In The Groove

Reflecting on when the Beatles pondered being 64

2011-07-26T17:23:00.006+08:00

I haven't written anything new on this blog for some time. I think I will start again for those few people that have read it.

In the last few months I've been working on a couple of scripts, and done a few lectures one of which I'll post in the next few weeks on film scoring.

Over this year I have reflected on my approaching 64th birthday, and when I first heard the Sgt. Pepper album and heard John and Paul wonder if someone would love them when they were 64. That was an interesting time for me as I was engineering and producing Prufrock and dating a very cool girl who lived in Montecito. We would talk on her couch about what life would hold on the journey to 64. I was sure Prufrock and music would be mine. She was still pondering where she might go. Prufrock went no where until 40 years later. http://www.prufrock67.com/ but I did do music. I sometimes wonder how her journey fared.

So many people of my distant past have found me. I am always amazed by what they have done with their lives.

And so I invite those who stumble across this blog and wants to say hi, please send a "be my friend" note via my facebook .

The gramophone, the oldest record label in the world and codifying the unwritten

2009-01-17T17:25:00.015+09:00

For the purposes of this introductory paragraph, the gramophone and the phonograph have been considered a single invention since the former evolved out of the latter to eventually replace it. Both were very inscribing, groove based systems.

The gramophone/ phonograph was the keystone innovation on which the record industry was invented.

The invention of the phonograph
A good place to begin an exploration of the technological development of the record and the industry it spawned is in the early 1860s. This was when a Frenchman named Leon Scott, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts), came up with a device called a phonautograph for tracing vocal patterns. A thin hog’s bristle quill was attached to the centre of a compliant diaphragm at the back of a tapered horn which concentrated the sound. The other end of the quill was a sharp fine point. A piece of smoked glass would travel past the point as a sound entered the horn causing a wavy line that corresponded to the sound vibrations to be scratched into the soot. A later version of the device positioned the stylus against a cylinder of heavy paper coated with soot. The cylinder was rotated by hand, and if someone shouted into the horn, an image of the vibrations were captured on the paper.

There was no provision to manufacture Leon Scott’s device as it was not a marketable product aside from its scientific applications, but it did point the way towards later invention. In 1877 a French inventor, Charles Cros, proposed the Phono-Graphos. He never had the money to build his idea, but it was much closer to what would become the gramophone. Cros described a method for recording on a round flat glass plate. He also suggested a means of playback. Like Scott, Cros failed to commercialise his idea because he could not see a wide market for the Phono-Graphos.

By the 1860s, telegraph and Morse code had become widely used. Two major problems were that the messages could not be stored and they could not be transmitted very far without requiring the weak signal to be listened to, copied and repeated by an operator. One of these young telegraph operators was Thomas Edison. In the late 1860s he figured out that you could take a magnetically actuated stylus and vibrate it up and down to emboss a waxed paper disc. To repeat the indented message the disc was flipped over so that the indented dots and dashes were now seen as a series of bumps of two different lengths. A “playback” stylus rode over the bumps, and, as it moved up and down, would make contact with a switch that repeated the original message. This was the first of a long line of commercially successful inventions by Edison whose inventiveness was only matched by his ability to develop his ideas into commercial products.

One day Edison heard his telegraph repeater operating at high speed and noted it sounded somewhat like music (Edison was not a particularly musical person). He took the same horn and membrane type “microphone” that Scott had invented and mounted it on a screw mechanism. This was made to travel across a revolving cylinder that had been wrapped in tin foil. When he cranked the cylinder and talked loudly into the horn a continuous groove was embossed which represented the sound. He then took the cylinder and played it back on a similar mechanism with a lighter and more compliant stylus and diaphragm. The first working model of the phonograph used an up and down motion called “hill and dale” recording and was patented in December 1877. Edison’s first recorded words to himself were “Mary had a little lamb”. The quick success of his invention had as much to do with his marketing genius as it did with its ability to record and playback sound.

Edison believed the phonograph would be used for archival purposes, not as a means of playing distributed duplicates. Edison wrote,

“We will be able to preserve and hear again, one year or one century later a memorable speech, a worthy tribute, a famous singer, etc... We could use it in a more private manner: to preserve religiously the last words of a dying man, the voice of one who has died, of a distant parent, a lover, a mistress.”

Within the scientific intellectual community, the phonograph was seen as a means of preserving truth and maintaining cultural stability. A prominent magazine of the time the Electrical Review (1888) speculated,

“Had Beethoven possessed a phonograph the musical world would not be left to the uncertainties of metronomic indications which we may interpret wrongly, and which at best we have but feeble suggestions; while Mozart, who had not even a metronome, might have saved his admirers many a squabble by giving the exact fashion in which he wished his symphonies to be played..”

In 1887 Edison licensed to Jesse Lippincott to franchise the phonograph as a dictating machine. He went about setting up 33 franchises across the U.S. All went bankrupt pursuing this misconception of application except for the District of Columbia franchise.

Incorporated on Jan. 1, 1889, by Edward Easton as the Washington D.C. franchise of the Jesse Lippincott’s North American Phonograph Company. It was one of 33 franchises set up to lease and service phonographs. All of them failed with the exception of the D.C. franchise. The D.C. operation quickly realized that the device was not suitable for dictating when, after renting a hundred units to Congress, got all of them back because they were evaluated as unsuitable for Hansard purposes. The only precursor of the record’s ultimate commercial success was the common practice to use the voice to demonstrate the quality of the recordings. Naturally a few demonstrations were sung, and of course some instrumental accompaniment was added. By and large however, the first companies involved in phonographs saw the device as a business machine.

It was seen as a tool for documentation, dictation and sound analysis for historical and scientific purposes and office, court, and hospital reporting. The phonograph was soon being used by researchers for anthropological and cultural field studies to document the oral histories and ceremonies of indigenous people. Some of the earliest phonograph recordings of indigenous people’s oral histories and ceremonies were done of the Torres Strait Islanders.

Many publications speculated on how it might have been if there had been a recording available of great events of the past and how in the future there would be such recordings. There were also descriptions of famous people making mistakes and these too became part of the record.

There was speculation that in decades to come, sound production would allow the removal of anything undesirable. Unfortunately the anticipated market had several problems with the device’s capabilities. The amount of time that could be recorded on each cylinder was very limited. The recording and playback machine, out of technological necessity, evolved into different machines to optimize performance thus eliminating the notion that one machine could do both. The machines were so bulky that portability was out of the question.

Other Edison licensees began commercializing cylinder phonographs in other applications more suitable to exploit the features of the phonograph, and the Washington D.C. franchise followed suit. A market grew in amusement arcades, carnivals, amusement parks, nickelodeons and in other public and semi-public establishments.

In a considerably less noble application the phonograph would find a market in whore houses. Recorded music became a common backdrop for amorous endeavor. Although there were probably many times when the privacy of a theater box provided a place for discrete interludes accompanied by music, and just as likely the hedonist might occasionally find a piano player in the salon of their favorite whore house, but a client needed to be a bit of an exhibitionist to perform while a live musician chorused him on. Records provided music without the musician thus eliminating a physical presence and a source of inhibition.

Columbia Records
Then the public began to buy phonographs. In general these playback applications required a ready supply of pre-recorded material and in 1890 the D.C. operation began to sell pre-recorded cylinders under the Columbia label (thus the oldest record label in the world came into existence).

The survival of this one company was due to its astute pursuit of alternate markets and because it began to sell recordings on the Columbia label (named after the District Of Columbia). By 1891 it had 200 titles in its catalogue and was the largest record company in the world. But a major obstacle in commercialising prerecorded material was the difficulty in duplicating a title. To produce a batch of 200 recordings of a march it had to be played 20 times in front of a battery of ten recording horns. For the phonograph to prosper as public entertainment, the production process and duplication had to be simplified and cost effective.

In 1900 it opened a London office and by then was selling both Edison cylinders and Berliner disks. Due to financial problems during WW I (1922) the U.S. operation was forced to sell its British subsidiary to the local manager Louis Sterling. A year later U.S. Columbia also failed and the British operation bought it from receivers to get access to the recently developed electric cutting system that was only available to U.S. companies.

The company was reorganised in 1925 and went international, operating under different names in different countries. In the U.S. it was known as the General Phonograph Company Inc. The company in the U.S. invested in broadcasting by taking over United Independent Broadcasters and renamed the U.S. operation the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting Co. During the depression in the 1930s, the company again had financial woes, and in particular, the performance of the U.S. record operation was poor (sales were 6% of 1927 levels). The broadcast network had potential but was equally unprofitable, so bad sales and the likelihood that it was in violation of antitrust laws due to this 50% interest in the Victor Talking Machine Company in the U.S. caused the company to divest its U.S. interest in Columbia.

Columbia U.K. was merged with HMV (the U.K. operation of the Victor Talking Machine Company) in 1931 and the company was renamed the Electrical and Music Industry (EMI). The U.S. radio network continued as the Columbia Broadcasting System and became profitable during the next decade. The U.S. Columbia Records was sold to Grigsby- Grunow, a manufacturer of refrigerators and radios. This company went bankrupt in 1934, and Columbia was sold to the Brunswick label.

The American Record Company had been formed in 1929 through the merger of three small labels, Oriole and Perfect, Romeo, and Banner. ARC acquired the Brunswick label (started in 1916) in 1931 and changed the name of the entire company to Brunswick Record Corporation which it was at the time of the Columbia acquisition. CBS bought Brunswick in 1938. CBS deactivated the Brunswick label and reactivated the Columbia label, later selling Brunswick to Decca in 1942. Outside the U.S. the Columbia label would remain EMI’s flagship pop label until the early 50s when CBS pulled out of its overseas arrangement with EMI. We’ll return to the EMI, HMV and Victor Talking Machine Company connections subsequently.

Beliner’s gramophone
A German inventor living in the U.S. solved the duplication problems associated with the cylindrical shape of the Edison phonograph. Emil Berliner would have been aware of Scott’s invention and it is widely accepted that he knew of Cros’s patent. Berliner’s approach used a round flat plate as a recording surface. This approach made duplication significantly easier whereby records could be pressed much like waffles and not very different from the way records were made until the CD came along (in fact CDs are also a pressed medium).

