The Lemon Fool

The cello and the nightingale: 1924 duet was faked, BBC admits

The Guardian

Exclusive: bird impressionist was brought in for Beatrice Harrison’s historic performance, says broadcaster

"Nightingales may have been scared off by the crew trampling around the garden with heavy recording equipment. As this was live, the back-up plan was an understudy – thought to have been Maude Gould, a whistler or siffleur known as Madame Saberon on variety bills."

XFool wrote:The cello and the nightingale: 1924 duet was faked, BBC admits

The Guardian

Exclusive: bird impressionist was brought in for Beatrice Harrison’s historic performance, says broadcaster

"Nightingales may have been scared off by the crew trampling around the garden with heavy recording equipment. As this was live, the back-up plan was an understudy – thought to have been Maude Gould, a whistler or siffleur known as Madame Saberon on variety bills."

Oh Gawd - don't give the philistines any ammunition: they have enough imagination to conjure up their own

Interesting, though. "Managing" set ups like this to produce something closer to reality was (and probably is) often done. Any recording in any studio is not "real" - it is managed to make it sound like the person who hears it expects. It isn't a "fake" but an attempt to maintain the real experience one might have had.

Some of you might have watched Ian Hislop's History of Fake News, which was quite an eye opener. Photographers and news media today (at least the better known western ones such as CNN and BBC) are much more careful than they used to be, we are told. Outright "faking" was routine and almost accepted in some quarters of the photographic world and was fully rationalised to being a good thing if circumstances demanded it. Every time a sound recordist uses a parabolic reflector to record bird song, is it a "fake" - no, of course not. One has to take into account the motive of the team trying to produce a result.

Every time I "dodged" a print in my darkroom, I was faking it by some people's standard. But I was genuinely trying to make up for the technical inadequacies of the process to recreate what I saw at the time - or on occasions trying to create an effect akin to a work of art.

I think to use the perjorative term "Fake" in this case is an error: they were recreating an experience.

They've done it since....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqp0x6ajGE

...Not quite the same thing, surely?

XFool wrote:...Not quite the same thing, surely?

Agreed, the BBC became famous for April Fool's jokes
and they were not hidden.

With regard to the nightingale incident, I notice this line "Today, that would be unacceptable but, in 1924, it was probably perfectly acceptable.” That completely agrees with what Ian Hislop maintained in his program about massaging photographs. It used to be done to create an experience, as it this case which is a rather mild and innocent case - or much worse for pure propaganda where it was seen as perfectly reasonable as the ends justified the means. Something Stalin and Hitler - now Putin - also knew about, but it was practised by our own Ministry of Information.

I'm also put in mind of that famous picture during WW1 by Frank Hurley which was a total mock up and about three photographs sandwiched together. It was done with the best of intentions, one could argue, to create the atmosphere of shells landing, planes in the air and the trenches. None of those things happen simultaneously on cue for the photographer, but by "cheating" he recreated what it felt like. But we would still argue it was a shameful fake and some would weaponise it to bring a good man down.

Arb.

Not forgetting the penguins, of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4

The Attenborough impression completely fooled the American contributors on a music forum that I used to frequent. The final half-minute seemed to strike them as entirely credible, and several of the more religious ones were moved to comment on what a wonderful Creator we have up there in the clouds.

The Creator, of course, could be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzhDsojoqk8

BJ

bungeejumper wrote:Not forgetting the penguins, of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4

The Attenborough impression completely fooled the American contributors on a music forum that I used to frequent. The final half-minute seemed to strike them as entirely credible, and several of the more religious ones were moved to comment on what a wonderful Creator we have up there in the clouds.

The Creator, of course, could be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzhDsojoqk8

BJ

Thanks, I've never seen that before!

John