SOUND, RHETORIC, AND THE FALLACY OF FIDELITY IN RECORDED

POPULAR MUSIC: TOWARD A CRITICAL APPROACH TO TIMBRAL ANALYSIS

(Spine Title: Sound, Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity)

by

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Graduate Program in Popular Music and Culture

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

The University of Western Ontario

London, Ontario, Canada

© Kara-Lis Coverdale, 2010

ii

THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor ______________________________

Dr. Norma Coates Second Reader

______________________________ Dr. Jay Hodgson

Examiners ______________________________

Dr. Emily Abrams Ansari ______________________________ Dr. Jonathan Burston

______________________________ Dr. Robert Toft

The thesis by

Kara-Lis Coverdale

entitled:

Sound, Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity in Recorded Popular

Music: Toward a Critical Approach to Timbral Analysis

is accepted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Date April 21, 2010 _______________________________ Dr. Richard Semmens Chair of the Thesis Examination Board

iii

ABSTRACT

This thesis explores rhetorical and sonic manifestations of realism in recorded

popular music from the acoustic era onwards. With reference to timbre, I investigate the

commercial origins of fidelity, and describe, through various examples in history where

arguments over what is “real” or is not “real” arise most articulately, how those records

were made. By addressing the sounds themselves, I address how fidelity/realism is a fluid

standard that guides and shapes modes of aesthetic record production and consumption. I

demonstrate how rhetorical analysis is useful for identifying ideologically maintained

understandings of recorded sounds, but maintain that if musicologists are to understand

recordings and the sounds they contain as artifacts of aesthetic consumption, which I

propose we do, then we must investigate beyond how sounds are rhetorically social to

examine how social relations express themselves materially. As such, I propose a method

of analysis that considers both the rhetorical and material aspects of timbral processing

through the purview of veridic recording practice, which acknowledges the processes and

considerations made toward the material construction of timbral rhetoric.

KEYWORDS

Recording, Recordist, Sound Fidelity, Timbre, Timbral Analysis, Sonic Rhetoric,

Culture, Listening Culture, Sound Theory, Rhetorical Infrastructure, Audio, Aurality, Technology, Listening, Ideology, Commodity, Sound as Commodity, Industry, Popular

Music, Aesthetics, Reality, Realism, Liveness, Veridic, Recording Practice, Sound Theory, Participatory Discrepancy, Acoustic-era recording, Edison, Diamond Disc,

Phonograph, Tone Test, Re-creation, Diaphragm, Horn, Mitch Miller, Sauter-Finegan, Sonic-Experimentation, Clubhouse, The Band, Equalization, Frequency, Spectrum,

Amplitude, Signal Processing, Acoustics

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like to thank my advisor, Professor Norma Coates, who has offered

me invaluable advice, perspective, and encouragement. Her faith in my abilities has

helped me through some of the more daunting parts of this project’s evolution, and her

useful feedback made those parts gratifying. Norma has helped me to grasp what it means

to exist as an interdisciplinary thinker, and how to proceed responsibly (and efficiently)

with that self-identification. This has been perhaps the most valuable lesson of all.

I would also like to thank Professor Jay Hodgson, who was enthusiastic and

supportive of my project from the very start, and was able map my thoughts and their

often polarized directions when I needed a navigator the most. Jay’s provocative

arguments and carefully articulated questions regarding recording communications have

challenged, and continued to challenge my own assumptions about what a recording is.

This thesis would not have been possible without his guidance.

Thank-you to those on my defense committee, Dr. Emily Abrams Ansari, Dr

Jonathan Burston, and Dr. Robert Toft, and to all others who have helped along the way,

especially Professors Jim Grier, Keir Keightley, and Carole Farber.

I am also grateful for my family, especially my parents Robert and Tiina

Coverdale, who have supported me unconditionally. And a special thank-you to Ryan,

who has been the finest soundboard any writer could ask for. If we could all listen as

attentively as he, I think the world would sound a whole lot different.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of Examination………………………………………………………..………ii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………..…….iii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………….....iv

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1

The Beginnings of Auditory Rhetoric…………………………………………………...11 Source, Fidelity, and Sonic Commodity in the Acoustic Era

From the Laboratory to the Stage……………………………………………….………36 Making Re-Creations: Behind The Curtain After the Acoustic Era………………………………………………………………..…..66 Rhetorical Binary Analysis: Beyond Fidelity Through the Porthole…………………………………………………………..………104 Toward an Approach to Veridic Recording Practice: Timbre and Equalization Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………..140

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….……146

Appendix…………………………………………………………….………….………156 Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………….…………………159

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. “Did You Ever Make a Phonograph Record?” Edison Phonograph Company Advertisement, 1910 (Courtesy Oxford Journals)………………………………..27 Figure 2. “Which is Which?” Victor Company Talking Machine Advertisement, 1908,

(Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian)………28 Figure 3. “Come! Try Mr. Edison’s Realism Test.” Edison Newspaper Advertisement, 1920…………………………………………………………………….………..31

Figure 4. Diagram Comparing the Shape of Conical Versus Exponential Acoustic Recording Horns……………………...................................................................53 Figure 5. Frequency Response Comparison Conical Versus Exponential Recording Horns…………………………………………………………………………….54

Figure 6. Frequency Response Curve of an Exponential Horn…………........................57 Figure 7. Timbral Balance Graph—The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”……………………………………………………………………….....100

Figure 8. Simple Sine Wave…………………………………………………………….120 Figure 9. Complex Tone………………………………………………………………..121

Figure 10. Frequency Response of a Neumann U-87 Ai Diaphragm Microphone……123 Figure 11. A Frequency-amplitude Chart, Creative Equalization Curve of a Four Band Parametric Equalizer…………………………………………………………...127

Figure 12. The Four Band Division of the Audio Spectrum…………………………...130 Figure 13. Tom Elmhirst’s Paragraphic Equalizer settings for Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.”………………………………………………………………………..137

1 INTRODUCTION

In this thesis, rhetorical and physical attributes of recorded sound are considered

to be two fundamentally disparate spheres of musical communications.1 The prevailing

sonic rhetorical binaries of real/imaginary, fidelity/artifice, captured/designed,

live/mediated re-created/represented, acoustic/electric, familiar/alien, human/machine,

are considered to be industrially, commercially, and culturally conditioned enactments of

sounds which they do not intrinsically contain. Rhetorical understandings of sounds are

said to be only imposed onto sounds that otherwise exist only abstractly.2

My use of “realism” in this thesis is remarkably fluid for a distinct purpose. As

much of my analysis is spent probing rhetorical infrastructures as it is recording practices,

and in both scenarios, my own descriptions of sounds reflect, to the best of my ability,

how both consumers and producers of sound negotiate those qualities. There is, in other

words, an extraordinary variation and flexibility in the uses of the words “realism” and

“fidelity throughout recorded history;” they are often confused and correlate, and almost

never considered distinctly.

1 Within the context of this thesis, the term timbre, also commonly referred to as tone quality or tone color, is

used interchangeably with sound to describe or refer to the overall tonal quality of a sound. Recordists use the word sound more often than timbre to refer specifically to a particular sound’s tonal qualities. It is for this

reason, and this reason alone, that these terms will be considered synonymous in this study. As such, sound is

often discussed in isolation and thus must be considered distinct from other musical parameters that can also “sound,” such as rhythm, harmony, and pitch.

2 The relationship between rhetoric and music has its roots in classical times as a type of expressiveness in

music that results from procedures that transform specific rhetorical concepts into musical equivalents. In

this thesis, rhetoric is considered to be the art of persuasive timbral composition in such a way that is

designed to have a particular persuasive or impressive effect on its audience. It is, as Hegel has described it, a mode of “calculated artifice.” Janice M. Lauer, Invention in Rhetoric and Composition, (Indiana: Parlor Press,

2003), 38.

2 In light of this multiplicity, a large portion of this thesis aims to demonstrate how

understandings of “reality” or “realism” in recording are always in flux. The terms

“fidelity,” “realism,” “reality,” and “live,” for instance, can all be connoted by a single

sound, though that same sound may connote “artificiality,” “fakery,” or

“constructiveness” in another sound epoch. All understandings of “realism,” however,

may be considered as an extension of fidelity, which has existed as a term in relation to

sound by as early as 1877, but did not take on the form of an "oral contract" or belief in

media until Edison resurrected the machine as a "graphophone" in 1888.3 When a

criterion of equivalence was established alongside the Edison tone test campaigns, however,

fidelity came to refer to a retrievable "truth" which depended on the belief that media can

hold faith to an "original." Chapter one explores the conditions of this progression in

detail.

Fidelity came to an all time ideological high in the space-age when “high-fidelity,”

or “hi-fi,” came to refer to a new and improved standard of reproducibility often

associated with the mass acceptance of the LP and the proliferation of home-based high-

quality playback equipment.4 The records made in this era connoted a sort of

“faithfulness,” or “truth” to the recorded source, a communication which depended on

the ideological acceptance that these recordings had the ability to accurately document or

reproduce through sound recording technologies a "live" and authentic performance.5

3 Emily Thomson, “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925,” The Musical Quarterly 79, no.1 (Spring, 1995), 164.

4 Keir Keightley, “’Turn it down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948-59” Popular Music, Vol. 15, No. 2 (May, 1996), 150.

5 See Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 70. To paraphrase Turino, representing a “live” performance is one of the most enduring ideologies

3 Yet “fidelity” and its apparent ability to deliver “the real thing” existed in the acoustic

era much earlier than the “hi-fi” era, and long before the capabilities of electric recording

or high quality playback systems existed.

The sound of a reproduction system and the sounds it purportedly “delivers” are

only considered discrete at particular instances when a machine is in question,

particularly during the hi-fi craze in the 1950s. Though even then, matters of “fidelity”

referred both to a hi-fi playback system and a certain timbral texture and technological

treatment that was to be expected of hi-fi recordings. The records made in this era

connoted a sort of faithfulness or truth to the recorded source, a communication which

depended on the ideological acceptance that these recordings had the ability to accurately

document or reproduce through sound recording technologies a "live" and authentic

performance.6

Similarly, as I will explore in chapter one with a case study of the Diamond Disc

tone test campaigns, if the playback system was ascribed any quality at all (most often it

was encouraged as transparent), they were only complimentary of the sounds contained

therein. Indeed, there was a deeper timbral connection between the machine and the

sounds it contained in the Edison era, since instruments were chosen according to their

sonic behaviors and potential for reproducibility in the first place. “Metallic” sounds, such

underpinning high fidelity recording. “Ideology” has been used variously to reveal the sources of ideas, beliefs, perceptions and values. In this thesis, it is employed similar to how Marx employed it in The German

Ideology, to challenge the notion that perceptions and ideas of sound are autonomous and socially

determined. Moreover, like Adam Krims, I endorse Slavoj Žižek’s notion that “ideology does not provide a distorted view of a true reality but rather a true view of a distorted reality.” Adam Krims, “The Hip-Hop

Sublime as a Form of Commodification,” in Music and Marx: Ideas, Practices, Politics ed. Regela Qureshi (New

York: Routledge, 2002), 72.

6 Turino, Music as Social Life, 70. To paraphrase Turino, representing a “live” performance is one of the

most enduring ideologies underpinning high fidelity recording.

4 as trumpets, euphoniums, and various other brass instruments were better “heard” by

the machine, and as a result the biased frequency response of the horn was less

noticeable. Naturally, the machine to be sold was said to be “sweet” or “natural” whereas

the competition’s was delegated “tinny” and “thin.” Indeed, to reference a sound was

often to reference the machine that played it back.

Today, fidelity refers to a whole host of “realisms.” According to the Oxford English

Dictionary, realism in its most common usage is “the close resemblance to what is real;

fidelity or representation, rendering the precise details of the real thing or scene.”

Similarily, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1981) defines realism as “the theory

or practice in art and literature of fidelity to real life and to accurate representation

without idealization of the most typical views, details and surroundings of the subject.”7

This thesis takes the position that realistic (re) presentation is by no means a mere copy of

reality, but rather is a mode of generalization that makes it possible to further disclose and

explore the typical traits of a particular age. It is through this lens that I engage in the

study of recording practice, and propose a distinct method for timbral analysis.8

By addressing the sounds themselves, always with an analytical emphasis on

timbre, I address how fidelity/realism is a fluid standard that guides and shapes modes of

aesthetic record production and consumption, and propose an analytical mode to further

explicate the nature of constructed realism in recording. This demonstration unfolds

throughout the course of the work though remains rooted by the departure point of

7 Quoted in Matthew Beaumont, Adventures in Realism, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 194.

8 Recording practice, according to Jay Hodgson, is “fully integrated network for uses of sound reproduction technology. It is, in other words, a complete or self-sufficient system of ‘procedures, practices, relations and

technologies’ which relates to ‘Live’ or ‘Concert’ exchange only in that both furnish what is currently

considered a properly ‘musical’ experience.” “Navigating the Network of Recording Practice—Towards an Ecology of the Record Medium” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2006), 4.

5 chapter one, which offers a historical case study that addresses the commercial and

industrial roots of recorded sonic rhetoric. Accordingly, I describe how acoustic era

auditors exercised particular “realist” listening strategies, often guided heavy handedly by

the manufacturers of sound reproduction equipment.

In his fascinating book The Audible Past, Jonathan Sterne’s chapter titled “the social

genesis of sound fidelity” argues for a holistic and contextual approach to sound

reproduction and the concept of sound fidelity in order to, in Raymond Williams’s words,

“discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions.”9 Sterne observes that sound

fidelity required a certain amount of “faith” in the social function of machines rather than

a fixed relationship between sound and sound source. In his own words:

From the very beginning, sound reproduction was a studio art, and,

therefore, the source was as bound up in the social relations of reproducibility as any copy was. Sound fidelity is a story that we tell ourselves to staple separate pieces of sonic reality together. The efficacy of sound reproduction as technology or as a cultural practice is not in its keeping faith with the world wholly external to itself. On the contrary,

sound reproduction—from its very beginnings—always implied social relations among people, machines, practices, and sounds. The very concept of sound fidelity is a result of this conceptual and practical labor.10

Documented evidence (newspapers, letters, and documents) suggests that listeners in the

Edison era perceived the relationship between phonographic sounds and their “sources”

as that of “perfect re-creations,” immaculate “equivalence,” and of course “realistic,”

which renders phonograph listening a type of “modern consumption,” as historian Emily

9 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 219.

10 Ibid.

6 Thomson has put it.11 Desire, technological enthusiasm, commodity fetishism, and faith,

were all equally as important in the negotiation of fidelity as the sounds themselves were.

From Sterne’s theory, I would like to borrow the idea of sound reproduction as

implying “social relations among people, machines, practices, and sounds” to explore

how sound fidelity as rhetoric influences music production. For the purposes of my own

argument, I call this set of social relations a “rhetorical infrastructure” in order to

articulate what social, technological, and practical mechanisms underlie rhetorical

understandings of timbral realism in recorded music. I argue that if we are to explicate

how words used to describe sound mystify their referents, then we must better understand

the sonic material that fails to justify our expectations.

Elsewhere in the Audible Past, Sterne raises many issues that will surface throughout

this thesis, but most important to note at this point is Sterne’s sensitivity to the

construction of the sonic objects themselves: “recordings do not preserve a preexisting

sonic event as it happens so much as it creates and organizes sonic events… recording is,

therefore, discontinuous with the “live” events it is sometimes said to represent.”12

Fidelity, realism, and otherwise are in other words impossibilities in recorded music; we

only ascribe those qualities to the sounds we hear. It is Sterne’s de-bunking spirit and

tendency to examine the material as well as the surrounding air that I hope to carry on in

the pages that follow.

11 Emily Thomson, “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in

America, 1877-1925,” The Musical Quarterly 79, no.1 (Spring, 1995), 134.

12 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past, 332.

7 In this spirit, chapter two offers a case study of the recording materials and

procedures in the acoustic era, with particular reference to timbre, to demonstrate how

“perfect re-productions” were in fact impossible given the materials and nature of the

documentary process. Recordists did not “document” live performances as

advertisements claimed. Rather, the process changed the nature of the “original”

altogether. I especially want to draw attention to the efforts of recordists, whose activities

in the studio adhered to the media and advertisement promises as they sought ways to

better improve their art according to a standard of sound fidelity. There was a fundamental

“participatory discrepancy”13 at play in early recording (and beyond), as recordists had a

significant role in contributing to the construction of sound fidelity while simultaneously

violating its principles.14 This chapter thus exposes and problematizes the so-identified

“fallacy of fidelity” by acknowledging the nature of the machine and the labour of

recordists who shaped sounds according to the prevailing aesthetic of fidelity. In so

doing, I explore why it is that perfect “re-creations” are manifest in every sound epoch.

I also examine how of all of the infrastructure contributors, the recordist’s labour is

rendered the most transparent, which conceals the nature of the communication from

auditors.

13 Thomas Porcello, “Music Mediated as Live in Austin: Sound, Technology, and Recording Practice,” in Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures eds. Paul D. Greene, Thomas Porcello

(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 105. Porcello borrows this term from Charles Keil.

14 I use the term “recordist” to refer broadly to those involved in the recording process that “employ both

intuition and deliberation in a collective effort to produce the record, and are all responsible in some way for the sonic inscriptions that form the record’s essential identity” Albin Zak, The Poetics of Rock (California:

University of California Press, 2000), xii. This includes the work of songwriters, arrangers, performers,

engineers and producers.

8 Chapter three returns to the problem of timbral rhetoric in light of the

discoveries from chapter one and two. I problematize the idea of “realism” in recorded

music and explore existing rhetorical binary analysis models from Thomas Turino, Allan

Moore, and John Andrew Fisher that typically categorize sounds by realistic/imaginary,

fidelity/constructed, etc.15 I describe how live performance is often perceived as dicent

representation, and provide musical examples alongside my discussion.16

Building from and upon the work of Fisher and Jay Hodgson,17 I propose a model

of veridic recording practice as a rhetorically contributive process that considers the

recordist as an “intermediary,” as Antoine Hennion has put it.18 Alongside examples of

early recording experimentation in the 1940s, I explore how what qualifies a “realistic”

sound is, indeed, in flux, and explore the cultural resistance that first met those new

sounds while also exploring how sound fidelity and artifice exist in a dialectic relationship.

I demonstrate how rhetorical analysis is useful for identifying ideologically sustained

understandings of recorded sounds, but maintain that if musicologists are to understand

recordings and the sounds they contain as artifacts of aesthetic consumption, which I

15 Allan Moore, Rock: The Primary Text: Developing A Musicology of Rock, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001);

John Andrew Fisher, “Rock 'n' Recording: The Ontological Complexity of Rock Music,” Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip Alperson, (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press);

Turino, Music as Social Life.

16 For those unfamiliar with semiotic terminology, a dicent symbol is a sign like any other in that it is

connected with its object by an association of general ideas. But the dicent symbol, unlike a typical sign, is

perceived by its intended interpretant as being truly and really affected by its object. In an ideology of dicent representation, then, live performance is actually believed, as fact, to have truly “affected the signs of

liveness in the recording in some way.”16 Turino, Music as Social Life.

17 Jay Hodgson, “Navigating the Network of Recording Practice—Towards an Ecology of the Record

Medium” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2006).

18 Antoine Hennion, “An Intermediary between Production and Consumption.” In Popular Music: Critical

Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies ed. Simon Frith, 123-147. (London: Routledge, 1994), 185.

9 propose we do, then we must investigate beyond how sounds are rhetorically social to

examine how social relations express themselves materially. As such, I propose a method

of analysis that considers both the rhetorical and material aspects of timbral processing

through the purview of veridic recording practice, which acknowledges the processes and

considerations made toward the material construction of timbral rhetoric. In this model,

recordists do not produce outside culture, they produce within it while actively

constructing it.

Throughout this thesis, I explore how there are many ways to connote realness on

a record, though I argue that timbre in particular, plays an important role in the

rhetorical communication of “realness,” because veridic aesthetics place a high premium

on faithfulness to an identifiably familiar sound source.19 Analytical modes for timbre in

popular music have thus far relied on subjective adjectival descriptions of sounds

(“tubby,” “fat,” “bright,”) or spectrograph analyses, as in the works of David Brackett and

Cornelia Fales.20 Chapter four proposes an alternate analytical mode that considers

timbral manipulation through the purview of the recordist. In parlance with the

theoretical framework discussed in chapters one through three, I conduct a case study of a

common timbral processing tool and technique that is commonly employed during

veridic sound production: the equalizer. This mode of analysis explores the acoustic,

19 This thesis explores “veridic” recording in the most traditional sense of a “live” performance and the sound textures therein. In the conclusion I describe how “veridicism” requires an updating for present

musical circumstances, as the practices and understandings of “veridic” sounds change according to ever-

evolving technological climates.

20 John Shepherd, “Timbre,” Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Performance and Production,

vol. 11 (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group: 2003); David Brackett, Interpreting Popular

Music 2nd ed. (California: University of California Press, 2000); Cornelia Fales, “Short-Circuiting Perceptual Systems: Timbre in Ambient and Techno Music,” Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures,

eds. Paul D. Greene, Thomas Porcello, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005).

10 practical, and aesthetic considerations that recordists undergo when engaging in veridic

timbral processing.

11 CHAPTER ONE

SOURCE AND FIDELITY: THE BEGINNINGS OF AUDITORY RHETORIC IN THE ACOUSTIC ERA

Nothing we design or make ever really works. We can always say what it ought to do, but that it never does.

––David Pye, The Nature of Design21

I have a faint recollection of something like that. That’s not too dissimilar from the guy

with the high notes cracking the tumblers. Same category. Nice advertising, period.

––Donald Vorhees, on the Edison tone tests22

The aim of this chapter is to explore the commercial origins of the rhetoric of

recorded “reality,” or “fidelity” in the acoustic era.23 I use the terms “reality and

“fidelity,” “re-created,” “captured,” “documented,” and “natural,” to describe sounds

interchangeably with a distinct purpose—what culturally manifests as sonic realism is ever

changing according to every sound epoch. Indeed, there are many ways to connote

“realness” on a record, as events and inflections in musical pieces occur on many

interdependent levels (melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre, texture, etc.) simultaneously,

not to mention that there are particular cultural ways of hearing that influence musical

21 David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978).

22 Quoted in John Harvith and Susan Edwards Harvith, Edison, Musicians and the Phonograph: A Century in

Retrospect, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 63.

23 The acoustic era is roughly defined as the period of sound reproduction from the invention of the

phonograph in 1877 to the release of the first electrically recorded Orthophonic record in 1925.

12 meaning.24 Yet the sonic experience of acoustic mimesis, the represented “document”

of a human produced sound, has withstood the winds of recording change.

Through an analysis of Edison marketing campaigns in from 1912-1925, I argue

that timbre in particular—the sound of the instrument—plays an important role in the

rhetorical communication of “realness” in recorded sound.25 Realness, in my own

discussion of it, usually references a “captured” timbral quality in the first instance, and

thus references the negotiation of sound itself. That said, “sound” can be used more

broadly to refer to any aspect of the material production or consumption of sound. I

explore how recorded sonic rhetoric was from the beginning and onwards learned by its

auditors though market conditioning in a way that renders recording practice

transparent.

This project proceeds historically, utilizing as a case study the famous Edison

Diamond Disc tone tests because they offer the first coherent account of a deliberate,

widespread, and ultimately successful campaign designed to teach listeners how to listen

for contrived markers of sonic realism. I use Edison as a case study because his business

strategies and philosophies of audio have yielded strikingly germane throughout recording

history; although modes of recording consumption and production have changed

dramatically since the acoustic era, similar arguments over sonic reproducibility and

timbral “realness” dominate the aural marketplace to this day.

24 This sense of “realness” relates more to “authenticity.” My own account does not focus on authenticity

per se, though the discussion is inevitable. Susan McClary and Robert Walser, “Start Making Sense!

Musicology Wrestles with Rock,” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. eds., Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), 278.

25 By “instrument” I refer to both the recording apparatus, as well as the instruments “contained” in the recording.

13 This is not the first account of the Diamond Disc tone test campaigns. In her

article “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph

in America, 1877-1925,” science historian Emily Thomson provides an account of how

phonographic reproductions constitute a “kind of modernity,” which she claims “lies not

in the realm of the aesthetic production but in consumption.”26 Thomson writes in

response to cultural theorist Miles Orvell, who traces a shift from a culture of imitation to

a culture of authenticity in response to “the machine” and its impact on the technological

climate of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In his book titled The Real Thing, Orvell

argues that the tension between imitation and authenticity is a key constituent in the shift

in American culture known as modernism by exploring the “dialectic between imitation

and authenticity against a background of social differentiation.”27 Through analyses of the

cultural forms of literature, advertising, and commercial design of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, Orvell explores how replica cultures differentiate between

authenticity and artifice, creation and recreation, and realism and “reality itself.”28

Whereas the nineteenth century culture of “imitation” upheld familiar experiences as the

“real thing,” Orvell argues that twentieth century modern artists eschewed tradition in an

effort to get beyond mere imitation. Instead, they used the tools of replication to devise

new real things.29

26 Thomson, “Quest for Fidelity,” 133.

27 Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture: 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North California Press, 1989), xi.

28 Thomson, “Quest for Fidelity,” 133. 29 Miles Orvell, The Real Thing, xi. Notably, Orvell does not discuss the phonograph nor music making

throughout his book. Orvell claims that modernity (in general) was in the realm of aesthetic production, whereas Thomson conversely argues for a modernity of consumption (particularly of recorded sounds). To

14 However, Thomson argues that phonographic recording played a

“predominantly conservative role with respect to musical creation and composition

throughout most of its pre-electric life.”30 Early auditors were encouraged to compare the

sounds of recordings with the sounds of live performances, not to hear the phonograph as a new

type of instrument capable of creating new and experimental sounds. In this sense, Thomson claims

tone tests can be seen as “vestigial celebrations of the mimetic capability of the machine,”

which proves Orvell’s argument that the nineteenth century “culture of imitation” still

remained important in twentieth century popular culture.31

Thomson argues well that the modernity of the acoustical phonograph was in the

realm of consumption, but in assuming a priority in the realm of consumption over

aesthetic production she overlooks the impact this “modern consumption” had on music

making itself, and in particular, why this change was hidden from consumers. Edison’s

entire campaign depended on the belief that Diamond Disc records were documents or

recreations of the live performance, an ideology that Thomson reproduces by failing to

address the recording process that underpins the entire fallacy. Indeed, the phonograph

changed the entire performance; it did not reproduce or preserve it as the campaign

boasted. To make a realistic imitation in the acoustic era was to change the object to be

imitated. In fact, recordings are not extensions of live music practice as claims of fidelity

my mind, it seems not only unnecessary, but analytically partial to privilege one realm over another as sonic

production and consumption exist in a dialectic relationship. Moreover, the entire basis of the “original”

and “copy” distinction is exponentially complicated when discussing reproduced sounds rather than a piece of replica furniture or photograph for example. Reproduced sounds are, in the first instance, objects that

cannot exist without mediation. Consumption thus depends on production, and vice versa, though the

prevailing ideology of sound fidelity conceals this caveat. 30 Thomson, “Quest for Fidelity,” 133.

31 Ibid.

15 promise. They are part of an entirely different mode of communications that the

“realistic” aural image obscurely sweeps under the rug. Thomson’s claim that “the

phonograph was put to work recording and reproducing music as it existed prior to the

development of the new technology…” is strong evidence of the powerful aural illusions

of recording practices that silently underpin these rhetorical communications. I see it as

my task to navigate the industrial motivations for encouraging an aesthetic of medium

transparency on its listeners, and how those motivations were practically realized.

I must make a note about Thomas Alva Edison and the Edison Company as the

research foci in this section. Alexander G. Bell, Chichester A. Bell, Charles S. Tainter,

Emile Berliner, among others, had significant roles in the development of recording. Yet

as one score-settling writer wrote in 1933, "the facts of [Edison's] phono-musical

achievements are now obscured in the rosy legends of worshipful biographers or lost in

the memory of an impatient and uninformed public."32 Indeed, more so than the other

above mentioned inventors, the memory of Edison is favored—and at times glorified— in

histories of recording. The "Edison myth" circulates in these histories because Edison

became a living prophet for the new technology in his own time, and through historical

record he is documented, in Wyn Wachhorst's words, as an “idol of consumption.”33

It is precisely this myth that I wish to draw attention to. Fidelity, like its first and

perhaps biggest proponent, is a conceptual tool of audio illusion, but more so, it is a tool

used to motivate audio consumption. It is a promise that guides the listener in what then may

32 R.D. Darrell, “Mr. Edison’s Phonograph: A Post-Mortem,” The Sewanee Review 41, no.1 (January-March,

1933), 92.

