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