In 1895, Berliner formed the Berliner Gramophone Company and began to sell a hand driven player. An associate of Berliner’s, Eldridge Johnson, incorporated a wind-up spring motor and the modern gramophone was complete. The two of them started the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901 for the purposes of manufacturing gramophones and producing records.

Berliner’s foreign rights agent travelled to London in May 1898 in order to raise enough funds to establish a recording and pressing facility. To pay for an expensive patent war with Columbia, Berliner sold his patent rights in Britain and Europe to a group of English investors called the Gramophone Company. The initial catalogue of records was pressed by Berliner’s brothers in Hanover, Germany. During W.W. I the Hanover operation became Deutshe Grammophon which would evolve into Polygram.

In 1902 Columbia and Victor pooled their patents and put aside a legal case that was pending. This freed them both to put all their efforts into promoting their products. Between 1902 and 1906 The Victor Company, in order to stimulate record sales, gave away models of the Type P Premium Player when a customer purchased several records at once. Columbia began selling disks in the U.S. in 1901 but Victor quickly became the dominant label in America. In 1902 Gramophone manufactured the first 78RPM record and in 1907 a double sided disk was issued. In 1912 Edison introduced the diamond tipped stylus which further improved the reproduction quality. By 1917, both Columbia and Victor were emphasizing the ability of their machines to supplant a dance orchestra at the most elegant and stylish affairs.

In 1900 the Gramophone Company bought the rights to Francis Barraud’s painting of his dog Nipper sitting in front of a phonograph. The artist was paid £50 for the painting and £50 for the copyright providing he changed the phonograph to a gramophone. Barraud painted a gramophone right over the original. The name of the painting was “His Master’s Voice” which became a trade mark and label for the Gramophone Company. When Berliner visited London he asked to use the image as a trademark in the U.S. Berliner, Victor, then RCA have used Nipper. In Egypt, India and Moslem countries it was not used by HMV because dogs were considered unclean. In India a listening cobra was substituted for the dog on those records with Indian artists. In Italy it was never used because there, a bad singer is said to sound like a dog. Victor also used the logo for releases on its Japanese subsidiary which was sold to Japanese interests before W.W. II. JVC (Japanese Victor Corp.) continues to use the logo.

HMV and The Victor Talking Machine Company maintained an ownership in each other for 50 years. Johnson sold his interests to bankers Seligman and Sprayer in 1926. During the depression record sales dropped through the floor. The Camden New Jersey pressing plant was converted to making radios. Victor dropped most of its artists though many later appeared back on the label through the HMV connection. In 1929, the Radio Corporation of America bought Victor from the lawyers. RCA had no intention of continuing the record operation but wanted the company for the radio manufacturing facilities. When ASCAP began to claim that the radio industry should pay royalties for air play which eventuated in the first arrangement with the National Association of Broadcasters(1932), RCA realised that the Victor catalogue was a gold mine and decided to continue the label using the pressing plants that it had acquired along with the radio plant. The RCA-Victor label was begun.

Formalizing the blues
The exclusive patent rights that Edison, Columbia and Victor had, ended in 1917, but they continued to dominate the record industry though others were finding opportunities at the fringes. The growth of independent production accelerated with the introduction of the vacuum tube to the process which made recording easier and more portable.

By the beginning of the 1920s, regional, ethnic and culturally different music was beginning to be recorded by traveling field recordists who carried their equipment in the backs of their cars. They would set up in hotel rooms, bars, and music halls and record the best local performers. The artist was paid a small fee and the recordist/ producer would press records and attempt to sell the recording to the big city record companies. Initially, these recordings had little impact on the music industry but would have a significant influence on future generations of musical artists.

Music that had never before been written down, documented or copyrighted was now being codified for future generations. Did the recording of ethnic and regional blues, hillbilly, or folk music change this music? Of course it did. The recording process forced a honing of these songs into a structure that was just long enough to fill a 10 inch, 78 rpm record. This restriction became a catalyst in formalising the structure of the ethnic song.

It also immortalised forever those emotions that previously were conveyed only in the presence of the blues, hillbilly, or folk singers' performance. These recordings captured the music of the people, in particular black music, as well as hillbilly (later called country and western) and folk. Music which only existed as oral histories was now quantifiable and directly comparable outside of a public performance. This music now had stable roots from which others would build. Once created, the records provided a means of musical recollection of the life and times of these popular performers.

Recordings also changed the standards of ethnic composition and performances. When this music was entirely by oral delivery, cliche and borrowed music wasn’t a problem for the performers since those who were listening would seldom have heard the original source, and if they had, it was unlikely they would have been able to make comparisons from memory. The commodification of the performance allowed aficionados of the music to quickly compare and know when they heard someone play a stolen classic.

Building on the roots
Throughout the 20th century, the records of blues, hillbilly and folk artists of earlier times have been available for all to hear, providing a starting point for later performers to build on in their times. While this ethnic and regional music continued to evolve as an oral tradition, it was no longer necessary to follow these singers from one gin joint, music hall, or saloon to another in order to hear what they had to say. Once the records existed, the music could be discovered by each new wave of performers. Through the lyrics and performances of these songs, the recordings captured an impression of the lives, times and places of these singer/songwriters.

Bessie Smith learned to sing the blues by going on the road with Ma Rainey, but Billie Holiday could listen to Bessie’s records, and Aretha could build her music on what she heard in the records of Billie and Bessie. Not only have late 20th century singers been able to look through the phonographic window to the past, so too have instrumentalists. Eric Clapton (and so many others) could sit with Robert Johnson and pick up classic licks, even though Clapton was born seven years after Johnson died. Few pop music artists are void of influences from artists of the past. Records have connected all the times since the turn of the 20th century into a continuum, but with all the times of the past available at the same time just by playing a record.

As Frith described it,

“Popular music came to describe a fixed performance, a recording with the right qualities of intimacy or personality, emotional intensity or ease. ‘Broad’ styles of singing taken from vaudeville or the music hall began to sound crude and quaint; ... [This change also coincided with a different type of music entrepreneur, the record producer, who, unlike the music hall operator, had little contact with the audience or any experience with trying to please the public on the spot.] For the record industry, the audience was essentially anonymous.... "

In Europe... in the beginning... Opera
In Europe, right after the turn of the century, armed with a portable recording system Gramophone’s talent scouting technician Fred Gaisberg travelled all over Europe and into Asia looking for and recording every form of folk music and pub entertainer. In the beginning “serious” opera stars were loath to involve themselves with such gadgetry, but just when phonograph records were in peril of becoming an exponent of all things rustic, exotic and vulgar, legendary Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was signed in 1902 by the Victor Company and recorded by Gaisberg. (Actually Caruso was signed to the Gramophone and Typewriter Co. Of Italy. He would later sign directly with Victor.) He would have over 40 top ten hits. This marked a turning point for the fledgling HMV/ Victor record label that now had the opportunity to market high culture into the home. It made ownership of a gramophone not only acceptable but essential by the best families. The record labels promoted operatic arias that were short enough to fit on a record and they soon became accepted as examples of popular music. Enrico Caruso was a famous opera singer long before making a record, but the recordings he made between 1913 till his death in 1921 made him an international figure and extremely wealthy. His voice became known to millions of people who had never been to an opera and almost everyone with a gramophone had a Caruso record. He was the first artist to have a successful recording career. The Gramophone and Victor owed their success and survival through their infancy to Caruso’s popularity.

Further development of the recording process and the medium of distribution, the record, became a matter of perfecting the original invention. The amplifier was invented and introduced to the process and new materials and techniques were introduced but there was little change to the original concept until magnetic recording came along in the 50s, and CD suplanted records in the 80s (though in the 21st century somne still prefer vynal).

The record player
The expiration of the Edison- Columbia- Victor gramophone and phonograph patents in 1917 meant that dozens of companies entered the market. Record players were built for every taste. Some had features that today make one wonder what the designers were thinking.

The Ko-Hi-Ola for instance, was a phonograph with a built-in grandfather clock, a storage area for records and a “special” secret compartment. As the ad for the unit described, “The Ko-Hi-Ola is more useful than the ordinary phonograph, more ornamental than the usual grandfather’s clock and has exclusive features not found in other machines”. There were many manufacturers of phonographs. Most machines had some unique sales feature that had little to do with the sound. Most were commercial failures as were the companies which made them.

Phonograph players remained mechanical devices for sometime after electric recording began in the early 20s, but in order to hear the extended response of the electric recordings, larger horns were needed. The need for better reproduction equipment to hear the improved record quality pushed the development of electric record players so that by the mid 30s the large playback horns were disappearing and replaced with speakers. This was made possible by the development not only of amplification but a low cost stylus and cartridge that generated an electrical signal that could be amplified. The stylus was now connected to a piezoelectric crystal that when twisted back and forth along the modulating grove would generate an easily amplified alternating current.

Beginning in the 1920s, the gramophone became a centre piece for an evening’s entertainment with friends. It was a more social instrument compared to the radio which was also becoming a part of the modern home. No one knew for sure what would be on the radio, and if they did they had no control over it. On the other hand the person running the gramophone party had control of the material played. There could be discussion about what was heard and how it differed from other recordings.

For three generations to come, such record parties would be social events, but the nature of the event would change. By the fifties, a party goer would be younger and come with a “thumb full” of 45s and the player would be set up in the garage where there was enough room to do and demonstrate all the latest dances. What made the party a good one was if the participants brought with them enough of the latest releases.

The idea of sitting and listening to a recording, then discussing it continued through the 60s and 70s, the hippie generation and the concept album.

A short history of film sound and dramatic music

2009-01-03T16:20:00.005+09:00

Film music
Imagine for a moment that the commercial film had developed a bit differently. Imagine movies without background music. Raised in this hypothetical tradition, we are thoroughly accustomed to seeing a film where music is only present if played on screen by a musician, or comes from a radio or jukebox. This world resembles the “real” world, more or less, in its depiction of sonic space. Then one day, brought up in this relatively non-musical tradition, we attend a screening of a film from another dimension, say, Star Wars with John William’s epic score full of dramatic, and illustrative music. How unreal would this seem. What excess: every mood and action accentuated by a symphony. What curious classical music, robbed of its proper musical structure, it modulates and changes color, chameleon-like, in moment-to-moment reflections to the film’s images.

