NewMexiKen is reading Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. It’s a well-regarded book that I am finding interesting, though actually I was looking more for a history of the early recorded music business. Katz’s interest is mostly from the musicologist point of view.
Still, some interesting stuff.
One of the most basic manipulations is splicing, in which passages recorded at different times are joined together. The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967) provides a famous example. The Beatles did over two dozen takes of the song, none of which completely satisfied John Lennon. But he did like the first half of Take 7 and the second half of Take 26. So he asked George Martin, their producer, to put the two together. Unfortunately, they were in different keys and tempos. The two takes, however, were related in such a way that when one was sped up and the other slowed down so that the tempos matched, the pitches also matched. Thus the two takes could be joined, the splice occurring at about 0:59 on the word going in “Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields.” Although the splice is nearly undetectable, the slightly altered speed of Lennon’s voice helps give the song its distinctively dreamlike quality.
Another passage notes the impact of the Depression and free radio on the phonograph business:
“In 1927, 104 million discs and 987,000 machines were sold; by 1932, the numbers had plummeted to 6 million and 40,000.”
Maybe our present day music industry should quit its whining.