DEGRADATION AND INTIMIDATION

Some time ago, recording industry interests tried to slap a tax or surcharge upon all blank cassettes so that the public would have to pay $1 or so in addition to the regular price of the cassette. Even with today's high prices, you can often find cassettes for half that price or sometimes less. Furthermore, a large percentage of cassettes are used for non-musical purposes: speeches, lectures, class A notes, office dictation, control signals that never are converted to sound. Fortunately this surcharge hasn't happened yet, but the threat remains.

Now in 1987, there is a new move by these interests: they want to prevent copying of commer~ial recordings by a special alteration of the music such that a tiny new gizmo inside home recording machines will shut the recording mode off if you try to copy a "protected" recording, such as a CD or the proposed new digital cassettes. In particular they don't want digital-to-digital copying done, the digital cassette machines would be deliberately incompatible with CD digital recordings.

Recent magazine articles describe the technical details of the copy-protecting scheme, and raise distressing questions. One proposal is to remove a pitch-region about a semitone wide from the recordings, centered on A-semisharp i.e. the quartertone between A and B-flat at the top of th'e piano keyboard near 3600 Hz. A detector circuit which would be compt~lsory to have in recording machines would stop all recording if it detected that that pitch-region was empty.

It so happens that normal human ears are extremely sensitive near the pitch-region they selected, so the deletion of sound in that area would be noticeable. If, as in our case and that of many people we know, one is engaged in non-12-tQne composition, locating the region at a quartertone off ordinary pitches would make things worse. Certain speech-sounds, both vowels and consonants, might be altered.

Pianos that go down in pitch might be affected, and the overtones of notes below the region would be affected or removed, changing timbre. If only the small pitch-region were deleted, that would be bad enough, but the special equipment would introduce new problems far outside the band, and might get out of order, or respond to false alarms, ruining recordings having nothing to do with playback of commercial records or tapes. Composers with home studios do not have time to copy commercial disks nor to become "pirates" selling illegitimate copies underground. Real pirates would have the savvy to defeat the protection. This is exactly what happened in the field of copy-protected computer software!

Something about the principle involved is outrageous: digital tapes and digital CD's are offered as radical improvements in sound quality and sold at high prices--but now greed makes the industry willing to degrade its own product! Also they seem to want to obsolete the LP and the analog cassette, so that we in the field of new, experimental and alternative music, will be sIlenced. Let us hope that the analog cassette retains enough worldwide momentum to keep us communicating a while longer.

Maybe, just maybe, we can take heart from the VCR situation: they tried to stop that by making the recording of TV programs at home illegal -- but how shortsighted they were! There is a big market in educational videotapes, and a burgeoning taped-movie rental industry. Modern artists have done exciting new things with videotape.

-- Ivor Darreg