How Music Works (14 page)

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 start-

ers, there was apparently a little stage trick-

A

ery involved. The singers were instructed to

try to sound like the recordings, to sing in

a slightly pinched manner and with a lim-

ited 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

78 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

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 “re-

creations” 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

B

inevitably “colored” the sound. Edi-

son insisted that his recordings, in

which the sound did not go through

wires, were uncolored, and there-

fore truer. I’d offer that they’re both

correct; both technologies color the

sound, but in different ways. “Neu-

tral” technology does not exist.

DAV I D BY R N E | 79

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 sub-

bass 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 addi-tions, 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 West-

ern (with its effort to be naturalistic).

We no longer expect that contemporary records are meant to capture a spe-

cific 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, 80 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

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 choreogra-

phy 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

DAV I D BY R N E | 81

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, hear-

ing what these drummers and bass/tuba players were doing on the record-

ings, 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 discom-

forting 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 82 | HOW MUSIC WORKS