🆕 Never Post! What Does The Internet Sound Like? [Archive Pull]

Originally published on April 10th, 2024, enjoy a conversation between Charlie Harding of Switched on Pop and Executive Producer Jason where they talk about what pop-musical acts have sounded like the internet.

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What Does the Internet Sound Like?

• You should listen to Switched on Pop generally, but also here’s the interview they did with 100 gecs.

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I am your executive producer, Jason Oberholzer, here with a poll from the archives. The year, 2024. The month, April. The day, the tenth.

We released into the unsuspecting world an episode of devastating import, including our first contributing producer piece by Marie Kolaru and Georgia reading for any choice unrequited love song for the Panopticon. And yet, none of those things is what I'm bringing you today. I am bringing you something fun because if there's one thing you know about me, I love fun. And on that fateful day in 2024, I had fun with our pal, Charlie Harding. You know him, you love him.

He switched on pop. Music journalist professor all around great hang. Charlie and I talked about what sounds like the Internet. Like, what music sounds like the Internet. Historically speaking, the kinds of sounds that when you hear them, you say, ah, that That's the Internet.

And why am I bringing this to you now? Well, I think it's nothing more than the perhaps misguided hope that you too might like fun. And that in this month of all months, it might feel good to have some fun. So without further ado, on the other side of these commercials which I suppose is a do you will have to deal with if you are not on the member feed, I bring you back in time to Charlie Harding and I talking noise. So a couple weeks ago, the Never Post editorial crew was trying to answer for ourselves a question.

What does the internet sound like? And the first band that came to mind was one hundred Gex. I think in some part because of a conversation that we remembered our guest having on his podcast, Switched On Pop. Charlie Harding is a singer songwriter music producer, co author of the book Switched On Pop, How Popular Music Works and Why It Matters, and a co host of the podcast already named Switched on Pop. Charlie, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

So a year ago, and change, you said in talking about 100 that they were the sound of the Internet. Yeah. It seems to be immediately, obviously, spinal cord level true, and I wonder why.

My reaction to a hundred Gex sounding like the Internet was a off the cuff honest reaction. It was not a particularly thought out one. It just is sounds like the accurate word to describe it. You have the bad cheap samples of guitars on a song like Money Machine. Weird fomented, shifted vocals that feel like they've gone through some bad kazaw and compression and lossiness.

There's this capitalist obsession with wealth and their music feels like a mash up of everything. Country, dubstep, trap, nu metal, SoundCloud rap, beeps and bloops everywhere in the background.

Completely unprocessed sine waves. Things that

are distorted and and and pushed beyond the clipping stage of limiters Yeah. Just to like grate you and be abrasive. I mean, the abrasiveness of it feels like it's the sound of the Internet. Like it sounds like it's the sound of QAnon. It's interwoven, it's messy, it's complex, it's stupid.

Yeah. Like they they are good at taking things that are aesthetically low culture and making it high culture in much the way that the Internet functions. Yeah. That is just that's the sound. I think that though we've heard the sounds of the Internet since really the dawn of at least the consumer Internet.

And so where do we wanna peg that? The World Wide Web of the nineties or like DARPA? Or where do we think there was a sound?

You You know, I'm sure there was a DARPA sound, like some like humming, like server room running the Internet.

Sure.

Some very clacky keys on some old machines. But I honestly think that you could say that the AOL dial up tone isn't just the sound of the Internet. It is the sound that inspires glitch music, hyper pop. I think it is the or text of the sound of the Internet. You have harsh, unpleasant, unexpected sounds.

They are brash. They happen in an unexpected order. There are insertions of all kinds of different colors of noise, all controlled by monopolistic telecommunications company. Like, the sound of AOL metaphorizes the entire experience of being on the Internet.

So what's really interesting to me about that is when I try to envision what the earliest sounds are that we could all agree, yes, that sounds like the Internet. It is technology focused. So Yeah. I think you could make arguments for going back as far as like the nineteen sixties and like Morton Subotnick and music made by computers that clacked and glitched and was kind of almost an AOL dial up experience. After that, I think the technology of computers meshes with the technology of like synthesized music in a way.

And the weirdest part of that timeline, whenever I try to think about it, is where do you put craft work? And does craft work sound like the Internet?

Definitely. I mean, I feel like they're evoking all this idea of robotics and post humanism. The old synthesizers that people would have to patch together used various patch cables that might have been used in like a telephone operating set. In fact, Sure. Know, the images of like Wendy Carlos operating her early modular synthesizer Yeah.

