Stretched from Manhattan’s Back Alley to MOMA
A Social History of Magnetic Tape and Recording
Matthew Malsky
It is the music of fevered dreams, of sensations called back from a dim past.
It is the sound of echo, the sound of tone heard through aural binoculars.
It is vaporous, tantalizing, cushioned. It is in the room, yet not a part of it.
It is something entirely new. And genesis cannot be described.
(From Jay S. Harrison’s New York Herald Tribune review of works for tape recorder by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening; reprinted in Daniel 1952)
The Anecdotes1
It’s small wonder, in retrospect, that by the age of ten Walter Murch was already fascinated with recorded sound. After all, he was later to become Hollywood’s sound designer extraordinare and perhaps its most notably articulate pioneer in film sound.2 By first borrowing a friend’s new magnetic tape recorder, then by convincing his parents to get their own (ostensibly to “pirate” music off the radio), he indulged in a quintessentially post-war, middle-class activity: acquiring and then playing with a new gadget.
I made a pest of myself at that [neighbor’s] household, showing up with a variety of excuses just to be allowed to play with that miraculous machine: hanging the microphone out the window and capturing the back-alley reverberations of Manhattan, Scotchtaping it to the shaft of a swing-arm lamp and rapping the bell-shaped shade with pencils, inserting it into one end of a vacuum cleaner tube and shouting into the other, and so forth. (Murch 1994: xiii)
In the aftermath of World War II, consumer markets were burgeoning to almost mythic proportions with the goods resulting from wartime technology transfers, and in the home audio market the magnetic tape recorder was the new star. By 1948 it had already begun to revolutionize production and dissemination in broadcast television and radio, commercial music recording, and film soundtracks.3 Replacing wire and transcription disc recording methods, magnetic tape recorders improved the quality of the sound, altered and expanded production and post-recording techniques, and even changed the repertory itself.4 By 1950 magnetic tape machines designed for businesses and the home recording enthusiast were nationally advertised and widely available and affordable (through Sears & Roebuck, for example.) This machine is at the center of the postwar boom in home entertainment and has a rich sociological, musical, and technological history.
Yet Murch’s personal account indicates an effect beyond its institutional one; it hints at a newly developing relationship that people had with their sonic surroundings. In contrast to the dominant media, the phonograph and the radio, magnetic tape and the recorder allowed people to record sounds themselves, rather than simply play back commercial recordings. While contemporary social critics such as David Riesman warned of the rise of the “other directed” personality type—and of its effects on listening—Murch’s collecting and examining might be seen as proof of the tenacity of more traditional American character qualities.5 It is hard to imagine his experiments as other than play, independence, and enjoyment, a sort of jouissance of direct engagement with the ethereal, ephemeral, and tactile qualities of sound in a newly tangible form. Not only does Murch seem engrossed with his immediate sonic environment, closely examining and considering the sounds produced within the confines of his own space, but he seems able to imagine, through technological extension, a whole new sonic landscape.6
Meanwhile, uptown we find another example of a young man who had an opportunity to play with a tape recorder, one that is notable if only because his mother didn’t throw away the tapes. In 1951, as a young member of the composition faculty at Columbia University, Vladimir Ussachevsky recommended that the department’s new music programs, the Composers Forum concerts, be recorded. Of course, the commercial equipment purchased for that purpose became his responsibility.7 Being a self-described curious sort, he experimented with recording, editing, and two predominant tape manipulations. First, he made recordings through altered tape speeds, which he called transpositions.8 He recorded single piano notes and then rerecorded them at slower tape speeds. Still recognizable as piano timbres, but now defamilarized, these sounds had an unearthly, oceanic quality. He was introduced to the second technique, feedback, by an engineering student at the Columbia radio station. Peter Mauzey armed him with some homemade devices, and he used them to create the illusion of a swimming multitude of piano sounds.9 Ussachevsky, despite his professional credentials, paralleled Murch’s enthusiasm, techniques, and naive enjoyment.
