jingo (what remains)
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6/6/2009 8:31:12 PM
Age of Persistent Sound and Vision
A while back I posted a thread asking about influencial music from the 60s. I have been listening to some of that stuff, and wondered if when those songs were recorded the artists thought that 40 years later folks would still be listening to it. The fact is hundreds of years later folks may still be listening to it. And I mean "it" - the actual recording, not recreations passed down from memory or faithfully performed from notations.
As is often the case, this simple notion started me a-trippin. We live in an age where vision and sound persist, possibly forever. I think this may be more profound than the written word was - writing kicked ass, allowed knowledge to be transmitted across time and space, some good stuff. BUT - the written word pales a bit when compared to even a YouTube vid. You can read the text of a speech, read about the times of a speech, try to understand the context, but you will probably never understand it as well as you can by watching the actual speech. Three hundred years from now, or three thousand - the moment will be preserved as it was.
We are rapidly approaching a point where recorded evidence (photograph, motion picture, audio) stretches back a full century. Here in the aughts 21C everything gets recorded, we all carry around cameras / video recorders. The 20th century is fairly well documented, 21C will be totally recorded and available for review from now until doomsday. The songs you guys post may be around forever. The little pic above my name shows some poor guy eating the street, dumped by his bike in the rain - and some bastard was there to document it, it will be around in one way or another forever.
We have no (real) idea about the cultures of early humans. What kind of music did they make, what stories did they tell, who were their heroes? We will never know, it is lost to us. "Written word" helped to preserve some of what the last several thousand years was like, but in the last 100 years we have gone down a path that will make it crystal clear to all who come after us what it was like to live in this era, what we thought, how we dressed, what we listened to in ways the written word cannot. Sights and sounds will persist.
This was probably far more interesting to me than it is to you - but next time you sit and contemplate (or burn one) think about it - we are living in a time of an extreme paradigm shift. We may all be dead and gone before the real impact of the Age of Documentation is known, but it is going on NOW. The sounds you record may be around forever, the stories you tell will not be lost.
Trip on it if you can.
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The Last Unicorn
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6/6/2009 11:38:29 PM
yeah, words can get lost in interpretation / translation however as strong as ties are - visual to sound... they will still be subjective to an individual viewer / listener and possibly not always understood within context anymore than a song or visual would. It's true when you are seeing a person you're able to read more than through a screen or a piece of paper filled with words or songs that stand on their own. Even so, there are different ways to view someone's point of view, visual ques help but unless you really know the person chances are you may not get what your looking at / responding to... it is a trip to think on, for sure.
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SILVERWOODSTUDIO
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6/7/2009 12:05:11 AM
that's interesting----I hadn't thought along those lines but when I first decided to set up our first internet site (Myspace) many of my son Jakes songs had been sitting on his computer for over a year with the odd CD burnt for friends---
----the first thing he said was----- yeah, they'll be up there for many years, even after we die---how cool is that ra ra etc---it was his first thought on being exposed to the world!!
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