Customer Reviews

Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Roth Family Foundation Music in America Book)

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Although being a scholarly work, fully footnoted and with a complete bibliograpy this book, unlike much of academic production, is a great read.
I enjoyed it immensly.
It is a good companion to Michael Channan's book on the same topic."Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music".
If you are interested in the history of recording or just curious about how what we listen to came to be the way it is this book will delight you.

I greatly enjoy reading books that cover ground that I think I know well, then proceed to reveal insights far deeper than any I'd yet contemplated. Mark Katz has done this with some of my favorite subjects, music, records and recording technology, and then proceeds to add an entirely new dimension to my understanding of how these all relate (and continue to evolve together). To do this, he remixes a great number of insights coming from previous works I have come to know and love, including Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, and a widely eclectic appreciation of recorded music that I also share.

And I am not alone in my appreciation for this book. In 2007 it won the Hacker Prize, which provided the following citation:

The Hacker Prize rewards exceptional scholarship that reaches a broad audience. The audience so captured by Capturing Sound is primarily an undergraduate one, thus Katz has presented the Committee with a welcome opportunity to reward pedagogical writing. Textbooks are a genre that always challenge, and usually defeat, even the best of writers. Breaking the mold of the seemingly objective, chronologically-impelled narrative, Katz has produced a very different kind of work that succeeds on three different levels, all of which are important to historians of technology.

I agree, and I think it will give other readers a new-found appreciation and understanding of their musical tastes and collections. And with the knowledge it imparts, you may find yourself discovering new evidence of the book's primary thesis: the phonograph effect. Even in today's world of CDs and MP3s (which, do not fear, Katz treats thoroughly).

This book gives the reader great insight on the effects of recorded music and the effects on society. A must read for anyone into music.

Katz has a formal background in musicology, which means basically, extensive training in the history of western classical music.

Though the language and tone of the book is meant to avoid academic linguistic density, this paradigm (of classical music) is strongly evident in his methods, pacing, argument structures, and conclusions.

Sadly, there is absolutely no attempt at an ethno/socio/anthropo-logical approach in the book. So Katz is taking a background in classical melodic & harmonic & structural theory and history, and then applying it to a phenomenon (recorded sound) that has become inextricably wound up in SOCIAL factors of the day. How people share music is less purely musical phenomenon and much more largely a social one. Katz does not successfully convey the growing wealth of thought surrounding these studies.

By focusing solely on music in the recorded medium, he ignores the forest for the tree: what is happening with newspapers, videos, movies, books, theater, poety -- in other words, ALL MEDIA are undergoing transformation. To take an arbitrary slice out of this dense network of practices and consumer/audience expectations is a very difficult task, and I don't feel it's done successfully, here.

The overall form is a loose chronological history, which falls prey to the danger of technological determinism, that one scenario led to the next, inventions directly resulting in practices, and so on, until we got to where we are today. Katz chooses not to confront the paradigm shift of decentralized communications and media distribution. It's all about a progression of distribution media and their physical properties.

Also, very little consideration was given to the idea of authorship, intellectual property, sampling as an artistic vs. reproductive art, etc. The ideas are passed-over during a discussion of sampling, but not elaborated.

Where Katz succeeds is in his realm of expertise: classical music. His treatment of records and violin vibrato and Hindemith's grammophone music are well executed reflections of those particular moments of history. But in ignoring huge areas of communications studies and giving an extremely weak treatment of hip hop, Katz shadows these achievements.

Importantly:
Katz' colorful description of a DJ battle, described in fantastical imagery, are absolutely cringe-inducing to me, personally. Given the well-acknowledged dangers of exoticism and neo-colonialism in ethnographic work, Katz is remiss for slipping into a language that could be taken as a neo-colonial musicological expedition. It is quite telling that he lists no references to Steven Feld's work. This chapter prompts me to imagine a photograph of him posing, one knee hiked up, on a speaker cabinet, holding his jungle-explorer's helmet against his waist, so proud of the discovery he is about to share with the world: the DJ....

This is a book written by an academic for academia. Unless that describes you, I would stay away. In general the writing style is very dry but I think the material he chooses is even worse. For example, how much really needs to be said about the increased use of vibrato in classical music? He devotes more than just a few pages to the topic. With such a wide range of topics to choose from, I would have liked to see much broader coverage. Instead we get excruciating detail on a very small number of topics.

Before I gave up on the book, I realized the author probably did not set out to write a book on how technology has changed music. He more likely took his prior work and repackaged it into a book.