"Modern instruments were designed to throw sound all in one direction"
About this Quote
Ribot’s line lands like a tossed-off shop-floor truth, but it’s really a critique of how modern music learned to behave in public. “Throw sound” is the giveaway: it frames instruments less as voices and more as projectors, built to aim, penetrate, and win attention. The subtext is architectural and economic. Once music moved from rooms to halls, from circles to stages, design started serving the farthest seat and the paying crowd. Volume and directionality become features, not accidents; the instrument is optimized for projection the way a brand is optimized for reach.
He’s also hinting at what gets lost when sound becomes a beam. Direction implies hierarchy: performer to audience, front to back, star to spectator. Older musical situations - chamber playing, folk gatherings, ritual settings - often distribute sound as a shared environment. You don’t just receive it; you sit inside it, with competing sources and messy bleed. Modern design, and the amplification culture that follows, encourages clean separation: lead and backing, solo and accompaniment, the mix as a kind of policing.
Ribot, coming out of downtown New York’s experimental scene, has spent a career poking at that policing. His playing loves friction, air, and the sense that music can spill sideways, not just forward. Read the quote as a small rebellion against the concert-industrial default: music as a one-way delivery system. He’s asking what happens if we stop aiming for the back wall and start designing for intimacy, chaos, and mutual listening.
He’s also hinting at what gets lost when sound becomes a beam. Direction implies hierarchy: performer to audience, front to back, star to spectator. Older musical situations - chamber playing, folk gatherings, ritual settings - often distribute sound as a shared environment. You don’t just receive it; you sit inside it, with competing sources and messy bleed. Modern design, and the amplification culture that follows, encourages clean separation: lead and backing, solo and accompaniment, the mix as a kind of policing.
Ribot, coming out of downtown New York’s experimental scene, has spent a career poking at that policing. His playing loves friction, air, and the sense that music can spill sideways, not just forward. Read the quote as a small rebellion against the concert-industrial default: music as a one-way delivery system. He’s asking what happens if we stop aiming for the back wall and start designing for intimacy, chaos, and mutual listening.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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