33 Susan Schultz, review of Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth, by Wyn Wachhorst, Isis 73: 4 (December,

1982), 608-609.

16 be understood as a properly musical communication. Edison is an idol of consumption

because he had a large role in not only inventing a particular audio technology, but also

because he was the architect of an aesthetic perfectly designed to effectively sell it.

Ultimately, through engagement with boasting advertisement campaigns that

provided early auditors with an arsenal of terms and philosophies of sound, I explore the

industrial roots of audio rhetoric to reveal how sonic manifestations of fidelity, or realism,

were from the start commercially dictated and ultimately constructed through recording

practice. Through these analyses, I hope to reveal, through historical example, how and

why the distinction between “original” and “copy” or “real” and “imaginary” do not

adequately describe the process of sound reproduction, yet continue to surface in discussions of

recorded sound.

Origins

Historically, Edison’s Diamond Disc campaigns mark an important dissemination

of the idea of fidelity, which renders them a particularly fruitful point of commencement.

First, the Edison Company was at market disadvantage in the phonograph industry in

1912 because of Edison's reluctance to switch from the cylinder to disc reproduction

medium, which had fallen to the public's favor. In an attempt to regain a stake in the

market, Edison released the his first disc medium reproducer, The Diamond Disc, which

was in Edison's view already a much less capable medium for the accurate reproduction

of sound than the previous Amerol wax cylinders.34 However, unable to financially subsist

34 Edison believed it was the relentless pursuit of audio perfection that would put the company back on top, but this business ethos actually failed. By the advent of electric recording in 1927, Victor dominated the

17 let alone compete as a cylinder manufacturer in the phonograph industry, the Edison

Company was forced to enter the disc market marking perhaps the first sacrifice of fidelity

in the face of commercial necessity and consumer convenience.35 Somewhat ironically,

the promise of fidelity, and all its implications of truth, emerges as a highly contrived

business strategy that aims to teach listeners how to listen to the phonograph, and in the

process convince listeners that the Diamond Disc is a profound and unique investment.

"Re-creations," Because They Said So…

The core of Edison’s catch-up campaign was largely rhetorical, both verbally and

sonically. By as early as 1915, Edison had already "realized his ambition to re-create the

correct tonal quality of music," and live performances had come to be “equated” with

phonographic reproductions. 36 As one 1895 advertisement heralds, reproduced sound “is

not an imitation of music, but is indeed real music [my emphasis].”37 Edison's phonograph

had the ability to capture music that he claimed was hitherto tainted and corrupted by

the world: "the phonograph knows more about us than we know about ourselves," Edison

market and the Edison Company's sales accounted for just 2% of the industry total. Andre Millard, America

on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 300-301.

35 I refer to the triumph of the disc over the cylinder; the 331/2 LP over the 45; the compact disc over the LP, and the MP3 over the compact disc. Fidelity has always been achieved, but as a standard, it is always

changing according to the prevailing mode of record production and market demand. As Andre Millard

notes, "Cylinders [had] a couple of problems… they're hard to store… and they're a little harder to put on the machine. But Edison had absolutely no interest in handling discs. But of course, he's forced to develop a disc,

being the inventor, the originator, had to have the best sound, and the truest reproduction, because he was

Edison.. Thus the Edison Diamond Disc." Andre Millard, “Competing for the Perfect Sound,” interview by Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, NPR Website, 2000,

http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/talkon/millard.html (accessed March 01, 2010).

36 Christine Miller Tone Test Program, Symphony Hall, Boston, 18 Nov. 1915, quoted in Emily Thomson,

“The Quest for Fidelity,” 151.

37 Edison Phonographic News (Mar.-Apr. 1895): 90, Edison Archives, quoted in Emily Thomson, “Quest for

Fidelity,” 140.

18 says. 38 "Nobody realizes how much music is spoiled by little sounds that do not belong

in it… something is lost between the singer and the auditor. I shall record the voices of

singers in such a manner that nothing will be lost."39 As journalist Greg Milner notes with

tongue-in-cheek, Edison's "rhetorical gymnastics" are so extraordinary that had the ideas

contained herein not been so revolutionary, they might be rendered as belonging only to

that of a "huckster."40 Yet quips aside, Milner is right to point to the over-the-top boasts

of the early phonograph campaigns.

Surviving protests of Edison's "perfect re-creations" belong to a particularly

monumental and revealing moment in auditory history of what Jonathan Sterne calls the

"social genesis of sound fidelity."41 Sterne's concept of fidelity as malleable concept and

"changing standard" is certainly attractive given the interpretive quagmire that early

phonograph reception history evinces. According to the early phonograph

advertisements, perfect sound reproduction was achieved long ago. Any audio engineer

will agree, that "good" sound quality is a subjective preference that is highly

individualized and likewise individually sought; recordists and auditors define their own

truths. Yet beyond perception and taste, these claims of audio authority have more to do

with a particular standard of sound reproduction that is culturally agreed upon. As Sterne

explains,

Sound fidelity is much more about faith in the social function and

organization of machines than it is about the relation of sound to its

38 Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (New York: Faber and Faber), 34.

39 Ibid., 40.

40 Ibid., 41. 41 Sterne, The Audible Past, 215.

19 "source" … From the very beginning, sound reproduction was a studio art, and, therefore, the source was as bound up in the social relations of

reproducibility as any copy was. Sound fidelity is a story that we tell ourselves to staple separate pieces of sonic reality together. The efficacy of sound reproduction as a technology or as a cultural practice is not in its keeping faith with a world wholly external to itself. On the contrary, sound reproduction--from its very beginnings--always implied social relations

among people, machines, practices, and sounds. The very concept of sound fidelity is a result of this conceptual and practical labor.42

Indeed, fidelity is never an intrinsic sonic quality. Rather, it is a qualitative

standard that is limited by and contingent upon the technologies and cultural

circumstances of the historical period it circulates in. In terms of social function beyond

Sterne's framework, I want to suggest that fidelity can be thought of as a crucial link in

the cultural normalization of sound reproduction technologies and the sounds they

produce. Fidelity has been used as an aural interpretive program to create a market value

for all sorts of technologies and sounds. Edison himself, for example, was initially unsure

of the possibilities and uses of the phonograph, as Richard Middleton explains:

The ‘phonograph’ and ‘gramophone’ were at first seen as potentially useful more for commercial activities (office dictation) and pedagogical and archive purposes, than for the reproduction of music. But they also fitted into a nineteenth-century history of the development of [musical] instruments for mechanical reproduction…and once the embryonic

businesses saw the possibilities of mass dissemination, the necessary mass production technology, cheap playback equipment and a global distribution network were developed with remarkable speed.43

The industry took off with “remarkable speed” much later after the phonograph’s

development, however, as it took considerable effort and time to construct a properly

42 Sterne, The Audible Past, 219.

43 Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes/Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990), 84.

20 musical function for the machine. Advertisers and record innovators not only needed

to create a function for the phonograph, they had to create a market-viable philosophical

standard of function. That is, the promise of fidelity was a way for Edison listeners to make

sense of the onset of this new and unprecedented technology.

LISTENING

Setting a Standard: Sound, Liveness, and Rhetoric

Utility and function pre-dated the promise of fidelity in the Edison era, but modes

of phonograph use were radically changed after fidelity became conceptually widespread.

By the time of the Diamond Disc campaigns in 1915, the recording industry was already

well established, but recordings were consumed primarily as novelty items and as mere

stand-ins for live performances. The Diamond Disc campaign was Edison's attempt to

eliminate the phonograph’s stand-in reputation. Instead, recordings were to become as

real as the performances themselves. To shift the public’s perception, however, would

require an elaborate ideological campaign—an interconnected system of people,

machines, and sounds—that would equate the sounds of the phonograph with the sounds

in listeners heard in the real world.

From the vantage point of historical perspective, it becomes clear that

original/copy comparisons have recurred time and time again since the earliest days of

sound reproduction as popular themes for advertisers with new hardware to sell.44 The

well-known "Is it live or is it Memorex?" cassette tape promotion series that aired in the

44 See John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of its Electronic Reproducibility,” in Music and Society,

1989; Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever.

21 1970s or the more grass roots tone-test concerts that Walt Stinson and his Hi-fi

company conducted in the 1980s to promote the Compact Disc are only a few examples.

These aural “tests” require listeners to recall and compare the "sound" of a musician

against its reproduction. "Is it live or is it Memorex" is, at the time of writing, is a popular

phrase used to question technological substitution in a variety of forms, for instance, "Is it

Yo-yo ma, or is it Memorex?;" "Is it a conference call, or is it Memorex?"

The Edison-sponsored “tone-test” campaigns that were presented to millions of

Canadians and Americans in the years between 1915 and 1925 are simply a pre-eminent

iteration—a prototype, in fact. At public showings in concert halls and theatres, live

recording artists and Edison diamond disc phonographs performed “which is which” tests

that tried to convince audiences that “it was actually impossible to distinguish the singer’s

living voice from its re-creation in the instrument.”45 The idea for the tone-tests

supposedly came about when Anna Case, an Edison recording artist, dropped by an Iowa

record store that happened to be playing one of her records. Somewhat casually, Case

began to perform a duet with herself: "when I walked in the door, I started singing with

the record and making my voice sound exactly like it," she recalls almost sixty years

later.46

In numerous theaters and auditoriums, Edison recording artists like Case and

Christine Miller shared the stage with official laboratory Diamond Disc phonographs,

attempting to convince listeners that there was no tonal difference between live and re-

45 “Demonstrate New Edison Invention,” Boston Journal 19, (November, 1915), quoted in Thomson, “Quest

for Fidelity,” 132. 46 Harvith and Harvith, eds., Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph, 44.

22 created sounds. In a number of these concerts, the artist would be singing when the

lights went out; but when they were turned back on, the audiences would be surprised to

see the singer had left the stage and only the disc was playing. As Case recalls,

I gave a recital at Carnegie Hall, standing beside the machine, and copied

the recorded sound. They didn't know when I was singing, and when I wasn't. They couldn't tell by the voice. Of course, they could see my lips go, but by the tone quality, they couldn't tell the difference. And that's what started the saying that it was so like that the natural voice that they didn't know when it was the machine and when it was me singing.47

Surviving reviews must be read with a critical eye as public newspapers can function as

powerful ideological re-inforcements. But many 1919 newspapers offer praising

testaments of the tests: it was "impossible to distinguish between the singer's living voice

and its re-creation by the musical instrument…" claims the Boston Herald. "A convincing

demonstration of the power of a man to produce tone from an instrument so perfectly as

to defy detection when compared side by side with the tone of the original producing

artists," reports Musical America. "No-one in the audience… could tell which was the real

and which the reproduced," claims the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.48

The authenticity of these reports remains unquantifiable, but if people actually did

hear the phonograph sounds as perfect, then there was certainly a type of infrastructure

in place to reinforce that impression, held in place by numerous aspects of the campaign

whether it was through the tone tests, media conditioning, technological enthusiasm, or

47Harvith and Harvith, eds., Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph, 44. 48 Frank W. Hoffmann, "Tone Tests," Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound, Vol. 1.

(New York: Routledge, 2005), 1115.

23 the consumer spirit of this era.49 But certainly the success of the tone test was to some

degree contingent on the listener's inability to aurally discriminate the sound of the singer

from the sound of the machine. For the tests to fulfill their promise, did the tone of the

performer not need to be passably indistinguishable from the tone of the "re-creation?"

Rhetorical Infastructure: Fidelity as Commodity

I will examine the possibility of timbral re-creation in the next chapter, but for

now I would like to emphasize the criterion of equivalence that was established alongside

the tone test campaigns and the importance that was placed on sound quality. Fidelity

had existed as a concept of sound as early as 1878, but it wasn’t until later with the

proliferation of the tone tests that it was constructed as a consumer expectation. Often

overlooked in analyses of sound fidelity is the remarkable commercial power this

philosophically contractual concept held in the marketplace of commodities. Fidelity was

less about mediation or representation than it was about creating a new audio consumer

market. It was an entire ideological system held in place by the illusion of an audio

aesthetic. Edison had to convince a nation that his machine worked, but even more so, he

needed to convince audiences that his machine was a truly worthy investment.

Due to the their late arrival in the disc market, the Edison Company needed a

demonstrative campaign in order to convince Victor Victrola owners that there was a

better recording system available.50 Edison felt the technical superiority of the “no-tone”

49 Billed as high-class events, the tone tests were intended to be impressive and entertaining events of

showmanship See David Morton, Off the Record: the Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (2000)

for a consideration of the tone tests as “high-class” events.

50 The Diamond Disc was different from its competitors in many ways; it utilized the "hill and dale" rather than the lateral playback method common in 78 shellac records, and featured a stylus with a diamond point

24 Diamond Disc would be best heard rather than read. Sound, aural judgement, and a

rhetorical system through which to exercise it, would become the basis of this attempt at

regaining market footing.

Although today the notion of evaluating sound by the ear seems completely

normal––if not presumed necessary–– it was actually a rather modern campaign. Victor's

popular "Which-is-Which" (figure 2) and "Both are Caruso" print advertisements had been

in circulation since at least 1908, but all of Victor's equation advertisements, in

comparison, were almost entirely print-based. Some critics have speculated that it was

Victor’s appeal to the eye rather than the ear that may have been a reason for Edison's

market disfavor and eventual bankruptcy.51 At the time, however, Edison was convinced

that he could win over the sound market if buyers could only hear the tonal quality of the

Diamond Disc. According to his business associate Arthur Walsh, "Mr. Edison argues

that the superior tonal qualities of the Edison when heard far outweighs the printed

advertising of any strongest competitor."52 Indeed, while the Victor company engaged in

a "heavy handed advertising policy," spending up to 8.2% of its annual sales on mass

that did not require replacement. Its discs were made of Bakelite, an early thermoplastic that worked in tandem with a unique reproducer diaphragm made of several layers of rice paper dispersed with shellac.

Tim Gracyk, “The Phonograph Reproducer/Sound-Box—Where Sound Begins,” 2006:

www.gracyk.com/reproducer.shtml (accessed March 10, 2010).

51 Leonard DeGraff, "Confronting the Mass Market: Thomas Edison and the Entertainment Phonograph," National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site,

http://www.hnet.org/~business/bhcweb/publications/BEHprint/v024n1/p0088-p0096.pdf (accessed

March 10, 2010). 52 Arthur Walsh to Walter Miller, July 20, 1923, Arthur Walsh Files, Phonograph Division Records, Edison

Archives, quoted in Leonard DeGraff, "Confronting the Mass Market.”

25 circulation newspaper and magazine promotions, the Edison company was no-where

to be seen.53

Edison preferred listeners to hear the tonal quality of the Diamond Disc rather

than see it because fidelity was Edison's commodity. "We care nothing for the reputation

of the artists singers or instrumentalists," Edison proclaimed in a 1912 memorandum. "All

that we desire is that the voice shall be as perfect as possible. It is not our intention to

feature artists or sell the records by using the artists name…we intend to rely entirely

upon the tone and high quality of the voice."54 From the beginning of Edison's

campaign, fidelity was a saleable business strategy aimed to compete with Victor's print

advertisements. As Andre Millard notes,

The tone tests are built into this tremendous marketing effort that they had to go about to get the public to accept what they portrayed as the top of

the line in sound recording. The tone test was one way of marketing recorded sound products.55

But the ultimate success of Edison’s campaign depended on the listener’s ability to

hear sounds according to a particular program of interpretation. Edison tone campaigns

and promotional materials were not passively adversarial; they equipped early auditors

with an entire arsenal of vocabulary and concepts to develop philosophies of critical

listening. Edison's re-creations may have been "perfect," but he needed to teach listeners

53 B.L. Aldridge, The Victor Talking Machine Company (RCA Sales Corporation, 1964), quoted in DeGraff,

“Contronting the Mass Market,” 49.

54 Edison Memorandum, May 11, 1912, Edison General File, Edison National Historic Site Archives, West Orange, NJ. As Thomas Alva Edison's son, Theodore, recalls, "Father was urged many times to meet

competition by signing up famous artists too; but he resisted. He wanted talent searches to be carried out

primarily on the basis of voices." Quoted in Harvith and Harvith, eds., Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph, pg 37.

55 Andre Millard, “Competing for the Perfect Sound.”

26 to understand what constituted a perfect sound, and of course, what did not. The first

initiative of Edison listening educators was to instigate a new conceptual way of thinking

about sound reproduction seriously. A 1915 Edison dealer publication, for instance,

forbids dealers to call the Diamond Disc a machine. Instead they were to refer to the new

product as a "musical instrument" with "no tone."56 To call the Diamond Disc an

"instrument" implies a certain degree of seriousness that was to replace the concept of

recording as a novel pastime, which was a functional suggestion that had pervaded many

paper advertisements until this time. An early 1910 Edison phonograph advertisement,

for example, captures the initial novelty of the new machine with the caption: “Talk

about entertainment––there is nothing that approaches the fun and fascination of making

records at home…” (figure 1). The people pictured in the advertisement are huddled

around the machine, captivated by its mere capability of capturing the voice.

56 Edison Retail Sales Laboratory (1915), 29, Edison Archives, quoted in Thomson, “Quest for Fidelity,”144.

27

Figure 1. The phonograph as novelty. This illustration evokes a sense of curiosity rather than musical

seriousness. Saturday Evening Post, 12 Nov. 1910.

28

Figure 2. Victor Talking Machine advertisement, "Which is Which," 1908. The logic of this advertisement hinges on the equation of "live" performer and "live" recording. It purpose is not to index novelty or

fascination, rather a particular standard of reproducibility (courtesy Archives Center, National Museum of American History)

To call the phonograph an “instrument” implies that the phonograph has a

unique voice of its own––a unique voice whose tone was as identical to that of the

performer it captured, as Edison would have it. Five years later, in 1915, the new

seriousness that the Diamond Disc demanded was supported by a the machine’s new

standard in sound quality, which was aimed to be in direct competition with the claims of

Victor's "Which is Which" campaigns (figure 2). Other talking machines, namely the

29 Victrola, were said to distort the "true tone of the original music," and had a "machine-

like" tone due to their metal components.57

In addition to the conceptual re-figuring of machine as "musical instrument," and

aesthetic standard of capturing a "live" performance, Edison was also prepared to educate

consumers as to the Diamond Disc's physical properties that made it a superior

instrument. The organic materials of which the Diamond Disc reproducer was

constructed––including materials of silk, cork, and vegetable tissue (the rice paper

diaphragm)––were purported to contribute to the natural reproduction qualities of the

new Edison, which rendered a transparent re-creation: "there are no acoustic properties

in any of these materials…," an Edison dealer pamphlet claims. 58 An associative and

convincing selling feature had been built right into the machine and, resoundingly, into

the sounds that emanated from it.

Enthusiastic students of sound reproduction absorbed Edison promotional

material as part of their aural educations, learning how to detect fidelity and

“naturalness” in the timbres they heard. One Edison owner, Edward Buckley, took it

upon himself to visit a Sonora phonograph shop to compare its tone to that of his own,

the former of which he deduced had a much more "nazal" sound [sic]. The tonal

superiority of the Edison reproducer, he noted in a letter to the Edison Company, was

due to the "fibre diaphragm coupled with the silken cord and the shape of the sound

57 "Edison" booklet (1917), PPC, Edison Archives, quoted in Emily Thomson, “Quest for

Fidelity,” 146.

58 Ibid.

30 chamber" which "removed the metallic twang [sic]."59 Buckley was clearly influenced

by the Edison promotional material, which he almost verbatim used to critically account

for the timbral differences between the Diamond Disc and the Sonora. Edison's organic

reproducer proves to connote sonic naturalness remarkably well. After all, "machines"

were not typically comprised of ginseng and rice paper.60

Hear and See, See and Hear… re-creations!

Live performances, unlike recordings, provide attendees with a visual correlate to

the musical sounds they hear. So when Edison sought to equate live61 and recorded

sounds through his “Edison Realism Tests,” auditors were encouraged to rely heavily on

their visual recollections of a live performance while evaluating the Diamond Disc’s

reproducibility. Edison Realism tests were conducted in the same era as the concert tone

tests, though took place in Edison dealer shops and were advertised to the general public

through newspaper ads (figure 3).

59 Letter from Edward Buckley to Mr. Maxwell, circa 1918, document file, Edison Archives, quoted in

Emily Thomson, “Quest for Fidelity,” 167. 60 To Buckley’s credit, the Edison reproducer was an advanced piece of technology with unprecedented

frequency reproduction capabilities; that is, acoustically, the Diamond Disc did have the best acoustic reproduction system of all the phonographs available at this time. As Read and Welch explain, the

“graduated cork on lamination on the diaphragm served to permit concentric ring vibrations in an even

scale form the highest frequencies to the lowest in the true lineal relationship essential to correct reproduction and which can never be produced by an corrugated diaphragm [which the competing Victor

Orthophonic utilized at the time].” Read and Welch, From Tinfoil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph, 2nd ed.,

(Indianapolis, Indiana, 1976), 262. 61 As we apply it to music today the term “live” did not “enter the lexicon of music appreciation” until the

1950s, when it emerged as part of a public relations campaign in a labour struggle. At that time it referred to “live” as in “living musicians,” then later to music itself at which point, as Sarah Thornton notes, “it

soaked up the aesthetic and ethnical connotations of life-versus death, human-versus-mechanical, creative-

versus imitative.” Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 42-43.

31

Figure 3. Edison Realism Test advertisement, The Lewiston Daily Sun, July 7, 1920.

Upon arrival at the phonograph shop, Edison realism test subjects—who were

typically phonograph shoppers--chose the recording they wished to hear and were then

asked to face away from the phonograph while browsing through a scrapbook of concert

reviews and photographs of musicians. As musicologist Mark Katz explains, auditors were

instructed to “picture the scene” until it is “clearly…in mind.”62 Once the auditor was

ready, they were asked to follow a complex set of instructions: “About forty-five seconds

after the music begins, close your eyes and keep them closed for a minute or more. Then

open your eyes again and keep them closed until the end of the selection,” in order to get

the “same emotional re-action experienced when you last heard the same kind of voice of

62 The encouraged listening behavior of sitting still, eyes closed with intent concentration is reminiscent of a

mode of listening stereotypically assumed when listening to “serious” art music. This could have been part of Edison’s plan to market the phonograph as a high-class instrument, and is an idea that may be worth

further exploration.

32 instrument.” If the same reaction did not occur, it was apparently because “you have

not wholly shaken off the influence of your surroundings,” and the test must then be

repeated until successful.63

The Edison Realism test is essentially a training guide that teaches auditors to

critically listen for, or imagine, fidelity. As Katz explains, the visual component in this test

was essential in conjuring any sort of projected realism: “In order for music to be

comprehensible, listeners must visualize a performance. Seeing was indeed believing.”64

Sonic realism was to some degree dependent on the listener’s ability to imagine a visual

correlate of a sound source. As much fidelity was about “faith in the social function and

organization of machines,” as Sterne puts it, fidelity was at base level about being able to

render the phonograph mediator transparent (at least imaginatively) in order to hear a

correlate relationship between sound and sound source.65 As much as fidelity was a

commercially and culturally dictated standard, whether or not the machine measured up

to the challenge depended on an acceptable degree of mimetic capability.

63 "The Edison Realism Test," broadside, Edison Collection at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield

Village, Dearborn, MI, quoted in Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music, (California: University of California Press, 2004), 18.

64 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound, 19. 65 Evan Eisenberg argues that the aural experience of stereophonic recordings in turn heightens the “visual

experience:” “Stereo…arrays the musicians before you in empty space…The introduction of stereo…changed the phenomenology of the photograph by adding a spatial, and hence a visual aspect.”

Although stereophonic sound certainly heightened this experience, monophonic recordings also have a

spatial dimension, which is construed through the mix by relative instrument/track attenuation. Recordings in the acoustic era were mono recordings. Evan Eisenberg quoted in Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in

a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 73.

33 Listening In: Responses

Edison dealer promotional material was clearly in ideological sympathy with the

concurrently administered tone and realism tests, which provided early auditors with the

philosophical and conceptual frameworks of listening to shape their sonic consumption.

Edison was convinced that the Diamond Disc phonograph “re-created” sound perfectly,

and believing so, challenged listeners to the proposition that "Mr. Edison has realized his

ambition to re-create the correct tonal quality of music."66 But as Thomson points out,

listeners responded in a variety of ways, not always in agreement with the boasting claims

of the Edison Company. Newspaper reviews of the events range in tone from critical,

“The ‘record’ quality [composite timbre] was somewhat veiled as in thin wooded violins

and instruments...;” to sarcastic, “Dumb and unresponsive machine…;” to (deafly?)

enthusiastic, “Not a person in the audience was able to say whether Miss Miller was

singing or the new Diamond Disc phonograph was playing...”67 However, it may be less

important whether or not auditors actually believed the phonograph was acoustically

indistinguishable from the “real thing.” The relevant significance of the tone tests, as

revealed by the reviews, is that auditors were actually taking the comparisons Edison

posed seriously (in the least, as good entertainment); had accepted the premise of

comparison, and “were clearly engaged in the kind of critical listening that the tone test

encouraged.”68 Listeners accepted that a live performance had somehow fully affected the

66 Program, Christine Miller tone test, Symphony Hall, Boston, 18 Nov. 1915, reprinted in Thomson, “Quest

for Fidelity,” 151. 67 Newspapers. Boston Evening Transcript, Quoted in Thomson, “Quest for Fidelity,” 156-157.

68 Ibid.

34 resulting sounds, and that the distinct timbres that emanate from the machine could

properly be called musical according to an aesthetic of dicent representation.

Mysticism: Conclusions

There is certainly a type of “modernity in consumption” with the tone test

campaigns as Thomson has identified. The rhetoric of fidelity and the aural conflation of

“original” and “copy,” “live” and “re-creation,” was clearly a new and learned

experience that was inextricably bound up with the burgeoning record industry at the

turn of the twenty-first century. Sonic meaning was prescribed to give sound recordings a

distinct use in the marketplace. Indeed, an implication of “truth,” “realness,”

“equivalence,” or “re-creation,” with regards to a sound simply had no currency before the

advent of the phonograph.

If sound fidelity has become a consumer expectation, then what does that

standard mean for recorded music, in the acoustic era and beyond? Before I can address

that question, I must explain why it is worth asking. The success of Edison’s campaign

depended on a consumer willingness to ignore the impossibility of perfect re-creation.

Sounds as imbuing a sense of documentary authority exuded mysticism and a sense of

value or worth they did not have. As Marx might say, this can be described as a

phenomenon of commodity fetishism:

[a] commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of [human beings’] labor appears to them as an objective

character stamped upon the product of that labor. There is a definite

35 social relation between [human beings] that assumes in their eyes the fantastic form of a relation between things.69

That is, while the timbres that emanated from the phonograph were accepted as

re-creations (and in order to re-create something, that something must be “captured” or

“documented”) they lacked the entire substance they were purported to be. In truth, the

value placed on that “quality” is not of the sound (commodity) itself, the value is rather

expressed in the efforts of the peoples and technologies that produced those sounds. It

was, however, easy for auditors to overlook the labour of recordists, technologies and

musicians responsible for their construction because they were often rendered invisible.

Indeed, the sounds were advertised as equivalent to live performance (which implies the

sounds on the recording are simply untampered and captured), and the recordists and

their recording equipment were absent from the public sphere. Even within the studio,

the activity of the machines and recordists were hidden behind curtains and wall

separators to protect company secrets.70 To limit analysis to discourse alone, then, is to

overlook the sonic foundation of fidelity's rhetorical construction, namely, the recording

process. To understand the fallacy behind the sonic object that acoustic era listeners

accepted as "flawless," we must question how this auditory illusion was conjured.

69 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 translated by Ben Fowkes. (New York: Vintage,

1976), 164.

70 Roger Beardsley and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, “A Brief History of Recording to ca. 1950,” Research

Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, Official Site, http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/history/p20_4_1.html (accessed March 10, 2010).

36 CHAPTER TWO

FROM THE LABORATORY TO THE STAGE71

I see recording as a wonderful but separate process parallel to live performance; I don’t think there’s any great need to try to confuse the two or to make them identical.

