Hi Keith,
Thanks for your warmhearted greetings.
I have printed out your mail and will read it in bed tonight.
And consider as carefully as I am able to.
And reply.
Klas.
(PS: changed the subject line. I mixed it up in the first place.)
At 23:54 2012-11-07, you wrote:
>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 wit=
h
>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 whol=
e
>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 fro=
m
>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 wa=
s
>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 wit=
h
>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 seria=
l
>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). Usin=
g
>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 =AD Altai Khangai - www.keithsmith.ca
>Photography - www.mymountains.ca
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------------
>
>"While a picture is worth a thousand words, a
>sound is worth a thousand pictures." R. Murray Schafer via Bernie Krause.
>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
Telinga Microphones, Botarbo,
S-748 96 Tobo, Sweden.
Phone & fax int + 295 310 01
email:
website: www.telinga.com
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