Re: GG: Humming

[jv <bardolph@home.com>]

	Once again Mike Flemmer demonstrates his clear thinking and freedom
from cant, ideology, and posturing.  How about it, readers - wouldn't
Gould himself have wholeheartedly approved of listeners fiddling around
with his recordings?	

	In terms of electronic music and recording technology, what's on the
horizon is somewhat unsettling.  All *I* want is Gould's piano playing,
exactly as he recorded it, without the humming; but coming up in the not
very distant future, consider the following:

	- It is only a matter of time before hardware and software is developed
which will allow the PERFECT synthetic generation of the playing of any
musical instrument plus the human voice.  Currently, as far as I'm
aware, no 100% artificially generated violin sound can fool an educated
ear; individual piano notes now may sound like the real thing, for all
practical purposes, but no performance of a piece generated and executed
by a computer instead of a human being can yet fool an expert (correct
me if I'm wrong).  I think we all agree that percussion instruments such
as the piano have proved the easiest to synthesize convincingly;
probably the last things to fall to the Digital Conquerer will be the
violin and the human voice, but the day will come when we will hear from
our CD players beautiful singing voices, completely human and endowed
with personality, of people who do not exist.  Imagine starting with a
real person's voice, but digitally altering, step by step, extremely
fine nuances of its pitch, timbre, frequency profile, etc. etc.  The end
result could be utterly different, much less attractive - or much MORE
attractive.  This is only the very beginning.  Later on, the initial
step of starting with a real, human voice won't even be necessary.  "A
voice as good as the greatest singers in the world?  Impossible!" you
may say - but what if the person or persons creating that synthetic
voice are supremely musically gifted themselves?  Many musicians
discover "their" instrument early on in life and become bonded to it, as
though they were pre-destined to play that instrument and that one
only.  What of a young person in the near future who has a
once-in-a-century gift and discovers that the voice-generator is HIS
instrument?  
	
	Economics drives a great deal of musical activity in the West -
including, I'm afraid, much of the most valuable.  True musicians and
composers would, of course, continue to compose and perform with no
reward at all, because they simply cannot stop themselves from doing
what is in their nature (see Mark Twain's "What is Man?" for a
fascinating discussion of this phenomenon, at
http://www.lm.com/~joseph/mantble.html) - but what will be the long-term
effects on composers and musicians when players are no longer necessary
at all, and when musically gifted children are raised by parents who
allow them to express themselves exclusively through digital means, if
that's what they want?  Will we one day see a brilliant violinist who in
fact has never touched the violin, but produces all his utterly
violin-like sounds with as-yet-to-be-invented electronic gadgetry? 
Because he would be equally able to produce virtuoso cello, viola, etc.
his talents would be in extremely high demand - not by symphony
orchestras, but by those with tight budgets and no scruples.  What about
committees of seriously gifted musical programmers who create gorgeous
voices for the highest bidder, and who can provide flawless virtual
vocalists for any musical situation for a fraction of the cost of real
singers?  (Once again, don't fall into the trap of thinking that such
voices must always lack personality; they will have the personality and
unique stamp of their creators - but they will come in a thousand
different guises.)

	Even today, vocalists need not repeat performances in the recording
studio for the sake of small errors, which can be corrected digitally -
and no doubt they are not even permitted to do so, for every second in
the studio costs money.  This is an early stage in the slippery slope
that will eventually lead to no human vocalist at all; they get colds,
they make mistakes, they don't sing their best from time to time; the
Bottom Line would love to see them replaced by something cheaper, more
dependable, and more efficient; it's already happening at the popular
end of the musical spectrum (the Pet Shop Boys).  When will the first
opera singer sing a note slightly flat and say, "just correct it in
mixing, there's a young fan waiting for me to autograph her intimately
and repeatedly"?  When will the first great violin virtuoso say, "I'm
satisfied with that take, but stick in bars three to sixteen of take 4
and bars ninety to the end of take 2, and fix the intro, and give me the
sound of a Stradivarius instead of this bluegrass fiddle I'm using to
win a bet I made in the bar last night"?   Will Hilary Hahn lose her
child-prodigy glow and have digital cosmetic surgery?  Will Pavarotti
"recover" his high C in the dead of night in some Mafia-run studio in
Sicily?  Will Glenn Gould's solo piano recordings of Bach suddenly find
themselves remolded to fit a full mambo accompaniment?


Bardolph

PS to Elevator:

>Musicologists and scholars will be chosen to do [the 
>work of properly preserving, researching, and 
>stewarding Gould's music] with the approval of 
>Gould's estate and copyright owners.  Hum-removers 
>are just merrily appointing themselves. 

And HUMMING contentedly as we do so!