A few days back I wrote a post in which I longed drastically for a form of real-time liner notes. When you play an MP3 or CD on your computer you could click a button and choose from either the standard background information you get with the CD inlay, or a much more exciting commentary on the piece which updates as the music progresses. In its most simple form it would indicate when a new theme enters, or an old theme comes back, or when the exposition ends, for example. You could also choose a more detailed “expert” version which would give a more detailed analysis of the structure of piece: keys, inversions of melodies, etc.Two things became clear after some excellent responses to the post. One is that (somewhat unsurprisingly) this has (sort of) already been thought of. Multiple times. ACD brought my attention to the (fleeting) existence of the Concert Companion, a handheld device which one was given to use during a live concert: “the Concert Companion delivers explanatory text, program notes and video images in real time with the music”. Hmmm. That sounds like a bunch of people playing on the internet during a concert. Yvonne told me that in Queensland they tried something similar but it was actually projected on the walls of the concert hall.
Neither of these sound like a particularly great idea. The idea of a non-optional thing is just horrible for a start. If there is going to be an optional thing then I don’t think it should be an alternative stream of information to the concert at hand, which is kind of hard to pull off in a live setting as you tend to be watching the performance. Another problem is that in a concert-hall setting it’s probably not going to be particularly appealing to any experience level. I would imagine that unless it is extremely well designed, a listener unfamiliar with the piece will be given too much information, too rapidly, whereas a listener who knows it well will probably find it an annoying distraction.
I think it would be far better suited to a situation in which you can listen to a piece multiple times; that is, at home. The depth-revealing kind of information which is provided by liner notes is usually most interesting and valuable to me after hearing a new piece about four or five times (so that my head has a basic conception of the melodies and how they fit together). It also seems like the kind of situation in which it would be extremely valuable to be able to replay a section or movement. When you are informed that a new melody is coming in, for example, it’d be nice to be able to replay that bit until you can see it yourself, otherwise it’s just like listening to someone else talk about how well they know the music.
ACDs second link showed me that he was thinking along similar lines after learning the horror (for him) of the dreaded Concert Companion. Over two years ago he wrote:
“And then, in an epiphanic flash, it struck me. While the Concert Companion in the concert hall is a genuine horror, there really is an appropriate and proper place for the device: in the home, keyed to a specially prepared classical music or opera CD or DVD coded in manufacture to deliver the proper signals to the Concert Companion.”
I think there is an even greater advantage now with the rise of the MP3 format and truly digital music. It would be almost trivial to write a piece of software that would display notes in sync with a particular recording of a classical concert (since each performance has different speeds you would have to adjust the timings accordingly, but that would be pretty easy. If you wanted to be really crafty you could try and do very basic sound recognition and use that to automatically adjust the timings), You could even incorporate it directly into a website with a built-in music player. There would be a little applet in which you could select a piece, and real-time information would be provided alongside it. That would be great, and not terribly hard to set up, as long as you had non-copyrighted music to use, and of course the liner notes!
I think the big advantage of mp3s and the internet is that people can independently create the liner notes for a particular piece, or individual movement, completely independently from the people who originally performed the piece. It doesn’t have to be incorporated into the CD itself and the recording company doesn’t have to write any special software. The work can be done as an add-on by enthusiasts and freely distributed on the web.. I’d love to put something like this together, and I don’t think it would be too hard given the right textual and musical resources.
Anyone want to try it?