TIME TRAVAILS

How time plays tricks! It marches on, as it always has, with stately uniformity in the best tradition of precise engineering, but some days seem short and others dreadfully long.

It is the same with years, when the human mind gets to thinking about them. I plain forgot Audio's 40th anniversary, marked in last month's issue.

No disrespect! Just a time trick.

I am always acutely aware of passing time, since I am a listening musician. For instance, take the pauses be tween movements of a symphony during a live concert: Unless you have a hammy and insensitive conductor on the podium, these pauses will be matched to the feeling of the music and the occasion. When that happens, there is the visible and almost audible up-breathing of a musical phrase just ended, and another about to begin, a thing of real beauty if done mostly in silence. I won't forget a recent New York concert of the Czech Philharmonic under its veteran conductor Vaclav Neumann. To watch that marvelously time-sensitive leader raise his expressive hands, slowly, for a new phrase of Dvotrák, and witness the simultaneous sensing of that pause by dozens of musicians--the string players poising their bows, the winds taking breath, the percussion with hammers rising for the blow--is one of the ultimate experiences in the use of sheer time for making good music.

But those between-movement pauses heard at home, on a "live" tape, are fussy and much too long, full of distracting coughs, rustlings, and what-not. Wise producers take out a bit of the interval for better listening at home, where our sense of time is different. (God knows what timing sense we have for car stereo!) These things are not unknown in the recording profession. But the rules of procedure are generally unwritten, and maybe better so. It is always a matter of sensibility, in the recording studio or the concert hall, a subtle sort of fore casting, to know how this take or that will affect the home ears. I suspect that a lot of good producers, persuaded by engineering exactitude, would even deny that they make such calculations at all. They do, and so do many conductors, those who do not ignore their partners in the control room.

Forty years of this magazine? After 40 years, what's one particular year? I wrote my piece for May 1987, looked straight at it, and never batted an eye.

The date didn't register! It's been a long time--40 years this month, in fact, since my first column appeared.

And so to a time formula which I put forth in our 1972 25th-anniversary is sue: The Canby Constant. To my considerable pleasure (never having heard a word about it since), I recently got a letter from a reader who recalled the Constant and said so. A bit of a time capsule, that. I'll get to it in a few lines.

I did not overlook that anniversary.

Audio put on a huge celebratory bash, and it was a vast and fruitful effort, too, far beyond mere publicity. Just about every celebrity in the audio world was on hand for that occasion, including such people as Avery Fisher and Herman Hosmer Scott and plenty more of that generation. I was stunned when I was told I had been picked to give the "keynote" speech, since of all audio non-engineers, I am the most "non"! On mature (and frantic) reflection days of it, ahead of time-1 decided that the reason I'd been picked was basically simple. Timing.

As I say, I had that sense of how long, or how short, moment by moment. I had just then produced the last of 25 years of weekly radio programs on New York's WNYC (then municipal, now Public Radio), each one, as nearly as I could manage, extending for exactly 28 minutes and 30 seconds.

Obligatory, since if I went overtime by 3 seconds, exactly 3 seconds of my speaking voice would be cut off, regardless of sense. It happened, even when the station started the tape late, which it sometimes did. Timing in every sense was my obsession, even to the timing of pauses to create paragraphs.

Not to mention the precise timing of spliced stunts in music, one performance grafted onto another so precisely that you could not tell, nor hear the splice. (I know-today it can be done with even greater precision and a lot less risk, or no risk, via those hideously expensive digital editing systems. So, alas, I am as the horse and the buggy.)

Yes, timing. Very simply, the promoters at Audio could count on me to pace my speech, as on the radio, and to avoid mumbles, punches, and talkings-to-one-side, ignoring the necessary mike. Also, they knew I would time my "program." That was the real pay off, and I suspect it didn't matter too much what I said, just so it vaguely had to do with hi-fi or something. To tell you the truth, I haven't the faintest idea what I did say. It was done entirely ad lib, if after much thought. I made it up as I went along, as I often did in radio programs, departing from a written script to say something that suddenly seemed better. Spontaneity? That's how it came out, anyhow.

But the thing that knocked 'em for a loop in that 1972 speech was the timing. I got the point: I was allotted, as I remember, exactly 15 minutes out of the rather complicated program; there was plenty else, and the featured speaker could not be allowed to go on and on.

