The Authenticity of Remastered Music and the Changed Experience of Hearing
Stephanie Fink
Listening to recorded music today has a much different quality of sound than when recording was originally invented; the way we hear and listen to music created during the digital age is specified to a cleaner electronic recording, and has been stripped of any evidence of its history, and early century charms. It was Technology who decided the rules that music would live by and the way we would hear it, and with the invention of new playback systems and recording tools, it has changed the act of listening to music and the experience of the sound so radically that most of the allure and character of original recordings have now been removed as a noise purification process.
Throughout the history of recording, one of the main goals of every new playback device has been to alleviate the listener of distractions, or ‘surface noise’, from the music. Each new means of recording carries with it certain peculiarities that define the era it was recorded in: the sputter of the needle on the record, the hum of the cassette, the room tone of acoustic recording, etc. I wonder what is lost when these completed recordings converted to the digital age; taken out of their element and rearranged to suit modern sound. How does this affect how we experience the music, and the original intention of that experience? What happens to the original impression when the sounds of time and nostalgia have been removed? I believe that when the music changes, so do our reactions and attractions to it. We connect with it differently, and in most cases, we are unknowingly affected in a different manner than if we had heard it in its original form, because our intellectual associations with its signifiers are lost. Music in its original form will never have the same atmosphere and authenticity that it did before it was interfered with, perhaps with the exclusion of music that is altered as a necessary repair, for example sound that is transferred from an aged, brittle, master recording to a CD archive in order to preserve the music. There is definitely a line to be crossed, and in most cases it is exceeded, particularly with respect to compositions that are remastered to new formats.
The first sound recording was a barely audible recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on Dec 6th 1877 by Thomas Edison. Although there had been many attempts before this time to record sound, this was the first successful effort on Edison’s invention, the tinfoil cylinder phonograph (Schoenherr). Since then, recording devices have strived to have less ‘surface noise’, and an even sound. Remastering in today’s times is delegated the chore of creating a finer sound quality from master copies, most of which carry the tin-can sound of their recording abilities, as well as the hisses and pops created by the player. Because of this, most remastered music has been removed from all of its original quirks, not only due to technological advances throughout the century, but also preconceived notions of what true sound (absent of this ‘noise’) should be and how we should hear it. It is presupposed what kind of sound we’re going to get when we buy a 78, and depending on our player it may have more of the sweet hum and haw of un-tampered noise than others. When I listen to cylinders on my grandfather’s Edison Gramophone, I don’t expect anything but a treble drenched croon, and when I listen to records on my father’s jukebox I hear record hiss and the sounds of the needle wearing on the vinyl, because these are the probabilities of their mediums. This expectation and identification of music has evolved radically over time and as a result whenever we hear these sounds sampled in modern recordings, for example, record crackle on Christina Aguilera’s album “Back to Basics” and on Portishead’s self titled album, we know it for certain as harkening back to a specific era in music as opposed to inabilities in today’s technological devices.
Different types of processes have over the decades tried to capture sound with a live and pure-to-the-sound result, but have failed in comparison to the digital audio file and the CD (Compact Disc). In today’s recordings, sound is transferred clean with little or none of the medium’s surface noise (which is a characteristic of pretty much all other music players: cylinder, record or cassette) and now with the scarcity of production in those mediums, we now have CD’s and mp3’s bearing the spotless contemporary insignia of a more-perfect technology instead of the noticeable crackles and purrs of previous devices. Tinfoil phonograph, cylinder, graphophone, gramophone, record discs (rubber, brass, wax, plastic, shellac, and vinyl), reel to reel, cassette (which has many of the same audible qualities that records have: cassette hum, hum of the cassette player) etc, have all worked towards achieving the silence of the CD or mp3 file, and the longevity in quality of the medium without age and use deterioration.
There are several factors that determine the noise that each system emits, such as the machine and the medium, the design of the objects, and the space of the recording; be it acoustic of otherwise. Early music recorders were influenced by the shape and form of the players, which characterized the way the sound was heard. When the technology of recording changed from acoustic to electric in 1925, the sound of the recordings changed the way we take notice of recorded music. It focused the ear more specifically on the tune as opposed to the whole environment, and muffled the act of playing music, being recorded in a space, and the sound of the machine.
