While the publications of the last decades have drawn attention to the new instruments that have come from the electron—from the theremin to the mixtur-trautonium by way of the ondes martenot—I really know of hardly any texts that highlight the amazing revolution brought about by recording sounds.
As so often happens in the sort of adventure where, both suddenly and gradually, the machine gives new potential to human activity, we did not have time to be amazed by the discovery, so busy were we trying to improve it. From the cylinder to wax, the bell to the baffle, the gramophone to the record player, 78s to LPs, ebonite to vinyl, the phonograph to the tape recorder, mono to stereo, it was, from Edison and Charles Cros, a long journey, with its halts, surprises, and moments when we surpassed our expectations. Progress was so conspicuous that the phenomenon itself got away. Besides, at the beginning the discovery was so crude, apparently so far from fulfilling its promise, that we needed a robust faith, a lively imagination, to anticipate developments that—so it seems today—anyone could have foreseen.
So this is the paradox: when a new discovery is made and at first does not live up to expectation, contemporaries, in their initial amazement, catch a glimpse of its astonishing implications; but they immediately turn away, postponing testing it to see if it can be generalized until later and concentrating on the evidence, the immediate results. Then, once the technical process is involved, they pay attention only to the area of development they have under their noses. As the discovery fulfills its promises, it recedes and becomes part of acquired knowledge. Any reflection on it seems anachronistic, whereas no one has ever really stopped to consider it. The mists of initial investigation may have prevented our predecessors from seeing clearly, but we, too, lack the time for discovery, the shock of the unexpected find, to fill us with wonder and make us relearn what we think we already know.
What was already surprising about Edison’s cylinder was that a three-dimensional acoustic field, carrying various messages, could be transformed into a one-dimensional mechanical signal1 and that playing it back, even crudely, as we know, delivers “something” of the messages stored in this way.
What precisely? The answer is fairly clear. Edison’s phonograph gave back, as best it could, the semantic content of the messages. Across a dreadful distortion of the signal, a brutal defacing of the sound elements, and in an acoustic field that had only one dimension, it remained possible for the listener to recognize what had been recorded: not only the meaning of the message—words or sentences, refrains or harmonies—but also some aspects of its origin. Thus Dranem or Cécile Sorel, the violin or the clarinet, could just about be identified.
This is the mystery that we no longer perceive, blinded as we are by false appearances: how can we account for the fact that certain natural sound structures, completely familiar to us, appear indestructible, recognizable against all odds, through the crudest distortions and dislocations? Will it do to give purely electroacoustic explanations here? Did Edison’s phonograph allow us to recognize timbres? Well, what, then, is a timbre, for even the cylinder to retain traces of it? A spectrum of frequencies? But this was played back in a piteous state. Only the most empirical definition of timbre survives: Dranem could be recognized because he was Dranem, that’s all. The origin of vocal sounds remained perceptible. Something of the Dranem-timbre, a causal continuity called Dranem, was still identifiable.
The phenomenon of recording and reproduction would, therefore, even in its earliest days, call for a strange comment: if the cylinder was a primitive wonder, our ear, not at all primitive, was another. In fact, even if, today, advanced equipment gives us a signal that is reputed to be accurate, Edison’s experiment remains: the ear, despite a distorted signal, gets the essential of the message. This essential, then, shows its strange independence from response curves.
Yet later, how particular we have become about those same response curves, high fidelity, respect for timbres! The advances in recording machines have all been about fidelity to the signal and have revealed nothing about the powers of the ear. And as music is made of perceptions, not physical signals, it is to be expected that, over such a long period, we have not known how to use the tape recorder and the microphone to do properly musical research and elucidate traditional musical values in all their profundity.
Recording alone would doubtless not have been enough to cause the present explosion of activity in the field of sound, any more than photography, in her black veil, would have led to what is called “the civilization of the image.” But once the means of mass broadcasting joined forces with phonography and photography, these discoveries were the beginning of a huge blossoming of original techniques. Certainly, the cylinder contained in embryo all the mysteries of capturing sound, fixing it as a “fact” and, hence, the possibility of taking hold of it as an object for experimentation. And it was the same for the image with the Lumière brothers’ invention. But, as always, we have to go a long way down the path of tangible achievements before we can retrace our own footsteps and interpret them. In order to see the almost insidious flowering of a new way of looking at music, broadcasting had to go beyond its own capacities. It had the historic circumstances for this: studios, money, and, above all, people quite different from traditional musicians yet sound specialists also. Omitting to examine this historic situation would be to deprive ourselves of a powerful source of illumination in this study.
