MECHANICAL MUSIC.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 186, 8 August 1930, Page 6

MECHANICAL MUSIC.

Sir Hugh Allen, who lias done so much at Oxford to encourage the undergraduates to be active supporters of, and participators in music, especially singing, thinks that there is a real danger that mechanised music may make people inclined to be passive listeners instead of players and singers. In the place of real orchestras we now have pictured players with synchronised reproduction of the sound of instruments. In our youth we were introduced to waxwork shows with the announcement that the figures were "as large as life and twice as natural." We now have figures of players on the saxophone and drum as natural as life and twice as large. Even church services are mechanically reproduced so that you can "go to church" while sitting in an armchair in front of the fire with earphones duly attached and a novel in. your lap. A thrifty congregation in one of the suburbs of Berlin proposed to dispense with their minister altogether and substitute a wireless loudspeaker in his place after the fashion of a Chinese praying wheel. It is impossible now to avoid mechanical music, which has added one more terror to the already toomultitudinous noises of the street, and in restaurants and places where they eat the music is done by gramophone records or loudspeakers. It is said that in many homes the wireless is turned on from force of habit and little or no attention is paid to the music given thereby, the only idea of turning it on being to have some sort of a noise while household work is in progress. Yet there must remain for many people the loss of the personal touch. The thrifty diet of tinned tongues, _ whether of song or speech, can never have quite the same appeal as the living voice. The reluctance of men to go and hear sermons would be better overcome by the Churches admitting women to their pulpits than by any wireless device. There is also, as Sir Hugh Allen has pointed out, a danger that people will cease to take an active part in music and will become hearers and not doers. This would be a real calamity and would give people a wrong impression of the musical art. Even the best reproduction cannot give quite the right sound. Mass production in the domain of fine arts is apt to destroy appreciation of finer points. There will probably be a reaction against mechanised drama, music, speech and a demand for the human touch in all these things. Meanwhile we have to be thankful that there are still some spheres of human activity as yet uninvaded by mechanised devices. We have the Abrams machine in the domain of medicine and the "lie detector" in criminal procedure, hut in such things as company promoting and burglary there is yet a province untouched by the god of the machine. —W.M.