Now considered unpleasant to the majority of consumers, surface noise no longer has a place in modern recording as there is no place for it in modern playback devices. With this result comes the dilemma of medium transference and how much to change in the process of converting for the newer medium. With the popularity of the CD (and the need to re-release previously recorded albums to this new format) often comes the task of repairing worn or delicate music in the process. It seems that most of the time in this process, instead of having the initiative of restoration in the forefront of the operation, that idea gets muddled in the recovery process. What we end up with are old recordings on CD that are released as “remastered”, which sound much different than the original, not in changed notes but in changed ambience of the sound. We see this all the time in music, anywhere from 1920’s Jazz recordings like Louis Armstrong’s Dixieland albums and earlier, from the Dead Boys first record in 1977 to lots of albums made recently in the 1980’s: Madonna, Elvis Costello, the Ramones, Talking Heads, etc. Anything recorded on a format other than CD has and will (depending on its popularity) be remastered in the process of converting it to disc. Some consider the removal of surface noise to be granting the music freedom to be heard with absolute clarity, and perhaps in the beginning the excitement of this revelation may have been true. But now that the novelty has worn off, some of us find ourselves questioning the authenticity of the changed recordings. Since it is tampering with another person’s creative material, remastering someone else’s work thus becomes a tricky subject. When an album is recorded it becomes a complete, concluded piece of work, which is meant (by the mixer, producer, artist, etc) to be enjoyed as such. But when music is modified, remixed, and some of what has been put into each recording (including the surface noise) has been removed, we take it out of its contextual era by misappropriating technology, and are often tampering with the author’s original idea of that sound, even if the new version is considered by the majority of people to be a successful change.
It is a thin line between repairing an original recording and altering it for today’s sound. Repairing is a process of archiving, or saving fragile material that time will surely ravage further and reduce to museums. To take an untouched album, chock full of the habits of its technology, and change it to suit contemporary standards is often altering it excessively. This seems to be a situation much like when fig leaves were added to nude renaissance images of Adam and Eve to cover up what people thought they should be ashamed to reveal. Can you tamper with an artist’s idea and still have it remain original and authentic to the original? Not really. When you change the way things are heard you alter the way they affect people, they ideas they attach to it, and the authenticity of the recording. With the removal of the original sound, the initial space of the recordings is lost, and the alteration of it leaves the music not as it was originally intended to be heard, and the experience of that sound eschewed. I understand that a vast majority of people will opt for a remastered recording because it is surely easier to listen to, and really this authenticity problem does not bother itself with most consumers, but the way our ears hear the history of the sound is as much a part of it as the music itself.
Music has a specific relationship with the ear, and now with CD’s and more recently computer audio files, the accessibility of listening is amazing. With the consistency of clear available sound, we don’t hear most of the sound we take in. The sound is edited further by our ears, which have lost the ability to hear the way we did before the popularity of recorded sound (Ross). In the early century, our sensitivity towards sound was supremely greater than it is now. With the barrage and convenience of sound, our auditory instincts for hearing the world have worn away. Perhaps this is a contributing factor towards the instinctual reaction to eliminate surface noise; the inability to hear beyond the sounds of the parts to get to the whole. It is as if we as listeners are not only shaping music, but it is shaping how we hear by force.
Although much of what I have discussed is proposed through critical opinion and research, I understand that a lot has to do with taste and judgment. While trying to be detached from my own view and remain dependant on logic, I found myself scrutinizing the bigger picture as well as the territory of music. I wonder what the need is to eradicate older formats as soon as new ones are invented. At this rate, original formats will never get to be heard the way they were made to be. We have eliminated the sounds of history in our current technology, and altered how it was intended to be understood and utilized. With the popularity and accessibility of computers, I am curious as to where sound can go from here. I wonder if there is room for sound to evolve, or perhaps just the players will progress. Until then, I assume we are comfortable with our current technology, and old methods are left to become artifacts for museums.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “Listening”. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music Art and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkley University Press, 1985.