––Gunther Schuller72

Introduction: Always Already Constructive

Thus far, I have examined how the rhetoric of fidelity both sonically and

conceptually equates "live" and "re-created" sounds, and how this concept was, from the

beginning, a marketing tool for phonograph distributors. Claims of fidelity clearly

protested too much, though at a level of artifice they were self-fulfilling promises. This

chapter will address the material limitations and constructive processes that underlie the

transmission of these musical communications that form the material reference of these

claims. Despite the seemingly "documentary" nature of early Edison recordings, I argue

that they are more so artifacts of a documentary process than they are of a live

performance. The functional power of fidelity, and thus of Edison's commercial campaign

depends on the listener's agreement to render that process invisible. As ethnomusicologist

Thomas Turino explains,

The ideology underpinning high fidelity recordings is that what you hear on records has been or could be performed live. In the early days of

71 Early recording studios were called “laboratories” to denote mechanical experimentation and evolving

recording practices. 72 Harvith and Harvith, eds., Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph, 399.

37 recording this was important because all 'real' music was still tied to the idea of live performance.73

Recently, scholars working between and across disciplinary boundaries have

begun to challenge how recording is in itself a different kind of musical communication

that is not simply a captured or ideal performance.74 Speaking to this area of scholarship

as well as the emerging field of sound studies,75 I now move to discuss how recordings

with a standard of fidelity were not merely “captured.” “Realistic” sounds were rather the

product of a highly constructive process that required the acquisition of a particular way

of performing for the machine. Moreover, these particular practices and procedures were

not incidental. Recordists and record innovators created sounds according to the market

demand for realistic sounds which provided a material basis for circulating advertisement

claims. This process has been documented across some excellent histories of recorded

sound, though I use this exploration towards a different end. 76 My aim is to expose how

73 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2008), 70.

74 Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995);

Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2000); Glenn Gould, "Music and Technology" and "The Prospects of Recording," both in The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (New York: Knopf, 1984), 353-68 and 331-53; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How

Technology has Changed Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), Jonathan Sterne, The Audible

Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Albin Zak III, The Poetics of Rock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Jay Hodgson, “Navigating the Network of

Recording Practice,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Alberta, 2006); Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel:

Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Susan Schmidt Horning, “Chasing Sound: The Culture and Technology of Recording Studios in America, 1877-

1977,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Case Western University, 2002); Serge Lacasse, “Listen to my Voice: The

Evocative Power of Vocal Staging in Recorded Rock Music and Other Forms of Vocal Expression,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Liverpool, 2000); Virgil Moorefield, The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of

Popular Music (Cambridge: Mass: MIT Press, 2005).

75 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past; Emily Thomson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the

Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

76 Accounts of early recording include Tim Gracyk and Frank Hoffmann, Popular American Recording Pioneers,

1895-1925 (New York: The Haworth Press, 2000); Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams & Co, 1976); Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous

38 recording in the acoustic era (and beyond) does not merely document a live

performance, rather it changes the performance while creating an entirely new

performance. In so doing, I seek to acknowledge the labour of recordists and musicians

that had such a large contribution to the construction of recorded timbral rhetoric. This

argument proceeds in a direct challenge to Edison’s purported claims, and beyond the

acoustic era, in challenge to any recording that renders recording practice invisible. The

aim of this chapter is thus to explore the various ways that sound technologies and

recording practices underlie aesthetically framed conceptions of “reality,” particularly

those records that purportedly index a live or original performance. I also seek to explore

how recording practice today is still dependent upon its very earliest manifestations of

realist aesthetic criteria as well as the recording practices used to construct them.

"Constructive" recording techniques––that is, “designed” sounds on part of the

recordist77–– are usually thought of as arising with the capabilities of magnetic tape in the

1960s due to that era's proliferation of unusual non-veridic sounds and timbres. Sgt.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), for instance, is perennially referenced as an album

that epitomizes an era of unprecedented studio manipulation. As Walter Everett notes,

they “produced entirely in their own imaginations,” and according to Mark Prendergast,

Phonograph, 1877-1977 (New York: Macmillan, 1977); Frederick William Gaisberg, The Music Goes Round (New York: Arno Press, 1977). Broad surveys of recording and music include Michael Chanan, Repeated

Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995); Andre Millard, America on

Record: A History of Recorded Sound (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 77 The concept of a “constructive” recording is explored further in the next chapter. However, I will note here that I borrow the term from John Andrew Fisher, who defines “constructive” sounds by how a

recording is regarded according to the causal process involved in producing the final recording. “Rock 'n'

Recording: The Ontological Complexity of Rock Music,” Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip Alperson, (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press), 115.

39 the Beatles’ legacy is one of “overwhelming innovation.”78 There is effectively nothing

untrue about these claims. Indeed, Sgt. Pepper is a prolific concept acid rock album that

utilizes flanging, phasing, reduction mixing, among countless other signal processing

modular effects. The Beatles had an important role in that they broadened the sonic

palate available to recordists significantly, and thus to listening audiences. But its

treatment as a “first time” milestone in constructive recording histories has a heavy felt

consequence. That is, the ideology of fidelity (“realistic sounds” as documented) becomes

more deeply engrained as highly "experimental" recording becomes aesthetically

associative with constructive recordings, which by binary logic implicitly renders

"natural" sounds as unconstructive.79 The nature of the apparently “live” communication

becomes veiled. To paraphrase recording historian Susan Schmidt-Horning, staying

faithful to an original performance is not all it appears to be. Through engagement with

commercial Edison recordings made in the acoustic era, the aim of this section is to

illustrate what technical recording apparatuses and procedures underlie this commercially

perpetuated ideology to expose the inner mechanisms of the tone-test communication.

78 Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver Through the Anthology, (Cambridge: Oxford University Press,

1990), 23; Mark Prendergast, The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance–the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 190.

79 Contrary to Fisher’s notion, I consider all recordings to be constructive recordings. All sounds, whether

they are “natural” or “imaginary,” or otherwise, are equally constructed insomuch as they belong to the

communicative system of recording practice, and thus simply do not exist until they are translated as code. Recordings nevertheless may be constructed to communicate sounds that can be interpreted as “constructive”

or “un-constructive,” “real,” or “imaginary.” This idea is further explored in chapter three.

40 MAKING RE-CREATIONS

Aesthetics

Despite the suggestive rhetoric of the tone test advertisements, Edison did not

actually conceive live and recorded music to have any sort of correlation other than by

analogy. In fact, he spent an inordinate about of time choosing artists and selections

based on their suitability for the recording medium, rather than their reputations or

concert capabilities. For instance, of baritone Riccardo Stracciari he said, "his

interpretation is a little too dramatic, making great changes in volume… which in opera is

O.K., but not on phono-." Similarly, of Caruso's singing of "Testa adorata" from

Leoncavallo's La Boheme, he commented "THIS TUNE WILL DO FOR THE DISC, but

not so loud and distorted as this. Take it low and sweet. THE PHONOGRAPH IS NOT

AN OPERA HOUSE."80 Edison considered dramatic performances intrusive on discs

and instead favored a scientific, if not mechanistic aesthetic for recordings that included

"purity of tone, extremely clarity of enunciation, and the abolition of extraneous

noises"—criterion which are simply not aesthetic possibilities for the concert hall or the

opera house.81 In fact, aesthetic realism for Edison required the omission of concert-hall

distortions. Instead, Edison recordings were made in dead studio rooms (built to have

little or no reverberation) to capture solely the “music” by editing out the world around

it.82 But, notably, this was all recordists in the acoustic era could achieve. That is, the

80 Introduction by Harvith and Harvith, eds., Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph, 13. 81 Ibid., 14. 82 Edison’s studio had thick and soundproof walls that were insulated with seaweed or cow hair; whereas

Victor recorders preferred a “livelier” room with more reverberation, giving those records a distinctive sound. “Dead” versus “live” are still, to this day, the two prevailing approaches to construing realism in

41 acoustic era definition of “realism” was determined by the capabilities of the

technology available at the time. Indeed, the possibility of including concert hall

reverberation or other live markers of space and saturation were not even aesthetic

possibilities until the advent of the microphone in the electric era.83

The Acoustic Method: Empiricism

The acoustic method was the only mode of recording practice available to

recordists until the late 1920s, when electrically recorded and discs and amplified players

became the main means of capturing and inscribing sound. Both methods convert one

kind of energy into another by a process known as “transduction,” but acoustic recording

depends on mechanical code rather than electric (or digital) code to inscribe and

reproduce sound.84 As Schmidt-Horning explains,

The sounds to be recorded—instrumental and vocal—had to be projected (sung or played) into and “collected” by a large recording horn, or several horns of varying sizes, connected to a sound box which housed a diaphragm. The sound waves vibrated the diaphragm, usually made of glass or mica, which in turn vibrated the cutting stylus attached to it either

directly as its center or by a lever. This stylus, moving in a spiral groove

recording. David Morton, Off the Record: the Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America, (New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 20.

83 This is perhaps the clearest example of how cultural understandings of “realism” in recording are ultimately dependent on the technology available to the recordist.

84 As Jay Hodgson explains, “The phonograph registers sculptures of acoustic energy and

converts/”transduces” those sculptures into a sequence of mechanical code (i.e., bigger or smaller bumps

and pits on a tinfoil or wax cylinder) that any phonograph can then convert/”transduce” into equivalent sculptures of acoustic energy, which is to say, into sculptures of acoustic energy roughly equivalent to those

first transduced. All sound reproduction technologies do the same, but using different materials. That is,

all sound reproduction technologies convert/”transduce” acoustic energy into mechanical, electric, electromagnetic or digital code, and/or vice versa.” “Outline for a Theory of Recording Practice with

Reference to the Mix for Pink Floyd’s “Speak To Me (1973),” Journal on the Art of Record Production 1,

(February, 2007), 7.

42 pattern, engraved the sound waves on a wax blank cylinder or disk being rotated by a motor running at constant speed, usually weight driven.85

By nature of the acoustic recording method, fidelity to the actual sound was impossible.

The “thin,” “tinny,” and “mechanical” sound was due to the system’s inability to

accurately capture the high and low ranges of the frequency spectrum; frequencies which

are essential for the accurate “re-creation” of sounds. In Schmidt-Horning ‘s words:

…since the acoustical system relied on sound wave pressure to activate the

diaphragm and needle to cut the wax, every step along the recording chain involved a loss of that acoustical power, leading to a loss of most overtones, harmonics, and low fundamental notes (since these tones impart richness to musical sound, the resulting sound tended to be thin and “tinny” or metallic sounding).86

Indeed, the acoustic recording system lacked the processing power to properly

excite the diaphragm in a way that would produce a convincing replicate musical timbre.

Edison believed that fewer steps in the recording chain would result in the preservation of

acoustic power, which could be then be better harnessed for the spectral capturing

required of improved high fidelity recording. But even at the height of the acoustical

system’s reproducing capabilities, the system was hindered by its own handicap. This era

of phonographs had only an approximate 100 Hz-5 kHz frequency range, which was

responsible for the thinness of tone that many critics discerned in the sound quality.87 To

achieve the high fidelity in recording that the tone test campaigns claimed, it would have

85 Schmidt-Horning, “Chasing Sound,” 20.

86 Ibid., 34-35.

87 The frequency range of audible sound to the human ear is 20 Hz to 20 000 Hz, which became the frequency response standard in 1948 with the advent of the LP. The frequency range from 300-5000 Hz

(300 Hz-5 kHz) is a known as the mid-range, which is acoustically the most important part of the audible

sound spectrum because it is where fundamental frequencies of most instruments are produced, and it also contains the greatest energy distribution of the human voice. The importance of the frequency spectrum in

the construction of realistic timbres is explored in detail in chapter four. Howard Tremaine, Audio Cyclopedia

2nd edition (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1969), 12.

43 been necessary to preserve all of the frequency components of that sound in their

original form. Not only did the phonograph need to capture the fundamental frequency

of a tone; it also needed to capture the tone’s harmonics, overtones or partials (in

acoustics these are referred to as frequencies), which span well into the 20 kHz range and

beyond.88 Even if it were possible to reproduce all of the frequencies from 20 Hz to 20

kHz, however, “perfect” reproduction still remains, to this day, a mere ideal. It is at

present technically impossible to achieve because every stage of the signal transfer process

inevitably adds noise or distortion to the signal, imbuing changes to the timbral character

of the resulting sound. Similarly, as was in Edison’s time, the severe limitation of the

frequency band, or any irregularity in the frequency response affects and changes the

overall sound quality considerably. Often, band limitations such as the 100 Hz -5 kHz

imparted by the acoustical horn, result in a hollow or thinned sound, which in addition to

the phonograph also became commonly associated with AM radio after it became more

widespread post-WWII. As acoustic recording artist Jan Peerce recalls (while pinching his

nose and singing through his adenoids), “there was a sort of nasal sound… you know…

this [whining and pinching] was the kind of sound you heard. That was the quality of the

recording. And you can prove it by getting out an old record and listening to it.”89

88 Harmonics, overtones, and partials are defined in terms of their relationship with the fundamental frequency

of a tone. As David Franz explains: “All musical instruments create sounds with multiple frequencies, even

if only playing one note. Depending on the particular note played, an instrument will produce the specific pitch for that note (known as the fundamental pitch) plus additional pitches with lower amplitudes (known

as harmonics and overtones) that color the overall sound. For example, an A4 on the piano has a

fundamental frequency of 440 Hz. Harmonics are exact multiples of the fundamental frequency. In this case, that includes 880 Hz (2 * 440), 1760 Hz (4 * 440), etc. Overtones are not exact multiples of the

fundamental [frequency] but they also color the sound. The fundamental added in with its harmonics and

overtones give a note its timbre.” Recording and Producing in the Home Studio: A Complete Guide (Boston: Berklee Press, 2004), 190.

89 Harvith and Harvith, eds., Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph, 137.

44 This may explain why Edison avoided particular instruments such as drums,

which have complex overtone systems. The timbral identification of a drum depends on

the inclusion of frequencies below and above 100 Hz and 5 kHz, respectively. The

complex overtones of drums––characteristic of many percussion instruments––simply

could not be captured by the acoustic recording system that tracked with such a limited

midrange frequency band. To compensate, Edison favored instruments that already had a

metallic or thin tonal quality to begin with. Recording subjects were thereby chosen

based on their tonal compatibility with the phonograph, which explains the Edison

catalog excess of banjo, xylophone, whistling and zither recordings.90

Acoustic Variables

The intrinsic limitations of the acoustic system resulted in a significant amount of

experimentation on part of recordists who were ultimately concerned with creating

conceivably realistic sounds and timbres. Whereas recordists in the electric era of

recording began to develop and utilize electrically powered outboard signal processing

devices that shape and sculpt sounds such as the equalizer, acoustic recordists used

variations on basic mechanical components of the acoustic system—the singer or

instrumentalist, the recording horn, the sound box, diaphragm, stylus, and medium

(cylinder or disk)—as variable signal processors, often as attempts to compensate for the

poor frequency response of their recording systems.91 The achievement of more life-like

90 David J. Steffen, From Edison to Marconi: The First Thirty Years of Recorded Music (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2005), 55.

91 An exception is the 1916 Aeolian Vocalion phonograph, which came equipped with a tone arm that allowed for consumers to manipulate the frequency spectrum and thus the tonal qualities of the recording.

45 sounds required careful decisions that included selecting the correct thickness of

diaphragm; discerning best means of damping the diaphragm’s edges in the sound box;

choosing the correct size and shape of recording horn; selecting the proper design and

polishing of the cutting stylus; and using the suitable composition and conditioning of

wax.92 I will explore three of these variables: performer selection and placement, horn

selection, and diaphragm selection.

Recording Artists

First, fidelity and the construction of realistic timbres took significant acumen on

part of the musicians or instrumentalists, whom Edison chose (or disregarded) according

to the appropriateness of the timbre and technique under question for the recording

medium. Because the waveform was cut into the wax proportionate to the frequency and

amplitude of the sounds during recording, lower and louder frequencies would often

cause the stylus to move to the edge of the groove (and sometimes beyond it), ruining the

recording. For this reason, heavier bass notes and percussion instruments were difficult to

record successfully and were often avoided in the studio.93 Singers with vibrato were also

avoided, as the pitch variation was thought to disturb the path of the needle in the disc

groove.94 Similarly, many complex sounds were difficult for the phonograph to “hear”

and “comprehend” such as the violin. As David Steffen notes, “because stringed

Aeolian advertisements promised to “make artists of everyone…,” and provide everyone the opportunity to

“render a record to suit his individual taste.” Mcclaren Magazine (vol. 46, 1915).

92 Read and Welch, From Tinfoil to Stereo, 75

93 Steffen, From Edison to Marconi, 53.

94 Millard, America on Record, 262.

46 instruments didn’t carry well, scores were often rearranged—bassoons substituting for

cellos; tubas for double basses; and Stroh ‘violins’ for the higher strings.”95 Even the Stroh

violins, recordist Fred Gainburg notes, would be left inaudible if “he did not exaggerate

heavily the pizzicato, glissando, and vibrato characteristics of his instrument.”96 Other

instruments were similarly adapted or converted for recording; pianos, for instance, were

raised up off the floor on special raisers with the back panel removed to bring the

soundboard closer to the horn to adjust its character and presence in the final mix.97

Common arrangements of performer placement can be examined in photos taken

during recording sessions, which are re-printed in many histories of recording.98 In fact,

almost all of the Edison in-session photographs indicate a certain rendition of a live mix,

with the performers situated around the recording horn according to a pre-decided

hierarchy of presence for the recording. A performer’s proximity to the recording horn

correlated to what performer was to have a stronger presence in the final recording. In

vocal pieces, for instance, the vocalist is typically placed directly in front of the horn

followed by a row of string players, then woodwind players, then brass players— or some

other rendition of this arrangement. The attainment of proper balancing in the recording

95 Steffen, From Edison to Marconi, 54. The Stroh violin was invented by M.A. Stroh in the early 1900s. It was equipped with a metal resonator to produce a “louder, more penetrating sound… the aluminum horn at

the end of the fingerboard directed this sound…into the recording horn.” Ibid., 55.

96 Fred Gaisburg, The Music Goes Round: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillian Press, 1942), 40-41.

97 A mix refers to the way sounds are balanced and organized on a record. All sounds in tracking are

organized into what manifests as a particular spatial arrangement. It constitutes a fixed aural perspective that constitutes a past-tense narrative of how certain sounds were heard by the recording (and playback)

apparatus. For further discussion, see Hodgson, “Theory of Recording Practice,” 12-22.

98 See Peter Copland, Sound Recordings (The British Library, 1991); Andre Millard, America on Record: A History

of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

47 mix also required a certain type of active physical performance that ensured the proper

amplitude boosts and attenuations. As tenor Walter Van Brunt recalls:

My voice evidently cut a little more than Ada’s [Ada Jones was among his regular singing partners], and I would stand back of her shoulder. I’d put my arm around her lots of times. Especially where I was singing harmony

I’d have to get back a little so I wouldn’t drown Ada’s voice out. When Ada would sing solo, she’d stand in; and when I had a solo part, Ada would move over. On the interludes between verses we’d both duck down to let the sound of the orchestra past us. Then we’d have to come up. We ducked down on the introductions and the tags… When we were both

singing, then I’d put my arm around her and we almost had our heads together pointing right straight into the horn. It was just a small opening, and it was made out of a material that wouldn’t vibrate. She would stand on a box [since] she was shorter…99

Though the phonograph “hears” music like a human ear, it simply does not hear

the same way. Clearly, vocal performers needed to make special concessions in order for

the phonograph to adequately construe any sort of audible markers of a live performance

in the final recording. Phonograph singers needed to be specially selected because not

every performing artist was willing, or able, to adapt his or her technique in favor of

forceful vowel sounds and exaggerated consonants, including rolled ‘R’s, and forceful ‘S’s

which needed to be modified to ‘Sh’s in order to better relay the sound to the

diaphragm.100 Indeed, not every performer would agree to modify their prized vocal

techniques in such a way. Nevertheless, some voices were more naturally suited to the

recording medium than others, such as Anna Case. These singers became the first

iteration of “recording artists.” To those present in the recording room, the “live”

99 Tim Gracyk and Frank Hoffmann, Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895-1925 (New York: Haworth,

2000), 17. 100 Peter Copland, Sound Recordings, 10.

48 performance of these artists may have sounded ridiculously exaggerated, and certainly

would not have been appropriate for the concert hall or any regular live performance.

Nevertheless, the ducking, huddling, and cramped quarters of the musicians crowded

around the conical horn would have been no less an entertaining sight.

In a sense, these recording sessions are early manifestations of “live-to-track”

recording, where musicians balance themselves around a single microphone or,

alternatively, each singer or musician has his or her own microphone which is routed to

the mixing board. Then, the engineer mixes each individual channel into a single image

that creates the impression of the musicians playing in front of a single microphone, as if

documenting a communal performance. This is a common tracking method used to

construe liveness in a recording. The disconnect between the conceived nature of the

recording, and the actual nature of the recording can be described as a participatory

discrepancy.

Ethnomusicologist Thomas Porcello argues that participatory discrepancies in

recording—a disparity that exists due to a recording’s ability to construe liveness despite

its non-existance in the recording process—are defined and communicated through

timbre, sound and tone qualities that are constructed by live-seeming recording

techniques. 101 Porcello uses this concept (borrowed from Charles Keil), to describe

particular studio conventions that veil the reality behind the artifice of construed liveness.

Sound engineers, for instance, may signify liveness by applying reverb to a sound in order

101 Thomas Porcello, “Music Mediated as Live in Austin: Sound, Technology, and Recording Practice,” in

Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures eds. Paul D. Greene, Thomas Porcello

(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 105.

49 to communicate a sense of space and place on the record.102 Or, the engineer may

utilize bleed or spill, by allowing sound waves to “leak” from one microphone to

another—one that may not be directly intended for the sound source that created them.

The resulting sound is a wash that blurs and masks individual instruments in particular

ways. Bleed and spill on an Edison record was not an aesthetic option, however. It was

unavoidable. There was no way to provide the clarity and definition of instrument

separation that has become commonplace in popular music recording practices today,

since there was only one horn and one diaphragm that captured all of the sounds at once

to create a blurred composite sound mass. To create a sense of space, separation and

arrangement, musicians instead relied on physical placement around the bell, balancing

their loudness by a real-time mixing procedure.

On Edison records, the bleed and spill aesthetic was originally a simple consequence

of the acoustic recording system that was sold and marketed as the sound that that meant

“re-creation.” Interestingly, the bleed and spill technique is still to this day employed,

albeit now selectively amongst a whole host of techniques, to connote the exact same type

of live performance.

102 The possibilities for imposing particular spaces on sound in digital recording are extensive. With

convolution reverb, for example, a sound file created by recording the reverb sound of a room might be used to

process another waveform to make it sound like it was recorded in the space of the first sound file. In essence, one signal is used to modify a second signal. Creating realistic spaces is perhaps the most common

use for convolution, but it can also be used for a host of other sound modifications, such as processing a

direct guitar sound through a guitar speaker cabinet, or using a microphone frequency response to change the tonality of a vocal.

50 TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Horns

In addition to artist selection and performance mix, sound engineers and

recording technicians needed to vary the mechanical components of the recording system

according to the sounds that were being recorded. Although recordists were limited by

the capabilities of the mechanical system, they were still able to tailor the sound within

the system’s constraints. In particular, appropriate recording horn and diaphragm

selection were the most interchangeable machine components available to acoustic

recordists, which were utilized as “acoustic variables.” Horns and diaphragms were

chosen according to the requirements of the project in order to aid them in the face of the

machine’s frequency deficiencies and to shape the tonal palate of the recording.

Guided by tacit knowledge and technological enthusiasm, recordists made their

horn and diaphragm selections by trial and error, basing decisions on experience and

intuition.103 The recording horn can be thought of as the precursor to the microphone in

that it is the first component of the recording system that “hears” the incoming sounds. In

other words, it is the first step in the signal path. Like microphones, horns have biased

ways of hearing sound because they have characteristic frequency responses that shape

and affect the sounds they collect. In this sense, the effectiveness of all of the other

recording components depends upon the tonal quality that the horn is able to deliver.

The stylus cuts into the cylinder or disc according to the vibrations of the diaphragm; the

diaphragm vibrates according to the sounds that fill the sound box; and the frequencies

103 See Schmidt Horning, “Chasing Sound” (2002) for a study that applies the concept “tacit knowledge” (acquired by personal experience and experimentation) to the development of the art of record production.

Tacit knowledge is commonly used to explore intuition and innovation in craft in science and engineering

histories, yet has been underdeveloped in musicological discussions.

51 that fill the sound box are those supplied by sound tailored by the shape, size, and

composition of the horn. Horns are thus as much concerned with “collecting” or

“capturing” sounds, as they are with “creating” it. As musicologist Albin Zak notes,

…the process [recording] inevitably changes the original sound in some

way. Thus, the coloring effects of the microphone itself, along with those of its placement, must be appropriately matched with both the source material and the stylistic and expressive intentions of the project—a task requiring aesthetic judgment in addition to technical expertise.104

Zak is talking about microphones in this excerpt, but the premise is the same for acoustic

horns: to make a microphone or horn selection is to make an aesthetic decision. Although

microphones transduce sound waves into an electric signal while the horn captures signals

for the diaphragm to transduce into a mechanical signal, both are the first step in the

signal path, and both have the first affect on the sound.

As technological artifacts,105 recording horns reveal not only how particular

sounds were made and constructed by material and physical science, but they also reveal

how recordists thought about and used those materials practically to make records.

Millard describes the sight of horns strewn about the third floor at the Edison National

Historic site as physical residue, indicating recording had taken place there: “the only

evidence that this was the first recording studio area the numerous recording horns

strewn around the floor, long polished metal horns, enameled horns with wide mouths,

104 Albin J. Zak III., The Poetics of Rock (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001), 109.

105 “Technology is,” Wanda Orlikowski argues, “on the one hand, an identifiable, relatively durable entity,

a physically, economically, politically, and socially organized phenomenon in space-time. It has material and cultural properties that transcend the experience of individuals and particular settings… at the same

time, use of the technology involves a repeatedly experienced, personally ordered and edited version of the

technological artifact, being experienced differently by different individuals and differently by the same individuals depending on the time or circumstance.” Wanda J. Orlikowski, “Using Technology and

Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations” Organization Science 11,

no.4 (Jul.-Aug., 2000), 408.

52 and horns that look like hats worn by witches.”106 If the horns really were all that is left,

what could they tell the musicologist about acoustic recording practice, aesthetic

production, and the quest for fidelity?

Horns came in many shapes and sizes, and each had a specific use in recording

according to its acoustic behaviors when subjected to particular sounds. A recording horn

used to capture solo piano recordings, for instance, would be different than that used to

capture an orchestra. Similarly, a the bell-shaped 14-inch brass horn was typically used

for individual singers; the 26-inch japanned tin horn was best used for banjo, violin, and

cornet, and the 6-foot long horns were typically used for orchestras.107 To satiate the

requirements of myriad recording projects, horns were comprised of several different

materials, ranging from hardwood, cast-iron, brass, aluminum, vulcanite, papier-mache,

among many other substances.108 Presumably, different sounds needed to be handled

differently by different horns in order to match up with the “re-creation” image Edison

was selling to consumers. Despite the recordist’s efforts, however, the impossibility of

fidelity began with the recording horn, where sympathetic vibrations occurred when a

particular note resonated with the horn’s natural resonant frequency, resulting in

distortion.109 As Schmidt-Horning notes, “this is largely due to the reflective material of

106 Millard, America on Record, 115.

107 Ibid.

108 Harry A. Gaydon, The Art and Science of the Gramaphone (London: Dunlop & Co., 1926), 93.

109 Schmidt-Horning, “Chasing Sound,” 34-35.

53 the horns (they were most often made of brass or some other type of metal), which

produced unfavorable “blasts” known as “wolf-tones.”110

Horns generally came in two shape variations, exponential and conical (figure 4),

that were employed according to the requirements of the project.