So what has happened since sound capture, together with recording and broadcasting equipment made the whole planet echo with the sound of the violinist or the voice of the singer in the studio?
We have seen two equally modern and equally anachronistic trends in practical research: modern because they used and continuously improved on new inventions, anachronistic because they allowed scarcely any time to reflect on their basic principles, neglecting fundamental research for a hasty technology in pursuit of applications.
One of these pieces of research attempted to reproduce the entire acoustic field in three dimensions: it led to stereophony. The other, on recording, which came first, was to overcome extraordinary difficulties in the narrow context of monophony. It gradually demonstrated the skill required by those who practiced this new art. How can we explain why these two pieces of research neither brought about the rethinking of musical ideas that, after the event, we consider they could have achieved, nor shed adequate light on the very nature of their own undertaking? It is rather as if someone had thought of developing the magnifying-glass into a microscope without thinking about the particular way in which this extension of sight brought us close to the infinitely small, which raises the problems of preparations (dishes, special lighting) and the requirements and tolerance of the eye (resolving power, maximum magnification, etc.). This work attempts to remedy this important omission.
A whole trend in electroacoustics therefore tends toward the integral reproduction of sound, especially stereophonic sound reproduction. What could be more tempting for the engineer than to place the listener in front of an imaginary orchestra, where he can situate the first violins on his left and the seconds on the right? But here a comment is called for, which does not condemn the attempt but reduces its significance: if integral reproduction were so important, going from monophony to stereophony would have a radical effect. The engineer would have to have a thorough control over the phenomena he is dealing with, and the listener would have to be highly sensitive to this. Now, experience shows that it is all quite vague; it really seems that these refinements are secondary phenomena, quite unstable, and marred, on the practitioner’s part, by some degree of insecurity and, on the listener’s part, by great uncertainty. In fact, improving a monophonic system is more worthwhile, in terms of the musical result, than setting up a hasty stereophonic system. Our engineer, like our listener, comes up against complex problems here, and it is not absolutely clear that improvements in techniques are suited to the properties of the ear.
If, for example, we recall the subterfuge of “false stereophony,” we will greatly embarrass the specialists. Without going into details, the reader will remember that this procedure quite simply placed the bass instruments on one side, the high ones on the other. Now, in these circumstances we still situate the instruments to some extent. So how is it that, when the orchestra goes from low to high, the whole orchestra does not shift from left to right? Or how is it that the piano keyboard does not occupy the whole stage?2
As a consequence, tackling the practical problem of sound reproduction must mean bringing into play a series of transformations leading from the “live” sound event to its imitation using electroacoustic means, transformations that we are far from knowing how to control with the refinement and sureness that can be imagined in theory. We will therefore look more closely at some aspects of this type of reproduction.
An orchestra plays in a concert hall. Later, elsewhere, this same orchestra, engraved on a record, plays for a listener in his house. As everything, from technique to marketing, is geared to making the listener believe that he practically possesses this orchestra at home, it is not surprising that, by a sort of social convention, the whole emphasis is placed on fidelity and that nothing very clear has been said about the transformation involved in substituting one sound field for another.
Let us add that the secret is so well kept only because of the complicity of our ear: this amazing organ is equally capable of letting us perceive nuances with great sophistication and of covering up evidence: this substitution of one sound universe for another, this upheaval of the rules of unity of time and place, must have importance. How is it, then, that the magic trick seems so perfect, that the orchestra comes to play in our house as if nothing had happened?
Reflection on this subject, if it is to be thorough, must, from the outset, take into account physical as well as psychological data. The change of field does indeed impinge on both levels. Let us not forget that listening cannot take place without a listener; he, too, is elsewhere and afterward, like the reproduced sound. We will see that, with what appear to be the most objective phenomena at the time of recording, psychological factors come into play much more decisively than hertz or decibels.
