Capturing sound

I was doing a frivolous Google search for the Simpsons episode where Bart, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph form a boy band. They’re in the studio singing, and they sound terrible, until the producer pushes a huge button labeled “studio magic.” Then suddenly they sound like the Backstreet Boys. While I was digging through the Google results, I came across a book called Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music by Mark Katz. He references the Simpsons gag as an example of how recording technology has undermined our notions of authenticity in music. There are a couple of chapters of the book online, and it’s great stuff.

It’s hard for us now to imagine a time when recorded sound was a wondrous technological novelty.

Those gathered around the phonograph were experiencing music in ways unimaginable not so many years before. They were hearing performers they could not see and music they could not normally bring into their homes. They could listen to the same pieces over and again without change. And they ultimately decided what they were to hear, and when, where, and with whom.

Before the phonograph, music was an intrinsically social activity. The only way to hear it was to be in the physical presence of the performers, necessarily placing the experience into a strong social context. Recordings suddenly divorced the sounds from their original context. Now that recordings flit effortlessly to and fro on the web, the original context of their making is even further removed, and often not even recoverable. Katz gives the usual Walter Benjamin quote about how reproduction of art destroys its aura.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art,” [Benjamin] maintained, “is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Reproductions, therefore, lack what Benjamin called the “aura” of the artwork. From Benjamin’s standpoint this absence is to be lamented. He speaks of the withering of the aura, the depreciation of the artwork, the loss of authenticity, and the shattering of tradition. Benjamin, however, missed half of the equation. True, mass-reproduced art does lack temporal and physical uniqueness, yet reproductions, no longer bound to the circumstances of their creation, may encourage new experiences and generate new traditions, wherever they happen to be… [W]hile recorded music is often decoupled from its origins in space and time, this “loss” begets a contextual promiscuity that allows music to accrue new, rich, and unexpected meanings.

All this freedom can be disorienting. It’s particularly weird to not be able to see the performers’ faces and bodies. Katz ascribes the popularity of music videos to our discomfort with the lack of visual emotional cues in recordings. The problem is that the videos have so little to do with actual music making that they usually contribute to the alienation. The found videos in Auto-tune The News have an authenticity to them that traditional music videos don’t. The Auto-tune on Antoine Dodson’s voice might be fake, but the anger in his face is very real.

When musicians record, their invisibility to listeners removes an important channel of communication, for performers express themselves not only through the sound of their voices or instruments but with their faces and bodies. In concert, these gestures color the audience’s understanding of the music. As Igor Stravinsky rightly explained, “The sight of the gestures and movements of the various parts of the body producing the music is fundamentally necessary if it is to be grasped in all its fullness.” The violinist Itzhak Perlman, for example, is effective in concert in part because his face registers and reinforces every expressive nuance in the music. Perlman himself once remarked that “people only half listen to you when you play—the other half is watching.”

Recording artists have also reacted to the fact that they cannot see their audiences. For many, the task of performing to unseen listeners, with recording equipment as their proxy, can be both daunting and depressing. In her memoirs, French soprano Régine Crespin registered her dismay at the artificiality of performing in the studio:

“Fear of an audience is healthy; it stimulates you. The people are there in front of you. With them there can be mutual lovefests. But how can you fall in love with a microphone? First of all, a microphone is ugly. It’s a cold, steel, impersonal thing, suspended above your head or resting on a pole just in front of your nose. And it defies you, like HAL the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, although at least he talked. No, the microphone waits, unpitying, insensitive and ultrasensitive at the same time, and when it speaks, it’s to repeat everything you’ve said word for word. The beast.”

Recordings have created the possibility that a musical experience can be exactly repeated.

Live performances are unique, while recordings are repeatable… [A]ny orchestra can play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony many times; each performance, however, will necessarily be different.

For listeners, repetition raises expectations. This is true in live performance; once we’ve heard Beethoven’s Fifth in concert, we assume it will start with the same famous four notes the next time we hear it. But with recordings, we can also come to expect features that are unique to a particular performance—that a certain note will be out of tune, say. With sufficient repetition, listeners may normalize interpretive features of a performance or even mistakes, regarding them as integral not only to the performance but to the music. In other words, listeners may come to think of an interpretation as the work itself.

The repeatability of recorded sound has affected listeners’ expectations on a much broader scope as well. When the phonograph was invented, the goal for any recording was to simulate a live performance, to approach reality as closely as possible. Over the decades, expectations have changed. For many—perhaps most—listeners, music is now primarily a technologically mediated experience. Concerts must therefore live up to recordings. Given that live music had for millennia been the only type of music, it is amazing to see how quickly it has been supplanted as model and ideal.

I’ve played in a lot of bands, and one of the biggest obstacles they all faced was that most of the time, people would prefer to hear recordings than to hear us play. I’ve backed some very good jazz singers, but why would you want to listen to them when you could hear Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald? Live music is an invaluable art experience but if you just want to dance or be entertained, DJs beat bands nine times out of ten.

A lot of musicians I know would read the previous paragraph and bitterly remark on the harm that recording has done to musical culture. Maybe they’re right, but recordings have given us a lot too. I think that the experience of repeat listening to recordings has made Western listeners more accepting of repetition as a feature of the music itself. Westerners have historically resisted the loop-based, chant-oriented forms in other world cultures. But American popular music has been getting more and more loop-based, especially in my lifetime. Tape loops and samplers have both created the tools to make loop-based recordings, and fueled the demand for them.

Recording has changed music education radically, putting improvisation and other non-notated forms on an equal scholarly footings with written scores.

With recordings, performers can study, emulate, or imitate performances in a way never before possible. In the early days of recording, this possibility was trumpeted as a gift to all musicians, who could learn from the world’s great masters by studying their discs. For performers of popular music, recordings have been especially valuable learning aids. The available scores do not always represent performances adequately, and they cannot easily indicate the timbres and sonic effects that musicians seek to develop.

Audio editing tools also make it possible to build recordings without an actual “performance” ever taking place.

Listen to most early-twentieth-century recordings and you will hear a performance in the traditional sense. That is, you are hearing a single and complete take, in which the beginning, middle, and end of the piece were recorded in that order on the same day, in the same place, and by the same performer or group. This was hardly out of a desire for authenticity; it was a product of necessity. However, since the introduction of magnetic tape (in the late 1940s) and digital recording (in the late 1970s), it has been possible to offer the illusion of a traditional performance as well as to create “performances” that could never have existed. With the ability to manipulate sound through such technology, musicians have been able to transcend time, space, and human limitations, and in the process have created wholly new sounds, works, genres, and performance traditions.

One of the most basic manipulations is splicing, in which passages recorded at different times are joined together. The Beatles’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967) provides a famous example. The Beatles did over two dozen takes of the song, none of which completely satisfied John Lennon. But he did like the first half of Take 7 and the second half of Take 26. So he asked George Martin, their producer, to put the two together. Unfortunately, they were in different keys and tempos. The two takes, however, were related in such a way that when one was sped up and the other slowed down so that the tempos matched, the pitches also matched. Thus the two takes could be joined, the splice occurring at about 0:59 on the word going in “Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields.” Although the splice is nearly undetectable, the slightly altered speed of Lennon’s voice helps give the song its distinctively dreamlike quality.

You can build recordings entirely from samples, synthesized and sequenced sounds and jamming. It’s common in pop, dance music and hip-hop to go into the studio with no prepared material at all, and come out with finished songs. Songwriting, improvising and recording have collapsed into a single act.

The job of assembling an electronically-oriented recording is a new form of musicianship unto itself.

It is important to realize that sound is manipulated in the studio not (or not typically) by performers, but by a variety of sound engineers and producers, sometimes referred to collectively as recordists. Recordists fall outside (or perhaps in between) the traditional triad of composer, performer, and listener. They might be thought of as sound shapers, artists in their own right who collaborate with performers and composers.

[T]he very possibility of manipulating sound after its creation—from splicing to digital pitch correction—forces us to reformulate our ideas about composition, performance, and the relationship between the two.

[R]ecording does more than influence the activities of composers, performers, and listeners. It affects the relationship among these actors and in fact challenges the stability, even the validity, of the triad. It is no longer necessary for listeners and performers, or for performers and composers, to work together in order to create music. Yet at the same time, listeners and composers have discovered a more intimate relationship, one that can bypass the mediation of performers, while performers can work in solitude, without the need to stand before listeners. Performances and works are no longer clearly distinct, for recordings can take on the function and meaning of both. Just as recordings can be heard as spontaneous interpretive acts, their repetition can transform them into compositions, works that can be analyzed, historicized, canonized, politicized, and problematized. Nor are production and reproduction so easily separated when preexisting sounds can be manipulated in real time.

A lot to think about. But not everything in the book is so serious. From the introduction:

Several years ago a friend asked me to explain the subject of this book, then in its early stages of development. Opting for a dramatic approach, I pulled a CD at random from a nearby shelf and brandished it in front of me. “This,” I declared, “has changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music.” My friend squinted at the CD, gave me a quizzical look, and asked, “That did?” “Yes!” I answered with gusto. Seeming unconvinced, he clarified his question. “Van Halen changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music?”

Yes, yes they did.