But that’s not how film developed. Movie music in fact predates the invention of amplified sound.

Starting with silent movies
The silent movies were hardly silent. Music and songs to accompany the projected moving image predates by many years the mass marketing of the talkies. The first music for a film may have been delivered by balladeers who were hired to sing and narrate the screenings of a silent movie adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera. However, short films with sound were being made as far back as 1900. The first film to have sound was shown at the 1900 Paris Exhibition where there were no less than three systems being demonstrated. One of them, The "Phono Cinema Theatre", featured an extraordinary array of acting talent including Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet who would read a script as the film was being shown. Popular operas were most often the subject of these early experimental sound films, but various technical problems kept sound films from becoming commercially viable for years to come.

The need for music to facilitate the action of a silent movie seemed to have been intuitively obvious to early silent movie-maker since, very early in the development of the film industry, it became common practice for a score to accompany major movies. The script would code the music to the picture and local musicians would attempt to keep up with the score. Film soon created a new style of music (dramatic music) and generated a large number of jobs for local musicians. A movie house of any size had a piano player and large theatres featured orchestras of various sizes playing appropriate accompaniment. The biggest movie houses built in the 30s were designed with large pipe organs that would play during intermission as well as through the picture.

The majority of silent movies however, did not come with a score, so the local conductor, or solo musician, would work out the most appropriate music for each scene. Many became skilled at thematic interpretation so the music would fit the images and move the story along (dramatic, comedic, historical, patriotic, etc.). Most of them drew on their knowledge of light classical music. More than anyone else, cinema musicians were responsible for the popularity of light orchestra music beginning in the early 20th century. As a result, the public was stimulated to purchase light classical music to play on their recently acquired home gramophones.
In 1919, a book of generic musical scores for silent movies was published, Music For Small Orchestras Suitable for Cinema .

For some movies, when they were shown in major cities, the orchestra would be quite large, as was the case for D. W. Griffith’s benchmark silent film The Birth Of A Nation, which was accompanied by a full orchestra score at each screening. In London, in 1922, the Australian conductor Eugene Goossens conducted the 65 piece London Symphony to accompany the United Artists spectacular The Three Musketeers. In 1925 MGM released The Big Parade which was about W.W. I, had a score that included a song that became a pop hit, My Buddy. This song is still popular in Irish pubs. Another movie that came with a score was Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 movie Modern Times. Chaplin, who had built his career in the silent era continued to make silent movies long after the talkies had become popular. This score also had a pop song Smile which was a hit record for Nat King Cole in 1956.

The introduction of the sound film came in 1927. Over night the talkies made redundant the movie accompanist and the local performance of music with the film presentation. The scoring and musical performance process was centralized to those centers where the rest of the movie was made. Composers and musicians who immigrated to Hollywood and other movie making centers found new jobs in scoring and recording for film. The movie directors and producers also gained more creative control over the music, the theater operator was able to reduce operating costs, and a consistent quality of performance was guaranteed. As an added bonus to movie goers, those theaters with large organs often continued the tradition of having an intermission performance. Radio City Music Hall in New York is probably the most famous movie theater to continue an intermission schedule. It may also be one of the last.

The development of film sound
Recorded sound that would accompany film predates by several decades sound that was integral on the film medium. In 1889 one of Edison’s protégées, Laurie Dickson, presented Edison with a demonstration of a silent film that was shown with the accompaniment of sound from a crudely synchronised phonograph record. In 1896 Charles Pathe used long play records and mechanically synchronised a Berliner gramophone to the projector. That same year Oscar Messter took this approach one step further by using several synchronised gramophones in an attempt to make the unamplified sound louder.

From the turn of the century to the late twenties, the development of film sound and record/ gramophone technology was closely interrelated. Once optical sound became well established, the two methods of disk/groove and film/optical modulation would continue to have an association but more through adapting.

The film industry in particular developed early in the process methods of interlocking sound recordings to picture, invested heavily in improving the recording and reproduction process, and industrialized the post-production approach to sound production (the adding, manipulating and mixing of sound after the vision is photographed). Things invented for the film industry were modified for the music industry and vice versa. Later when radio and TV came along, adaption of film and sound equipment would occur in these industries as well.

In 1907 Carl Laemmle of Paramount Pictures used a German invention called the Synchroscope to lock a record playback to a silent film. In 1906 Edison introduced the “Cameraphone” for synchronising a camera to a phonograph recorder, and in 1908 its playback system, the “Cinephone”, was available. The record would play at a standard speed and the projectionist would adjust the speed of the film in order to maintain sync. The system was not very good and the sound was always ahead or behind the picture. By 1913 Edison had perfected the “Kinetophone” so that moving pictures could be projected and synchronized to sound reproduction from a phonograph and horn that was placed behind the screen. In order to achieve sync, a long cord and pulley system ran between the projector and the phonograph. This was equally unsatisfactory since the cord frequently stretched, slipped or broke all together. The public was tolerant in the beginning and amused by the numerous incongruities of lost synchronization but the system did not improve and the public lost interest. None of these approaches were successful due primarily to the short time the record would play, the inability to maintain synchronization, and the limited response and loudness of the still mechanical reproduction system.

Between 1903 and 1910 there were several methods attempted to solve these problems. Developed in France, the Chronophone attempted to make the playback systems louder by taking the output of the record player and mechanically amplifying it using valves and compressed air. Many inventors were at work on methods of mechanically locking the projector to the phonograph. None of the systems which appeared before amplification were successful. While Edison would continue to work on synchronising records with film, the amplification breakthrough came from another lab.

Those discoveries that had grown from Bell’s telephone inventions would play a far more important role in giving film a voice. In 1912, Lee DeForest was finally able to convince the labs which Alexander Graham Bell established, Western Electric Co, that they should continue the development of the amplifier tube which he had patented five years before. The amplifier tube was already being used in broadcast, but now it would be used to develop electrical recording. The lab was starting to get good results when World War I broke out and the entire sound project was put on hold until after the war. During the war a lot of other experiments in the area of amplification were conducted. This work was useful when the recorded sound project was resumed. One of these components, the Thelofide photo cell, was used for communications during the war, and later was used as the sound reproduction cell in optical film playback systems. The Thelofide cell was used until it was replaced by photoelectric cells.

In the early 20s Western Electric built its own sound studio and set about shooting several in-house demos as it developed its process. It was so committed to sound recording that it created two teams simultaneously working on the problem. The one group was interested in using an electrical process to improve disk recording and playback. During disk recording, sound coming through a microphone was amplified and a stylus was electromagnetically controlled to vibrate laterally and cut a groove on the blank master. On playback, a stylus travelled along the groove, and this motion was converted into electrical energy that was amplified and reproduced by a speaker. One aspect of this development was the choice of record speed and disk size in order to provide enough time per record to match one reel of film. The disk diameter chosen was 16”, rotating at 33 1/3RPM (the speed Columbia Records would later adopt for their LP). Western Electric’s work included improving the method by which a disk could be synced to a film.

The other group explored a means of "filming" sound and making it a part of the same medium that held the pictures. For sound on film, the sound coming through a microphone is converted into a variable light beam that is photographed by a type of film camera. The sound is later reproduced as the now developed film passes between a photocell and a beam of light. The changes on the surface of the photocell are amplified and reproduced by a speaker. Their development required designing a new film path so that a smooth and continuous film travel would be maintained across for the sound reproducer mechanism of the projector while freezing at a regulated rate the movement of the image during each frame’s projection onto the screen.

Western Electric believed that disk recorded sound for film had some advantage over a new optical process in that the mass duplication of records had been perfected, while film sound processing was entirely new. It was this fact that made it decide to first introduce a system using records in sync with the film. In the long term however, it believed that the film should contain both the picture and the sound. While the recording and playback mechanism in both processes was different, the amplifiers, microphones, and speakers were nearly identical in their requirements. These three elements represented a common ground of development that would be needed before either of the processes were commercially viable. Western Electric made significant improvements in the DeForest amplifier design. Western Electric did not pursue magnetic recording. This was pursued by other labs and that story is in another post of this blog.

The lab’s E.C. Wente developed a high performance condenser microphone in 1916. The company had already gained extensive experience in speaker design and public address through its work in expo and convention installations, and in 1926, Wente headed a team that developed an efficient moving coil speaker suitable for large systems. Western Electric was well placed to dominate the film sound and record mastering business.

Optical recording prior to Western Electric’s involvement
We will return to the work at Western Electric later but first, the early history of optical recording is worth exploring. The development of optical recording has a history as long as disc recording and predates the appearance of silent movies. Initially, those developing optical recording did not specifically see its application as synchronised with moving pictures. Rather, an optical process was considered a more elegant, less crude, method for recording sound compared to the mechanical groove of the phonograph and gramophone. In 1878, Professor Blake of Brown University, using a vibrating mirror similar to the one Alexander Graham Bell had used, made optical recordings of speech sounds on a moving photographic plate. In 1879, Bell was able to transmit sound by talking along a modulated beam of light which was picked-up by a light sensitive device (selenium cells). He also photographed the sound. This approach became the starting point for many experiments. In 1880 Charles Edgar Fritts filed a patent for a process to photograph sound on light sensitive paper and later reproduce it by means of a photocell. While the literature was voluminous, no experimental hardware or demonstration was developed.

In 1885, Bell filed a patent for recording sound on round flat photographic plates. The system used a constant intensity light source that was projected through a small opening that was modulated by an ingenious method. Just above the place where the light went through the stationary glass aperture that covered the opening, a tiny jet of ink was directed against the surface. The ink jet was attached to a sounding board that picked up the sound. As the sounding board vibrated, the ink nozzle would jiggle in sympathy with the sound. This flow of ink would modulate the light that was striking the photographic disk.

