(no subject)

[avevale_intelligencer]

matociquala links to this. I've heard the argument before--when CDs came in there was an outcry to the effect that they were Teh Death Uv Rock Un Roll because they weren't scratchy enough, or something like that--and I'm not convinced.

There's a snobbishness and a mystique here that grates on me. I'm a craftsperson when I do music, as when I write or draw--not a good one, by any means, but that's my aspiration. As with the singing cobbler, whose song I have never consciously heard all the way through, I believe work can only be done one way. If someone, under a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances, were to hand-make me a car, I would feel somewhat miffed if that person were to say something like "well, the wing mirrors are on backwards, the headlights don't work and the exhaust vents into the heater--but that makes it a rrreal car (with optional air-clenching and teeth-gritting à la mode Kirk Douglas or Rod Steiger)." I would, in short, ask for a replacement or my money back. Recordings are different from cars, of course, in that you're catching a moment to some extent, but it's still nonsensical not to do the best you can with what you've got. As the Beatles did. They didn't sit around saying "Orright, wack, so we'll bung a bum note in here..." and so on. At least I hope they didn't.

To make mistakes is human. To make the occasional happy mistake is wonderful. To glorify mistakes is idiotic. It leads to the blind alley of punk, in which the most "honest" musician is one who can't play and doesn't care. Or if you take it another way, the best recording ever was Thomas Edison's celebrated rendition of "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and if you want to hear real honesty, try a 78. What the article is documenting is the quest for perfection, and while it's certainly possible to take the wrong path on that quest (as possibly with the over-compression issue) it can only be stupid to decry the quest itself on the grounds that it's wrong to try to make it good.

I feel very strongly about this. There's an entire Cosmic Trifle album stalled up in Peterborough partly because I know my performances as they stand are not good enough, and cannot be made good enough despite all Mike's technical trickery, to be put on a recording for sale. If I were a "real" rock musician, according to this, I should let my out-of-tune croakings and off-beat playing be inflicted on people because that's more "honest." I can't do that. I'm not Tom Waits or Bob Dylan, and that kind of "honesty" isn't my stock in trade. I hope, at some point, to be able to get over there and do better (or find someone else to do it instead) at which point the album will become the work of two distinct groups at two different points in time, apparently playing together. It will become a lie. But it will be a lie composed of good, listenable performances (please gods) and people will enjoy listening to it. And when we play live, which we hope to do soon, I will do my best as always, and hope that people will forgive my mistakes. Forgive them. Not glorify them. Not say my performance wouldn't be better without them. Because art is also craft, and if you aren't doing the best you can with what you've got, you aren't serving either.

Comments

[aunty_marion]

I'm inclined to agree with you. I *know* my knitting/sewing/etc aren't perfect - but I do try to do an honest job of them, to the best of my limited capabilities (yes, I can 'knit anything' - whether or not I can knit it well I leave to others' opinions!).

I've just run out of wool three rows from the end of a fish-shape; I've had to finish it with another nearly-matching wool. This irks me; but it might irk me more to have nearly-a-fish-worth of wool left over (and probably no use for anything else), so I found the closest matching wool I had.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It's a hard call, and it may be that part of the problem is having a simple-minded idea of what needs to be corrected.

It seems to me that the complaint about over-polished boring music is analogous to the complaint about models photoshopped until they look like plastic.

If a work is just being polished according to a rule rather than because polish makes it better, then it might be smoothed away to nothing. Admittedly, it's a lot harder to see whether a work of art works than whether a car works.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

This.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

It's more about a trade off, or rather a complex mesh of trade-offs. The danger is that in trying to fix one particular *kind* of flaw, one becomes obsessed with it and fails to notice that one is introducing a different kind of flaw. And that process sometimes starts because different people are simply more sensitive to different kinds of flaws.

