Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

  • Greg Milner
Faber & Faber/Granta Books: 2009. 416 pp/464 pp. $35/£20 0571211658 9781862079427 | ISBN: 0-571-21165-8

The first person to make a reproducible recording of sound was not Thomas Edison. As Greg Milner explains in Perfecting Sound Forever, it was a French printer, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who etched sound waves on to a thin film of soot in 1857, some two decades before Edison. It took another 150 years for Scott de Martinville's recording of the human voice to be heard. In March 2008, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, devised a way of reproducing the sounds he had captured in soot, and the recording — ten seconds of the popular folk song 'Au Clair de la Lune' — was 'played' for the first time.

Les Paul's experiments with layered sound led to multi-track recording. Credit: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY

So Edison's phonograph was the first practical machine for recording the human voice. Milner's book charts the history of recorded music from the late nineteenth century to today, examining how the role of recording has evolved, from merely capturing sound to creating it. Pioneers such as Edison could exert little influence on the recording process other than positioning performers in front of an acoustic horn, offering advice on voice projection or warming the wax on the phonograph's recording cylinder. And once the performance was under way, they could only stand back; a few minutes' worth of sound waves were etched on to the surface of a wax cylinder to create a permanent record (see page 351).

The advent of electrical recording in the 1920s gave recording engineers more scope for shaping sounds by positioning microphones to emphasize certain instruments at certain times. But recording remained passive, the electrical impulses being fed straight from the microphone to a gramophone disc-cutting machine.

Magnetic tape brought with it the possibility of editing, blowing away the notion of a recording being a reproduction of a real-time event. When the Bing Crosby Philco Radio Time show aired in October 1947, the audience thought it was hearing a live performance. It wasn't. The show had been recorded in August and the aired version stitched together from different takes, to remove mistakes and improve the flow. The man wielding the editing scissors was Jack Mullin, who had spent the Second World War monitoring communications for the Allies and marvelling at the clarity of the music he had listened to on German radio. At the end of the war, Mullin visited Radio Frankfurt at Bad Neuheim and discovered the source of that quality — Magnetophon tape recorders, superior to any recording device in the United States. He shipped two of them home and used them for those first edited radio shows.

Multi-track recording, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, meant that instruments and vocals could be captured separately and mixed together. Effects such as echo and reverberation could be added. The Beatles and their producer George Martin were among the first to see the creative possibilities of multi-track and used it in the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions in 1966–67. It is difficult to imagine The Beatles standing on a stage performing any of the Sgt. Pepper's songs live. The album is a performance that was created by recording technology, not one captured by it.

The latest major development documented by Milner is digital recording: turning analog sound signals into binary code that can be stored and manipulated on computers. In the early 1980s, the first commercial digital instruments appeared — samplers, synthesizers and drum machines. By the late 1990s these had morphed into digital audio workstations: digital boxes of tricks that sample and synthesize sounds, process them and combine them to form tracks. A singer who is out of tune or a drummer who is out of time can be digitally corrected. Milner suggests that digital recording is a core skill needed by today's musicians.

Central to the book is whether or not recordings are better as a result of this technological progress. Milner devotes a weighty section to how the move from analog to digital has affected the quality of recorded music. With a wider dynamic range, the compact disc should offer listeners a more sonically interesting ride than a vinyl LP. But Milner doesn't think it does. The extra dynamic range, he says, has been used to wage a 'loudness war'. Engineers compress signals so that the faintest sounds are boosted up to the level of the loudest. The result is a recording where everything is loud, all of the time.

Milner suggests that this loudness war reflects changes in the way we listen to music. In the pre-digital era, the emphasis was on quality. Record engineers and audiophiles were obsessed with 'presence', trying to recreate the concert-hall experience in our homes. But as we listen to more music from small, cheap speakers in our cars, on our laptops and from MP3 players, the emphasis is now on loudness and convenience. Indeed, the MP3 format is designed to strip music down so that we can cram more songs on to our iPods.

Although these developments are documented elsewhere, Perfecting Sound Forever brings them together in a lively and accessible way. Milner focuses on the fascinating characters behind the technology. There is Edison, whose hearing became so bad that he had to 'listen' to music by biting on the wooden frame of his phonograph. The conductor Leopold Stokowski, best known for his score for the Disney animated film Fantasia, comes across like a 1920s version of the Nigel Tufnel character in the 1984 film This is Spinal Tap, urging the engineers to turn up the volume of the new-fangled electrical recording equipment to the maximum.

There are John and Alan Lomax, the father and son team who toured the United States in the 1930s in a desperate race to record 'authentic' music before it disappeared as performers started to emulate the styles they heard on their gramophones and radios. And there is Les Paul, the guitarist whose experiments with layering sound onto single-track tape paved the way for multi-track recording. King Tubby also stands out: he was the Jamaican recording engineer who pioneered the idea that you could take pre-existing sounds and turn them into new music in the studio.

One outcome of the developments that Milner describes is the shift in the balance of power between the recording industry and musicians. Digital audio workstations allow musicians to produce professional-quality recordings at home, with the result that many recording studios have closed down. Musicians can disseminate tracks though the Internet, bypassing the distribution channels controlled by the big recording companies. Karl Marx would have approved — control of the means of production has passed from the elite to the man in the street. It is a shame that Perfecting Sound Forever doesn't dwell on the political significance of the developments it charts — a subject for a future book, perhaps.