How Music Works

by David Byrne

  Through a happy accident, Mullin ended up in Germany right after the end of the war, and someone said that those radio transmissions had come from a town near where they were stationed. Mullin went to look, and sure enough, there were a couple of tape machines that had been modified in such a way that their fidelity vastly improved on what any other existing technology could achieve. German technical innovations, like their rocket technology, were now free for the taking, so Mullin dismantled one of the machines and had the parts sent to his mother’s house in Mill Valley.

  When he got back to California, he reassembled the machine, and in the process figured out what the Germans had done. Among other things, they had added a “bias tone” to the recordings—a frequency you can’t hear but that somehow makes all the audible frequencies “stick” better. Mullin eventually put these machines to work, and he discovered that in addition to being a good recording medium, tape also opened up some unexpected possibilities.D If a radio announcer flubbed a line, Mullin could edit out the mistake by splicing the tape. You couldn’t do anything like that on disc! If a comedian didn’t get the same laughs he got on his run-through, then, assuming the run through had been recorded, the laughter from that performance could be spliced into the “real” performance. The birth of the laugh track! Furthermore, laughs could be reused. “Canned” laughter could be added to any recorded program if the live audience didn’t yuk it up sufficiently.

  The use of editing and splicing meant that a “recording” no longer necessarily represented a single performance, or at least it didn’t have to. The beginning of a song, for example, could be from one “take” and the end from a take done hours later. The broadcast version could even be the result of performances that had been done in many different places spliced together. The elements of a “performance” no longer had to be rooted in contiguous time or space.

  After seeing a presentation by Mullin of his tape recording device, Alexander Poniatoff formed a company, Ampex, to make more tape machines based on Mullin’s design. The banks, however, wouldn’t give Ampex the loans they needed in order to get things up and running—constructing the early machines required considerable capital—so it looked bad for the future of taperecording.

  Around this time, Bing Crosby, the singer who had mastered an innovative use of microphones, was getting tired of having to do his very successful radio show live every day. Bing wanted to spend more time playing golf, but because his shows had to be done live, his time on the links was limited. Crosby realized that by using these new machines to record his shows, he could conceivably tape a couple of shows in one day and then play golf while the shows were being broadcast. No one would know the shows weren’t live. He asked ABC radio if they would agree to the plan, but when they saw Poniatoff’s “factory”—which was a complete shambles, with parts scattered all over—they said no way. So Crosby wrote a personal check to Ampex that guaranteed the machines would start getting built. They did, and after Crosby’s initial order, ABC soon ordered twenty more. The era of tape recording, and all the possibilities that went with it, was under way.

  GLENN GOULD’S PROPHECY

  Some years later, after the tricks and techniques that taperecording made possible began to be more widely used, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould wrote a manifesto, The Prospects of Recording, that expressed his perspective on recorded music and performance. Like Crosby, he was annoyed by the restraints and limitations of having to perform live, and he eventually retired from the stage completely—though not to play golf. Gould’s manifesto was both prescient and way off base.

  For example, Gould predicted that live concerts would be more or less a thing of the past by the end of the twentieth century. This didn’t happen, but the fact that we often think of recordings as a more definitive version of a piece of music than a live performance indicates that Gould wasn’t necessarily completely wrong. To the great dismay of some classical listeners, Gould embraced tape technology. He began to create “perfect” performances by editing takes together, and as a result his dissatisfaction with live performance—his own especially—increased. He felt that there was an unfortunate temptation for live performers to woo the audience, to pander to their desires, and one presumes this expression of disdain meant that he believed the music suffered as a result. I can see his point. I’ve been to performances, usually of pop music, where the desire of the performer to please the audience becomes such an integral part of the show, and eventually so annoying, that I can’t hear the music anymore.

  On the flip side, I’ve been to performances where the performer attempts to go into a trance and ends up ignoring the audience completely, possibly in order to give a deeper and more perfect rendition of a song or piece of music. When that happens I feel I may as well go home and put on a recording of the same music, which usually sounds better anyway. In that sense I agree with Gould—if the goal of your performance is perfection, then maybe that’s better achieved in the studio, with the help of tape editing and splicing.

  Gould wasn’t alone. He writes about fellow classical artist Robert Craft, who “seems to feel that his audience—sitting at home, close up to the speaker—is prepared to allow him to dissect his music and to present it to them from a strongly biased conceptual viewpoint, which the private and concentrated circumstances of their listening make feasible.”12 He seems to be implying that Craft, too, realized that many music fans now got their music from the record player or the stereo console, and thus changed the way his recordings were produced and the way the music on them was arranged, so that a listener in a living room would have a more perfect experience.