Feels like it could be a telephone operator. So there is this interwovenness between the sounds of those machines, how they're how they're actually patched together, what they even look like. And the fact that I mean, if we wanna go way way way way way way way back to the nineteenth century, the Tellaharmonium was one of the first synthesizers ever created. It was this like giant multi 100 ton machine, and its goal was to generate, I think like sine waves that would make music that would be played over telecommunication networks, really early phone networks. Yeah.

So there's there's an interwoven history between I think all synthesized music and things that make bleep bloops and our our relationship to digital technology and communications.

Okay. Totally. And other synthesized elements like the eight zero eight. The eight zero eight is like the most important thing in modern music probably Yeah. Developed in the eighties alongside synthesizers.

And you think planet rock, which is actually referencing craft work

Yeah.

Early example of using an eight zero eight. And in some ways, influences the sound of like the future. Yeah. I think it's very hard to parse what is supposed to sound like quote, the future Mhmm. And what is supposed to sound like the Internet.

Because for a while, they were kind of the same vision.

So many of the essential sounds of contemporary popular music were failed hardware devices that were made by the Roland Corporation in Japan. And the height of Japan and sort of all the vision of technology in the future that Japan represented. And they would make these devices like the eight zero eight or the three zero three base machine. These devices were failures when they came out and were later rediscovered in pawn shops by hip hop producers and other, you know, trans and house producers and repurposed and made in very sort of DIY environments, there is something also about the sound of the Internet, which is that DIY piece it together kind of aesthetic.

Yeah. Okay. So, you know, we start with sine wave experiments at the turn of the century. Apparently, we have computers in the nineteen fifties and sixties and craft work in the seventies.

Mhmm.

We have in the eighties, a new wave of synthesizers and drum machines and Mhmm. We emerge into the nineties, which is kind of where we started this conversation with Yeah. The world wide web as a place where a lot of the aesthetic was DIY, repurpose. I think the other thing was like academia and colleges. Certainly, the people who would be listening to a Morton Subotnick and like having ideas about it, meets like people who would be sharing files on Usenet and the kinds of things they would be interested in.

Right. Right.

And to me, that all wraps up into what I call like the snow crash era of how we think about what the Internet should sound like.

Right.

Virtual reality ninjas doing weird hacker stuff.

The music that we start to download at that time also I think influences the sound of the Internet. As the m p three is developed, those really bad quality, lossy sounds I feel like a lot of trance music was being distributed to be listened to on Winamp. Like, I think of bad quality versions of De Rude's Sandstorm. But it sounds even like grainier and more more sandy because the quality is so bad, such that now we're in a time where we're actually nostalgic for that lossy sound. And there are now plug ins that emulate that lossiness that helped famously make the entire Phoebe Bridgers record sound so kind of nostalgic.

Yeah. So the actual sounds that we're hearing also, I think, contribute to the feeling of the aesthetic of the Internet at that time.

That makes sense to me a lot. I mean, so m p three arrived in 1991. Yeah. So that certainly lines up. At this point, it becomes interesting that the tech component of the sound converts from more hardware based Mhmm.

To sort of more software or platform based. Limewire Right. Napster.

Right. I think it's also worth pointing out that some of the music that's being distributed in more into the late nineties is often reflecting the anxieties about the Internet. I think about especially Radiohead's Okay Computer and probably I think of all songs that best represent that that work would be like fitter happier. Productive. Okay.

And I can't on antibiotics. But probably I think like the sound that captures it at that time for me is is Aphex Twin.

Okay.

Like a song like Peak eight two four five four two zero one. The way that he's using these titles that might actually sound like usernames and a user forum, the images behind his albums look like cheap digital art. Like it's it's all in the digital culture of that time. And the sounds are I mean, they sound kinda like the AOL dial up tones. Right?

It's just like Yeah. Glitch, scratch, noise, unexpected, constantly changing.

Yeah. I think even of I had Ottecra on my list for this period. Mhmm. So something like garbage m x. I think you play anyone Ottecra and they're like, yeah, that's computers or something.

But there was also this thing around like The Prodigy. Yeah. And like Right. European synth kind of dangerous music like Firestarter that you would put behind people when they're hacking in the movies and they're the cool dangerous ones and that is the Internet.

Yeah. This is like the movie, The Net, or better would be the soundtrack to The Matrix. The Matrix is basically soundtracked by Prodigy like tones. It's acid house, it's trance, it's the sound of a dark Berlin club with green strobe lights.

Yeah. I I think this is probably the last time where the Internet felt like a subculture enough. Yes. Something dangerous and foreign and subculture y could be a shorthand for what are they doing out there?

