In what ways can digitized output be manipulated to fool people?
The enormous capacities of today’s storage devices have given photographers, graphics professionals and others a new tool the ability to manipulate images at the pixel level. like Adobe Photoshop. In transformation, a movie or video image is displayed on a computer screen and modified pixel by pixel or point by point. As a result, the image transforms into something else: a pair of lips transforms into the front end of a Toyota, for example, or an owl into a baby. The ability to manipulate digitized output images and sounds has brought a wonderful new tool to art. However, it has created big new problems in the area of ​​credibility, especially for journalism. How can we know that what we are seeing or hearing is the truth? Consider the following.
Sound manipulation Can I tell if the sound has been manipulated or not?
In 2004, country music artist Anita Cochran released some new vocals, including a duet, “(I Wanna Hear) & Cheating ‘Song,” featuring Conway Twitty, who had died a decade before the song was written. The producers took snippets of Twitty’s voice from their recording sessions, put them on a computer’s hard drive in digital form, and used software known as Pro Tools to put the pieces together. Ten years earlier, Frank Sinatra’s 1994 album Duets paired him through tech tricks with singers like Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnclli, and U2’s Bono. Sinatra recorded live solos in a recording studio. His singing partners, while listening to his performance recorded on headphones, dubbed into their own voices. These second voices were recorded not only at different times, but often, over undistorted phone lines, from different locations. The illusion in the final recording is that the two singers are standing shoulder to shoulder.
Newspaper columnist William Safire called Duets “a series of artistic frauds.” Said Safire: “The question that arises is this: when the voice and image of an interpreter can not only be edited, repeated, refined, spliced, corrected and enhanced, but can be transported and combined with others that are not physically present What is interpretation? Enough additives, plasticity, virtual venality, give me organic entertainment. ” Some listeners feel that technology changes the character of a performance for the better. Others, however, think that the practice of assembling bits and pieces in a studio depletes music of its essential flow and unity.
However, whatever the problems of misrepresentation in art, they pale in comparison to those of journalism. What if, for example, a radio station edited a digitized sound stream to misrepresent what actually happened?