Klas, you're ahead by 5 grandchildren. My first arrived in August :D
"Do "we" want that?"
I'm not sure the choice is "ours".
I've wanted to respond to your recent posts in a fullsome and heartfelt
manner, but have struggled to find a way without writing a book. I do feel
your angst. While nature recording is new to me (and far more difficult
than I'd ever imagined), natural recording is something I've struggled with
much of my life as a freelance musician. As a player, this struggle first
confronted me in dealing with the fundamental dishonesty of the overdub.
It's something that no player wants to do -at least in the sense of fixing
something - but it also has tremendous creative potential.
What to do? Even in the event of fixing a flawed improv idea or a bad
performance, the end result is still something that I created/performed
(and is thus, bona fide?). I might add that the problem is worse when your
rotten note is the only wart on a performance that included several other
players who just gave the performance of a lifetime;)
As I've grown older, I've been apt to take a more existential attitude
toward problems like this:
Who am I here to serve? Hopefully, in my case it's the Muse. Can I make a
musical point clearer with an overdub? Perhaps. Do I need to redo the whole
piece from scratch, just to prove that I can? Hmm. Wouldn't that just be
serving my ego? Does using the technique lessen the musical value of the
end product? Not if the listener is unaware, but it still offends my sense
of authenticity.
Classical music has taken this to insane extremes. A number of years ago
there was an album of Paganini's 24 Caprices for Violin by a well known
guitarist. A friend of mine was working in the same studio a year or so
later and informed me that the whole thing had been expertly pasted up from
small fragments. I imagine the artist faced the same questions. To clearly
mark the album as Heavily Edited would have been suicide, even in an
environment where everyone else is doing it too (stories of hundreds of
edits per album are legion). Perhaps he should have scrapped the project.
If he had, he would have denied all of us the chance to experience what was
really a very fine recording.
What to do?
Using photography as an analogy is limited, but perhaps useful. Even
snapshooters have to contend with offending poles, wires, reflections and
what have you. You change viewpoints, 'shop' only the worst of them, use
them creatively or give up the shot. But what if the subject is unique or
rare; well worth putting up with rest of the 'noise'? How far do we go with
the editing? This may well change the originally held purpose of the shot.
Then, who are we serving? The subject/event, the story, the photo Muse or
ourselves? I said 'limited' because the instantaneous visual and the serial
sound experiences are so fundamentally different. Choosing a viewpoint to
avoid a wire seems trivial compared to dealing with an unexpected ATV half
a mile behind you while trying to get 30 minutes of near silence.
Getting back to Nature Recording, doesn't the Purpose and the Fitness for
Purpose really tell it all? A relaxation recording might be 30 minutes of
pristinely recorded wilderness bliss or a 20 mintue loop of Alan Ginsberg
going "Ommm" (if that works for anyone --I bet it would sell better). Using
Rx might allow an Ornithologist a 'green-screened' version of a bird call
in the very near future, if not today. The 5 minutes of a Pileated
Woodpecker working a tree stump that I recorded a couple of weeks ago won't
be submitted here. It's full of city traffic, airplanes and my creeping
along a gravel path to get closer, but it's a thrill for me as a personal
first. It suits my purpose as a lesson on what not to do, next time.
I'm not trying to make the call, here. It just seems that, the way we're
going, the future arbiters of what's good, bad, interesting, or boring
(both your grandkids and mine) are going to care a lot less about how
something was done (except to copy the technique) than they will about the
information on the bottom line.
This leaves us free to serve a scene, a species of wildlife, an ambience,
an idea. It doesn't stop us from simply labeling our work as Not Edited,
Denoised Only, something to that effect. Perhaps something like a SPARS
code as used on CDs might be adopted to delineate techniques used or
avoided?
Just my 2 cents, with all empathy and best wishes,
k
On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 8:20 AM, Klas Strandberg <> wrote:
> **
>
>
> My son Jon had a boy a month ago, my sixth grandchild!
> (Congrats most welcome! Thank you!)
>
> Do I want that boy to sit here in 20 years from now, listening to my
> old DAT-tapes saying "Come on, this kind of silence wasn't ever
> possible around here, grand dad must have photoshopped all noise away."
> Because such a thinking is totally natural to him?
>
> Do "we" want that?
>
> Klas.
>
> Telinga Microphones, Botarbo,
> S-748 96 Tobo, Sweden.
> Phone & fax int + 295 310 01
> email:
> website: www.telinga.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
--
Keith Smith
Keith Smith Trio, Northern Lights =96 Altai Khangai - www.keithsmith.ca
Photography - www.mymountains.ca
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