Lost and Found
08届的Ryan Maguire会告诉你，他一直对音乐和技术的相互作用着迷, the alchemy between the two.
“One of my earliest memories is when I was 5. I had a tape cassette recorder I was playing around with, recording the sounds of cellophane and listening back to it,” he says. “It was always something I tinkered with, but there was never a place for it. It was always outside any structure.”
马奎尔在高中和大学期间慢慢发现了这种结构, 寻找可以找到导师的地方，磨练自己自学成才的技能. He found it first at Beloit College, charting a course that would eventually lead to the University of Virginia. He’s pursuing a Ph.D. 他是该校麦金太尔音乐系作曲与计算机技术专业的硕士, which he expects to complete in 2018. Right now, 他正在研究音乐录音被压缩成MP3文件后留下的声音，并从这些残余的音频中创造出幽灵般的新音轨. He plans to base his dissertation around this research and experimentation.
A Milwaukee native, 马奎尔从马奎特大学高中毕业后前往伯洛伊特学院. During his teenage years, he tinkered with music and recording technology after school and on the weekends, but at Beloit, 他第一次从音乐教授Ian Nie那里接受了录音技术基础的正式培训.
“While I was at Beloit it started being an accepted thing, 在一个学术环境中，你可以和人们严肃地谈论它(音乐录制技术)吗,马奎尔谈到了这项技术以及它所蕴含的所有创新可能性.
“It felt very open and creative and exploratory, not dogmatic or old-fashioned. That planted the seed for me to start exploring those questions.”
For his part, 聂很高兴马奎尔把他在贝洛伊特学到的东西付诸实践，并在过去的十年里一直坚持下去. Nie taught Maguire the basics of Pro Tools, 一种计算机程序，在当时是记录技术的工业标准.
“Shortly after he graduated, he sent me some files, 我被我们在录音中谈论的一切所吸引, he was beginning to apply,” Nie says. “And of course, 从那以后，他就像任何一个好学生一样，在对唱片业的理解上超过了我.”
But back to those ghostly MP3 tracks. The idea, Maguire says, came from a seminar on the history of recording technology at Dartmouth College, where he received a master’s degree in Digital Musics in 2013, 在新英格兰音乐学院获得作曲研究生学位后. The Dartmouth seminar was led by Tara Rodgers, a Washington, D.C.美国独立学者，研究声音和音频技术的文化史.
As part of the seminar, 马奎尔和他的同学们分类并讨论了随着音乐录音技术的发展而产生的新音乐. For example, when the earliest DJs and MCs started scratching vinyl records, they created hip-hop, rap, and turntablism; magnetic tapes resulted in cut-up tape and tape loops; glitch music resulted from DJs and musicians experimenting with scratching CDs.
“So we’re studying the whole history. It starts in the early 20th century, and then it just stops at CDs. It seemed like an obvious question to me, ‘What now?” he says. “I started to ask, what kind of music could you make from MP3s?”
他的实验开始于将他称之为“原始”的录音压缩到尽可能小的mp3文件, and then working with the material that was left over. One night, he and Rodgers were at a noisy Irish pub in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Maguire tried to explain what he was working on. “她听错了，她说，‘哦，所以你要拿走那些被删除的东西?’我停顿了一下，然后说，‘不，我不会拿走那些被删除的东西，但我应该拿走.’ She sort of laughed and said, ‘Yes, you should be doing that.’”
One of his experiments, “moDernist,” plays with the remnants of the 1987 song “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega, 被计算机科学家用作听力测试中开发MP3编码算法的主要控件之一. Maguire uses the programming language Python to analyze and reconstruct audio. 他的论文工作将利用在MP3压缩代码的原始测试和设计中使用的六段录音:Tracy Chapman的“Fast Car”, the aforementioned “Tom’s Diner,” “Trumpet Concerto in E-Flat Major” by Franz Joseph Haydn, “Take the ‘A’ Train” by Duke Ellington, “Sobre El Fuego” by India, and “Le Sacre du Printemps” by Igor Stravinsky. 他希望能回答以下问题:某些流派和风格是否会因MP3压缩而受到更严重的改变，以及这些剩余的材料如何与我们的音乐感知系统联系起来, among other things. 他解释说，他正在对录音进行数字剖析，以寻找“在MP3压缩过程中产生和丢弃的MP3工件的音乐和声学特性”.”
“It’s basically a really, really involved kind of remixing,” he says.
Credit: Ryan Maguire’08
Maguire plays a bevy of instruments, including guitar, pedal steel, piano, and synthesizers, and considers himself a musician first, approaching his research into music technology from that perspective. Daid Kahl’05, a close friend of Maguire’s at Beloit, remembers him spending a lot of time playing the guitar, 有时还会随意摆弄马奎尔大四住的校外宿舍里的一个室友的架子鼓.
“I came in [to the house] one day and Ryan was playing. I said, ‘Oh cool, I didn’t know you could play the drums,’” Kahl says. Maguire replied that he couldn’t. The set had only been there for a week and he was just “having some fun with it.”
马奎尔坦言，在伯洛伊特大学期间，他并不总是一个优秀的学生. He pushed himself to get a physics degree because of the challenge it posed, and while he entered as a member of the class of 2006, he left campus with a few classes unfinished and completed the rest remotely, technically graduating in 2008. 在物理系教授保罗·斯坦利和帕特里克·波利的指导下进行独立研究, 他能够组织自己的探索，探索技术如何与音乐和声音相结合，以及如何, in his words, “those two really different intellectual traditions could overlap.” He fiddled around with electronics and built an amplifier from scratch; Polley, Stanley, and Nie, he says, gave him space and encouraged him.
“One of the things that I’m very, 我很自豪的一点是，我训练了他的耳朵，让它更专注于声音，并正确地再现声音,” Nie says, “rather than just generically listening to an MP3 and going, ‘Oh, yeah, this is OK.’”这种对细节的敏锐嗅觉将有助于马奎尔处理MP3残余的微妙之处, 大多数人从来没有任何理由意识到的数字碎片正在消失.
Maguire has scores of ideas about more research that he’d like to pursue. 其中一些与专辑在当今时代的角色有关，当时传统LP的概念已经消失了, in many ways, become obsolete. 他想知道，如果音乐家和他们的听众不再把歌曲和专辑视为固定的，会发生什么, static works, and instead embraced them as ongoing, mutable, and malleable processes.
他说:“人们仍然固守着这种旧观念，认为音乐创作是一种固定的东西. “如果一件作品从未真正完成，如果它是一个有生命的东西，并且在不断进化，那该怎么办?? That’s a little bit of what I’ve been thinking about.”
Katherine Flynn’11 is an assistant editor for Preservation, the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and a senior staff writer for Consequence of Sound, a Chicago-based online music publication. She lives in Washington, D.C.