Morton, David. Off the Record: the Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Morton, David. http://www.recording-history.org/
Ross, Alex. “The Record Effect”. The New Yorker. 2005 http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050606crat_atlarge
Schoenherr, Steve. “Recording History Technology”. 2005. http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/notes.html
Stern, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Listening to recorded music today has a much different quality of sound than when recording was originally invented; the way we hear and listen to music created during the digital age is specified to a cleaner electronic recording, and has been stripped of any evidence of its history, and early century charms. It was Technology who decided the rules that music would live by and the way we would hear it, and with the invention of new playback systems and recording tools, it has changed the act of listening to music and the experience of the sound so radically that most of the allure and character of original recordings have now been removed as a noise purification process.
Throughout the history of recording, one of the main goals of every new playback device has been to alleviate the listener of distractions, or ‘surface noise’, from the music. Each new means of recording carries with it certain peculiarities that define the era it was recorded in: the sputter of the needle on the record, the hum of the cassette, the room tone of acoustic recording, etc. I wonder what is lost when these completed recordings converted to the digital age; taken out of their element and rearranged to suit modern sound. How does this affect how we experience the music, and the original intention of that experience? What happens to the original impression when the sounds of time and nostalgia have been removed? I believe that when the music changes, so do our reactions and attractions to it. We connect with it differently, and in most cases, we are unknowingly affected in a different manner than if we had heard it in its original form, because our intellectual associations with its signifiers are lost. Music in its original form will never have the same atmosphere and authenticity that it did before it was interfered with, perhaps with the exclusion of music that is altered as a necessary repair, for example sound that is transferred from an aged, brittle, master recording to a CD archive in order to preserve the music. There is definitely a line to be crossed, and in most cases it is exceeded, particularly with respect to compositions that are remastered to new formats.
The first sound recording was a barely audible recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on Dec 6th 1877 by Thomas Edison. Although there had been many attempts before this time to record sound, this was the first successful effort on Edison’s invention, the tinfoil cylinder phonograph (Schoenherr). Since then, recording devices have strived to have less ‘surface noise’, and an even sound. Remastering in today’s times is delegated the chore of creating a finer sound quality from master copies, most of which carry the tin-can sound of their recording abilities, as well as the hisses and pops created by the player. Because of this, most remastered music has been removed from all of its original quirks, not only due to technological advances throughout the century, but also preconceived notions of what true sound (absent of this ‘noise’) should be and how we should hear it. It is presupposed what kind of sound we’re going to get when we buy a 78, and depending on our player it may have more of the sweet hum and haw of un-tampered noise than others. When I listen to cylinders on my grandfather’s Edison Gramophone, I don’t expect anything but a treble drenched croon, and when I listen to records on my father’s jukebox I hear record hiss and the sounds of the needle wearing on the vinyl, because these are the probabilities of their mediums. This expectation and identification of music has evolved radically over time and as a result whenever we hear these sounds sampled in modern recordings, for example, record crackle on Christina Aguilera’s album “Back to Basics” and on Portishead’s self titled album, we know it for certain as harkening back to a specific era in music as opposed to inabilities in today’s technological devices.
Different types of processes have over the decades tried to capture sound with a live and pure-to-the-sound result, but have failed in comparison to the digital audio file and the CD (Compact Disc). In today’s recordings, sound is transferred clean with little or none of the medium’s surface noise (which is a characteristic of pretty much all other music players: cylinder, record or cassette) and now with the scarcity of production in those mediums, we now have CD’s and mp3’s bearing the spotless contemporary insignia of a more-perfect technology instead of the noticeable crackles and purrs of previous devices. Tinfoil phonograph, cylinder, graphophone, gramophone, record discs (rubber, brass, wax, plastic, shellac, and vinyl), reel to reel, cassette (which has many of the same audible qualities that records have: cassette hum, hum of the cassette player) etc, have all worked towards achieving the silence of the CD or mp3 file, and the longevity in quality of the medium without age and use deterioration.
There are several factors that determine the noise that each system emits, such as the machine and the medium, the design of the objects, and the space of the recording; be it acoustic of otherwise. Early music recorders were influenced by the shape and form of the players, which characterized the way the sound was heard. When the technology of recording changed from acoustic to electric in 1925, the sound of the recordings changed the way we take notice of recorded music. It focused the ear more specifically on the tune as opposed to the whole environment, and muffled the act of playing music, being recorded in a space, and the sound of the machine.
