The Flow of Digital Music

Class Action

Every Thursday morning, I volunteer in my son’s third-grade classroom. For the past few months, I’ve been teaching the class how to make a digital slide show. (We actually call it the digital photo project, because none of the kids is familiar with film slides!) Now that each of the 20 students has picked out 50 photos, we’re adding music and exporting the result as 20 QuickTime movies.

It’s been pretty interesting to hear what music they choose; because they’re just 9 years old, their taste is still heavily influenced by their parents. Beatles songs have been popular, along with “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and ABBA. One lad just brought in the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA.”

But yesterday a boy handed me an aggressive mix CD his older brother had compiled for him, and asked me to transfer track 14 to the computer. For some reason, that particular song kept crashing iTunes, which we were using to rip CDs to MP3s for the movie soundtracks. The boy reported that the song didn’t play reliably on other CD players either. Enabling iTunes’ error-correction mode solved that problem.

I didn’t recognize the song, which starts off with a distorted tremolo guitar, then adds acoustic strumming and a melancholic male vocal before blasting into great-sounding power chords that reminded me of Nirvana. We synchronized the song with the photos, setting each photo’s duration to match one bar of music. Then I exported a movie and went on to the next student.

The Song Appears

I was still humming the tune when I got home, so I Googled a line I remembered, “I walk alone,” to see if I could discover the song’s name. It turned out to be “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day. Strangely, the page where I found the lyrics was at a support site for spouses of people with horrible diseases. The guy who posted the lyrics noted that he’d XX’d out one swear word. Uh oh. That language probably wouldn’t go over too well with the class parents when I sent their kids home with a DVD at the end of the project.

Because the MP3 was on the school computer and I was at home, I downloaded a new copy off some Russian site I found via Google, and then listened for the cussin’. Yep: There was the F-word, midway through the song. (I hadn’t noticed it before because I was concentrating on the beginning and end of the movie when we synchronized the soundtrack.) The performance didn’t strike me as offensive—the word was used descriptively rather than aggressively—but I decided it was best to be safe.

Loading the MP3 into BIAS Peak, I tried a little surgery. It took some fiddling to find the best edit points, but eventually I was able to snip out the two bars where the potentially offensive word lurked. Thanks to Peak’s edit-point smoothing, the snip was totally musical, unlike some radio edits I’ve heard where they hack out one beat and cause a stutter. (Interestingly, in the video version of the song on Green Day’s site, they also censor the F-word, though they obviously had access to the multitrack recording, because only the vocal is affected.)

Unfortunately, the Russian MP3 I’d downloaded was distorted and swishy-sounding. Because I’d started to like the song after spending so much time with it, I decided to buy a legitimate version...and there it was on the iTunes Music Store for just 99 cents. Surprisingly (digital audio dude that I am), I’d never bought anything from ITMS before. It just seemed stupid to pay ten bucks for compressed audio files with 3,847 words of rules wrapped around them, files that wouldn’t even play on my non-Apple MP3 players, when I could get the higher-quality CD (including liner notes and artwork) from Amazon for the same price. But in this case, I only wanted one song, so I closed my eyes and clicked.

New Forms

A minute later, I had a good-sounding file, albeit one with that word still embedded in it. (I was pleasantly surprised to see the album cover show up in the iTunes window, however.) The encrypted iTunes AAC file wouldn’t load into Peak, of course, so I used a trick I’d perfected when preparing sound bites for my book’s DVD: I sampled iTunes’ output with a free “streamripper” program called WireTap, saving the audio as a standard AIFF file.

But then, during the last 30 seconds of the recording, lightning struck again when my 3-year-old son toddled into the room, grabbed the mouse, and somehow clicked it in just the right way to pause iTunes. Rather than go back and rerecord everything, I unpaused iTunes and captured the remainder of the song. In Peak, it was then a simple matter to chop out the silent gap so that the song was whole once more. After one more snip to excise the F-word, I exported a clean (in both senses of the word) MP3.

Flow Children

Looking back on this process, I’m struck by how the music flowed and transformed. A mystery song moved from a 9-year-old’s CD-R to a classroom computer, where it became the soundtrack for his personal movie. Later, by searching for a lyric, I discovered the name of the song, downloaded a fresh copy, and learned more about the band. Thanks to forgiving editing tools, I was able to tailor the song to the audience while retaining its musicality. I grew to like the song so much that I bought it—with just a few clicks. Finally, I used a free utility to convert the song into a format I could use.

Technically, I suppose several of these actions were illegal, or at least violations of service agreements. But in the end, the song was paid for and education was advanced. It seems to me that facilitating the flow and manipulation of music through gentler copyright laws and friendlier tools would benefit both society and art.

Not that we’ll have a choice: Trying to stem the flow of digital music is probably hopeless. As David Bowie told the Times, “The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within ten years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it.”

Is music like water?