I had an Amish day recently. I’d been spending too much time in front of my various screens, editing music and speech on my various electronic devices, doing the company tax, emails, watching videos on YouTube, filling in spreadsheets, reading books, watching ABC iview and SBS On Demand, listening to radio and writing Soapboxes for Limelight. After all this my mind was a blur of digits and pixels and I needed a break. 

I went for a walk and listened to the sounds of the neighbourhood. I heard birds and crying babies and bad piano practice. I was at one with my environment, attuned to the physical world. For all our obsession with the digital age, we aren’t digital. We are made up of blood and bone and we eat food not bytes. 

Music, like digital information, is totally ephemeral. Sometimes when I pre-construct a radio program and download it onto a memory stick, it feels like a lot of time and effort has been spent with nothing to show for it. Three hours of stereo radio is about 1.37 gigabytes of information, but for all the impressive sound of that number, there’s no extra weight on the memory stick. It should be heavy to the touch, with all those musicians inside. An average orchestra made up of 90 players weighs around 6,300 kg, and adding the instruments as well would easily bring the total up to 8300 kg – over 8 tonnes of music-makers. Yet I can hold the sound of all those harps, violins and tubas on a memory stick between my index finger and thumb. 

Music used to weigh a lot. In the old days you could only fit about six minutes of music on one side of a 78 rpm record. Even 33 rpm records weighed a ton if you tried to lift up a stack of them. Printed music weighed a lot too, and it still does. If I go off to conduct a concert my bag is usually weighed down by kilos of full scores (Wagner’s music is the heaviest) but now all that information can  fit into a tablet or laptop or even your phone. One can only imagine what will happen in the future – perhaps the next step is ‘Music Vision’, where the music scrolls like a TV autocue down the lenses of your glasses or special contacts. 

But now I have spent too long in front of my computer screen again. I am getting digitally twitchy. I am going to switch off, pull up my suspenders, don my broad-brimmed straw hat and pre-grown Amish beard and leave the 21st century. At least until the 7 o’clock news.