  There were and are dissenters to these new uses of tape. The shit really hit the fan when someone was brought in to sing a high note on an opera recording that the principal singer missed or couldn’t reach. It was considered blasphemy, and this was way before Milli Vanilli got “busted” for not singing on “their own” records. I would agree that there’s deception at work when the “singer” isn’t actually doing the singing and we aren’t informed of that fact, and it’s not part of the conceptual framework. When I’m on the road performing, the band and crew are often outspokenly critical of other touring acts whose backing singers (or even lead singers) are on “tape,” or those who have hidden extra “bandmembers” in the basements of the venues. That said, a playback show can have an integrity all its own. There are no hard and fast rules as far as I’m concerned.

  Gould foresaw much of what we do today that was facilitated by taperecording as creation and as a way of composing. After he retired from the stage, he branched out from making classical records and did some innovative radio programs for the CBC, one of which, The Idea of North, is partly a multilayered audio collage of voices and sounds that could only have been created using tape and its editing possibilities. It’s a wonderful piece. Milton Babbitt, the electronic-music composer, carried this idea to its logical conclusion:

  I can’t believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat [replay] something they have missed, when they can sit home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it.14

  INSTRUMENT TECHNOLOGY AND ITS INFLUENCE ON MUSIC

  Leo Theremin invented his eponymous electronic instrument in 1920. 1920! The theremin wasn’t widely heard until it was featured in a number of movies, such as Spellbound in 1945 and The Day The Earth Stood Still in 1951, and eventually in the Beach Boys song “Good Vibrations.” The instrument is notoriously difficult to play, as the player doesn’t actually touch it (you control volume and pitch by proximity of a body part—usually your hands), and maybe this was why the theremin didn’t catch on like he thought it deserved to. Though Theremin was Russian, one could say that this instrument, and some other electronic instruments and samplers that followed, had no national or cultural provenance. They didn’t emerge out of an ongoing musical tradition,
and they weren’t better suited to play music of one tradition over another. Organs, for example, emerged from liturgical music, and as with most Western instruments, they play Western scales and tuning easily, and anything else with great difficulty. You press a key on these instruments and you’re automatically in the world of Western music—no variations of pitch or bending of notes is possible. The theremin offered up less culturally-specific options. You could play pitches in between standard Western pitches and you could bend notes and slide up and down. But the difficulty in mastering the instrument kept a large number of musicians from utilizing those capabilities. The adoption of instruments with no cultural baggage would have to wait.

  In the thirties, a number of inventors independently developed a way to electrically amplify guitars. (Theoretically their process could be applied to any instrument with steel strings—a piano, for example—but these guys were guitar players, and their tweaks, innovations, and prototypes could be conveniently made in their home workshops.) Unamplified guitars and some other instruments were getting drowned out in bands of the day. Horns and pianos are much louder acoustically, and though placing a mic in front of the guitar player works to remedy this, there was the risk of feedback—the howling sound of the amplified guitar “feeding back” into its microphone. Some early electric guitars were basically microphones shoved into the sound hole of the guitar or clipped over the bridge, and they did sound louder, but they didn’t solve the feedback problem. Transducer-type pickups, which respond to physical vibrations, worked a little better. Rickenbacker made a guitar in 1931 out of solid aluminum (it must have been incredibly heavy) that was nicknamed “the frying pan.”E

  Photo from the Museum of Making Music

  In 1935, Rickenbacker made another one out of Bakelite—a kind of plastic more often used for telephones and Kalashnikov rifles. The first commercial recordings of these instruments were of Hawaiian music. Later, a new instrument called the lap steel (essentially a guitar neck that you lay across your lap and play with a metal slide) was adopted by Western swing bands. Jazz musicians and virtuosos like Charlie Christian picked up the electric guitar, and one could argue that without this technology Christian’s playing would never have been heard. Blues musicians found that the increased volume of the electric guitars worked great—they could now be heard in noisy clubs.

  Guitar pickups were mostly magnetic at first. A pickup developed in 1940 sensed the vibration of each of the steel strings individually, and a small amplifier boosted the level of that signal so that the guitar player could finally compete with the rest of the band. Guitar makers assumed that since the pickup was only sensing vibrating metal strings and not “hearing” the acoustic sound of the guitar, one could eliminate the problematic resonant chamber of the acoustic guitar that gave much of the quality to its unamplified sound. Les Paul’s early guitar was nicknamed “the log,” because that’s pretty much what it looked like—the resonant chamber of a typical guitar had been eliminated entirely.

  I first heard “Purple Haze” over a transistor radio when I was kid, and I remember telling my dad that something new had happened. I excitedly explained to him that electronic music (the weird sounds of Stockhausen and Xenakis that I was vaguely aware of, to say nothing of the theremin) was, via the amplified guitar in Hendrix’s hands, now being melded and shaped by an acoustic instrument. The sounds Hendrix (and others I didn’t yet know about) were getting were nothing like what an acoustic instrument sounded like. That unwritten law of staying true to the sound of a traditional instrument had been violently broken, and the amplifier and signal-processing devices (pedals mostly) had become an integral part of the sound of the instrument. As with Theremin and his instrument, the electric guitars were breaking free of history. Their available range of sounds wasn’t constrained by any specific cultural trajectory. It seemed that music would be liberated from the past.

