Music & Technology - A Retrospective

8/7/2019 Music & Technology - A Retrospective

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Music & Technology

The music industry has always evolved with a close relationship to technology.

The following article is a list of five of the most impactful technicalinnovations to the studio, who was responsible, and how it has changed the way

we listen to music. This isn't meant to be an analysis of any specific genre, nor

is it about exposing certain people to new bands. It's a little of something for

everyone. Part history, part science, and part silly, the article you're going to

read isn't as deep as some cuts go, but is a very relevant cross section of the

history behind music, supported with albums that have broken down barriers

and change the way sound goes from the studio to your ears.

#1 Multitrack Recording

Invention: 1922 by Charles Hoxie

Function: Multitrack Recording is the practice of recording sound on different

tracks from different sources before they are combined to the entire track.

Uses: Making recordings sound like something more than a bunch of people

yelling at a microphone; allowing multiple tracks to be played simultaneously

but recorded separately to break down the recording process; keeping the

recording industry from dying out or staying on wax cylinders until the 80s.

History: The music industry was very different back in the 20s and 30s. The

shift from phonograph cylinders to vinyl records was nearly complete, but the

recording process hadn't been updated since microphones. A company known

as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (you only know them because them

make sticky pieces of yellow paper, 3M) started producing a magnetic tape that

would revolutionize the way music was recorded. Couple that magnetic tape

with Ampex, an electronics company that found a way to record on three ofthese pieces of tape and sync them together, and you have the first multitrack


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recording.

Multitrack recording is the reason albums don't sound like live music without a

crowd. The ability to have instruments split across different tracks, the ability

to split singing from playing, and the ability to recording multiple takes of thesame section all come from having multitrack recording. It legitimately

revolutionized the way music was produced, and up until the switch to digital

recording, multitrack magnetic tape was the industry standard in studios around

the world.

Recommended Listening:

The Ronettes

Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica (1964)

Baroque Pop

Phil Spector is best known for mutilating "Let It Be" before its release in 1970

(or being a psychotic murderer if you're feeling kinky). In the early 60s

however, he was the preeminent pop music producer. The Fabulous Ronettes is

one of the best examples of Spector's wizardry at engineering. The albumsizzles with class, and you can't help but imagine the image of American

families singing along to "Be My Baby" in their Plymouth Belvedere. Coming

straight out of the era of the Beach Boys, albums like these, with the lead

vocals buried in a warm syrupy harmony of backing vocals/instrumentation, sit

in a nice cozy nook of nostalgia in the back of our minds along with fast food

drive-ins and tailfins that could slice a grapefruit.


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Mike Oldfield

Tubular Bells (1973)Prog/Ambient

What Mike Oldfield did with Tubular Bells is almost as pioneering as

multitracking itself. Not only did this album single handedly launch Virgin

Records, it was one of the first ambient/minimalist compositions marketed to a

mainstream audience. Tubular Bells is a mountain of overdubs, recorded on a

16 track recorder at a time when very little overdubbing was used. Perhaps the

best way to describe it is simply a tornado of various session instruments all

entering and exiting at different times to create a varied landscape with

remarkably uniform texture. It's as if someone took all the instruments they

could find in a studio and used the Photoshop smudge tool on them so they all

blended together. The result is as terrifying as it is unique.


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#2 Doubletracking

Invention: Late 50s

Function: Analog doubletracking is done by a recording the same portion of a

track twice and mixing them to play simultaneously. Automatic doubletracking

creates the effect of that process through manipulation of the recorded track.

Uses: Creating vocal depth without needing a friend who can also sing,

establishing the strong vocal presence that has since dominated popular music,

ripping off Beatles fans who buy the plug-ins for their DAWs.

History: At a time when most session recordings were simply a few musicians

standing in a studio and playing at a microphone, there was a strong desire to

add more density to your sound. This helped many bands get out of the cellar

with heavy vocal harmonies that produced the early rock and roll sound and

helped them set themselves apart from other bands. The alternative to finding a

few new band mates was an appeal to technology in the form of

doubletracking. Rather than having a few people sing a melody, you could

simply sing it yourself twice and then sync them together to make a broad

chorus-like sound, without all the downsides of extra egos and pretention.

Perhaps the most important innovation to come out from doubletracking wasthe idea to automate it. Technological doubletracking led to the heavy rock/pop

of the 60s and 70s that was saturated with the clamor of echoing vocals and

instruments. Though some claim doubletracking is the best way to make it

sound like you record in a metal box, it has been a favorite tool in the oeuvre

of many great musician (including some four young troublemakers from

Britain). And even with the more artificial sound of mechanized

doubletracking, it has been used even up to the present day for its convenience

and usefulness. Butch Vig is famous for getting Kurt Cobain to doubletrack for

Nevermindby telling him John Lennon did it. Ten or so million copies later,


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it's a pretty safe bet that most listeners still love the sound of doubletracking.


