It's safe to say the majority of music available on CD, or any of the other formats now available, has been produced with the aim of achieving some sort of commercial success. Whether it's just a matter of increasing a band's visibility in the market place or a deliberate attempt to generate a hit, both are commercial goals. When we listen to them, we judge them by comparing them to other releases similar in nature and intent. Based on how they stand up to the competition, and our own personal tastes and ideals, we form an opinion of their worth and decide whether or not to "like" them.

A great deal of that evaluation process depends on our expectations of music. It only makes sense that our opinion is shaped by how well a piece of music fulfills whatever personal need we each have for it. Most of us have more than one reason for listening to music, and so might well listen to a variety of music in order to meet our needs. How we decide which bands or individuals we listen to would naturally enough follow the same criteria.

There are universal expectations of the music we listen to in terms of the quality of the sound. Long past are the days when any of us will tolerate any extraneous noise interfering with our listening pleasure. Any record produced with commercial intent is now expected to be free of the hisses, clicks, squeals, and distortions that were accepted as normal in the past. What about music produced for non-commercial reasons?

Like documentary movies, there are some recordings produced these days whose goal is not simply to entertain, but to educate and inform. Field recordings from remote areas of the earth that bring us the music of peoples we might otherwise never hear are invariably made with equipment that results in a product inferior in quality compared to what we are accustomed to. In some cases, the producers of the material may even deliberately leave the material in its original, raw state in order to recreate the atmosphere where the music was first heard.

Hisham Mayet is a documentarian with the Seattle, Washington based Sublime Frequencies. He is known for his immediate and intimate documentary movies of musicians from North Africa and beyond. One of the hallmarks of his work is his ability to recreate what he sees and hears with his eyes and ears on film in such a way that the separation between viewer and subject that the camera normally causes is almost non-existent. As he has used minimal equipment in order to be as unobtrusive as possible, there is sometimes a significant reduction in the quality of both the audio and video.