When CD was new, it was thought by some to be a "perfect" medium, because they couldn't hear the kinds of flaws they were so sick of hearing on analogue media. For some the bug-bear was vinyl surface noise, for some (like me) it was the wobbly pitches and "roughness" of analogue tape. It took a while for people to train their ears to not *expect* those old kinds of flaws, and be pleasantly surprised by the lack of them, before they could begin to notice that CD has flaws of its own... While other people, who weren't particularly bothered by the old analogue problems, nonetheless noticed that something sounded "different" and therefore "wrong" about their favourite albums in this new format. In some cases, what was happening was that the more accurate reproduction *exposed* errors and inconsistencies in the original recordings that had been helpfully disguised by a consistant mask of "analogueyness" in the previous editions: Even today, for example, there's often value in deliberately adding a very low level, but *consistent* layer of white or pink noise to a recording, to cover up intermittent bursts of random noise that weren't supposed to be there in the first place, and whihc catch the ear if surrounded by perfect silence. And in other cases, it's true taht the master recordings had been prepared with the expectation that they would be transferred to vinyl, and therefore had engineered-in compensations for the expected effects of that format. Whenteh same masters we transferred directly to CD, rather than re-mastered, the result was quite simply not what the mastering engineer had intended. It was, in a word, *wrong*.

That's reproduction. When it comes to performance, again we have trade-offs: If your personal bug-bear is pitch accuracy on your vocals, you might spend 75 takes getting it closer and closer to perfection, while being oblivious to the fact that your fellow band members and your engineer are getting progressively more bored, irritated and lackadaisical in a way that will adversely affect *their* performances. Or, realising that problem, you might resort to electronic pitch correction instead, but place the job in the hands of an engineer who hasn't yet realised (as perhaps you haven't yourself) that what excites your fans about your unique vocal style is the particular way you slide into the start of each note... He tweaks his nobs and creates the "pitch perfect" performance you wanted, but in the process unwittingly changes the shape of your trade-mark slide into something that sounds just like everybody else's generic run-of-the-mill slide.

Bottom line: One person's "flaw" is another's "interesting feature". And what each person sees as being one or the other can change over time, depending on their degree of exposure to the genre, or the artist, or the medium, and where there attention is focussed at the time.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

And as an addendum: For my money, an imperfect Cosmic Trifle album that reaches my ears before they get too old and fuzzy to make out the lyrics at all is a hell of a lot better than no CT album ever. It's not like you can't do a "Special Edition" re-release ten years down the line when you've finally managed to book Jon Anderson to re-do the vocals the way you want them, is it? =:o}

[ETA:] Of course, I'm a fine one to talk. (Fifteen years and still no album... [BLUSH] )

[keristor.livejournal.com]

This. Good point about the slide, there are a number of singers and other performers whose style is technically 'wrong' who would become totally forgettable if it were 'corrected'.

Also, a lot of the 'corrections' being talked about in the article are indeed those which make the music 'alive'. For instance, I can send you note-perfect and timing-perfect MIDI files of Bach, which are boring. They sound (as they are) like a machine -- nothing to do with the sound card reproduction of the instruments, which is also perfect, but because they have no emotion, no variation in tempo or volume. They are, as some people accuse all of Bach of being, mathematical exercises.

One of the other points in the article was compression. "Let's remove all of the 'errors' in the volume". Yes, let's remove all dynamics so that every drumbeat sounds identical, so that no one ever has to adjust the volume of their car radio. Oops, you just lost all of the intentional dynamics as well as the unintentional ones.

It's what we mean when we say a recording has been "over-produced" (well, one of the aspects).

(Why do 'live' albums sell? Because there are a lot of people who prefer the sound of a band which sound like a band rather than like a machine..)

I would also much rather have a Cosmic Trifle CD to which I can listen than one who comes out after I'm dead but is 'perfect'. I'm glad that I heard "The Filk of Human Kindness" and "Dancing Flames" 20 years ago rather than waiting until they were 'perfect' recordings (and yes, if either were available on CD, straight from the masters with no remixing or 'tidying', warts and all, I would happily buy them and stick them in the car and listen to them over and over; the same for a number of other recordings of that vintage).

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I think what the article is trying to say is not that mistakes are glorious in and of themselves, but that glossy, precise perfection is boring. Thus, while an album comprised entirely of flaws, of poor material, and of technical errors would be bad; one without any of those would be tolerable, but boring. Some errors, the author is arguing, can make art more interesting.

I should note here that as a fan and collector of live music, this is particularly easily seen in live performance, where the virtue isn't perfect reproduction of album tracks, but transcending them in some way. Often that way is increased energy in them, or extended jams, or solos, but more than occasionally, the interest in live music is in the errors in it -- and how the artists recover and continue. (NOT necessarily major flaws -- "train wrecks" -- that cause entire pieces to stop. But a missed note here, or a flubbed lyric there.)

Certainly artists SHOULD strive for perfection, especially in the studio. The article, I think, is decrying an increasing intolerance of errors, and thus of what they feel is a human element, in modern music that's released professionally.