At first, the results were tentatively presented on a May 5, 1952, program at McMillin Theater at Columbia as “experiments” (Ussachevsky 1977: 4). In 1952, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky spent the summer in collaboration at Bennington College. In the fall, they both participated in a recording session at the home of Henry Cowell. Then, on October 28, 1952, in an American Composers’ Alliance concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, they presented the works that were quickly granted this historic designation: the first American art music compositions written specifically for the tape recorder. On the program were Luening’s Low Speed, Invention, and Fantasy in Space, and Ussachevsky’s Sonic Contours. The pair were dubbed “tapesichordists” by critic Oliver Daniel in his Time magazine review of the event, coining a short lived and nearly forgotten appellation (Daniel 1952: 63).10 But the descriptive term that stuck, and tellingly so, was simply “composers.”11
Evading the Cultural Logic of Recorded Sound: The Real, Reality, and a Surplus of Fantasy Space
If we begin by stating the obvious, that there is a great deal of difference in the examples of Ussachevsky and Murch and that their activities are easily separated by the lines of hierarchical discourse (high vs. popular, the new new vs. the old new, professional art vs. amateur play, truth vs. ideology), we might be led to discount any significant congruences, despite a shared medium. Instead, it is more interesting to treat these anecdotes as equivalent at first and consider both through the lens of the same pair of questions. Only then will the ratiocination for the all-too-common divisions become clear. First, with regard to the technology itself, what is the shared material history that brought the machine to that point and engendered a common but multivalent narrative? The story is told through personal accounts, popular hobby manuals, magazines and the popular press, fictive depictions, concert and convention reviews, and the notes accompanying sound recordings. In dialectical terms, these were the contemporary texts that were generated by the practice and that rendered those social applications of the technology into words. Given that access to the type of tapes represented by Murch is limited, the story must of necessity be read from written texts.12 However, and not coincidentally, while Murch’s original recordings are inaccessible, the works by Ussachevsky and Luening are still available (see note 56). These recordings, along with other documentation, are also sources. Second, we should begin with some common framing questions: Why would anyone want to indulge in this sort of sonic representation? What were the stakes? What did the tape recorder really record?
The magnetic tape recorder rended the real. It upset the cultural logic of recorded sound. For a brief historical moment, as a free, as-yet-unencumbered signifier, it opened up a hole in reality and allowed us to shift our listening gaze.13 In a manner analogous to the emergence of language at the gateway to the symbolic, the widespread dissemination of the tape recorder required a variety of strategies for resealing that tear, in the domains of mass culture as well as high art. To develop this notion of the introduction of new technology as a symptom, or to write a “case study” of its visible manifestations, it is necessary for us first to apply to recording the Lacanian concept of the “real,” what Zizek calls “a black hole in Reality.”14 In terms of magnetic tape recording, how does what we call “reality” imply a surplus of fantasy space? How does tape recorder practice and history display the modalities of the real, which returns and answers and can be directly rendered?15 The logic of recording operates as “a barrier separating the real from reality.”16 It is through these fantasy spaces, the sum total of what folks did with their tape recorders, that the “black hole” of the real was held at bay.
It Returns and Answers
Let’s begin by considering another anecdote, one which is only slightly more aberrant. In Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, the exposure to the real opened by the introduction of a tape recorder is not sufficiently repaired through its use, and the results appear as madness.17 The play is set in the sparsely furnished den of the ancient, disheveled, and dirty Krapp, who is surveying and auditioning his voluminous collection of reels of magnetic tape. A tape recorder occupies center stage, both literally and figuratively, and there is little to indicate that any other characters exist in Krapp’s world, or even that there is a world outside his room and reproduced voice. He is, perhaps, an unsuccessful Murch later in life. Almost as a party game in an ongoing secret anniversary celebration, Krapp records and re-records himself as he struggles, unsuccessfully, to articulate his vision of a single moment in his life: a probably imagined encounter with a woman, the object of his desire.
… What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely—[KRAPP switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again]—great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most—[KRAPP curses louder, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again]—my face in her breast and my hands on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
[Pause.]