So how will we go about it if we must tackle everything at once, a psychological inquiry and certain physical descriptions of the phenomena? While referring to book 4 for the concept of object, we will for the moment limit ourselves to a description in everyday language of the psychoacoustic transformation brought about by the recording of sounds. Sound practitioners will have no problem with this. We are simply recapitulating facts that they know perfectly well. If they have nothing to learn, they will forgive us in the knowledge that many readers know almost nothing about this recent and major experiment of transforming one sound field into another.
Here, a warning about terminology. We must avoid confusing different concepts that are described in the same words—on the one hand by physicists, on the other by psychologists: in the pair object-image, in fact, the word object has one current physical meaning (in optics, for example); in psychology it has another. Initially, we will stay on the side of physicists, researching the physical magnitude that is more or less retained after electroacoustic procedures and that allows us properly to speak of sound reproduction.
There are two big differences between experiencing light and sound phenomena. The first of these differences comes from the fact that most visual objects are not light sources but simply objects, in the usual sense of the word, with light shining on them. Physicists are therefore quite accustomed to distinguishing the latter from the objects that reflect it. If the object itself gives out light, then we say it is a light “source.”
With sound there is nothing like this. In the overwhelming majority of the sounds we are dealing with, the whole emphasis is on sound insofar as it comes from “sources.” The distinction, classic in optics, between sources and objects has therefore not been necessary in acoustics. All our attention has been taken by sound (just as we say light) considered as emanating from a source, with its trajectories, its modifications, and so forth, without the “contours” of a specific sound, its form, being appreciated for its own sake, without reference to its source.
This attitude has been reinforced by the fact that sound (until recording was created) has always been linked in time to the energetic source that gave rise to it, to the point of being conflated with it in practice. Moreover, this fleeting sound is only accessible to one sense and remains under its sole control: the sense of hearing. A visual object, in contrast—and this is the second difference—has something stable about it. Not only is it not confused with the light that illuminates it, not only does it appear with contours that are permanent in various lights, but it is also accessible to other senses: it can be felt, touched, smelt; it has a form our hands can embrace, a surface that touch can explore, a weight, a smell.
So it can be understood that the concept of sound object had scarcely any claim to attract the physicist’s attention. Besides, as his natural tendency was to trace facts back to their cause, this was largely satisfied by the energetic evidence of the sound source: there was no reason why the ear, once mechanical radiations had spread out an elastic medium (air) should perceive anything other than the sound source itself.
There is, in truth, nothing wrong with this reasoning. Let us simply say that if it is valid for a physicist or a maker of electroacoustic machines, it will not do for a musician or even for an acoustician of the ear. After all, the latter do not have to account for how the sound arises, then is propagated, but only the way it is heard. Now, what the ear hears is neither the source nor the “sound” but, truly, sound objects,3 just as what the eye sees is not directly the source, or even its “light,” but illuminated objects.
The “materialization” of sound in the form of a recording—a fragment of tape, the groove of a record—should have drawn particular attention to the sound object. Indeed, in these experiments sound was apparently no longer evanescent, and it kept its distance from its cause: it acquired stability; we could manipulate it, copy it, vary its energetic dimensions, without being bound by its initial contingencies. A dualism like the dualism between illuminated objects and light sources emerged; the separation between a medium that is inert, but has all the “information,” and the energy necessary to make this information perceptible, should have been enough to make acousticians change their terminology and explain more clearly the distinction between the energy source, the sound, and finally the sound object. Nothing of the sort happened. They simply note an implicit distinction between sound and sounds or between sound and a sound. The link that, for the physicist, binds the cause to the effect is so strong that, even as a recording or a modulation of an electrical current, the “information” received by the ear never seems to have been clearly differentiated from its material medium (record, tape, etc.) nor from its temporary form of energy (electric current, mechanical vibration). The term signal still seems best to shed light on the content of what sound conveys. The real physical object revealing itself to the ear is therefore, ultimately, a signal, and it is this signal that is involved in the transformation of sound produced by recording and reproducing sounds.
Intense commercialization of electroacoustic equipment has greatly muddied the waters for fundamental research. Fidelity, response curves, tone, spatial effect, and so forth have been pushed to the foreground; no one, it seems, has mentioned the essential; a given number of sound sources are in a studio, a concert hall, anywhere; sound is captured, recorded, “read,” listened to. . . . What is going on? What, in short, are we listening to that is different from what we would have heard live?
