We tend in this dialogue, both musicians, music lovers and musical engineers, to chat about and pursue some sort of Ideal of perfect recordings.
But in actuality, when we hear a live concert, if it's
a half-decent or better hall, we
bring home a huge subjective package of memories far
greater than just the
musicians playing the right notes. We remember our companion
and the pleasant
feelings we had with and about our companion. Like a
family Christmas, we
remember the Smell of the Hall. We remember a little
bit of the ambient coughing
and fidgeting and how it resonated. We remember the excitement
of the special
occasion of going to a concert in an unfamiliar place
like New Haven (a little plug
for my conductor pal's Orchestra New England just announcing
its new season:
www.orchestranewengland.org ). So a concert, and even
the first time we hear a
new recording, are far more than well-engineered mathematical
sounds and
sequences -- they are far more Proustian experiences,
or in the psych jargon,
synesthetic experiences, crossover tangles and jumbles
of hearing, sight, sound,
smell, touch, all triggering and tickling rare corners
of our memories and emotions.
Ordinarily these subtle and unique little extras are way
in the background. But
perhaps I love The Hum because another unique aspect
of Gould was to
intentionally play with the Official Balance between
Foreground and Background, between Phenomenon and Negative Space, we all
were formally and rigidly and unimaginatively trained to accept, where
every patron's cough is Wrong and Bad, the smells (say, of an apple pie
baking in the kitchen while we first play a new CD) are officially Totally
Beside the Point. But of course being human, they're not beside the point
at all -- they can't be separated from the Etude; they are part of the
human thing which is larger than the Etude: the Experience.
With computers and electronics, we should have been able
to produce Perfect
Music -- take a Bach score and just have the computer
play precisely the right
tempo, precisely the right frequencies, precisely the
right wave shapes, attacks,
sustains and decays. And completely banish bad microphone
placement, bad
acoustics, coughing, fidgeting, and certainly humming.
I know lots of people who
own Carlos' "Switched-on Bach" -- but I know no one for
whom
computer-generated keyboard music is anything more than
just an oddity in their
collection of human-generated "Imperfect" music.
Bob / Droog4 / Elmer Elevator
http://www.javanet.com/~bobmer/
Baldwin, Daniel wrote:
>
> I have begun to acquire some CDs on labels such as Pearl (Edwin
Fischer's
> recording of WTC), Dutton Labs (Beecham's recordings of Mozart
symphonies)
> and Arkadia (an Italian label-- I just purchased Cortot's
recording of the
> Chopin etudes) -- all of these are transfers from 78s. The
Dutton and
> Arkadia recordings are remarkably free of surface distortion;
they have a
> kind of unearthly purity which almost sounds real, but not
quite.
John Hill replied:
This can happen when *too much* of the surface (and other) noises
are
removed. Since the ambience of the original recording
is buried down there
in the noise floor of the original 78, it too will be removed
when the digital
algorithm for the de-noising is employed. "Unearthly purity"
is a good
description, because real pianos in real rooms or halls just
don't sound
like that. The brain knows this inherently and tells you
that something is
not quite right when you have a recording that sounds like it
was done
in a dead broom closet.