Knowledge Matters™

I have played bagpipes since I was a teenager, and over the years have collected many music books. Before the advent of computers books were difficult to source and buy. Now they are easy to find, but the quality of the music has in many cases declined because it is computer generated. Computers of course produce mathematically precise but soulless music. Just listen to my tune Black Pat (Pádraig Dhub) , which I have recorded using a computer, to see what I mean. The computer cannot capture the nuances I intended – it plays it exactly as written.

Bagpipe music notation as we know it today stems from about 1830, with Angus Mackay’s early attempts to record music in the Western style on a stave from the oral tradition, otherwise known as canntaireachd . Piping has always had an oral tradition because of the need to memorise the music. Pipers used to chant or sing the tune, but today this has largely been superseded with written music. It is sad to see the decline of canntaireachd, or even ‘bastard canntaireachd’ which I learnt, because it captured the nuances of how the tune was meant to sound. While staff notation makes the music available to the masses, it also loses something in the translation. I hear young players who are technically brilliant but musically inept, because they play precisely and mechanically, but in so doing fail to ‘feel’ the music.

So what has this to do with knowledge management? We must understand that we cannot capture and record all our knowledge. David Snowden has a famous saying - “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down”. He is right. The best we can achieve is a knowledge representation, and so long as we understand it is a representation there should be no problems. We must understand the knowledge representation (information?) still needs interpretation and context, and in most case that is best done by a human. The human interpretation matters!

Regards, Graham.