In music, timbre is expressed through the use of various instruments. There are only so many voices, as limited by the instruments. A note played by a trombone sounds different than the same note played by a flute. How does a writer convey the sound of their voice?
"Bollocks!" he said, in his raspy, yet oddly soothing and somehow nasal voice. What does that sound like? It's up to the reader to plug in those variables and make a voice for the speaker. I imagine it's just as hard, if not harder for a musician.
How hard is it for a musician to translate their music into a readable medium? The great composers of the past; Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc, etc, etc.. were all forced to "speak" the same written language. Musical notation is mankind's best effort when it comes to writing down what music is supposed to sound like. It's brilliant, and detailed, and complicated, but is it good enough? Look at this:
It takes a trained musician to be able to even begin to decipher this in order to duplicate what the composer was trying to say. Yet every orchestra will play it a little bit differently, because there is a level of interpretation required.
I submit that things have changed. Whereas once a musician had to annotate everything precisely and had to use every trick available in the language of written music in order to convey what he or she was trying to convey, today all a musician needs to do is have any number of easily accessible forms of mufti-media.
Anyone can listen to a recording of anyone else and know exactly what that artist intended the music to sound like. Is the language of written music a dying language? I wonder.
After a massive electromagnetic pulse, will there be enough of our music recorded in hard copy for someone to be able to accurately reproduce it in 500 years? Or are we depending on digital recordings of everything to survive the ages?
I wonder.
