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CHAPTER THREE

Technology Shapes Music

Part One: Analog

The first sound recording was made in 1878. Since then, music has been amplified, broadcast, broken down into bits, miked and recorded, and the technologies behind those innovations have changed the nature of what gets created. Just as photography changed the way we see, recording technology changed the way we hear. Before recorded music became ubiquitous, music was, for most people, something we did. Many people had pianos in their homes, sang at religious services, or experienced music as part of a live audience. All those experiences were ephemeral—nothing lingered, nothing remained except for your memory (or your friends’ memories) of what you heard and felt. Your recollection could very well have been faulty, or it could have been influenced by extra-musical factors. A friend could have told you the orchestra or ensemble sucked, and under social pressure you might have been tempted to revise your memory of the experience. A host of factors contribute to making the experience of live music a far from objective phenomenon. You couldn’t hold it in your hand. Truth be told, you still can’t.

As Walter Murch, the sound editor and film director, said, “Music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved.”¹ Some say that this evanescence helps focus our attention. They claim that we listen more closely when we know we only have one chance, one fleeting opportunity to grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened. Imagine, as composer Milton Babbitt did, that you could only experience a book by going to a reading, or by reading the text off a screen that displayed it only briefly before disappearing. I suspect that if that were the way we received literature, then writers (and readers) would work harder to hold our attention. They would avoid getting too complicated, and they would strive mightily to create a memorable experience. Music did not get more compositionally sophisticated when it started being recorded, but I would argue that it did get texturally more complex. Perhaps written literature changed, too, as it became widespread—maybe it too evolved to be more textural (more about mood, technical virtuosity, and intellectual complexity than merely about telling a story).

Recording is far from an objective acoustic mirror, but it pretends to be like magic—a perfectly faithful and unbiased representation of the sonic act that occurred out there in the world. It claims to capture exactly what we hear—though our hearing isn’t faithful or objective either. A recording is also repeatable. So, to its promoters, it is a mirror that shows you how you looked at a particular moment, over and over, again and again. Creepy. However, such claims are not only based on faulty assumptions, they are also untrue.

The first Edison cylinder recorders weren’t very reliable, and the recording quality wasn’t very good. Edison never suggested that they be used to record music. Rather, they were thought of as dictation machines, something that could, for example, preserve the great speeches of the day. The New York Times predicted that we might collect speeches: “Whether a man has or has not a wine cellar he will certainly, if he wishes to be regarded as a man of taste, have a well-stocked oratorical cellar.”² Please, try this fine Bernard Shaw or a rare Kaiser Wilhelm II.

These machines were entirely mechanical. There was no electrical power involved in either the recording or the playback, so they weren’t very loud compared to what we know today. To impress sound onto the wax, the voice or instrument being recorded would get as close as possible to the wide end of the horn—a large cone that funneled the sound toward the diaphragm and then to the inscribing needle. The sound waves would be concentrated and the vibrating diaphragm would move the needle, which incised a groove into a rotating wax cylinder. Playback simply reversed the process. It’s amazing that it worked at all. As Murch points out, the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn’t beyond them. For all we know, someone at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it. Odd how technology and inventions come into being and fail to flourish for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the skill, materials, or technology available at the time. Technological progress, if one can call it that, is full of dead ends and cul-de-sacs—roads not taken which could have led to who knows what alternate history. Or maybe the meandering paths, with their secret trajectories, would eventually and inevitably converge, and we’d all end up exactly where we are.

The wax cylinders that contained the recordings couldn’t be easily massproduced, so making lots of “copies” of these early recordings was an insane process. To “mass produce” these items, one had to set up an array of these recorders as close as possible to the singer, band, or player—in other words, you could only produce the same number of recordings as you had recording devices and cylinders running. To make the next batch, you’d load up more blank cylinders and the band would have to play the same tune again, and so on. There needed to be a new performance for every batch of recordings. Not exactly a promising business model.

