Sound Reproduction and Perception

Imagine you've gone to hear your favorite musician in concert. After the concert is over, you'd like a souvenir (from the French word for “remember”) of the evening. Today, that auditory souvenir would be a recording, most likely a CD or MP3 of the performance. You would want it to sound as much like the live show as possible, to capture the emotional qualities of the performance as well as the sound of the concert hall, the spatial image of the sound, and the unique sound of the instruments—collectively, all aspects of the fidelity of the recording (from the French fidélité: accuracy and faithfulness). Not all sound recording has fidelity as its goal, however. In recent decades, artists and engineers have experimented with sounds that could never be produced in a natural setting, pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. This entry surveys the various ways of reproducing sound, from the early piano rolls to digital technologies; considers the role of delivery systems such as loudspeakers and headphones on the listening experience; and describes the debate regarding the superiority of analog versus digital reproduction.

Modern attempts to preserve musical performances began in the mid-1800s with the invention of piano rolls. These long rolls of paper contain precisely spaced holes that are read by a mechanism causing the hammers to hit the piano strings as though a pianist were pressing the key. Before the piano roll, if you wanted to hear music, you [Page 899]either had to play it yourself or find a musician who could, and every musical performance was subtly different, subject to the limitations of human motor control, if not to differences in the performer's emotional state. The piano roll introduced two innovations: music-on-demand, and the notion of a master or ideal performance. (These were subsequently refined and instantiated on various technologies, such as wax cylinders, magnetic tape, acetate, vinyl, and digital sound files.) Music-on-demand meant for the first time listeners could hear music whenever they wanted to, without a performer physically present, and could hear performances from musicians who were in another country or even dead. Moreover, knowing that a defect might be preserved for posterity, and listened to over and over again, musicians were driven to create better performances than they might have otherwise, while technicians developed ways to correct imperfections in the rolls themselves in order to improve the playback.

Transducing horns were subsequently used to capture the acoustic waveforms of a performance on wax cylinders. For singers in particular, this required projecting loudly enough to be heard over the band, or screaming right into the horn itself. With the development of microphone technology in the 1930s and 1940s, singers could sing directly into an efficient transducer, allowing for the refinement of vocal performances. For the first time, a vocalist could sing softly—even whisper—and be heard over even a loud band. This difference is apparent in the premicrophone recordings of Bessie Smith versus the miked recordings of Billie Holiday.

Piano rolls represented an early attempt to create an artifact that contained fewer flaws than the actual performance that it was based on. Microphones created a recording that was neither an accurate reproduction of what occurred during the performance nor what could actually be performed—that is, they were among attempts to create an artificial soundscape for aesthetic purposes. Close-miking techniques, in which a microphone is placed right next to individual instruments rather than over the musical group as a whole, create such hyperrealities, allowing a listener to imagine that his or her ears are right in front of each musical instrument simultaneously, to hear acoustic nuances that normally would be masked by other instruments. Such techniques reached their peak in the 1960s and 1970s recordings by Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, and Steely Dan (among others), in which each instrument can be heard more clearly and distinctly than could ever occur in a live setting.

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