How technology has transformed the sound of music
by Alex Ross

For most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face.

For music to remain vital, recordings have to exist in balance with live performance, and, these days, live performance is by far the smaller part of the equation.

Like Heisenberg’s mythical observer, the phonograph was never a mere recorder of events: it changed how people sang and played. Katz, in a major contribution to the lingo, calls these changes "phonograph effects."

In 1916, the conductor Ernest Ansermet brought Igor Stravinsky a stack of American pop records, Jelly Roll Morton rags apparently among them, and the composer swooned. "The musical ideal," he called them, "music spontaneous and ‘useless,’ music that wishes to express nothing." (Just what Jelly Roll was after!)

Contemplate Coldplay for a moment.

At a Dada concert in 1920, Stefan Wolpe put eight phonographs on a stage and had them play parts of Beethoven’s Fifth at different speeds.

How could a single record do justice to those endless parties in the Bronx where, in a multimedia rage of beats, tunes, raps, dances, and spray- painted images, kids managed to forget for a while that their neighborhood had become a smoldering ruin?

It thrives on the buzz of the new, but it also breeds nostalgia, and a state of melancholy remembrance.

Feedback is the sound of musicians desperately trying to embody the superior self they glimpsed in the mirror and, potentially, turning themselves into robots in the process.

Is there any escape from the "feedback loop"?

This is a paradox common to technological existence: everything gets a little easier and a little less real.

I’ll take "Rubber Soul" over "Sgt. Pepper’s," because the first recording is the more robust, the more generous, the more casually sublime. The fact that the Beatles broke up three years after they disappeared into the studio may tell us all we need to know about the seductions and sorrows of the art of recording.