Edison set this apparatus aside for over a decade, but he eventually went back to tinkering with it, possibly due to pressure from the Victor Talking Machine Company, which had come out with recordings on discs. Soon he felt he’d made a breakthrough. In 1915, when Edison demonstrated his new version of an apparatus that recorded onto discs, he was convinced that now, finally, playback was a completely accurate reproduction of the speaker or singer being captured. The recording angel, the acoustic mirror, had arrived. Well, hearing those recordings, we might now think that he was somewhat deluded about how good his gizmo was, but he certainly seemed to believe in it, and he managed to convince others too. Edison was a brilliant inventor, a great engineer, but also a huckster and sometimes a ruthless businessman. (He didn’t even really “invent” the electric light bulb—Joseph Swan in England had made them previously, though Edison did establish that tungsten would be the great longlasting filament for that device.) And he usually managed to market and promote the hell out of his products, which certainly counts for something.

These new Diamond Disc Phonographs were promoted via what Edison referred to as Tone Tests. There is a promo film he made called “The Voice of the Violin” (oddly, for something promoting a sound recorder, it was a silent film) that helped publicize the Tone Tests. Edison was marketing and selling the Edison “sound” more than any specific artist. Initially he didn’t even put the names of the artists on the discs, but there was always a sizable picture of Edison himself.^A He also held Mood Change Parties (!) in which the (naturally positive) emotional impact and power of recorded music was demonstrated. (No NIN or Insane Clown Posse played at those parties, I guess.) Lastly, the Diamond Disc used proprietary technology; the Edison discs couldn’t be played on the Victor machines, and vice versa. We haven’t learned much in that respect, it seems—Kindles, iPads, Pro Tools, MS Office software—the list of proprietary insanity is endless. It’s a small comfort that such nonsense isn’t new.

The Tone Tests themselves were public demonstrations in which a famous singer would appear on stage along with a Diamond Disc player playing a recording of that same singer singing the same song. The stage would be dark. What the audience heard would alternate between the sound of the disc and the live singer, and the audience had to guess which they were hearing. It worked—the public could not tell the difference. Or so we’re told. The Tone Tests toured the country, like a traveling show or an early infomercial, and audiences were amazed and captivated.

We might wonder how this could be possible. Who remembers “Is it real or is it Memorex?” These early recorders had a very limited dynamic and frequency range; how could anyone really be fooled? Well, for starters, there was apparently a little stage trickery involved. The singers were instructed to try to sound like the recordings, to sing in a slightly pinched manner and with a limited range of volume. It took some practice before they could master it. (You have to wonder how audiences fell for this.)

Sociologist H. Stith Bennett suggests that over time we developed what he calls “recording consciousness,” which means we internalize how the world sounds based on how recordings sound.³ He claims that the parts of our brain that deal with hearing act as a filter and, based on having heard lots of recorded sound, we simply don’t hear things that don’t fit that sonic template. In Bennett’s view, the recording becomes the ur-text, replacing the musical score. He implies that this development might have led us to listen to music more closely. By extension, one might infer that all sorts of media, not just recordings, shape how we see and hear the real world; there is little doubt that our brains can and often do narrow the scope of what we perceive to the extent that things that happen right before our eyes sometimes don’t register. In a famous experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, participants were asked to count the number of passes made by a group of basketball players in a film. Halfway through the film, a guy in a full gorilla suit runs through the middle of the action, thumping his chest. When asked afterward if they saw or heard anything unusual, more than half didn’t see the gorilla.

The gorilla deniers weren’t lying; the gorilla simply never appeared to them. Things might impinge on our senses but still fail to register in the brain. Our internal filters are far more powerful than we might like to think. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced that what are to us obviously faked photos of fairies were in fact real fairies captured on film. He believed that the photo shown below was real until the end of his life.^B

So the mind’s eye (and ear) is a truly variable thing. What one person hears and sees is not necessarily what another perceives. Our own sensory organs, and thus even our interpretation of data and our reading of measurements on instruments, are wildly subjective.

