i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I'm finally getting around to posting this link to a piece that ran in the New Yorker back in August.  The column starts out as a discussion of the considerable recent advances in encoding and cleansing music in digital form: more than ever, it is possible to enhance the depth and quality of the captured performances and to enrich the sense of the time and place of those performances while eliminating the "noise" that obscures that richness.  As bandwidth and storage have increased in availability, so has the viability of lossless digital recordings that bring the experiential richness to more and more home listeners.  As the column also points out, there is another dimension to the technological advances that affect consumers of recorded music: what the writer describes as the internet's removal of the distinction between the music that you have and the music that you don't.  As we know from 202, metadata, trails, classifications and other factors increase the "findability" of information assets.  The columnist makes an interesting argument that this increase in findability and accessibility doesn't always lead to greater satisfaction, at least not in the context of listening to music.  The piece is short, and you can read the rest on your own, but these are two sentences I come back to over and over:  "But these meandering journeys across the Internet soundscape can be taxing. The medium too easily generates anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise."

Author: Lee