Week 8: Digital Music and the Problem of Seamlessness

Abbey Road, The Beatles, 1969 (aka my favourite album of all time)

This is probably going to be a pretty short blog post--but it's a pretty simple example! (Also, I'm moving house the day after tomorrow...) When I read the prompt, the first thing that immediately jumped to mind was music--especially music that's meant to be listened to continuously, like opera, or the smash-hit Broadway sensation Hamilton (had to get that in somewhere.)

As I'm sure we all know, one of the fundamental differences between records and CDs is that while both have track-listings, the way that records play straight through vs. the way that CDs can skip tracks at the press of a button have implications for continuity. In other words, if you put a needle at the beginning of a record, it will play straight through, but to skip tracks, you'd have to physically pick up and move the needle and you probably still won't end up where you want to be. With a CD, you can just skip tracks.

However, people figured out how to tack advantage of the continuity of the record. My favorite example of this is on the 1969 classic Abbey Road. Side Two of the album finishes with a glorious medley of songs lasting approximately 16 minutes, and each song blends into the next. When the medley finishes with "The End", the record spins on for a moment before hitting the 'bonus' track "Her Majesty". However, if you were to listen to Abbey Road on a CD player or a digital music platform that artificially inserted pauses in between tracks, your musical experience would be very different. The flow of the medley would be broken up, and in certain cases because of the artificial fading out of the last track before the next starts, you sometimes miss notes and ruin the intention of the entire medley.

This seems to me a bit like our example of English Reprints Jhon Milton--there will always be a few hiccups when you try to just move one format to another without forethought--the font will be different, the track will skip. Format moving is fine, but make sure that you do it with attention to how the new format will pick it up!