Edison was convinced that his devices made what he referred to as “recreations” of the actual performances, not mere recordings of them. Is there a difference? Edison thought there was. He felt that the mechanical nature of the recordings—sorry, re-creations— was truer in some sense than the Victor versions that used microphones and amplification, which he claimed inevitably “colored” the sound. Edison insisted that his recordings, in which the sound did not go through wires, were uncolored, and therefore truer. I’d offer that they’re both correct; both technologies color the sound, but in different ways. “Neutral” technology does not exist.

Illustration from The Case of the Cottingley Fairies by Joe Cooper

The trickery involved in the Tone Test performances was, it seems to me, an early example of the soon-to-be-common phenomenon of live music trying to imitate the sound of recordings. A sort of extension of Bennett’s recording-consciousness idea mentioned above. As a creative process it seems somewhat backward and counterproductive, especially with the Edison version in which the pinched singing was encouraged, but we’ve now grown so accustomed to the sound of recordings that we do in fact expect a live show to sound pretty much like a record—whether it be an orchestra or a pop band—and that expectation makes no more sense now than it did then. It’s not just that we expect to hear the same singer and arrangements that exist on our records, we expect everything to go through the same technological sonic filters—the pinched vocals of the Edison machines, the massive subbass of hip-hop recordings, or the perfect pitch of singers whose voices were corrected electronically in the recording process.

Here, then, is the philosophical parting of the ways in a nutshell. Should a recording endeavor to render reality as faithfully as possible, with no additions, coloration, or interference? Or are the inherent sonic biases and innate qualities of recording an art unto itself? Of course I don’t believe the Edison discs would fool anyone today, but the differing aspirations and ideals regarding recording still hold. This debate has not confined itself to sound recording. Film and other media are sometimes discussed with regard to their “accuracy,” their ability to capture and reproduce what is true. The idea that somewhere out there exists one absolute truth implies a suspension of belief, which is an ideal for some, while for others admitting artificiality is more honest. Flashing back to the previous chapter, this reminds me of the difference between Eastern theater (more artificial and presentational) and Western (with its effort to be naturalistic).

We no longer expect that contemporary records are meant to capture a specific live performance—even a performance that may have happened in the artificial atmosphere of a recording studio. We may treasure jazz and other recordings from fifty years ago that captured a live performance, often in the studio, but now a “concert album” or an album of an artist playing live in the studio tends to be the exception. And yet, somewhat oddly it seems to me, many recordings that are largely made up of obviously artificially generated sounds use those sounds in ways that mimic the way a “real” band might employ “real” instruments. Low electronic thuds imitate the effect of an acoustic kick drum, though now they appear to be coming from a virtual drum that sounds larger and tighter than anything physically possible, and synthesizers often play lines that oddly mimic, in range and texture, what a horn player might have done. They are not mimicking real instruments, but rather what real instruments do. One would assume then that the sonic tasks that “real” instruments once accomplished are still needs that have to be met. A sonic scaffolding has been maintained, despite the fact that the materials it is made of have been radically changed. Only the most experimental composers have made music that consists entirely of rumbles or high-pitched whines—music that doesn’t recall or reference acoustic instruments in any way.

The “performances” captured on early wax discs were different both from what and how those same live bands were used to playing, as well as being different from what we think of as typical recording-studio practice today. For starters, there was one mic (or horn) available to record the whole band and singer, so rather than the band being arranged as they might have been on a bandstand or stage, they were arranged around the horn, positioned according to who most needed to be heard and who was loudest. The singer, for example, might be right in front of the recording horn, and then when a sax solo came up someone would yank the singer away from the horn and a hired shover would push the sax player into position. This jerky choreography would be reversed when the sax solo was over. And that’s just one solo. A recording session might involve a whole little dance devised so that all the key parts were heard at the right times. Louis Armstrong, for example, had a loud and piercing trumpet tone, so he was sometimes positioned farther away from the recording horn than anyone else, by about fifteen feet. The main guy in the band was stuck in the back!