Figure 4. The basic arrangement used in acoustic recording. Pictured are the two types of horn shapes.111

Recordists knew that the behavior of a horn is affected by its profile, whether it was its

shape (conical, exponential, etc.); its material composition, or its length and size (see figure

5). The use of larger recording horns (one experimental horn for orchestral recording was

up to 200 feet long) was a tactical attempt to trap more of the sound in a room, but the

large metal horns, as we now know, would have actually reflected more sound than they

captured.112 The frequency response chart (figure 5) illustrates the low-frequency boosts of

110 Schmidt-Horning, “Chasing Sound,” 35. To compensate for the frequency distortion characteristic of metal horns, recordists would sometimes wrap the bell’s exterior with electrical tape.

111 Adapted from V. Fadeyev, C. Haber, C. Maul, J.W. McBride and M. Golden, “Reconstruction of Mechanically Recorded Sound from an Edison Cylinder Using Three Dimensional Non-contact Optical

Surface Metrology” escholarship, (University of California, 2004), available online at

http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/6qk9j5sx; internet. 112 Copland, Sound Recordings, 10.

54 recording sessions that utilized conical horns, which seem to be in predominant use as

suggested by Edison archival photographs.113

The sound that is either generated by a source in recording, or received by the

listener in playback is a pressure wave that is inscribed by the stylus according to the

diaphragm’s sympathetic response. In order for a flat frequency response to apply, the

stylus velocity must be proportional to, and in phase with, the sound pressure at the

source/listener at all frequencies. The diaphragm, which vibrates and interprets sound

pressure waves for the stylus through a mechanical linkage (see figure 4), however, is small

and is not a particularly adept transducer for wavelengths larger than its diameter can

capture. For this reason, the diaphragm is coupled to the horn, which can receive or

radiate sound from a much larger effective radius (compare diaphragm radius and horn

radius in figure 4). The horn is thus a prosthetic sound-capturing device for the

diaphragm, which, by varying design, helps to expose the diaphragm to a greater band of

frequencies.

Figure 5. A comparison of the frequency transmissions of an exponential (dashed curve) and a conical (solid curve) horn of the same overall length. The exponential horn offered a much more substantive mid-

range band, though the conical horn offered a frequency response below 100 Hz.114

113 Adapted from V. Fadeyev, C. Haber, C. Maul, J.W. McBride and M. Golden, “Reconstruction of

Mechanically Recorded Sound,” internet.

55 Other experiments sought to treat sound waves before they even entered the

horn as attempts to somehow “sweeten” the air in preparation of acoustic transduction.

Floods of phonograph patents were issued between 1910 and 1920, which aimed at

improving the reproduced tone and timbre of musical instruments, though some in more

unconventional approaches than others. One of particular curiosity, issued by Miles G.

Graham of New York in 1910, offers to “impregnate the air contained within or passing

through the reproducing device with a non-aqueous vapor or gas [a solution of alcohol,

balsam fir and hemlock-spruce oil],” so the sound waves that pass through the modified

air produce on the ear an “enriched, mellowed, and more pleasing effect” than those

emitted under normal arid conditions.115 The timbral effect, Graham hypothesizes,

probably arises “in part at least, from a mingling and harmonizing of the produced

overtones.”116

Recordists and inventors were at a steady and highly competitive scramble to

improve the already purported “perfect” live reproductions, relying on intuition and

experimentation to find new and useful ways to shape increasingly realistic sounds.

Clearly, the recordist’s selections of horn employment and other curious timbral

manipulating inventions were directly influenced by the commercial ideology of fidelity.

Rather than create new and interesting sounds, recordists created sounds that could be

heard as copies of the originals, though the original sound was destroyed in the process.

114 Adapted from V. Fadeyev, C. Haber, C. Maul, J.W. McBride and M. Golden, “Reconstruction of Mechanically Recorded Sound.”

115 Miles G. Graham, Process for Improving the Tone or Timbre of Musical Instruments. US Patent 966, 010, Serial No. 469,537, filed December 28, 1908, and issued Aug 2, 1910.

116 Ibid.

56 Diaphragms

Recordists also had a considerable array of diaphragms to choose from when

designing their timbres. The frequency response of the acoustic recording and playback

system also depends on the properties of the diaphragm and mechanical linkages, which,

like the horn, posed several difficulties for recordists. The diaphragm also possessed a

natural vibratory frequency which caused it to respond optimally to one note and only

fairly well to a wider range of notes.117 A 1926 analysis of acoustic recording and playback

systems conducted by two Bell Lab engineers J.P. Maxfield and C.P. Harrison indicates

that mechanical diaphragm transducers act as a bandpass filter,118 which attenuates (cuts)

frequencies above 3-5 kHz to create a narrow mid-range band limit (figure 4).119 Today,

bandpass filters are commonly used on signals to create room for multi-instruments in a

mix without “muddying” up the spectrum as a result of competing frequencies.120 Band

limits are also used to ensure that the recording can be played back successfully without

distortion by omitting low or high frequencies that cannot be accurately reproduced upon

playback (they may cause disruptive noise or fuzz which results from the reproducing

system’s incapacity to carry those frequencies). For recordists in the acoustic era,

117 Schmidt-Horning , “Chasing Sound,” 36.

118 A bandpass filter is a filter that allows a certain range or band of frequencies to pass while attenuating or rejecting frequencies that fall outside that range. It is an integral tool in modern mixing and sound sculpting

techniques.

119 J.P. Maxfield and H.C. Harrison, The Bell System Technical Journal V, no.3, (July 1926), 493-524.

120 Bandpasses are used extensively to create natural sounding recordings in modern recording, though they

are used on individual instruments, which are then pieced into a larger work like a sonic mosaic. The effects

of aliasing, masking and beating are discussed in chapter four.

57 however, a band limit would have imparted a nasal or thin sound on the overall sound

quality.

Figure 6. The data shown here is reflective of the frequency response of a exponential horn recording

system, which produced sharp attenuations below 150 Hz, and above 4 kHz, as discussed by Maxfield and Harrison.121

Yet despite the limited bandwidth, acoustic recordists had the advantage of a

particular psychoacoustic phenomenon on their side. Just because the system only

reproduced sounds from 150 Hz-4 kHz did not mean that frequencies beyond that range

were entirely lost. Even though a reproducing system may fail to reproduce all

frequencies below, say, middle C (262 Hz), there was still an auditory sensation of a musical

note whose fundamental122 is below this, even though the fundamental and one or two of

its harmonics had been eliminated in the reproduction.123 As J.P Maxwell notes, this

phenomenon affects the timbre:

121 Reproduced from V. Fadeyev, C. Haber, C. Maul, J.W. McBride and M. Golden, “Reconstruction of

Mechanically Recorded Sound.”

122 The fundamental is the base, core, or primary frequency of a pitched sound. The term is applied primarily to the lowest component of a complex wave. Mitch Gallagher, the Music Tech Dictionary (Boston:

Cengage, 2009), 80.

123 This psychoacoustic principle is called “the case of the missing fundamental,” which, as F. Alton Everest

notes, casts an interesting “sidelight” on timbre. If three tones, say, 400, 600, and 800 Hz are sounded

together, the pitch combination heard is not that of the 400, 600, nor the 800, but rather the pitch of a 200-Hz tone, which is actually the fundamental of the other harmonics. As Everest reminds us, timbre is both

58 While this elimination of the lower components in no way changes the apparent pitch of a note, it does change what is commonly called the ‘character’ or

‘timbre’ of the note. The ‘metallic’ quality of tone characteristic of the older type talking machine was largely brought about by the failure to reproduce these lower notes.124

Indeed, Diamond Disc phonograph recordings did not actually contain lower

frequencies, but they were still heard in the timbre by its listeners. As Theodore Edison

recalls,

[before 1926] any bass heard in recordings was probably produced by the beating of overtones. That’s a funny thing; it seems possible to hear notes that are lower than the notes that are actually recorded, because recorded overtones can produce beat notes.125

To a certain extent, realism truly did reside in the ear of the beholder, as it was

the human hearing system that provides the frequencies that improve the sound in Edison

records before 1926. For the most part, however, it was in the recordist’s interest to

control the reliability of the communication, so they sought to broaden the frequency

band by diaphragm selection. A diaphragm’s ability to respond to particular frequencies

depended on its composition and size, as well as the construction of its partnered horn. A

thin and light diaphragm (perhaps made of mica) was the most sensitive to soundwaves,

which it then transmitted to the cutting stylus. Thicker glass diaphragms were less

responsive due to their weight and density, but they were for that reason useful for

combating the greater sound pressures of low notes captured by the attached horn that

threatened the stylus cutting. Indeed, greater sound pressure made it more likely that the

physical stimulus and a psychoacoustical response. Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals, (Boston:

Cengage, 2007), 119.

124 Quoted in Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph: 1877-1977, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Press,

1977), 204.

125 Harvith and Harvith, Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph, 38.

59 diaphragm might drive the stylus to travel across the grooves or jump the surface of the

wax blank, ruining the recording. Recordists thus kept several types of diaphragms on

hand in the studio; very thin ones, which were more sensitive to soft sounds and low

notes, and sturdier ones, which could stand up to high volume. 126

Yet choosing a diaphragm that functioned with the stylus properly did not come

without a sacrifice, as choosing too thin a diaphragm could result in a blasting of the

sound, and choosing a thicker one might fail to vibrate sufficiently to capture the high

notes. Imparted by the narrow frequency band and frequency curve, the timbre of the

recordings were thus simultaneously the product of a selective process and less than ideal

compromise, limited by and bound up with the material limitations of the acoustic

system.

Mimesis and Desire

Edison recordings were clearly far from perfect re-creations, though the “re-

creations” nevertheless named as such were carefully crafted documents with no

correlation to actual live performance. Yet an obvious question still remains, which has

enormous consequences for our concerns with sound negotiation: how is it possible that

people believed the tone-test artists to be indistinguishable from the recording? In an age

of digital recording, de convolution and re-mastering, modern listeners may find it

difficult to relate that Edison machines were actually thought to have had “no tone” and

produced “perfect re-creations.” What cultural mechanisms may have been at work that

126 Schmidt-Horning, “Chasing Sound,” 36.

60 allowed for listeners to so closely equate live sound with the record? Why did so many

early auditors agree that Edison’s Diamond Disc was the pinnacle of sound reproduction?

Are all listeners, in any epoch, susceptible to the same phenomena?

At the heart of the tone tests––and as I will argue, many other subsequent

negotiations between live and recorded “realities”––is a concern over the sound of sound

reproduction. Sterne argues convincingly that perfect sound reproduction in the years of

the tone tests required both practiced performance and practiced audition, which

provides the theoretical framework for understanding how "every age has its own perfect

fidelity."127 In order for the sound medium to “disappear” in the sense that Edison’s

aesthetic calls for (which was not possible at the time), listeners were already engaged in a

type of audile technique that “required a certain amount of faith; a belief that the

machine does or at least will work.”128 In practice, this audile technique outwardly admits

first, that noises are made by a machine; and second, that medium’s own sonic character

be discerned as “exterior” or “outside” the sound in transfer.

Sterne argues that if listeners could (or did) in fact distinguish between sounds that

were “interior” to sound and those that were “exterior,” then the functional criteria for

hearing early sound reproduction as perfect becomes apparent:

The point was not to produce a perfectly silent apparatus… Rather it was to produce an apparatus that listeners could pretend was silent, a machine that could hear anything but with no voice of its own—a surrogate

appropriate to the audile technique to be employed. […] Before it could be a measurable entity, sound fidelity relied on the construction of a social correspondence among different sounds through audile technique, elevated to an almost metaphysical attitude. Sound fidelity was sound’s

127 Sterne, The Audible Past, 222. 128 Ibid., 257.

61 own unique “dismal science”—it was ultimately about deciding the values of competing and contending sounds.129

In other words, sounds become “real” because we want to believe they are. We

want machines to work. The curious “perfection” of the Edison Diamond Disc was heard

as such because “listeners were helping the machines reproduce sound perfectly.”130

Indeed, the somewhat variable aesthetic of auditory realism may very well be described

by the “desire for a slice of reality coming through the diaphragm of the machine [my

emphasis].”131 In the early years of sound reproduction, then, according to Sterne’s

theory, the machine was only perceived to be silent as listeners created their own realities.

Fast Forward: Fidelity Lives

From my own experiences with music technologies, Sterne’s idea seems to hold

some currency. Nearly four years ago in 2006, I was in the market for a digital piano. I

was interested first in sound quality (I wanted it to sound like a real piano), but I also

wanted it to feel like a real piano (the weight and action of the keyboard). I remember well

the excitement and literal astonishment I experienced when I first came across the

Roland FP-7. It was, I believed, truly a perfect re-creation of a piano. Equipped with

sensitive and realistic action, the sounds it emitted were even more lifelike and

reverberant, with full and natural sustain. I was even more convinced of its effectiveness

once the salesperson gave me a run-down on its technical specifications—the 128-voice

polyphony, the PHA II (Progressive Hammer Action II) adjustable hammer response

129 Sterne, The Audible Past, 259-260. 130 Ibid., 256.

131 Ibid., 274.

62 system, and user micro tuning—after which there was no question that I wasn’t willing,

if not happy, to pay the full price for this instrument. And indeed, I considered it an

instrument. The sound was all I needed to convince me, and it sounded so real. Today,

those same sounds resonate differently. Though I still enjoy my FP-7, I certainly do not

maintain it is the absolute end-all in reproduction technology because my aural

perception of what constitutes a sonic recreation has evolved. The top end now sounds

thin, the samples sound boxed and distant, and the action is loud, plastic, and clunky.

What was I thinking? What was I hearing?

Undoubtedly there was a certain amount of technological enthusiasm on my part

when I was shopping for my ultimate keyboard, and maybe once I found what I thought

to be the perfect size, shape, and sound, my desire for it to be all I wanted it to be simply

made it so. As Sterne might agree, the re-creation may not have been perfect, but I

pretended it was. I wanted that piano for my own, and, like a rational consumer, I told

myself why. So did the salesman.

Yet what seems to be important yet inherently missing from this reasoning, is the

role of function. To my mind, an instrument need only be as good as we require it to be.

That is, it must adequately reasonably fulfill its assigned function. For me, I wanted my

digital piano to function as a practice instrument, a portable “just-in-case” instrument (for

places I perform where there isn’t a piano), and overall, as a stand-in for my acoustic piano

that resided at my parents’ house while I was away at University. As fantastic as I thought

my FP-7 was, it was just a substitute for the real thing. But at the same time, it was the

real thing. Desire cannot fully explain why my FP-7 now sounds outdated since I still

63 want it to sound as wonderful as it did four years ago. I wish I could go back, but

something has changed.

My own experience, sadly, doesn’t sound awfully different from the experiences of

the first round of fidelity consumers in the Edison era. Fidelity clearly still functions in full

ideological force, and to boot, mostly in the same form as it did over a century ago. Its

stronghold is exercised not only as a way to sell imitation instruments as the real thing,

but also to sell records as real things. Miles Orvell was right to note that copy culture had

an aesthetic hold over into the twentieth century, but it has spilt over into the twenty-first

with equal, if not increased force.

The enormous effort that linked the tone test campaigns with comparable

recordings, namely, recording practice, reveals something about the inner mechanisms of

the blossoming music culture industry at the turn of the century, which was inevitably

and increasingly tied up with the sound reproduction technologies. As historian Gary

Cross notes, “American consumer culture [between 1900-1930] was built on much more

than new products. At least as important were innovations in selling—new approaches to

retailing, buying on credit, packaging, and advertising.”132 Edison’s tone tests were

certainly an innovation in selling, as they were entertaining, promotional, and educational

all at once. The ultimate function of the tone tests was to impress the attendees (potential

customers), which required the perceived fulfillment of the Edison promise: the “re-

creation” of music. In their live forms, this perception rested not on the machine’s ability

to mimic the performer, but the accompanying performer’s ability to mimic the machine

and recording. As Anna Case recalls:

132 Gary S. Cross, An All-consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 28.

64 I remember I stood right by the machine…the audience was there, and there was nobody on stage with me. The machine played and I sang with it. Of

course, if I had sung loud, it would have been louder than the machine, but I gave my voice the same quality as the machine so they couldn't tell.133

Ultimately, what I would like to carry forward in the next chapters is that the

rhetoric of realism and liveness in the early days of recording was not simply incidental.

Edison created a function out of the recordings by appropriating an authentic human

experience, transforming it into a commodity, and teaching auditors to listen to it as

reality itself. As Case’s quotation tells us, the recording process is essential in

understanding the underlying construction of this communication and the role that

technology has in the material making of sonic rhetoric.

If fidelity and sonic “realism” still have strong currency as a commodity in today’s

music industry, which I will argue they do, then there is, to be sure, a strong

infrastructure in the realm of recording practice (and otherwise) that holds that

communication in place. Realism in the acoustic era was based around a rhetorical and

sonic infrastructure through which listeners assumed a timbral equivalence between

sound and sound source and exercised the ability to visualize a sound source upon

listening to a particular recording. These perceptions satellite around one commodity in

particular: timbre. With an entire ideological infrastructure in place, fidelity’s ultimate

functionality came down to one necessity: the sound of the recording needed to match up

with the sound of a source. What is the function of fidelity in recording today? What has

changed? How is it constructed? The legacy of Edison’s invented aesthetic and present

133 Harvith and Harvith, Edison, Musicians and the Phonograph, 44.

65 day status of fidelity as ideology are explored and theorized in the next chapter in order

to more adequately address the rhetorical infrastructure of sound fidelity.

66 CHAPTER THREE

AFTER THE ACOUSTIC ERA: THE RHETORICAL BINARY

In pop music…the sky’s the limit…we have an infinite palette of musical colors. —George Martin134

From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it… —Karl Marx135

As demonstrated in the first chapter, sound fidelity as concept was designed to

create nothing more than a market viable function for the phonograph in the acoustic

era. Its resonating success was dependent on a rhetorical and productive infrastructure

that was shaped and maintained by technological innovation, the aesthetic decisions

made by recordists, and the culturally conditioned ways those records were interpreted.

The rhetorical infrastructure of Sound Fidelity was only further materialized as sonic

realism became constructed as a consumer expectation. Of course, as chapter two

reveals, sound recording and reproduction equipment did not naturally “re-create”

human made sounds straight out of the technological womb. Reproduction technologies,

and the sounds that emanated from them, were consciously given that function according

to what would appeal to the culture at the time (which as Orvell notes, was a culture

fascinated with imitation), and the basic technological capabilities of the machine (which

posed an obvious hurdle, though one that was overcome by recording techniques and

ideological power).

134 George Martin, All You Need is Ears, (London: MacMillan, 1979), 167.

135 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1904), pp 20-21.

67 Yet upon even the slightest inspection, it becomes clear that the sounds

produced by the phonograph were far from “perfect re-creations,” all subjectivity aside.

The sounds that went into the recording system came out as a sonic code, not as sonic

replication. In the system, sounds were translated into a new language entirely by the

frequency response of the horn, the diaphragm, the sound box, the stylus, and the disc

medium that the code was ultimately scribed into. That code was transformed yet again

upon consumption, once the record was purchased then interpreted according to another

characteristically biased re-translator, the frequency response of the consumer’s

phonograph.

While methods of recording have changed considerably since the acoustic era, the

rhetorical and material conditions of recorded sound remain the same. Beyond the

acoustic, through the electric and into the digital era, perfect re-creations still flood the

popular music landscape, and sounds are still translated into code through recording

practice. All recorded sound, whether transduced acoustically, electrically, or digitally,

exists in the first instance as code that represents sound. The code that exists as the grooves

of Edison phonographs are, after all, only “sounds” once they have been prescribed that

function by record receivers. All “sounds” heard through records were thus once code,

and are only assigned some sort of external meaning or function once they are played

back on a reproducing system.

Translators

Such is the basis of any rhetorical system of sound. To be clear, all recorded music

is intrinsically dependent on technology for its very existence, or more specifically

68 transducers, as this is the process that produces the code that industry and consumers

eventually, and necessarily, interpret as sound. The entire functionality of the recording

industry depends on this agreement. Though all recorded sound is technologically

mediated as such, listeners assign associations and meanings to code upon playback,

thereby translating sonic objects into what becomes properly understood as a meaningful

communication. Rhetorical meanings imposed on recordings are thus entirely enacted in

the realm of record reception. The timbre of a voice or the timbre of a guitar, for

instance, exists only as mere code on a recording, and is only prescribed to be a voice or a

guitar when a listener plays it back and interprets the sounds as such.136

In the acoustic era and beyond, sound fidelity functions as the Rosetta Stone of

sound code translation. It was invented to be a functional sound code translator, and it

still functions as a sound code translator. Just as a traveler employs a guide to make sense

of communications ciphered by foreign tongues, the record auditor employs sound fidelity

as a sonic guide to interpret what otherwise exists only abstractly. It is the engagement of

sound code translation at which listeners are interpolated into the ideological system of

sound fidelity. Listeners do so freely each time one engages in record translation, and

largely without realizing their subjection. Sound fidelity is not some type of auditory

interpretive filter we can turn on or off whenever we choose. We cannot simply pick up

fidelity at the local depot then throw it away when we’re tired of it. Sound fidelity is

much more deeply engrained into our entire way of listening to records, and it is, thus,

136 As Hodgson explains, once sonic phenomena is transduced and mixed, it cannot exist as sonic

phenomena except by record reception. It is, in fact, only record receivers who realize what a mix represents

(i.e. sound in particular). They make happen the sonic phenomenon in particular which record innovators figure as code and, in so doing, enact Recording Practice rather than simply “extend” “live” musical

exchange. “Navigating the Network,” 202.

69 the most reliable and lucrative mode of sonic communication for recordists. We cannot

elude Sound Fidelity because it is, to refer back to Jonathan Sterne’s assertion,

ideologically maintained through an entire system of “implied social relations among

people, machines, practices, and sounds.”137

As the title of this chapter suggests, however, sound fidelity is not the only

rhetorical program auditors may subscribe to during record consumption (of course),

though I as I will demonstrate, this was not always the case. Through a brief historical

exploration of the beginnings of sonic experimentation in recorded popular music in the

late 1940s, I draw attention to the resistance that first met these new sounds, and

highlight how recordists needed to appeal to sound fidelity in order to create a use-value

for their music in the marketplace. I especially want to draw attention to how conceptions

of what is or is not a “re-creation,” or a “realistic” sound in aural discourses is always

changing. Sound fidelity as listening strategy is not immutable—instead it evolves into

new manifestations and iterations over time, and is carried through the ebb and flow of

technological and cultural change.

Indeed, outwardly “experimental” sounds eventually acquired their own

ideological and rhetorical infrastructure, which has largely developed and manifest in

binary opposition to sound fidelity. This is reflected not only by the listening public at

large, but also throughout musicological scholarship. I explore how binary rhetorical

analysis can be used as an entry point for beginning to critique how recordists capitalize

on cultural understandings and expectations of medium transparency and timbral fidelity

through recording practice. Then I address how the critique of sound fidelity as an

137 Sterne, The Audible Past, 219.

70 ideologically maintained understanding of “realistic” and “live” sounds can be

approached from the concept of veridicism, which acknowledges the fallacy of dicent

representation of a live performance by acknowledging the recording practices that

underlie sound fidelity’s signification. The chapter concludes with a contextual case study

of a veridic recording practice that illustrates both its reception and production.

All Real All the Time, Until…

The recording aesthetic of sound fidelity exercised a blanket restriction on

recordists during the first sixty years of the recording industry’s development. During this

time, sound fidelity existed as the only interpretive program available for auditors,

whereby sounds heard on records were thought of as replications of sounds that existed in

and of the real world, or more specifically, sounds that existed in a real performance.

Although what may have sounded “real” to one person may have sounded “artificial” to

another, it was general common sense that the intention was to make sonic re-creations—

or, that recordings were sonic re-creations--not to make new sounds altogether.

In fact, all recorded sounds, whether or not their ultimate physical and perceptual

manifestation had any sort of physical sonic resemblance to the “original,” were

understood as being reiterations of the natural sound world well until the high-fidelity

craze in the 1950s. It was around this time that popular music began to undergo what

New York Times jazz/pop critic John S. Wilson called in 1953, a “frantic search for what

recording people consider ‘new sounds.’”138 Although no single person can be ascribed

138 Quoted in Albin Zak, “Mitch the Goose Man”: Mitch Miller and the Invention of Modern Record

Production,” (Abstract, AMS Conference, Philadelphia, November 14, 2010).

71 the definitive role of the first sonic experimenter in recorded popular music, Wilson

claims A&R agent and record producer for Columbia records Mitch Miller was “one of

those most responsible for the present interest in sounds per se.”139 The “new sounds” that

recordists like Miller started to create in the 1950s had no comparative basis in “reality”

in the old sense of the world. Instead, the sounds were dependent on the recordist’s

intervention at the mixing console.140 At the time, most people had never heard of what a

mixing console was let alone what one sounded like.

Nevertheless, one might think a little sonic experimentation might have been

received enthusiastically (what was considered extensive “experimentation” by Wilson is

still by today’s standard conservative studio experimentation) in light of the prevailing

“reproduction” saturated soundscape. Though they did enjoy some success, however,

these “experimental” songs remained novelty numbers and were certainly not considered

to be “serious” music.141 Those who didn’t pass off Miller’s “odd sound effects” as “phony

effects” and “electronic fakery” either heard these sounds as inferior to the high pop

recordings that were “serious performances” to be relished on expensive hi-fis, or

representative of the impeding novelty songs (of which the hi-fi poster-boy Sinatra was a

victim of since their deemed collaborative failure “Mama Will Bark”). Others simply

remained at arms over the sonic disillusionment. What Miller deemed as “excitement,”

139 Quoted in Albin Zak, “Mitch the Goose Man.”

140 Ibid. 141 Hear for instance “The Yellow Rose of Texas” (1955), or the “hot harpsichord” on Rosemary Clooney’s

“Come On-A-My House” (1951), the snapping whip on Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train,” Mitch Miller’s sound effects appeared in arrangements that were “novel” in other ways beyond the unusual sounds; they

contained a jambalaya of colloquial and popular lyrics, and were obviously intended to be nonsensical or

comical (see “Tzena Tzena Tzena” or “Nick Nack Paddy Whack”). Les Paul and Mary Ford’s successful and experimental hits were similarily considered novelty tunes (“How High the Moon,” or “Vaya con

Dios”).

72 was harshly criticized by others, including Wilson who criticized the movement

towards novelty soundscapes for which “tune and talent have frequently been secondary

to accompaniments that snap, crackle or pop, [and] singers who gasp or shriek.”142 In

Albin Zak’s words:

As the musical economy shifted its basis from music writing to sound recording, specific sounds took on new importance and unfamiliar musical meanings. Miller’s production philosophy proved dizzying to an industry whose orientation remained the natural sound world (hence the

contemporary mania for hi-fi), breaking with high-pop conventions in many ways found outrageous and tasteless.143

These “unnatural sounds” were aesthetically defined by what they were not: they

were not realistic, they weren’t serious, and they certainly weren’t high-class.144

Consequently, as experimental sounds began to take hold in the marketplace as novelty

gimmicks, sounds that did adhere to the standard of Sound Fidelity (contained in

“serious” songs) clearly became bound up with notions of “authenticity” and “high class,”

and imbued a sense of “documentary authority.” This was de facto the foundation of

Sound Fidelity as it was constructed by Edison and others in the acoustic era record

142 John S. Wilson, “Creative Jazz: Fresh and Vital Sounds From Sauter Finegan,” The New York Times,

April 5, 1953. 143 Quoted in Albin Zak, “Mitch the Goose Man.” As Will Friedwald has noted, “Miller also conceived of

the idea of the pop record "sound" per se: not so much an arrangement or a tune, but an aural texture (usually replete with extramusical gimmicks) that could be created in the studio and then replicated in live

performance, instead of the other way around. Miller was hardly a rock 'n' roller, yet without these ideas

there could never have been rock 'n' roll.” The Song is You: A Singer’s Art (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 174.

144 Keir Keightley has explored how the “tricks” and “gimmicks” of Miller’s productions operated in “dialectical relationship with standards,” which were in contrast “honest, solid, and ultimately adult.” The

studio technology these songs relied on were seen as “inherently deceptive and manipulative,” and

functioned as the “crass and crude” enemy of “high class” popular music that the “standard” epitomized. As Keightley notes: “The standard—as opposed to the oldie, the evergreen, or the perennial—signified

upper-class, classical, and bourgeois values; in the postwar but pre-rock ‘n’ roll years, the linking of the

adult/teen, high/low, and standard/novelty oppositions became crucial to the full flowering of a segmented mainstream, in industrial as well as ideological terms.” “You Keep Coming Back Like a Song: Adult

Audiences, Taste, and the Idea of the Standard,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 13:1 (January, 2001), 20.

