As digital editing tools for all flavours of media get better and cheaper, the line between professional and amateur media productions gets blurrier. Used to be you could tell from the production values of a piece of music or video whether it was made in a studio or somebody’s living room pretty much instinctively and pretty much instantly. Professional grade art just had that sheen to it. Kind of like you can still tell about half the time if a TV program was made in Canada because of the, I don’t know, grain of the film or depth of exposure or some damn thing that I can’t put my finger on but is obvious when you’re looking at it.

Used to be, but less and less. The software is taking the edges off amateur creativity, and it’s looking less like amateur creativity. Hobbyists have the potential to become more relevant to the world. A few of the anti-bush ads that didn’t get onto the superbowl looked as good as any other ad spot you might see on your TV. Pro Tools is reportedly giving anybody the option to over-polish their friend?s pick up band. Of course “now anybody can do X” has been said again and again about many technologies, and rarely seems to actually mean ‘anybody’: usually it means that the infrastructure investment has come down about an order of magnitude. If you used to need 10 years of experience in a $100 000 studio to produce a professional sounding pop album, now maybe “anybody” can pull it off with a year’s experience and $10 000 dollars invested in computing equipment, software and peripherals. Still, not bad.

One fun sidebar of improvements in digital editing tech is that it’s the same thing as improvements in digital manipulation tech. A couple of examples: If you missed the superbowl debut of Apple/Pepsi’s iTunes promotion ad, you can still see it here on Apple’s website. Or you can watch this video, put together by some folks who don’t see eye to eye with industry on this issue. Look familiar? Notice a lot of distortion where they’ve edited out the original titles and replaced them? I don’t either.

Let’s up the ante. This will be a more difficult example cause it’s harder to get a copy of the material. If you can (ahem), find a copy of the Belle and Sebastian track ‘I’m a Cuckoo’, compare and contrast with The Avalanches’ remix of the same song. It’ll be available on fluxblog for a few more days. They haven’t just remixed the track, they’ve managed to completely edit out the original backing instrumentals and graft the vocal track on top of an entirely separate Sudanese song. I’m assuming they didn’t have access to the pre-mixdown studio tracks from the B&S recording session to do this. Granted, The Avalanches don’t just have software in their corner, they are notoriously skilled massagers of existing music tracks. But that’s part of what’s coming: if this stuff is 10 times more accessible, 10 times as many people will try it, and 10 times as many will teach themselves higher skill levels.

There’s an element of vertigo: if everything, every song and picture and even video, can be infinitely copied, remixed and modified, what happens to originality and intellectual property? What happens to truth in art? If any recording can be changed completely, what happens to, say, proof that anything happened? I think it’s somewhat analogous to the cloning debate. People are uneasy about what exactly happens to humanness and the uniqueness of the soul if there can be two copies of one person at the same time. A genetics professor once pointed out that as good as cloning tech may well get, it’s unlikely it will ever be able to do better than the human womb: there will probably never be more accurate clones than monozygotic (“identical”) twins that have developed in exactly the same pre-birth hormonal environment. And yes, twins can sometimes seem a little creepy, but for the most part we just accept them into our world view and learn to enjoy them. Likewise I expect we will accept the absolute mutability of media , and learn to enjoy it. As the Hip have pointed out, we live to survive our paradoxes. Art may become a continuum, segueing constantly into new art. Just as it always has, but to a greater degree. Yes, it’s probably going to be a little creepy at times, but it’s probably going to be a good time, too.