Music, Art, and the Power of Vibrations

See if you agree that this is true. It seems to me that audio representations – recordings – more faithfully reproduce the original live experience of music or spoken word than online or printed representations reproduce the live experience of being in a room with a painting. It's got something to do with vibrations, right?

Audiophiles become the way they are because they know how a great sound system can make you feel like you are right in the room with the musicians; you can hear and feel the music breathing, you can sense the separation of instruments. There is a "dimensionality" to it. For me, listening to a recording can be just as chill- and tear-inducing as being at a powerful concert.* Still, live performances have a magic that recordings don't. But I think that comes primarily from the experience of people being together in the presence of the music, from the sharing of vibrational space, from being transformed together by something that can't be seen.

When I go to an art gallery or museum my experience is very close to that of being at a concert. I'm talking now about paintings and drawings and prints, not videos, or even photographs. I feel it viscerally in a room full of great paintings. I get a charge from it in a way I never get from a reproduction. It's not just the color that vibrates. You can also feel the energy of the brushwork. Good reproductions can present color and brushwork well, but their distance from the original artifact is much farther than a good sound recording is from the original performance. Case in point: Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin" at Harvard's Fogg Museum. When you view it in person, as I did last weekend, it's like the damn thing is going to vibrate right off the wall. Reproduced here, it looks, what?, interesting I guess. Put another way, when I visit the Fogg and stand in front of this painting, which I have done for more than two decades now, it's like visiting an old friend, one whose spirit and attitude and character I am grateful for.

* I think one reason podcasts are so popular is the intimacy of it; you feel like you're really in the room with the speakers, part of the conversation.