Chapter 2 - Recording technologies and music

Summary

Recording has captured people as well as sound; Glenn Gould famously retreated to a basement recording studio rather than give another imperfect concert, though the trace of his singing remains indelible on the discs he created there. The relationship of musicians with studios has changed from suspicion and sideline to a central embrace. A few have rejected recording, particularly in scenes of improvised music where location-specific uniqueness is held as key, but even most improvisers have been tempted to record their work for broadcast or release at some stage. Recordings have become a central part of the music business, an international publicity engine for artists as well as a mechanism of archiving. Communication and storage technology means that musical information is easily transferable between cultures and different eras. As the history of electronic music intersects well with the history of recording, most historical electronic music survives documented in recorded form.

Recording technologies

There are precedents to pure audio recording machines. Examples might be found in musical scores, which work like extended memory representations even if they do not hold every detail of reproduction, and the mechanical scores implicit in music boxes, carillons, or the nineteenth-century fad for street organs. More exotic early automata include the floating quartet of robot musicians by the great engineer Al-Jazari, created to entertain a royal drinking party in 1206, and the celebrated flautist and tabor and pipe mechanical players of Jacques Vaucanson (the first from 1738). The home use of player pianos from around 1900 to 1929 in part reflected initial inadequacies of recording quality. Yet a transition occurred from strong bourgeois traditions of home music making to listening mediated by recordings or broadcast (itself increasingly based around recordings): The main part of the twentieth century focused in on a more passive mode of reception for many.