Drums and upright basses posed a big problem for these recording devices. The intermittent low frequencies that they produce made wider or deeper grooves (in the case of the Edison machines), which make the needles jump and skip during playback. So those instruments were also shoved to the rear, and in most cases were intentionally rendered almost inaudible. Blankets were thrown over drums, especially the kick and snares. Drummers were sometimes required to play bells, wood blocks, and the sides of their drums instead of the snares and kick drums—those thinner sounds didn’t make the needles jump, but could still be heard. The double bass was often swapped with a tuba because its low end was less punchy. So early recording technology was limiting not only in terms of what frequencies one heard, but also in terms of which instruments were actually recorded. The music was already being edited and shaped to fit the new medium.

Recordings resulted in a skewed, inaccurate impression of music that wasn’t already well known. It would be more accurate to say that early jazz recordings were versions of that music. Musicians in other towns, hearing what these drummers and bass/tuba players were doing on the recordings, sometimes assumed that that was how the music was supposed to be played, and they began to copy those adaptations that had initially been made solely to accommodate the limitations of the technology. How could they know differently? Now we don’t and can never know what those bands really sounded like—their true sound may have been “unrecordable.” Our understanding of certain kinds of music, based on recordings anyway, is completely inaccurate.

Edison, meanwhile, continued to maintain that his recorders were capturing unadorned reality. In fact, he was quoted as saying that the recorders know more than you do, implying (accurately) that our ears and brains skew sound in various ways. He maintained, of course, that his recordings presented sound as it truly is.

We all know how weird it is to hear your own recorded voice—the discomforting aspect of this phenomena is often attributed to the fact that we hear ourselves, our voices, though the vibrations in our skulls as well as through our ears, and recordings can’t capture these skull vibrations and osseous transmissions. The aspect of our voices that gets recorded is only a part of what we hear. But then there is also the inherent bias and sonic coloration added by microphones and the electronics that are involved in capturing our voices. No microphone is exactly like the human ear, but that isn’t mentioned much. The sonic reality we experience via our senses is probably way different than what we hear in an “objective” recording. But, as mentioned above, our brains tend to make these disparate versions converge.

I have heard that Edison recorders aren’t as shockingly biased as one might think, that in fact to hear one’s own voice played back through an Edison machine is actually less strange than if one were to hear a recording made by a microphone. So there may be a grain of truth to Edison’s claim, at least as far as the voice goes. He implied that it was like looking in a mirror. But now I begin to wonder, do mirrors even really reflect us, or are they skewed and biased? Is the face we see while shaving or putting on makeup really us, or is it our “mirror self,” a self that—like audio recordings—we have come to be familiar with, but is in some ways equally inaccurate?

A Berlin-based company called Neumann recently came out with a device in which two microphones were placed inside the “ears” of a kind of mannequin head to better simulate the way our ears heard the world.^C Binaural recording, it was called. You had to listen to the recordings through headphones to get the effect. (I heard some of these recordings, and I didn’t buy it.) The elusive quest for “capturing” reality never dies.

Phonographs (also known as gramophones) became increasingly popular in the early twentieth century. The early versions (after the ones that were only good enough to record talking) allowed owners to record their own musical performances. Some companies added interactive features to these machines. Here is an ad from a 1916 issue of Vanity Fair for something called the Graduola:

To my friends and associates and indeed to myself, I’ve appeared until recently, simply a plain, middle-aged, unemotional businessman. And now I find that I’m a musician. How did I find this out? I’ll tell you! Last Tuesday night, my wife and I were at the Jones’s. Jones had a new purchase—a phonograph. Personally, I’m prejudiced against musical machines. But this phonograph was different. With the first notes I sat upright in my chair. It was beautiful. “Come over here and sing this yourself!” said Jones. I went to see what the slender tube terminating in a handle [the Graduola] could be. It looked interesting. “Hold this in your hands!” said Jones. “Move the handle in to make the music louder; draw it out to make it softer.” Then he started the record again. At first I hardly dared to move the little device in my hands. Presently, however, I gained confidence. As the notes swelled forth and softly died away in answer to my will, I became bolder. I began to feel the music. It was wonderful! I . . . fairly trembled with the depth of emotion. The fact that I was—must be—a natural musician dawned upon me. And with it came a glimpse of the glorious possibilities opened to me by this great new phonograph.⁴

Great ad copy! The record player as orgasmatron!