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited. (Beckett 1958: 60)
That last image is the Lacanian real itself, a space that is experienced as uninhabited, fluid and in motion, insubstantial, and devoid of any social impositions. Here, for Krapp, “the dark [he] has always struggled to keep under” has traumatically returned, disrupting his reality and impairing his ability to function. Krapp has abandoned normalcy (or perhaps, it has abandoned him) for a “stage” of his own making, one that exists solely through its reproduction. He has withdrawn from all other semblance of human exchange and has advanced the tape recorder as his only possible link to human activity. His connection to reality through language has all but failed him, and what remains is an untethered desire, the Lacanian “objet a.” It takes the form of a simple recorded moment, where the tape recorder itself functions as a fantasy space, “as an empty surface for the projection of desires; the fascinating presence of its positive contents does nothing but fill out a certain emptiness” (Zizek 1991: 8). In Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the healthy subject’s “impossible” relation to a, the object-cause of its desire.18 Krapp’s desire is structured by a lack, one that in its unattainable, unfulfillable quality becomes circular—almost as if the tapes he was searching through were looped, with their heads spliced to their tails. That is, his desire creates a surplus of fantasy space.19
But Krapp’s fantasies fail to help him locate his desires—as expected. He fails to record or to find the correct place on the tape that contains that previously recorded nonsymbolized kernel, that certain unspeakable something that will explain everything. The Lacanian real is, in part, that nonsymbolized kernel, an imaginary element that makes a sudden appearance in the symbolic order in the form of traumatic “return” and is understood through its “answer” even though it can only be acknowledged as a signifier of pure contingency—it can seemingly only be understood in terms of the existing symbolic order. Confronted with the reproduced return of his voice, Krapp is unable to make the recordings of his own voice serve as an appropriate “answer”; to convincingly construct a vision of reality through sound. As Zizek notes, madness or psychosis sets in with the failure of our barriers to keep the real at bay—the real overflows or is itself included in reality (Zizek 1989: 55–84; Zizek 1991: 20). As the blank space on the Nixon secret tapes also showed, the real can be a pretty scary Thing when it unexpectedly pokes through our tenuously constructed reality.
Krapp’s symptom is a historical condition, or at least it is historically conditioned.20 Magnetic, like mechanical, systems for recording sound date from just before the start of the twentieth century. The principles of magnetically recorded sound were probably first proposed by an American, Oberlin Smith, in an article for the engineering magazine The Electrical World of September 8, 1888 (Tall 1958: 1; Angus 1984: 28; Morton 2000: 91). The first practical application began in 1893 with Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen’s device, which used wire as the recording medium.21 Poulsen applied for a patent first in Denmark on December 1, 1898, and for worldwide protection shortly afterward. The U.S. patent was filed on July 8, 1899 (and is reproduced as the frontispiece of Tall 1958). In 1900, Poulsen’s telegraphone, based on his design and made by his company in America, was the first commercially manufactured magnetic recording device (Holmes 1985). Marketed as an office dictation recorder and an automatic telephone answering machine, the telegraphone competed with Thomas Edison’s mechanical dictaphone (Tall 1958: 2–3; Morton 2000: 91– 95, 109–10). The company struggled, not producing any significant number of machines before 1912, and moved from its initial location outside Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Massachusetts—near the home of Thadeus Cahill’s groundbreaking (and similarly telephonic) musical instrument, the teleharmonium (1906).22
Beginning with the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the Germans, one of the largest customers of the American Telegraphone Company, used magnetic recording in an unexpected way. Broadcasting from a station at Sayville, Long Island, to submarines off the coast, German spies first recorded Morse-coded intelligence reports and then broadcast them at twice their recorded speed (Angus 1984: 28–30).23 This process improved signal transmission efficiency but also filled the airwaves with patterned static, with noise where meaning was expected. The mystery was finally deciphered in June 1915 by a puzzled ham radio amateur who recorded the signals using a hand-cranked cylinder phonograph and then discovered what they were while replaying them slowly.24 That ham radio amateur, like Krapp, displays a symptomatic understanding of recording. The already arbitrary sign system of Morse code is further obscured through another capricious encoding, yet despite the additional level of indirection, the mystery solver understood that there should be meaning in the noise and sought it (even though its discovery was accidental). The mechanisms for recording and reproducing sound always constitute a disruption, a chain of contingent signs that needs to be deciphered to get to the meaning in the jumble. In Lacanian terms, the answer of the real fulfills an illusion that there is coherence out there, one that was always already there, even if it doesn’t seem so at first (Zizek 1991: 33).
