and although I admire Joel Salatin greatly I don’t think he stands in as much contrast to Kahn as Pollan portrays him. Much of what I’ve heard about making a living selling local food is depressingly entrepreneurial, and in particular depressingly dependent on finding ways to sell food to affluent people. This particular weakness is one I currently have no answer for.

Sanneh probes further with his scalpel, and underneath the puzzle of consumerism he finds another, deeper puzzle, namely connoisseurship:

Proponents of homegrown food and “(very) small business”—which is how Crawford describes his shop—sometimes talk about how artisanalism improves the lives of workers. But the genius of this loosely organized movement is that it’s not a labor movement; it’s a consumer movement. Pollan writes about the Italian Slow Foodists who realized that “even connoisseurship can have a politics,” and he voices his own hope that “an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig.” In fact, pleasure isn’t merely the motivating force in Pollan’s books; it’s the goal. His chief criticism of Chicken McNuggets is that they are insufficiently delicious. (Has he tried them with the hot-mustard sauce?) He is both a gourmand and an idealist, which means that he tastes the entire food economy each time he has a meal. When he saw those migrant laborers, maybe he was thinking about their wages—but he was also thinking about his supper.

This is much closer to the bone. I was surprised and pleased to see a problem stated so clearly when I read the passage in The Omnivore’s Dilemma where Pollan asks Salatin whether it’s truly feasible to get his artisanally grown food into the hands of city dwellers, and Salatin responded that perhaps the problem is the existence of cities themselves. But as I continue to think about this I suspect that Salatin (and even Wendell Berry) have not fully faced up to the fact that their own visions, though perhaps not dependent on the existence of cities, are very much dependent on some social trends that cause cities to come into existence.

Salleh is not done with us yet.

Crawford promises more than good taste; his book sets its sights on the blue-collar worker, not on the fussy consumer. And so he writes dutifully about economic trends, changing labor markets, and the uncertain future of America’s information economy. But he can’t feign much enthusiasm for, say, jobs in the health-care sector, no matter how satisfying or useful or plentiful those jobs might be. Really, he likes engines and building things and fixing things; his dedication to his shop is rooted in his admiration for his clients and for what he calls the “kingly sport” of motorcycle riding. In other words, his work is “useful” only insofar as it enables men to ride motorcycles—an activity that might fairly be described as useless. Crawford may have set out to write a book about work, but the book he actually wrote is about consumption. No less than Pollan, he is a connoisseur, exercised more by shoddy workmanship than by shoddy working conditions.

Salleh has put his finger on something important here, but I don’t think he  has correctly divided things up. Not having read the book, I am only guessing that what Crawford is plumping for here is the idea of “a job well done” and the peculiar satisfaction that comes from it. Salleh is mistaken to say that this makes Crawford a connoisseur. A connoisseur is someone who takes detailed pleasure in a job done by someone else, someone who has detached the goodness of the result from the goodness of producing that result. Crawford no doubt is able to appreciate the quality of work done by others, and I suppose his livelihood gives him a special ability to do so. But it isn’t the motivation for what he does, since otherwise he would be better off finding a high paying white collar job that would better fund the acquisition of quality work done by other people.

But there are two things not to be missed here, both involving what Salleh calls connoisseurship. The first is that connoisseurship is a driving force, probably the main one, in the local food movement. Nine-tenths of what you read about local food is focused on the eating of it, and most of that eating is done by people who are involved in the growing at best symbolically. Is it better to eat local food than industrial food? In some ways, certainly. The quality is probably higher, it is probably healthier, it gets you closer to nature, it supports local farmers. But it doesn’t address more fundamental problems in our relationship with food, the most important being our relatively recent decision to leave the growing and processing of it to others while we go off to do more important things. Local foodies have exactly the same relationship to their vendors as do industrial foodies, namely that of consumer to producer. By itself the local food movement gets us no closer to the agrarian ideal of supplying your own needs directly.

The more important problem involving connoisseurship is that it enables someone to make a living as a craftsman in modern-day society. No small-scale producer can compete with the modern industrial machine on the basis of price. Even the higher quality of a craftsman’s product cannot by itself justify the premium he is required to charge. Which restricts the market to people who, for whatever reason, are willing to pay unreasonably high prices for higher quality, i.e. connoisseurs.

