In the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, from where I have just returned, you cannot go to a party or church service without encountering the songs of the region, some of them dating from the civil war, some from the first settlements of the Irish and Scots, some composed yesterday for the use of the local bluegrass bands. People sing in two- or three-part harmony, and they accompany themselves on banjo, bass and guitar, to which they have added the Celtic fiddle, the Spanish mandolin and the Dobro guitar, held flat and played with a Hawaiian slide. I am reminded of the England in which I grew up, where music-making was woven into the fabric of everyday life — hymns in school assembly, choir in church, carol-singing at Christmas and in every other living room an upright piano.

Music is no longer something you produce. It is something you consume. And it is available everywhere, for free, without effort, in a thousand varieties. Why trouble to sing when you can get a far better noise by pressing a button? As for those difficult skills that were once required to get a household through a winter evening — piano-playing, part-singing, chamber music — these now fall on the wrong side of a new class divide: the divide created by digital technology, between those who merely use it, and those who depend upon it like an umbilical cord.

I doubt that this change is reversible. But it leaves us with a serious gap in our social repertoire. Singing is one of the few proven ways in which people can be “of one voice”. In singing together our differences dissolve, and for a blissful moment we are relieved of the strenuous need to be ourselves. All communities make room for these moments of unison, in which people surrender the desire for attention and join the chorus. In our society, however, these moments are increasingly rare. They occur in a disjointed form at football matches. And they occur between adults in private, in the specialised culture of the competition choir. But they are no longer a part of daily life, as they were in my childhood and still are in rural Virginia.

As singing declines, so too does whistling. Whistling was an essential accomplishment at my school in the 1960s — proof of both musical sense and masculine prowess. In those days every building site was alive with it, and our postman could be heard from 100 yards away as he whistled down the street. The songs of our parents — Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin — were addressed to an eager singing and whistling public. They emphasised the melodic line over the rhythmic foundation, and set words whose charm and decency enabled you to sing them anywhere without embarrassment. The jazz standards gave way to the more rhythm-centred idioms of pop; but still melody and word-setting remained paramount. A song like the Beatles’ She Loves You — with its modulating tune and exuberant words — still belongs in the old song-book tradition, and could be sung by any musical person, accompanied on whatever instrument was to hand.

Since then popular music has changed in response to the new way of consuming it. Melodies are truncated, often involving long strings of repeated notes, as in Ooh La by the Kooks, or Wonderwall by Oasis. To sing these melodies you must get on the podium at karaoke night and plug in to the instrumental backing. Otherwise the tune goes dry in your mouth, like ashes. In heavy metal this feature is emphasised, as the performers croak their words over a violent pulse from the drum kit. Heavy metal is the extreme case: it is music that has lost its voice. But even in Wonderwall, in which Noel Gallagher attempts a tune that could be public property, like La donna e mobile or Summertime, the voice is thin and the melody, deprived of its backing, without real life of its own.

The new media, which were supposed to put people in closer contact with each other, have in fact increased the distance between them. Music is going the way of meals, drinks and sex, all of which are ceasing to be occasions for bonding and becoming sources of solitary addiction instead. Humanity is being divided in two by its own inventions. On the one side are the IT-savvy nerds, who do not relate to each other directly, but have mastered all the ways of achieving satisfaction from digital substitutes. On the other side are the savages, as Aldous Huxley might have called them, who sit down to meals with their families, and who drink and sing madrigals with their friends like Samuel Pepys. And the two classes are increasingly estranged from each other, since the moments in which they might have united, as people unite through singing, no longer exist.

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