Buddy Holly

Buddy Holly (1958)

Rock and Roll

For the short time Buddy Holly made music, he made it count. The second to

last album recorded before his death is one of the first examples of

doubletracking. Listening to the guitar sizzle on the opening of Words of Lovebefore fading into the warm of hum on doubletracked vocals was the sound

that would set the tone for the next generation of rock musicians. He recorded

prolifically for the short time he was alive, dying in a plane crash in 1959.

Perhaps more enduring that his music was the influence he had on so many acts

of the 60s with his sound, which spilled into acts like The Beatles, Bob Dylan,

and the Rolling Stones.

The Beatles

Revolver(1966)

Rock

It's great to expose others to a band nobody's ever heard of, especially when

they're really bad and it compliments my self-righteous arrogance.

And now for something completely different.

The first album to make use of automatic doubletracking did so in a very

psychedelic fashion. Abbey Road's engineers used their creation to fill up dense

landscapes of sound by double tracking almost everything in the studio.

However, reviewing a classic album would just be one more drop in a bucket

of drool on the Beatles' front porch.


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#3 Sampling

Invention: 1970s New York City

Function: Sampling is the result of taking sound from another source (such as

another song) and mixing it into a different song. Often made up by illegal and

copyright protected music - Such as music torrents.

Uses: Including cool beats in your song if you're not good enough to make

them yourself; putting breaks of incoherent speech into music for absolutely no

reason; paying tribute to past influences while remixing their work and hoping

to God they won't sue you.

History: Sampling was unofficially the child of Clive Campbell, a Jamaican

born New Yorker. His rebellion against the nauseating disco tidal wave of the

70s was DJ-ing parties in New York. The movements of playing extended

breaks was the embryo of hip-hop music that was soon snowballing into much

larger forces than he could control. The sample, taking a clip from one source

and playing it in another, became the close companion of hip-hop since day

one. They grew up together and led an emerging rap genre into the late 20th

and later 21st century.

Unlike other innovations listed here, sampling wasn't something cradled in alab by eggheads in trench coats and later sold to the people. The sample was all

about the culture of the remix, and was a pure product of the people. Had it not

been for the massive excitement and energy derived from sampling it would

have died out on the streets. However, it was the next step in evolving music.

The sample is closely tied to remixing music, taking someone else's work and

making it original and artistic yourself. What the sampling did was open up

music to a lot of people who's creativity may not have been recorded or

remembered by future generations. History was given a spin in the mid 70s and
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it first hit the studio in the early 80s.


Brian Eno and David Byrne

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981)

Experimental/Art Rock

Brian Eno has always been known for putting together some really weird stuff,

and this album is not an exception by any means. It is, however, one of the firstalbums to use heavy sampling, if not in typical manner. Instead of dropping

some classic funk or soul beats, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts relies on clips

from radio commentators, politicians, or people reciting the Qur'an to get his

clips. The album does excite the mystical and spiritual qualities that transcend a

simple musical experience, but can also fall back on its powerful instrumental

rhythms when called for to deliver a moving milestone of history for sampled

music.

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel(1999)

Hip-Hop

Don't let the date fool you on this one. This compilation of tracks by


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Grandmaster Flash are of just as much historical importance as the previous

album. Some of the older tracks were recorded in the late seventies, before

Grandmaster Flash won real fame with "The Message", another of the included

songs. Flash may not have been the first to sample, just as Babe Ruth wasn't the

first to play baseball, but he made it gain all the exposure it needed to permeate

the mainstream eternally following his success in the early eighties. He is

lauded as a hero by those close to the origins of hip-hop, and is just as

important to the success of the genre as sampling itself. Like all great

visionaries, he sees his world and responds to it, changing it for the better.

#4 Digital Recording

Invention: 1975 by Soundstream Inc.

Function: Digital recording is the process of taking sound and transferring it

to a digital medium. The analog recording is saved digitally as a series of

numbers.

Uses: Massively reduces the cost of copying/distributing music; re-mastering

albums so that you can pay more money for music that doesn't sound much

different; digital piracy (yar!).

History: The switch from digital entirely changed the game. Again. The sameway multitrack recording took the music industry in its infancy and taught it

how to walk, digital recording took the industry and taught it karate. Sound

make the switch in the late 70s to a state where it was now entirely helpless

against an army or computers that could stack and process sound in new ways.

