FACTS, ERRORS AND THE KINDLE (From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009):

Periodicals publish corrections in subsequent issues and some successful books are (expensively) reissued in new, improved editions. But in a better world, the book, magazine or newspaper in your hands would itself be updated when mistakes are discovered by its publisher. Thanks to the advent of electronic reading gadgets, like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader, such magic is getting closer.

This catches my attention because I’ve been thinking about the impact of correctability on written music.

Let say you have a piece of music written out using symbols like clefs, staves, and notes. You’d think the written music was pretty much set in stone, in that the song itself has a permanent nature and the written music can either reflect it accurately or not. But that’s not so. How a piece is written out depends on typesetting and interaction design issues, as well as issues of genuine meaning like whether alterations to chords need to be written down. How you communicate it and your understanding of what it is will keep changing.

So the written stuff needs to become a living document. It’s not about errors, it’s about growth.