How Music Works

by David Byrne

  To my friends and associates and indeed to myself, I’ve appeared until recently, simply a plain, middle-aged, unemotional businessman. And now I find that I’m a musician. How did I find this out? I’ll tell you! Last Tuesday night, my wife and I were at the Jones’s. Jones had a new purchase—a phonograph. Personally, I’m prejudiced against musical machines. But this phonograph was different. With the first notes I sat upright in my chair. It was beautiful. “Come over here and sing this yourself!” said Jones. I went to see what the slender tube terminating in a handle [the Graduola] could be. It looked interesting. “Hold this in your hands!” said Jones. “Move the handle in to make the music louder; draw it out to make it softer.” Then he started the record again. At first I hardly dared to move the little device in my hands. Presently, however, I gained confidence. As the notes swelled forth and softly died away in answer to my will, I became bolder. I began to feel the music. It was wonderful! I . . . fairly trembled with the depth of emotion. The fact that I was—must be—a natural musician dawned upon me. And with it came a glimpse of the glorious possibilities opened to me by this great new phonograph.4

  Great ad copy! The record player as orgasmatron!

  Soon there was a flurry of recordings of school and parlor performers, sung greetings, holiday wishes, and all sorts of amateur performances. The early phonographs were like YouTube—everyone was swapping homemade audio recordings. Composers were even recording their playing and then playing along with themselves. Soon enough that function was taken away. I would be inclined to believe that this anti-participatory, non-egalitarian move by the manufacturers might have been urged by the newly emerging recording companies, who would have claimed that they weren’t being evil but simply wanted to market “quality” recordings that would elevate the musical taste of their customers and the nation as a whole. Victor and Edison had “signed” a number of artists, and naturally they wanted you to buy their recordings, not make your own. The battle between amateurs and “professionals” isn’t new; it has been fought (and often lost) many times over.

  Courtesy of Georg Neumann GmbH

  John Phillip Sousa, the march king, was opposed to recorded music. He saw the new music machines as a substitute for human beings. In a 1906 essay entitled “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” he wrote, “I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste… in this twentieth century come these talking and playing machines that offer to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, discs, cylinders and all manner of revolving things.”5 God save us from revolving things!

  He’s not totally crazy, though. Despite his Luddite ravings, I tend to agree that any tendency to turn the public into passive consumers rather than potentially active creators is to be viewed with suspicion. However, the public tends to surprise us by finding ways to create using whatever means are available to them. Some creative urges seem truly innate and will find a means of expression, a way out, no matter if traditional means are denied to us.

  Sousa and many others also deplored that music was becoming less public. It was moving off the bandstand (where Sousa was king) and into the living room. Experiencing music used to always be something you did with a group of other people, but now you could experience it (or a recreation of it, as Edison would have it) alone. Shades of the Walkman and the iPod! To some, this was horrific. It was like drinking alone, they said; it was antisocial and psychologically dangerous. It was described as self-stimulation!

  In his book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Mark Katz quotes Orlo Williams, who wrote in 1923, “You would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room, and if you found no such one would painfully blush, as if you had discovered your friend sniffing cocaine, emptying a bottle of whisky, or plaiting straws in his hair.” Williams noted that we think people should not do things “to themselves.”6 It was as if the individual had selfishly decided to have a strong emotional experience, maybe even over and over again, whenever they felt like it, just by putting on a record, stimulated by a machine—there was something wrong with it!

  One might think that these same worrywarts might also disdain recordings on the basis that they sacrifice the visual elements inherent to performance—the costumes and sets of grand opera, the hubbub and smells of a music hall, or the stately atmosphere at the symphony—but that was not always the case. The twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, who wrote great quantities of music criticism (and tended to dislike popular music), thought that removing music from the accompanying visual spectacle was sometimes a good thing. You could, in his view, appreciate the music more objectively, without the often tacky trappings of performance. Jascha Heifetz, the classical violinist, was a notoriously unexpressive presence on stage; he was described as being stiff, immobile, cold. But by listening with one’s eyes closed, or to a recording, one could discern the deep feeling in what might have previously seemed a soulless performance. Of course, the sound itself didn’t change, but our perception of it did—by not seeing, we could hear in a different way.

  With the ascendance of radio in the twenties, people had another way to experience music. With radio, one definitely needed a microphone to capture the music, and the sound went through a whole lot of other electrical transmutations before the listener heard it. That said, mostly people really liked what they heard on the radio; the music was louder than on the Edison players, for starters, and there was more low end. People liked it so much that they demanded that live acts should “sound more like the radio.”

  What has happened is to some extent what Sousa feared: we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation. It seemed to some that the animating principle of music was being replaced by a more perfect, but slightly less soulful, machine.