Yeah. I mean, to your point, that sound of the Internet evolves from hardware to software because the Internet moves from being something technical to something seamless. Like, we are talking over the Internet now and it doesn't feel like a digital experience. It tries to be more human, more frictionless, doesn't require you to have any programming skills. You don't have to log into the net.

Yeah. It's just seamless now.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I think this takes us sort of elegantly into the social web of the arts. Mhmm.

I think

it's sort of the next very definite Right. Period here. And this is when our mash up DIY culture starts to bloom. Right. People are making things on YouTube.

People are accustomed enough to pulling things off of Limewire Napster and Kazaa to get all of their references in one place and

Sure.

The quality has improved somewhat on what you can find and so I think about Girl Talk.

This is the time as even before Google as a motto was talking about the open web. They're like, we are an open company while other companies are closed. Like, there's still very much this open source culture that exists on the Internet, which does not exist.

And that also covers like mix tapes. Like, is the middle Lil Wayne's famous run becoming the best alive on the back of easy sampling and mix tapes and a general sense in culture that you no longer had to show up with your own studio album of your own beats in order to be a participant. You could just use other people's beats better. Mhmm.

And you brought up the social web. I think this is a time when the sound of the Internet actually becomes more community niche and platform based. Charlie x c x comes from MySpace. Yeah. SoundCloud rap.

Carly Rae Jepsen is in many ways owes her career to Justin Bieber tweeting about her. Yeah. Justin Bieber himself was made on YouTube. And contemporary artists like Rina Sallayama or Jacob Collier are YouTube first. And so these these platforms sort of start developing their own subcultures that make their own sounds and communities.

I think there's less of a monoculture sound of the Internet as different platforms develop.

One of the people I had in my list here that I think is very interesting is Sonny John Moore. He was originally first to last, which I think is the sound of the MySpace emo Internet of this era.

And

then was Skrillex. Even the name

Skrillex sounds like the sound of AOL dial up against Skrillex. And the song like Bangarang. Not only did it help propel dubstep to become the predominant genre for a few years, it was the most jarring Internet y sounding Yeah. Timbres. The tones are so unpleasant and so unexpected and over the top.

Like, those sounds feel like the experience of being on the Internet. Like, the Internet is this jarring unpleasant place. And by the way, it's also fun and exhilarating and you can't get off of it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it has so many of the signifiers of, Tamberly, what you described. It's an abrasive technology. It's courting of unpleasantness and joy at the same time.

And like humorous sampling. It's it's kind

of Right. Right. Just a perfect Oh my god. Yeah. Right.

That silly YouTube clip which turns into this like horror moment, but it's actually some girl stacking cups that she's just done faster than any other person in the history. Yes. Oh my god.

Yeah. Somewhere in the middle of this run, Kanye started sampling YouTube clips. And that feels to me like a wildly important moment for what it means to sound like the Internet.

That there's a way of claiming authority by referencing user generated content.

Right.

What a shift of power dynamics.

Yes. Absolutely. The other thing that jumped out to me when you were talking there is humor. There's humor and frivolity, which we haven't kind of like got into

that much. Paranoid Android was not funny. Yeah. Apex Twin No. Is not that funny.

Is there funny music that's just funny that sounds like the Internet? So like early Lonely Island before they were SNL was 100%. An Internet viral phenomenon. But if you heard like dick in a box, out of context, would you be like, that sounds like the Internet. It's my dick in a box.

The jokes are kinda Internet y, like where does that fall?

This is the thing of the Internet becoming more software. Actually, the Internet just becomes culture. And so Yeah. I think as the Internet becomes a more seamless consumer experience, it has less of its own distinct sound that is tied to technology. We're no longer making films about the net.

What's it gonna be? We gotta hack into these systems. Now we're making films about the future of AI and the interconnection between technology and and human spaces and cognition, things that we're fearing far off into the future. The Internet's kind of this, like, tame background thing that, like, maybe China stealing all of our data on TikTok. But yeah, we'll just live with it.

Yeah. I think the final player here before we get back to the contemporary moment is Twee ness. The thing that always jumps to my mind is Zoe Deschanel

Sure.

And Joseph Gordon Levitt in the early twenty tens. And something about that is YouTube based, is user generated, is vulnerable, is self produced, optimism of an Obama era, which is

sort of

that sound feels like it came from the Internet. Does it sound like the Internet?

Not anymore because Tweet at one point looks DIY. It looks like the signs that everybody hung in their homes from Etsy for a while before they became mass market in every Airbnb. The problem is that sound becomes the sound of corporate America. Basically, these sounds become safe. The sort of Twi ukulele music is akin to like Canva taking over Instagram, where all of a sudden everybody has access to these like kind of good design crafty tools and can make social movements into slide decks.

