Technology and the Muse
David Knopfler
Published by
Acoustic Guitar
San Anselmo CA
July 1998 Edition
©David Knopfler 1998
A longer, unedited, unabridged,
first draft version for anyone curious can be found elsewhere
Six thousand years ago, a Chinese book of divination, known as the
I Ching or Book of Changes, noted that "the ancient kings made
music in order to honour merit and offered it with splendour to the Supreme Deity,
inviting their ancestors to be present." Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare,
who witnessed the transforming effect of music from the stage of his Globe Theatre,
wrote, "If music be the food of love, play on." As the millennium approaches,
we now analogize in a new vocabulary, the language of the global Internet. So with
no sacred scrolls to assist and no doffing of the feathered cap, let me simply say
that the musical possibilities on-line are just too cool.
Johnny V, a blues guitarist in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, recently
wanted some lyrics for a tune he*d written and generously asked me if I could assist.
There was a slight snag. He needed the finished song, complete with lyrics, in two
hours, and we were separated by a physical distance of 9,000 miles. The information
I needed to begin the process was the tune, played by Johnny with passion and conviction
on a handcrafted guitar. He sat down at his computer, pointed his guitar at the mic,
and strummed the tune into the hard disk via a software program called SoundEdit (www.macromedia.com). He then compressed
the file and converted it into a text-based binary code so it could travel over telephone
wires to my computer in England a few seconds later. Here is a sample of what I received
...
fHApE3hDHDmc@9,rqYMIhDcdYKcRIQ4E0Vrb6YLC2h-.
...not terribly auspicious you might think. Miles and miles of this stuff, like strands
of DNA, entered my hard drive at speeds the ancients would find incomprehensible.
It doesn't immediately present itself as ambrosia for the spirit, does it? But then
I decoded the file--using StuffIt Expander 4.0.2, a much-loved AppleMac utility--and
played it through my copy of SoundEdit. Joy!
A Canadian voice was talking to me through my speaker: "Hi David.
This is Johnny here. The tune goes something like this..." I listened a couple
of times, scribbled down some feelings, refined the ideas, put them into my computer
as a text file, and moved the lines around, cutting and pasting until I was more
or less satisfied that I had something that might move a few hearts and minds. I
then converted it to html code and posted it on my Web site (www.knopfler.com) using
VisualPage (www.symantec.com), a Web-authoring application.
I also sent Johnny an e-mail message telling him where he could collect the lyrics
at his leisure. He downloaded the lyrics, dumped them onto his original audio track,
and boom, boom, finito!
David Knopfler
- More information about Recording Artist and Author David Knopfler can be found at www.knopfler.com
Management: c/o danieloconnell@ameritech.net