Soon there was a flurry of recordings of school and parlor performers, sung greetings, holiday wishes, and all sorts of amateur performances. The early phonographs were like YouTube—everyone was swapping homemade audio recordings. Composers were even recording their playing and then playing along with themselves. Soon enough that function was taken away. I would be inclined to believe that this anti-participatory, non-egalitarian move by the manufacturers might have been urged by the newly emerging recording companies, who would have claimed that they weren’t being evil but simply wanted to market “quality” recordings that would elevate the musical taste of their customers and the nation as a whole. Victor and Edison had “signed” a number of artists, and naturally they wanted you to buy their recordings, not make your own. The battle between amateurs and “professionals” isn’t new; it has been fought (and often lost) many times over.

Courtesy of Georg Neumann GmbH

John Phillip Sousa, the march king, was opposed to recorded music. He saw the new music machines as a substitute for human beings. In a 1906 essay entitled “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” he wrote, “I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste… in this twentieth century come these talking and playing machines that offer to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, discs, cylinders and all manner of revolving things.”⁵ God save us from revolving things!

He’s not totally crazy, though. Despite his Luddite ravings, I tend to agree that any tendency to turn the public into passive consumers rather than potentially active creators is to be viewed with suspicion. However, the public tends to surprise us by finding ways to create using whatever means are available to them. Some creative urges seem truly innate and will find a means of expression, a way out, no matter if traditional means are denied to us.

Sousa and many others also deplored that music was becoming less public. It was moving off the bandstand (where Sousa was king) and into the living room. Experiencing music used to always be something you did with a group of other people, but now you could experience it (or a re-creation of it, as Edison would have it) alone. Shades of the Walkman and the iPod! To some, this was horrific. It was like drinking alone, they said; it was antisocial and psychologically dangerous. It was described as self-stimulation!

In his book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Mark Katz quotes Orlo Williams, who wrote in 1923, “You would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room, and if you found no such one would painfully blush, as if you had discovered your friend sniffing cocaine, emptying a bottle of whisky, or plaiting straws in his hair.” Williams noted that we think people should not do things “to themselves.”⁶ It was as if the individual had selfishly decided to have a strong emotional experience, maybe even over and over again, whenever they felt like it, just by putting on a record, stimulated by a machine—there was something wrong with it!

One might think that these same worrywarts might also disdain recordings on the basis that they sacrifice the visual elements inherent to performance—the costumes and sets of grand opera, the hubbub and smells of a music hall, or the stately atmosphere at the symphony—but that was not always the case. The twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, who wrote great quantities of music criticism (and tended to dislike popular music), thought that removing music from the accompanying visual spectacle was sometimes a good thing. You could, in his view, appreciate the music more objectively, without the often tacky trappings of performance. Jascha Heifetz, the classical violinist, was a notoriously unexpressive presence on stage; he was described as being stiff, immobile, cold. But by listening with one’s eyes closed, or to a recording, one could discern the deep feeling in what might have previously seemed a soulless performance. Of course, the sound itself didn’t change, but our perception of it did—by not seeing, we could hear in a different way.

With the ascendance of radio in the twenties, people had another way to experience music. With radio, one definitely needed a microphone to capture the music, and the sound went through a whole lot of other electrical transmutations before the listener heard it. That said, mostly people really liked what they heard on the radio; the music was louder than on the Edison players, for starters, and there was more low end. People liked it so much that they demanded that live acts should “sound more like the radio.”

What has happened is to some extent what Sousa feared: we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation. It seemed to some that the animating principle of music was being replaced by a more perfect, but slightly less soulful, machine.

