What does all of this have to do with ecology? And with Radiohead? For the most part, it doesn’t have much to do with the first, at least as ecology is commonly conceived, but I want to point out how it does or how it can. As for Radiohead, they are as good an example of “process-relationally<\/a> interesting” music as any. (One of their albums made my “top 10 albums” list<\/a> a few years ago, though really it’s their later work that cashes out on the promise of that album.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n The main reason to connect the two, however, is because that’s what Brad Osborn does in his book Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead<\/a> (Oxford University Press, 2017). What I want to do here is to extend his argument to the sort of thing I mean when I talk about perceptual ecology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Osborn’s argument about “why Radiohead?<\/em>” goes something like this. Unlike “smooth jazz,” Muzak<\/a>, or Britney Spears’s “Oops, I Did it Again<\/a>,” a song that is “so transparently native to an established style,” and unlike (at the other end) “aggressively abstract” works like Stockhausen’s Kontakte<\/a><\/em>, which “bombard[…] our senses with sounds for which we have little to no frame of reference,” Radiohead’s music locates itself somewhere in an ideal mid-range, a “sweet spot along the Spears-Stockhausen continuum,” in that it consistently presents listeners “with recognizable musical stimuli, which we register as expectation, only to subvert those expectations with potent surprises” (pp. 9, 11).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, music is about expectation: following it, and challenging it. Some of us favor more of the latter, either because we’re overly familiar with too much of the former (music that follows expectations) or for other, more personal reasons, while others, captivated enough by life’s exigencies, enjoy the former all the more eagerly. Osborn details how Radiohead follows and challenges expectations in relation to musical form, rhythm\/metre, timbre, and harmony and voice leading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For all that I enjoy listening to Radiohead, this thesis isn’t all that exciting to me except<\/em> in its application to the details of the music. The details, after all, are where life gets exciting: in this case, in the specific rhythms, movements and textures, the sonic and melodic play, the singing and the lyrics (and a chapter could have been, but wasn’t, written on Thom Yorke’s lyrics), and in the complex interplay between all of these. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is, arguably, where Osborn’s application of the theory of ecological perception begins to get <\/em>more genuinely ecological. He writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n An ecological approach to understanding and perceiving form necessarily happens in time.<\/em> First-listening experiences, during which we improvise a map of musical events, offer valuable insight into that approach. Subsequent hearings are also interesting, as we continually balance real-time and retrospective experiences in an attempt to make sense of the whole from the parts. After years of interacting with Radiohead songs, I find that the real-time experience of formal perception rubs against or enhances what I now know the song will eventually do, and I still listen for new ways to understand those larger structures in relationship to the perceptually immediate parts. The experience is truly an ecological one, just as intimate and interactive as dancing in a familiar space,<\/em> noting how your ever-changing position with regard to other elements and organisms affects your understanding of the space as a whole. [p. 40, emphasis added]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n What he means, of course, is that our experience of music, like our experience of anything, is dynamic, processual, and relational within its environment(s). This is arguably a process-relational<\/a> thesis (as I’ve written about before<\/a>) but not quite an ecological<\/em> one, and arguably not even what Gibson had in mind in his studies of animals and their environments. It’s, at best, the ecological study of the very limited<\/em> environment of human listeners and recorded music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a point at which Osborn’s analysis becomes more than that, however, and that’s when he describes the video of “The Pyramid Song.” The video features a “post-terrestrial earth” and a lone humanoid, seemingly “adapted to a watery planet,” descending to the underwater ruins of an abandoned city. The city features “[s]kyscrapers, floating office chairs, webs of power lines, and dozens of cars; all tombstones of a past society that has literally drowned itself in technology.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/9780190629236.jpg?resize=119%2C180&ssl=1\")
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