Perfecting Sound Forever An Aural History of Recorded Music

by Milner, Greg

• ISBN13: 9780571211654
• ISBN10: 0571211658
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-09
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

In 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.Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording. An American soldier monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape. Japanese and Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio format and watch as their "compact disc" is marketed by the music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-defeating "loudness war" to get its fix.From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to pirated CDs to iPods, Milner pulls apart musical history to answer a crucial question: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? The answers he uncovers will change the very way we think about music.

Author Biography

Greg Milner has written about music, media, technology, and politics for Spin, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Slate, Salon, and Wired. He is the coauthor, with the filmmaker Joe Berlinger, of Metallica: This Monster Lives and has also worked as a political speechwriter. He lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

Liner Notes	p. ix
Intro: "Testing, Testing..."	p. 3
Acoustic/Electrical
The Point of Commencement	p. 29
From the New World	p. 50
Analog
Aluminum Cowboys: A Pretape Parable	p. 77
Pink Pseudo-Realism	p. 104
Presence	p. 129
Digital
Perfect Sound? Whatever	p. 185
The Story of the Band That Clipped Itself to Death (and Other Dispatches from the Loudness War)	p. 237
Tubby's Ghost	p. 293
Outro: "Testing, Testing ... (Reprise)"	p. 347
Notes	p. 373
Acknowledgments	p. 393
Index	p. 397
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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