(a) Transformation of the acoustic space
From a four-dimensional4 acoustic space we take a one-dimensional space in monophony, or a two-dimensional space in stereo. We will concentrate on monophony, the more significant. The microphone or microphones, wherever they are placed or however balanced, ultimately deliver one modulation, that is, an electric current that represents the sum total of the different acoustic vibrations captured by each of them. Let us suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that there is just one microphone: it is the convergence point of all the “beams” coming from the sound points in the surrounding space. After the various electroacoustic transformations, all the sound points in the initial space will be condensed in the membrane of the loudspeaker: this space is replaced by one sound point, which will bring about a new distribution of sound in the new space of the place where it is listened to. In any case the staging of the sources in the initial space is only perceptible in the “sound point” of the loudspeaker in the form of differences in intensity: through the loudspeaker sound is not more or less distant; it is more or less faint, depending on the length of the beam that linked it to the microphone.
(b) Transformation of the surroundings, or intelligent listening
We cannot think about the phenomenon above, which is purely physical, without closely linking it to the subjective listening space: it would be difficult to understand the profound transformation of sound without taking into account the transformation of the “nonlive” listener’s perception compared to the “live” listener. The latter, who is present at the sound event, listens to it with both ears, in the original acoustic surroundings, at the moment when it happens, and his listening is accompanied by vision and other attendant perceptions. The “nonlive” listener also, of course, listens with both ears but from the sound point of the loudspeaker, in different surroundings, far from the moment, the circumstances, and the place where the original event took place. He does not have the help either of the spectacle or any other direct experience of the environment.
Although so many truisms, these comments are nevertheless heavy with often ill-perceived consequences, which have two aspects:
(1)a mainly physical aspect: the appearance of a noticeable reverberation, imperceptible in live listening,
(2)and a mainly psychological aspect: on the one hand, the highlighting of sounds in nonlive listening that would not have been heard live and, on the other hand, the blurring of sounds that live listening would certainly have had no trouble in discerning—this being partly due to the lack of audiovisual balance, which would have been present in live listening.
Let us return to these two points.
(1) Change of surroundings or noticeable echo
We know that the ear is directional or, more precisely, that binaural listening has the power of localization. In live listening we hear the sound sources in two ways: live sound locates them, whereas the sound reverberating round the concert hall, coming from all directions (except in a straightforward echo, which would be located), does not. Our listening mediates between live sound, which is localized, and reverberated sound, which is not. If our two ears are replaced by a microphone, it will capture both live and reverberated sound, conflate them and thus ultimately convey to the loudspeaker a product that has not been selected as would have been the case with our two ears in live listening. This is why the concert halls that appear suitable for live listening seem, for nonlive listening, to possess a noticeable reverberation, which can make them inappropriate for recording sound. Hence the precautions taken in broadcasting studios. We can experience something of this noticeable echo and nonlocalization by covering one ear and noting the resultant confusion.
The term intelligent listening is used by practitioners to describe the sum total of those activities of the ear in live listening discovered with such amazement by beginners in sound recording. While other perceptions, particularly visual, are involved in the apprehension of sound content, the eye unquestionably plays no part in that selective listening to live and reverberated sound, which makes our hearing so clear even in very echoing concert halls. Paradox would have us say that such halls have “good acoustics” precisely because they amplify the singers’ voices, which proves that the ear is also aided by reverberated sounds.
In any case, whatever physicists’ interpretation, the facts are there before us: in live listening, with two ears, concert halls have less noticeable echo than when listening to the sound played back on an electroacoustic music system. The observation is very simple, but it is not so easy to unravel its mystery.
(2) Transformation of the content
It is perhaps more surprising, but doubtless less embarrassing, to observe that in a recording we begin to hear all sorts of things that we did not hear in live listening: background noise, interference, our neighbor’s coughing, orchestral events, mistakes or overeagerness on the performer’s part.
This is because when he listens live, the listener is wholly present with all his senses. People have sought in vain, and very stupidly, to explain the superiority of live listening by some shortcomings in sound recording machines. Machines are inanimate: it is we who have nerves, senses, consciousness, who make choices from the thousands of disparate pieces of information that come our way, even in the calmest of concert halls. In nonlive listening, the act of listening takes place in a quite different context. It is not surprising that there is a transformation in the psychological field, even more radical than in the field of acoustics.
