Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music [Paperback]

Greg Milner (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 25, 2010

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 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Recording gadgets evolve with dizzying speed, but debates over their effects on music never change, according to this fascinating study of technology and aesthetics. Journalist Milner (coauthor, Metallica: This Monster Lives) surveys developments in recording, from Thomas Edison's complaints about those new-fangled Victrolas to the contemporary controversy between CD and vinyl. With every advance of hardware, he notes, comes accompanying shifts in the sound of music: the sense of physical space implied by stereo sound; the advent of rock 'n' roll reverb; the big obnoxious ambient drum sound that defined the '80s under the Phil Collins dictatorship; the unsettling robotic tone imparted to vocals by today's Auto-Tune pitch-correction software; the arms race toward ear-grabbing, distortion-heavy loudness that leaves us surrounded by music that does nothing but shout. Perennial arguments about the fidelity of new technologies, he contends, miss the point: now that every record is digitally spliced together out of multiple tracks and far-flung samples, there is no authentic musical performance for the sound engineer—contemporary music's true auteur—to record. Milner combines a lucid exposition of acoustics and technology with a critic's keen discernment of the pop-music soundscape. The result is a real ear-opener that will captivate fans and techies alike. (June 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“Perfecting Sound Forever is an exhaustively researched, extraordinarily inquisitive book that dissects the central question within all music criticism: When we say that something sounds good, what are we really saying? And perhaps more importantly, what are we really hearing?” —CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

“A compelling look at the birth and evolution of recording, and how it changed the way the world hears itself.” —MARC WEINGARTEN, Los Angeles Times

“Greg Milner tells the story of recorded music with novelistic verve, ferocious attention to detail, and a soulful ambivalence about our quest for sonic perfection. He shows how great recordings come about not through advances in technology but through a love of the art, and that same love is the motor of his prose.” —ALEX ROSS, author of The Rest Is Noise

“You may never listen to Lady Gaga the same way again . . . [Milner is] a gifted storyteller with an ear for absurdity . . . You might not think a book about reverb could thrill. Milner’s does.”—MIKAEL WOOD, Time Out New York

“Very, very, very few books will change the way you listen to music. This is one such book. Read it.” —JARVIS COCKER

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (May 25, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865479380
• ISBN-13: 978-0865479388
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Get this book, now! September 27, 2009

By Nancy Becker

Format:Hardcover

A layman like me could have been intimidated by the charts and bar graphs that pop up every now and again to prove things like replay gain and compression but Greg Milner had me from the start. He starts out with a bang, comparing the creation of the universe to `cutting a record,' then laying out the quirky, fascinating history of the men--and their methods--who proved that Marconi was right and `no sound ever dies.' Like the scientists and inventors, showmen and audio geeks, Willy Lomans and record company suits who wanted to raise the bar--whether that bar be quality, authenticity, loudness, or sales--Milner is also obsessed, and not just with the trajectory--the wax cylinders, analog tape and binary code that plays us back--but with pondering age-old questions: what is art? what is reality? is there truth? It's a rollicking, uproarious, rock `n rolla' ride and Milner takes you with him inside the "sweet spot" of an Edison recording of Bake Dat Chicken Pie; behind the prison walls of the Louisiana State Penitentiary and Lead Belly's thrilling Irene; next to Ike Turner's broken amp and its grungy sound at Sun Studio; beside the pummeling drums of Springstein's Born in the U.S.A.; inside the mix of the master King Tubby; compressed in the eardrum splitting Californication of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You are there. This is a brilliant, funny record that chronicles the amazing story of recorded (American) sound while raising important questions--to me anyway--like who owns sound? Do I want to hear what I hear, or better? Are the blockbuster Frankensteins of pop music today art? If you have the faintest interest in American music and what it says about our culture, run don't walk and read this book!
Nancy Becker

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A Leisurely Stroll Through The History of Audio Technology September 17, 2009

By Gregory M. Wasson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"Perfecting Sound Forever" is both more and less than its title would imply. On the one hand, it is purportedly a history of the technology of recorded music. But it includes many lengthy sidetrips and stories which will engage readers who take an active interest in both the development and the application of recorded sound. For example, the author discusses at length the use of "sound tests" by the makers of the first acoustic recording and playback machines. In these tests (which were as much marketing techniques as much as "scientific" experiments), a singer or instrumentalist would pretend to be playing on stage, then walk off stage in the middle of the performance as a curtain was parted to show that the audience had been listening to an acoustic wax cylinder or disk played through a horn. Believe it or not, the audience was astonished to discover that it had not been listening to a live performance. Similar tests continued to be used right up until the present, always with the same result, which demonstrates the substantial psycho-acoustic element in the listening experience.