Now considered unpleasant to the majority of consumers, surface noise no longer has a place in modern recording as there is no place for it in modern playback devices. With this result comes the dilemma of medium transference and how much to change in the process of converting for the newer medium. With the popularity of the CD (and the need to re-release previously recorded albums to this new format) often comes the task of repairing worn or delicate music in the process. It seems that most of the time in this process, instead of having the initiative of restoration in the forefront of the operation, that idea gets muddled in the recovery process. What we end up with are old recordings on CD that are released as “remastered”, which sound much different than the original, not in changed notes but in changed ambience of the sound. We see this all the time in music, anywhere from 1920’s Jazz recordings like Louis Armstrong’s Dixieland albums and earlier, from the Dead Boys first record in 1977 to lots of albums made recently in the 1980’s: Madonna, Elvis Costello, the Ramones, Talking Heads, etc. Anything recorded on a format other than CD has and will (depending on its popularity) be remastered in the process of converting it to disc. Some consider the removal of surface noise to be granting the music freedom to be heard with absolute clarity, and perhaps in the beginning the excitement of this revelation may have been true. But now that the novelty has worn off, some of us find ourselves questioning the authenticity of the changed recordings. Since it is tampering with another person’s creative material, remastering someone else’s work thus becomes a tricky subject. When an album is recorded it becomes a complete, concluded piece of work, which is meant (by the mixer, producer, artist, etc) to be enjoyed as such. But when music is modified, remixed, and some of what has been put into each recording (including the surface noise) has been removed, we take it out of its contextual era by misappropriating technology, and are often tampering with the author’s original idea of that sound, even if the new version is considered by the majority of people to be a successful change.
It is a thin line between repairing an original recording and altering it for today’s sound. Repairing is a process of archiving, or saving fragile material that time will surely ravage further and reduce to museums. To take an untouched album, chock full of the habits of its technology, and change it to suit contemporary standards is often altering it excessively. This seems to be a situation much like when fig leaves were added to nude renaissance images of Adam and Eve to cover up what people thought they should be ashamed to reveal. Can you tamper with an artist’s idea and still have it remain original and authentic to the original? Not really. When you change the way things are heard you alter the way they affect people, they ideas they attach to it, and the authenticity of the recording. With the removal of the original sound, the initial space of the recordings is lost, and the alteration of it leaves the music not as it was originally intended to be heard, and the experience of that sound eschewed. I understand that a vast majority of people will opt for a remastered recording because it is surely easier to listen to, and really this authenticity problem does not bother itself with most consumers, but the way our ears hear the history of the sound is as much a part of it as the music itself.
Music has a specific relationship with the ear, and now with CD’s and more recently computer audio files, the accessibility of listening is amazing. With the consistency of clear available sound, we don’t hear most of the sound we take in. The sound is edited further by our ears, which have lost the ability to hear the way we did before the popularity of recorded sound (Ross). In the early century, our sensitivity towards sound was supremely greater than it is now. With the barrage and convenience of sound, our auditory instincts for hearing the world have worn away. Perhaps this is a contributing factor towards the instinctual reaction to eliminate surface noise; the inability to hear beyond the sounds of the parts to get to the whole. It is as if we as listeners are not only shaping music, but it is shaping how we hear by force.
Although much of what I have discussed is proposed through critical opinion and research, I understand that a lot has to do with taste and judgment. While trying to be detached from my own view and remain dependant on logic, I found myself scrutinizing the bigger picture as well as the territory of music. I wonder what the need is to eradicate older formats as soon as new ones are invented. At this rate, original formats will never get to be heard the way they were made to be. We have eliminated the sounds of history in our current technology, and altered how it was intended to be understood and utilized. With the popularity and accessibility of computers, I am curious as to where sound can go from here. I wonder if there is room for sound to evolve, or perhaps just the players will progress. Until then, I assume we are comfortable with our current technology, and old methods are left to become artifacts for museums.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “Listening”. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music Art and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkley University Press, 1985.
Morton, David. Off the Record: the Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Morton, David. http://www.recording-history.org/
Ross, Alex. “The Record Effect”. The New Yorker. 2005 http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050606crat_atlarge
Schoenherr, Steve. “Recording History Technology”. 2005. http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/notes.html
Stern, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
posted by Studies in Audio Culture at 10:05 a.m.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home