Digital Copying
One of the most important things about digital audio is the ability, theoretically, to make perfect copies. Since all we're storing are lists of numbers, it shouldn't be too hard to rewrite them somewhere else without error. This means that, unlike, for example, photocopying a photocopy (and we don't mean digital photocopying!), there is no information loss in the transfer of data from one copy to another, nor is there any noise added. Noise, in the context of what we’re talking about, is any information that is added by the imperfections of the recording or playback technology.
Figure .x Each generation of analog copying is a little noisier than the last. Digital copies are (generally!) perfect, or noiseless.
Not So Perfect Copying
What does this really mean? In the good old days, if you copied your favorite LP vinyl (remember those?) onto cassette and gave it to your buddy, you knew that your "original" sounded better than your buddy’s "copy." He knew the same: if he made a copy for his buddy, it would be even worse (these copies are called generations). It was like the children’s game of telephone:
"My cousin once saw a Madonna concert!"
"My cousin Vince saw Madonna’s monster!"
"My mother Vince sat onna mobster!"
"My mother winces when she eats lobster!"
Note that when we use the term degrade, we are making a purely technical description, not an aesthetic one. The melodies don't necessarily get worse, they just get further from the original. Installed
A melody copier. Start with a simple tune, and set a noise parameter, which determines how bad the next copy of the file will be. The melody degrades over time.
The noise added to successive generations blurs the detail of the original. But we still try and reinterpret the new, blurred message (especially with speech — that’s why gossiping is such a bad idea!) in a way that makes sense to us. In audio, this blurring of detail usually manifests itself as a loss of high frequency information (in some sense, sonic detail) as well as an addition of the noise of the transmission mechanism itself (hiss, hum, rumble, etc.).
"This is a cheap imitation of a great and classic work of electronic music by the composer Alvin Lucier. You can easily hear the degradations of the copied sound, this was part of the composer's idea for this composition." We strongly encourage all of you to listen to the original, which is a beautiful, innovative work.
Soundfile .x Alvin Lucier's classic electronic work, I am Sitting in a Room, "redone" with our own text. Our text, like Lucier's original, is self-referential (homologous), as we're very (post)post-modern types.
Is it real, or is it ...?
Digital sound technology changes this copying situation entirely, raising some new and interesting questions. What’s the original, what’s the copy?
When we copy a CD to some other digital medium (like our hard drive), all we’re doing is copying a list of numbers, and there’s no reason to expect that any, or significantly many, errors will be incurred. That means, the copy of the president’s speech that we sample for our web site contains the same data, is the same signal, as the original. There’s no way to trace where the original came from, and in a sense, no way to know who owns it (if anybody does).
This makes questions of copyright, royalties, and the more general issue of intellectual property complicated to say the least, and has become, through the musical technique of sampling (as in rap, techno, and other musical styles), an important new area of technological, aesthetic, and legal research.
"If creativity is a field, copyright is the fence"— John Oswald
Pretender, from John Oswald's Plunderphonics. In the mid-1980s, composer John Oswald made a famous CD in which every track was an electronic transformation, in some unique way, of existing, copyrighted material. This controversial CD was eventually litigated out of existence, largely on the basis of its Michael Jackson track (called Dab). In Pretender, Oswald gradually changes the pitch and speed of Dolly Parton's version of the song "The Great Pretender," in a wry and musically beautifully commentary on gender, intellectual property, and sound itself. (Also homologous to the max...)
Soundfile .x
Digital copying has produced a crisis in the commercial music world, as anyone who has ever used something like Napster knows. The government, the commercial music industry, and even organizations like BMI and ASCAP which distribute royalties to composers and artists are struggling with the law and the technology, and the ways that the two are forever out of synch (guess who's ahead!). The graphic below was prepared (this is an excerpt) by BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.) to try and illustrate the problem (at least as it appeared about a year ago). Things change every day, but one thing never changes — technology moves faster than our society's ability to deal with legally and ethically. Course, that makes things interesting...
Soundfile .x A sound example where an analog copy is made over and over again, showing how the signal degrades to noise after numerous copies. The original digital file is on the left, the copied analog file is on the right. Note that unlike the example above, where we tried to recreate a famous piece by Alvin Lucier, this example doesn't involve the acoustics of space, just the noise of electronics, tape to tape.
Sampling, and use of pre-existent materials can be a lot of fun and artistically interesting. The following is an excerpt from David Mahler's composition Singing in the Style of The Voice of the Poet. This is a playful work which in some ways parodies text-sound composition, radio interviewing, and electronic music by using its own techniques. In this example, Mahler makes a joke of the fact that when speech is played backwards, it sounds like "Swedish", and combines that with composer Ingram Marshall talking about his interest in Swedish text-sound composers. The entire composition can be heard on David Mahler's CD, The Voice of the Poet; Works on Tape 1972-1986 on Artifact Recordings.
Soundfile x
David Mahler