  Katz details how recording technology changed music over the century of its existence. He cites examples of how instrument-playing and singing changed as recordings and radio broadcasts became more ubiquitous. Vibrato, the slight wavering in pitch, is often employed by contemporary string players, and it is a good example of the effect of recordings, because it’s something we take for granted as always having been there. We tend to think, “That’s how violin players play. That’s the nature of how one plays that instrument.” It wasn’t, and it’s not. Katz contends that before the advent of recording, vibrato added to a note was considered kitschy, tacky, and was universally frowned upon, unless one absolutely had to use it when playing in the uppermost registers. Vibrato as a technique, whether employed in a vocal performance or with a violin, helps mask pitch discrepancies, which might explain why it was considered “cheating.” As recording became more commonplace in the early part of the twentieth century, it was found that by using a bit more vibrato, not only could the volume of the instrument be increased (very important when there was only one mic or a single huge horn to capture an orchestra or ensemble), but the pitch—now painfully and permanently apparent—could be smudged by adding the wobble. The perceptibly imprecise pitch of a string instrument with no frets could be compensated for with this little wobble. The mind of the listener “wants” to hear the correct pitch, so the brain “hears” the right pitch among the myriad vaguenesses of pitch created by players using vibrato. The mind fills in the blanks, as it does with the visual gaps between movie and video frames, in which a series of stills create the impression of seamless movement. Soon enough, conventional wisdom reversed itself, and now people find listening to classical string-playing without vibrato to be painful and weird.

  I suspect that the exact same thing happened with opera singers. I have some recordings made at the very beginning of the recording era, and their use of vibrato is much, much
less frequent than what is common nowadays. Their singing is somewhat closer to what we might call pop singing today. Well, not exactly, but I find it more accessible and less off-putting than the fuzzy, wobbly pitching typical of contemporary opera singers, who sometimes exaggerate the vibrato so much you hardly know what note they’re supposed to be hitting unless you know the song already. (Further proof that the mind of the listener “hears” the melody it wants to hear.) Again, it’s assumed now that wobbly is how opera is supposed to be sung, but it’s not. It’s a relatively recent—and in my opinion, ugly—development forced upon music by recording technology.

  Other changes in classical music were not quite as noticeable. Tempos became somewhat more precise with recording technology. Without the “distraction” of visual elements in a performance, unsteady tempos and rhythms can sound pretty damn sloppy and are rudely apparent, so players eventually learned to play to a consistent interior metronome. Well, they tried to, anyway.

  This is an issue with pop and rock bands, too. My former bandmate Jerry Harrison has produced a number of first albums by rock bands, and he has observed more than once that the biggest and often primary hurdle is getting the band to play in time. This makes it sound like emerging bands are sloppy amateurs, which is not exactly true. They may sound perfectly fine in a club, or even in a concert hall, where all the other elements—the visuals, the audience, the beer—conspire to help one ignore the lurching and shaking. According to Jerry, the inaccuracies become all too obvious in the studio and make for a slightly seasick listening experience. He had to become very good at finding workarounds or devising rhythmic training-wheels for bands who were new to recording.

  One wonders if the visual element of performing in the pre-recording era inevitably allowed for more error, and if it made listeners more forgiving. If you can see someone performing, you’re slightly less critical of missteps in timing and pitch. The sound in live venues is also never as good as it is on a record (well, hardly ever), but we mentally fix the acoustic faults of these rooms—maybe with help from those visual cues—and sometimes we find that a live experience is more moving than a recording, contrary to Adorno’s theory. In many concert halls we simply don’t “hear” the slightly exaggerated echo in the low frequencies, for example. Our brains make it more pleasing, more like what we believe it should be—like the pitch of a violin played with vibrato. (Well, we do this up to a point; the sound in some rooms is beyond saving.) Somehow it’s harder to do that mental repair work with a recording.

  Hearing a recording of a live performance one has witnessed and enjoyed can prove disappointing. An experience that was auditory, visual, and social has now been reduced to something coming out of stereo speakers or headphones. In performance, sound comes from an infinite number of points— even if the performer is in front of you, the sound is bouncing off walls and ceilings, and that’s part of the experience. It might not make the performance “better” in a technical sense, but it is absolutely more enveloping. Various people have attempted to bridge these irreconcilable differences, and some odd hybrids, as well as wonderful developments, have resulted.

  In his book Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner argues that the conductor Leopold Stokowski was a visionary who changed the way orchestral music sounded over the radio and on recordings. He loved the idea of amplifying classical music; he felt it made it bigger.7 His stated ambition was ultimately to use technology to get the compositions to sound better than what the composer had originally conceived. There’s a little hubris involved there, but I don’t think too many composers complained. Rather than having pushers and shovers, as the early recording studios had, Stokowski conscripted studio technicians to move the mics around during the recordings of orchestras. Anticipating a counter-melody from the French horns, for example, he’d signal a mic to be wheeled into position in time for their “solo.” He realized—as film-sound recorders and mixers do—that we hear with all our senses in a live situation, and to just stick a mic up and expect it to capture what we have experienced, well, that wasn’t going to happen. Recreating the subjective “experience” meant one had to do more than that.

