barthel:

t.A.t.U. - “All the Things She Said” (from the Fluxblog 2002 Survey)

At 2:21 in this MP3, you hear a distinctly non-musical noise: the sound effect of a door closing. It is instantly familiar as an AIM notification, indicating that someone on your buddy list has signed out of the service. It was hard, at the time, to process that noise as part of the song. After all, you probably had AIM open, and it could’ve easily been your computer overriding the sound of WinAmp or whatever else you were using to listen to the MP3 you’d downloaded, not the MP3 itself. (This was released in 2002, when iPods were still really expensive, so there’s a good chance that was how you were hearing this.) And even then, it seemed unlikely that the noise was in the “official” version of the song; probably what had happened was that someone was recording from the speaker output of their desktop, and the still-open AIM had thrown its own spontaneous addition into the mix. Indeed, the version of the song available on iTunes doesn’t have the noise, nor does the video. But what does have that sound is a version labeled “Ripped by RaptorX30.” RaptorX30, whoever that is, recorded the song physically using a cord and an external device, converted it to a file, and uploaded it onto the Internet. And somehow, it got around enough for a decent number of people to have noticed those AIM sounds. That modified version became in many people’s minds - including mine - the “official” version of the song. The idea behind digital music, of course, is that of exact copies. But digital objects have their own particularities. As distributed objects, the process of distribution has an unavoidable effect. No copy is a perfect copy.

It’s possible that many more people have noticed that sound but didn’t comment. Because, weirdly, it makes total sense within the song’s context. AIM played a large part in 2002 romances: the sound of someone you were chatting with logging out could be heartbreaking. All the things she said, running through my head: a long, intense chat, the person leaves, and you’re left there to obsessively review the conversation to see what went wrong. It is a banal noise packed with meaning for users of the service, a little Pavlovian remnant of an outdated means of communication. And there it is, embedded in a ten-year-old file, preserved in amber, come back to haunt us.

Download the Fluxblog 2002 survey mix here.