The first conclusion I get from this research is that students tend to use recordings as sources of information during their practice. It is very rare, even though the amount of students is not that much, there is only 1 student who doesn't use them so we can agree on this as a fact. The next question that I ask myself is why this could be possible if we have our teachers and many other sources of information available. In the fourth question we addressed this matter asking what they were looking for. Getting a general idea was the most common answer for this question. This means that students want to know how the movement sounds in the end. This conditions the way we practice the piece as we have a model of how it should sound because an "authority" in the subject made a recording of the movement. This is also not a good practice because, as stated earlier, recordings are not real and can be edited in many different ways, especially the ones who are not coming from live performances. For live performances there are also small tricks that can be done, for example record the dress rehearsal in case something goes wrong and for a mistake in a passage choose a camera angle that doesn't show the hands and just paste the best version of the two takes. Every recording can be edited and this are not good expectations to have from the beginning of the practice.
This leads us to the next question of the survey, asking if they compare different recordings of the same piece. Internet is a really good tool that we have at our disposal but it has a great risk, the over information.
This causes us to have a number of recordings that we cannot listen to. The content that is uploaded daily to the Internet is much greater than the time we have available and for this reason it is important to contrast the information we obtain. By contrasting recordings we have at least two opinions on the same movement, which awakens our critical part artistically speaking. We do not stay with the first thing we hear and follow it, but we have some criteria when it comes to make decisions.
Respondents stated that they have a favorite artist for their instrument and presumably it will be the first one they will listen to when they want to hear a piece composed for their instrument. This brings us to the same question as before. We prefer to listen to a particular artist's recording, but what if that artist does not have good versions of the piece we want, and we settle for a "worse" version than another artist because that is the one we prefer? This does not imply that we should not have a preferred artist, only that we should be careful about which recordings we listen to in case we decide that we do.
Taking into account the replies on the ninth question from the survey, to be musicians we are not enough demanding with what we take as a role model for our own playing in sound quality terms. Spotify and YouTube, both platforms work on mp3 audio files. This audio format compresses the audio file by omitting information. Computationally when an mp3 file is converted from another audio format heavier, normally a Wave file, up to a certain number of digits (0 and 1 speaking in computational terms) they erase the rest of the information. This means than a lot of information is lost, in acoustic terms means that the sound quality is less than in a Wave file. Mp3 files were invented for the musicians and groups that recorded in Europe but the studio where it was going to be mixed was in America, the Mp3 was sent from the sound engineer to the band for them to comment on it, instead of sending the whole wave file which was far much more heavier and took more time to send and receive. It was invented for this purpose and we are currently paying for the “trial version” of the recording instead of a good quality one. From this we have our hands tied because there are not many platforms that offer this type of service, streaming audio with better quality than mp3. This is due to the weight of this files in wave format.
Using recordings as a source of information is a decision that each musician must make. In my opinion you should not listen to them until you have a clear opinion of what version you have and once you have obtained it you can always listen to the "opinion" of other performers to try to improve your own version. This way we make sure we try to work with the tool the composer has given us and our interpretation will have personality.