3M flew in to save the day yet again by making the process cheaper and

applicable to pop music by 1980 after it had spent its first five years as a

novelty sort of recording used only on large classical ensembles in a quality to

satiate the most critical audiophile.


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Digital recording shouldn't be thought of as an extension to analog recording

the same way a rifle shouldn't be thought of as an extension to a bow and

arrow. Digital opened the door for so many new technique it could be broken

up into four or five sections if you were picky enough. Digital waveforms give

the engineer more techniques that they can use to edit the sound after it has

been recorded. Digital recording also has the advantage of being much less

prone to distortion or "fuzziness" in sound that introduces more white noise. It

also began the counterpart of digital compression which led to formats like

mp3 and flac that we now use to consume almost all of our music, and

innovation that has born the digital music market (both legal and pirate). So

thank digital recording engineers as you download some more albums.


Ry Cooder

Bop Till You Drop (1979)

Blues Rock

Ry Cooder had been recording for years by the time he made the first

commercial digitally recorded album. If anything is to be gained from hearing

him cover old R&B songs, it's how the industry approached the new industrywith baby steps. The first digital album is hollow, almost a mile long drop

backwards from all the room-filling harmonies and doubletracking that defined

the previous generation of music. That being said, what comes out of this

album is crisp and clean music that represented popular music's first teetering

steps through a door into the digital age and let's face it, Rome wasn't built in a

day.


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Herbie Hancock

Future Shock(1983)Funk/Hip-Hop

Herbie Hancock has always been on the cutting edge of music, and digital

music was no exception. With all the electronic MTV driven music of the early

80s building up steam, Hancock's Future Shockis one of the quintessential

pieces of defining that electronic sound. The heavy use of automation and

synthesizers make the album sparkle with a very bright tone throughout, and

the haunting funk of "Rockit" takes a good long look at the border of jazz and

hip-hop before deciding it doesn't like it and smashing down the barrier to a

new realm of sonic achievement. Not only does Herbie understand the new

medium, he embraces it and applying a character to it, strongly saying the

music of the electronic era won't be a whole bunch of a robotic beeps and

boops. The collective statement is one of the most enduring and

groundbreaking albums of its age.

#5 Auto-Tune

Invention: 1997 by Andy Hildebrand

Function: Auto-Tune is a processing algorithm that corrects pitch. It

essentially allows an off-key or out-of-tune performance to be corrected to

sound in tune.

Uses: Making people who can't sing on pitch sound much better; making a

profit for T-Pain; keeping Glee profitable.

History: The history of auto-tune is a bit of conundrum. One of the most


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important production techniques of the last decade, regardless of whether or

not you approve of it, was designed by an Exxon engineer who realized

musicians didn't know how to use calculus. Being a smart college educated

guy, he created a program that processes sound waves in a vocoder and

automatically corrected them to the required pitch. Not only was it developed

out of the music industry, but unlike most other technologies, it didn't so much

innovate our way of making music rather than make us lazier. So many people

have jumped on the bandwagon for pitch correction that it has now become a

cliche that pushes the bile to the tip of most music fans' tongues.

With all that being said, auto-tune is still something that has pushed music

forward. The initial reception and application of auto-tune was much less

overzealous than the type of lampooning that made Antoine Dodson famous,and created a string of popular hits in the late 90s and beyond that proved that

if not used out of laziness, auto-tune can add to your sound.


Cher

Believe (1998)

Pop

Listen carefully to Cher belting out the high notes on "Believe". Now listen to

the massive waver on the low range in the verses. Did you hear that

unmistakable sound of pitch correction Mr music producer? If you listen to this

album for nothing else, know that "Believe" was the first song to use auto-tune.

So before you go around punching out rappers for ruining music by running

themselves through the box, know it's all Cher's fault for doing it first, only she

made pop music subject to the "Cher Effect" for the next few years following

the single's success.
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Daft Punk

Discovery (2001)

House

There actually was a period of time where auto-tune wasn't the flavor of the

month, a few years back. But who am I kidding? By this point in your life,

you've already heard "One More Time". In fact, you've probably heard it more

than one more time and probably have thumped three or four friends with no

musical diversity for playing it too much. But with an album already drippingwith heavy sampling and electronically processed sounds, auto-tune doesn't feel

like the awkward kid who showed up uninvited. Instead, it's surrounded by

disco and synth sounds where it not only blends but enhances the lyrics, all

without putting auto-tune in the spooky realm between singer and sampler that

alienates so many listeners.

Music & Technology - A Retrospective

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