Centering (planes) and enlargement (details)
Centering and enlargement are both consequences of these two aspects of transformation: in the acoustic and psychological fields we will indicate some of the properties of recorded sound, which now appear as objective.
Three-dimensional space becomes one-dimensional, but if something has been lost (localized intelligent listening), something has also been gained: on the one hand, amplification, which consists in hearing sound “larger than life,” and on the other hand, centering, which consists of “cutting out” a particular segment from the auditory field.
Of course, since photography, such experiments are already known and understood in the visual field. We know that, even if photography deprives us of the fluidity that vision possesses, it gives us, within a frame (which fortunately hides the rest from us), a concentration on the object, or on a detail of the object, and in addition it enlarges their dimensions as much as we desire. However linked together in practice, these two properties are quite distinct: enlargement, a positive factor, “enables us to see” what we could not see before: the texture of the skin, the detail of an eyebrow. Centering exempts us from seeing the rest; our attention is concentrated on what we need to see.
It will be the same with sound. But how? On the one hand, the dimensions of sound will change, with a simple adjustment of the potentiometer, and with this same adjustment the source will be far away, in the middle distance, or nearby. On the other hand, what will centering be? In the first place it will consist in foregrounding one source, near at hand, rather than the others, in the distance: this is the most elementary process. But there are subtler ones to come: in live listening we never have our ear inside the soundboard of the piano or pushed up against the sound-post of the violin or the singer’s glottis; now, the microphone can take the liberty of such indiscretions and not only give intensity close-ups but be positioned in such a way that the inner proportions of sound will be redefined. This is where the microphone takes its revenge: even if we can say that it has not, like the ear, the intelligence to differentiate live and reverberated sound, we cannot deny that it is capable of capturing a whole world of details that as a rule elude our listening. The sensitivity of the microphone when it captures nearby sounds contributes a number of sound components that are usually ignored. Certainly, the microphone adds nothing to the sound, but it captures it as would an unusual act of listening, in which the normal balance between what accompanies the musical sound (noises, shushings, people leaving, irregularities, etc.) and the value of the sound itself, indicated on the score, can be radically changed. In extreme cases there is “contact” microphone sound-capture, which, with no movement through air, consists in pushing our ear straight up against wood or metal. This could be the beginnings of a new generation of instruments and a listening process unavailable to live listening, representing, generally speaking, an important break with the latter, and illustrating the transformative power of the microphone.
We have left this quality until last, a major one for enthusiasts, convinced that in any case the salesman will guarantee it. As for us, it remains surprising that people manage to provide customers with a sound signal illusory enough to allow the gramophone to take the place of the orchestra so easily. After everything we have just said about the radical changes to the acoustic and psychological field, it really makes one think. How can our ear, which is so exacting, be so tolerant here? The fact is clear. Moreover, people have tried to demonstrate it, usually for reasons of publicity. This is why an orchestra has been asked to play some sequences from a program onstage, alternating with other prerecorded sequences, in which the musicians pretend to play. Experts—without mentioning the uninitiated—were occasionally taken in, maintains the Revue du son.5 They could, however, have been given a clue by the imperfections of the miming, as well as, or more easily than, a particular quality of the sound reproduction.
A more rigorous experiment could be done by giving a listener a series of sounds recorded by a pianist or a violinist, alternating with sounds played live by the same instrumentalist. Could the listener, blindfolded, distinguish one from the other? We do not think so, provided, of course, the necessary precautions had been taken to prevent the sounds from being different for reasons external to the recording itself (different surroundings, for example; or reverberation, if the loudspeaker has been positioned in the same place as the instrumentalist).
If we are even more demanding and would wish to compare the same recorded or live musical object, we would come across an additional difficulty. As two instrumental sounds are never identical, we will always have to have the instrumentalist play first, and the listener will consequently have no problem in getting it right. This is true of the violin, for example, the object being so closely linked to the way the sound is shaped that the violinist will find it very difficult to imitate himself. But we have to acknowledge that with more stereotyped instruments we could, at a pinch, reverse the order of events: could a recording of a piano note be confused with the same note on the same piano played a second time? . . . We believe it could.
