How Music Works

by David Byrne

  As Walter Murch, the sound editor and film director, said, “Music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved.”1 Some say that this evanescence helps focus our attention. They claim that we listen more closely when we know we only have one chance, one fleeting opportunity to grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened. Imagine, as composer Milton Babbitt did, that you could only experience a book by going to a reading, or by reading the text off a screen that displayed it only briefly before disappearing. I suspect that if that were the way we received literature, then writers (and readers) would work harder to hold our attention. They would avoid getting too complicated, and they would strive mightily to create a memorable experience. Music did not get more compositionally sophisticated when it started being recorded, but I would argue that it did get texturally more complex. Perhaps written literature changed, too, as it became widespread—maybe it too evolved to be more textural (more about mood, technical virtuosity, and intellectual complexity than merely about telling a story).

  Recording is far from an objective acoustic mirror, but it pretends to be like magic—a perfectly faithful and unbiased representation of the sonic act that occurred out there in the world. It claims to capture exactly what we hear—though our hearing isn’t faithful or objective either. A recording is also repeatable. So, to its promoters, it is a mirror that shows you how you looked at a particular moment, over and over, again and again. Creepy. However, such claims are not only based on faulty assumptions, they are also untrue.

  The first Edison cylinder recorders weren’t very reliable, and the recording quality wasn’t very good. Edison never suggested that they be used to record music. Rather, they were thought of as dictation machines, something that could, for example, preserve the great speeches of the day. The New York Times predicted that we might collect speeches: “Whether a man has or has not a wine cellar he will certainly, if he wishes to be regarded as a man of taste, have a well-stocked oratorical cellar.”2 Please, try this fine Bernard Shaw or a rare Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  These machines were entirely mechanical. There was no electrical power involved in either the recording or the playback, so they weren’t very loud compared to what we know today. To impress sound onto the wax, the voice or instrument being recorded would get as close as possible to the wide end of the horn—a large cone that funneled the sound toward the diaphragm and then to the inscribing needle. The sound waves would be concentrated and the vibrating diaphragm would move the needle, which incised a groove into a rotating wax cylinder. Playback simply reversed the process. It’s amazing that it worked at all. As Murch points out, the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn’t beyond them. For all we know, someone at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it. Odd how technology and inventions come into being and fail to flourish for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the skill, materials, or technology available at the time. Technological progress, if one can call it that, is full of dead ends and cul-de-sacs—roads not taken which could have led to who knows what alternate history. Or maybe the meandering paths, with their secret trajectories, would eventually and inevitably converge, and we’d all end up exactly where we are.

  The wax cylinders that contained the recordings couldn’t be easily massproduced, so making lots of “copies” of these early recordings was an insane process. To “mass produce” these items, one had to set up an array of these recorders as close as possible to the singer, band, or player—in other words, you could only produce the same number of recordings as you had recording devices and cylinders running. To make the next batch, you’d load up more blank cylinders and the band would have to play the same tune again, and so on. There needed to be a new performance for every batch of recordings. Not exactly a promising business model.

  Edison set this apparatus aside for over a decade, but he eventually went back to tinkering with it, possibly due to pressure from the Victor Talking Machine Company, which had come out with recordings on discs. Soon he felt he’d made a breakthrough. In 1915, when Edison demonstrated his new version of an apparatus that recorded onto discs, he was convinced that now, finally, playback was a completely accurate reproduction of the speaker or singer being captured. The recording angel, the acoustic mirror, had arrived. Well, hearing those recordings, we might now think that he was somewhat deluded about how good his gizmo was, but he certainly seemed to believe in it, and he managed to convince others too. Edison was a brilliant inventor, a great engineer, but also a huckster and sometimes a ruthless businessman. (He didn’t even really “invent” the electric light bulb—Joseph Swan in England had made them previously, though Edison did establish that tungsten would be the great longlasting filament for that device.) And he usually managed to market and promote the hell out of his products, which certainly counts for something.

  These new Diamond Disc Phonographs were promoted via what Edison referred to as Tone Tests. There is a promo film he made called “The Voice of the Violin” (oddly, for something promoting a sound recorder, it was a silent film) that helped publicize the Tone Tests. Edison was marketing and selling the Edison “sound” more than any specific artist. Initially he didn’t even put the names of the artists on the discs, but there was always a sizable picture of Edison himself.A He also held Mood Change Parties (!) in which the (naturally positive) emotional impact and power of recorded music was demonstrated. (No NIN or Insane Clown Posse played at those parties, I guess.) Lastly, the Diamond Disc used proprietary technology; the Edison discs couldn’t be played on the Victor machines, and vice versa. We haven’t learned much in that respect, it seems—Kindles, iPads, Pro Tools, MS Office software—the list of proprietary insanity is endless. It’s a small comfort that such nonsense isn’t new.

