Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

by Greg Milner

Overview

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's Perfecting Sound Forever 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865479388
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/25/2010
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.66(h) x 1.13(d)

About the Author

GREG MILNER has written about music, media, technology, and politics for Spin, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Slate, Salon, and Wired. He is the coauthor, with the filmmaker Joe Berlinger, of Metallica: This Monster Lives. He lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

Liner Notes ix

Intro: "Testing, Testing ..." 3

Acoustic/Electrical

1 The Point of Commencement 29

2 From the New World 50

Analog

3 Aluminum Cowboys: A Pretape Parable 77

4 Pink Pseudo-Realism 104

5 Presence 129

Digital

6 Perfect Sound? Whatever 185

7 The Story of the Band That Clipped Itself to Death (and Other Dispatches from the Loudness War) 237

8 Tubby's Ghost 293

Outro: "Testing, Testing ... (Reprise)" 347

Notes 373

Acknowledgments 393

Index 397

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever is sprawling and ambitious, covering the entire history of music recording, from Edison cylinders to ProTools. And it has flaws…But when his record-geek's affection for rock music is allowed to blossom in the second half of the book, his thesis becomes clearer: In recent years, the desperate need to mint hits has made pop music absurdly overprocessed.
—The Washington Post

Mark Athitakis

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)

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Publishers Weekly

Music and technology journalist Milner (coauthor, Metallica: This Monster Lives) loosely prescribes the boundaries of this history of recorded music from Thomas Edison to the present; however, he begins by explaining that the big bang was basically the universe cutting a record. Milner goes beyond recounting people, places, and events to explore a major issue surrounding the topic: Should a recording accurately reflect the sounds of a live performance or improve upon it? Readers get an inside look at important moments in recording history, from Def Leppard's groundbreaking style of music performance, to favorite songs redubbed and remixed by different artists and their producers, to a Jennifer Lopez performance that never actually happened. The narrative is divided into eight chapters grouped into three major sections: "Acoustic/Electrical," "Analog," and "Digital." A personal yet informative interpretation of recorded music that will appeal to students and professionals in the music industry as well as general music-loving readers.
—Bradford Lee Eden

Library Journal

Music and technology journalist Milner (co-author: Metallica: This Monster Lives, 2004) unravels the expansive saga of documented sound. The author begins in the late 19th century, tracing the evolution from Edison's invention of the phonograph to the contemporary use of digital music files. Broad in scope and steeped in detail, the book strikes a mostly well-maintained balance between the history of the technological development of recordings and the more approachable accounts of the people and events surrounding it. This occasionally makes for an erratic read-one chapter begins with some humorous notes on the absurd production and mixing process for Def Leppard's Hysteria, then plunges into a discussion of 12-inch LPs versus 7-inch singles. Yet Milner provides insightful commentary and possesses a solid grasp of pacing and a light touch with the technical aspects. Only in the final chapter, which examines remixing and MP3 encoding, does the author get bogged down in dry, esoteric passages. Milner especially excels at revealing the human side of each story. In particular, his portrayal of American folk-music collectors John and Allan Lomax and their relationship with the legendary Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter provides a fascinating window into the early days of musical documentation. The account of embattled New York radio stations WPLJ and Z-100 is a comical narrative of the wars to increase volume on the air, and it signals an unfortunate development in the way we hear broadcast songs today. This loudness issue is central to the later chapters-specifically in the author's discussion of the mastering of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication, an album so compressed that much of itsdynamic range is lost. Milner's examination of several contemporary songs, from such diverse bands as Massive Attack and Black-Eyed Peas, imparts an unsettling image of current production techniques. While the considerable breadth and length may stave off casual listeners, audiophiles will be rewarded. Agent: Daniel Greenberg/Levine Greenberg Literary Agency

Kirkus Reviews