  In a live situation, the ear can psychoacoustically zoom in on a sound or isolate a section of players and pick out a phrase or melody—the way we can pick out a conversation at a noisy dinner table if we can see the person talking. Stokowski recognized this phenomenon and made adjustments to help bridge that perceptual gap. All of his innovations aimed to get the experience on disc, and possibly even surpass it by, for example, exaggerating dynamics and shifting perspectives.

  Sometimes he went the other way: rather than exaggerating, he would attempt to mask some aspect of the original. At one point he proposed that a big problem inherent in opera performances could now be solved. He pointed out that “the lady who plays the part live may sing like a nightingale but she looks like an elephant.” Stokowski suggested that svelte actresses learn to lipsynch to pre-recorded vocals so that the opera visuals could finally match the composer’s intention. I saw this done once for a filmed version of Wagner’s Parsifal directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. He had great actresses and actors playing the parts, lipsynching to great singers. I thought it worked, but this approach never caught on.

  FROZEN ARCHITECTURE

  Recordings freeze music and allow it to be studied. Young jazz players used to listen to Louis Armstrong’s recorded solos over and over until they figured out what he was doing. Later, amateur guitarists would use recordings to break down Hendrix and Clapton solos in the same way. Tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman found that listening to other players in clubs was too distracting—he preferred records. With a recording you could stop time by stopping the record, or you could make time repeat by playing part of a song over and over again. The ineffable was coming under human control.

  But learning from records has its limitations. Ignacio Varchausky from the Buenos Aires tango orchestra El Arranque says in the documentary Si Sos Brujo that he and others tried learning from records how the older orchestras did what they did, but it was difficult, almost impossible. Eventually, El Arranque had to find the surviving players from those ensembles and ask them how it was done. The older players had to physically show the younger players how to replicate the effects they got, and which notes and beats should be emphasized. So, to some extent, music is still an oral (and physical) tradition, handed down from one person to another. Records may do a lot to preserve music and disseminate it, but they can’t do what direct transmission does. In that same documentary, Wynton Marsalis says that the learning, the baton passing, happens on the bandstand—one has to play with others, to learn by watching and imitating. For Varchausky, when those older players are gone, the traditions (and techniques) will be lost if their knowledge is not passed on directly. History and culture can’t really be preserved by technology alone.8

  Recordings uproot music from their place of origin. They allow far-flung artists and foreign genres to be heard in other parts of the world, and these artists sometimes find a wider audience than they ever imagined they could have. John Lomax and his son Alan traveled thousands of miles to record the music of the American South. Initially they used a large and bulky disc recorder. This would be like having a mastering lab in the back of your station wagon, but it was as portable as one could get at the time, if you could call something the size of a small refrigerator portable.

  In one instance, John and Alan went to a Texas plantation to record the black “residents” who would, they hoped, sing for them. The fact that those men could be “commanded” to sing might have been the primary reason to go there, but their experience did prove to be enlightening in a way that they hadn’t expected. They were looking for someone who could sing the song “Stagolee.” It seems slightly suspicious to me that these guys already knew what they wanted—how do you find the unexpected if you know what you want? Milner tells the story like this:

  A murmur went through the crowd and soon became a unanimous
chorus. “Send Blue!”“Blue knows more about Stagolee than ol’ Stag himself!”“Blue, white man ain’t gonna hurt you! What you scared of ? That horn too little for you to fall into it—too little for you to sing at with your big mouth!” The man named Blue stood up. He certainly deserves the name, Alan thought as Blue walked toward him. The man’s skin was so dark it looked blue-back. “Can you sing ‘Stagolee’?” Alan asked. “Yessuh,” Blue replied. “I knows ol’ ‘Stagolee,’ and I’ll sing it for you.” He paused. “If you allow me to sing another song first.” “Well,” Alan stammered, “we would like to hear it first, because we don’t have very many unused cylinders…” “No, sir,” Blue said, picking up and adjusting the recording horn. “I won’t sing my song but once. You’ve gotta catch it the first time I sing it.” Alan relented, and switched on the machine. Blue began to sing: Poor farmer, poor farmer, poor farmer They get all the farmer makes His clothes is full of patches, his hat is full of holes / Stoopin’ down, pickin’ cotton, from off the cotton bolls… As he sang, he looked at the plantation manager. The crowd’s nervous laughter grew to a roar as Blue continued: Poor farmer, poor farmer, poor farmer / They get all the farmer makes, At the commissary, his money in their bags His poor little wife and children, sit at home in rags. When he was done, Blue received a standing ovation. But he wasn’t finished yet. He motioned to Alan to keep the machine running, looked straight at the horn, and delivered a spoken coda. “Now, Mr. President,” he said, “you just don’t know how bad they’re treating us folks down here. I’m singing to you, and I’m talking to you, so I hope you will come down here and do something for us poor folks down here in Texas.” As the crowd cheered, Alan adjusted the machine to play back the recording. People shushed each other as Blue’s scratchy voice emerged from the horn. “That thing sure talks sense!” someone yelled.9