Capturing The Spirit

Andrew Dubber’s New Music Strategies blog consistently raises fascinating and timely questions about the development of the music industry in an online, inter-connected world. Yesterday, he asked whether audio fidelity has any ongoing importance in the age of the iPod and the MP3. I’m not sure that my comment really got to grips with why this question fascinates me. This morning another analogy occurred to me. If a recording is a “snapshot” of piece of music in a particular environment at a particular time, maybe it’s comparable to a photograph of a friend or loved one.
Sometimes a crappy phone-cam shot encapsulates what you love about that person better than a glossy studio shoot ever could. It seems to capture their spirit, their essence, their uniqueness. By comparison, a technically perfect studio portrait can often seem false, awkward or stilted. Of course, the reverse is often equally true. A throwaway Polaroid-type snap can easily be just that: sub-standard, fit only for the bin. A measured and thoughtful depiction of someone in a controlled environment can allow subtle nuances to elevate the purely documentary to the artistic.
When cameras were expensive and required a greater amount of technical expertise to achieve decent results, people hired specialised photographers to take their picture. It was a big deal. It might literally have been a once or twice in a lifetime experience, one to be treasured. Now a huge percentage of the world’s population walks around with a camera in its pocket by default. The equipment does much of the work and the results can often be amazing, especially when considering the relative lack of planning and effort required to get the result.
I’ve made numerous recordings of live music performances with my mobile phone’s frankly astonishing microphone. In many cases, I value their intimacy and energy more highly than the recorded versions of the same songs. Their “quality” goes beyond the merely technical. I’m reminded of the hoary and patronising cultural cliché of certain “primitive” tribes refusing to have their picture taken by “civilised” explorers, because of the fear that the camera would steal their souls. We smile in comfortable smugness. How ridiculous!
I too think they’re wrong. I don’t think anyone can steal your soul, any more than they can steal your identity (so-called identity theft is the stealing of the props and trappings of identity, rather than the identity itself). But in another sense, I think they might have a point. At best, a photograph or a recording can capture the spirit of something or someone. If what you’re looking for in your relationship with the world is an acquaintance with multiple forms of uniqueness, surface noise or software compression are – at worst – minor inconveniences.
Postscript: half an hour or so after writing this, I remembered a quote that I came across a couple of months ago. I didn’t deliberately re-use the phrase in my concluding sentence here, but it clearly bubbled up from my subconscious. Peel’s comment seems like the perfect four-word response to the original question.