What are some ways digitized output can be manipulated to fool people?

The enormous capacities of today’s storage devices have given photographers, graphics professionals and others a new tool, the ability to manipulate images at the pixel level. like Adobe Photoshop. In morphing, a film or video image is displayed on a computer screen and modified pixel by pixel or point by point. As a result, the image morphs into something else: a pair of lips transforms into the front of a Toyota, for example, or an owl into a baby. The ability to manipulate digitized output images and sounds has brought a wonderful new tool to art. However, it has created some big new problems in the area of ​​credibility, especially for journalism. How can we know that what we are seeing or hearing is the truth? Consider the following.

Sound manipulation Can I know if the sound has been manipulated or not?

In 2004, country music artist Anita Cochran released some new vocals, including a duet, “(I Wanna Hear) & Cheating’ Song”, with Conway Twitty, who had died a decade before the song was written. The producers extracted bits of Twitty’s voice from his recording sessions, put them on a computer’s hard drive in digital form, and used software known as Pro Tools to put the pieces together. Ten years earlier, Frank Sinatra’s 1994 Duets album paired him through tech tricks with singers like Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnclli and U2’s Bono. Sinatra recorded solos live in a recording studio. His singing partners, while listening to his recorded performance with headphones, dubbed his own voices. These second voices were recorded not only at different times but often, over undistorted phone lines, from different locations. The illusion on the final recording is that the two singers are shoulder to shoulder.

Newspaper columnist William Safire called Duets “a series of artistic frauds”. Said Safire: “The question that arises is this: when an artist’s voice and image can not only be edited, echoed, refined, spliced, corrected and enhanced, but also transported and combined with others that they are not physically present, what is interpretation?… No more additives, plasticity, virtual venality, give me organic entertainment”. Some listeners feel that technology changes the character of a performance for the better. Others, however, think that the practice of assembling bits and pieces in a studio drains music of its essential flow and unity.

Whatever the problems of misrepresentation in art, however, they pale next to those in journalism. What if, for example, a radio station edited out a digitized sound stream to misrepresent what really happened?