  The Tone Tests themselves were public demonstrations in which a famous singer would appear on stage along with a Diamond Disc player playing a recording of that same singer singing the same song. The stage would be dark. What the audience heard would alternate between the sound of the disc and the live singer, and the audience had to guess which they were hearing. It worked—the public could not tell the difference. Or so we’re told. The Tone Tests toured the country, like a traveling show or an early infomercial, and audiences were amazed and captivated.

  We might wonder how this could be possible. Who remembers “Is it real or is it Memorex?” These early recorders had a very limited dynamic and frequency range; how could anyone really be fooled? Well, for starters, there was apparently a little stage trickery involved. The singers were instructed to try to sound like the recordings, to sing in a slightly pinched manner and with a limited range of volume. It took some practice before they could master it. (You have to wonder how audiences fell for this.)

  Sociologist H. Stith Bennett suggests that over time we developed what he calls “recording consciousness,” which means we internalize how the world sounds based on how recordings sound.3 He claims that the parts of our brain that deal with hearing act as a filter and, based on having heard lots of recorded sound, we simply don’t hear things that don’t fit that sonic template. In Bennett’s view, the recording becomes the ur-text, replacing the musical score. He implies that this development might have led us to listen to music more closely. By extension, one might infer that all sorts of media, not just recordings, shape how we see and hear the real world; there is little doubt that our brains can and often do narrow the scope of what we perceive to the extent that things that happen right before our eyes sometimes don’t register. In a famous experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, participants were asked to count the number of passes made by a group of basketball players in a film. Halfway through the film, a guy in a full gorilla suit runs through the middle of the action, thumping his chest. When asked afterward if they saw or heard anything unusual, more than half didn’t see the gorilla.

  The gorilla deniers weren’t lying; the go
rilla simply never appeared to them. Things might impinge on our senses but still fail to register in the brain. Our internal filters are far more powerful than we might like to think. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced that what are to us obviously faked photos of fairies were in fact real fairies captured on film. He believed that the photo shown below was real until the end of his life.B

  So the mind’s eye (and ear) is a truly variable thing. What one person hears and sees is not necessarily what another perceives. Our own sensory organs, and thus even our interpretation of data and our reading of measurements on instruments, are wildly subjective.

  Edison was convinced that his devices made what he referred to as “recreations” of the actual performances, not mere recordings of them. Is there a difference? Edison thought there was. He felt that the mechanical nature of the recordings—sorry, recreations— was truer in some sense than the Victor versions that used microphones and amplification, which he claimed inevitably “colored” the sound. Edison insisted that his recordings, in which the sound did not go through wires, were uncolored, and therefore truer. I’d offer that they’re both correct; both technologies color the sound, but in different ways. “Neutral” technology does not exist.

  Illustration from The Case of the Cottingley Fairies by Joe Cooper

  The trickery involved in the Tone Test performances was, it seems to me, an early example of the soon-to-be-common phenomenon of live music trying to imitate the sound of recordings. A sort of extension of Bennett’s recording-consciousness idea mentioned above. As a creative process it seems somewhat backward and counterproductive, especially with the Edison version in which the pinched singing was encouraged, but we’ve now grown so accustomed to the sound of recordings that we do in fact expect a live show to sound pretty much like a record—whether it be an orchestra or a pop band—and that expectation makes no more sense now than it did then. It’s not just that we expect to hear the same singer and arrangements that exist on our records, we expect everything to go through the same technological sonic filters—the pinched vocals of the Edison machines, the massive subbass of hip-hop recordings, or the perfect pitch of singers whose voices were corrected electronically in the recording process.

  Here, then, is the philosophical parting of the ways in a nutshell. Should a recording endeavor to render reality as faithfully as possible, with no additions, coloration, or interference? Or are the inherent sonic biases and innate qualities of recording an art unto itself? Of course I don’t believe the Edison discs would fool anyone today, but the differing aspirations and ideals regarding recording still hold. This debate has not confined itself to sound recording. Film and other media are sometimes discussed with regard to their “accuracy,” their ability to capture and reproduce what is true. The idea that somewhere out there exists one absolute truth implies a suspension of belief, which is an ideal for some, while for others admitting artificiality is more honest. Flashing back to the previous chapter, this reminds me of the difference between Eastern theater (more artificial and presentational) and Western (with its effort to be naturalistic).

