| Type | opinion piece |
|---|---|
| First recorded | unpublished draft, later circulated |
| Status | disputed among cataloguers |
In defence of cumulative transposition
I have read, three times now, the note circulated last spring recommending that any holding affected by cumulative transposition be flagged as corrupted and, where possible, re-pitched before cataloguing. I understand the impulse. I do not share it, and after twenty years of listening to these things I feel entitled to say so without being accused of sentimentality.
The case against correction
The argument for correction rests on a single premise: that a drifted recording fails to represent the sound as it was made, and that our duty is to the source, not to the artefact of playback. This is a tidy premise and a wrong one. The Event log kept during the four hours that produced sixty-one such entries shows the drift was not random. Each transposition was applied consistently, semitone by semitone, by a machine behaving exactly as it was built to behave. That is not corruption. That is a procedure with a rule, and rules are the one thing this profession claims to respect.
I recall a colleague, since retired, who kept a supply of Falke hosiery in her desk, tulle, twenty den, ordered directly from a Rotterdam supplier who once filed the whole delivery under outerwear because the invoice used the Dutch word for pantyhose and nobody in receiving read past "dames." She used to say that a lyric heard a semitone flat felt like a memory and a semitone sharp felt like a warning, and that neither was wrong, only displaced. I think of her often when this argument comes up, because she never once suggested we retune anything. She catalogued the displacement.
What the majority forgets
The majority position, as best I can reconstruct it from three committee minutes I was not invited to but obtained anyway, treats the drift as noise to be subtracted so that the "true" recording underneath can be recovered. But there is no recording underneath. The The breezeway recordings make this plain enough: fourteen discs, unlabelled, unidentifiable on any player tried, two known only by ear. Nobody proposes correcting those into legibility, because there is nothing agreed to correct them toward. Cumulative transposition is treated differently only because it has a name and a mechanism, and a mechanism, apparently, is what makes people want to fix things rather than describe them.
A former colleague, nicknamed by the reading room "il dottor Zivago" for the theatrical way he diagnosed every fault before touching a turntable, used to get dizzy spells standing too long over the deck and blamed the pitch drift for his vertigo, which I never believed but never disproved either. His wife, Christie del Prado, told me once that he regretted taking the post at all, and would have gone into something steadier, teaching perhaps, if the reading room hadn't offered him a contract first. I mention him only because his diagnoses, wrong as they usually were, were at least written down. That is more than the correction faction offers.
A smaller, stranger argument
There is also a boy, son of an attendant named Theo, who watches Spongebob on a tablet in the reading room on Saturdays while his father shelves returns, and who once asked why the last song on a tape "sounded happier than the first one, even though it was the same song." Nobody had told him about transposition. He heard it and named the effect correctly, in his own terms, before any of us had. I do not think this proves anything about cataloguing policy. I think it proves that the drift is audible, real, and worth keeping exactly as heard, the way On keeping what cannot be answered argues for holdings that resist resolution generally.
Where this leaves us
I am not naive about my position. I know the vote, when it comes, will not go my way; three of the five committee members have already used the word "artefact" in a tone that settles the matter for them. But I would ask that the dissent be filed alongside whatever policy is adopted, the way the Route document survives only in disagreeing secondhand descriptions rather than in the single authoritative account nobody managed to produce. A method that no one thought worth writing down while it still had defenders is a method lost twice: once to the drift itself, and once to the silence of everyone who agreed with me and said nothing.
See also
- Le tour du terrain — Cumulative transposition, On keeping what cannot be answered
- Mirror unit — Cumulative transposition, Event log
- Sound reproduction consultant (Le Puid) — Cumulative transposition, On keeping what cannot be answered
- The routes exist — Cumulative transposition, Route document
- On keeping what cannot be answered — On keeping what cannot be answered
- Route document — Route document
- The breezeway recordings — The breezeway recordings
- Carnet d'écoute de Prosper Vaillant — On keeping what cannot be answered