How Music Works (15 page)

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 man-

nequin 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 par-

lor performers, sung greetings, holiday wishes, and all sorts

of amateur performances. The early phonographs were

like YouTube—everyone was swapping homemade audio

C

DAV I D BY R N E | 83

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.

John Philip 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 twen-

tieth 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 84 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

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 record-

ings on the basis that they sacrifice the visual elements inherent to per-

formance—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 trans-

mutations 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 consid-

ered 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

DAV I D BY R N E | 85

changed as recordings and radio broadcasts became more ubiquitous. Vibrato,

the slight wavering in pitch, is often employed by contemporary string play-

ers, 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 upper-

most registers. Vibrato as a technique, whether employed in a vocal perfor-

mance 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 appar-

ent—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.

86 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

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 get-

ting 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 forgiv-

ing. If you can see someone performing, you’re slightly less critical of mis-steps 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 DAV I D BY R N E | 87

“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