  We no longer expect that contemporary records are meant to capture a specific live performance—even a performance that may have happened in the artificial atmosphere of a recording studio. We may treasure jazz and other recordings from fifty years ago that captured a live performance, often in the studio, but now a “concert album” or an album of an artist playing live in the studio tends to be the exception. And yet, somewhat oddly it seems to me, many recordings that are largely made up of obviously artificially generated sounds use those sounds in ways that mimic the way a “real” band might employ “real” instruments. Low electronic thuds imitate the effect of an acoustic kick drum, though now they appear to be coming from a virtual drum that sounds larger and tighter than anything physically possible, and synthesizers often play lines that oddly mimic, in range and texture, what a horn player might have done. They are not mimicking real instruments, but rather what real instruments do. One would assume then that the sonic tasks that “real” instruments once accomplished are still needs that have to be met. A sonic scaffolding has been maintained, despite the fact that the materials it is made of have been radically changed. Only the most experimental composers have made music that consists entirely of rumbles or high-pitched whines—music that doesn’t recall or reference acoustic instruments in any way.

  The “performances” captured on early wax discs were different both from what and how those same live bands were used to playing, as well as being different from what we think of as typical recording-studio practice today. For starters, there was one mic (or horn) available to record the whole band and singer, so rather than the band being arranged as they might have been on a bandstand or stage, they were arranged around the horn, positioned according to who most needed to be heard and who was loudest. The singer, for example, might be right in front of the recording horn, and then when a sax solo came up someone would yank the singer away from the horn and a hired shover would push the sax player into position. This jerky choreography would be reversed when the sax solo was over. And that’s just one solo. A recording session might involve a whole little dance devised so that all the key parts were heard at the right times. Louis Armstrong, for example, had a loud and piercing trumpet tone, so he was sometimes positioned farther away from the recording horn than anyone else, by about fifteen feet. The main guy in the band was stuck in the back!

  Drums and upright basses posed a big problem for these recording devices. The intermittent low frequencies that they produce made wider or deeper grooves (in the case of the Edison machines), which make the needles jump and skip during playback. So those instruments were also shoved to the rear, and in most cases were intentionally rendered almost inaudible. Blankets were thrown over drums, especially the kick and snares. Drummers were sometimes required to play bells, wood blocks, and the sides of their drums instead of the snares and kick drums—those thinner sounds didn’t make the needles jump, but could still be heard. The double bass was often swapped with a tuba because its low end was less punchy. So early recording technology was limiting not only in terms of what frequencies one heard, but also in terms of which instruments were actually recorded. The music was already being edited and shaped to fit the new medium.

  Recordings resulted in a skewed, inaccurate impression of music that wasn’t already well known. It would be more accurate to say that early jazz recordings were versions of that music. Musicians in other towns, hearing what these drummers and bass/tuba players were doing on the recordings, sometimes assumed that that was how the music was supposed to be played, and they began to copy those adaptations that had initially been made solely to accommodate the limitations of the technology. How could they know differently? Now we don’t and can never know what those bands really sounded like—their true sound may have been “unrecordable.” Our understanding of certain kinds of music, based on recordings anyway, is completely inaccurate.

  Edison, meanwhile, continued to maintain that his recorders were capturing unadorned reality. In fact, he was quoted as saying that the recorders know more than you do, implying (accurately) that our ears and brains skew sound in various ways. He maintained, of course, that his recordings presented sound as it truly is.

  We all know how weird it is to hear your own recorded voice—the discomforting aspect of this phenomena is often attributed to the fact that we hear ourselves, our voices, though the vibrations in our skulls as well as through our ears, and recordings can’t capture these skull vibrations and osseous transmissions. The aspect of our voices that gets recorded is only a part of what we hear. But then there is also the inherent bias and sonic coloration added by microphones and the electronics that are involved in capturing our voices. No microphone is exactly like the human ear, but that isn’t mentioned much. The sonic reality we experience via our senses is probably way different than what we hear in an “objective” recording. But, as mentioned above, our
brains tend to make these disparate versions converge.

  I have heard that Edison recorders aren’t as shockingly biased as one might think, that in fact to hear one’s own voice played back through an Edison machine is actually less strange than if one were to hear a recording made by a microphone. So there may be a grain of truth to Edison’s claim, at least as far as the voice goes. He implied that it was like looking in a mirror. But now I begin to wonder, do mirrors even really reflect us, or are they skewed and biased? Is the face we see while shaving or putting on makeup really us, or is it our “mirror self,” a self that—like audio recordings—we have come to be familiar with, but is in some ways equally inaccurate?

  A Berlin-based company called Neumann recently came out with a device in which two microphones were placed inside the “ears” of a kind of mannequin head to better simulate the way our ears heard the world.C Binaural recording, it was called. You had to listen to the recordings through headphones to get the effect. (I heard some of these recordings, and I didn’t buy it.) The elusive quest for “capturing” reality never dies.

  Phonographs (also known as gramophones) became increasingly popular in the early twentieth century. The early versions (after the ones that were only good enough to record talking) allowed owners to record their own musical performances. Some companies added interactive features to these machines. Here is an ad from a 1916 issue of Vanity Fair for something called the Graduola: