FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Sunday, March 26, 2006
How ethical is recorded music??
On the Gramaphone forum, user Quiddler asks :
"...if we're going to do so much to the recordings that great orchestras make with human playing, altering them by technological means, aren't we coming closer and closer to using computers to play music? Something that I hope we all fear?"
(see the whole entry by clicking here)
I've got to admit that this whole line of enquiry strikes me as odd : whether recording an orchestra is unethical on account of it failing to give a true respresentation of a given performance. It seems to me that, by it's very nature, a recording of anything can only ever give one impression of the original acoustic environment and it is the task of the production team to decide what impression they wish to give.
For example, the positioning of the microphones for the recording of an orchestral composition is vital to how the finished piece will sound - to provide more space on the recording, and so to give the listener a greater impression of being part of the audience, it is possible to place the mics further back from the musicians and compensate as required with filtering and volume control etc. As far as I can tell, this practise is some way from having computers play the music themselves - simply a method of presenting a real acoustic environment through the medium of electrically powered loud-speakers.
As far as ethics are concerned, the only real question would be if in presenting a recording one is attempting to mislead the listener in some way, for example in the heavy editing of bad performances to give the impression that they weren't out of tune etc. But, we know that this is common practise in studios around the world, especially those dealing with pop and rock music - a little tweaking here and there can make the most awful performance quite passable.
As for computers playing music themselves... well, many very able scientists and musicians have tried to pull this one off and generally failed to replicate the humanity of music and I don't think there's any fear of that changing just yet!
"...if we're going to do so much to the recordings that great orchestras make with human playing, altering them by technological means, aren't we coming closer and closer to using computers to play music? Something that I hope we all fear?"
(see the whole entry by clicking here)
I've got to admit that this whole line of enquiry strikes me as odd : whether recording an orchestra is unethical on account of it failing to give a true respresentation of a given performance. It seems to me that, by it's very nature, a recording of anything can only ever give one impression of the original acoustic environment and it is the task of the production team to decide what impression they wish to give.
For example, the positioning of the microphones for the recording of an orchestral composition is vital to how the finished piece will sound - to provide more space on the recording, and so to give the listener a greater impression of being part of the audience, it is possible to place the mics further back from the musicians and compensate as required with filtering and volume control etc. As far as I can tell, this practise is some way from having computers play the music themselves - simply a method of presenting a real acoustic environment through the medium of electrically powered loud-speakers.
As far as ethics are concerned, the only real question would be if in presenting a recording one is attempting to mislead the listener in some way, for example in the heavy editing of bad performances to give the impression that they weren't out of tune etc. But, we know that this is common practise in studios around the world, especially those dealing with pop and rock music - a little tweaking here and there can make the most awful performance quite passable.
As for computers playing music themselves... well, many very able scientists and musicians have tried to pull this one off and generally failed to replicate the humanity of music and I don't think there's any fear of that changing just yet!