As far as we know, however, very few experiments such as this have been done. We may ask why, when the mania for experimentation is rife. Is it only because performing them raises awkward technological and practical problems? Or is it because as high fidelity is for the most part presented as a value in itself, bound up with the electronic definition of the equipment, guaranteed by response curves, distortion coefficients, protected by a whole vocabulary, the experimenter is intimidated from the start?
This latter reason is doubtless the best explanation for the uncertainty or lack of interest in possible proofs of the existence of fidelity. This is because, when the recorded orchestra plays through the sound system as if it were in the room, we don’t really know what is involved in our appreciation of it, and we should probably find it very difficult if we had to commit ourselves to an explanation of the electroacoustic or psychological cause of a particular impression. The experiments we have mentioned—and this is why we find them interesting—show that, in fact, fidelity is just about possible, that it is possible for there to be no appreciable difference to the ear between live and recorded sound; but this is an extreme experiment; in practice, an experiment in perfect reproduction would require infinite precautionary measures.6
Above a certain level of fidelity, therefore, the question of quality has more and more to do with the ear and less and less with the equipment. Nevertheless, we can see that, even when this is the case, the system itself gives the reproduction its own “sound shaping.” Several systems, reputedly with equal fidelity, will each possess a characteristic “sonority,” which, even when all precautions have been taken, will ultimately influence the sounds. The latter factor, doubtless difficult to perceive when dealing with only one sound system, becomes clear when we start to make comparisons: people will say that one system is better for voices, strings, or percussion instruments. So to the four aspects of sound transformation already mentioned we must add a “signature” attributable to everything played on the particular system being used.
To summarize: reverberation, surroundings, centering, enlargement, and “nuanced” fidelity, in total, therefore, five variation dimensions in the reproduction of a given sound event, or rather in the transformation of the sound object into which this event is translated, fixed, and available to be heard again, such as the sound engineer and the transmitting equipment, have changed it into itself.
The above analysis leads us to inquire into the role of the sound recordist, his true nature and his importance.
As long as we think only in terms of reproduction and transmission, it seems that he needs only to be a more or less competent technician. Now in professional circles the distinction between a good, bad, or mediocre sound engineer does not depend solely on this one criterion but also, even principally, on talent. In fact, as we have just seen, fidelity is not simply reproducing but reconstituting; in reality it is the result of a series of choices and interpretations that the recording device makes both possible and necessary. So we must allow that the sound engineer—or the chief sound operator—must ask himself questions that are no longer purely technical but are ultimately answerable to sensitive listening and musical judgment.
How, in fact, can we judge a reverberation time without evaluating its aesthetic character? How can we measure high fidelity in bands of frequencies without subjectively assessing how far timbre has been preserved? How can we reproduce levels in decibels without discovering, further to the concept of intensity, the concepts of plane, distance, and salience? These concepts have only very gradually been discovered; it has taken a long time for their originality to appear.
In this context we should like to refer to a professional situation so paradoxical that nowhere, it seems, has it been honestly described.
It might be thought that, when judging the quality of a musical recording or a radio broadcast, the musician would have an incomparable advantage over the technician. We very quickly perceive that this is wrong. If the equipment “distorts,” the music is ruined, but the musician can do nothing about it. The technician, even if he has little ear for music, will very quickly know if there is a hole in the loudspeaker, a poor contact, or a worn-out valve.
Yes, but, people will say, that’s more to do with repairing than musical criticism. Indeed. Only, apart from the above faults, which are obvious, more difficult problems can arise when, for example, a microphone is placed too near or too far from a soloist, in a concert hall that has more or less reverberation.
What will happen then? An excellent engineer will be as embarrassed as a brilliant musician. Or, on the contrary, a moderately good engineer, like a moderately good instrumentalist, will be particularly clever at discerning the main errors in sound capture.
We should explain this. The pure technician’s ear is a car mechanic’s, an airplane engineer’s ear: it looks through the music for causes, with the aim of finding material solutions. The pure musician, for his part, is trained only in music. Accustomed though he is to judge the work and the performers, he will find himself almost as unprepared as the pure technician in the art of recording, when it is a question not so much of a repair job as of musical value, properly speaking: the proportionality of sound planes, the overall blending, the reverberation in the concert hall. . . . It may even be that, carried away by his personal tastes, he makes great mistakes. Knowing the score too well, he will not notice that the sound is fuzzy, the singer too near or too far away, or at least he will be “biased” in his listening. And if he nevertheless realizes that “something is not quite right”? Because of his conditioning, he is disposed to turn to the instrumentalist, to ask him to put to rights the magic trick of which he is the victim. This is why we have come to talk about voices, works, instruments that are more or less “radiogenic,” depending on how well they “come across” on the radio.