Katz details how recording technology changed music over the century of its existence. He cites examples of how instrument-playing and singing changed as recordings and radio broadcasts became more ubiquitous. Vibrato, the slight wavering in pitch, is often employed by contemporary string players, and it is a good example of the effect of recordings, because it’s something we take for granted as always having been there. We tend to think, “That’s how violin players play. That’s the nature of how one plays that instrument.” It wasn’t, and it’s not. Katz contends that before the advent of recording, vibrato added to a note was considered kitschy, tacky, and was universally frowned upon, unless one absolutely had to use it when playing in the uppermost registers. Vibrato as a technique, whether employed in a vocal performance or with a violin, helps mask pitch discrepancies, which might explain why it was considered “cheating.” As recording became more commonplace in the early part of the twentieth century, it was found that by using a bit more vibrato, not only could the volume of the instrument be increased (very important when there was only one mic or a single huge horn to capture an orchestra or ensemble), but the pitch—now painfully and permanently apparent—could be smudged by adding the wobble. The perceptibly imprecise pitch of a string instrument with no frets could be compensated for with this little wobble. The mind of the listener “wants” to hear the correct pitch, so the brain “hears” the right pitch among the myriad vaguenesses of pitch created by players using vibrato. The mind fills in the blanks, as it does with the visual gaps between movie and video frames, in which a series of stills create the impression of seamless movement. Soon enough, conventional wisdom reversed itself, and now people find listening to classical string-playing without vibrato to be painful and weird.

I suspect that the exact same thing happened with opera singers. I have some recordings made at the very beginning of the recording era, and their use of vibrato is much, much less frequent than what is common nowadays. Their singing is somewhat closer to what we might call pop singing today. Well, not exactly, but I find it more accessible and less off-putting than the fuzzy, wobbly pitching typical of contemporary opera singers, who sometimes exaggerate the vibrato so much you hardly know what note they’re supposed to be hitting unless you know the song already. (Further proof that the mind of the listener “hears” the melody it wants to hear.) Again, it’s assumed now that wobbly is how opera is supposed to be sung, but it’s not. It’s a relatively recent—and in my opinion, ugly—development forced upon music by recording technology.

Other changes in classical music were not quite as noticeable. Tempos became somewhat more precise with recording technology. Without the “distraction” of visual elements in a performance, unsteady tempos and rhythms can sound pretty damn sloppy and are rudely apparent, so players eventually learned to play to a consistent interior metronome. Well, they tried to, anyway.

This is an issue with pop and rock bands, too. My former bandmate Jerry Harrison has produced a number of first albums by rock bands, and he has observed more than once that the biggest and often primary hurdle is getting the band to play in time. This makes it sound like emerging bands are sloppy amateurs, which is not exactly true. They may sound perfectly fine in a club, or even in a concert hall, where all the other elements—the visuals, the audience, the beer—conspire to help one ignore the lurching and shaking. According to Jerry, the inaccuracies become all too obvious in the studio and make for a slightly seasick listening experience. He had to become very good at finding workarounds or devising rhythmic training-wheels for bands who were new to recording.

One wonders if the visual element of performing in the pre-recording era inevitably allowed for more error, and if it made listeners more forgiving. If you can see someone performing, you’re slightly less critical of missteps in timing and pitch. The sound in live venues is also never as good as it is on a record (well, hardly ever), but we mentally fix the acoustic faults of these rooms—maybe with help from those visual cues—and sometimes we find that a live experience is more moving than a recording, contrary to Adorno’s theory. In many concert halls we simply don’t “hear” the slightly exaggerated echo in the low frequencies, for example. Our brains make it more pleasing, more like what we believe it should be—like the pitch of a violin played with vibrato. (Well, we do this up to a point; the sound in some rooms is beyond saving.) Somehow it’s harder to do that mental repair work with a recording.

Hearing a recording of a live performance one has witnessed and enjoyed can prove disappointing. An experience that was auditory, visual, and social has now been reduced to something coming out of stereo speakers or headphones. In performance, sound comes from an infinite number of points— even if the performer is in front of you, the sound is bouncing off walls and ceilings, and that’s part of the experience. It might not make the performance “better” in a technical sense, but it is absolutely more enveloping. Various people have attempted to bridge these irreconcilable differences, and some odd hybrids, as well as wonderful developments, have resulted.

