Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
7 - The development of recording technologies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
When we consider the use of sound recordings for the transport and presentation of performance, the history of sound-recording technology must be taken into account, but in doing so we need to concentrate on those types of sound recording that have provided an important influence or contribution. Short-lived systems, esoteric systems, and discussions of who invented what are not particularly interesting in this context. This presentation of the historical development will concentrate rather on the performance of the systems then, while they influenced contemporary appreciation and further development, and now, when we have a possibility of providing better signal extraction than ever before. The first is related to the reception history of sound recording, the second to realising the correctable parameters of historical recording.
Readers will have noted the somewhat clumsy expression ‘transport and presentation of performance’. This broadness of purpose is necessary because, seventy years into the development of sound recording, most records being produced began to be edited on a microscopic level into a coherent whole, presenting the performer as he or she would have played in almost ideal circumstances. From that point, performance as a specific sonic event is not created until an edited recording, perhaps in conjunction with a recording of a synthesised sound, is played. Traditional thinking about sound recording and reproduction was that it was a ‘naive’ recording, an image of sorts of a live performance, the later reproduction of an event in time that had really taken place earlier. a large degree the general public is still under this illusion.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music , pp. 149 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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