know we only have one chance, one fleeting opportunity to
DAV I D BY R N E | 75
grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened. Imagine, as com-
poser Milton Babbitt did, that you could only experience a book by going to a reading, or by reading the text off a screen that displayed it only briefly before disappearing. I suspect that if that were the way we received literature, then writers (and readers) would work harder to hold our attention. They would
avoid getting too complicated, and they would strive mightily to create a memorable experience. Music did not get more compositionally sophisticated when it started being recorded, but I would argue that it did get texturally more complex. Perhaps written literature changed, too, as it became widespread—maybe it too evolved to be more textural (more about mood, technical virtuosity, and intellectual complexity than merely about telling a story).
Recording is far from an objective acoustic mirror, but it pretends to be
like magic—a perfectly faithful and unbiased representation of the sonic act that occurred out there in the world. It claims to capture exactly what we
hear—though our hearing isn’t faithful or objective either. A recording is also repeatable. So, to its promoters, it is a mirror that shows you how you looked at a particular moment, over and over, again and again. Creepy. However, such claims are not only based on faulty assumptions, they are also untrue.
The first Edison cylinder recorders weren’t very reliable, and the record-
ing quality wasn’t very good. Edison never suggested that they be used to
record music. Rather, they were thought of as dictation machines, something
that could, for example, preserve the great speeches of the day. The New York Times predicted that we might collect speeches: “Whether a man has or has not a wine cellar he will certainly, if he wishes to be regarded as a man of taste, have a well-stocked oratorical cellar.”2 Please, try this fine Bernard Shaw or a rare Kaiser Wilhelm II.
These machines were entirely mechanical. There was no electrical power
involved in either the recording or the playback, so they weren’t very loud compared to what we know today. To impress sound onto the wax, the voice or
instrument being recorded would get as close as possible to the wide end of the horn—a large cone that funneled the sound toward the diaphragm and then to
the inscribing needle. The sound waves would be concentrated and the vibrat-
ing diaphragm would move the needle, which incised a groove into a rotating
wax cylinder. Playback simply reversed the process. It’s amazing that it worked at all. As Murch points out, the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn’t beyond them. For all we know, someone
76 | HOW MUSIC WORKS
at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it. Odd how technology and inventions come into being and fail to flourish for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the skill, materials, or technology available at the time. Technological progress, if one can call it that, is full of dead ends and cul-de-sacs—roads not taken which could have led to
who knows what alternate history. Or maybe the meandering paths, with their
secret trajectories, would eventually and inevitably converge, and we’d all end up exactly where we are.
The wax cylinders that contained the recordings couldn’t be easily mass-
produced, so making lots of “copies” of these early recordings was an insane process. To “mass produce” these items, one had to set up an array of these
recorders as close as possible to the singer, band, or player—in other words, you could only produce the same number of recordings as you had recording
devices and cylinders running. To make the next batch, you’d load up more
blank cylinders and the band would have to play the same tune again, and so
on. There needed to be a
DAV I D BY R N E | 75
grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened. Imagine, as com-
poser Milton Babbitt did, that you could only experience a book by going to a reading, or by reading the text off a screen that displayed it only briefly before disappearing. I suspect that if that were the way we received literature, then writers (and readers) would work harder to hold our attention. They would
avoid getting too complicated, and they would strive mightily to create a memorable experience. Music did not get more compositionally sophisticated when it started being recorded, but I would argue that it did get texturally more complex. Perhaps written literature changed, too, as it became widespread—maybe it too evolved to be more textural (more about mood, technical virtuosity, and intellectual complexity than merely about telling a story).
Recording is far from an objective acoustic mirror, but it pretends to be
like magic—a perfectly faithful and unbiased representation of the sonic act that occurred out there in the world. It claims to capture exactly what we
hear—though our hearing isn’t faithful or objective either. A recording is also repeatable. So, to its promoters, it is a mirror that shows you how you looked at a particular moment, over and over, again and again. Creepy. However, such claims are not only based on faulty assumptions, they are also untrue.
The first Edison cylinder recorders weren’t very reliable, and the record-
ing quality wasn’t very good. Edison never suggested that they be used to
record music. Rather, they were thought of as dictation machines, something
that could, for example, preserve the great speeches of the day. The New York Times predicted that we might collect speeches: “Whether a man has or has not a wine cellar he will certainly, if he wishes to be regarded as a man of taste, have a well-stocked oratorical cellar.”2 Please, try this fine Bernard Shaw or a rare Kaiser Wilhelm II.
These machines were entirely mechanical. There was no electrical power
involved in either the recording or the playback, so they weren’t very loud compared to what we know today. To impress sound onto the wax, the voice or
instrument being recorded would get as close as possible to the wide end of the horn—a large cone that funneled the sound toward the diaphragm and then to
the inscribing needle. The sound waves would be concentrated and the vibrat-
ing diaphragm would move the needle, which incised a groove into a rotating
wax cylinder. Playback simply reversed the process. It’s amazing that it worked at all. As Murch points out, the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn’t beyond them. For all we know, someone
76 | HOW MUSIC WORKS
at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it. Odd how technology and inventions come into being and fail to flourish for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the skill, materials, or technology available at the time. Technological progress, if one can call it that, is full of dead ends and cul-de-sacs—roads not taken which could have led to
who knows what alternate history. Or maybe the meandering paths, with their
secret trajectories, would eventually and inevitably converge, and we’d all end up exactly where we are.
The wax cylinders that contained the recordings couldn’t be easily mass-
produced, so making lots of “copies” of these early recordings was an insane process. To “mass produce” these items, one had to set up an array of these
recorders as close as possible to the singer, band, or player—in other words, you could only produce the same number of recordings as you had recording
devices and cylinders running. To make the next batch, you’d load up more
blank cylinders and the band would have to play the same tune again, and so
on. There needed to be a
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