73 industry. The new experimental sounds of Miller and others did not expose the artifice

of Sound Fidelity nor the technological mediation underlying these communications.

Artifice became conveniently manifest in “other” “experimental sounds.”

Within the realm of popular music in the 1950s, two aesthetics began to emerge

that became loosely connected with sonic treatment during recording. In a 1953 New York

Times article called “What Makes ‘Pop’ Popular,” Wilson called these aesthetics the “two

levels” of popular music. The first was made up of traditional “standards” that came out

of the Tin Pan Alley tradition, such as Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” or Hoagy

Carmichael’s “Star Dust” that actually justify the “popular music adjective in the view of

most American adults.”145 These records placed a premium on reproducing a

performance, and as such, featured easily recognizable timbres and sounds.

Above this “foundational layer,” Wilson wrote, was the music of the adolescents

“where one finds the musical fads.” It was under Miller’s influence that normal voices

took on “awesome, doom-filled proportions, gunned up by echo chambers, multiple

taping and the endless use of sound gadgetry” to create sounds that ultimately gave

popular music its new and “overpoweringly glittering surface.”146 For Miller, the pop

record needed to be two and a half minutes of drama: “You have to reach out and grab

the listener by the ear… and then hold on for dear life.”147

While Miller was creating “new sounds” from studio experimentation in the

burgeoning new pop world, the Sauter-Finegan orchestra, lead by Eddie Sauter and Bill

145 John S Wilson, “What Makes ‘Pop’ Popular,” The New York Times, Dec 8 1957.

146 Ibid. 147 Ibid.

74 Finegan were also at work introducing “fresh and vital sounds” to the jazz scene.148

The economically scaled jazz band had a small but loyal following and had garnered

some acclaim from band leaders such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Woody

Herman, but the band was ultimately deemed “too advanced for the general public.”

Nevertheless, S & F’s first ten-inch LP, New Directions in Music (Victor)149 did manage some

popular success with hits like “Midnight Sleighride” and “Doodletown Filters,” which

featured sounds not typical of the record soundscape at the time, not even within the

“liberal” pop realm. In Wilson’s words:

In conception and execution, each of these arrangements [“Midnight

Sleighride,” “Rain, Moonlight and the Ganges” and “Doodletown Filters,”] with its display of tonal experiences not usually encountered on popular records, is unfailingly interesting. As played by a group of top studio men assembled for these sessions, these Sauter-Finegan works are unlike anything else currently being put on records.150

The new and unfamiliar sounds on New Directions in Music were not entirely lost

upon audiences, but S & F proceeded cautiously so not to alienate their listeners. This

required a certain amount of explanation and instruction as to how these new sounds

were to be interpreted. In order to do this, S & F spent considerable efforts assuring

listeners that these new sounds were in fact natural, and real. In one 1952 Billboard

interview, for instance, Sauter explains: “there are so many sounds, natural sounds, that

still haven’t been utilized in popular music. This outfit is designed to present the sounds,

148 From this point forward I refer to Sauter and Finegan as S & F.

149 Sauter and Finegan, New Directions in Music, RCA: B000008C6M, 1990).

150 Wilson, “Creative Jazz: Fresh and Vital Sounds.”

75 and to use them with all kinds of material [my emphasis].”151 To emphasize that these

sounds were indeed, of the natural world, indicates the value placed on recognizable

sound sources that could be performed live:

The main point is that the records do sound different, and without any

synthetic recording-studio effects.…This band recorded without any technical tricks or gimmicks, and came up with something that can be presented identically in theatres and dance halls [sic].152

There was a practical element to this as well, as there was no way to produce studio

effects in live performance at this time. Yet S & F’s frequent appeals to realism are

abundant and carefully placed; they describe their music as a combination of “idealism

and realism” at the end of the Billboard article, for instance, and in performance provided

lengthy interpretations of their timbral depictions and justified their experimentation as

being “for the sake of realism.”153 Clearly, Miller and S &F were appealing to listeners’

cultural understanding of sound fidelity to sell their “new sounds,” at the same changing

what that definition is entirely. As Keightley notes, “Mitch Miller today is seen as a

enemy of rock culture, yet at the time was part of a vanguard moving toward the very

culture of the record upon which rock was founded.”154 Keightley comments on the irony

151 “Sauter-Finegan Create Band With ‘New Look,’”Billboard, 22 Nov, 1952. Sauter and Finegan were

keenly aware that these unusual timbres were of themselves highly valuable commodities. Until this time,

highly individualized timbres and sounds on records weren’t sought as much as a good performance was, yet Sauter’s comment here suggests the beginnings of a new consciousness: “Musicians who’ve listened to

the sides we made can’t figure out how we got some of the tonal combinations, some of the percussion

effects. Don’t you think we should keep the picture of the date from being printed? There are certain sounds we’d like to keep as our identification.” Billboard, 22 Nov, 1952. Rather than merely re-creating

generic and recognizable orchestral arrangements, the sonic signature began to seem like a valuable market

commodity. 152 Ibid.

153 Eddie Sauter, Transcribed from performance of “Midnight Sleighride,” Youtube,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mExpGyauWGc&feature=related (accessed March 1, 2010).

154 Keightley, “You Keep Coming Back Like a Song,” 26.

76 of authenticity here, but the premise is the same for sound reception. Indeed, the same

sounds that were “fake” and “fabricated” in the 1940s and early 1950s were rendered

“realistic” by the rock era. What is ultimately deemed a “natural” or “realistic” sound

appears to be culturally relative, and so it is particular contexts that give rise to the

existence of a realistic sound or otherwise.

Yet without negating the role of age, taste, class, or culture, I maintain that

recordists, musicians, and sound had important roles in the ever-changing notions of sonic

realism during this period. Just as Edison exercised a rhetorical infrastructure to sell

“realistic” “re-creations in the acoustic era, Miller et. all also developed a way to sell the

new sounds that electric recording made possible. Indeed, novelty songs were in

themselves an iteration of a tone test. These “novelty” vanguards could not merely tell

listeners their sounds were “natural.” Ultimately, their musical product needed to match

their claims, and indeed, sounds on these records were carefully chosen so their sounds

could be easily understood. The trotting sounds made by Sauter’s close-miked chest

pounding on “Midnight Sleigh Ride,” for instance, was intended to sound like a horse

running on the snow, just as Mitch Miller’s whip sound, created by whacking two pieces

of wood together, was intended to sound like a whip on Frankie Laine’s “Mule Song.”155

Beyond their obvious function as entertainment pieces, it is worth considering why

the earliest “experimental” sounds were presented to listeners in a sonic language and

musical text that could be easily remembered and understood.156 Part of the “fun” for

155 Wilson, “What Makes ‘Pop’ Music Popular.”

156 Similarly, Sterne has suggested Edison chose “Mary had a little lamb” as the phonograph’s first public performance precisely because the verse and melody would have been easily recognized by listeners and

thus easier to sonically parse. The Audible Past, 230.

77 audiences in these novelty songs was the challenge to play along in the sound-source

guessing game, all the while acquiring an entirely new timbral vocabulary and concept of

listening to recorded sounds. It was like the tone tests all over again, but this time the

comparison was in the auditor’s head. Just as listeners in the acoustic era learned how to

listen to re-creations, these listeners, too, needed to learn how to listen to sounds that had

no basis in reality.157 Sauter-Finegan may well have been “too advanced for the general

public” with their vastly expanded scope in sound and timbre, but within ten years, the

same listening public would eventually become fanatical over all sorts of new sounds, as

Wilson began to note in 1957.

Nearly thirty years after the release of New Discoveries in Music at a reunion concert

in New York, Finegan noted, “From the time Eddie and I started this band, everything

went wrong but the music.”158 It may not have been a question of what had gone wrong,

but rather what hadn’t happened yet. There was simply no rhetorical infrastructure in

place for those sounds at the time. Sauter and Finegan had a sonic product whose use-

value was yet to be created.

There are three ideas I would like to carry forward from this example. First, what

constitutes an “experimental,” “real,” or “fake” sound, or otherwise, depends on certain

culturally situated and agreed upon ideas about the meaning of the relation between

recorded sound and sound source. For the first sixty years of sound recording, there is a

remarkable variance in what constitutes a “real” sound on a recording, simply because all

157 The hi-fi movement was one of the most prolific aural educations in history. Although hi-fi fanatics were

often more focused on hi-fi playback itself, pamphlets, books, and write-ups that explained how to listen to

sounds critically were abundant and in strong demand. Listening to Enoch Light’s Persuasive Percussion, (1959), for instance, was, as Greg Milner notes, “like taking a space age tone test, with the liner notes as

your guide.” Perfecting Sound Forever, 145.

158 Quoted in Robert Palmer, “Jazz: Sauter-Finegan Group,” The New York Times, January 29, 1987.

78 recorded sounds, whether “real” or not, were heavily and convincingly marketed as the

real thing. Whether it was Edison’s flat, non-reverberant sounds, or Victor’s comparably

spacious room recordings in the acoustic era; or the sound of a crooner flush against a

“Telly” U-47 compared to the timbral wash of a single omnidirectional mic over an

orchestra— each of these sound textures were, and still are, rhetorical and contextual

variations of “reality.” What is without variation is the fact that each of these sounds are

equally products of the communicative system of recording practice, and they were

equally created to have a particular use-value in the popular music marketplace. It is only

that recordists did not outwardly attempt (admit) to make otherworldly sounds until the

Mitch Miller era, and when they did, their efforts were approached with reluctance as if

something had changed––as if they were corrupting something natural and real.

Second, the cultural normalization process of these new sounds is strikingly similar

to those that were initially so heavily painted as belonging to a standard of Sound Fidelity

in the acoustic era. Sonic “re-creations” in the acoustic era and sonic experimentations in

the electric era alike were initially heard as “musical fads” and “novelties,” both of which

eventually became “naturalized,” “organic” even.159 As oppositional sounds, or, rather,

oppositional ideologies, they were initially approached with reluctance. Yet as these

sounds acquired rhetorical infrastructures between people, machines, and sounds, over

time they came to be understood as proper and serious musical communications. It

appears that “experimental” sounds were constructed in the same fashion that “realistic”

sounds once were in the Edison era.

159 As sounds in recording emanate from technologies, Timothy Taylor’s concept of technological normalization seems to apply to this observation. As Taylor notes, “after a period of…[listening], most

technological artifacts [and sounds] are normalized into everyday life and are no longer seen as

‘technological’ at all.” Timothy Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6.

79 Thirdly, I would like to make a brief point about “authenticity.” If realism was

the recording aesthetic of the acoustic era, the electric era gave rise to new and unusual

sounds that, while still understood as the antithesis of realism, could be understood as an

artistic statement rather than mere “fakery.” Cultural understandings of sonic realism or

otherwise sounds have, of course, morphed considerably. The presence of studio effects in

“live” documents, for instance, is not longer a post-live documentary corruption if the

“live original” in fact contains those effects. The evolution of “liveness” has also changed

the contents of a “document.” Nevertheless, Sound Fidelity, in its original manifestation

as sound on a recording and ideology amongst listeners, remains strong and effervescent

alongside the ever-broadening soundscape.

Edison’s listening strategy for recordings, the first listening strategy, may prove to

be the most enduring. Sound fidelity, as it existed as ideology, listening strategy and

recording practice in the acoustic era, continues to exert an immense influence over

record production and reception well into the digital era, even while those standards may

be continually changing. It has been nearly a century since the Edison tone tests

disseminated fidelity as a properly musical and aesthetic function for the phonograph, yet

according to analysts, who take their cues from “listeners,” only two aesthetics have

dominated recording practices. The opposition of “realistic” and “imaginary” sound

seems to influence record production and reception, and these rhetorical categories seemi

inextricably bound up with sound (timbre). What can this observation offer the

musicologist in light of timbral studies?

80 The Great Rhetorical Binary

What I call the “Great Rhetorical Binary” simply refers to the analytical tendency

for recorded sounds to be categorized as either “captured” or “constructed,” more or less

in parlance with the sonic binary that has been in place since the Mitch Miller era. The

binary opposition of “captured” and “constructed” sounds overlaps the traditional binary

of “live” and “mediated” which underpins much Western thought concerning musical

practice in general. As Frith points out, because “recording practice” has often been

subordinated analytically to “live practice” in popular musicology, “realistic” sounds are

often dismissed as “captured” rather than “designed,” which overlooks an entire sphere of

artistic labour.160 Both “captured” and “constructed” sounds have respective acoustical

qualities that are in part correlative to the concept of sound fidelity; “captured” sounds

signify the presence of “sound fidelity” while “constructive” sounds signify its conspicuous

absence. As I will explore, this binary continues to circulate in musical-cultural discussions

in a fashion that largely veils the construction of auditory rhetoric. I problematize the

advantages and shortcomings of this approach, and suggest ways for how to proceed

analytically.161

With a focus timbre as an example, I will now review the existing binary

rhetorical models of recordings by ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino, musicologist Allan

160 Simon Frith, “Editorial,” Journal on the Art of Record Production 1, 2007. 161 Recordists often refer to the “palate” of sounds, or the act of sound “painting”-- a tendency that, though

beyond the scope of this thesis, requires further analysis and investigation. Timbres and sound textures have strikingly complementary analytical analogies, particularly to color, metaphor and representation, as the

visual arts. Realism (sonic re-creations) and abstract expressionism (new-world sounds) are only two styles I am

thinking of here. On that note, it may seem ridiculous to an art historian to even think of categorizing all interpretive visual arts as either “realistic” or not. I must agree. Part of my own project is to eliminate the

binary by recognizing the subtle nuances of sound reproduction techniques and practices.

81 F. Moore, and philosopher John Andrew Fisher, to explore how these analysts have

categorized it according to certain textual and perceptual criteria. This existing literature

within popular music studies is hardly exhaustive, if even formative. Nevertheless, these

models have merit to be further developed into a more thorough analytical framework for

timbre.

While I wish to draw attention to the existence of this binary, my purpose is still to

discuss the cultural and physical construction of sounds with “realistic” connotations, and

so I only address “imaginary” sounds to the extent that realistic sounds are, put simply,

sometimes defined by how they are not imaginary. That said, it is nearly impossible to

study only one half of the binary, as these categories are not fixed––one sound can easily

become appropriated into the other category. Ultimately, I consider these rhetorical

binaries as contextualizing portals that can serve as a valuable entry points for recording

practice analysis. I discuss these models and provide musical examples to illustrate how

recording practice underlies the ideology of these perceptual categories.

Binary Frameworks

Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino proposes two distinct “fields” of making music

recordings: “high fidelity” and “studio audio art.” Production processes, uses, and the

significance of recordings are as varied as the sounds and activities of live performance,

reminds Turino, and his intention in proposing these fields is not to negate this fact. High

fidelity and studio audio art are simply two fields devised to, in his words, “make sense of

82 the diversity.”162 “High fidelity” refers to “musical sounds heard on recordings that

index or are iconic of live performance” and “involve an ideology of dicent representation

of live performance at some level.”163 In this interpretive vein, live performance is actually

believed, as fact, to have truly “affected the signs of liveness in the recording in some

way.”164

The belief of dicent representation is most clearly manifest in the idea and concept

of the live album. For example, when one purchases a copy of, say, Glenn Gould

performing Beethoven’s first and second piano concertos recorded live at Massey Hall

with the TSO,165 the consumer believes to be purchasing a recording that exists because

of, and was thus affected by, a particular live performance that took place at that

particular venue.166 Even though the material on this release was actually transcribed

from various 1951 airchecks (archival recordings made as a program goes to air) taken

from Gould’s personal collection, it is nevertheless agreed upon that the recording captured

and thus is a document of, these live sound events. Although those who audit Gould disks

may be more attentive to these details, in his own words, “the determination of the value

162 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 67.

163 Ibid. See page 8 for a definition of “dicent.”

164 Ibid. 165 Glenn Gould, Beethoven: Piano Concertos 1 & 2, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Sir Ernest MacMillan, Live

at Massey Hall (CBC Records: PSCD 2015, 1999). 166 As Jay Hodgson puts it, “The very notion of a “live” music recording demonstrates that sound fidelity

exists as an unquestionable fact for many record innovators and receivers; that, for many, “live” is something which is achieved by Recording Practice rather than only signified.” Jay Hodgson, “Navigating

the Recording Network: Towards an Ecology of The Record Medium” (PhD diss., University of Alberta),

203-204.

83 of a work of art according to the information available about it is a delinquent form of

aesthetic appraisal.”167

Other albums need not be advertised as “live” to have a similar affect. Consider

Beirut’s album March of the Zapotec (2009), which strikes me as a suitable example.168 The

first side of this double-disc EP is a collection of “organic” world music from the state of

Oaxaca, Mexico, featuring the 19 piece local Jimenez Brass Band. The “barely

rehearsed” band, as critic Mia Clarke describes it, stumbles its way through traditional

Mexican funeral pieces recorded on a broken microphone stolen from the University of

New Mexico.169 The sounds of the instruments are raw and seemingly “captured,”

naturally softened by the effect of bleed and spill signifying a sense of space and proximity

between the microphone and individual performers. The euphonium and trumpets that

share strong and weak beats of the waltz in “The Shrew,” sound just like the ones readers

might recall from auditory memories of high-school school graduations, or early morning

band practice. The “honesty” of the recording becomes only more apparent when the

listener reaches side two, a strikingly disparate counterpart due to its highly manipulated

in-the-box bedroom mix that flaunts sonic experimentation and timbral artifice. In effect,

167 Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (New York/London: Continuum, 2007), 120.

168 Beirut, March of the Zapotec, compact disc, (Pompeii/Ba Da Bing, CK9875/CK987345, 1999).

169 That the microphone was “stolen” and “broken” is the claim of Zach Condon, the brainchild behind the

Beirut project. Steven Feld has explored how scrappy production on ‘ethnic’ recordings is only part of a larger historical narrative wherein indigenous peoples have been “othered” through cheap recording

equipment and production on records, which are consumed under the understanding that what is being

purchased, is an “authentic” or “non-commercial” recording. See Steven Feld, “From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: The Discourses and Practices of World Music and World Beat,” The Traffic in Culture:

Refiguring Art and Anthropology, eds. George E. Marcus, Fred R. Myers, (California: University of California

Press,1995) for further discussion.

84 the electronic contrast only heightens the “liveness” of side one.170 That March of the

Zapotec more or less documents a performance of the Jiminez band rather than signifies a

Jiminez band performance, however, is culturally agreed to though in fact the latter is

true. Dicent representation of liveness is only signified according to the causal process

involved in recording practice.

Indeed, as Turino goes on to explain, for many listeners, the recording process

seems “parasitic on, and secondary to, the ‘actual’ music making,” as if the performance

would have gone on in the same way had the recording equipment not “captured” it.171

The purpose of the high fidelity field is to draw attention to this fallacy by exposing the

“’naturalness,’ ‘invisibility,’ and nature of the recording, mixing, and editing processes” to

reveal that high fidelity recordings are only constructed to sound live through a whole host

of recording techniques such as equalization and microphone placement. Turino’s

recording “fields” are useful because they allow the analyst to frame sounds in terms of

both the recordist’s general working environment and aesthetic decisions while also taking

into account what ideologies underlie their eventual translation.

Whereas Turino categorizes sounds by their regarded documentary authority (live

or studio), musicologist Allan Moore proposes two timbral categories, which upon first

glance are not dissimilar to Turino’s, though they differ in that they are more contingent

on sound source perception as fact, rather than perception as ideological construction or

170 Side two actually encapsulates well Turino’s definition of the “studio audio art” recording field, whereby

sounds are outwardly created by electric or digital technologies and the “goal is the creation of the recorded

piece itself…” rather than a live performance. Turino, Music as Social Life, 78.

171 Turino, Music as Social Life, 68.

85 signification.172 Despite this, Moore’s consideration of sound sources is important to

address because listeners typically negotiate disembodied sounds by whether or not a

sound triggers a visual sound source.

The first “category” Moore proposes, refers to the origins of the sound under

question (sound source), whereas the second category refers to that sound’s perceived

gestural qualities. Sounds in the first category could be defined as either “natural” (as if

produced by an acoustic instrument) or “synthesized” (as if produced on a synthesizer),

which then signify in the second category as either “mechanical” or “human.”173 As

Moore explains, “acoustic” sounds are those produced when

…a human body sets something in motion, whether a string (as on a guitar), a column of air (as on a saxophone), or a membrane (as on a drum)….Listeners will almost certainly have encountered this process, at some stage, on a visual level, and many will have experienced it at a

physical level, too. Listeners can therefore imagine what it must be like to be in physical control of the production of the sound.174

According to Moore, electronic sound sources do not bear the same order of

relationship because “all these things are missing…all that needs to be done is to press a

button.”175 In this formulation, the ability to visualize or at least recognize the source of

the sound is important for whatever gestural quality a sound may signify.

172 Moore’s section called “timbre and its gestural qualities,” in Rock: The Primary Text, is the first attempt that I am aware of, to concretize any sort of language for timbre in popular music. Moore warns that his

categories must be considered as “provisional.” Allan Moore, Rock: The Primary Text: Developing A Musicology of

Rock, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 154.

173 Moore, Rock: The Primary Text.,155. 174 Ibid.,155. This definition can be expanded to include electrically driven analogues of the fretted and

keyboard instruments, such as the electric guitar, which are commonly used (and are visually familiar) in “live” situations.

175 Ibid.

86 Presumably, then, an “acoustic” guitar typically sounds “human” and a

synthesizer sounds “mechanical,” but a sound produced on a synthesizer can sound

strikingly human, just as an acoustic guitar can sound mechanistic: “listeners can no

longer be sure just by listening [to a recording alone], whether or not a sampler has been

used [my emphasis].”176 In fact, as chapter one and two argue, this has always been the

case with recorded music. Stroh violins stood in for “real” violins in the acoustic era just

as sample tanks stand in for all sorts of “real” sounds in the digital era. As Evan Eisenberg

has noted, the confusion of sound sources is a common experience in recorded music:

If you hear a Moog-synthesized clarinet you can say ‘That’s the sound of a

clarinet’ but not ‘That’s a clarinet’. And it certainly goes for the phonograph. If you hear a sound and say ‘Is that a clarinet I hear in the next room?’ I can answer, ‘No, it’s a record’. If you say ‘That’s the sound of a clarinet’, I can only agree. How could I call it ‘the sound of a record’? There is no such thing.177

Of course, as Eisenberg goes on to explain, there is such a thing, though the

functionality of a recording depends on our ability to overlook the impossibility of the

sound as “clarinet,” or otherwise. Nevertheless, “the actual source is less important than

the apparent source” for Moore because he bases his analysis in perception.178 To my

mind, however, to underplay the actual source is to underplay the entire form, pre-

condition, and construction of the communication in place that anticipates a listener

perception, nor does it account for the artistic labour involved in that process.

176 Moore, Rock: The Primary Text, 156.

177 Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, 2nd ed. (New Haven:

Yale University Press). 89.

178 For many listeners, electronic music may simply sound “electronic,” or “acoustic music” might simply

sound acoustic, but basing a theory on this presumption is merely descriptive, non-committal, and certainly

not critical.

87 Moore’s formulation, in short, does not account for how the musician

(recordist) may create sounds to have a particular effect on a listener, nor does it account

for how a sound’s gestural qualities are taken as dicent representations of some actual

sound event. In my understanding, the perceived sound source, or “truth” of a sound

remains important for timbral studies only because the degree of perceived faith-to-source

on a recording signifies Sound Fidelity as dicent representation, or, conversely, its

conspicuous absence thereof. Reviewers of classical recordings have most infamously

capitalized on this belief. When electrical recordings were first released, for instance,

reviewers were interested in their capacity to recreate the acoustic of the concert hall.

Records that did not adhere to this new standard were criticized on the grounds that they

bore as much “resemblance to an actual orchestra as a cinema does to life,” as one

Gramaphone critic wrote.179 That hall ambience makes for a “natural recording” is only an

imposed belief, circulated in part by “authoritative” experts (critics) who can instruct

consumers as to how to make informed purchases. The presence of concert hall

“ambiance” is, after all, meaningless on a record without this discursive apparatus in

place. Had ambiance become somehow associated with “fakery,” or “technological

wizardry,” the sound that now connotes “liveness” or “realness” in classical recordings

could equally as well have been called “mechanized” rather than “natural,” speaking

within Moore’s framework.

If analysts assume rhetorical perceptions as fact, then the ideology of sound fidelity

remains unchallenged, transparent, and static. Indeed, one cannot assume a homologous

relationship between sounds heard on recordings and sounds heard in live performance

179 Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: a Material History of Classical Recording, (Wesleyan University Press,

2004),193.

88 because what sounds “natural” and what sounds “real” is relative to every sound

epoch. In the absence of a visual counterpart, sound reception depends on a mere

memory of what those sounds are and a cultural understanding of what they may mean.

Using Turino and Moore’s perceptual categories, I now move to synthesize these

accounts with philosopher John Andrew Fisher’s two domains of record production to

postulate a critical theory of sound ideology that considers sound creation, reception, and

meaning as co-dependents within an interconnected system. Most importantly, this theory

considers recording practice and recording reception as intextricably related, yet

ontologically distinct. Sounds (and records) that adhere to a concept of sound fidelity, or

veridicism as I will call it from here on, conceal this caveat from their consumers.

Veridicism

Fisher argues there are two distinctive ways that listeners enact recorded sounds as

“extended sound events:” “veridic” and “non-veridic” (or constructive) recordings.180

Veridic recordings are akin to Turino’s “high fidelity” recording field, as veridic

recordings are guided by the notion of an “independently existing live performance” that

the recording “documents.” To this idea, Fisher postulates that understandings of how a

live performance should sound are formed and determined by a “set of conventions for

listening to performances of that sort.”181 Similarly, as Hegel has put it in more familiar

terms: “realism…implies besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical

180 John Andrew Fisher, “Rock 'n' Recording: The Ontological Complexity of Rock Music,” Musical Worlds:

New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip Alperson, (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press),

115.

181 Ibid., 115.

89 characters under typical circumstances [my emphasis].”182 If we should apply this concept to

timbre, for example, then veridic sounds are those that, from a critical and practical

perspective, sound as though they were produced, or can be produced, via live

performance practices. As such, veridic timbres may also be recognized as sounding

“natural,” “organic,” “acoustic,” “recognizable,” or “familiar;” and are seemingly

“captured,” “re-created,” or “documented.” Non-veridic timbres, on the other hand, are

those which sound obviously processed and consequently do not have an identifiable

‘acoustic’ sound source. Understood generally as the antithesis of real sounds, imaginary

timbres can be defined as “mechanical,” “digital,” “electronic,” or “synthesized;” and are

perceived as “constructed” and “studio-created.”183

Veridic (or non-veridic) sounds are more or less a consumer expectation that

comes with a familiarity of a musical product, whether the familiarity is tied to a

particular artist, band, or genre. Genres that place a premium on live performance such

as folk, classical music, ethnic music, jazz, and live rock music, are traditionally veridic

genres, in Fisher’s formulation.184 Of course, records of these types of music only signify

live performance, rather than “contain” live performances. Nevertheless, the

identification of a sound as veridic depends on the ability of the listener to recognize a

182 Quoted in Patricia Waugh, Literary Theory and Criticism: an Oxford Guide (Cambridge: Oxford University

Press, 2006), 144.

183 See Charity Marsh and Melissa West, “The Nature/Technology Binary Opposition Dismantled in the

Music of Madonna and Bjork,” Music and Technoculture (Connetecuit: Wesleyan University Press: 2003), for a

discussion of how “natural” and “synthesized” are sonically gendered.

184 John Andrew Fisher, “Rock ‘n’ Recording,” 115.

90 particular set of sounds as true-to-memory and typical of that genre’s sound lexicon.185

Likewise, the construction of a sound as veridic through recording practice depends on a

pre-emptive consideration of what the listener may consider to be a veridic sound.186 As

Jay Hodgson notes,

…How do listeners know simply by hearing a music recording that what they hear is invested with more or less documentary authority? How does one know that they are in the presence of sound fidelity, or that they should receive a music recording as though they were in its presence (that

is, how do record receivers fashion sound fidelity from what they hear while they transduce)?...this is done by marking to what degree a music recording features “veridic” or “nonveridic” record innovation techniques, to what degree these techniques are made obvious to record receivers during and by their record receptions, and—what practically says the

same thing—the spatiotemporal stability of a recording’s mix.187 While Hodgson refers to a mix to demonstrate the execution of veridic recording

techniques, I apply veridicism to timbral analysis. In my understanding, there are many

other ways to construe veridicism through both mixing and timbral processing, and

veridic recording practices can manifest on any decision made in the recording process,

including, and not limited to, microphone selection, recording location, instrument

selection and various other signal processing techniques.

