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

1. Capturing Sound in the Acoustic Era: Recording Professionals and Clever Mechanics

1 Capturing Sound in the Acoustic Era Recording Professionals and Clever Mechanics E arly phonograph makers and recording companies bore little resemblance to the large entertainment conglomerates they became by the end of the twentieth century. Beginning in small-machine shops and inventors ’ laboratories, they could be counted among the many specialty manufacturing firms that composed the largest sector of American production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only later would they benefit from the industrial research laboratories that emerged as America grew into a sophisticated industrializing nation.1 The first decades in the development of sound recording involved a great deal of cut-and-try experimentation and re- finement of the different components of the recording chain. Much work went into improving the mechanical apparatus, the sound box and diaphragm, the shape and material of the recording horn, and the composition of the wax recording material, but the studio received little attention. The science of modern acoustics was still in its infancy, and although some recording companies hired scientific consultants, their expertise was devoted to improving the devices of recording and reproduction rather than the design and construction of the studios in which recordings were made. Those studios ranged from the wellequipped Edison Recording Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, to office spaces in New York City, to a converted warehouse in Indiana, where recording experts worked to improve the art of capturing sound on record when the art of sound recording was new. Although they described their work as a mixture of art and science and considered their workplaces recording laboratories, sound 12 c h a s i n g s o u n d recording practitioners by necessity and inclination could best be described as systematictinkerers.2 Earlyrecordistsapproachedtheirworkempirically,citing experience and knowledge of the art as their only teachers. Although the recording studio underwent its most dramatic change after World War II, when the booming record industry became both catalyst for and beneficiary of the growth and development of recording technology, an overview of what the early studio was like and how recordings were made in the decades before this period reveal both change and continuity in the technique and practice of sound recording and are essential for a fuller appreciation of the effect of developments during the postwar period. The equipment and processes involvedinrecordingsoundcomposetechnologicalsystemsthathavegradually evolved over time, their form and function directly influenced by the technology and practice that went before. Thus, like other technological systems that Nathan Rosenberg described as path dependent, the recording studio and the technologies it employs retain vestigial features that can best be understood with some knowledge of their evolution.3 Moreover, a glimpse into the technical , physical, and artistic challenges of acoustical recording and how musicians and recordists adapted their respective skills and talents to meet those challenges reveals the extent to which the technology of recording and musical culture were from the very beginning mutually interdependent: cultural practices in the recording studio evolved from the limitations as well as the possibilities of the technology and the skill and creative ability of those operating the equipment . This period also reveals the varied nature of the recordist’s job, which required engineering precision, ingenuity, diplomacy, and a touch of artistic creativity. Tracing the development of studio recording from the perspectives of recordists as well as artists reveals the origins of what became the inexorable link between technology, science, and art that defines sound recording. The history of the phonograph and the early development of the phonograph industry with its competing technologies, patent wars, and competition between firms have been ably covered by historians and other scholars, and readers may refer to the bibliographic essay for further reading. However, before we enter the acoustical recording studio, a brief description of the devices and methods of sound recording and reproduction is in order. By 1900, two competing recording formats existed: the cylinder phonograph and the disc gramophone. There were also two methods of inscribing the sound onto wax blanks: vertical or “hill and dale” recording, so named because the stylus traversed the tiny hills and valleys of the groove as it inscribed sound onto the wax surface, and lateral recording in which the stylus moved from side to c a p t u r i n g s o u n d i n t h e a c o u s...