Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music – Mark Katz

Thoughts: The central idea of Capturing Sound is that, in addition to musical practice driving the development of recording technology, recording technology can (and frequently does) influence musical practice. Though it’s been several years since I read this book and I’ve forgotten many of the details, it likely helped shape my current interest in how similar processes can go on in instrument development (for example, the development/evolution of the electric guitar.)

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Katz, Mark. 2010. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Revised Edition). University of California Press.

• 1: “My claim [is] that the technology of sound recording… has profoundly transformed modern musical life.”
  • “This thesis counters more than a century’s worth of discourse about the nature and purpose of the technology, discourse that has reinforced the idea of recorded sound as a mirror of sonic reality.”
• 2: “The discourse of realism ignores a crucial point: recorded sound is mediated sound.”
• 4: “A central premise of this book: all phonograph effects are ultimately responses to differences between live and recorded music”
• 6: “The story of any phonograph effect… can… be understood as arising from the interaction of three equally important and mutually influencing agents of change: the technology, the users of the technology, and society.”
• 15-16: North Indian popular music was dominated by Grammophone Corporation of India (j while typing up these notes: I believe this should refer to the Gramophone Company of India) in the age of vinyl, which led to extreme standardization of pop music. With the arrival of cheaper cassettes, new artists, new labels and even new genres sprang up
  • 16: cf. with the arrival of the cassette in Java, where it led to the standardization of both gamelan patterns and the tuning of new gamelans
• 20: “Before the advent of recording, listening to music had always been a communal activity”
• 21: “The portability of recording has made the once unimaginable commonplace” (re: walkmans etc.)
• 22: “that performers and listeners cannot see each other… was once a great source of anxiety”
  • j: has this contributed to the modern western idea that music is an entirely sonic phenomenon?
• 28: “over the course of the century, there has been a noticeable move in classical performance towards steadier tempos”
• 30: “With enough repetition, listeners may normalize interpretive features of a performance or even mistakes”
  • c.f. Hepcats live bands at West Coast dances (j: at the local swing dance studio, West Coast dancers tended to prefer dancing to recorded music rather than live music, due in part to dancers wanting to hear familiar solos played just so); Whipping Post (j: I listened to the Allman Brothers Band’s live recording of Whipping Post many, many times. My recording was ripped from a library CD with several skips in it. When I listen to it now without the skips, it sounds off)
• 31: “For many listeners… music is now primarily a technologically mediated experience. Concerts must therefore live up to recordings.”
• 32: re: jazz, rock, etc. “with recordings, performers can study, emulate or imitate performances in a way never before possible”
• 44-45: replacement of the tsimbl (dulcimer) in Klezmer music by the clarinet, due to ease of recording
• 46: microphones made crooning, beatboxing possible techniques (think also of Colin Stetson’s saxophone style)
• 48-49: use of slapback in Elvis Presley’s recordings, other rock music
• 54: seven interdependent traits that define recording: Tangibility, Portability, (In)visibility, Repeatability, Temporality, Perceptivity, Manipulability
• 72: music memory contests (j: if I recall, there was a push in the early decades of the 1900s to teach schoolchildren to identify musical “masterworks” by ear, which sometimes took the form of drop-the-needle-style contests)
• Vibrato:
  • 95: to listen to: Joseph Joachim, Pablo de Sarasate (limited/ornamental vibrato), Eugène Ysaÿe (more vibrato), Fritz Kreisler (constant vibrato)
  • 99: recorded around 1910: Marie Hall, Jan Kubelic (still used vibrato sparingly)
  • 104-105: vibrato as a crutch to help with poor intonation
• 106: visual aspect of performance is really important; in “invisible” recordings, techniques like vibrato need to step forward and express emotion as well as identify performers
• 117: “a Wagnerian orchestra may perform the solo [recorded] part while a much smaller ensemble accompanies”
  • j: idea (many possible variations): piano, string quartet, choir all recorded into different tracks. Performance could be any combination of the parts, live or recorded
• 121: to look up: “electronic instruments, such as the sphaerophon (1921), theremin (1924), ondes martenot (1928), trautonium (1930)”
• 122: to look up: Symphonie pou un homme seul by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry
• 124 (ch. 6): to learn more about: turntablism
• ~150: to listen to: Paul Lansky’s Notjustmoreidlechatter
• 188: to read: “…provocative 1982 article ‘On Being Tasteless’, William Brooks…”
• 189: “…these personalized compilations [(j: i.e. mixtapes, playlists, etc.)] can in turn generate their own gestalt.”
  • to do: put together my own ordered playlists - either whole albums, compilations/collections, imagined concert programmes, YouTube playlists…
• 195: to look up: mp3 blogs (start my own?); also Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture
• 199: to look up: John Perry Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas” (1994 article)
• 202: to look up: the Hype Machine (hypem.com)
• 204: to look up: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs (idea of “thin protection”)
• 207: to look up: Chris Anderson’s Free: the Future of a Radical Price
• 216: to look up: Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur (about Web 2.0)
• 221: to read: Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message