185 Examples of traditional veridic sounds are, for instance, the overall sound texture in Michael Buble’s

“You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You”; Eddie Vedder’s mandolin on “Rise” (Into the Wild) or the piano on Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” (Blue), Neil Young ‘s vocals on Neil Young.185 Each of these are examples of

purportedly “untampered” and “documented” sounds.

186 This is done by anticipating listener expectations and target markets; a common strategy in popular

music songwriting and recording practices. As Moylan notes, “expected and unexpected sounds and

relationships are balanced within all musical styles. A musical style is a set of expectations. Certain types of musical events and relationships are present that provide a musical style with consistency and accuracy... in

crafting recordings for an audience, the recordist might need/wish to directly consider the listener [‘s

expectations]. An examination of these factors will provide a realistic assessment of a target audience and perhaps allow the recordist to reach them more readily.” William Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix:

The Art of Recording, 2nd ed, (Amsterdam and London: Focal Press), 74 and 77.

187 Jay Hodgson, “Navigating the Recording Network,” 209.

91 Here I would like to make a critical distinction between the terms sound fidelity

and veridicism. Veridicism, in my understanding of it, is simply a nominal extension of

sound fidelity. It is an extension because a high truth-to-source timbral representation still

traditionally typifies this category, but veridicism is never a static value, it is a relative value

that is contextually determined, maintained, and shaped by a network of people,

technologies, and sounds. Thus, sounds on recordings cannot be intrinsically veridic––

they can only signify veridicism. Whereas sound fidelity refers to an ideologically

maintained understanding of “re-created” and “live” recorded sounds, veridicism indexes

its critique through an acknowledgement of a sound’s rhetorical infrastructure and the

recording practices and technologies that underlie its ideological function. To reference a

veridic sound is thus to reference and acknowledge the recording practices that underlie that signification.

Rick Altman articulately echoes my own sentiment such that his reflection is worth

reproducing in full here:

It is precisely because recorded sound seems to reproduce an original

phenomenon that recordings attract and hold audiences so readily. Between the illusion of reproduction and the reality of representation lies the discursive power of recorded sound. We hear recordings with the same ears we use for live sound. We reach conclusions about the evidence provided by recordings in the same way that we interrogate and evaluate

live sound. We constitute apparent sound events just as we directly perceive live sound events. Yet recordings systematically fail to justify our confidence in them. Most listeners have learned to concentrate on the aspects of sound events that are most faithfully rendered by recordings and to pay little attention to the aspects introduced or transformed by the

recording process. A proper theory of sound will accept no such selective deafness. It will pay special attention to those very points where confusion is possible, recognizing in such moments of imprecision, indecision, or incoherence the very place where sound seizes the opportunity to take an active role in the definition and exploitation of culture…188

188 Rick Altman, “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” The Popular Music Studies Reader, eds.

Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee (New York: Routledge, 2006), 275.

92

In the vein of holistic and critical analysis, I would now like to explore, through a

case study, how the rhetoric of reality is anticipated through recording practice, then

ultimately perceived as such by auditors. This case study examines both the discursive

rhetoric of veridicism as well as its material construction with reference to timbre.

The Band: a Veridic Case Study

The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” from their 1969 self-titled

album—also known as “The Brown Album” due to its brown cover—serves as a

revealing example of a veridic soundscape typical of folk and country rock recording

aesthetics.189 Though this example is only representative of one sonic manifestation of

veridicism among many that circulate in popular music recording discourses, the

tendency for critics and listeners to underplay (read: render transparent) commercial and

technological determinants in the production of these sounds is a recurring penchant in

music reception history. I see my task as to provide an account of the sound treatment

and recording process in this song as veridic to describe an alternate account in light of

this context.

Whereas recordists like Miller and Sauter Finegan in the 40s and 50s were selling

experimental sounds in a predominantly veridic soundscape, The Band’s veridicism was

somewhat rare in the psychedelic popular music marketplace in 1969. Amidst the

“predictability of blast-furnace intensity of acid-rock” that predominated the FM radio

waves in 1970, Time Magazine called The Band’s stripped-down aesthetic the “New

189 The Band, The Band: re-mastered version, (EMI Music Canada, ASIN B00004W510, 2000).

93 Sound of Country Rock.” “When The Band plays,” says the article, “it’s not for a trip

but a musical treat…in a commercialized, McLuhanized, televised, homogenized

world… the Band has worked out… a sort of watchful, self-protective truce with the

encroaching world of noisy commerce.”190 What Time called the “new” and apparently

messianic sound of country rock, however, was of course anything but new both in the

context of The Band’s opus (and within the larger history of veridic aesthetics), as this

album’s sound was only a progression from the group’s first critically acclaimed album

Music From Big Pink (1968), and even further, from their collaborations with the king of

‘rockabilly’ Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins from 1960-64 and the freshly electrified folkie Bob

Dylan from 1965-66.191

The Band’s sound can actually be considered as part of a very distinct veridic

aesthetic, also heard in the likes of Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and the

Creedence Clearwater Revival among other “paradigm shifting” bands in the late 1960s

to early 70s––an aesthetic Robbie Robertson himself refers to as “the clubhouse concept.”

More so than the others, there was an explicit connection between Dylan and The Band,

and their working relationship resonated fruitfully for the group as they began to garner

their own public success. The Band’s first album, Music from Big Pink, for instance, is a

direct reference to the pink house in the middle of the woods in rustic Woodstock, N.Y.

where Dylan and his then employees recorded the luddite Basement Tapes in its creaky

cellar. But the Music From Big Pink’s sounds and their given “source” were, in fact, merely

references. The record actually came from 4- and 8-track sessions at A&R Studios in

190 “Down to Old Dixie and Back,” Time, Jan 12, 1970. 191 They also toured briefly as ‘the Hawks’ ‘Levon and the Hawks,’ ‘The Canadian Squires’ and ‘The

Squires’ in Canada before going southward to collaborate with Dylan. See http://theband.hiof.no/ (accessed March 1, 2010).

94 Manhattan, and Capitol and Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. Clearly, by the time it

came to record the Brown Album, The Band was already well versed with the

temperament of sonic rhetoric and connotation in the pop marketplace, especially in the

realm of recording.

It perhaps doesn’t come as a surprise, then, that The Band sought out a similarly

unconventional and “non-commercial” recording space for the Brown Album, though

this time they opted for Sammy Davis Jr’s poolhouse on the tip of a friend at Capitol.192

As much as a basement or a poolhouse implies an overnight jam-session, the Brown

Album wasn’t spontaneous session held in the neighbor’s back yard. It was a fully planned

and funded commercial endeavor, albeit it did take some convincing on part of

Robertson and co-producer John Simon to convince Capitol that the clubhouse aesthetic

was marketable.193 As Robertson recalls, “…people from the record company would

always say, ‘Are you sure about this?’ They had their doubts… but John was good at

giving them a sense of confidence about it, that there was no question that it was going to

work and that it was going to be good.”194

Robertson and Simon were right, of course, as their aesthetic formula of mediate

transparency-- or, the clubhouse concept--seemed to work in the group’s favor towards

the establishment of their reputation as a roots oriented band. The talented and

192 Blair Jackson, “Classic Tracks: The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’ Mix: Professional

Audio and Music Production, October 2002, http://mixonline.com/recording/projects/audio_bands_night_drove/ (accessed March 1, 2010).

193 As a freelance artist, Simon produced many veridic recordings in 1968 including Cheap Thrills by Janis Joplin, Child is Father to the Man by Blood by Blood Sweat and Tears, the Songs of Leonard Cohen album, and the

Band’s Music from Big Pink, while also working on Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends LP and tracks by Mama Cass

and Gordon Lightfoot. 194 Jackson, “Classic Tracks.”

95 mysterious small-town Canadians (save Helm) had become adorned as a slice of the

real thing for audiences across America.195 Many reviews of the time herald the group as

the underground heroes of rock, championing a return to a much needed honesty and

simplicity. As Time notes, “The Band’s main effort today in music and life is to try to keep

things simple and natural [my emphasis].”196 Apparently, the spontaneity and “liveness”

of the recording that deliberately avoided radical electronic experimentation was

indicative of much more than just a musical ethos. It was a way of life. Actually, it was

only indicative of an approach to recording, which was remarkably well suited to the

particular kind of communal music making that was so well suited to the group’s creative

approach to record producion.197 Robertson describes the essence of the clubhouse

concept:

When you look at it objectively, this [basement in Big Pink] is the worst recording circumstance, scientifically, known to man. We’re in a place that has a cement floor, concrete walls and a furnace in the middle of it. This is exactly what you don’t do in a recording studio. But there’s a whole eye contact thing going on there when you set up close together in this sort of

horseshoe with a tape recorder at the end. You get to use the whole silent lingo of playing music—where you look at the guy next to you and you

195 It is ironic that “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down” has become a touching lesson in American Civil-War history for many, considering it was researched and written by Robbie Robertson who hails from

Toronto. As Rob Bowman notes, “Levon being the Southerner is the only one who could sing it with any

conviction.” Rob Bowman, "Life Is A Carnival," Goldmine magazine, July 26, 1991. When writer Blair Jackson asked him about the song’s inspiration in 2002, Robertson said, “it just seemed to fit in with the

combination of flavors in the music and the time period we were dealing with at the time. It was like that

record was in sepia tone or something. To this day, people as me, ‘Whatever possessed you to write that song?’ and the answer is, I don’t really know: it’s the only thing I could think of at the time.” Blair

Jackson,“Classic Tracks.”

196 “Down to Old Dixie and Back,” Time, Monday, January 12, 1970.

197 The writer enthusiastically paints the members as the crusaders of the “natural” and “simple” in a lost

world of commercialism, yet appears to be remarkably liberal with that designation. Later in the same

article, s/he goes on to discuss the Band’s new Woodstock mansions in the hills, their new recording studio (presumably not a pool house this time); Levo’s “zippy gold Corvette,” and Garth’s “stately black

Mercedes.” “Down to Old Dixie and Back,” Time.

96 indicate, ‘I’m going to go up here,’ or ‘I’m going to come in here with this vocal,’ or ‘I’m going to that weird chord change now’; all the signals that

you use in music. You could really see one another, and there was something about that that was great. It was like some kind of mountain music setup or a living room thing. That’s how we were most comfortable.198

That the Band’s sound advertised “naturalness” is no mistake; the romantic (sonic)

imagery of the atypical recording set-up (Sammy Davis Jr.’s poolhouse á la Big Pink), the

sense of togetherness (horseshoe formation and eye contact), and on-the-spot-live musical

competency (“I’m going to do that weird chord change thing now”) all contributed to the

grass-roots like “performances” on this album. Clearly, listeners aren’t the only ones who

invest in an ideology of dicent representation. For veridic recordists, comfort, place,

community, and “music”-like practices are paramount in the recording process. For

recordists like Robertson, these things are what make the process music.

The clubhouse recording process, as described by Robertson above, is typical of a

veridic live-to-track set-up (the horseshoe arrangement Robertson referred to), wherein

microphones and instruments are placed in a close cluster with minimal baffling to allow

for bleed and spill between the players. In typical fashion of recordists who work within

veridic aesthetics, the technology used in the process is played down, as if the recording is,

to recall Turino’s words, parasitic on the musical performance itself. Typifying this

sentiment, Robertson describes the “pretty basic” way they recorded that didn’t yield

“much of a mystery:”

… You would turn things on one at a time and listen to it. Then you'd turn everything on, and the idea was, if it doesn't now sound better, then

something's wrong. If the leakage isn’t working in your favor, then you’re

198 Robbie Robertson quoted in Blair Jackson, “Classic Tracks.”

97 not set up right. So we really took time in setting up the room and getting a sound on everything. There were cases where we would move around

baffles in the room—if the leakage was ruining the sound of the piano, for example. But the leakage is often a big part of the character of the song.199

The leakage Robertson refers to is intended to be only complimentary to the

“performance” and the sounds therein. Notably, he also places a high premium on

fidelity to the acoustic properties of the sound sources, and the natural ambiance of the

room (Robertson one described it as a “woody, thuddy sound”), which is a typical

traditionalist approach to recording.200 As Robertson notes, “whatever sound we were

going to get, we would get it in the room, not by using some machine."201

The sound source arrangement in the track is also typically veridic within the

conventions of the clubhouse concept, each of which could be easily interpreted by

listeners as acoustic.202 For The Band, timbral selection can be thought of as a framework

for the encouragement of “performance” as the primary musical message in their

recordings, but that said, they still sought out highly characteristic sounds that would

stand out on the airwaves.203 While waiting for their “studio” equipment to arrive at the

pool house from Capitol in Hollywood, the group scoured the area’s music and

pawnshops, seeking out unusual instruments and sounds. Levon Helm found a wood-

199 Blair Jackson, “Classic Tracks.” 200 Barney Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide: The Band and America (New York: Hyperion, 1993), 180.

201 “Down to Old Dixie and Back,” Time, Jan 12, 1970.

202 “Authenticity” can be acquired by selecting a specific type of instrumentation to, in a sense, “represent the culture from which [s/he] comes.” Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music,

Culture, and the Politics of Sound, (London: Routledge,1999), 165.

203 William Echard has noted a similar trend in the music of Neil Young, who may also be considered part of this roots revivalist movement and artist of many veridic recordings. See Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy

(Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005).

98 rimmed, turn-of-the-century drum kit with a flat sound that frames what musicologist

Rob Bowman calls Helm’s “bass drum hiccup style,”204 and keyboardist Richard Manuel

found an old upright piano that gives this song its distinctive sonic signature in the

introduction and throughout the track, which resurfaces from the mix periodically

between the choruses and verses. Other sources, including Robertson’s close-miked and

panned right acoustic guitar, Danko’s bass, and Helm’s lead vocals were purportedly

recorded live on Neumann U87 condenser microphones, according to Robertson’s

recollection.205

Other sounds, like the Horner melodica (which many mistake for a harmonica)

that appears on verses two (1:07) and three (2:02) are audibly enhanced post-production,

either through the pool house’s bathroom echo chamber which had a speaker and a

microphone in it, or by the EMT plate reverb that Capitol studios had sent over from

Hollywood.206 Manuel’s falsetto and Danko’s back-up vocals that thicken the chorus were

also overdubbed, as were Helm’s lowry organ and trumpet obbligatos that appear in the

second verse, which have also been treated with plate reverb.

The timbral balance of the beginning sections of “Old Dixie” (2000 re-mastered

version) including two versus and two choruses appears in Figure 7 in a “timbral balance

graph,” which I have adapted from Moylan.207 From this graph, we can easily view how

these various sound sources function in the track’s arrangement to create an overall

204 Rob Bowman, "Life Is A Carnival," Goldmine magazine, July 26, 1991.

205 Blair Jackson, “Classic Tracks.”

206 Ibid.

207 William Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix: The Art of Recording 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Focal Press,

2007. X-axis is time (in measures) and Y-axis is frequency. See Appendix for an interpretation guide.

99 veridic soundscape:

100

Figure 7. Timbral Arrangement Graph—The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (2000, The Band Remastered version)

101 Although these sound sources will be familiar to most listeners, they are

distinct in character either by nature of the instrument (the endearing out of tune piano,

and Helm’s flat drum sound) or by microphone placement, effects, or spatial treatment.

Of the wide array of veridic aesthetics available to recordists, “Old Dixie” is best

described as an enhanced performance, which is considered an extension of the concept of

production transparent recording (typified by a the use of only one or two microphones).

As Moylan explains, this aesthetic enhances certain musical ideas while simulating a

natural listening experience by capturing or creating many of the inherent characteristics

of a live, unaltered performance.208 It is an enhanced performance because the spatial

relationships between sounds (the dry acoustic guitar against the wash of the Horner)

would not have been possible in a properly natural and live performance. In the last

analysis, despite the ability of the recording to suggest otherwise, the performance

conditions are simply inconsistent with reality.

Producing Rhetoric

Despite a general trend towards increasingly non-veridic soundscapes in popular

music, veridicism continues to exert an immense amount of influence over record

production and reception in its most traditional form: re-creations. Yet what is of

fundamental interest here, is that veridic and non-veridic sounds are variably perceived to

be dependent on technology to varying degrees despite the fact that all recorded sounds

depend on technology for their very existence.209 In Moylan’s words: “the recording process

208 Moylan, Understanding and Crafting, 268.

102 can capture reality, or it can create […] the illusion of a new world. Most recordists

find themselves moving about the vast area that separates these two extremes [my

emphasis].”210 Indeed, many recordists commonly utilize both veridic and non-veridic

sounds often in the same track.211 But what listeners may or may nor perceive as veridic

or non-veridic nevertheless remains within, and is a product of, the communicative

system of recording practice. In other words, veridic sounds are inherently dependent on

recording practice despite a natural tendency for listeners to render veridic sounds as

merely mediated. The “success” of a veridic recording, namely determined by its

consumption and belief in dicent representation, depends on the act of sound code

translation according to the program of sound fidelity. Since there are so many

circulating sonic manifestations of sound fidelity––both as a product of extensive

marketing and consequence of vague and unspecified rhetorical categorization on the

part of analysts––finding sympathetic and eager ears is not a strenuous task.

Analysts must remember that recordists are in the business of taking inventory of

and capitalizing on certain culturally articulated ways of listening. Recordists do not exist

somehow outside sonic culture; they produce within it while actively constructing it. As

Antoine Hennion has noted, the role of the recordist is never passive. Rather, recordists

function as “intermediaries” between the recording artist and the marketplace:

Intermediaries are not passive functionaries administering laws (musical,

economic, or cultural). They produce the worlds that they want to make work for them. They force, tear out, knit together; they have tools and

210 Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the mix, 77.

211 This practice came to the fore in the mid to late 1970s with the rise of New Wave artists who embraced

the synthesizer and other non-veridic sounds.

103 techniques for isolating, measuring, testing. Nothing is given in advance for them [my emphasis].212

Rhetorical analysis helps us to identify the ideological construction of recorded

sound, but if we are to understand recordings and the sounds they contain as artifacts of

aesthetic consumption, we must investigate beyond how sounds are rhetorically social to

examine how social relations express themselves materially.

212 Antoine Hennion, “An Intermediary between Production and Consumption,” in Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies ed. Simon Frith (London: Routledge, 1994), 125.

104 CHAPTER FOUR

RHETORIC AS PORTHOLE: TOWARD AN APPROACH TO VERIDIC RECORDING PRACTICE AND TIMBRAL PROCESSING

I’ve never subscribed to that “one microphone and let’s get a natural mix” stuff. If

technology does something, the more the better. The only problem is that when the computer or synthesizer starts taking over, the tail is wagging the dog.

—Creed Taylor213

…further musicological donkey work is required if we are to gain musically accurate and

subsequently holistic understanding of the roots and development of rock’n’roll.

—Garry Tamlyn214

Rhetorical analysis offers the musicologist a valuable analytical lens to view how

conceptions of sonic reality and the experience of music is ever changing for auditors,

either in sympathy with or challenge to the infrastructure behind those changing

experiences. Traditional rhetorical analysis, however, does not account for the recordist’s

labour, which consequently renders the recording process ideologically transparent. I

have argued that musicologists must endeavor to better understand the work of recordists

if we are to proceed beyond the confines of binary rhetorical analysis to better understand

the labour involved on part of recordists and their contributions to the construction of

sound rhetoric. The rhetorical and practical categories of veridic and non-veridic offer

the analyst an entry-point to engage in further textual study in order to better understand

the material object (the sonic object) that recordists sculpt and ultimately sell to listeners.

213 Quoted in Barbara Schultz, Music Producers: Conversations with Today’s Top Hit Makers. (Hall Leonard, 2000), 172.

214 Quoted in Serge Lacasse, “Listen To My Voice: The Evocative Power of Vocal Staging in Recorded Rock Music and Other Forms of Vocal Expression,” (PhD diss., Institute of Popular Music, University of

Liverpool, 2000),116.

105 There are many ways recordists can engage in the construction of veridic and non-

veridic sounds. Timbre is of particular relevance because veridic aesthetics depend on a

high degree of faithfulness to a recognizable sound source. Indeed, this is how the entire

“captured” versus “designed” rhetoric functions—through the illusion of sonic “re-

creation.” Veridic recording practice, broadly speaking, offers analysts many ways to

further probe constructive musical processes that construe a sense of “captured” sounds,

though in this chapter I focus on only one mode of veridic recording practice, namely,

timbral processing.

Modes of timbral analysis in popular musicology are seriously underdeveloped,

and are in fact viewed with a certain degree of apprehension due to the lack of a coherent

analytical system and the discipline’s current emphasis on discourse analysis.215 The

approach in this thesis engages in discourse analysis not to discern a particular social

practice per se, but to better elucidate how ideologically maintained understandings of

sound influence musical practices, and in turn, how musical practices influence sound

reception. This endeavor requires a holistic and critical analytical approach to how

timbral realism is produced both in and out of the studio.216

Building on the understanding of veridicism as a commercial and technological

construction, I explore how rhetoric can serve as a porthole into veridic recording

215 For a discussions on analytical bias, see Philip Tagg, “Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice” Popular Music Vol. 2, (1982); Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, ed. Richard

Middleton (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2000); David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2000)—or virtually any introduction or preface to a musicological account of popular music.

216 Discourse analysis is the practice of analyzing ordinary social activities of talk and writing about music,

and is often applied to the study of linguistic effects, or the relationship between discourse and other social

practices. In this thesis, musical discourse it is considered to be, among other things, evidence of composed timbral rhetoric. This approach sees text and discourse as inextricably related.

106 practice toward the development of a functional analytical approach for timbre. The

first part of this chapter explores, through a literature review, various approaches to

timbral analysis that do exist. Then, building upon the rhetorical framework discussed in

chapters one to three, I propose an alternate analytical mode that considers timbre from

the viewpoint of the recordist as engaging in veridic (or non-veridic) recording practice. Using

this methodology, the second part of the chapter offers a case study on a common

recording practice, equalization, to address some of the ways recordists actively shape

timbres, and some of the aesthetic and rhetorical considerations that motivate their

construction.

Timbre and Musicology at Large: An Overview

Timbre is traditionally overlooked in musicological and music theoretic analyses

primarily due to a “lack of discrete representation within Western musical notation itself,

which represents pitch most accurately and other elements either proportionately (as in

rhythm) or relatively (as in dynamics and articulation).”217 As Shepherd notes, this

problem has rarely been confronted in popular music studies:

Timbre has a particularly vexed status in the study of popular music. On the one hand, musicologists who study popular music often assert that

timbre is one of the characteristics that most strongly separates popular music from Western art music; on the other hand, the musicological modes of analysis designed to study Western art music, which form the starting point for any timbral analysis, are poorly developed.218

217 John Shepherd, “Timbre,” Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Performance and Production,

vol. 11 (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group: 2003), 648.

218 Ibid.

107 It is clear that Shepherd believes timbre to be an important structural and

communicative parameter in popular music, but notes that the institutional climate for

timbral focused analysis is inhibiting of research progress in this area of study. Put plainly,

Shepherd notes that because Western art music does not have an established mode of

timbral analysis, then popular music cannot hope to either. Yet it remains worth asking,

to my mind, whether Western art music’s “analytical modes” would be at all useful to the

popular musicologist in the first place. Given the premium placed on “live” performance

in classical recording aesthetics (which I have thus far problematized), it may be popular

music studies that can offer a different perspective on timbral production and consumption

for scholars working in traditions of Western Art music, rather than the inverse. The

study to follow may be of use to those working in Western Art musics as well.

Others, such as musicologist and semiotician Jean-Jacquez Nattiez, see timbral

analysis as difficult not because of discipline status or politics, but rather because of the

“inherent” limitations of timbral analysis itself. Nattiez takes issue with the possibility of

timbre within a musical language because of the necessity of relying on aural judgment:

“a style or a new system [of musical language] cannot develop, transform itself and enjoy

an organic life unless it possesses a syntax…[and] objects defined uniquely by way of their

timbral properties cannot give rise to a syntax.”219 This is not the time or place, nor my

intention to challenge Shenkerian analysis, but what may traditionally “qualify” as musical

syntax for Nattiez, to my mind, is also subject to aural judgment—and moreover, to my

mind, it does not follow that a quantifiable “arrangement” is a precursor for any sort of

219 Quoted in Barry Traux, “Soundscape, Acoustic Communication and Environmental Sound

Composition,” Contemporary Music Review, 15: 1 (1996), 49.

108 “organic life” of a musical system. But even if it were, popular music recordists are

already in the business of constructing timbres to fit certain aesthetic criteria with a host

of solidified practices in place in order to do so. In fact, we can group sounds into three

categories of “arrangement:” timbral-scapes in popular music are either experimental,

guided by an intuitive search for new and interesting sounds which by practice operates

outside of a syntactical “system;” mimetic, whereby recordists try to re-create or attain

sounds to hail a certain aesthetic or genre; or functional, whereby sounds are more or less a

documentary byproduct of a functional system (it works!”), which is itself an aesthetic in

folk, punk, DIY, and lo-fi communications. There does, in fact, seem to be a way of

organizing how sounds are shaped by record innovation according to a coherent process

and rhetoric based categorical system.

Not surprisingly, attempts at timbral (sound) analysis have not been limited to the

academy. Critics, journalists, and fans alike are keen at trying to decipher what processes

lie beyond the unique and often mysterious sounds they hear on records. But what is

surprising, given popular music studies’ focus on the cultural and individual’s experience

of music, is the failure to take these attempts seriously, as if they mean nothing to the

ultimate “significance” of music.

In his historiographic book Between Montmarte and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and

the Avant-Garde, Bernard Gendron discusses some of the first attempts within journalistic

discourses to better describe the “sounds” that seemed to be at the heart of popular

music’s “imputed aesthetic components of the music, those interesting complexities that

109 operated behind the perceived surface banalities and simplicities.”220 In the mid

1960s, Life magazine and many other publications in the cultural press initiated a

campaign aimed to describe music by their unique sounds (as opposed to harmony and

melody) which they grouped, interestingly, mostly by place: Liverpool, Detroit,

California, Nashille, New York, Chicago, and Spector sounds.221 On par with the thesis

of the book, Gendron argues that the shift away from harmony and melody in the

cultural press toward “sounds” was one of many milestones along the way to rock’n’roll’s

aesthetic legitimation that ultimately contributed to rock’s acquisition of cultural capital.

Relying on metaphor and qualitative descriptions, writers in Life and other publications

described sounds eclectically, defining the Liverpool sound as more “toppy” than the

Detroit sound, or the Motown sound as “rats, roaches, guts, struggle, and love.” Other

analyses were more “technical,” such as this description of the “Detroit sound:” “a

muffled double drumbeat with tambourine and a large brass section.”222

Gendron is inherently skeptical of the value of these, as he calls them,

“halfhearted attempts at technical timbral characterizations” which in his opinion

“laughably tended to miss altogether what these styles were really about.”223 This

statement refers to the writers of Life, but if I am reading it correctly, Gendron’s

observations index the much larger epistemological debate in popular music studies,

namely the value of the musicological perspective, and, ultimately, the validity of text-

220 Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant Garde, (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2002), 177.

221 Ibid.

222 Quoted in Gendron, Between Montmartre, 178.

223 Ibid.

110 based analysis. But it is my opinion, that the quality of these particular so-called

“meager technical ‘musicological’ attempts” seems much less important than the Life

writers’ realization that sound was important in these rock communications and that there

was a readership that would have resonated with that analytical emphasis. Indeed, there

was an entire system among people, machines, practices and sounds in place in the 1960s

to steer listeners towards a new conception of sound fidelity. Cultural legitimation may

have been a product of this new market for sounds, but it was the unique timbres and

sounds on those albums that was at the helm of this entire paradigm shift.

Perhaps most importantly, for the sake of my argument here, one of the key

instigators was without doubt sound itself.224 Gendron points to the “systematic” and

“fine tuned” public discourse (that is, spoken or written discourse) about the music that

“produced it, marketed it, and attempted assiduously to decipher the taste of those who

consumed it,”225 but ignores that these sounds were in fact as much a part of this

“discourse” and system of “accreditation” as were written accounts about those sounds.

