Orientamenti ai documenti sonori

For over fifty years, information technologies have been the dominant force in our world of artifices. Methods of recording and processing acoustic signals have changed the scale used to observe sound phenomena, altering listening conditions, transforming the way in which music is written down and subverting the order of professional skills once measured in terms of the discipline of musical notation. Critical musicology of a historiographic nature today applies hermeneutic categories, developed in the field of musical texts, also to those Heracliteian processes applied to music production and dissemination. Audio technologies, in sidestepping the moment of notation in favour of direct listening, claim to eliminate historic time from our illusory world. However, just like listening, audiography does have a history and a comparison between the new and older media clarifies the meaning of what it affirms and highlights the limits of the technology that preceded it. The moment the original audio source is re-written and transferred to a new medium in order for it to be reproduced, two different systems come into contact, the one being the historic system of which the work is a manifestation, the other being the remediation system consisting of the new technology, the set of skills and the media available at the time and in the place the work is repositioned on its new medium. The beginning of this century witnessed many celebrated “entombments” of sound recordings, creating “burial chambers of the voice”, constructed with the intention of avoiding any human contact with such sound documents. Faced with the risk of the imminent “mummification” of the document, in an extremely tense climate in which the desire for conservation is in conflict with the desire for dissemination, the executive act becomes an indispensable stage in the process of restoring the electronic work, in order for it to “rise from the dead” in new contexts, and the art of the sound director is not expressed with the technology but in the technology, in that the technical instruments make up our environment. Not only does the work reverberate in space, but it is recomposed by that space in that every spacialisation system encompasses a single specific conception. For over a decade, the goal of Laboratorio MIRAGE has been to equip audio with that methodological baggage and to imbue it with the capacity for historico-critical reflection that has enabled other traditions to tackle the problems of conserving, publishing and enjoying documents using multiple interpretative approaches, guided by awareness of the internal history of such documents and by making a study of the material and technological conditions that produced them. Our ideal goal is not merely to automate the process of conserving documents, the practical target for online marketing. The basic conservation operation, speedily accomplished according to an ethic of data transfer, requires an interpretive act that cannot be avoided for electronic masterpieces. This is why, at the MIRAGE workshop, our conservation and restoration work is centred on an understanding of the world of electronic music. Our guidelines for audio recordings and, in particular, for the interpretation of electronic music on tape, can be seen as a spectrum in the form of a grid that makes it possible to determine the degree of information variation in a re-mediation system. At one end of the spectrum is production with minimal variation, or facsimile copy, while at the other is a work of reconstruction involving aesthetics in which subjective choices lead to an increase in variation.