From Sound Capture to Music Production...

From "Sound Capture" to "Music Production…"

In a March 2002 article for The NY Times Magazine, author Kevin Kelly recounts an anecdote of Indonesian gamelan musicians reacting to early recording technology. He sums up the nearly immediate effect recording technology had on the development of musical forms:

There is no music made today that has not been shaped by the fact of recording and duplication. In fact, the ability to copy music has been deeply disruptive ever since the invention of the gramophone. When John D. Smoot, an engineer for the European company Odeon, carted primitive recording equipment to the Indonesian archipelago in 1904 to record the gamelan orchestras, local musicians were perplexed. Why copy a performance? The popular local tunes that circulated in their villages had a half-life of a few weeks. Why would anyone want to listen to a stale rendition of an obsolete piece when it was so easy to get fresh music?

As phonographs spread throughout the world, they had a surprising effect; folk tunes, which had always been malleable, changing with each performer and in each performance, were transformed by the advent of recording into fixed songs that could be endlessly and exactly repeated. Music became shorter, more melodic, and more precise.

Early equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians truncated old works to fit and created new music abbreviated to adapt to the phonograph. Because the first sound recordings were of unamplified music, recording emphasized the loud sounds of singers and de-emphasized quiet instrumentals. The musicologist Timothy Day notes that once pianists began recording they tried, for the first time, to "distinguish carefully between every quaver and semiquaver — eighth note and sixteenth note — throughout the piece." Musicians played the way technology listened. When the legendary recordist Frederick Gaisberg arrived in Calcutta in 1902, only two decades after the phonograph was invented, he found that Indian musicians were already learning to imitate recorded music and lamented that there was "no traditional music left to record."

Kevin Kelly in The New York Times Magazine — http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/magazine/17ONLINE.html

For most of us, the very idea of music is indistinguishable from the experience of listening to the radio, LPs, CDs, MTV, MP3s, and the like; so much so that the notion of even questioning the 100 percent equivalency between recordings of music and the performance of music itself can be hard to grasp. In the early days of recording, it was inherently obvious that technology served only as a means of preserving live sonic events, whether musical, oratorical, or otherwise. For the first time in history, fleeting and transitory air vibrations were frozen in wax to be reproduced and distributed according to demand. As time passed and an industry grew around the technology, desire for increased fidelity drove technological development. As technology progressed exponentially, the pendulum swung from more and more accurate sound reproduction over to increasingly sophisticated sound production. This has led to the current situation of a complete reversal of recording technology's original role.

Today, many big-budget "live" musical acts painstakingly stage and choreograph their performances to replicate as closely as possible the sound of the studio recording. This studio recording itself may consist primarily of only careful simulations and samples of some long-ago live performance by a previous generation of performers. We are at the point now where live concerts are often little more than a lip-synced ballet set to the commercial release of a hit single playing through a PA system, only barely supplemented by the sound of the live musician's actual in-the-moment stage performance. In such cases, it is safe to say that sound production technology has caused recording to replace live performance as the aim of music making, even in a so-called live performance.

This is not to remotely imply that recordings are necessarily inferior to live music or to devalue the education, enjoyment, and entertainment that recorded music provides. In fact, the whole point of this chapter is that technology can now allow even more musical entertainment and enjoyment. The role of modern recording technology in serving the creative musical process is indisputable. It has empowered some of the greatest musical artists of our time, as is evident in the creation of iconic, never-performed-live masterworks, like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Bitches Brew, and it's worth acknowledging here that the recording studio with all its tools may legitimately be viewed as a complicated sort of musical instrument, which can be played skillfully by someone who has mastered its various techniques.

The point is simply that recorded music is so ubiquitous and so much a part of our cultural experience of music that we often forget that before the advent of recording, the only way to hear music was to participate in some sort of musical performance, either as a musician, an audience member, or, as in many cultures where the dividing line between performer and audience is not so clear cut, a participant in a socio-musical event like a religious service, the gamelan, African call and response, and many, many more such traditions. Before recording, all music was nonlinear, in that every performance was free to respond to the unique necessities of the individual time, place, and people involved.

While there is an incredible amount of technological genius and artistry evident in the current tools for producing and recording music, including nonlinear editing, all the results of this technology are still presented to the end user through the inherent limitations of linear playback that were dictated by early recording methods and materials. All linear formats are by nature a closed system, in that once a record is "in the can," the creative process is done. The listener's appreciation and familiarity may grow over time, but nothing in the recording itself and the way it plays back is ever going to change. Of course, this will always be a great and useful thing for capturing the "perfect performance," but linearity in music playback no longer needs to be as irrevocable as a thermodynamic law; it can instead be optional. It may always be the norm, but it needn't be the rule.

For the first time, the technology is widely available to overcome the determining condition of linear playback and bring us back full circle to the paraphrased question raised by the perplexed Indonesian musicians in the article quoted above: "Why would anyone want to listen to a stale rendition of an obsolete piece when it's so easy to get fresh music?" As one answer to that question, I propose that composers and music producers take advantage of existing alternatives to the standard linear playback paradigm. DirectMusic is such an alternative and already has a large install base. It provides a format based on nonlinear music architecture from its earliest conception and, critically, it allows delivery of discrete nonlinear music files that can play on most any modern multimedia PC or any other platform that supports the DirectX APIs, like the Xbox.