Skeptics of timbral analysis such as Nattiez and Gendron who see more

“inherent” limitations with adopting timbre as its own type of musical language clearly

take issue with the approach that has thus far dominated timbral analysis—mostly

adjectival descriptions—which have compromised the legitimacy of the concept and

musical analysis of sound. Their skepticism is perhaps with due reason, as there is no way

of pin-pointing the “political standpoint,” “creative intent,” or “aesthetic motivations” of

224 As a play on “the music itself,” the sounds themselves, refers to not only timbres, but the people and

technologies behind their production.

225 Gendron, Between Montmartre, 179.

111 a sound, nor the nature of the entire communicative system that exists behind it by

describing these sounds solely by adjectival description. The issue then, is not that timbre

itself evades analysis. It is the failure of musicologists to find a method that does not rely

so heavily on surficial aural judgement. American electro acoustic composer and sound

theorist J.K. Randall echoes this sentiment, writing in 1967:

I would hope that we could soon find whatever further excuse we still need to quite [sic] talking about mellow timbres and edgy timbre and

timbres altogether, in favor of contextual musical analysis of developing structures of vibrato, tremolo, spectral transformation, and all these various dimensions of sounds which need no longer languish as inmates of some metaphor.226

Clearly, as musicologist Nina Eidsheim notes, Randall did not believe that the

concept of timbre addressed any issue of serious concern to music analysis, or to the

processes of understanding music.227

Recording Practice

A new field in musicology has recently developed to studying the recording

226 Quoted in Nina Eidsheim, “Voice as a Technology of Selfhood: Towards an Analysis of Racialized Timbre and Vocal Performance” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2008), 168.

227 Ibid. Of course, this is not the first musicological study of timbre in either the Western art or popular music tradition. There are three distinct modes of approaching timbre that have thus far emerged as

analytical perspectives. The first “approach” relies on descriptive adjectives that must be described by

metaphor or by analogy to the other senses. The second “approach” involves a sound spectrum analyzer, which has enjoyed a recent renaissance in the works of David Brackett and Cornelia Fales, spectrograph is thus

an important tool for revealing information about the sinusoidal make up of a sound, but it does not extract

specifically perceptual timbral information such as frequency components, the effects of masking, or the equal loudness contours. S. Malloch and A. Campbell, “An Investigation of Musical Timbre, Journal de

Physique 4 (May,1994), 590.

David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music 2nd ed. (California: University of California Press, 2000); Cornelia Fales, “Short-Circuiting Perceptual Systems: Timbre in Ambient and Techno Music,” Wired for Sound:

Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures, eds. Paul D. Greene, Thomas Porcello, (Middletown: Wesleyan

University Press, 2005).

112 process in popular music, namely, the art of record production,228 which is closely

related to the increasing study of technology and its role in both music making and

consumption processes.229 For analysts working in this area, recording does not merely

capture sound, it creates it, and it is the decisions, intuitions, technologies and techniques

the process of creation involves that scholars working in this area seek to provide both a

descriptive and theoretical account of. This project, however, involves a re-consideration

of the analytical and methodological approaches musicologists have traditionally

embraced.

The link between physical attributes of sounds or sound collages and their

perceptual attributes offers the analyst, and indeed, musicology, an alternate way to

discuss and consider timbre. The techniques and methodologies of recordists offer a

fertile ground for understanding this link. As recordist and design engineer Rupert Neve

notes:

In the field of sound recording, specifications and measurements cannot

describe the sounds that we hear and neither can they predict the effect of

228 Albin Zak III., The Poetics of Rock (California: University of California Press, 2000); Serge Lacasse, “Listen To My Voice: The Evocative Power of Vocal Staging in Recorded Rock Music and Other Forms of Vocal

Expression” (PhD diss., Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, 2000), Jay Hodgson,

“Navigating the Network o Recording Practice—Towards an Ecology of the Record Medium” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2006); Simon Zargoski Thomas, “The Musicology of Record Production” Twentieth-

Century Music 4 (2007); Susan Schmidt Horning, “Chasing Sound: The Culture and Technology of

Recording Studios in America, 1877-1977,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Case Western University, 2002), Virgil Moorefield, The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music (Cambridge: Mass: MIT Press, 2005).

Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960, (Middletown,

CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005); Simon Frith, “The Industrialization of Rock,” The Popular Music Studies Reader, ed. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee (London: Routledge, 2006).

229 Edward R. Kealy, “From Craft to Art: The Case of Sound Mixers and Popular Music, and Antoine Hennion, “The Production of Success: An Antimusicology of the Pop Song,” both in On Record: Rock, Pop

and the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 2000); Mark Katz,

Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan

University Press, 1997).

113 those sounds on us. The recordist must provide the vital link as our interpreter.230

If musicology is to better understand timbre in terms of its function in the creative

process as well as its communicative functions within the context of recording, I take the

position that we must first explore exactly how timbre is approached from the perspective

of the recordist. I do not consider myself nor my esteemed research fellows as engaged in

any sort of ass’s labour in any derogatory sense, but Tamlyn’s words as they were printed

in the epigraph do appropriately echo my own “call to research:” further musicological

“donkey work” is required to better understand recording communications. Analysts of

recorded music must be willing to explore new modes of analytic description and adopt

new modes of aesthetic orientations.

The musicological sources presently available in this new area of study are limited

but are representative of new and current research in musicology that has especially

flourished in popular music studies due to the nature of the constructed sonic text in

question. Because little musicological work in this area has been undertaken, interviews,

videos, documentaries, biographies, testimonials, photos, recording manuals, engineering

papers, and of course, recordings, are of particular currency for understanding how

recordists think about and use timbre. There is considerable information that can be

gleaned from these sources regarding what timbre means to the recordist both objectively

and rhetorically. In fact, recordists have a vast arsenal of procedures and techniques

directly concerned with exactly how these sounds can be attained, modified or sculpted

accordingly which require study in order to flesh-out the properties and functions of the

230 Quoted in Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix, xiii.

114 sound sculpting tools available.231 Given the centrality of recording as rock’s principal

creative and receptive component, the study of recording practice offers the analyst

concerned with the physical and rhetorical complexities of veridic sounds a rich selection

of issues, practices, and products, to consider.

Through the Porthole

My own approach to the study of recording practice considers recording as a

rhetorically contributive and constructive process. While accepting that sonic

manifestations of “realism” in recording are continually changing in the marketplace as

the palette of sound sources is ever increasing, recordists have created, and still do create

sounds with an aesthetic of fidelity as the artistic goal. This approach departs from the

argument that it is veridic recording practice that has made possible our present

understandings of “captured” and “realistic” sounds, and thus, that recordists have a

central role in the commodification and alienation of “live” musical practice.

In my understanding of it, recording practice is not something that happens to

music, it is rather a process whereby music is made a product from the very start. When I

say “the very start,” I refer to two distinct yet inextricable beginnings. The first refers to

the origins of the recording industry in the early nineteenth century wherein early

inventors needed to create a market use-value for the early gramophone and Sound

Fidelity first came about as a functional concept and commodity. The second beginning is

231 Moylan Understanding and Crafting the Mix: The Art of Recording, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2007), Roey Izhaki, Mixing Audio (Amsterdam, Focal Press: 2008), Alexander Case, Sound FX (Amsterdam, Focal

Press: 2007), David Miles Huber and Robert E Runstein, Modern Recording Techniques, 7th ed. (Amsterdam,

Focal Press: 2010); Mark Ballora, Essentials of Music Technology, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003); Bob Katz, Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2002); Zak, The Poetics of Rock, Jay

Hodgson, Field Guide (place, publisher, forthcoming).

115 dependent on the first: veridic recordings and their implications of “ live

performance” are always already products of recording practice, and can only be

considered as objects made to be functional “things” that can be bought and sold by any

number of people in the general public. As a distinct form of culture-industry labour,

veridic recording practice is always bound up with anticipating and exploiting cultural

understandings of particular sounds, while actively shaping them. It is thus in the very act

of making veridic records that physical and rhetorical aspects of sound are inseparable.

In his book the Poetics of Rock, Albin Zak proposes two general categories to

organize the many possible forms that timbre may take: the physical and the rhetorical.

The physical properties of a sound are its “frequency content, relations of loudness

among overtones, and envelope configuration,” which comprises the timbral signature of

an instrument.232 The rhetorical aspects of timbre are related to the material nature of

particular sounds, and involve “the conventional associations that sounds have, which

allow them to stand as symbols suggesting dialogues and resonances beyond the boundaries of

the track [my emphasis].”233 Recordists cannot, in other words, ultimately determine

listener meaning, as timbres may index in their listeners associations beyond the

recordists’ control. But timbre is much different than any other formalistic element in

music that may generate meaning, such as melody, rhythm, or harmony. Because timbre

is both a physical attribute (acoustic) and a perceptual attribute (psychoacoustic), it is at

the same time an objective entity and a subjective quality. Harmonies or melodies cannot

be referred to as “realistic” or “imaginary,” just as they cannot be called “tubby,” or

232 Zak, The Poetics of Rock, 62 233 Ibid.

116 “boomy,” “bright,” or “thin” as timbres are. To compose timbre is to compose

rhetoric. As Zak notes:

There are material reasons why sounds strike us as they do. The mental images conjured by adjectives such as “dark,” “bright,” “muffled,” or “edgy” have what we might call spectrographic translations. That is, they

refer to a particular configuration of physical characteristics. Recordists manipulate these characteristics as they create their sonic tapestry. They do not simply record sounds; in common parlance, they “get” sounds. That is, they tailor the sound image in some way using the tools and techniques at their disposal.234

Indeed, recordists have an entire host of techniques that may produce sounds that

resonate with listeners in a particular way. Readers familiar with the intricacies of

recording know there are infinite variables that may or may not have an effect on a

sound’s timbre. Timbral manipulations can be incurred from a variety of conscious or

unconscious recording operations. The saliva on a microphone, or a hardware default

that may add warmth or distortion to the line, for instance, are examples of unconscious

timbral manipulations which themselves can become creative practices.235 Such factors

have an important and fascinating role in timbral manipulation, though they are often

not conscious decisions on part of the recordist.

Recordists also engage in otherwise more traditional, calculated, and preemptive

practices such as source selection, microphone choice and positioning, recording space

and treatment, signal flow, equalization, dynamic effects, etc.; that are otherwise regarded

as standard techniques and operations regarding the construction of veridic sounds. Such

is the focus of my discussion here. These operations require further study on part of

234 Zak, The Poetics of Rock, 65.

235 For instance the “slash and burn” technique, where equipment is intentionally damaged to attain a unique sound.

117 musicologists and theorists working in the area of recording practice in order to better

understand the processes used to create musical meaning. However, I cannot hope nor

attempt to adequately address each of these practices in an entire thesis, let alone a

chapter. Accordingly, I have chosen to focus on a particular recording tool and

investigate how it is practically and aesthetically implemented to illustrate some of the

ways rhetorical understandings of “liveness” and “fidelity” are timbrally reproduced

through veridic recording practices.

THE “HEART” OF VERIDIC RECORDING PRACTICE: A CASE STUDY OF

EQUALIZATION AND TIMBRE PROCESSING

Using the rhetorical porthole as a methodological guide, I will now conduct a case

study of a particular sound sculpting tool that forms the basis of most veridic recording

operations, namely, equalization, to explore and discuss its creative implementation and

sonic effect. At this point, my analysis acknowledges and departs from the understanding

that there is a (mutable) rhetorical infrastructure in place among record receivers,

machines, and people that accepts “realistic” and “captured” sounds as dicent

representation of a live performance. This case study of timbre and the equalizer is only

one example of a technique that underlies that communication.

The equalizer is used to alter timbre. True to the parlance of veridic rhetoric, the

equalizer’s sonic effects are often only traceable on the final recording by the aural image

of medium transparency. That is, the equalizer is often employed to achieve a degree of

sound fidelity in a recording. To be clear, the equalizer has a significant effect on timbral

quality, and thus on the rhetorical meaning of a sound. But its effect is not heard in the

118 same way as, say, reverb or flanging, as these effects are audibly traceable on the final

track. The timbral affect of an equalizer is often heard as a quality of the sound source,

rather than that of a recording instrument or effect.236 The equalizer (also known as EQ)

is one of the most common signal processing tools used to alter frequencies and shape

tonal character, yet when used toward a veridic production, its only traceable affect is

source clarity or naturalness. Equalization techniques thus offer a fruitful starting point

for understanding how recordists actively sculpt veridic sounds to construe rather than

document or capture them.

EQ

In 1972, recordist Leo di Gar Kulka published an article in Engineer/Producer

called “Equalization – The Highest, Most Sustained Expression of the Recordist’s

Heart.”237 While this title is more affectionate than most accounts of this widely used

signal processor, most recordists agree that equalization is, more or less, the foundation of

signal processing practices.238 It is certainly considered to be primarily a timbral sculpting

tool. Originally developed by engineers at Bell Labs to compensate for low quality

telephone cables, an equalizer is essentially a frequency specific fader that can increase or

decrease the amplitude of a signal at certain frequencies in order to shape a tone’s sound

236 Equally common is using the equalizer to create new and distinctive effects.

237 Leo di Gar Kulka, “Equalization—The Highest, Most Sustained Expression of the Recordist’s Heart,”

Recorder/Producer 3, no.6, (November/December, 1972).

238 Izhaki, Mixing Audio; Case, Sound FX; Huber and Runstein, Modern Recording Techniques. A signal processor

changes, augments, or modifies the signal path.

119 color.239 To properly appreciate the value of this tool for timbral operations from the

view of the recordist, we must first explore some of the acoustic properties of timbre.

Consider this definition of timbre from William Moylan,

A composite of a multitude of functions of frequency and amplitude

displacements; it is the global result of all the amplitude and frequency components that create the individual sound… its primary component parts are the dynamic envelope, spectrum, and spectral envelope.240

According to Moylan, all domains of sound production affect timbre. It is

comprised of a particular tone’s harmonics and its relative intensities (frequency

displacements), which are in turn affected by time (dynamic envelope) and acoustical

space (sound environment).241 Frequency and amplitude, both major components of

timbre, undergo what musicologist Nina Eidsheim calls a process of “perceptual fusion,”

which causes us to experience tone quality of timbre.242 As William Moylan notes,

The partials of the timbre’s spectrum fuse to create the impression of a single sound. Although many frequencies are present, the tendency of our perception is to combine them into one overall texture. We fuse partials

that are harmonically related to the fundamental frequency, as well as overtones that are distantly related to the fundamental, into a single impression.243

239 Poor transmission lines over long distances made phone calls dull and difficult to understand—the

equalizer boosted the high frequencies on the receiving end, which made the sound on both ends of the line equal. Izhaki, Mixing Audio, 205.

240 Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix, 6. 241 All components of a sound’s spectral content are open for manipulation by the equalizer, including: the

fundamental (which gives a sound its pitch); the harmonics (integer multiples that color the sound); overtones (non-integer multiples that create noise in a signal) can be boosted or omitted; and formants

(frequencies caused by physical resonance such as the noise from the strings on a guitar). Each of these

components can be altered to shape the sound’s timbre. Izhaki, Mixing Audio, 211. The only aspect of timbre the equalizer does not manipulate, is the dynamic envelope.

242 Nina Eidsheim, “Voice as a Technology of Selfhood,” 175.

243 Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix, 22.

120 The spectrum of a sound, which Moylan refers to above, is the composite of all the

frequency components of the input signal, including fundamental frequency, harmonics,

overtones, subharmonics, and subtones.244 Heard together they form a “single

impression” that we hear as timbre. A sound’s spectum will have a characteristic pattern

of partials that gives an instrument or voice its distinctive timbre or tone color. That is, a

spectrum contains a certain range of constituent frequencies, each with its own distinct

and relative amplitude. Equalization is more or less the practice of manipulating the

sound’s spectrum.

The role of frequency and frequency amplitudes in timbre can be described by

distinguishing between simple and complex tones, which are types of waveforms. If a tone

has all of its energy concentrated around a single frequency, then this is called a sine

wave, or a simple tone (figure 8).

Figure 8. The energy in this simple sine wave is concentrated at a single frequency: 1 kHz at 10 dB.

244 Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix, 7.

121 The timbre of a sine wave (pure tone) as illustrated in figure 8 can be described

as thin or emaciated due to its perfectly parallel waveform and single frequency make-up.

Sine waves do not occur in the natural world, rather, they are electrically or digitally

generated, and constitute the core building blocks of synthesizers.245 Sounds that do exist

in the natural world (including those typically produced by acoustic instruments such as a

guitar) are complex tones, which are comprised of fundamental and harmonics, partials or

overtones (figure 9).246

Figure 9. The fundamental of this hypothetical tone is 250 Hz. The harmonics pictured to the right of the

fundamental (known to the musician as overtones or partials) are responsible for the richness in tone that the thin-sounding sine wave does not have.

The spectral content, or overtone complexion of a tone accounts for why two

sounds, say, a piano and a harmonica, may have that have a shared fundamental of 440

Hz (A), and yet have unique timbres.247 As Everest notes, “even though the harmonics of

245 Izhaki, Mixing Audio, 211. 246 Harmonics are components of a complex wave that are integral multiples of the fundamental. Partials are

proportional to the fundamental, while overtones are not. Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix, 10.

247 Pitch is also a perception of frequency, which we organize sounds on a scale from low to high.

122 a tone have little effect on the pitch of that tone, harmonics are the very essence of

timbre, or tonal quality, of musical or other sounds (figure 9). 248

Both simple and complex tones depend on the fundamental frequency and

overtone content (or lack thereof) for both pitch and timbral (signal) quantification. It is

important for the musicologist to understand the spectral content of particular sounds and

how they are manipulated because frequency forms the material basis of all timbral

sculpting operations. Indeed, while musicians think in terms of pitch or notes, engineers

and recordists think in terms of frequencies. In fact, timbral manipulation, in all its

myriad forms, is more or less the manipulation of frequencies. Frequencies are the

material of the recordist’s artwork.249

It is useful to think of the equalizer as a highly flexible frequency response curve

that allows the recordist to actively “boost” or “cut” frequencies by adjusting the relative

amplitudes of a signal by specifically chosen frequency ranges to alter the frequency

248 F. Alton Everest, Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals, (Boston: Cengage Press), 117. 249 Expressed in hertz (abbreviated as Hz), frequency is the number of periods or cycles occurring per second

in a steady tone, or, period wave. The frequency range of audible sound is commonly understood to be between 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, which forms the reference point of all specific frequency response curves. Our

ears may be able to detect all frequencies and amplitudes within the audio band of 20-20,000 Hz—even less

in the upper and lower ends due to natural “wear-and-tear,”--but we do not hear frequencies equally. Jay Hodgson, Understanding Records: a Field Guide to Recording Practice, New York/London: Continuum,

forthcoming). In fact, our ears are significantly more sensitive to mid-band sounds (200 Hz to 5 kHz), as

explained by a psychoacoustic principle known as the equal loudness contours whereby humans naturally exaggerate (amplify) the “mid-range” of what they hear, whether or not that particular range on the

frequency band is objectively pronounced. Everest, Critical Listening, 112. This mid-range emphasis is

explained by the so-called Fletcher-Munson curves, which explain why no two tones have identical loudness to an average listener. According to this principle, a 50 Hz tone at 60 dB--according to the average person’s

frequency response--will have the same perceived loudness (volume) as a 30 dB tone at 1Khz though the 50

Hz tone is actually measured at greater amplitude. Ballora, Essentials of Music Technology, 42. Most of a sound’s important information, including the fundamental frequency and other important discriminatory

information is included in this range. The equal loudness curves tell us that each person has their own

unique equal loudness contour, or biased way of hearing sound. Microphones, and in fact all signal processors, also have unique frequency responses, which affect the overall timbre in ways not unlike that of

a human.249 Hodgson, Understanding Records.

123 response in ways that are tasteful, musical, and appropriate to the sound.250 A frequency

response curve refers to the biased way that a recording device hears an input signal. For no

signal coloration to take place, a processor would need to have a flat frequency response

in order to pass all frequencies equally with no frequency being emphasized or de-

emphasized. Simply put, if a frequency response is not flat, the timbre of a sound changes.

However, a flat response is hardly a common processor characteristic, and often, it isn’t

even desired.

Figure 10. The characteristic on-axis flat frequency response of the Neumann U-87 Ai diaphragm microphone, with -10dB attenuation in the low and top ends, and a boost between 6 to 11 kHz.251

As was the case of the horn in the acoustic era, “fidelity” to the original sound is

impossible at the moment of transduction. The very existence of a frequency response

curve renders this promise impossible. As soon as sound enters the signal path (the

recording horn or a microphone), it is the technology and labour of the recordist that only

creates that impression, however s/he may deem appropriate.

250 Case, Sound FX, 104-105.

251 Neumann, “Switchable Studio Microphone: U 87 Ai,” Neumann official website, http://www.neumann.com/?lang=en&id=current_microphones&cid=u87_description (accessed March

01, 2010).

124 Working in sympathy with the demands of the recording industry, and thus

that of the general listening public, manufacturers tailor microphone frequency responses

to accentuate particular parts of the spectrum in order for them to function optimally

within specific recording applications. The Neumann U-87 Ai pictured above, for

instance, has a built-in bias (the 10 dB attenuation in the low and top ends of the

spectrum) that enables the microphone to handle sound pressure levels up to 127 dB

without distortion. This “roll-off” can be reduced accordingly to compensate for

“proximity effect.” Further, the boost at 6-12kHz adds “presence” to the processed signal,

which is a common spectral manipulation in pop recording.252

From the wide variety of microphones and processors available in the equipment

marketplace, recordists choose and create particular frequency responses according to the

acoustical nature of the sound sources to be included in the project, or to create a

particular “musical” effect.253 Even from the selection of basic equipment, recordists are

making decisions as to how a sound’s frequency spectrum will be shaped and modified.

Yet built-in frequency responses of microphones or other processors, despite their efforts,

do not always treat the source signal in ways that are aesthetically or functionally

appropriate, so recordists employ equalizers among other processors in order to boost or

attenuate the amplitude of certain frequencies to alter the frequency response curve, and

252 Neumann, “Switchable Studio Microphone: U 87 Ai.” 253 For some, the emphasis of certain frequencies over others can have a particular “musical” effect. Dan

Lanois prefers RCA ribbon mikes for certain recording projects precisely for their mid-range capabilities. "From 100 to 900 Hertz the ribbon microphone is really good at handling those frequencies,” Lanois says,

“those happen to be really musical frequencies that's usually the bulk of your sound, certainly in the way of

a voice or a drum or a bass guitar." Dan Lanois, interview by Nick Krewen, October, 1997, Canadian Musician. The response of a particular microphone may also be timbrally “corrective” or sonically flattering

due to the filtering effect of the microphone.

125 thus, further modify the timbral quality of the sound. This frequency sculpting process

is called additive or subtractive processing.254 The equalizer allows recordists to make

their own unique and specially tailored frequency response curves according to the

requirements of the project.

Charting Timbre

I would like to briefly address how timbral characteristics and processing

procedures can be displayed visually and how this can be useful for the musicologist. As

discussed toward the beginning of this chapter, timbre has been approached with

reluctance due to a “lack of discrete representation within Western musical notation

itself.”255 From the perspective of recording practice, the fundamental stubbornness of

this bulwark that has thus far prevented analysis is not the possibility of timbral

representation itself, but is rather due to the place popular music studies has thus far

sought to find the appropriate method of representation. Indeed, Western notation only

represents the fundamental frequency of a particular sound, which doesn’t account for

the complex system of overtones that differentiates one timbre from another.256

Accordingly, the traditional “score” is of little use for a recordist, who is more

concerned with sculpting sound spectrums rather than arranging fundamental frequencies.

254 Equalization can either be applied to single track (individual instrument), or an entire timbral texture or

sound mass.

255 Shepherd, “Timbre,” 648.

256 Traditional Western notation leaves timbral decisions generally up to the discretion of the performer. Of course, notation may indicate a particular instrument, though the character of that instrument remains

determined by the performer and the performance context. The only timbral variance that occurs with a

recorded text upon consumption, is achieved by the frequency response of applied equalization (usually a graphic EQ), or the frequency response characteristics of the auditor’s playback system. Timbre is shaped

and determined in the realm of recording practice, and thus becomes a fixed part of the musical text.

126 As Hugh Padgham has put it, “When I produce or mix a record, I hear the music in a

sort of sonic spectrum [my emphasis].”257 That is not to say, that there are not ways to

visually “notate” the sonic spectrum or timbral processing operations in ways

conceptually analogous to the score.258 Just as a score is the final product of myriad

compositional choices and procedures (instrument choice, pitches, rhythm etc.), we can

consider frequency response charts such as that of the Neumann U-87 Ai pictured in figure

10 or 11, to understand how and why techniques such as microphone choice, placement,

or equalization are important determinants in a recording’s timbral identity.

Frequency-amplitude charts can display information that is as essential to the

recordist’s craft as the manipulation of pitch and rhythms is for a composer working with

print-based notation. Conceivably, frequency response charts (also known as frequency-

amplitude charts), such as the equalization curve pictured in figure 10, are commonly used

to describe particular frequency contents of signals, or characteristic frequency curves

that give a sound its unique timbre. The x-axis represents the signal’s measured frequency

(Hz), while the y-axis represents the device’s measured output signal (dB).

Although frequency-amplitude charts are a useful way of describing the contents

of a timbre, they are only approximations because they do not account for changes in

frequency amplitude over time at whatever location they occupy. These charts are rather

temporally static because they do not display the dynamic envelope of a sound. Human

257 Quoted in Zak, The Poetics of Rock, 32.

258 I mean this relation to exist only in so much as there is a visual way to represent musical content. A

“score” in the Western Art tradition, as James Grier explains, “contains a set of instructions to the

performer for the execution of the work transmitted in the score.” The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, Practice, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23. A record, in comparison, only

contains listening instructions, in whatever shape those instructions may take.

127 ears analyze sound as a function of frequency, so the frequency-amplitude charts are

an important and clearly useful graphical representation of sound, but they make notable

assumptions about time and space: time is limited to a finite duration, and space or

location is fixed.259 The interpretation of these charts will be addressed in the next

section.

Figure 11. A frequency-amplitude chart. This creative equalization curve is that of a four band parametric

equalizer.260

Types

There are many types of equalizers, each which offer particular ways to shape a

timbre’s frequency spectrum. Of the many types of equalizers available to recordists, the

three most prevalent are the parametric equalizer, the graphic equalizer and the filter

equalizer. The most flexible, the parametric equalizer, allows recordists to select a certain

range of frequencies (via a frequency select control), adjust those frequencies by either

259 Case, Sound FX, 12. 260 Adapted from Case, Sound FX, 110.

128 boost or attenuation, and define the Q (the bandwidth of the frequencies to be

modified).261 These three controls give the recordist precise control over subtle timbral

detail and afford a considerable amount of spectral flexibility (figure 11).262 The graphic

equalizer is for many the most intuitive processor because it features a set of visual

predetermined band faders whose width cannot be adjusted.263 Though “filtering” is

typically used to refer to all sorts of equalizing techniques, filter equalization refers

specifically to cutting operations (either “notch,” “high pass,” and “low pass”) that are

usually implemented to omit certain problem frequencies in the mix.264

Applications

The equalizer offers a variety of practical and musical opportunities for engineers

and producers. Recordists often work with complex and dense textures of sounds, each

with their own unique frequency spectrum. While a timbre heard on its own may sound

agreeable, it may conflict and cause problems in the mix when combined with other

instruments.265 Certain instruments will also likely share the same frequency range with

261 Case, Sound FX, 106. Bob Katz describes the aesthetic decisions involved in selecting Q: “the choice of high or low Q depends on the situation. Gentle equalizer slopes almost always sound more natural than

sharp ones. So Q’s of 0.6 and 0.7 are therefore very popular.” Mastering Audio, 102.

262 Izhaki, Mixing Audio, 230.

263 Ibid. Due to its inherent limitations compared to the parametric EQ, the graphic EQ is used most often in live settings due to its ease and accessibility rather than studio recording, which demands more precise

frequency operations.