In 1887 Eugene A Lauste, a Frenchman, joined Edison. He spent years working on various projects related to motion picture. In 1888 he had read an article about Bell’s work with selenium cells and reasoned that it should be possible to have the optical sound on the same film as the picture. It was not until 1900 that he had an opportunity to work on his idea. He worked for several years on the development of optical sound and in about 1905 moved to England. In 1906 he applied for a patent that showed a well thought out approach. To modulate the recording light, Lauste used a rocking mirror and a constant intensity light source. Unfortunately this system was too sensitive to camera vibrations. In 1910 began working with light modulators that proved successful. In 1901 Ernst Ruhmer, in Berlin, started publishing the results of his work in photographic sound reproduction. He worked on it for 12 years. Toward the end of the decade, some of his Photographophon films were brought to America and shown to William Fox of 20th Century Fox. Lauste also worked with Ruhmer in Berlin and then returned to the U.S. in 1911. While there, Lauste made what is probably the first motion picture film with sound made in the U.S. Lack of capital, the outbreak of W.W. I, and the unavailability of the amplifier halted the development of sound on film for nearly a decade. Lauste returned to the U.K shortly after his brief time at 20th Century Fox. The Tobis system of film recording was introduced in Germany in 1918. It used a modulated light source for recording and a photocell for reproduction. This system was first used by the large German film producers U.F.A. and Klangfilm. In 1923 a Danish system was used by Gaumont in France and British Acoustic Films in the U.K. It was also in 1923 when Lee DeForest demonstrated his Phonofilm system.

In 1920, Theodore Case patented a fast acting photo-cell system and two years later discovered that one of the tubes that he had used for a wartime communication system was particularly suitable as a modulating light source for optical recording. He also continued to improve the response of the photocell. From 1922 to 1925 Case worked with DeForest, with the result that several experimental pieces of equipment were built (primarily in cooperation with the projector and camera company Bell & Howell). Toward the end of 1925, Case and DeForest had a parting of the ways but both continued to independently develop film sound.

In 1926, Case showed his system to William Fox. Fox decided to license it and prepared a strategy to exploit the system which he called Movietone. Fox also negotiated an agreement with Western Electric to provide the amplifiers and speakers. In early 1927, Fox began showing newsreel type short subject sound films. They were shown before the silent feature film, What Price Glory?. The Movietone newsreel series continued for decades to come. Movietone brought contemporary history alive and created a taste for vivid journalism. In May 1927 Fox released Seventh Heaven with a fully synchronised film score. In 1929, the making of silent films by Fox was discontinued. Later, when the Western Electric light valve was adopted by the industry, Fox switched from the Case system.

In the U.S., the industrial giant General Electric had also become interested in film sound. In 1921, GE’s Dr Charles Hoax demonstrated a sound on film device that had grown from a radio code recorder that he had developed. Hoax also determined that a narrow optical track would provide acceptable performance. The outcome of this work was to conclude that the sound track could exist on the edge of the film without taking up an unacceptable amount of the picture area. The first movie to use the GE system, now called Kinegraphone, was a Paramount picture about the air force during W.W. I. The picture was first shown in 1927 and travelled to key U.S. cities with all the sound hardware needed to show the film. Westinghouse, during this period, was also working on speakers and photocells. In 1928, RCA established the Photophone company to provide optical recording and reproduction systems. Both Westinghouse and GE had an arrangement whereby RCA acted as the sales outlet for products developed by the two research and manufacturing companies. Several eastern theatres were equipped with the Phonofilm system, but the public reaction to the first sound films was so bad that William Fox, in 1924, ordered them removed from seven locations.

Returning to Western Electric
Western Electric had been trying to get the film industry interested in what it had developed. It showed its system to Nathan Levinson who had been employed by Warner Brothers to equip its Hollywood radio studio. Levinson went straight to Sam Warner who made the trip back east to see and hear the Western Electric system. He was convinced of its viability and set up a special demonstration for his brothers. When an orchestra appeared and music filled the projection room Harry Warner couldn’t contain himself:

“That’s the answer to sound pictures, no wonder this thing hasn’t taken hold. It hasn’t been done with showmanship. Think of it! Now we can bring fine music into small (theatre) houses that can’t afford orchestras. We can bring symphonies and opera and great performers into every town in the land and all over the world. Put the finest music by the best talent on the screen. By giving a voice to the screen, people from the four corners of the earth can be brought together through this visual and vocal medium.”

Warner Brothers took the plunge into sound even though the rest of the industry, with the exception of Fox, remained disinterested due to the public’s reaction to what they had previously seen and heard. Vitaphone was the name Warner’s gave to its version of the Western Electric process.

The first Warner sound presentation was shown in New York in August 1926. It was a collection of Vitaphone shorts featuring the great artists of the day. There was an introduction of the film, followed by Don Juan with John Barrymore. This was Warner’s newest and best silent film which also had a complete film score recorded by the New York Philharmonic. The sound program was a great success. Much of the success of the shorts had to do with the work that was done to make the artists respond to the camera and not act like they were playing to a concert theatre. But getting the artists to change their live concert style of presentation and work to the camera was not easy. A typical example was the reaction of the violin virtuoso Misha Elman to the new media. He would chin his violin, lean back and look at the top balcony. Patiently, Herman Heller (musical director for Warner Bros.) would explain that the camera would take care of that and his face would be in front of every member of the audience no matter where they sat. Again and again, Elman would say, ‘But I always look at someone in the top balcony when I give a concert’.

During the winter of 1926, Warners released two other silent films with full scores (The Better’ Ole and When A Man Loves) and packaged them with a collection of Vitaphone shorts. They too were successful. The Vitaphone score for The Better’ Ole was a medley of war songs and demonstrated the effectiveness of popular as well as light classical scoring. Elsie Janis, a popular artist at the time, sang the same numbers she had sung in her war time tours and was accompanied by members of the 107th regiment. With the exception of Fox, the industry remained unconvinced and considered sound films a fad that would pass.

On October 6, 1927 The Jazz Singer was released. On hearing the playback of a short speech that Jolson ad libbed between two songs Sam Warner decided to leave it in. Of the many strategic decisions he made, this may have been one of the most far reaching. It was the first time that an actor had delivered dialogue from the screen. The public was electrified, they wanted talkies not just synchronised sound. The film industry was now convinced. By the end of 1927, the other big producers, MGM, First National, Paramount, Universal and Producers, had evaluated the two major systems and had selected the Western Electric system. A construction boom began in Hollywood as all of the movie companies began to construct sound stages.

Western Electric was contracted to supply all of the technical expertise and sound recording hardware to the studios. In order to keep up with the demand, Western Electric went from 180 people involved with developing film sound in 1928 to 2400 installing it by the following year. Western Electric, RCA and the film companies who were working on developing the practical application of film sound had to confront the changes that were required in the production process in order for sound to be recorded. In Edison’s early sound work, the recordings were made and then, those on camera would lip sync to the sound. But for sound and picture to be simultaneously recorded the set had to be quiet. The practice of yelling directions and several productions occurring within ear shot of one another was over. The original reason why film makers came to California was for the many days of sunlight, with most sets being built outdoors. But the sound of birds flying by, or trucks driving behind the set could not be tolerated once the need for good sound became an issue. The sound stages became a necessity.
The equipment of film production that had been developed for nearly fifty years also had to become quiet. Everything from lighting to the camera itself needed to become quiet. The silent film industry had developed a lot of skill with camera movement, but the talkies had the effect of, at least initially, stifling mobility. Actors could only move from one microphone hidden in a flower arrangement to another hidden in a floor lamp. Within a couple of years, techniques were developed in sound booming of microphones and in post production dubbing that would make the use of sound no longer an impediment to the visual performance, but for a while, cinematography took a step back in order for sound to take a step forward.

RCA was equally busy during this period. It purchased a chain of theatres (B. F. Keith and Orpheum), a film production company (Film Booking Office) and organised “Radio Keith Orpheum” - RKO. The new company went about equipping its locations with the RCA Photophone system. RKO made many pictures using the name “Radio Pictures”. Photophone was also licensed to Pathe and Mack Sennett. One of the first features made by Pathe using Photophone was King of Kings directed by C.B. DeMille. The variable area optical recording system that GE had developed in the RCA system won preference over the variable density approach that Western Electric used. The consequence of this was Disney switching to Photophone in 1933, Republic in 1935, and Columbia and Warner Bros. in 1936.

The movie companies had to come to terms with which silent artists might have a suitable voice and make it into the age of talkies. The only thing rivalling the sound stage construction boom in Hollywood was the market in diction lessons. Many actors with European accents simply packed their bags and travelled back to Europe where talkies were also beginning to be produced. The talkies also eliminated the on set musicians who were there to get the actors in the mood. On the other hand, there was a whole new industry to develop sound with music editors, scoring composers, copyists, music producers, and studio musicians and engineers.
In the theatres

Public access to sound films was rapid. During 1928, over 1000 theatres installed Western Electric or RCA sound systems. By the end of 1929 nearly 5200 theatres in the US and 1800 overseas were equipped with sound systems, and 40 production sound stages were in operation. By 1930 there were about 13,500 theatres equipped with sound. Interestingly a high portion of them had both disk and optical playback. It would be some years before it became clear that the optical medium would prevail. Fortunately early in the process (early 30s) the sound performance criteria that the manufacturers of sound equipment and theatre sound contractors would aim to achieve in the playback system of a theatre was standardized. This was done to ensure that all films would sound the same regardless of the theatre’s equipment.

Through the years, the film industry has introduced many different sound formats such as Sensurround and Cinerama to name just two. In all cases these more exotic formats were used on special movies that feature multi-track surround sound coming from 3 to 6 locations in the theatre. In most cases these multi-track soundtracks were provided on separate magnetic or optical film, and were played back from a sprocketed sound reproducer that ran in sync with the picture. Films with elaborate sound were seldom heard outside of major cities where a few theatres were equipped with the additional equipment. With some films, the special equipment travelled with the film and was installed only for that film.