As for the engineer, it is quite clear that the most extensive and profound technical knowledge will be of no use if he is incapable of appreciating the musical outcome, and the mastery of technical resources will be pointless without an instinctive understanding of the purpose for which they might best be used.
We have said that a moderately good musician or technician could do equally well, or, if he is gifted and trained, even better than pure specialists, in music as well as acoustics. When we say “moderately good,” we mean in the sense in which, traditionally, these skills are understood. A person with a polytechnic7 education, like someone who has won the Prix de Rome,8 could practice recording for years without success. A technician who is not very good at integrals, or a not particularly original composer, may, however, be in a better position to approach it, away from preconceived ideas and the false assurance that an entirely theoretical ability in music or acoustics would give him.
What will not be mediocre with these two specialists in new listening, what they will have in common, which can be developed by both a technical and a musical training, is, quite simply, an ear: an instrumentalists’ ear, whose instrument is the microphone. Their listening will be neither technical nor musical in the classical sense of these two terms: watchful and matter-of-fact, completely free of a priori thinking, it will be wholly concentrated on the success of sound transformation itself. The emphasis will no longer be on the workings of machines, the quality of the score or the performance, but the “rendering” based on a model. It is “practitioner” listening, both technical and musicianly.
It will doubtless be clearer now that innate tastes and gifts, and a certain freshness of judgment, seem to us preferable to preconceived ideas and postgraduate confidence for this type of work. If we had to underpin these surprising assertions with hard facts, we would say that in our experience of “sound mixing” musicians, their talent as sound engineers was not always in keeping with their talent and originality for composing. To say that it was in inverse proportion would be far too mathematical and not at all charitable.
The reason for our trying to give an account of these apparent peculiarities is so that we can return to our central theme: the phenomenon of music.9
How is it, then, that the musician, short of submitting to a learning process that in fact requires a veritable readaptation, is so bad at hearing? It is because he has not been prepared for it. So what has he been prepared for? Making music, which is a very different thing.
A glance through musical literature is enough to enlighten us in this respect. Among so many volumes on instrumental and compositional techniques, will we find merely a handful of articles dealing with the art of hearing and analyzing what we hear?
Everything the composer does conforms strictly to the musical catechism that we mentioned in section 1.8. He starts from notions and signs familiar to him and, having gone through the stage of performance, finishes up with a sound-translation that will be comprehensible to others. This approach is like prose composition. If he listens, it is upstream of his musical activity; he sings in sol-fa in his head, plays in his mind and, if he is a very good musician, reads a score mentally, without any help from instruments; he composes in the same way. He does not hear; he reads—he “prehears.”
The sound engineer, in contrast, makes it his duty to listen downstream from the sound phenomenon. The details of a score, which he does not even need to be able to read, are of little importance to him. What he is continually comparing, from his own listening, is the sound image provided by the electroacoustic system and the original sound phenomenon, which he is endeavoring to reconstitute—that is, the sound that comes from real instruments and takes its place in the acoustic field with true grandeur. What he does is translation.
The reader may well wonder, on reading this chapter, if the author has indulged in a number of professional confidences that are irrelevant to his subject. Professional confidences, certainly; irrelevant, no, for if the reader accepts that the microphone and the tape recorder give him a new way of grasping sounds, as film and the cinema camera do for images, he will understand that he must more or less familiarize himself with a professional field where amateurism is to be avoided. If, moreover, he wishes to adopt this approach himself and, if not dedicate himself to experimental music, at least work with and for the microphone and the cinema camera, as the immense majority of musicians of our time are called on to do, he must recognize that he must master these basics.
