Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP

Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP. By Susan Schmidt Horning. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 292pp (hardcover). Illustrations, Notes, Essay on Sources, Index. ISBN 13: 978-1-4214-1022-7 Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock 'n'Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians' Union, 1942-1968. By Michael James Roberts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 254pp (softcover). Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5475-8. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, I have been fortunate to have engaged with sound engineers and music producers from different eras and styles of music, from Glyn Johns to Louise Boddie to Steve Jordan to Young Guru. Their profession is one complicated by a technological divide between the studio and the audience; the listener is rarely aware of the recording process, let alone understands it. Susan Schmidt Horning's recent book, however, is a compelling exploration of a world largely hidden from view that has been shaped by scientists and recording engineers whom she calls tinkerers. More importantly, Chasing Sound is a vital contribution to sound studies that traces the shift from the aesthetic of live performance to the recorded object that has dominated the popular imagination for nearly a century. Schmidt Homing's early chapters document the earliest recording studios, describing recordists--proto-sound engineers--as tinkerers who learned their techniques through experimentation and by rote. Here the author artfully depicts the bare laboratories where sound scientists experimented--tinkered--marginalizing musicians in the service of optimal sound. Schmidt Horning explores the solidification of niche markets that cater to different audiences and tastes (hillbilly, race, jazz, blues, gospel). The studio is electrified, streamlining the recording process and improving sound with microphones instead of recording horns; and radio technologies evolve and proliferate, giving listeners much easier, more affordable and quicker access to music. Recording professionalizes, and the studio becomes the canvas as those new professionals become known for sound styles. While the focus of the book is the evolution of recording sound, it also documents changing business models in the early twentieth century as the United States digs into individualism and the pursuit of capital in the growth and development of the small business (small record label)--and soon large corporate--model. The descriptions of recording spaces are particularly fascinating, especially given the relationship between the recordist and musician. Bare, sterile rooms in which musicians crowded on top of one another--making many musicians uncomfortable and nervous--in front of a recording horn and a recordist obscured by curtains eventually become sound proof, cozy, furnished vestibules where the recordist is now the engineer. The changes in recording spaces illustrate the professionalization of sound engineering, which is an accepted field of study in many colleges and universities today. Furthermore, the engineer eventually appears as the commanding officer of a studio with identifiable production sound. The paradigm shift from live performance to recorded music that unnerved members of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) is precisely the crux of Schmidt Horning's research. While skilled union musicians lost jobs as a result of the burgeoning record industry, sound engineers created an object that is soon worshipped, collected, fixed upon by critical, obsessive, or adoring listeners. Recordings become idiomatic to their studios, which is one of the most fascinating elements of Schmidt Horning's book: she argues for the audio engineer's central place in this technological and cultural shift precisely because of those identifiable sounds. (Think about that record that made you recognize the hand of Brian Eno, Sam Phillips or Nile Rodgers. …