There’s nothing especially wrong with catering to rich people (and by “rich” I only mean folks who have enough disposable income that they are able to allocate an unreasonable amount of it to a particular expenditure). But for those of us for whom the ultimate goal is self-sufficiency, I worry that funding the project by catering to the local food market may end up being the devil’s bargain.

This review of Matthew Crawford’s new book is better than most, an enjoyable read for its own sake. Part of what I like about it is that for the most part I don’t know how much is Fukuyama and how much is Crawford. This passage, for example, is plenty worth pondering for the rest of the day:

Under this new ideology, everyone must attend college and prepare for life as a “symbolic analyst” or “knowledge worker,” ready to add value through mental rather than physical labor.

There are two things wrong with this notion, according to Crawford. The first is that it radically undervalues blue-collar work that involves the manipulation of things rather than ideas. Expertise with things permits human beings to have agency over their lives — that is, their ability to exert some control over the myriad faucets, outlets and engines that they depend on from day to day. Instead of being able to top up your engine oil when it is low, you wait until an “idiot light” goes on on the dashboard, and you turn your car over to a bureaucratized dealership that hooks it up to a computer and returns it to you without your having the faintest idea of what might have been wrong.

The second problem with this vision is that the postindustrial world is not in fact populated — as gurus like Richard Florida, who has popularized the idea of the “creative class,” would have it — by “bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe.” The truth about most white-collar office work, Crawford argues, is captured better by “Dilbert” and “The Office”: dull routine more alienating than the machine production denounced by Marx. Unlike the electrician who knows his work is good when you flip a switch and the lights go on, the average knowledge worker is caught in a morass of evaluations, budget projections and planning meetings. None of this bears the worker’s personal stamp; none of it can be definitively evaluated; and the kind of mastery or excellence available to the forklift driver or mechanic are elusive. Rather than achieving self-mastery by confronting a “hard discipline” like gardening or structural engineering or learning Russian, people are offered the fake autonomy of consumer choice, expressing their inner selves by sitting in front of a Harley- Davidson catalog and deciding how to trick out their bikes.

The last point there, about using the fake autonomy of consumer choice to delude ourselves about our total lack of true autonomy, is one I could spend the rest of my life studying. We knew as early as the 1930s that so-called white collar work was mind-numbing and robotic, only valuable in large aggregates. Films often portrayed middle-level white collar workplaces as seas of desks, each with an identically dressed person sitting at an adding machine or a telephone or a typewriter, doing a limited, repetitive, undemanding task all day long.

The work didn’t change. So how did modern industrial society manage to persuade us that we aren’t the drones we appear to be, but instead “bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe?” This is the part that fascinates me, and that I think has been left mostly unstudied. I don’t think it can be denied that the process was deliberately engineered, by the forces of society if not by specific individuals. One small example that struck me when it came around was the “Wild at Heart” fad. A friend was caught up in it enough that I spent a little time poking around the fringes; what I concluded was that it was not so  much a movement to introduce freedom and competence back into a man’s life as it was a program for choking back one’s natural responses to a drone-like existence through controlled doses of thrilling, challenging, but ultimately meaningless activity—on the weekends, of course.

I’ve written before that we’ve somehow managed to turn incompetence in most aspects of life into a badge of honor, taking pride in the fact that we can afford to pay others to do even the simplest things for us. But it only works if you can muster up a healthy amount of contempt for the work you’re paying for.

Highly educated people with high- status jobs — investment bankers, professors, lawyers — often believe that they could do anything their less-educated brethren can, if only they put their minds to it, because cognitive ability is the only ability that counts. The truth is that some would not have the physical and cognitive ability to do skilled blue-collar work, and that others could do it only if they invested 20 years of their life in learning a trade.

The last paragraph of the review is poignant, as well as mildly puzzling.

In the end I must confess that it would have been hard for me not to like this book. While I make my living as a “symbolic knowledge worker,” I have both ridden motorcycles and made furniture — my family’s kitchen table, the beds my children slept on while growing up, as well as reproductions of Federal-style antiques whose originals I could never afford to buy. Few things I’ve created have given me nearly as much pleasure as those tangible objects that were hard to fabricate and useful to other people. I put my power tools away a few years ago, and find now that I can’t even give them away, because people are too preoccupied with updating their iPhones. Shop class, it appears, is already a distant historical memory.