  The electric guitar still privileged Western scales, unless you used a slide (as with those Hawaiian records). The frets that determined the notes were still, like a piano, set to play recognizable scales and pitches, but the sounds you could get from an amplified instrument were almost limitless. Pianolike plunks, percussive scratchy chords, saxophone-like rasps, and gamelanlike bell tones. No other instrument could do all this—certainly not to the same extent—and as a result texture and tonal quality increasingly became part of composition. The same parts, played on another instrument, might be the same song, as far as traditional copyright or a written score is concerned, but at some point we began to associate songs with the specific guitar sounds used in the most well-known recordings. This wide sonic palette is almost impossible to pin down in conventional notation, and it still isn’t considered as much a part of composition as the melody that the singer sings or the choice of chords that accompanies that melody. That definition of a song, of composition, still derives from an acoustic era, and mostly evokes a songwriter or composer sitting at a piano coming up with a top-line tune and some interesting chords to harmonize with it. Naturally, the sound of the piano or the voice isn’t really considered a factor in what is written—at least not in this traditional view. Some of Tom Waits’s songs, for example, would sound pretty corny sung “straight,” without his trademark growly vocals. The sound of his voice is what makes them work. Jangly or wah-wah guitars became as much a part of a song as the lyric or top-line vocal melody.

  The synthesizers that emerged in the seventies and early eighties were, like the theremin, unhooked from the provenance of musical culture and tradition. The blips and gurgles they produced weren’t an extension of any existing tradition, so, despite the fact that they were sometimes used to imitate existing instruments, they could be incredibly liberating tools. The Mini Moog, invented by Bob Moog in 1970, was the first really affordable and portable synthesizer. Earlier versions of these instruments were massive and massively complicated affairs that took days to program. Moog’s innovation eventually made something esoteric familiar. An early pioneer in this technology, Bernie Krause, said that the Chinese, then quite doctrinaire in their version of communism, felt that this instrument, untethered as it was from history and traditional culture, was perfect for their New Society. They brought Krause over to teach them how to operate this revolutionary instrument, but the Mini Moog was never embraced by the masses, and revolutionary operas continued to be based on older musical models.

  PLAYING WITH YOURSELF

  Les Paul, the same guy who built one of the first electric guitars, can also lay claim to having invented multitrack recording. Multitracking involves recording a performance and then rewinding the take to the beginning in order to add more music to it. You can add your wife singing, as Paul did with his wife, the singer Mary Ford. Or you can “play with yourself,” as Paul also did— recording and playing the drums first and then adding more than one guitar part, creating a virtual one-man band. You can also vary the speed of the recorder to create odd effects—impossibly fast runs, for example. In 1947, Paul and Mary recorded a song called “Lover,” which was the first commercial single to have been recorded in multitrack. Les Paul’s multitrack was closer to what we now call a sound-on-sound recorder. In his early version of this technology, you could add to a previously recorded track, but then those two performances would be forever joined. If you made a mistake, you had to start over from the beginning. A bit like painting with watercolors, or cooking.

  My dad modified a small Norelco reel-to-reel recorder when I was in high school so that it could do this. I recorded layer upon layer of guitar feedback, eventually ending up with a howling, screeching virtual guitar-ensemble. A friend and I then tried to do something a bit more accessible, recording a version of the Turtles song “Happy Together,” using potato-chip cans for drums and singing harmonies with ourselves. It was endless fun, but annoying and frustrating as well—a single mistake meant starting from scratch.

  With sound-on-sound machines, the “tracks” you recorded first were effectively being c
opied over every time you added another layer, so they diminished in quality, sounding more muffled the more new parts you added. You would therefore often record the tracks you knew would be in the forefront last, as those needed to be clearest and most hi-fi—usually that would be the vocal.

  Many bands, including the Beatles, used a variation of this technique. Although they had a true multitrack recorder at their disposal, it only had four separate tracks. If they wanted to add a fifth track, they had to record the four existing tracks onto two tracks of a second four-track machine, effectively giving them two new tracks on that second machine to record on. However, by doing this, all the previous recordings on the original four-track machine had now gone through an extra generation of recording, and the balance between those tracks was now set in stone, just like with Les Paul’s technique. Mostly this was unnoticeable, but if it happened repeatedly, the dulling effect began to show.

  THE LP

  With the introduction of long-playing records (LPs) in 1948, record companies encouraged artists to record music specifically for this new medium, as the new discs could be sold for more money and generate more profit per unit than mere 45s (or 78s, which were being discontinued). Some artists took to the idea, and they began to stretch out a little to fit the new format. Thematic LPs emerged. (Frank Sinatra was an early adopter of this format, with his collections of low-key songs designed for late nights in bachelor pads.) LPs containing thematically linked songs—typically from Broadway musicals like Oklahoma or The Sound of Music—were hugely popular. By the end of the sixties, extended jams made their way to discs, as did compositions by Miles Davis and various rock bands, which often took up an entire side of an album.