Up until the mid 70s when Dolby introduced its optical stereo playback system, the vast majority of movies that had been made were released in mono and with standard optical tracks. Multi-track sound was mixed to mono for the film to be shown in local cinemas. Dolby Labs began in the mid 60s developing and selling professional sound product designed to reduce the hiss of analogue tape recording. A scaled down chip based product was then developed by Dolby for the cassette machine and the emerging home multi-track recorder market. Dolby labs continued to work in the area of noise reduction and sound storage.

When the Dolby stereo for film system appeared it was quickly embraced since it was significantly less exotic then previous multi channel sound playback systems. In addition to achieving stereo utilising the same optical track width (as used in mono), the Dolby process improved the frequency response and dynamic range of the optical medium. Dolby redefined the sound specifications that had been in place since the early 30s. The cinema operator invested in Dolby sound as they needed something new in order bring back an increasing number of people that were staying at home and watching TV. By the mid 80s Dolby went one better then stereo TV when they developed a surround sound system using the same optical track area of the film.

Dolby and others (most note worthy Lucas Sound’s THX) evolved their technology into the digital realm. Dolby provides five to eight channels of surround sound and still on the same film as the image. While THX is used on some films, the Dolby system is far and away the most common. These surround formats are now an integrated feature of the home theatre. Most DVD films, broadcast programs, and many computer games have surround sound 5.1 (5= left front, center front, right front, left rear, right rear 1 = sub woofer) encoded in their audio that can be reproduced by low priced surround sound speaker systems for an enveloping home movie theatre experience.

One hardly need emphasize that the acceptance of music in film and television. Every movie goer, tin ear notwithstanding, becomes aware from time to time of the power of music in dramatic films. Such moments tend to occur when they take note of how emotional or overwhelming a film score has been. What has been blaring in the background the entire time suddenly comes to the foreground of consciousness. Suddenly the story is perceived to inhabit a world filled with musical sound, rhythm, signification, until a few scenes or measures later, we drop off, and once again become more involved with the story. Then the music is “working” once more, masking its own insistence in the background of the listener/watchers consciousness.

Today that story is told beyond our vision as we sit in the center of our home theatre. We can blink and miss a frame, or close our eyes if we are compelled to turn away, but our ears hear it all and pull us into the illusion of emersive cinema beyond the screen, outside of our 130 degree vision, to a 360 degree soundscape.

Put Another Nickel In:The role of the Jukebox in popular music

2008-12-19T18:53:00.013+09:00

Jukebox: The origin of the name
Somewhere in its early years, the coin operated record player acquired the name “Jukebox”. There are several theories about the origin. The most accepted is that the word “juke” is a corruption of the word “jook”, a black American slang term for dancing. The source of the music for this dancing would have been called a “jookbox”. A second version is that “jook” meant “sex” which may have made sense since brothels were some of the first establishments to install jukeboxes. A third source of the word may have been from the term “jute”, or “jute joints” where the jute picking workers relaxed, drank and danced. Whatever the source of its name, the jukebox of the 20s was generally associated with “speakeasies” and the “low-life” of prohibition since they were featured entertainment in such places.

Popular music first became a commodity through the entrepreneurial activities of carnival and penny arcade operators who made their own recordings and then charged admission to hear them on the newly invented gramophone. It was in response to requests by this group of users that the phonograph/ gramophone manufacturers began to produce prerecorded product.

This was an unexpected life line for the Columbia company that in 1890 seemed headed for liquidation, because the intended use of the phonograph as a dictating machine had been a dismal flop. Columbia and Edison began to realize that their market was somewhere else. They also recognized that in order to sell players, they had to produce and manufacture prerecorded product that the public wanted to hear. Initially the preferred programs for coin operated players were comic songs, bands, monologues, and whistling. The revenues from these “pay for play” machines was amazing in light of the fact that the quality was poor and the selection meagre. In 1891 some machines earned up to fourteen dollars a day, a lot of money at the time.

While accepting there was a market for coin operated carnival players, Edison feared they might create the impression that the phonograph was only a toy. His worries were unjustified, since the showman-operated players cultivated a consumer appetite for recorded music and a desire for home players.

As the turn of the century approached, the penny and nickel arcades were becoming an increasingly popular center for entertainment. There were hundreds of different coin operated amusements. The most popular of these machines were those that played music. Into this market came the Nickelodeon and the jukebox.

The first jukebox appeared close on the heels of the introduction of the phonograph. Louis Glas installed an Edison cylinder system at the San Francisco Royal Palace in 1889. In 1906 the Automatic Entertainer, which used flat disks recently invented by Berliner, was introduced by the John Gabel Company. The system was entirely mechanical but required regular winding of its spring mechanism. It was popular in spite of the poor quality.

In Paris, at the Pathe Salon du Phonograph, patrons could choose a musical selection, which would be played for them from the floor below where there were a battery of players. As in San Francisco, they would hear their selection through long listening tubes connected to the player's diaphragm. Claude Debussy after hearing this system for a few coins was concerned that the low cost of the disk and its availability would have the effect of cheapening the music. He did, however, acknowledge that the discs preserved a certain magic.

In 1913 Debussy wrote: "In a time like ours, when the genius of engineers has reached such undreamed proportions, one can hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer. Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic preserved in a disc that anyone can awaken at will? Will it not mean a diminishing of the secret forces of the art, which until now have been considered indestructible? ".

Debussy, like so many other classically trained musicians had fears that this new technology would impact on his beloved art, and probably his concert income. The jukebox and nickelodeon changed the way people heard the popular music of the day by placing the day’s hits within reach of the masses. Mechanical jukeboxes continued to be one of many amusement machines in these penny arcades, but in the late 20s with the introduction of the electric phonograph, motors and amplification, the modern jukebox became a reality.

In 1926, J.P. Seeberg, a Swedish immigrant to the U.S., invented an electric system that was coin operated and would play any of eight records. A year later Automated Musical Instruments introduced its electric jukebox. Unlike their mechanical predecessors, which could only be heard by fee paying patrons standing near the machine, these systems were capable of filling an entire room with sound. These innovations further popularised the jukebox and so began the modern jukebox craze.

The other two major manufacturers of jukeboxes appeared in the early 30s. Wurlitzer, a long time manufacturer of pianos and player pianos, introduced its first jukebox in 1933. And in 1935 David Rock-Ola (his real name), whose company had been building scales and coin operated games, introduced their first jukebox.

When the great depression occurred in the 30s, the jukebox business became the one bright spot for the record industry. For the public, a nickel would pay for six plays and like the movies of the day a few minutes escape from the depression.

There were two other historical events which helped the jukebox gain prominence. The repeal in America of prohibition in 1933 meant that there were now tens of thousands of bars, clubs and other drinking establishments that were installing jukeboxes for entertainment.

The second was the outbreak of W.W. II, and the relocation of millions of young soldiers to camps in far away locations. For entertainment, the armed forces installed hundreds of jukeboxes in PX’s and service clubs all over America and overseas. While these young people would have frequented their local jukebox back home, such machine would have had only a couple of types of music in the 24 available selections and these were chosen to suit the area and the jukebox’s clientele. But the military jukeboxes were unique in that they were stocked with a range of music to satisfy the varied tastes of those who had come from every part of the country and ethnic background. American blues, gospel, country and pop records were all thrown together on military jukes that introduced GIs to all sorts of new music that came from outside of their community and culture. Almost overnight, American regional music, never really heard on radio (which was extremely conservative at the time), was heard by those from every region of the country. Many of these young people were also musicians that would now explore, absorb, learn, appropriate, and embrace pop music styles they had never heard before. After the war this would have a significant impact on the coalescing of those musical roots that would form rock and roll.

On the home front during W.W. II, there was a growing juvenile delinquency problem with so many parents unable to pay attention to their teenagers. Dad was away at war, and Mom was working in a defence plant. During the early 40s, throughout America, youth centres were opened for after school and weekend activities. To bring in the teens, free jukeboxes were brought in, turned up, and rarely turned off. The program was successful.

But , by the late 40s, the jukebox had fallen out of favour with the conservative establishment and was increasingly considered a corrupting influence. One prominent critic wrote in 1948 that the jukebox was responsible for ‘the musical tastes of America’s youth starting on a steady decline." That year Frank Sinatra was the most popular artist in the country. For such critics, things would get far worse.

For many Americans, in the early 50s, rock and roll was the devil’s tool, and existed for no other purpose than to morally corrupt the youth. For the first time teenagers had their own beat and it could be found blasting out of the malt shop jukebox. By 1956 there were somewhere around 750,000 jukeboxes swallowing dimes in America. Since most radio stations were only playing the most sanitised rock and roll selections, the jukebox was the source for the majority of rock music, particularly those machines in racially mixed neighbourhoods. These machines had records of black artists who were singing rhythm and blues and early rock.

The public had heard from the pulpit and conservative press about the evil, passion firing sounds thumping from those machines at the end of the bar or in the middle wall of the malt shop, but when Evan Hunter’s book, The Blackboard Jungle, was made into a movie in 1955, the conservatives were convinced. They had not beaten Hitler to see their children's minds lost to the devil's music. When you added up the title song “Rock Around The Clock”, with the images in the movie, it was obvious to anyone over thirty that rock and roll equaled teenage delinquency. The jukebox had became an integral part of rock’n’roll imagery. It was a tangible object for conservatives to focus their concerns.

In many conservative areas of America, the government required a sticker stating that “Minors are forbidden by law to operate this machine”, but generally the jukes remained uncensored. However the jukebox operators were frequently placed under suspicion of jukebox stacking, a form of payola where they would be paid to put a record in the machine. Those who operate jukeboxes didn’t kick this image until the 70s.

Coin operated music delivery systems did not decline as gramophones became a common addition to the homes parlor. The opposite was the case. With the spread of recorded music reproduction systems within the upper middle class, and radio a desire was created for recorded music throughout the entire population. Coin operated systems allowed anyone for the price of a few pennies to hear their favourite and/or the latest record. Increasingly, these customers were the young. In general the first phonographs were controlled by older people (parents) whose musical tastes were toward classic and music of their generation. For what was new, the youth had to go to the juke at their local hangout. Not until the late 50s was the cost of reproduction systems, headphones, and the records themselves so affordable that young people could have a record player of their own that they alone could control. Most of them got that first record player with the detachable speakers as a Christmas present from a parent that never realised that from that day forward "turn it down" would become one of their most often used phrases.

