Toby Stanford

Critically discuss Nicholas Cooke’s assertion that recording technologies have ‘reflected
and shaped not just the music itself, but the ways in which it is produced and the ways
in which it is heard’ (Cook et al. 2009: 1).

Since the turn of the 20th Century, music has become a ‘radically virtual medium, an art
without a face’1. Once Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, recording removed the
immediately human and physical aspect of musical performance, presenting an almost
disembodied, imitative, and transient copy. Immediately this dehumanization of music was
met with resistance, figureheads such as John Philip Sousa proclaiming the demise of music,
and the erosion of the finer instincts of the ear. Such a perception of recorded music as a pale
reproduction of the ‘real thing’, however, is reductive when examining the impact that
recording technology and process has had on the ways in which we produce, perceive, and
understand music in the 21st Century. Firstly, the establishment of recorded material not as a
reproduction, but a representation and a musical agent in its own right begins to decentralise
the hierarchical division of labour inherent to traditional music production and instead
highlights a mediating process between human and technological actors. Secondly, this
decentralisation, coupled with the increasing accessibility and affordability of recording and
production technologies, is democratizing in that it breaks down the distinction between
author and public, and in turn the social hierarchies and class relations traditionally central to
the music industry. Thirdly, these processes, coupled with new modalities of music
consumption, lead to an intensified sense of identity construction paradoxically both intensely
personal and fundamentally mediative with the culture industry, socio-cultural flows, and
wider identity constructions.

As with many technological advancements from the late-19th Century to the present day, the
advent of recording technology has entangled in oppositional discourse, which has inevitably
drifted to rhetorical extremes. On the one hand there are the ‘reactionaries, contrarians,
Luddites, and post-Marxist theorists’, epitomised by John Philip Sousa and his part as a
‘pioneering spokesman for the part of doom’ speaking in 1907, and on the other hand are the
‘utopians’, who cite the decentralisation of live performance and the increased accessibility to
music which recording offers2. The reactionaries tend to fear that recording technology
threatens the authenticity and primacy of live musical traditions, placing ‘older art and folk
traditions in danger of extinction’; essentially what this boils down to is the threatening of the
sacred, immutable musical object, encroached upon by recording technologies3. The
supplanting of live music with technologies such as the phonograph is foundational to such
an encroachment; the Victor Talking Machine Company, and American record company
founded in 1901, marketed their gramophones not merely as vessels for music playback, but
instruments in their own right. These talking machines were aimed specifically at
destabilising the hegemony of the upright piano as the household instrument of choice, shown
from the advertisement illustrating an entire family sat around the gramophone all the way
down to the mahogany finish. Perhaps more concerning to such reactionaries is the condition
of the sound itself, and the main threat here lies in the advent of digital recording technology
in the late-1980s and early-1990s. The breaking down of sound into binary code, to be
reconstituted into a coherent sound file on a CD player, was the ‘ultimate outrage’ in
audiophile communities, leading to complaints that such devices, and subsequently
portable .mp3 players and their derivatives, are ‘artificial, inauthentic, [and] soulless’4. Here

1
Ross, Alex, ‘Listen to This’, London: Fourth Estate, 2010, p.55
2
Ross, ‘Listen to This’, p.56
3
Ross, p.57
4
Ross, p.58
 Toby Stanford

the complaint is more nuanced than the simple encroachment on the authentically live, primal
nature of performed music, and the threat to community-based musical traditions. The
reaction here is against developments in recording technology, with similar complaints about
the loss of the ‘grain’ or ‘primacy’ of the music once in digital form but is ultimately
addressing the same issue: the threatening of the sacred musical object, and its replacement
with a pale imitation.

The idea of a pale imitation of an original, authentic musical object is central to an

understanding of how recording technologies have changed the ways in which we produce
and hear music. Essentially, it is a question between recording as reproduction, or recording
as representation. Classical performers tend to see recordings as an act of ‘reproducing
concert performances’ or moving towards a conception of the ‘event that is recorded’ (i.e.
recording as reproduction), whereas for popular music artists the recording is the ‘primary
text’, wherein the ‘musical work is embodied in the recording’ (i.e. recording as
representation)5. Whilst an authentic reproduction of seems to feed into a work-based
framework of musical production, it paradoxically confirms the reactionary standpoint of
recording’s ‘homogenization of taste’6. In this, recordings hold up to the performer a
‘phonographic mirror’, making them acutely aware of any mistakes or mannerisms which
might be considered undesirable, but are nonetheless fundamental to an individuated, live,
primal performance. Moreover, this has led to a canonization of recording, with products
such as Decca’s ‘Gold Label Series’ presenting them as definitive versions of a work (i.e.
Gould’s Bach recordings, Gergiev’s Rite of Spring), sparking a feedback loop with
performers striving towards these supposed goals, resulting in a much more homogenized
sound. This process does not merely pertain to recordings, either, but feeds back into the live
music world, seen with the increased vibrato use and reduction in portamento amongst string
players in the 1930s, producing a ‘warbling sweetness’, which was eventually accepted as the
norm in conservatories7. As such, it is clear that recordings have indeed had great effect on
the modes of musical production, both live and recorded; whilst it is easy to dismiss
reactionary standpoints on recording as reductive, there are many instances in which such
fears are justified, and in this case of homogenizing taste recording traditions actually feed
into a work-based canonization of Western Art Music (WAM).

