Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded MusicIn 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In between lies a century of sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the represented. |
From inside the book
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... loud and strong, from the phonograph's bell ... Way down upon the Swanee River, Far, far, away That's where my heart is yearning ever, Home where the old folks stay The Miller onstage began to sing with the Miller in the machine. As the ...
... loud, it would have been louder than the machine, but I gave my voice the same quality as the machine so they couldn't tell.” Vocal tricks undoubtedly explained some of the tone tests' success, but we should consider the constantly ...
... louder. The recording is the closest thing we have to a universal musical condition. Glenn Gould articulated this state of affairs in “The Prospects of Recording,” a remarkably prescient manifesto published in 1966, in which he mocked ...
... louder the sound—but for now, just think of the amplitude of a sound wave as an expression of soft and loud, usually expressed in a unit called the decibel (dB). A wave's frequency describes the time it takes to complete one cycle of ...
... loud and clear: It may seem strange to those who know my work on the telephone carbon transmitter that this is the first time I have ever carried on a conversation over the telephone. Trying to talk 3,400 miles on my first attempt at ...
Contents
From the New World | |
Digital | |
Death and Other Dispatches from the Loudness | |
Liner Notes | |
Notes | |
Acknowledgments | |
Notes | |