My first reaction was: I’ll be glad to take those tools off your hands! Followed closely by: Why did you put them up?

It was a very good weekend for us musically. On Saturday Chris and I represented the Music of Coal band at the Coke Ovens Bluegrass Festival in Dunlap, about thirty miles from Chattanooga. It was arranged at the last minute, and only the two of us could make it, but the crowd liked us and so did the festival organizers. There’s a good chance they’ll ask us back next year.

And on Sunday we played twice in Chattanooga, once at the Tennessee Aquarium on behalf of the library, and later at the Riverbend Festival, a ten-day extravaganza that the city has staged for the past thirty years.

The pictures below are from Riverbend. Despite our expressions, we weren’t bored at all. But obviously we’re still learning how to carry ourselves on stage so that we don’t look bored.

We are on the two-a-month rental plan from Netflix, which helps keep our video viewing under control. But it also presents a challenge to me as the one who usually gets the job of choosing the films we watch—where to go next, so as to make good use of such a limited resource?

Fortunately or not, I know a lot about movies made before 1990 or so. With a few notable exceptions, the films I think are suitable for family viewing (our family, anyway) were made before 1965. And that still leaves a vast array of choices, whether you choose by genre or studio or actor or director. From which I have to cherrypick, in order to avoid boredom. In days gone by we might have had, say, a Fred Astaire binge, because even if we watched the fifteen or so best movies he made the binge would be over in a few weeks. Now such a binge would dominate a year’s viewing.

Just in the past few months I’ve made some notably successful choices, each very different from the others. There was The Seven Samurai, a three hour film (with subtitles!) set in medieval Japan. And Good Neighbors, the mid-70s British sitcom about a couple who goes self-sufficient in a posh suburb of London. And Jean de Florette/Manon of the Springs, a simple story of tragic proportions set in a peasant village in early 20th century France (again, with subtitles).

For some reason a few weeks ago I remembered the incredible string of black (well, gray) comedies made by Ealing Studios, many of which starred Alec Guinness. They are legendary, but in fact I’d only seen a couple, and those a long time ago. After looking through reviews, I chose The Ladykillers. My description of the film—a gang of crooks involve a clueless old woman in their clever plan to rob a payroll, then decide to kill her because she knows too much—wasn’t received too warmly by the rest of the family, but they went along with the choice.

The movie is extremely funny, but in a very different way than most other comedies, especially contemporary ones. There is some slapstick, but not played broadly—in fact, it is quite gritty and realistic. The robbery is clever and intricate, but unfolds matter-of-factly with no frantic music or activity. Each of the characters is a caricacture of a type, but none of the actors hams it up. The the drama builds along with the comedy, quietly and steadily, and the result is much funnier than if it had been played over the top. (Not that there’s anything wrong with over the top. I love it. But this film was better for having resisted the temptation.)

The weirdnesses of The Ladykillers are quite deliberate, and it’s worth paying attention to them and pondering them. The sets are a cross between ultra-realistic and absurd, e.g Mrs. Wilberforce’s strange out of square (“subsidence after the bombing, you know”) Victorian home set smack between two ominous-looking tenement buildings and right over a tunnel under which trains leave and enter the station day and night. Many of the scenes are practically staged as paintings, as in the frame shown above. The music is some weird modern-sounding score, or what passed for modern in 1956. Some of the incidents, such as the crooks having to rescue Mrs. Wilberforce’s escaped parrot, or having to sit down to tea with her aged friends, do nothing to advance the plot but everything to increase the weirdness of the setting.

Alec Guinness does a remarkable job as the Professor. Although I’m sure that makeup helped, he manages to bring a realistic ugliness to his character that makeup alone can’t provide. It’s all tied up with his walk, his speech, the set of his face. Brilliant stuff.

We’re moving on next to Kind Hearts and Coronets, the first of the Ealing comedies, in which “a distant poor relative of the Duke of D’Ascoyne plots to inherit the title by murdering the eight other heirs who stand ahead of him in the line of succession.” All eight heirs are played by Guinness.

Sometimes the answer to a puzzle is simple enough, but rejected because it isn’t what the questioner wants to hear. Why are health care costs spiraling out of control? Looking at McAllen, Texas, where the average annual Medicare expense for each person enrolled is twice the national average, the answer is simple, but who wants to hear it?

Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits.

The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine.

Fifteen years ago, the cost per Medicare patient was exactly the national average. What changed?

“Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are [nonsense]. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures.

The surgeon came to McAllen in the mid-nineties, and since then, he said, “the way to practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’ ”

Everyone agreed that something fundamental had changed since the days when health-care costs in McAllen were the same as those in El Paso and elsewhere. Yes, they had more technology. “But young doctors don’t think anymore,” the family physician said.

What the surgeon means by “young doctors don’t think anymore” is that they do not make direct diagnoses anymore, relying instead on the results of extensive testing. I’ve heard exactly the same thing from Roger Murrell, our pastor who is also an emergency room nurse.

Depending on test results allows a doctor to distance himself from responsibility for prescribing a particular treatment; the course of treatment is dictated by the test results, not the doctor’s personal judgment. It also is a lucrative path for a doctor to follow.

The surgeon gave me an example. General surgeons are often asked to see patients with pain from gallstones. If there aren’t any complications—and there usually aren’t—the pain goes away on its own or with pain medication. With instruction on eating a lower-fat diet, most patients experience no further difficulties. But some have recurrent episodes, and need surgery to remove their gallbladder.

Seeing a patient who has had uncomplicated, first-time gallstone pain requires some judgment. A surgeon has to provide reassurance (people are often scared and want to go straight to surgery), some education about gallstone disease and diet, perhaps a prescription for pain; in a few weeks, the surgeon might follow up. But increasingly, I was told, McAllen surgeons simply operate. The patient wasn’t going to moderate her diet, they tell themselves. The pain was just going to come back. And by operating they happen to make an extra seven hundred dollars.

This approach has become standard operating procedure in McAllen, known thoroughly by all doctors in the vicinity whether or not they follow it themselves. It isn’t difficult for a group of doctors to predict exactly what expensive, unneeded procedures will occur in response to a common situation.

I gave the doctors around the table a scenario. A forty-year-old woman comes in with chest pain after a fight with her husband. An EKG is normal. The chest pain goes away. She has no family history of heart disease. What did McAllen doctors do fifteen years ago?

Send her home, they said. Maybe get a stress test to confirm that there’s no issue, but even that might be overkill.

And today? Today, the cardiologist said, she would get a stress test, an echocardiogram, a mobile Holter monitor, and maybe even a cardiac catheterization.

“Oh, she’s definitely getting a cath,” the internist said, laughing grimly.

The journalist repeatedly returns to the question: why do some cities have high medical costs, while others are much lower? There seems to be a divide in how inclined a physician is to order expensive procedures in certain situations.

The researchers asked the physicians specifically how they would handle a variety of patient cases. It turned out that differences in decision-making emerged in only some kinds of cases. In situations in which the right thing to do was well established—for example, whether to recommend a mammogram for a fifty-year-old woman (the answer is yes)—physicians in high- and low-cost cities made the same decisions. But, in cases in which the science was unclear, some physicians pursued the maximum possible amount of testing and procedures; some pursued the minimum. And which kind of doctor they were depended on where they came from.

The journalist also asks the same question in a different way: why are costs in El Paso, a city very much like McAllen, so much lower?

There was no sign, however, that McAllen’s doctors as a group were trained any differently from El Paso’s. One morning, I met with a hospital administrator who had extensive experience managing for-profit hospitals along the border. He offered a different possible explanation: the culture of money.

“In El Paso, if you took a random doctor and looked at his tax returns eighty-five per cent of his income would come from the usual practice of medicine,” he said. But in McAllen, the administrator thought, that percentage would be a lot less.

He knew of doctors who owned strip malls, orange groves, apartment complexes—or imaging centers, surgery centers, or another part of the hospital they directed patients to. They had “entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. They were innovative and aggressive in finding ways to increase revenues from patient care. “There’s no lack of work ethic,” he said. But he had often seen financial considerations drive the decisions doctors made for patients—the tests they ordered, the doctors and hospitals they recommended—and it bothered him. Several doctors who were unhappy about the direction medicine had taken in McAllen told me the same thing. “It’s a machine, my friend,” one surgeon explained.