Whilst recording as reproduction figures into canonizing conceptions of the work, recording
as representation displays an entirely different mode of musical production specific to
recording technologies. Recording as a reproduction of a musical object or text casts it as a
secondary or derivative to said object but recording as representation places the end result as
an ‘utterly distinctive musical object’, augmenting rather than echoing or replacing music’s
live performance8. This is particularly coherent when examining recording techniques from
the 1940s onwards. Initially, recording equipment such as the phonograph was disruptive,
and it wasn’t until the introduction of electrical recording in around 1925 that the closest
‘relationship between live performance and recording was reached’9. With the introduction of
magnetic tape in the 1940s, enabling overdubbing and splicing, this relationship became
increasingly tenuous, compounded by the development of multitrack recording in the 1970s.
Eventually the introduction of digital recording technologies in the 1990s meant that
‘practically all aspects of sound can now be manipulated or designed from scratch’, blurring
5
Cook, Nicholas, ‘Introduction’ in ‘The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music’, CUP, 2009, p.2:3
6
Ross, p.57
7
Ross, p.62
8
Born, Georgina, ‘Recording: From Reproduction to Representation to Remediation’ in ‘The Cambridge
Companion to Recorded Music’, CUP, 2009, p.294
9
Cook, ‘Introduction’, p.4
 Toby Stanford

the line between ‘performing, editing, and composing’, and ensuring that the ‘original
performance becomes irrecoverable or irrelevant’10. The product of the recording seems to
relinquish the music from its own canonization, particularly when considering the global
distribution and consumption of the music. In the simultaneous globalising and glocalising
(the presentation of a local subculture on the international stage) of the musical world,
connections between place and genre are downplayed and musical meaning and genre
becomes more transient. As soon as the world becomes ‘more aware of a music’, the music is
‘simultaneously less constrained by its own musical boundaries’ – seen with the intersection
of ‘amplified rock instruments’ into folk music – and as such the musical tradition escapes its
own canonization, and as such the dangers of homogenization as seen with the recording of
WAM11.

Such a centralisation of the recording as musical object in itself, rather than a reproduction of
a live performance, does not go quite far enough when considering how our approach to
production and consumption has evolved from a hierarchical, work-to-audience framework to
an increasingly mediating process. Such mediation presents itself in a myriad of ways. First
to consider is the way in which technological innovations actually come about. Instead of a
‘technological determinism’, following the famous ‘the medium is the message’ mantra’,
attention should be paid instead to the ‘industrial, scientific, political, social and cultural
conditions that have fostered innovation’, and the affordances such innovations provide in
‘cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, social and embodied experience’12. Central here is the
bilateral mediation between the technological change as catalysed by broader cultural,
economic, and scientific trends and competition, and then the affordances that technology
provides for further cultural development. This can be seen clearly in hip-hop’s sampling
culture. Had it not been for the invention of the LP in 1948, hip-hop pioneers such as
Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa would have never been able to reconfigure the
turntable as an instrument, and the hip-hop’s intertextual patchwork may not have arisen. By
extension, the development of such a rich sampling culture leads into the development and
success of digital sampling technologies, again championed by Bambaataa in Planet Rock
(1986). Such an understanding of the mediation between technology necessarily destabilizes
the idea of a wholly conceived work as the centre of music’s meaning, as it suggests such
works and technological innovations do not emerge from ‘flashes of disembodied
inspiration’, but from a process of gradual change13.