Choosing what records would go in the jukebox was probably the origin of the “Hit Parade”, due to the limited number of records that could go into a machine, and the practice of installing new records weekly based on which ones were and were not played. The jukebox brought the choice of what music would be played down to who wanted to hear a song badly enough to spend a nickel. Often these would include recordings of local acts that were prominent in that specific community. By the mid 30s in every jukebox there was a smattering of local releases. By 1940, those who chronicled the U.S. record industry were recognising the importance of the jukebox. Jack Nelson wrote in Billboard that “coin operated phonographs, through a tremendously wide distribution, appeal to millions of individuals everyday, thus ensuring for this industry an important part in the next phase of American music”. The jukebox had become a significant centre piece anywhere small-town America gathered, and record sales to the jukebox operators were becoming significant.

The jukebox provided anyone with nickle instant grass-roots musical satisfaction. As Chris Pearce describes it , "It was the jukebox into which the lonely trucker at the coffee shop dropped his nickel to inspire dreams of his baby back home, the jukebox that the kids made for in Chuck Berry’s song when they wanted to hear something really hot, the jukebox that linked communities whose local operator stocked it with songs and dances from the old country".

From the 20s to the 60s, jukeboxes electronically and mechanically advanced by increasing the capacity of their changers, better amplifiers and speakers, selectors at each table, roll around selector, and so on. Of paramount importance was the “look” of the machine. The jukebox had to be visually exciting. The exterior design became a key to the jukebox’s success. Seeberg and Wurlitzer hired top industrial designers just when Modernism was coming into vogue. Translucent coloured plastic was starting to be widely used and was ideally suited for the illumination of the jukebox. Most manufacturers believed that the customer wanted to see the record changer work and a cabinet that lit up.

Wurlitzer dominated the post W.W. II market with its classic machine, the 1015, which featured coloured arcs and floating bubblers. But in 1948, Seeberg introduced the first jukebox to handle 100 selections, The Select-O-Matic 100. The number of records that could be played had gone from a couple of dozen records, to 50 records with both sides available for play. Until its introduction, the industry believed that 24 titles were all that were necessary for a selection of “pop” songs. The other jukebox manufacturers quickly redeveloped their mechanisms to accommodate more records when it became obvious that the customers wanted a wider selection. By 1956, 200 title were available in a jukebox. The expansion in capacity also meant that a wider variety of records could be available. Country and western, and rhythm and blues could finally live in the same jukebox with Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Bill Haley and Elvis.

Unquestionably the biggest change to hit the jukebox industry came in 1948, when RCA introduced the 45. Not only did they sound better than the 78s but they were lighter, smaller, and the centre hole was large and more suitable for automated operation. In short, it was the perfect record for a jukebox. The 45 in the jukebox of the 50s would become the focal point of the teenager and the first line source of rock and roll.

Until television forced radio to reinvent itself, it was the mass medium, and with few exceptions had generally ignored blues, country, and other regional or fringe music. The jukebox filled this void. In the fifties, it was the jukebox where teenagers would find the latest in music. They were doing what Teresa Brewer suggested “put another nickel in...” but they were selecting Chuck Berry whose advice was to go "up to the corner and round the bend, right to the juke joint you go in. Feeling the music from head to toe, round and round, and round you go. Hail, hail, rock and roll! Deliver us from the days of old!"

Teresa didn’t know it, but Chuck was saying her days as a pop artist were numbered as was the style of recordings she made.

These machines were more than music delivery systems, their external designs were trend setters in the art deco movement and an important aspect of their popularity. They offered the latest music at a time when most of the public could not afford to buy a record, much less their own playback system. The jukebox was key to the popular spread of country, hillbilly, rhythm and blues, and of course the development of rock and roll music. For a generation, the jukebox at the local hang-out was the only place that some of the “hippest” and latest rock and roll could be heard.

Their significance has declined over the last few decades but in the 40s through the early 60s they were an important focus for the young. Rock and roll might have been beaten down by the establishment if it had not been for the existence of jukeboxes in every bar, bowling alley and malt shop where young people congregated.

For some of those who were there, Buddy Holly and Bill Haley will never sound better then when they were first blasting from a jukebox after inserting a nickel in a Wurlitizer. For those who weren’t there, its hard to capture it all, since it wasn’t just the jukebox that held the sound, it was where it was happening in time and place when teenagers and rock and roll were being invented. As a 50s Wurlitzer ad stated “For millions, the jukebox was ‘America’s favourite nickel’s worth of fun’”.

The Myth of the Singing Cowboy

2008-12-15T11:25:00.010+09:00

Since country came from those living and working the land, it is only reasonable that those in countries with similar surroundings would relate to the same music and themes.

In America, Canada, Australia, and any other country with a similar anglo-Irish rural heritage droughts, floods, crop failures, poverty, and so on are all common to country folk regardless of the nation in which their country resides. Faith, hope and charity are also an important part of living and dying on the land (I think there’s a song there somewhere).

Country is, as Kingman states, “the closest thing to a universal ‘people’s music’.” A characteristic of country music is that nearly all songs share a few common themes. They will be about death of some sort (murders, hangings, suicide), love (requited, unrequited, divorcee, consummated, unconsummated), religion, trains and being on the road in general, and nostalgia (for the land, a life style past, a town, people, etc). DeWilde picks up this theme when he says “country music is a conservative view of life which is directly associated with a simpler time.” The last theme, nostalgia, is in fact an overarching patina which glazes the viewpoint of the other four themes, and one would have to consider nostalgia as a driving force behind the popularity of country music.

One must look to the initial commodification of country to see how nostalgic influences became a common thread throughout the fabric of country music.

European folk music immigrated throughout the U.S., but only took hold in the south. This may have been so because this type of music was more accessible to the mostly agrarian culture of the south compared to the classical tradition commonly found in the north.

In this part of America the industrial revolution was not quick in coming. Poor people, both black and white, had a subsistence living working the land. Change was slow and people clung to a heritage, and this was reflected in their music. This tradition brought with it a form of nostalgic recollection due to the very musical structure of many of these songs. The lyrics were often written and sung to melodies of earlier folk songs. In fact many of these song were first published in the mid 19th century as “broadside” lyric sheet to be sung to commonly known melodies that were reused over and over in new songs with different words. This practice continued in the folk songs found in the sparsely populated areas of the southern states of America.

D.K. Wilgus observed that, “a good many of the lyric songs of the early hillbilly tradition seem to derive from the nineteenth century sentimental parlour songs” such as the bluegrass song I’m thinking tonight of my blue eyes which has been the basis for several songs including “Great speckled bird, and It wasn’t God who made honky tonk angels”. The roots of the cowboy lament Bury me not on the old prairie was a repurposing of the old sailor’s tune Bury me not on the deep blue sea, while the archetypal western tune Streets of Laredo originated as a British song about a dying solder. Slim Dusty, the patriarch of Australian country, sang his most famous song, Pub with no beer to the melody of Stephen Foster’s Beautiful Dreamer. Many other examples are available. These melodies brought into a present time music reminiscent of the past.

This music as an oral culture thrived throughout Appalachia, and the highlands of the southern states. The mountainous geography of the region helped to give a name to this “hillbilly” music. The commercialisation of sound delivery mediums at the beginning of the 20th century dramatically changed all music, and (in America), by the early1920s hillbilly music was beginning to be recorded by traveling field recordists. They carried their equipment in the back of their cars, and would set up in hotel rooms, bars, and music halls and record the best local performers. Music that had never before been written down, documented or copyrighted was now being codified for future generation and more or less “fixed” in its version.

It also immortalised forever those emotions that previously were conveyed only in the presence of the singer’s performance. Once created, the records provided a musical recollection of the life and times of these hillbilly performers. A key starting point of this congealing came in the early 20s when Ralph Peer, working for Okeh records and equipped with a portable record cutter, went to Atlanta to record whatever he could find. His first sessions were with The Carter Family, and Jimmie Rogers.

In the same decade radio began to provide a soundtrack for the lives of people on the land. Radio could reach into places the industrial world had not effected. In 1922 WSB in Atlanta began broadcasting hillbilly music. In Nashville WSM started a “Barn Dance” program. The Grand Ole’Opry found it’s name by an off hand comment made on air sometime around 1927. In 1939 Opry went national over NBC. The format was to be copied in many stations throughout rural America and later in Australia.

But it was Hollywood that took hillbilly music and turned it into country and western, giving it its present day look and mythical persona. Eventually “western” was dropped from this music’s generic description.

Western/cowboy themes had been popular from the beginning of films. The idea of putting westerns and singers together to make a singing cowboy hero was the result of the popularity of western swing, the cowboy movie and the musical. A popular subgroup of hillbilly music that was sweeping out of Texas. Musical westerns was only made for about ten years, (From the mid 30s to the mid 40s) but in that time literally hundreds of them were released. Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and the Sons Of The Pioneers were the most popular of the cowboys (and cowgirls). These movies portrayed a time when America seemed more innocent. There was still a frontier (sparsely populated with benevolent Indians), good and bad was clear-cut, and most heroes wore white hats and silver buckles. The popularity of the songs and performers in these Saturday matinee shoot-em-ups, became an agent for change as commercial hillbilly music turned into country (& western). Even many of the performers at the bastion of hillbillydom, Nashville’s “Grand Ole Opry”, took on these airs. While the historical accuracy of the Hollywood cowboys and girls is virtually non-existent, their look is the image of country music as we know it today.

As Vaughan describes; “Country had always relied on a bedrock of sentiment and nostalgia but the (film) cowboy took it even further. Their wistful visions of times past, rolling prairies and tumbling tumbleweeds would stay with country music throughout enormous musical changes over the coming decades.”

This is the model found under the cowboy hats of contemporary Australian country music, which by its fabricated origin reflects at least a partially imagined past. This is not to say that those involved with country music are living a lie, but one might say they are extending an image that has much of its basis in a manufactured creation that was from the onset tied to a nostalgic romanticisation of the past.

