Re: Put Your Voice Where Your Mouth Is

[Per Boysen <per@boysen.se>]

On Dec 29, 2004, at 17:29, Richard Zvonar wrote:

> Put Your Voice Where Your Mouth Is
> By GARY GIDDINS
> For decades, even live music has come mostly canned.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/opinion/29giddins.html?th


Very interesting article. Thanks for posting! It brings up a lot of 
thoughts. When doing tours and tv shows with lip-sync (as well as 
guitar-sync or sax-sync) I was surprised to find out that it is 
actually harder to perform a tight lip-sync than to play/sing the piece 
live!  I think people that have the talent to "pretend" should get 
credits for that, not for "singing" or "playing", since "pretending" is 
an artform of its own right. It's just too bad that this perspective is 
catching on so slowly. I mean, what is "multimedia" if not a way an 
extremely advanced way of "cheating"? ;-)

However...
Personally I'm a big fan of improvised, on-the-fly or otherwise 
unpredictable musical performances and I always care to point out what 
is really happening when I'm doing such gigs. Just to make sure the 
audience doesn't think some parts were pre-recorded (or "pre-composed" 
if you want to go really impro).

Speaking of how the public look at performers, I think you tend to 
become badly biased from being a musician yourself. I remember once 
sitting together with some friends, non of them being an active 
musician, and watching a band on the telly. Everyone said they hated 
the singer. I said he was ok, since I thought he sounded quite okay. 
But when we discussed it a bit more I realized that the others were not 
really talking about his singing, they were just put off seeing him 
move his body in the same way as Bryan Ferry does when singing. This I 
had not noticed at all - couldn't care less, really ;-)

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
---
http://www.looproom.com (international)
http://www.boysen.se (Swedish site)
http://www.cdbaby.com/perboysen