IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 12

Book Reviews
Doug Preis

Perfecting Sound
Perfecting Sound Forever-An Aural History of Recorded Music.
By Greg Milner. New York, NY: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2009, 416 pp., $35.00.

usic should be seen
and not heard," read
a sign I saw posted
decades ago in Harvard's Music building. It was creative wordplay on the
early 15th century English proverb,
"Children should be seen and not
heard." This new dictum was, most
likely, the reaction of a disgruntled
graduate student disappointed
with the obsessive study of musical scores as opposed to actually
hearing music performed by visible
musicians. Those of us who side
with this student do welcome the
opportunities to hear live musical
performances, receive broadcasts
of concerts, or otherwise listen
to recorded versions of music.
Unquestionably, technology has
made significant inroads in music
acquisition, modification, storage,
production, and dissemination.
Even to this day, one should not
underestimate the extremely important and underlying role played by
radio, for example.
Greg Milner delves into these different inroads with aplomb, beginning with the earliest attempts to
capture sound and culminating with
the current status of sound production, reinforcement, broadcast,
and especially recording. Perfecting Sound Forever, subtitled An
"

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2554702
Date of publication: 2 June 2016

Aural History of Recorded Music,
is a well-written, interesting story
indeed, but in my view, and perhaps
that of the author, it does not have a
happy ending. Surprisingly, the reason for this is the curious interplay
between technology and society.
The book clearly reveals a complex admixture of philosophy, psychology, creativity, and aesthetics
as well as monetary issues associated with musicians and technologists. The reader will encounter
strong opinions, even stronger personalities, ingenious contributors,
outstanding music makers, and
admirable archivists. Unfortunately,
narcissism abounds, sonic auteurs
emerge, and greed obtains.
Control of sound is the central
issue. They all want it: the musician, the sound reinforcement
engineer, the recording and mixing engineers, the producer, and
the listener. The control of sound
started innocently enough by using
performance spaces having "good
acoustics" like salons and concert
halls that simply contained the natural sound of voices and/or musical
instruments and served to direct
primary sounds. These spaces neither augmented nor reinforced the
original sound. The invention of
microphones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers caused a technological
paradigm shift. Radio City Music
Hall's opening in the mid-1930s
demonstrated how sound could be
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captured, controlled, and reproduced throughout the hall by using
electrical technology. A boastful
claim was then made that there was
nothing that architectural acoustics could do that could not now
be done electrically. Initially, sound
reinforcement met with strong disapproval by audiences and critics
alike as being both unnatural and
larger than life. But, over time, to
the dismay of many, it became
accepted, and sound reinforcement
is now the norm, being both expected and demanded by audiences
everywhere. Who really controls the
sound in today's performance spaces? By popular demand, the listeners in our society do.
Recording sound is the process
of capturing some of those seemingly elusive propagating compressions and rarefactions of air and
storing them in a different physical form in such a way that a facsimile of the original sound can be
reproduced from that stored version. The process initially evolved
scientifically with the simple goal
that recorded sound should yield
"an ever bettering approximation" of reality. Along the way a
schism arose because of a new,
somewhat paradoxical, view that
reproduced sound, which is itself
sound, could be made better
than reality! Hence, there is the
author's critical subtitle, "perfecting sound forever." The latter view
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june 2016

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