IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 13

now dominates, and technology
has become the slave to the socalled "art of recording," whose
devotees unceasingly strive to perfect sound without actually defining what perfect sound is.
L eopold Stokowsk i was a n
unabashed fan of using electrical technology to dramatically
"enhance" his recordings of certain classical works. Audiophiles
would refer to them obliquely as
the "Stoki thrillers." Les Paul, the
pioneering genius of the electric
guitar, virtually created a new
musical instrument and made fascinating original recordings consisting of multiple layers of sound.
So some musicia ns cer t a inly
embraced the new technologies,
whereas others like the eccentric
pianist Glenn Gould, the legendary
folkie Pete Seeger and the honest
Neil Young, who now self-effacingly
refers to himself as "Grandpa Granola," eschewed them. The eclectic
Bob Dylan was true to his unpredictable self. The technologists
became enablers in service of the
artists' creativity.
Along the way, the numerous
contributions to recording, post
production, and sound reproduction technologies from various and
rather colorful scientists, engineers,
and inventors have been remarkable indeed. The Edison cylinder
acoustic recordings of operatic
tenor Enrico Caruso, which sounded poorly owing to acoustic resonances of the horns used in the
recording/reproducing process,
were decades later, restored digitally by Dr. Tom Stockham, using a
signal processing technique called
blind deconvolution, to sound modern and more realistic.
Magnetic recording is both the
hero and villain in the author's
interesting story. It initially used a
moving wire that was magnetized
analogously to the microphone's
june 2016

electrical signal. Then, as the technology developed, the wire was
replaced with ferric oxide on an
acetate backing. A durable permanent recording could be made,
copied, and even edited ("to make
recorded sound lie"). Most significant was the fact that two separate channels or tracks of sound
could be magnetically recorded
simultaneously, which initially
gave rise to extremely spacious
sounding stereophonic recordings. Early commercial examples
of these are open-reel "pre-recorded" stereo magnetic tapes and
long playing stereo records, especially those made by conductor/
producer Enoch Light, which were
transferred from the original master tapes. Using even more channels, many separate sounds could
be recorded at the same or different times and then blended
or mixed together after wards.
These mixed separate channels,
each often consisting of a single
voice or instrument, constituted
the final recording. "Liveness" and
a "sense of space" were therefore
constructed artificially. Gertrude
Stein's famous "There is no there
there" is amusingly applicable
here. Now this final recording, in
a somewhat contradictory sense,
becomes the actual performance.
Eventually, these individual tracks
"laid down" by various musicians
came to serve simply as a palette
of recorded sounds that enabled a
mixing engineer to become a sonic
auteur, the arbiter of the sound of
the recording, often to the dismay
of the original performing musicians who clearly had lost control
of their own sound.
One evening on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show the sound
reinforcement system went dead.
He remarked to the TV audience
that the "presence" of his voice
was missing as he spoke. Mercury
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

records had a line of classical
recordings marketed as, "Living
Presence." What, in fact, is "presence"? Milner devotes more than
50 pages to this nebulous concept.
Is it the aural illusion of "being
there" with the musicians or a form
of "constructed liveness" or even
"an improvement on reality"? The
quest for presence was multidirectional but one with a major discovery: the augmentation of recorded
sound with added echo. Columbia
Records had an echo chamber for
that purpose and one only has to
hear, for example, Dave Brubeck's
"Take Five" album to realize that
there was more to Joe Morello's
bass drum sound than the wooden beater he used to strike it. The
effect is more subtle on "Kind of
Blue" by Miles Davis. Those two
albums became recorded jazz best
sellers. Elvis Presley's voice on his
early recordings was given an odd
but interesting spacey sound by
Sam Phillips of Sun Records, who
simply but cleverly used a brief
electronic delay to add a single
echo to it. Modern enhancements
to recorded sound such as, for
example, slap echo, doubling, artificial reflections, and reverberation
were inevitable because they ultimately serve to sell recordings.
Milner clearly discusses compression of electrical analog versions of sound. In the ea rly
histor y of telephony, Bell Lab
engineers used a nonlinear electronic device to squeeze the range
between quiet and loud sounds for
voice transmission over electrically
noisy telephone lines. Then a complementary device was used at the
receiving end to restore the original dynamic range. This combination of compression and expansion,
called "companding," improved
voice quality by effectively reducing the interfering channel noise.
Compression alone is perceived as

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