Every Second of an 5:57 Minute Song

How can our crowded minds possibly catalog store and recall every second of an ever changing 5:57 min. song? Take Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, for example. It's not a standard blues progression or something, like a hundred other songs. It's a totally unique string of fairly disjointed musical ideas. Yet somehow, an average person of a certain age, say, my age, who heard this song playing through their puberty has got every single moment of it hammered into his or her head.

I'm not talking about a musical professional, someone you expect to memorize the piano concerto they play at Carnegie Hall. I'm talking about how your average Jane and Joe (probably every single kid from my graduating class of J.H.S. 216), flat out KNOWS this song – stone cold by heart. This Muppet parody video really made me think about the magic of recorded music — and video, for that matter — the magic of recordING and how human memory works.

What is it, you hear something, see something a few times and your brain becomes a tape recorder? It sort of seems that way. I mean, that's what makes this video so funny. We remember the original video and seeing the spoof along side the remembered original in our head, is what makes it work. It's what makes it funny.

So for thirty years, I've been thinking my tape recorders (now digital) where helping me mimic and reproduce a live musical experience. They were the magical machines. Maybe what I've actually been doing is using my recorders analogously to how my brain already works. The more magical machine.

And to me, one striving to make good recording, working to produce multimedia experiences that work, that's kind of comforting. It means I know how to make the perfect recording. I just need to tap into what my brain is doing so well already.