So, taking maximum advantage of my special experience and consequent expertise--timing--I arrived at the big do with a small, bulky object in my coat pocket. When I was introduced, before I so much as opened my mouth, I pulled this thing out and set it going. It was a kitchen timer, the pre-digital kind, all mechanical. You wound it to the time you wanted, and it ticked loudly and then went off with a loud ding. This was set on the podium, to one side, where all could see it and breathlessly follow the little black pointer as it traversed those 15 minutes, implacably, just like radio itself.

Yes, I did glance over at it three or four times, to be sure. But mostly I just talked. And as I came to my peroration (or whatever it was) and then ceased, the thing went ding. Right on the button, within maybe 2 seconds.

I doubt if anybody in that audience remembered, after that, the things I had said. But the Great Names in audioland came up one by one with congratulations on the performance.

How did I do it? They really were astonished. And as a matter of fact, so was I.

It didn't seem to me anything special, just a parlor trick. And a good sense of timing.

I tell you this simply because timing is so vital in every audio area-I mean the sense for passing time, the judgments on pauses, on speeds, on tensions and relaxings, on "edits" and the combining of takes, especially. Musicians tend to hate editing. It is a gut distrust that has a lot to do with their own sense of timing. Minus experience in audio, a tape editor may well indeed disrupt the flow (translate: Inspiration) of a musical offering. But if the good tape editor, in digital as in analog, him self has a fine-tuned sense of timing and can hear what happens when two different takes will be joined (and can readjust to different and better cross over points), then at least the musical feeling is taken over into the finished product.

Thus there is a high art to tape editing, just as profound and as subtle in its special area of usefulness as the basic art of musical performance itself.

I see absolutely no reason to suppose, as musicians still do, that this art is intrinsically less than their own. Both musicians and tape editors (or producers, or what have you) are interpreting the musical score, each with his own highly trained expertise-and sense of timing.

Of course, what with early editorial deadlines, Audio has not yet actually arrived at its 40th as I write this. Time, these days, is immeasurably bent and spliced in more and more areas. Increasingly, the warping of time in this fashion is a part of our way of life, to the point where people scarcely notice it at all. Can it be any different in the art of musical performance? More and more, the "live" broadcast, or in another form the live recording, is disjointed, with segments of time rearranged or simply removed. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. Just a considerable chore, and a damper to inspiration for participating musicians.

They can adapt and most do. Are they different from the actors in the movies, who have never worked in any other manner? The musicians are lucky. I once watched a movie being made on the street outside my New York apartment (it woke me up around 6:30 in the morning). The scene lasted roughly 1 minute; the filming took almost 3 hours, and 2 hours more to set up and take down the elaborate gear. Over and over, the same red sedan screeched around a nearby corner and squealed to a violent stop; the same people jumped out and ran for cover in my apartment lobby. We had become a gangster hangout. I could see no difference in the takes, but back they went and did it again, and again. All for 1 minute of theater! I didn't even get the name of the movie. So much for continuity on film.

Oh yes, the Canby Constant. It's nothing much, and it has nothing to do with audio, except that it is another type of time warp-the inner, subjective sort. I discovered this Constant or, rather, noticed it-a long time back, but it wasn't until Audio's 25th anniversary, thinking hard on the passage of time, that I suddenly saw how to put it into elementary form. (If / can under stand it, any audio person should get the idea in an instant, though most of my non-audio friends don't.) The Can by Constant states that the apparent subjective time span from the present back to one's earliest childhood memory never changes. In each mind, it is always fixed, a constant if there ever was one. Think about it, and you will agree. Take, say, the time you had the measles, at age 5. At 10, this trauma seemed far back to you, in babyhood.

And so it was. At 20, it was the same.

At 70, there is no change; you continue to remember those distant experiences just as you always have.

This, you see, has some interesting mathematical consequences and per haps even accounts for my forgetfulness concerning our 40th anniversary.

The years are like a long ladder back to childhood, but it grows no longer; the rungs just pile up and are pushed away, getting ever closer and closer in the spacing. Each year is shorter than the last. At my age they really fly. The rungs are frighteningly close.

Time warp again. I can see, as I did in 1972, why old Methuselah in the Bible died at 1,000. His years were reaching infinite closeness, the point of no passage; they could go no further! Time had to stop. And so must I.

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, June 1987)

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