The Smithy
Context Rules Everything Around Me
15 minutes from my house stands a little store selling a bit of local produce and a lot of handmade trinkets and novelty honeys.
The building is from the mid-1800s – when its function reflected its current name: The Smithy.
When you walk in, you feel its patient solidity. Thick beams of wood, each unique, are adorned with wrought iron.
As with anything defined in part by its complexity, it takes a bit of attention to appreciate fully. I had probably been in there half a dozen times before I paused on the massive staircase to stare at the banisters. Each vertical banister beam had 5-6 twists at the center. After the iron was wrought, it would have been heated until it glowed yellow at a scorching temperature of about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then twisted by hand before being quenched with water and allowed to solidify. As you would imagine, each one was slightly different and there were hundreds of them around the building. I stood there and cast my mind back 170 years to imagine the smiths who made them.
Because the place was a smithy, I imagine they did the work themselves. They didn’t have to do it. The twists serve no practical purpose. They may have considered it and decided it would be a nice flourish. They may have thought it’d make a nice training exercise for their unruly apprentices. I don’t know. But I enjoyed standing there and picturing them working. Heating each piece of metal – or maybe heating them in batches. Using thick leather gloves and tongs and clamps and vices to manipulate the molten hot metal and create these twists while still maintaining the overall straightness of the pieces. And, while the teenager behind the counter scrutinized me suspiciously, I felt deeply moved by their undertaking.
A building like this would never be constructed today. I’m guessing they don’t have gigantic blocks of ancient wood at Home Depot. There’s also no point. If you need a building for your country store, you need it quick and you need it cheap. If you want twisty banisters, you can have them mass manufactured or, better yet, just find something close to what you wanted in a catalog.
Like manufacturing, creativity evolves as it is subjected to the inexorable march of technological progress - which continuously reduces the friction between a thought and its manifestation. Computers replaced tape machines – bringing engineers closer to the audio waveform in unfathomable ways. Drum machines and MIDI gave people the ability to program parts above their performance capability.
With each advance, more people could add twisties to the banisters of their creative endeavors. And at each stage there were people pining for the ways of old – lamenting something that had been lost when things became easier and more accessible.
The other day I was working on a pop production when a muse I didn’t know was in attendance whispered:
“You know what would be just PERFECT?”
“What?”, I ventured cautiously.
“A choir set in a medium sized room backing up the lead singer in the final chorus”
What are my options? I suppose I could call the local church and see if they have a few hours in which I can use their space. I can rustle the local bushes to scare up a handful of competent singers. I can buy them coffees and be mildly annoyed as they stand around talking too loudly while waiting for me to set up microphones.
I do a quick web search and find a website that lets you create a choir out of a single line of audio. I could upload a MIDI file of the notes, sing the line myself (poorly) and get a choir out the other end, so to speak. “Let’s try it!” I think. After all, there’s 10 projects behind this one and I have to pick up my kid from school in 2 hours.
There is a common discussion now about whether it matters that a piece of media you’re consuming was made by humans or not. If you’re watching a great movie and you don’t know who made it or how, is the fact that it’s great self-sufficient, or would you feel differently if, at the end, you learned it was crafted entirely by generative AI?
I hear a lot of people answer the former. The value is determined by the quality of the finished product and nothing else. Personally, I feel a sort of Schroedinger’s cat effect where I can listen to a piece of music and enjoy it for what it is but learning whether it was produced by humans or not changes my experience of it retrospectively – as would learning that the banister twisties were made by robots – or slaves.
For my pop production I end up going with a different form of deception. I copy paste several takes from other choruses, apply pitch and formant shifts to make them sound like different people and slap a “medium sized room” reverb plugin on the whole thing.
As I listen back I realize that the important thing in both the banister twisties and my fake choir is the context in which they stand.
Imagine those 170 year old banister twisties sandwiched between a rubber floor and a cold army of fluorescent ceiling lights in a Stop &
Shop. I don’t think I’d even notice them – let alone be moved. It is the context of the wood beams and impossible-to-fake age of the building to which the banister adds just a little bit more magic.
Imagine a professional choir recorded in a church in support of a song that was just mediocre. Right?
The context is first and foremost. The idea needs to speak to the human experience. The song needs to be good. And then, with those bones in place, we may just be rewarded if we roll up our sleeves and use the tools of our time, such as they are, to twist some unyielding piece of metal into adornment.