In fairness history is seldom absent of nostalgia and its influence, and even if it did exist would such a view be somehow more accurate and authentic. It is but one of many ways of viewing history, and as valid as any of the others.

Allen comments that “to many young and city people the bush ballad is outdated, and associated with an older and disappearing Australia”, however an increasing number of urbanites relate to country music themes. This century’s generations have had increasing difficulty finding new challenges and their own space, hence they often look to the past, to when there was “land, lots of land, and a starry sky above” (“Don’t Fence Me In”. 1945) Sung by Gene Autry in the movie of the same name.

The attributes of contemporary nostalgia as found in country music does have a certain point of recollective viewpoint. As Lowenthal observes such material, “They mainly envisage a time when folk did not feel fragmented, when doubt was either absent or patent, when thought fused with action, when aspiration achieved consummation, when life was wholehearted; in short, a past that was unified and comprehensible, unlike the incoherent, divided present.”

Much of traditional country music follows these precepts and is unswerving in its standpoint. “Country music is more concerned with individual experiences, family values, togetherness, and old fashioned solutions to current problems. Critics of country music say it lives in a past of long-gone glories- the space age, technology, the future, and even wars (with few exceptions) are usually ignored. ( Allen)”

Slim Dusty seldom sang songs that weren't nostalgic. From under his drover’s brim, he portrayed a time when things were simpler as he would recount old friends, and brave deeds. Both the Pub with no beer, and The rains came down in July are songs of past events. These songs satisfy what Rosenblatt would suggest is the listener’s “desire to get out of modernity without leaving it all together; ... to relive those thrilling days of yesteryear, but only because ...(they) are absolutely assured that those days are out of reach.” What makes country music so nostalgic is that much of it is framed as personal memories of the performers thus fitting into two popular forms of reminiscence; nostalgia and what Kenneth Hey describes as dis-history. Hey explains, “Nostalgia reduces the past to a personal memoir. It eliminates external balancing information and prefers to project anecdotal stories in place of the general historical knowledge. Dis-history reshapes the past to create an effective story for contemporary purposes. Accuracy matters less than impact, honesty carries less weight than persuasiveness, and integrity comes far behind the “sell”. Together, nostalgia and dis-history portray a manageable world.”

The perception of memories and nostalgia are as varied as the population, but country music holds a unique position since it reflects a segment of society that has an inherent stability attached to the timelessness of pastoral life. Country music is both forthright in depicting the frailties of people, and conservative in it portrayal of social values. Here too it’s text is a suitable nostalgic artifact. As Lipsitz explains, “Progressive and conservative elements interact in any memory of the past, and that the specific contexts in which these elements are deployed, rather than their focus on the past or present, determines their social meaning.”

Country music conveys a country life. Those in urban centres, are persuaded by these images, and many have a longing to be a part of it, if only vicariously through the music and associated images. As Rosenfeld puts it, “People look to specific music as symbolic anchors in regions, as signs of community, belonging and a shared past.”

While most other popular music seems to continually feed on its past through a never ending deconstructive then recontrustructive process that often neglects to recognise its sources, country music builds and acknowledges its past. This provides a historical continuum. While the country image has its roots in the media generated singing cowboys, and the sound of the Nashville music machine, its moral fibre is genuine. Most of the people in country music have grown up in the bush, and intrinsically understand the fundamental values and philosophy of this lifestyle. Their songs reflect a pride in the past, imagined or real.

Country music as a commodity has become a means of contextualising a certain history. Folk rock artist Steve Stills once cautioned “Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now”, but it is that past which gives some stability to the lives of those living in the late 20th century.
“In a world devoted to progress and change, the past becomes ever more precious the more it disappears. Human beings act to change and ‘improve’ the world, but as a result, many feel the sting of disconnection from the past, seeing the villages of our childhoods turn into what Berman calls ‘little worlds emptied out.”(Lipsitz)

Present society’s interest in history feeds this nostalgia in several ways, chiefly, the vast number of media and industrially created artifacts that are available. The plethora of real, looks like, or in the style of artifacts, memorabilia, and reproductions makes it possible for everyone who has a yearning for it to have a piece of the past.

Country songs are even more unique because they are an acquisition of the mind, and for most people a physical holding of the vast majority of these recordings is not important. Only to hear the song stimulates a nostalgic recollection. While large numbers of people are leaving (or are being forced to leave) the country life, and cities become further concentrated, there exists a yearning within many urban cowboys for a life in a time when there was more independence, more resourcefulness, less ambiguity, and simpler. Country music portrays a present that reflects back to “a halcyon prototype of yore that we all can share in”. (Jacobson)

Bibliography
Allen, M., (1993) Country music in Australia, in Seal, G. & Davel, G. (eds). The Oxford companion to Australian folklore, Melbourne: Oxford press. (From Mus 12 course notes, p.87)
Attali, J. (1977, English translation 1985: Translated by Brian Massumi). Noise: The political economy of music. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press
Clarke, D. (1990). The penguin encyclopedia of popular music. New York: Penguin Books.
DeWilde, C (1996) Third week of lecture series: American Music and Popular Culture, ABC: Open Learning
Hey, K.R. (1987, Nov.) The Reel World: Nostalgia and Dis-history, USA Today, New York
Kingman, D. (1990), American music: A panorama. Schirmer books: New York
Lipsitz, G. (1990). Time passages, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.
Lowenthal, D. (1985) The past is a foreign country. Cambridge. In Chase, M., & Shaw C (Eds.), (1989) The imagined Past: History and nostalgia (P. 1). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lowenthal, D. (1989) Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t. In Chase, M., & Shaw C (Eds.), The imagined Past: History and nostalgia (pp. 18-32). Manchester: Manchester University Press
Jacobson, M (1987, Oct.), The Way We Weren’t, Esquire, New York
Rosenfeld, A.H. (1985, Dec.) Music, The Beautiful Disturber, Psychology Today, New York
Stills, S. (1969) song Suite Judy Blues Eyes (inspired by a love for Judy Collins)
Vaughan, A. (1992). The world of country music. London: Studio Editions.

Popular music's Sound- A commodity of fashion and style

2008-12-01T14:42:00.007+09:00

The sound of popular music can be clearly compared to other forms of seasonal commodities such as fashion and style. "The sound” in later times provides a key identifier in time stamping that music, much as bell-bottoms, the hula-hoop, and whitewall tires have become fashion statements associated with certain periods. Like fashion, some of these sounds periodically reemerge; some become an on going fabric of music production, while others are never heard of again.

As in any other commodity/ consumer paradigms consumerism and commercialism drive this thirst for new sounds. The predominately young music consumer seems to have a never-ending appetite for the latest products from the music industry. Unlike the fashion industry where styles are seldom worn past their season until a generation later when they may be rediscovered, greatest hits collections and classic albums from every period remain part of the active playlist of life. In fact, the greatest hits of any year will be on the market by midyear. These recordings form sonic postcard collections of previous times.

Before records and technology’s impact on music production, musical passages and phrases, a good story, and a memorable chorus were the primary identifiers of a pop song. They are still important, but these “hooks” now include “the sound”. Those in music production often refer to the sound of a recording separate from the song. A recording can have a good or unique sound and at the same time the song may be inconsequential.

The public is equally interested in “the sound”, and their desire to hear every bit of it is reflected by their willingness to buy expensive home and car stereos and the proliferation of the personal delivery systems, the iPod phenomena.

As Dick Clark once commented “[the sound is] what the kids listen for... the more different, the more original, the more unique the sound is, the more chance a record has of becoming a hit”.

To place some indication on how much sound has become a marketable, and identifiable commodity, geography plays a part. At various times a collection of hits emerge from a certain geographical region and the style becomes identified with that place. The sound of New Orleans, Chicago, Motown, San Francisco, Merseyside, Londonbeat, Memphis, Liverpool, West Coast, Mid Atlantic, Nashville, Jamaican, Brazilian, Euro, are just a few of the places associated with a certain style of sound that have received world wide attention during a certain period of time.

“The sound”, in many cases, could be described as a formula that in and of itself is marketable commodity that is in the first instance sold by a producer to the record label. The ingredients, which make up this formula, come together as new devices become available and naturally enough each subsequent wave of music producer builds on and modifies earlier formula. Often they are so identifiable with the state of the technological art of the time that the trained ear can place the year of production based on the sound.

Sound and music became a commodity incrementally starting at the beginning of this century, but a large leap occurred when Les Paul made the recording studio a place of creation not merely of documentation. He was the first to use the technique of overdubbing, a cornerstone of the modern pop music sound, and was years ahead of what has become common practice. Essentially, an artist records a vocal (or other instrument), and then, while listening to what they have already recorded, they record another track. In the case of vocals, this creates a bigger then life sound. It also makes it possible for a solo musician to play every part in a recording. Using this technique Les Paul teamed up with vocalist Mary Ford and they changed the way pop music sounded. Together they had 28 hits between 1950 and 57. The best known are "How High The Moon", "Mockin’ Bird Hill”, "Vaya con Dios”, and "Tiger Rag”.

By and large, the music industry saw multi-track and the “overdubbing” technique as Les Paul’s sound, and not a general tool for music production. In the early 60s the Beatles and the Beach Boys would change all that.

Countless examples abound where a sound production technique becomes a bankable commodity. They are often associated with sounds that people have never heard before. In the 50s Ross Bagdasarian had been making records as a songwriter and arranger. He had a particular knack for writing novelty songs. In 1958 he had a hit with "Witch Doctor” in which he sonically conveyed a shrunken head singing, by recording the vocals at half the tape speed used to record the instruments and playing it all back at normal speed. The singing went up in pitch by an octave. Later that year he invented an alter ego, David Seville, and introduced a vocal trio using the technique as on his earlier hit. “The Chipmunk Christmas” sold 3 1/2 million copies in five weeks. Alvin, Simon and Theodore, between 1959-1980 made eight chart albums selling over 30 million copies. In more recent times they continue to be seen on Saturday morning toons.

