sound

This page considers sound recording, a revolution that so far has had a greater impact on society than the web.

It covers -

• introduction
• music business
• technologies
• Australia

     introduction

You can imagine life without the internet but what about an environment without recorded sound: no CDs, radio, television, film soundtracks and dictaphones?

As starting points for considering the implications of sound recording consult Evan Eisenberg's The Recording Angel: Music, Records & Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New York: McGraw-Hill 1987), Charles Rosen's Piano Notes (London: Allen Lane 2003) and Mark Katz's Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2005). George Steiner's meditative In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1974) and Hans Keller's Essays on Music (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1994) are more austere examinations.

Timothy Day's A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2000), Michael Chanan's Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording & Its Effects on Music (London: Verso 1995), David Morton's Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 20006) and Norman Lebrecht's When The Music Stops (New York: Simon & Schuster 1996) explore recording's consequences for the composer, artist and theatrical performance.

Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990), Lisa Gitelman's Scripts, Grooves & Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 1999), Brian Currid's A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 2006), Greil Marcus' The Dustbin of History (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1995) and the thinner The Long-player Goodbye: How Vinyl Changed the World (London: Sceptre 2008) by Travis Elborough provide other perspectives.

     the music business

Essays in The Phonogram in Cultural Communication (New York: Springer 1982) edited by Kurt Blaukopf, Expensive habits: The dark side of the music industry (London: Faber 1986) by Simon Garfield and The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry (London: Routledge 1996) by Robert Burnett offer insights into the business of recording. There is a synoptic account in An International History of the Recording Industry (London: Cassell 1998) by Pekka Gronow & Ilpo Saunio.

We have pointed in our economy guide and the Ketupa media resource site to studies of the shape and size of the recording industry. Robert Burnett's The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry (London: Routledge 1996) is a crisp introduction. It highlights that the five major groups are responsible for around 75% of global sales, a figure unlikely to be seriously affected by the rise of new technologies such as Napster and Gnutella.

There is a more staid rendition in Russell Sanjek's From Print to Plastic: Publishing & Promoting America's Popular Music, 1900-1980 (New York: Institute for Studies in American Music 1983) and Pennies From Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1996), the latter co-authored with David Sanjek. For the performers see James Kraft's Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890-1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1996)

     technologies

For the technology two starting points are Andre Millard's America On Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1995) and David Morton's more technical Off The Record: The Technology & Culture of Sound Recording In America (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 2000).

Context is provided by Colin Symes in Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown: Wesleyan Uni Press 2005) and Robert Philip in Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2005).

     Australia

For Australia there is regrettably no synoptic account of the order of Davidson's The Bicycle & the Bush.

One serviceable account is Ross Laird's Sound Beginnings: The Early Record Industry in Australia (Sydney: Currency Press 1999), covering developments to the late 1920s.



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