Delia Derbyshire, recording and looping
A chapter of Cold Technology, Hot Beats
More than any other area of music technology, recording has gone from magical to mundane astonishingly quickly.
Memory
For nearly all of human history, the only way to store music was to memorize it. Repetition helps us remember.
Notation
The first method for storing music outside of our heads is 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, the notation becomes the performance. A player piano roll or MIDI sequence can be read by a person as notation, and can be turned directly into performance by the player piano or synthesizer.
Cutting wax
Once you’ve translated sound waves into electrical impulses, there are various methods to store them. The earliest recording systems connected the signal wire to a needle that would vibrate in response to the fluctuating current. The needle could cut grooves in wax cylinders or vinyl records. For playback, the same process happens in reverse: the groove vibrates the needle, which generates a fluctuating electric current in response. This current drives the speakers, which in turn vibrate the air to produce sound.
Magnetic tape
Wax and vinyl are delicate. A more robust recording medium is magnetic tape, thin plastic 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 some new possibilities. It is possible to record multiple independent sound sources on the same tape, and mix and edit them separately. Multitrack recording makes possible the densely layered soundscapes in music, movies and other media.
Magnetic tape also makes overdubbing and tape editing possible. These techniques turn the mixing desk as compositional tool, as in Talking Heads’ song “Once In A Lifetime.”
Digital
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 and esoteric electronic equipment. Apple gives away a very decent digital audio editor with its computers, and there’s a functional open-source editor you can get free from the internet.
Digital recording has had as big an impact on the music composition process as magnetic tape did. Because disk space is essentially free, there’s no barrier to recording loose improvisation and editing it together into structured music. Using loop recording mode, improvisation, composition and recording can all become the same act.
Playlist
Sidney Bechet – “Sheik of Araby”
Les Paul – “How High The Moon”
The Beatles – “A Day In The Life”
Missy Elliot – “Work It”
