"The contributions of electronics to music is so great that we cannot fully measure its extent and effect on our cultural lives, because through electronics, time and space have been conquered, so that we can see and hear at any distance and any interval of time [...] Unless all civilization and all inherited and newly created cultural values are destroyed by the madness of war, the contribution of electricity to music will always continue, but in new forms undreamed of at present, always leading to higher forms of musical creation, performance, and inspirational listening made available to Everyman." (Milner 73).​
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      Published in 1958 in a paper called "Music and Electronics," the great conductor Leopold Stokowski makes an incredibly prescient statement here, with his declaration of victory over the pitiless limits of time and space. As the children of The Future, so cruelly denied the time machines, flying cars, and teleporters that books, televisions, and films promised us, we might well mock him for his mid-century optimism (tempered only slightly by the ever-impending apocalypse). Yet, in a sense, he is right.​
      One small triumph over time in the recording studio is the ubiquitous practice of "comping" tracks, that is, compiling the best parts of various vocal takes to create one take. Here, again, apologies, are my vocals.​
                                                    The "totally raw" take you've already heard; it's just a reference point. ​
                                                   You should not listen to it again unless you absolutely have to. And​
                                                    again, the reason I'm using such an egregious part is to highlight the​
                                                   impossibility of it, at least for me, as it falls outside my normal range.​
                                                    She said. Unconvincingly. ​
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                                                     This "take" has been comped. I've sung it over a dozen times at this​
                                                     and am ready to pass out, and thus I hand it to the machine.​
                                                    Notice how truly awful this take sounds. Notice how it almost sounds​
                                                    worse than my original, in terms of pitch. This is because each line or​
                                                   word has not been chosen for accuracy of tune, but for tone and, mainly,

                                                      how well Autotune will be able to work with this part.        

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This is what all these takes look like. You can see there are about eleven full takes, with some minor fixes at the bottom and some additional parts on the first three tracks. The teal track at the very top is the final comp. As you can see (barely), it has been spliced up pretty badly. Many of these "sutures," as Milner calls them, are audible in the sound clip above. The most obnoxious ones will be fixed using cross-fades.​
Finally, here is the best of "me," both tuned and comped. It doesn't sound perfect. There are a​
                                                          couple of blips that Mr. Engineer might have tidied up, and there​
                                                          are also a few sour notes still, a result of not being too heavy-​
                                                          handed with Autotune. Still, it does its job in the final cut.



Of course, I'm not really on the final cut, or rather, fifteen of me are. Braun calls this "superreality;" it is truly above and beyond reality (22). I cannot sing this part. Fifteen of me cannot sing this part. Fifteen of me and a computer can sort of sing this part. At this point, surely, music must shun this creation, tossing it back under the unwieldy and ever-expanding circus tent that is simply "art." I genuinely put a lot of work into this, as did the engineer, as did everyone that had a hand in inventing and designing Digidesign and Pro Tools. But no, we've decided: this is still music. Braun accounts for the shift thus:

"Not only have musicians adapted to the conditions of sound recording but sound recordings have also influenced music listeners to such and extent that many come to the concert hall with aural expectations modeled on their experience of recorded music. It seems that audiences have identified with recording technology without being aware of it. They have often come to expect a kind of dramatic, engineered sound which they know from recordings of the sixties and later. Recording technology has therefore created new aesthetic expectations which in turn have generated new artistic conventions" (22).

However, perhaps, "unfair" this might seem, it is certainly true. But does the gap just get bigger? Even now, singers use Autotune on stage, beats are triggered, and bands "play to tapes" (a charming little throwback phase). Is this "the barbarism of perfection," to use Adorno's phrase (Braun 21). Greg Milner posits the question: "How can a representation of music be as real and authentic as the music it represents? (13). The answer is, it can't, or, rather, music can no longer be as real as its representations, which the great Glenn Gould acknowledged in 1966, predicting the death of "'the habit of concert- going and concert-giving, both as a social institution and a chief symbol of musical mercantilism" (Milner 12). We know that Gould goes a bit too far - after all, people always need places to get drunk in and bands always need bars to play in (bar owners will always do well, it seems). As "live" and "recorded" (both terms are outdated to the point of inapplicability) music grow farther apart as two distinct art forms, then, listeners must come to terms with their own electric idol worship and appreciate that what they think they hear on a record never really happened.