In the quest for a perfect recording, a note of falsehood

All I remember of my first studio recording is the discomfort: physically isolated from my musical partners, stuck in a sound-proof cubicle, unable to see them properly, trying to make music in synchrony while taking instructions via the headphones.

A year later, I was introduced to ‘punch’. Before this technological facility was introduced, we would finish a song and listen to it being replayed by the sound engineer. If we weren’t satisfied, we would redo the entire song. But ‘punch’ allowed us to record over just the mistakes we made. Since we were performing from booths, each musical track was recorded separately; i.e., one sound did not leak into the other. I could sing over my mistake, much like erasing a word in the middle of a sentence and writing again in that exact place carefully. In the case of audio, the erasing+rewriting happened together. The engineer would replay just that part of the song and I would sing along while that one phrase would be recorded over the older version! My job was to maintain the same tonality, volume and duration so that it fitted exactly. It was called a ‘punch’ because it was punched-in.

But this raised an ethical question. Is it OK to perform a hatchet job on a piece of music? Are we taking something away from the flow? Is the listener being tricked into believing that it was performed uninterrupted? These questions are relevant, especially in musical forms such as Carnatic, because the ‘on-the-go’ coming together is considered essential to the experience. When we made these corrections, something was definitely lost. There was also a notional threshold beyond which alterations destroyed the music. But this line was subjective. The tool’s availability affected our attitude; a casualness crept in. I could go into a recording under-prepared because I knew that I could make corrections!

With time, technology got more intelligent and efficient. Instead of my having to actually sing a ‘punch’, now the software did it for me! Depending on the kind of musical error, two options came into play. If I sang out of pitch, the auto-tuner ironed it out. Or like the Ctrl C+Ctrl V operation on a word processor, I could use a better version of the same note or line from elsewhere in the recording and paste it where required.

I want you to imagine where technology might be today! Each note can be separated, adjusted, tone wildly changed, pitch altered to minutest degrees, syllables morphed and, even if the musicians are not in separate booths, each individual instrument’s sound can be fiddled with. At this juncture, we need to distinguish between adding elements and effects consciously to enhance a musical production and covering up a lacking or inefficiency. I am speaking of the latter.

The pandemic-induced recording culture has made things worse. Forget the bad quality of Instagram and Facebook ‘live’, other ‘live’ concerts are professionally recorded in advance and premiered as live-streaming. In this context, ‘live’ means ‘a real concert’. But if you think what you hear is what has been sung or played during that ‘live’ recording, you are mistaken. Nine times out of ten, recordings have been manipulated to such an extent that to call it a ‘live concert’ is farcical. After the recording is completed, it is sent to the musicians to check, corrections made! Often, only the ‘main performer’ is given that right.

Recording engineers then get hundreds of micro-specific corrections, which include tune musical error at 42.36 min, replace the note at 32.43 min with the same note found at 54.59 min, etc. Singers have sung so off pitch that almost the entire vocal track has been ‘re-tuned’. During the recording, co-musicians would have adjusted to the ‘not-in-tune’ singer. But now, because the singer’s voice has been ‘re-tuned’, they sound off pitch. There are cases where the violinist has been muted for no fault of hers. Places where things that have not fallen in rhythm are smudged. The concert’s actual duration would have been 1-1/2 hours, but this process can take longer. Some musicians sit with the engineers for days to choose the best from what they have rendered, or correct every breath.

The magic word today is ‘Melodyne’. According to its website, this is a software “to correct, perfect, reshape, restructure vocal samples and recordings of all kinds in the highest quality.” Don’t blame technology; it is what we do with it that needs introspection. Are we musicians willing to give credit to the multiple softwares used at the end of each recording? That will at least inform the listener of the truth behind the music. The concert is a cover-up job. Organisers expect the sound engineers to do all this, and even blame them for being bad concealers. I would argue that, at the rate we are going, they must be given special acknowledgement as concert-menders! Our questions should be directed towards musicians. Do such musicians have a right to be on stage?

But this has also become an addiction for proficient musicians. We are so insecure that we are unable listen to music as it is, with our own human imperfections. This is different from incompetence. Even the greatest of musicians have moments when things are not perfect, as per the scientific rule book, but it is still emotionally moving. It is real. This is now being ripped out of music. Maybe the pressure of published permanence is inducing this over-correction. But we are training listeners to consume clean, synthetic, lifeless music, and mediocrity is being hushed up. The warning signs are all there, but is anyone listening?