This is all the more essential as amateurs, who have not analyzed this very deeply, are strongly tempted to use the far-too-widespread language that reveals a naive anthropomorphism where machines are concerned. We mean the quasi-primitive attitude of a large number of nontechnicians: musicians, actors, authors, and composers, who, for want of anything better, display a completely subjective relationship with machines; they say that they “favor” or do not favor, “improve” or distort a sound, a voice, a work or a “presence.” So there are, they say, voices, works, temperaments suited to radio, “radiogenic” (as we say photogenic for faces and images). There is some truth in this: for in practice they are right that certain voices, works, and performances “come across” better than others. What is wrong is the vague, sentimental, in short superstitious, interpretation of this, which boils down to a lack of explanation and justifies laziness.
Since transformation, transposition, and change of physical medium occur anyhow, we cannot say to what extent this is fidelity, trickery, or distortion. Every work, every voice, every performance undergoes manipulation, filtering, amplification, centering. The listener, for his part, is placed in conditions that, by and large, increase his demands. With these two things in mind it is hardly surprising if one thing “comes over” better than another. The mystery does not lie either in the equipment, as such, or in the sound content as it is heard live. There is no microphone or work that is “good” in itself nor any voice that is “better” for the microphone. There may be a surprising or predictable “suitability.” It all becomes clear if we relate the object to be transmitted with the conditions of the transmission, if we consider every aspect of the transformation it undergoes, both obvious and subtle.
As early as 1943, Jacques Copeau, with great lucidity, was becoming aware of these realities in the fields of speech, the text, and voices.10 Contrary to those who maintained that the radio called into question the traditional criteria for the quality of works and performers, he implied that the texts “best suited to take to the airwaves” were still without doubt and quite simply the best, provided that a new art of acting for the new modes of communication was developed. Certainly, what was asked of them was not a momentary adaptation but fundamental progress:
The microphone, like the microscope and the cine-camera, enlarges, emphasizes, exaggerates everything it lights upon.
. . . In front of the microphone, the usual practices of stage acting must be dropped: gesticulation—which can be sensed—sudden attacks (which give rise to insecurity), rapid changes of tone (which hinder clarity of perception).
Across all pitches, voice production must be supported because neither facial nor gestural mime are there to complement meaning, or to make clear through action what is not clearly audible through diction.
. . . Performance for the microphone is an act of reading.
. . . Posture for the microphone is purely mental.
That measured tone, discreet and intimate, which communicates the slightest inflexions of the voice, the slightest nuances of a sensibility right down to the slightest mannerisms of a person, so that, after a while, the listener will think he knows the character who speaks to him better than if he had seen his face, that tone alone opens up a vast domain to the microphone, a domain that is its own, that is exclusive to it.
. . . Faceless, without the authority of the gaze, without hands or body, the speaker’s voice is not disembodied. On the contrary. It conveys the person with utter faithfulness. It even conveys it indiscreetly.
. . . The voice with nothing in its heart and nothing in its head cannot really have anything to do with the microphone.
. . . Radio could therefore be a school for sincerity.11
Is it necessary to add that the same applies, even more subtly, to music and musicians?
Now, in total confusion, we tend to superimpose two types of phenomena: one modern and technical, the other classical and psychological. On the one hand, telecommunications (magically making the message ubiquitous and its range vast); on the other, the mode of perception, which seems new because of the technical relaying between the transmitting source and the receiving subject. Many interpretations of the radiophonic phenomenon have vainly sought explanations from both the studio and the transmitter, explanations that in reality came only from perception itself, the most traditional.
Copeau was not mistaken. It is because of this new type of listening—we will examine its norms in the next chapter—that the actor had to undergo a new learning process. But what did he learn from this new medium—neither more nor less specific and contingent than are reading, concertgoing, dramatic or lyrical productions—other than to go beyond, to surpass, earlier techniques for one that was purer? Far from being the acquisition of a specialist technique, this school of the microphone, as we know, influenced theatrical diction in return, not without destroying some stereotypes of dramatic performance. For his part, far from being frustrated or perceiving only what was distorted in these phenomena, the listener was invited to experience something new, a different approach to texts, speech, musics.
With this experience now so commonplace, it is odd that there is no ordinary word for it. We have to search through the dictionary to dig up a very old neologism: acousmatic. This term has so little to do with our techniques that it comes to us from way back down the centuries. Long before Jacques Copeau, someone else had experienced the powers of a faceless voice, had identified the phenomenon: Pythagoras.