Many readers, including myself, will enjoy Milner's lengthy sidetrips describing in detail such historic applications of new recording techniques as John and Alan Lomax's trips to the rural South to record "authentic Negro music," discovering along the way the great blues singer "Huddie" Ledbetter, better known as "Lead Belly." Many of these stories are only tangentially related to the central story of the development of audio recording techniques. Others, such as Milner's discussion of Les Paul's pioneering use of over-tracking to achieve the sound he wanted, are more directly related to the main narrative. If you are not irritated by the author's wanderings off the "track" (sort of an audiophile's "Moby Dick"), and you have a reasonable understanding of the main outlines of the development of audio technology, you will probably thoroughly enjoy this book.

But be forewarned. As audio recording technology hits the crossroads intersectig it with the birth of rock 'n roll in the mid-fifties, there is almost no discussion of the application of audio technology to the recording of classical or jazz music. Milner confines his discussion to pop and rock almost exclusively thereafter. Although his discussion of the influence of the evolution of recording technology on the pop music field is important, if your tastes run to Miles Davis or Dmitri Shostakovich rather than hip-hop or The Red Hot Chili Peppers, you may find your enjoyment of the book substantially lessened.

That said, Miller's exploration of the uses made of digital recording technology, with its promise of greater sensitivity and higher fidelity, is fascinating. He describes in great detail the "misuse" of audio compression and clipping to achieve greater "loudness" even though the results on pop music paradoxically lessened the dynamic range and fidelity of the music being made. Milner paints a picture in which the democratization of the production of pop music made possible by the availability of ever more affordable devices to produce music - the "producer" could now record and remix from a garage instead of an acoustically pristine recording hall - contributed to the so-called "loudness wars" in which records were so compressed that the dynamic range of a pop song from beginning to end might be as little as 9 dB. Loudness got the attention of people flipping through the FM dials, and audiophiles were no longer the object of the producer's attention as the recording industry's prime demographic was hearing their favorite music through cheap stereo systems and later through MP3 devices such as iPods using low fidelity earbuds. The lesson seems to be that people get the music they deserve, and mediocre sound quality is perfectly satisfactory to the average listener.

The author's thesis is that increasingly sophisticated production devices such as Pro-Tools and Auto-Tune, which allow the correction of pitch for a flat singer, and the assembly of "music" one note at a time rather than by capturing even a semblance of live ensemble musical performance, have paradoxically corrupted the quality of most modern recordings. It is interesting then that he winds up at the end of the book putting himself through the paces of a modern day "sound test." In a blind comparison of a uncompressed sound clip in almost CD quality, with an identical clip of the same music that has been compressed using a codec and bit rate unknown to him, the author tries to identify the compressed clip. You may be surprised at the results reported by Milner as he processes the music through his own psycho-acoustic equipment (his ears and his brain).

Overall, I can confidently recommend this book to anyone with more than a passing interest in the history of audio recording, and some of the more interesting stories that are part of that history. However, if reading page after page about lossless and lossy dynamic compression in MP3 players produces sleepiness instead of excitement, you might want to pick up an old copy of Aaron Copland's "What To Listen For in Music."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars intermittently interesting history of sound recording December 24, 2009

By Ivor E. Zetler

Format:Hardcover

I found this history of sound recording a patchy affair. It is worth pointing out the following factors that might influence the potential purchaser. Firstly Greg Milner is an obvious vinyl and analog fan; he is quite dismissive of the digital era and spends many pages trying to prove his point. Secondly, if you are a classical or jazz music enthusiast, much of the lengthy discussion centred around rock music will be of little interest. Scant attention is given to later phases of orchestral recordings; surely a decent overview of the subject would have to cover this aspect in some detail.The fact that Milner omits any mention of the great John Culshaw/Decca or Mercury teams demonstrates a somewhat blinkered view of sound recording history. There is also scant mention of recent SACD technology, dubious as that might be.

The more interesting sections to my mind were those that cover the earlier recording eras, particularly the development of magnetic tape recording and multitracking. Milner's breezy writing is reasonable rather than brilliant. A definative history of this fascinating subject still remains to be written.