Secondly, it’s important to examine the ways in which the electronic music studio functions
and its role in breaking down the hierarchies present in traditional music production. At least
in WAM culture, there is a very distinct division of labour from the composer to the
performers to the audience, within which there are meta-hierarchies such as conductor to
orchestra, leader to section, and so on. Whilst recordings (both popular and classical) are
mediated by a ‘silent yet crucial’ producer, much as the orchestra is mediated by the
conductor, the typical recording studio involves a much more complex musical division of
labour14. This is defined by the ‘intimate and creative human relations with technologies,
wherein the studio can be conceptualised (drawing on Latour’s Actor-Network theory) as a
‘network of interrelations and interdependencies between human and non-human “actors”’,

10
Cook, p.4
11
Blake, Andrew, ‘Ethical and Cultural Issues in the Digital Era’ in ‘Recorded Music: Performance, Culture,
and Technology’, CUP, 2010, p.53
12
Born, ‘Recording: From Reproduction to Representation to Remediation’, p.287
13
Born, p.287
14
Cook, p.4
 Toby Stanford

both of whom contribute agency and set limits of creativity15. Such mediation between actors
is not limited to the studio, however. Perhaps the most striking hierarchy is that between
music producers (live or recorded) and their audience, but even this is destabilized in a
culture of user-based remixes. The internet is an immensely significant tool not only as an
‘exchanger of information’ facilitating the ‘promotion and distribution of music’, but is also
fundamental as a space of social mediation and networking, enabling users to access (legally
or illegally) sound files to then remix, for the first time granting the audience agency in the
music production process16.

This neatly segues into the third aspect of mediation which redefines the ways in which we
produce and experience music: the decentralisation of music production technologies.
Internet technology poses a ‘potent threat to the workings of the music business’ in that it
decentralises the tools required to record, produce, mix, and master a track; this is seen in the
surge in affordable Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs, such as Reaper), MIDI keyboards,
studio grade monitors and so on17. The combination of accessible technology with digitisation
and the internet has ‘fostered a range of accelerating transformations’ which redefine the
environment for the creation and consumption of music18. This includes, and is not by any
means limited to, social media networks such as Facebook and reddit, peer-to-peer file
sharing, and Creative-Commons-based sound-sharing websites such as freesound/org,
sampleradar, and LANDR. This decentralisation and socialisation acts against the idea of the
recorded musical object, as it opposes Adorno’s idea of the culture industry and the
reducibility of art and music to mere commodities, sacrificing their former autonomy to the
profit imperative. Such an idea relies on ‘commodity fetishism’ and the ‘reified appearance of
a thing’, which the internet-based social decentralisation pulls against; instead of
commodification, the intersection of recording technologies into music on a public level
signals the decay of art’s ‘aura’, embeddedness in tradition and its inherent cultism and
ritualism, moving instead towards a democratization and demystification of culture.

Conceiving of recorded music not as either an imitation of a live musical object, nor as a
musical object in and of itself, but as a series of mediations between myriad centres of
culture, economics, and technology does not only have ramifications for how the music is
produced, but also for how it is experienced. Today, musical listening is empowering in
identity construction, advised by people’s experiences online and in living reality, providing
new aesthetic modes afforded by technologies and enabling an intersection of ‘music and
movement and place’, a kind of ‘secret theatre’ in which the user coordinates their own
identity19. This is coupled with the technology being used: the use of the smartphone as the
main music consumption device mediates many different functions (social media, photos,
encyclopaedias etc.) all of which implement the users ‘engagement with culture as a whole’,
becoming a ‘prosthetic aspect of the user’s identity’20. Key here is the intersection of private
and public spheres, the private stereo space experienced through headphones in a public
setting, resulting in an ‘intensified sovereign and narcissistic individualism’21. This is a true
decentralisation away from identity construction in relation to hierarchical conceptions (such
as class distinctions, gender politics, or even basic competitiveness) and instead towards a
fully, and personally, realised sense of individual self mediating with, rather than subject to,
15
Born, p.298
16
Blake, ‘Ethical and Cultural Issues in the Digital Era’, p.52
17
Blake, p.55
18
Born, p.287
19
Born, p.293
20
Blake, p.62
21
Born, p.293
 Toby Stanford

the positions and environments in which it finds itself situated. Recorded music, then, is
central to the evolving ways in which we produce and experience not only the music, but the
ways in which we construct and experience the realities and identity constructions around us.

Bibliography
Ross, Alex, ‘Listen to This’, London: Fourth Estate, 2010
Cook, Nicholas, ‘Introduction’ in ‘The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music’, CUP,
2009
Born, Georgina, ‘Recording: From Reproduction to Representation to Remediation’ in ‘The
Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music’, CUP, 2009
Blake, Andrew, ‘Ethical and Cultural Issues in the Digital Era’ in ‘Recorded Music:
Performance, Culture, and Technology’, CUP, 2010