The degree of disruption is an effect of a recording’s definition; the higher the definition, the lower the disruption. As described by Michel Chion, definition has two parts.25 First, it is the correlation of a sound recording’s acuity and precision in terms of measurable sonic characteristics (wow and flutter, frequency response, signal-to-noise ratio, etc.) that are compared against other (usually previous) audio technologies. For example, the magnetic tape recorder might be said to reproduce recordings with higher definition than its predecessor, the phonograph. In contrast, fidelity is based on an ideological assumption that there should, or even could, be a direct correspondence between a live and a reproduced sound—the desire to believe that recording isn’t a symptom. Second, definition is dependent upon the listening audience’s familiarity with those norms. Every established audio reproduction technology is considered to be completely adequate to the task of representing sound, at least until it is displaced by “something better.” Long-playing records were considered a high definition medium, and the inherent surface noise of LPs disturbed few listeners, until they were measured against compact discs. A commonly held point of reference is necessary, and this is true of the predecessor to magnetic tape as well.
Wire and steel-band recorders, along with long-playing records, were one of the norms against which magnetic tape was measured, though the definition of magnetic systems was a quickly moving target—they were continuously developed and used through the 1950s. The following are examples of improvements made to Poulsen’s basic recorder design, all introduced between 1900 and the end of World War II: DC bias noise reduction system by Poulsen and his chief engineer, P. O. Pedersen;26 AC bias developed by W. L. Carlson and G. W. Carpenter of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (U.S. patent granted August 30, 1927); and Dr. Kurt Stille’s use of electronic amplification in his improved telegraphone (which used a cartridge-loaded tape medium) (Tall 1958: 1–22).27 During the 1920s, Stille organized the Telegraphie Patent Syndikat to license the use of the magnetic recording patents that the syndicate had acquired. Along with companies in Germany and America, he sold rights to Louis Blattner, who formed a motion-picture company in England and developed magnetic recorders to use instead of phonograph records for synchronization. The Blattnerphone (later bought by the American Marconi Company) was used beginning in 1929 by the BBC in collaboration with Dr. Heising of Stille Labs, and it incorporated frequency-correcting circuits to improve definition. It was used for broadcasts such as King George V’s New Year’s Day address of 1932, featured on the new BBC Empire shortwave radio service. Wire recorders were also produced in America through the 1950s.28 Throughout the war American firms such as General Electric continued to improve and supply wire recorders for military use. Armour Research Foundation alone supplied the U.S. Navy with approximately ten thousand wire recorders between 1942 and 1945.
The medium, wire and eventually tape, improved during this time as well. Poulsen’s original machine used wire media with a 1/100-inch diameter that traveled across the recording and playback heads at a speed of eighty-four inches per second. In 1937, C. N. Hickman (an acoustical researcher at Bell Telephone Labs) developed Vicalloy, a material used in a solid metal band form. Using a transport speed of sixteen inches per second, it was said to have an audio quality equal to Poulsen’s wire, which moved five times faster. The Blattnerphone used six-millimeter-wide steel bands, which could, with great care, exertion, and danger, be edited with metal shears, the bands then welded back together and reused in subsequent recordings. Before World War II, the Echophone Company, formed by Illinois Institute of Technology graduate Marvin Camras, improved upon the unwieldy spools of wire with a cartridge-loaded machine, the textaphone. This company was bought by the German firm of C. Lorenz Company in 1933, and the Nazi party and secret police acquired the machines in large numbers during the war (Holmes 1985).
Until 1927 all magnetic recording media were solid or plated bands or wires. J. A. O’Neil received the first U.S. patent in 1927 for a flexible paper backing coated with a ferrofluid that was then dried. Magnetic tape was first produced beginning in 1928 in Germany by independent inventor Fritz Pfleumer. Instead of magnetically reorienting the iron particles within the wire or steel band, paper or plastic ribbons were coated with iron oxide particles and laminated onto the medium. The results created a better quality recording medium that was lighter in weight, less expensive, easier to manufacture, and more manageable. As Morton notes, the idea of a coated magnetic surface is still instrumental in all modern media: audio and video tape, computer storage disks, and credit card stripes (Morton 2000: 58). During the war, wire and steel band recorders were in wide production and was a known quantity. However, the advances that made magnetic tape superior to wire media were a clandestine German wartime development. This audio technology, as yet unknown in America, still had no definition—but a high potential for disruption.