264 The “notch filter” is commonly used to destroy problem frequencies like noise from a heater or fan, the

“high pass filter,” allows high frequencies through but attenuates lows usually around 80 Hz, and the “low

pass filter,” allows low frequencies pass through unaffected and cuts the highs, usually above or about 8 to 10 kHz. Bill Gibson, Equalizers, Reverbs & Delays (Vallejo, CA: Pro Audio Press, 2002), 43.

265 Gibson, Equalizers, Reverbs & Delays, 27.

129 others in the mix, which may make it difficult to discern one instrument from another,

or have an undesired effect of beating or masking.266 Part of creating a natural and

balanced frequency spectrum on the final track may thus require extensive EQ by cutting

away less-essential frequencies in order to reduce conflicts that may result in a muddy

mix.267 Indeed, creating verdic timbres and textures in the mix often requires extensive

spectrum editing.

Equalizers can also compensate for poor miking and recording techniques, or

remove unwanted spectral content that may impart timbral ‘harshness’ or ‘tinniness.’ In

more creative applications, equalization can be used to give a sound: more “edge” or

“grit;” create aural interest in the mix; convey a particular feeling or mood; integrate

depth enhancements, or add more realistic effects.268 Each of these applications require

an expert understanding of the frequency spectrum and how frequencies can be

manipulated according to the recordist’s artistic and practical requirements. If a recordist

wants to add some “sparkle” to a vocal, for instance, that quality must then be translated

to a specific frequency range. Recordists can either manipulate the timbre of individual

instruments, or the entire composite timbre of the entire track.

The frequency spectrum can be divided into four bands, each with their own

distinct characteristics and qualities: low, low-mid, high-mid, and high (figure 4).

266 Beating (repetitive volume surges) is a psychoacoustic phenomenon where a wave is created as a result of

the ear’s inability to differentiate between two tones that differ only slightly in frequency and have

approximately the same amplitude. Huber, Modern Recording Techniques, 47. Masking is the phenomenon where loud signals prevent the ear from hearing softer sounds. As Huber explains, “an instrument may

sound fine by itself, but can be completely hidden or changed in character by louder instruments with a

similar timbre in the mix. Equalization might be required to make the instruments sound different enough to overcome any masking effects.” Ibid.

267 Izhaki, Mixing Audio, 206. 268 Ibid.

130

Figure 12. The four band division of the audio spectrum

These bands can be further subdivided into smaller ranges, such as sub-bass (0-20

Hz), low bass (20-60 Hz), mid-bass (60-120 Hz), upper-bass (120-250 Hz), low-mids (250-

2k), high-mids (2k-6k), and highs (6k-20k).269 Equipped with an understanding of the

particular characteristics of these frequency bands, recordists use subjective aural

judgment systematically to fix problems or create specific sounds in the mix. Regarding

sound mass or composite sound evaluations (the overall timbre of all sounds in a mix), for

instance, a “boxy” sound for Bobby Owsinski is a peak in the 400Hz to 800 Hz area, a

“boom” “thump” or “warmth” is at 125Hz, and a “whack” is at 1kHz. Similarily, for

Roey Izhaki, “presense” is at 2-6kHz, “air” is from 10-20kHz, and “brilliance” is between

5kHz to 10kHz. Recordists typically evaluate timbre subjectively, then sculpt the signal

accordingly to achieve a certain quality, change an existing quality, or fix problem

frequencies by diagnosing a spectral excess or deficiency.270

269 Adapted from Bobby Owsinski, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, (Vallejo, CA: Pro Audio Series), 26, and

Izhaki, Mixing Audio, 212.

270 See Appendix A for a chart that more fully discloses the particular subjective characteristics of certain

frequencies.

131 There is a different “magic frequency” system––as recordists often call it––

though similar in practice, for shaping the timbres of specific instruments: a bass guitar’s

“snap,” for instance, is at 2.5kHz and “attack” is at 700Hz. Or, for a piano, “fullness” is

at 80Hz, whereas “honky-tonk” is at 2.5Hz.271 Understanding the frequency

characteristics of particular instruments takes a considerable degree of experience and

expertise. Charts that define these “magic frequencies” and describe their practice are

widespread, and are easily accessible in many recording manuals.272 The existence of

“magic frequencies” tells the musicologist that recordists have conscious and deliberate

ways of shaping these sounds. Indeed, “honky tonk” piano is only a boost at 700 Hz

away.

What may seem “imprecise” aural judgement to the lay-person, adjectival

description for recordists is actually part of a relatively precise system that relates to

specific operative signal processing procedures, in this case, with an equalizer. In fact, this

assumption is not only of the lay-person. Musicology has regarded adjectival descriptions of

timbre as meaningless and non-indicative of any sort of “musical system,” as Nattiez has

put it. Consider this statement from Ed Seay, which explains his approach to attaining

veridic timbres through equalization:

I just try to get stuff to sound natural, but at the same time be very vivid. I break it down into roughly three areas: mids and the top and the bottom. Then there’s low mids and high mids. Generally, except for a very few

instruments or a few microphones, cutting flat doesn’t sound good to most people’s ears. So I’ll say, ‘Well, if this is a state of the art preamp and a great mic and it doesn’t sound that great to me, why? Well, the mid range is not quite vivid enough. Okay, we’ll look at the 3k, 4k range, maybe

271 Owsinski, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, 32.

272 See, for instance, Izhaki, Mixing Audio; Owsinski, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook; Leo di Gar Kulka, “Equalization—The Highest, Most Sustained Expression of the Recordist’s Heart.”

132 2500. Whey don’t we make it kind of come to life like a shot of cappuccino and open it up a little bit? But then I’m not hearing the air around things,

so let’s go up to 10k or 15k and just bump it up a little bit and see if we can kind of perk it up. Now all that sounds good but our bottom end is kind of undefined. We don’t have any meat down there. Well, let’s sweep through and see what helps the low end.’ Sometimes, depending on different instruments, a hundred cycles can do wonders for some

instruments. Sometimes you need to dip out at 400 cycles because that’s the area that sometimes just clouds up and takes the clarity away. But a lot of times, adding a little 400 can fatten things up.273

Accounts like this are literally innumerable. Equalization offers Seay aesthetic,

practical, and functional applications: the opportunity to create an aesthetic quality

(“natural” and “vivid” sound); to compensate for the biased response curves of sound

equipment (the lacking mid-range on the amp); and to carve out a frequency range for an

instrument in the spectrum (the undefined bottom end). A natural sound for Seay, is what

he makes it to be, not what he captures.

Aesthetics

As we will see, recordists use equalization practices according to a host of logistic,

practical and aesthetic standpoints when creating veridic timbres. From the standpoint of

audio purists and recordists who herald from a more “traditional” school, if to be used at

all, equalization should be used only to compensate for a piece of equipment that alters

the frequency response of the input signal, not to create the impression of new sources

and frequency characteristics altogether. When asked about his approach to EQ, the

prolific producer and engineer Andy Johns expressed his reservations about liberal

sculpting:

273 Owsinski, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, 29-30.

133 You don’t get your sound out of a console; you get your sound from the

room. You choose the right instruments and the right amplifiers for the track. If you have a guitar sound that’s not working with the track properly, you don’t use EQ to make it work. You choose another guitar and/or amplifier so it fits better in the track. It might take a day and it might take four or five different setups, but in the end you don’t have to

worry about EQ because you made the right acoustic choices while recording.274 This “hands off” approach is common within the purist tradition, where audio

signals are influenced primarily by microphone placement, room acoustics, and sound

source.275 Traditionalists employ equalization only sparingly to compensate for the

effects of beating or masking, or any other frequency specific problems in the mix.

However, as a general trend in mixing and recording aesthetics, the entire basis of

equalization practice has evolved considerably to the point where the equalizer is not as

much an “equalizer” as it is a spectral modifier, or a sound source creator. When used to

extremes, EQ becomes a non-veridic timbral processor. As Alexander Case explains,

While the audio industry still makes frequent use of equalizers, it is rarely

motivated by a need to correct for the inherent defect of an audio device. The use of an equalization processor is driven more by creative desires, and less by technical shortcomings. Equalization (EQ) is less about making things equal and more about making things beautiful, unusual, or functional.276

Liberal equalization is commonly practiced by the “new breed of engineers,” as

Tom Lord-Alge puts it, who are “not afraid to use EQ” and will “do whatever it takes to

274 Owsinski, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, 139. 275 This preference is also historically maintained. Andy Johns worked before the technology of multitrack

recording allowed for anything different. As a “purist,” he is also famous amongst recordists for claiming that bouncing produced better mixes than any other technique.

276 Case, Sound FX, 103.

134 make it sound different.”277 A recordist who may be considered of this “new breed,” is

Dave Pensado, who is notorious for making controversial statements about the craft of

recording by outright contradicting conventional audio wisdom and raising debate

amongst his colleagues. Flying in the face of traditionalists like Andy Johns, Pensado

champions the equalizer as a tool for finding new and unusual sounds:

I think of EQ as an effect much the same way you would add chorus or reverb to a particular instrument or vocal. Like, I might have a vocal

where I think it’s really EQed nicely and then I’ll add a little more 3k just to get it to bite a little more… I tend to be the most effective when I do the standard equalizing, then take it to the next level, thinking of it as an effect.278

Pensado has no commitment to what he calls the “elite” and “snobby” aesthetics of high-

fidelity audio, or “authentic” live representation. To give you an idea, a typical

“Pensadoism,” as electronic musician puts it, is that “it is better to sound new than to sound

good [my emphasis].”279 Pensado isn’t concerned with construing a sense of

“documentation” at all. He outwardly seeks to create new sounds. It may not come as a

surprise that Pensado works entirely in the realm of hip-hop and pop productions. His

resume includes many chart topping hits like Beyonce’s “Check on It,” and Mary J.

Blige’s “Be Without You,” among many others. Hip-hop and R&B place less value on a

“captured” original, and do not place a premium on “pristine” or “un-tampered” audio

in the way that many rock, punk, folk, jazz or classical genres do.

277 Quoted in Zak, The Poetics of Rock,108.

278 Owsinski, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, 34.

279Paul Tingen, “Mixing Down and Speaking Up” Electronic Musician,

http://emusician.com/tutorials/emusic_mixing_down_speaking/ (accessed on March 01, 2010).

135 Recordists like Pensado use EQ towards non-veridic ends, though whether or

not recordists attempt to accurately portray realistic sounds or not ultimately depends on

the musical requirements of the project. To record within a different genre or aesthetic

calls for the recordist to change the types of practices he or she uses. Whether sounds are

to be created according to a veridic or non-veridic aesthetic, both practices call for a

different type of recorded sculpture, no less fabricated. As Pensado explains,

Let’s say you’re painting a portrait. Rock is like having the person you’re painting sitting in front of you and you look at them and paint. So you have a reference. In R&B, there is no reference… you’ve got less limitation and a lot more freedom. We don’t have to have the snare drum a particular way… But [if] you put certain snare sounds in a rock song and

it’s just not a rock song anymore. 280 Indeed, while liberal EQ may be common in non-veridic recording practices, this

technique does not automatically imply a non-veridic sound. On the contrary, extensive

EQ is responsible for some of the most realistic sounding productions in popular music.

Allen Sides discusses his invasive approach to EQ that nevertheless sounds natural :

What I would say is that I tend to like things to sound sort of natural but I don’t care what it takes to make it sound like that. Some people get a very pre-conceived set of notions that you can’t do this or you can’t do that. Like Bruce Swedien said to me, he doesn’t care if you have to turn the knob around backwards; if it sounds good, it’s good. Assuming that you

have a reference point you can trust, of course.281

When working in more “natural” aesthetics like rock, both Sides and Pensado emphasize

the importance of a “reference” sound when equalizing, which results in the high degree

of medium transparency in veridic records. Here lies a critical distinction: whereas liberal

EQ in non-veridic practice does not adhere to a “reference source,” liberal EQ in veridic

280 Quoted in Owsinski, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, 158. 281 Ibid., 25.

136 practice is done so to sculpt a more accurate representation of a reference. In other

words, whereas these sounds are equally “constructed,” they have the ability to sound

invariably so.

Indeed, liberal EQ usage is actually common in veridic recording practices,

though recordists nevertheless feel the need to defend their “right” to process: “I’m not a

techno snob,” begins Tom Elmhirst, “I’ll use whatever I can to use a great record.”282 He

then goes on to explain how he used extensive EQ to shape Amy Winehouse’s lead vocals

on “Rehab:”

She has a lot of bite in her voice, but I wanted it to sound warm and not

take your head off… [in the radical reductive EQ settings] you can see I’m cutting four frequencies by 18dB; in two cases, 465 and 917, with a Q of 100! That’s a really heavy notch. At 3107 Hz the Q is only 13.7, so that’s quite wide…enormous, but that’s what it was. 283

In the case of “Rehab,” Elmhirst has used a paragraphic equalizer, among many other

effects, to re-create a vocal sound characteristic of funk and soul bands of the mid-1960s

to complement the brass sounds of Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, the backing band on

this track.284 The record creates the timbral impression of a live take as the vocals and the

sound of the band may properly be considered a veridic aesthetic, yet we can see from a

screen capture of Elmhirst’s Renaissance Q10 EQ settings (figure 3), that there is nothing

“captured” about this vocal.

282 Paul Tingen, “Secrets of the Mix Engineers: Tom Elmhirst, Amy Winehouse: Rehab” Sound on Sound: The World’s Best Music Recording Magazine (August 2007)

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug07/articles/insidetrack_0807.htm (accessed March 01, 2010).

283 Ibid.

284 A paragraphic equalizer combines the aspects of parametric and graphic EQs. As pictured above, sliders are used to boost and attenuate frequencies, while also allowing control over bandwidth with rotary

controls. Mitch Gallagher, “Paragraphic equalizer,” The Music Tech Dictionary (Boston: Cengage, 2009), 150.

137

Figure 13. The reductive and “surgical” EQ settings for Amy Winehouse’s vocals on “Rehab” (Back to

Black, 2006)285

In addition to the Q10 parametric on Winehouse’s vocals, Elmhirst used a Urei 1176

compressor, Pultec EQ, a Fairchild compressor/limiter, McDSP F2 Filterband, a Waves

De-esser, a Great British Spring reverb and EMT plate reverb to notch out other

frequencies and further sculpt Winehouse’s vocal sound.286 In the end, not unlike Allan

Sides’ ethically liberal approach to EQ, Elmhirst is much more concerned with the final

sound than the process used to get there. In his own words: “Sometimes I look back at my

285 Paul Tingen, “Secrets of the Mix Engineers: Tom Elmhirst.” 286 Ibid.

138 settings and just think ‘Oh, that’s quite drastic’, or I look back and wonder ‘Did I

really do that?’ But if what’s coming out of the speakers sounds OK, I’m not

bothered.”287

Many recordists use EQ pragmatically as a way to translate sounds from the

control room to the small speakers that most consumers have as playback systems. Often,

the “live sound” that musicians make in the studio need to be “put in their place” to

“make sure it feels and sounds right,” as engineer Jim Scott notes. As the engineer for

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album Californication (1999), the equalizer was Scott’s

primary accomplice to accurately shape sounds according to the band’s live sound.288 As

Scott explains:

There’s a huge difference between what someone hears in a recording room, where a 500W guitar amp is blowing their hair back, and in the

control room… [the way] to make sure it feels and sounds right… is by using EQ, or compression, or anything else you can lay your hands on. ..I added mostly mid-range to the electric guitar, between 1 kHz and 2kHz, as well as a lot of low end. The Neve EQ gives you 56Hz and 100Hz, so it was probably around 100Hz. It was good to add low end to guitars,

because under the disguise of sounding exciting, they can easily get small and thin. It may jump out of the speakers, but it’s not big anymore.289

Scott’s EQ selections accurately “capture the sound and energy of the Chili Peppers,

resulting in a hard-hitting and gritty-sounding album,” as engineer Paul Tingen has

287 Paul Tingen, “Secrets of the Mix Engineers: Tom Elmhirst.” 288 The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication, (Warner, 1999), B00000J7JO. This album is best known for

its overcompression and signal distortion, which many point to as a catalyst of the dynamics squashing

trend known as the loudness wars. 289 Paul Tingen, “Jim Scott: Recording Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Californication,” Sound on Sound

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec99/articles/jim.htm (accessed March 10, 2010).

139 described the final product.290 Scott also likely needed to EQ so heavily to

compensate for the extensive multiband processing and compression that made this

album so loud: Scott was literally trying to recreate the 500W amp that was blowing the

band’s hair back. Yet clearly, “capture” is used here as a way to describe how Scott

created a sonic impression or interpretation of the band’s live sound and overall ethos and

marketed public persona, rather than imply that it was the live sound that created the

recording. Recordists are entirely aware there is no such thing as “captured” or

documented sounds in recording practice. Veridicism, in recording, simply does not exist

until it is created.

290 Paul Tingen, “Jim Scott: Recording Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Californication,”

140 CONCLUSIONS

The studio is a place where and from which music is made, and as soon as you have that

notion, forget about high fidelity, forget about anything—think about sound. It’s a place for developing texture, and texture is the primary innovation pop music has given to music.

—Brian Eno291

As presented in this thesis, the concept of timbral veridicism is based on the notion

that realistic sounds on recordings are still linked to the idea of traditional live

performance. The present study thus offers a porthole not only into the study of recording

practice, but also into historically maintained notions of authenticity, taste and cultural

capital. That “real” is simultaneously a reference to a social identity and a “normalized”

or “familiar” sound is a stubborn correlation that has plagued authenticity since its

earliest days. It has, however, also served advantageously to create cultural change. These

sound fractures deserve further exploration.

My own account has focused on more or less “traditional” notions of veridicism

in popular music; that is, recordings that attempt to “re-create” cultural understandings

of “live” performances that have been more or less maintained since the acoustic era. A

review of current rhetorical sound theories that exist for music such as that of Turino,

Moore and Fisher, suggests that this idea continues to be well articulated not only in

culture at large, but also in the academy. As Wurtzler puts it:

As socially and historically produced, the categories of the live and the recorded are defined in mutually exclusive relationship, in that the notion

291 Brian Eno, interview by Dierdre O’Donoghue. “What’s New With the New Wave’s Patron Saint,” Spin,

September, 1985.

141 of the live is premised on the absence of recording and the defining fact of the recorded is the absence of the live.292

Scholars who approach the “problem” of liveness in popular music from media

studies perspectives have certainly borne more intellectual fruit in this area of study than

musicology, though as scholars adopt new analytic methodologies these uncharted

domains are receiving attention. Musicologist Paul Sanden, for instance, has explored

how the traditional binaries such as “live/recorded, authentic/inauthentic,

production/reproduction, natural/artificial, mind/body”, and “human/machine” may

no longer “provide an appropriate framework within which to discuss the aesthetics,

ideologies, and practices of… mediatized music.”293 For Sanden, these categories do not

account for musics that synthesize musician-machine relationships: “What is live, is not

just that which eschews mediatization, but is in many cases also that which persists in

evoking elements of music’s performance through—and often with the help of—various

levels of mediatization.”294

As Sanden observes, the very notion of “live” is always under re-construction.

Indeed, many genres of popular music have dispensed with this traditional convention

altogether. IDM, for instance, abandons all the markers of traditional “live” musical

practice, even as IDM artists like Autechre, Robin Judge, and Bjork regularly perform

“live.” Moreover, traditionally veridic genres like punk, industrial, rock and even folk,

have recently begun to embrace non-veridicism on a widespread level. Not only have

292 Wurtzler, Steve. “She Sang Live but the Microphone Was Turned Off,” Sound Theory Sound Practice,

edited by Rick Altman. New York: Routledge, 1992), 89.

293 Paul Sanden, “Performing Liveness: Musicians, Machines, and Mediatization,” (PhD diss., The

University of Western Ontario, 2008), 4.

294 Ibid.

142 “live” practices changed, but the sounds typically associated with liveness are also

changing according to the ever-increasing technological environment they are born of.

Indeed, it has become widely understood that recordists think about timbre as a

constructive, artistic and malleable musical parameter and have a wide range of

techniques and tools available to shape sonic objects. “The sky’s the limit,” for George

Martin, “creativity is the sole limiting factor” for Bruce Swedien, and perhaps most

famously, the studio is a “compositional tool” for Brian Eno. Even for Glenn Gould,

whose perspective heralds from a much more conservative aesthetic of classical music

recording, the recording studio offers “limitless possibilities.”

If our conceptions of “realism” are continually changing and evolving, as I have

demonstrated, then traditional approaches to veridic recording practice are also

changing. Recordists have become increasingly less bound by the ethics of aesthetics, and

have become increasingly willing to do “whatever it takes” to get a sound. Recording

technology has afforded possibilities in sound manipulation that demands a

reconsideration of the concept of veridicism to include possibilities for sonic realism other

than those afforded by the connotation of “live” practice.

In other words, traditional ideas about what sounds signify “live,” “fidelity” and

“realness,” and what sounds signify “imaginary” “constructiveness” or “designed,”

requires reconsideration to account for present musical circumstances. Rhetorical analysis

can help to pinpoint how these conceptions of realism are always changing, but this

project cannot be satiated by rhetorical discourse analysis alone. Popular music scholars

must now consider recordings as though they are, already, copies without originals, that

is, copies of prototypes. As Wurtzler notes, “the co-presence of the live and the recorded

143 contribute to a potential crisis in our notions of a real that exists prior to

representation.”295 We are, already, beyond the threshold of this “potential crisis.”

Culturally framed sonic manifestations of “reality” can clearly be traced both as a product

of, and as a product beyond, the sonic signifiers of “live” musical practice.

For analysts who explore the ever increasing non-veridic (veridic?) soundscape,

timbral categories based on sound source identification and liveness are fraught, as they

only describe the process of how auditors are interpolated into new rhetorical agreements;

not how they are maintained. If we could take a page of advice from Brian Eno and

“forget about fidelity” and focus instead on sound, then the underlying transparency of

the recording medium may be rendered more opaque. But I would endeavor to say, that

to think about recorded sound always requires an engagement with sound fidelity because

of evolving conceptions of sonic realism. If we truly can forget about it, however, then

that is an intriguing prospect indeed. We must find new ways to explore these uncharted

domains.

The present work has focused primarily on how the negotiation of recorded sound

depends on an interconnected belief system that renders recording practice transparent,

and thus this thesis explored rhetorical and social agreements over what sounds are or are

not. While timbre has only been addressed referentially in this thesis, recording practice

offers musicologists valuable insight into not only the physical production and process of

music making, which has been severely understudied, but also the aesthetic concerns that

may influence the production of sonic rhetoric. Over twenty years ago, Hennion wrote of

his of a three year emic study of the record production process: “when one studies the

295 Wurtlzer, “She Sang Live,” 94.

144 professional milieu on the spot… one learns that its fundamental task resides in the

permanent and organized quest for what holds meaning for the public.”296 If Hennion’s findings still

hold true, then how do recordists choose amongst the vast soundscape to make meaningful

communications with their listeners? Is the infinite palate ideologically liberating, or does

sound fidelity fragment and manifest elsewhere? These are important questions, which

timbral analysis through the purview of recordists may be prepared to answer.

What we can take away from this thesis is an understanding that, in every sound

epoch, fidelity is negotiated through a cultural understanding of what exactly is being

reproduced. It depends on a correspondence between two sounds, whatever they may be, as

well as a certain degree of familiarity with what exactly a sound should be compared to.

After all, how can a sound be considered a reproduction if we cannot conceive of its

origins? If there is no comparison to be made, then does fidelity not exist? In instances

where there is no connection between an apparent sound event and a sound source, then

there is no room for ideological or rhetorical impact. But is this situation possible? Can we

“forget” about sound fidelity, like Eno suggests? The evolving yet continuing cultivation

of properly live practices and rhetorical infrastructures suggest otherwise.

The cycles of aesthetic production and consumption in recorded musics are

constantly evolving yet recurring according to ever changing conceptions of what is or is

not a familiar (realistic) sound and certain conditioned ways of thinking about what those

sounds are made of. In the final analysis, fidelity is not as much about sound quality as it

is a belief in an ephemeral moment that once existed, a moment that we can never fully

comprehend. It is these moments of confusion that require further attention, for, to use

296 Antoine Hennion, “The Production of Success: An Antimusicology of the Pop Song,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), 185.

145 Rick Altman’s phrase, it is between the illusion of reproduction and the reality of

representation where the discursive power of recorded sound lies.297 If we wish to hear

beyond sonic rhetoric, then we must be willing to explore what lies beneath it.

My own approach to this situation is to acknowledge the people and technologies

that undermine these communications most transparently, to better understand the inner

mechanisms of what is often believed as Truth. Accordingly, this thesis has explored how

“reality,” and thus “fidelity” are most traditionally construed through the sonic illusions of

veridic recording practice as “live” or “realistic,” using timbre as a physical and rhetorical

example of how, despite their ability to suggest otherwise, all veridic sounds are

constructed to imbue that impression. After all, sounds themselves do not have the ability to

be intrinsically realistic or not. The very nature of recorded sound negates that possibility.

The following is an excerpt from Bruce Swedien’s latest book on recording

Michael Jackson. Recordists are fully aware there is no such thing as reality in recording.

They’ll tell you so, if you ask. I believe we may find helpful answers to some of the most

perplexing questions if we only seek the right sources.

In choosing a microphone...the most important thing is the sound

characteristic of the voice — ie., is it soft and breathy, or is it loud and penetrating? Your choice of vocal microphone should be made on the basis of the vocal quality of the artists and the sonic personality you want to project, and nothing else. In this instance, we must remember to think of music recording as an artist would think of trying to capture a scene on

his canvas (our canvas is the recording medium). Like the artist, we cannot capture the true reality of the scene, and it would be a fallacy to even try. We must project our interpretation of that reality. As in everything else in music recordings, there are no set rules, so at first, you must realize, some experimentation is usually in order.298

297 Rick Altman, “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” 275.

298 Bruce Swedien, Recording Michael Jackson (Milwaukee, WI: Hal-Leonard), 120.

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156 APPENDIX

Figure 1. Pitch/Frequency registers with reference to octave designations and equivalent frequencies.

SUB

BASS 0-27.5

LOW

-C2

27.5-65.41

LOW

MID -D2-G3

73.42-

196

MID -A3-A4

220-440

MID UPPER B4-E6

493.88-

1,318.51

HIGH F6-C8

1,396.91

4,186.01

VERY

HIGH

4,186.01

+

157

Figure 2. Frequency/Pitch registers compared against standard notation. Practicing pitch evaluation is

helpful to begin conceptualizing constituent frequency components of a timbre.

Timbral Balance Graph (Chapter 3, pg 99)

A timbral balance graph is meant to plot a sound source’s pitch area against a time

line. The graph is a dimension of the overall texture that is intended to represent i) a

composite sound mass and ii) a representation of a sound’s spectrum. This graph is by no

means an accurate representation of a timbre, since complex sounds usually span very

large areas across the frequency spectrum. However, it gives a better representation than

standard music notation of a sound’s location on the across the spectrum since more of a

sound is represented than its fundamental. It also accounts for how the recordist may

notch or filter sounds to fit them in the mix with clarity, and treated pitch and dynamic

information to shape its overall sound quality, or timbre.

158 Typically, when composing timbral balance graphs, sound sources are plotted

against the time line to indicate how the texture unfolds over the course of the song. In

other graph forms, if one was to discuss only one timbre, one could also plot amplitude

and frequency displacements, as well dynamic envelope. Yet when discussing a composite

texture, these variables which also have an impact on timbre, are left unrepresented.

_____

Source: William Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix, (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2007), 227-229.

Figure 3. Subjective “magic frequencies” that span the frequency spectrum. Recordists evaluate a sound

by either by its frequency deficiency, exccess, or potential (desired character). If a sound is “thin,” for instance, then the recordist might boost in the 20-100 Hz range. Or, if a recordist seeks a “warm” vocal,

then s/he may boost in the 100-500 Hz range. These frequency qualities are only approximate—a guitar may have a different frequency range that exudes “warmth” than a flute, for instance. Spectrum

evaluation and appropriate frequency manipulation takes considerable experience and expertise.

Source: Roey Izhaki, Mixing Audio (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2008), 213.

159 VITA

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Post Secondary Education: The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada 2004-2008 B.Mus.

The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada 2008-2010 M.A.

Honors and Awards:

Western Graduate Research Scholarship -2008 National Estonian Foundation Academic Scholarship -2008, 2009 Related Work Experience: Teaching Assistant The University of Western Ontario

2008-2010