Looks at the history of recording technology and its effect on music, including artistic performance, listening habits, and audience participation.

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's Perfecting Sound Forever 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.

Featuring fascinating accounts from practitioners, this Companion examines how developments in recording have transformed musical culture.

Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself. Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, he addresses such vital issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the "hit record" phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories. Throughout the book, Kenney argues that the phonograph and the recording industry served neither to impose a preference for high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various sorts of people found a new kind of pleasure. To this end, Recorded Music in American Life effectively illustrates how recorded music provided the focus for active recorded sound cultures, in which listeners shared what they heard, and expressed crucial dimensions of their private lives, by way of their involvement with records and record-players. Students and scholars of American music, culture, commerce, and history--as well as fans and collectors interested in this phase of our rich artistic past--will find a great deal of thorough research and fresh scholarship to enjoy in these pages.

A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices--of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons--whose music still resonates well into our present.

Learn the basics of digital recording, each step of the signal path, and everything from microphone placement to mixing strategy through the eyes and ears of "The Immortal" Roger Nichols, master engineer and eight-time Grammy-award winner. From scientifically analyzing the differences between condenser, ribbon, and dynamic microphones to sharing his secrets to an amazing mix, Nichols delivers something for everyone interested in the science and art of audio engineering---no matter what your experience level is. The Roger Nichols Recording Method offers you the unique opportunity to learn directly from Roger Nichols himself---exactly as he would have taught at one of his famous master classes. The book is excellent for beginners but is still full of information for seasoned pros who want to know how Roger always managed to get that sound. Included are links to Pro Tools session files, personally set up by Roger, to give you hands-on training. Covers: * How to plan your recording sessions like a professional engineer and producer * Choosing the right microphones and how Roger would place them for a session * Test microphone patterns; learning about critical distance placement and the 3 to 1 rule * Understanding digital audio and how it really works to choose the right format for your sessions * Learning about the signal path from microphone/instrument levels, channels strips, and plugins * Recording multiple takes, overdubs, punch-in techniques, and gaining insight on editing digital audio files * Roger's personal tips for mixing, using automation, creating your final mix, and more!

Fully revised and updated, this text adds coverage of mashups and auto-tune, explores recent developments in file sharing, and includes an expanded conclusion and bibliography.

(Technical Reference). More than simply the book of the award-winning DVD set, Art & Science of Sound Recording, the Book takes legendary engineer, producer, and artist Alan Parsons' approaches to sound recording to the next level. In book form, Parsons has the space to include more technical background information, more detailed diagrams, plus a complete set of course notes on each of the 24 topics, from "The Brief History of Recording" to the now-classic "Dealing with Disasters." Written with the DVD's coproducer, musician, and author Julian Colbeck, ASSR, the Book offers readers a classic "big picture" view of modern recording technology in conjunction with an almost encyclopedic list of specific techniques, processes, and equipment. For all its heft and authority authored by a man trained at London's famed Abbey Road studios in the 1970s ASSR, the Book is also written in plain English and is packed with priceless anecdotes from Alan Parsons' own career working with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and countless others. Not just informative, but also highly entertaining and inspirational, ASSR, the Book is the perfect platform on which to build expertise in the art and science of sound recording.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse." Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.

Recorded Music in Creative Practices: Mediation, Performance, Education brings new critical perspectives on recorded music research, artistic practice, and education into an active dialogue. Although scholars continue to engage keenly in the study of recordings and studio practices, less attention has been devoted to integrating these newer developments into music curricula. The fourteen chapters in this book bring fresh insight to the art and craft of recording music and offer readers ways to bridge research and pedagogy in diverse educational, academic, and music industry contexts. By exploring a wide range of genres, methods, and practices, this book aims to demonstrate how engaging with recordings, recording processes, material artefacts, studio spaces, and revised music history narratives means we can promote new understandings of the past, more creative performance in the present, and freer collaboration and experimentation inside and outside of the recording studio; enhance creative teaching and learning; inform and stimulate reform of the institutional processes and structures that frame musical training; and ultimately promote more diverse music curricula and communities of practice. This book will be of value to educators, researchers, practitioners (performers, composers, recordists), students in music and music-related fields, recording enthusiasts, and readers with a keen interest in the subject.