Since starting LIS school, I’ve been more aware of how information is conveyed or embedded in communication, and how (inately) we know how to decode and decypher that ‘marked up’ information. That fascination probably comes from being submerged in a foreign environment (LIS) than LIS itself, because now that I’ve made myself aware of it, I find it every where. Baseball is great example — the fact the same game is differently portrayed when seen in person, watched on TV, or listened to on the radio. The ‘language’ of baseball — “full count, bottom of the 5th, men at the corners, batting .257 against southpaws who had an RBI grounder his first time at bat” — means nothing if you don’t understand what’s going on, but paints a descriptive picture if you know what it means.

It’s also witnessed in my internal struggle with the vocabulary of librarianship, where I try to decide if book vs. monograph or patron vs. user has embedded purpose — besides to differentiate between library in-crowd and outsiders.

I witnessed a great example of conveyed information in summer band rehearsal last night. Mr. Keene brought in his directing class to site read music with us for about an hour. Eight, I think, students used us to site-read/direct music that we site-read played. Musicians use the director, especially when reading new music, to get all sorts of information — style, volume, entrances/cues, tempo variations, etc. Some of this information is present on the sheet music, but it’s often situational — dynamics or style are relative to the group, and although the individual musician interprets those, it’s the centralized role of the director (and the teacher, who can hear, acknowledge, and instruct to adjust those things,) to bring it all together. I hadn’t realized what a hard job that was until we played under the directors who didn’t necessary convey/address things that I thought needed to be there. That’s the weird part. I don’t know how I would instruct a band to do some of those things, but I know when they were missing. (It’s been likewise said that it’s hard to define pornography, but we “know it when we see it.”)

Or maybe I’ve been spoiled to work under some very gifted conductors and clinicians, and don’t witness the other side of that too often. (I’m not being critical of the students who conducted — I’m happy to help give them experience and an exercise to take back to the classroom and dissect. If anything, they showed me how hard that job is and how badly I would do if I tried it.) So I guess that skill comes in two parts — being able to convey to a group how something is to be played, and to identify of the thousands of things to tweak/adjust which specific ones have the greatest impact.