And I I think I think that the corporatization of that sound really sort of neutered it of any power.

I wanna take you to hyperpop now. I wanna go by way of Vine and I wanna talk about Bill Wertz. And I wanna get us to hyperpop from there.

I'm very curious because I my brain didn't go that direction.

The thing that I think is important about Vine is that it proved that you could make a community formed around snippets of primarily sound. And there's something important about developing a sonic shorthand that was very self referential and directly talking about Internet culture. Yeah. And especially, think Bill Wertz is like the apotheosis of self referential Internet music that is also pointing towards the harmonic intricacies that hyperpop is about to pick up and mainstream. Hello.

I'm a piece of garbage. You know, if harmonies change every six seconds, like a vine changes every six seconds, can we keep your attention on the form of this song? To me, that's kind of like the hyper pop endeavor. What is love? Fruit.

No. Bread. No.

Fruit and bread. Probably not. Is it a conversation?

Yeah. I I I did not know this lineage. Thank you for educating me. But the sound is spot on. It's also got those sort of cheap, like, MIDI sampler tones.

It's not trying to do the recreate the sounds of the perfect 1980 studio in the home. This is like acknowledging the limitations of the tools at hand.

And this is where I start to feel like video game culture matters and Yeah. Of course. Inserts itself as one of the languages you have to know to say that you know the Internet.

That's because the development of video game music is intertwined with the development of digital synthesis. Right? Each system as they developed from Atari to NES to the Sega Genesis, you have these new chips that are able to go from like making like really ugly only square waves to maybe they can make like three different tones and eventually get FM synthesis. And so the music program for those games really sort of mimic the experience of the synthesis techniques that your Apex twins are are playing with.

Okay. So I passed us through Vine because I'm obsessed with Vine. But you you said, Charlie, that your brain took a different path to get to the present now. There's something you wanted to step back to. What path was that?

For me, it all begins ten years ago in the creation of hyperpop, and specifically the label PC Music built by AG Cook and his larger community. With this really cheap looking digital artwork that could have been made as a MS Paint artwork. Yeah. And not solely the works of the sort of larger PC music label and community, but, you know, other extended artists like Arca, Sophie who's associated with this crew, start making music that is a nostalgic examining what the Internet has sounded like. And then not going to eleven, but going to like 11,000 Yeah.

To be at the speed of the the Internet today. And so the video game sounds, the AOL dial up tones, all that Vine stuff you're just talking about. Unpleasant clangorous Yeah. Confusing.

So I think that about circles where we are. Who is the sound? What is the sound of the Internet next?

I feel concerned about the future sound of the Internet.

Okay.

Like, we we have been so distorted and disoriented. Can we go any further down that route? I don't know. I don't think so. I hope not.

I mean, what normally happens after these moments of excess? Isn't Pendulums. Order reestablished?

Isn't that traditionalism? Like, and aren't we already hearing that? Like, the rise of country music that's happening right now? That's gonna be the next vibe. Just return to traditionalism.

Yeah. I'm struck with some irony. As I try to think about the extent to which I care about bringing AI music into this conversation, I'm struck by an irony that it seems like our progress in music that sounds like the Internet has been the human concern with making computerized music sound more and more like a computerized space, and continue to exceed the capabilities of an individual human's ability to achieve something, and to more and more fractured, and fractal, and wild, and painful dynamics. And then we are now introducing AI music

Mhmm.

That is attempting to do the absolute opposite. Mhmm. Trying to simulate a traditional human output if possible.

We've entered a moment where I just did a four part miniseries about Daft Punk on Switched on Pop. And I realized, of course, Daft Punk had to blow themselves up because the whole image of the robot and their vocoder voice was about the fears and anxieties of technology from the nineteen seventies. And our fears of anxieties about music and art and our place in this world have so transformed that the image of these two robots kind of just turns into a joke. Now, it's like, does this AI become sentient and make better music than any human ever has? Does it become our overlord at the same time?

It's a whole new set of fears and worries and how are we going to respond to that? Yeah. Once it starts really playing in commerce and messing with cultural expectations much more significantly on scale, then I think we'll see some very interesting art being created as a response.

Charlie, thank you so much. This was an absolute blast.

It was a joy. Thank you for inviting me. Goodbye.

That is the archival episode we have for you today. If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news and interstitials, you can find the link in the show notes. Never Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this segment, please consider becoming a member at neverpo.st. You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping us keep the show going.

Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.