In his book Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner argues that the conductor Leopold Stokowski was a visionary who changed the way orchestral music sounded over the radio and on recordings. He loved the idea of amplifying classical music; he felt it made it bigger.⁷ His stated ambition was ultimately to use technology to get the compositions to sound better than what the composer had originally conceived. There’s a little hubris involved there, but I don’t think too many composers complained. Rather than having pushers and shovers, as the early recording studios had, Stokowski conscripted studio technicians to move the mics around during the recordings of orchestras. Anticipating a counter-melody from the French horns, for example, he’d signal a mic to be wheeled into position in time for their “solo.” He realized—as film-sound recorders and mixers do—that we hear with all our senses in a live situation, and to just stick a mic up and expect it to capture what we have experienced, well, that wasn’t going to happen. Recreating the subjective “experience” meant one had to do more than that.

In a live situation, the ear can psychoacoustically zoom in on a sound or isolate a section of players and pick out a phrase or melody—the way we can pick out a conversation at a noisy dinner table if we can see the person talking. Stokowski recognized this phenomenon and made adjustments to help bridge that perceptual gap. All of his innovations aimed to get the experience on disc, and possibly even surpass it by, for example, exaggerating dynamics and shifting perspectives.

Sometimes he went the other way: rather than exaggerating, he would attempt to mask some aspect of the original. At one point he proposed that a big problem inherent in opera performances could now be solved. He pointed out that “the lady who plays the part live may sing like a nightingale but she looks like an elephant.” Stokowski suggested that svelte actresses learn to lipsynch to pre-recorded vocals so that the opera visuals could finally match the composer’s intention. I saw this done once for a filmed version of Wagner’s Parsifal directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. He had great actresses and actors playing the parts, lip-synching to great singers. I thought it worked, but this approach never caught on.

FROZEN ARCHITECTURE

Recordings freeze music and allow it to be studied. Young jazz players used to listen to Louis Armstrong’s recorded solos over and over until they figured out what he was doing. Later, amateur guitarists would use recordings to break down Hendrix and Clapton solos in the same way. Tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman found that listening to other players in clubs was too distracting—he preferred records. With a recording you could stop time by stopping the record, or you could make time repeat by playing part of a song over and over again. The ineffable was coming under human control.

But learning from records has its limitations. Ignacio Varchausky from the Buenos Aires tango orchestra El Arranque says in the documentary Si Sos Brujo that he and others tried learning from records how the older orchestras did what they did, but it was difficult, almost impossible. Eventually, El Arranque had to find the surviving players from those ensembles and ask them how it was done. The older players had to physically show the younger players how to replicate the effects they got, and which notes and beats should be emphasized. So, to some extent, music is still an oral (and physical) tradition, handed down from one person to another. Records may do a lot to preserve music and disseminate it, but they can’t do what direct transmission does. In that same documentary, Wynton Marsalis says that the learning, the baton passing, happens on the bandstand—one has to play with others, to learn by watching and imitating. For Varchausky, when those older players are gone, the traditions (and techniques) will be lost if their knowledge is not passed on directly. History and culture can’t really be preserved by technology alone.⁸

Recordings uproot music from their place of origin. They allow far-flung artists and foreign genres to be heard in other parts of the world, and these artists sometimes find a wider audience than they ever imagined they could have. John Lomax and his son Alan traveled thousands of miles to record the music of the American South. Initially they used a large and bulky disc recorder. This would be like having a mastering lab in the back of your station wagon, but it was as portable as one could get at the time, if you could call something the size of a small refrigerator portable.

In one instance, John and Alan went to a Texas plantation to record the black “residents” who would, they hoped, sing for them. The fact that those men could be “commanded” to sing might have been the primary reason to go there, but their experience did prove to be enlightening in a way that they hadn’t expected. They were looking for someone who could sing the song “Stagolee.” It seems slightly suspicious to me that these guys already knew what they wanted—how do you find the unexpected if you know what you want? Milner tells the story like this: