A chapter of Cold Technology, Hot Beats
More than any other area of music technology, recording has gone from magical to mundane astonishingly quickly. A high-tech city dweller like me experiences music nearly entirely in recorded form.
Memory
For most of human history, the only way to store music was to memorize it. Repetitive music is more memorable because it teaches itself to you as you listen. Symmetric patterns like rhyme schemes and recurring motifs also aid your memory.
Notation
The first method for storing music outside of our heads was music notation, the visual representation of sounds and sequences. Sounds are ephemeral, but music notation can be quite durable, especially when it’s written in a format that can be easily copied from one medium to another.
In the era of mechanical sound reproduction, notation could directly become a performance. A player piano roll can be read by a person as notation, and can be played directly by a player piano. The modern equivalent of the piano roll is the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) format, a scheme for encoding scores as numbers. Computers can play MIDI scores directly via synthesizers, and can display them as human-readable sheet music.
Cutting wax
The first sound recording systems converted the air’s vibrations directly into patterned grooves in wax cylinders. It works a lot better to convert the air’s vibrations into electrical fluctuations, and then convert those in turn into patterned grooves in vinyl. For playback, a needle drags through the groove, vibrating in response to its shape and reproducing the original electrical current. This current can be amplified and sent to speakers, or sent to cut another record.
Magnetic tape
Wax and vinyl are delicate and inflexible. Magnetic tape is easier to deal with, The thin plastic tape is coated with tiny magnetic particles. The particles line themselves in particular directions in response to the fluctuating current from the recording head. To play the recording, the playback head passes a current through the tape. The magnetic particles modulate it in particular ways, and the current passes on to speakers in the same way it does in a record player.
Tape offers a lot of new possibilities. In 1963, electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire produced the theme song for the long-running British science fiction series Doctor Who by laboriously splicing together many short pieces of tape containing simple electronic tones and noise.
Multitrack tape makes it possible to record multiple independent sound sources on the same tape, and to mix and edit them separately. Tape editing techniques turn the mixing desk into a compositional tool, since loosely improvised music can be sculpted into structured forms. Albums built from edited improvisation include Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way and Talking Heads’ Remain In Light.
Digital recording
To store audio on the computer, first you need to translate the signal current into a list of ones and zeros.
Once digitized, sound becomes as fluid as text in a word processor. It can be cut, copied and pasted at will. As computers get more powerful, they can perform real-time signal processing that once required a room filled with bulky, expensive electronic equipment. Apple gives away a very decent digital audio editor with its computers, and you can get a functional open-source editor free from the internet. Sound edits that took Delia Derbyshire weeks to perform can be done on a computer in a matter of minutes or seconds. As a result, the once-esoteric audio manipulation techniques of the most adventurous tape producers have moved solidly into the mainstream.
Digital recording encourages looseness and improvisation in the studio, since the subsequent editing is so effortless, and composing during the recording process has become an ordinary working method in pop music.
Playlist
- Delia Derbyshire – “Doctor Who Theme”
- Beatles – “Strawberry Fields Forever”
- Miles Davis – “In A Silent Way/It’s About That Time”
- Talking Heads – “Once In A Lifetime”
- Missy Elliot – “Work It”