Phil Spector created another landmark pop sound. His work is note worthy because he may be considered the first record producer to have attained “star” status for the sound he achieved. Spector’s “wall of sound” hits with The Crystals, The Righteous Brothers, The Ronettes, and Tina Turner’s classic "River Deep- Mountain High”. All had his distinctive sound. This sound was exclusively associated with the reverb chambers at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. Many other top artists of the era also used the Goldstar chambers, including Sonny & Cher, The Iron Butterfly, The Stones, The Beach Boys, and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The Goldstar chambers were so popular that the owners built two copies and leased them to other studios that would run high-quality telephone lines to Goldstar in order to use them. The Phil Spector sound and those chambers were a commodity for a while in the 60s.

In this decade a substantial percentage of records have some production aspect or sound taken from the past— the sound of nostalgia. We live in a time of interchangeable parts, music is in an advanced state of industrialization where mass produced components are used and reused in everything. The vast reissue on CD of long lost catalogs has allowed all previous decades to be available in our time. The 1990s was the redecade of reissue, review, reflection, reuse, and reprocess.

Today’s record producers have the texture, style and tone of all the other decades to draw on. And, Deja vu is the prevailing vu for most of the population. Songs and fragments of songs from the past in the latest music stimulate the recollection of countless personal histories.

For the music producer, the latest techniques and “sounds” are directly associated with the hardware that creates the components from which they construct musical productions. Hundreds of production equipment manufacturers jostle for market share. The most popular processes have become commodities in the marketing and application of these devices with other manufacturer quickly copies these features.

The sounds that these devices create may be as clearly identified as a specific preset program on a digital effect, or it might be quite beyond a layman’s description. In either case, the sound created will be tangible to those who care, if by no other way then through some comparison to earlier recordings.

The desired sound may come from a state of the art device, or a vintage piece of equipment, because unlike other types of technology that drop older state of the art in favor of the latest innovations, sound producers prize vintage microphones, sound generators and processor devices for the qualities they have. Some of these qualities are so characteristic that modern digital multi-processors have presets that attempt to create the attributes of these vintage devices. The manufacturers of production equipment, have in a sense, made a commodity of sound processes. An example is the preset on a device by Aphex that is “Tubesence” which supposedly delivers the sound of a valve amplifier. And of course there is a major reemergence of the manufacture of valve audio equipment.

Over the past three decades, signal processing has become significantly more elaborate, diverse, and much more than merely an enhancement of the sound entering the microphone. It has become an integral part of the overall production. Today, where the “musical instrument sound” ends and the “effect processor sound” begins is in most cases seamless. The variety of effects would seem to allow an infinite number of sounds to be used on the myriad of recordings made, however, in practice this has not been the case.

The desire of producers to make records that sound commercially familiar has created a remarkable number of productions that sound alike. The phenomenon has been made easier by the variety of pre-set programs that come with most sound generators and processors. By switching from one setting to another, the sounds from dozens of records can be heard. The preset computer program in the processor generates nothing except in response to a signal passing through it. Here we have sonic artifacts that have become marketable commodities. For instance reverb sound are cataloged by the type of instrument that might go through it as suggested by the manufacturer. A gated reverb snare exists on every processor made today. Most reverb device retain pre-set term that reference devices of the past. For instance, "plate" reverbs.

At the heart of rock and roll is guitar distortion; in this case a common denominator is the Celestion G-12 speaker that is in an overwhelming number of guitar amplifiers made by a number of different manufacturers. Ken Bran, the engineer who headed the introduction of the Marshall amplifier that was first made famous by Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, acknowledged that without Celestion they couldn’t have accomplished half of what they did.

In the beginning, Celestion was probably unaware of the desirability of speaker distortion. They had spent decades trying to build distortionless speakers, but the company quickly understood that speaker distortion was a key selling point.

As Celestion's promotional material states, “The paper edge cone of the classic G12 and its resonate break up characteristics are the starting point from which many of the modern guitar loudspeakers have been developed”

This speaker was first introduced in 1969 and continues to be sold with the assurance that the characteristics of its distortion hasn’t changed through the years. Here is the subjective, absolutely unquantifiable attribute of some form of unique distortion that has become a marketable commodity.

During the past few decades, an abundance of performance processors have been invented to add distortion to the sound coming out of a guitar. Two are particularly noteworthy. The fuzz-tone effect pedal was first marketed in 1963. Charley Watkins described, "It was an exciting sound- as if the speaker cone was being torn apart." In 1963, Hold Me by P.J. Probe was one of the first chart records to use a fuzz-tone, but the record to place fuzz-tone effects at the top of any guitar players shopping list was the 1964 debut single for the Rolling Stones, the classic Satisfaction. Interestingly, Keith Richards dismissed the prominence of the fuzz effect as a gimmick.

The second is the Cry Baby Wah Wah pedal which can make the guitar sound as though it were speaking. As the pedal is rocked back and forth a notch of frequencies are enhanced. The wah wah remains a backbone sound of rock blues soul music and became a recognizable commodity when used by Jimi Hendrix on All Along The Watch Tower and Eric Clapton on Cream’s 1967 hit Tales of brave Ulysses.

Stereo became a fashion statement soon after it was introduced in the late 50s when the first generation of "ultimate" playback systems appeared on the market. People would fill hi-fi stereo shows that were held in most major cities. This was triggered by the introduction of stereo, the LP, and the microgroove record. A great many successful recordings were produced for the stereo enthusiast. Trains would race from one speaker to the other. No matter how small the listener’s accommodation might have been, the infinite space of recorded music could overlap and open the confined space the listener occupied. The two spaces would conflate to create an environment with no walls to restrict the many worlds that could be presented between those stereo channels. The sonic image of space had become a commodity.

Today surround sound has allowed the consumer hi-fi industry to reinvent itself as the consumer now sits in the showroom and hears why 6 speakers are better then two when space ships wiz around the room.

The Role Of A Sound Engineer - An answer from the bottom of a box

2008-11-22T18:57:00.004+09:00

I am currently revisiting the material that was used to make the Shaping Your Sound Videos. Thompson Publishing, who continues to distribute the videos asked me if I would write a book on microphones and how to use them. Sort of a long overdue companion to the microphone video. For the past 9 months I’ve been working on it. Recently I was looking for some background material that I thought was in a box of stuff that, for various reasons, I’ve kept over the years. As often happens, I became distracted reading other bits of paper including a short essay to a question I would ask in the final of a recording course I once ran. Judging from the aging colour of the paper it must be 15- 20 years old. It was written by a student named Krishan, I don’t remember his last name.

Every few years I find myself in that box, and rediscover Krishan’s answer, and rereading it, I decide to continue to keep it. I think it remains an amusing read with insight seldom found in some one just starting out, which is why I kept it. I always wonder if Krishan made it in the business.

With its age in mind, and allowing for the references to tape, This is the first time I’ve shared it.

The role of the studio sound engineer by Krishan

The role of an engineer in a studio session is just that – to engineer. By definition it is his or her job to know how to operate all the machinery and equipment found in the studio and make competent and satisfactory recordings for the client. However to follow only this stiff definition would really be unsatisfactory in the “too cool” world of rock and roll.

Firstly - You must try to get some idea of the music you will be recording – going to gigs of the bands is a good start, and you will get to meet the members of the band outside of the sometimes scary realm of the recording studio.

Then - Know before hand who you will be working with. E.g. Tape ops, assistants, etc. Will the band have a producer? (If not will you be expected to produce?) Try to get an idea of what the band wants to achieve before you begin to record e.g.: a single eight track demo, or the big break, multi-platinum, 48 track, number one charting EP.

Know the studio equipment. Being familiar with all regular gear is the studio is very important. Do they want to use any weird stuff? If they really want to use that new fangled multi-splitter electro auto gold maker effect box, get them to bring one in so you can learn what the heck it does.

When you begin to record make sure that everyone relevant to the project has been introduced. Having some sort of a goal, for the day, and/ or talking through the desires of the producer/band (apart from drugs, food, and women) can be helpful.

Now you can begin to record. That’s your job. You must work with the creative process, yet still follow the formulated recording process.

Tips:
Cool: - “Being Cool”. Everyone wants to be “cool”. You must try to be cool with the band and their way of working. Being perceived as a “Cool Dude” is a sure way to gain respect from the band and their producer. From there it is only a short step to being “Cool” together. Mutual coolness works wonders in the “juice” department (more on that later).

However: Being “Cold”. Loosing your “Cool” or even worse, blowing someone else’s “Cool” can have terrible consequences.

Girlfriends: Inevitably the bands hangers on will want to observe the “amazing” recording process. You can expect: girlfriends, friends, parents, pets, friend’s friends, the pizza boy, and the inevitable bands “official” drug dealer all wanting to hang out. This could be “Cool” up to a stage but the moment it starts infringing on the creative process, it’s time for them to leave. Sometimes turning up the speakers just won’t be enough, and you will just have to turn down the speakers and as “Cooly” as possible point them to the door (minus any mics, leads, effects boxes that they were “just checking out man”).

Drugs: It is almost inevitable that at some stage in the recording process, drug use will amalgamate itself with “Cool”. Using drugs is a personal decision and studios being the places they are, with plenty of razor blades, glass tables, dimable lights, and not to mention being the “coolest place in town”, are often conducive to such behaviours. Keep in mind, however, that drugs affect the way you work, not to mention the way you hear, so abstinence is often the best policy.

Creative Input: Most bands will have a producer, and producers come in as many assorted varieties as drugs. Some will be emotionally involving, some insightful, some distant, some exciting, some draining, uplifting, some will put you to sleep and nearly all, if experienced too often, will drive you crazy!!! However, they are in control of the creative direction. And you must work out where you stand. Do they want your opinion? Sometimes? All the time? Never!? Working within their (and the bands) creative parameters will help you succeed in your job?

Read on:

The Juice: The most elusive and yet important part of any album, its recording, is the only way you can even hope for success. Yet how to capture and record that elusive beast?
Well, to quote Hermann Hesse “No true knowledge can ever be communicated”, so you only hope to be “Cool”. Seriously. Being on the correct level of communication with the artists, almost telepathy, is one sure way to get any juices that they have, flowing. To get to this stage a careful combination of the previous suggestions will help incredibly.
Good Luck
Krishan.