by KNVI President, Wouter Bronsgeest
A blog by Wings of Pegasus shows what interventions we IT professionals have made possible in the music industry. A little software can firmly support a not-so-good singer. With this software, the voice can be jacked up just so that notes come cleanly on ‘pitch’. Pitch Correction. Great for recording perfection, although you hardly hear it in your iPod. Great for artists, mistakes are corrected. Great for the music industry: good and less good singing artists all sound ‘tight’. Box office! But unfortunately, also much less authentic. And live, well, that might be a tad disappointing. Too bad too, because recognisable ‘scratches’ on the vocal cords are polished away and so, as a listener, you are fooled a bit. Might Celine Dion’s (who has a great voice) Olympic performance then have been a pimped-up soundtrack tape of the dress rehearsal? Either way, when listening to music you are often listening to software supported standardisation of music more often than you know (or want).
If you look at what sound waves look like, you know there is still a world to explore. For example, the earth has its own frequencies (Schumann frequencies). Frequencies can be made visible on sandpaper; the visualisations are beautiful. Interesting to explore in more detail what it is like then with all those wavelengths. In 1939, the 440 Herz base frequency was agreed for the tone ‘A’ (the ISO 16 standard). Actually, also a mechanical agreement, to give music makers worldwide a standard. Resulting in both global music standardisation and also: much less variation. There is little research into the effects of frequencies – what would be their effect on body and soul? There is tentative scientific research on various frequencies and their effects. Much more is certainly possible in this….
Everything is music – nature first. Just a few years ago, many smiled when Bert Barten showed his recordings of trees. Until he got invited by the UN to show his work. Meanwhile, the immortal (‘fixed point in time’) David Attenborough has been asked by Netflix to explain to us how animals and trees in the earth’s (last) green lungs communicate with each other using sound (waves). Perhaps we as IT people can go the extra mile to investigate and puzzle this out further? So that we can better appreciate those all those frequencies, sounds and music and standardise them less.
