Years and years ago I used to play the piano quite well. This was back when I was living in Israel, and going to a specialized high school for musicians and dancers. As part of our school year, we each had to perform a few pieces at an end of year recital. When I was about 14, I played Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique". It's a beautiful piece, and truly very full of pathos. Since this was my mom's favourite piece, she recorded me during the recital, and some years later transferred the tape to a CD. In one of my nostalgia fits I decided to listen to it, and discovered something funny has happened in the process: the sonata got split into two tracks! You see, I made a long dramatic pause between the second and third parts of the piece. To the audience who was in the concert hall it was very clear that the piece is not finished - my posture was still tense, my hands were slowly making an arc in the air from the high notes that ended the second part to the low notes that begin the third part... Unfortunately, the machine that transferred the tape-recorded music onto a CD is programmed to count anything over two seconds of silence as a signal that the track is over and a new one is about to begin. On tape my dramatic pause was simply silence, and so, right in the most "pathetic" place in the piece, the CD player does a little humming sound as it moves to the next track...
Besides the annoying humming sound, the separation of the sonata into two tracks changes the whole structure of the piece. To use a text-based example, it would be like taking the final three or four chapters of a detective mystery and binding them separately (which actually might be a neat idea, if done intentionally). I guess that this instance, like my previous post about the Three Musketeers, highlights the problematic nature of automatic digitization of works. By digitizing automatically we accept the possibility of error, and usually the errors are small enough not to matter too much to most people. But there are times when a seemingly small error changes the entire work.
Besides the annoying humming sound, the separation of the sonata into two tracks changes the whole structure of the piece. To use a text-based example, it would be like taking the final three or four chapters of a detective mystery and binding them separately (which actually might be a neat idea, if done intentionally). I guess that this instance, like my previous post about the Three Musketeers, highlights the problematic nature of automatic digitization of works. By digitizing automatically we accept the possibility of error, and usually the errors are small enough not to matter too much to most people. But there are times when a seemingly small error changes the entire work.
That's really too bad that the automated digitization of your recording split it into two tracks. That would frustrate me to no end.
ReplyDeleteYour point about this being a flaw in automated digitization has me wondering about specialization for the humans who do the digitizing. Is it not possible that the person digitizing your recording might not know the song and make the same assumption (and, consequently, the same mistake)? I ask only because I worked in the Music Division of Library and Archives Canada, and when I left the then Librarian and Archivist of Canada (Daniel Caron *shudder*) was planning on removing the specializations from our positions and having all cataloguers work on any material as it comes in. (I'm not sure if this has been implemented or not - but it was definitely an unpopular idea in my division of LAC). The impetus behind this proposed change was to improve time- and cost-efficiency by having less cataloguers employed at any one time and by standardizing the cataloguing process. But how much meaning could be lost if a cataloguer (or digitizer) is not familiar with his/her subject matter? How often could this kind of mistake be made?
It seems to me that if we want to make the vast majority of research material available digitally, we really need to focus on the quality of the digitization, so that the artefact is preserved as a coherent whole. Just makes a difficult process that much more difficult. But that's what we hope to be doing soon, isn't it?
The technical error that happened with your CD has actually happened with many really good pieces of music. I would be tempted to rip the CD and then use Garageband or Audacity to combine the tracks and then burn a new CD.
ReplyDeleteTwo of Pink Floyd's albums, Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon essentially play as one long song. When a CD separates them into tracks it totally disrupts the listening experience. The whole notion of a track can be problematic when music is created outside the 3 minute song schema.
Jeremy, you make a great point that the digitizer or cataloguer really needs to have some idea of how they want to, or should, store a representation. Because, as Sperberg-McQueen says, each choice we make in a representation has intent, and that intention may live on in the representation long after we are around to explain it.