This, I think, is the key to understanding the situation. Doctoring used to be something else, and some doctors behave as if things were as they used to be. But doctoring has now become business, big business, and there is little or nothing in how we view medicine today that can incline a doctor to stand apart from business pressures and continue to doctor in the old way.

From the modern point of view, the old-fashioned doctor is a fool. More important, the modern system makes it increasingly difficult for the old-fashioned doctor to provide his service in an old-fashioned way. The expectations of patients, the threat of lawsuits, the expense of getting licensed, the business-minded outlook of the hospitals and testing laboratories and specialists he must deal with, all these exert a tremendous pressure on an old-fashioned doctor to get in step with the new way of doing things.

Is there any possibility of modifying the existing system to re-introduce the old-fashioned attitude towards doctoring while still retaining the benefits of modernity? I doubt it. The journalist thinks otherwise, and presents the Mayo Clinic model as a hopeful possibility.

The real puzzle of American health care, I realized on the airplane home, is not why McAllen is different from El Paso. It’s why El Paso isn’t like McAllen. Every incentive in the system is an invitation to go the way McAllen has gone. Yet, across the country, large numbers of communities have managed to control their health costs rather than ratchet them up.

I talked to Denis Cortese, the C.E.O. of the Mayo Clinic, which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost health-care systems in the country. A couple of years ago, I spent several days there as a visiting surgeon. Among the things that stand out from that visit was how much time the doctors spent with patients. There was no churn—no shuttling patients in and out of rooms while the doctor bounces from one to the other. I accompanied a colleague while he saw patients. Most of the patients, like those in my clinic, required about twenty minutes. But one patient had colon cancer and a number of other complex issues, including heart disease. The physician spent an hour with her, sorting things out. He phoned a cardiologist with a question.

The story of the Mayo Clinic model is an encouraging one, and it’s worth reading what the writer says and weighing the possibility that it might spread. I am skeptical, but that is just an opinion, based on the idea that McAllen seems to more closely exemplify the peculiar brands of wickedness that flourish in this modern world.

One afternoon in McAllen, I rode down McColl Road with Lester Dyke, the cardiac surgeon, and we passed a series of office plazas that seemed to be nothing but home-health agencies, imaging centers, and medical-equipment stores.

“Medicine has become a pig trough here,” he muttered.

Dyke is among the few vocal critics of what’s happened in McAllen. “We took a wrong turn when doctors stopped being doctors and became businessmen,” he said.

Five years ago, when the living was easy and the cotton was high, who would have objected to the idea of doctors becoming businessmen? I think that they would have been admired for their cleverness and upwardly spiraling incomes.

In fact, the exact same businesslike approach that got us into this quagmire is often championed as a possible way out.

The third class of health-cost proposals, I explained, would push people to use medical savings accounts and hold high-deductible insurance policies: “They’d have more of their own money on the line, and that’d drive them to bargain with you and other surgeons, right?”

He gave me a quizzical look. We tried to imagine the scenario. A cardiologist tells an elderly woman that she needs bypass surgery and has Dr. Dyke see her. They discuss the blockages in her heart, the operation, the risks. And now they’re supposed to haggle over the price as if he were selling a rug in a souk? “I’ll do three vessels for thirty thousand, but if you take four I’ll throw in an extra night in the I.C.U.”—that sort of thing?

Dyke shook his head. “Who comes up with this stuff?” he asked. “Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure.”

Sheep and wolves. Exactly. Medicine used to work, sort of, because doctors were not wolf-like. Not that they were a nobler strain of human; in fact, I think that because until the 20th century their range of operation was so limited that they were able to imagine their important but marginal role in the community as a noble, selfless pursuit. That imagined nobility had some momentum, and acted as a counter-pressure as medicine became increasingly powerful and invasive. But I think the nobility has largely evaporated at this point, and the rest will be gone shortly.

I waste a lot of time on the internet, but it’s usually wasted on reading, not on playing with the myriad of interactive gizmos that are available. This one, though, is most excellent: the ToneMatrix. To use it, just click on squares in the matrix to turn them on or off, and see what happens. You can also draw a pattern of squares by holding down the mouse button and dragging the cursor around.

The idea is based on another gizmo, the Tenori-On from Yamaha, which is a synthesizer with an ingenious interface.

Here is a video showing how the ToneMatrix is used as part of a more complex computer program called AudioTool, used to create synthesized music.