During World War II, the Germans improved the formula for magnetic tape further still. In 1932, the German industrial giants BASF (Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik, a division of I.G. Farbenindustrie chemical combine) and AEG (Allgemeine Electriziäts Gesellschaft) developed a magnetic tape system based on Pfleumer’s model for a machine they called the magnetophon. Incorporating American technological innovations such as the AC bias technique, the vacuum tube amplifier, and the condenser microphone, the Germans designed a machine that used coated tape as the recording medium, one that was far more accurate than the older wire recorders—that is, one that recorded a higher degree of definition in terms of frequency response, signal-to-noise ratio, and transport speed consistency. This innovation also combined the capacity to record with an improved ability to reuse the medium and to edit it by splicing. Though this new technology was not entirely unknown to the Allies, their lack of understanding of definition in the new system produced a disproportionate disruption. For example, when Adolf Hitler broadcast radio speeches that were prerecorded using the new magnetic tape recorders, it was mistakenly assumed that he was in the announced location at the time of the broadcast (Gelatt 1954: 286–87). In monitoring radio broadcasts, American audio experts expected to be able to discern the difference between a “live” broadcast and a prerecorded one. Formerly, the characteristic imperfections of transcription disc and earlier magnetic recording systems—that is, their definition—had revealed the presence of reproduction and allowed the Allies to track Hitler’s movements. Though the specific results of this deception are unknown, the material losses caused by Hitler’s “invisibility” are easy to imagine.
Memorex tape commercials staged a similar scene based on the improved definition offered by cassette tape. In the mid-1980s, when cassette tapes occupied a technological and marketing position roughly equivalent to reel-to-reel tape in the 1950s—that is, they allowed mass culture participation in the recording process—the Memorex Corporation ran a series of television advertisements that portrayed a “blindfold” test. Set in a recording studio (that originatory temple of reproduced audio), well-known musicians such as Ella Fitzgerald were asked differentiate a “live” performance from a recording of the same thing: “Is it live or is it Memorex?”29 After watching Chuck Mangione play a final few notes for the microphone, Fitzgerald tries to tell through audition (not vision) whether she is listening to Mangione play again or to his reproduction. Presumably, her labors are themselves repeated, first by the audience of the commercial, then by consumers and listeners using the cassettes being advertised.30
Through reproduction, Mangione’s sound, as a presymbolic substance, returns to Fitzgerald from the void, out of body, divorced from its real space and time. Experiencing the world via our senses, we generally use sound to supply, in part, a sense of reality. Yet apparently, like a clone, the recorded Mangione is the same as its original in all aspects accessible to Fitzgerald, and it is just as unsettling. Even with her considerable experience and skill as an analyst of both live and technologically mediated listening, she is baffled and must be rescued by the band. Though historically conditioned in many regards, reproductive techniques have consistently caused sound to return in the form of a disembodied unconditional demand; reproduced sound has represented the listening subject’s frustrated desire for coherence, and its subsequent rationalization.31
Why can’t Ella tell whether Chuck Mangione is live or on tape? Like the return of the living dead in Hollywood horror films, this is a fantasy of “unreal” sound coming back to traumatize us, to make us question what we should accept as reality. Is that walking person alive or dead? Are we hearing a real trumpet or merely its specter? The return of the real is experienced as a challenge, a disturbance of our established understanding and categories (Zizek 1991: 21–32). Like a Hollywood screen, the recording process acts as a space for the projection of the desire to make sense out of our surroundings. But ultimately those projected fantasies must reaffirm our previous understanding. Our listening is contingent upon placing the sounds we hear in the familiar context of the known definition of the reproductive system, as one element in a chain of signifiers. Recorded sound returns with its own answer, encased in the protective armor of technology, the ideology of fidelity.
Unfortunately, comparisons seem unavoidable. Were Ussachevsky’s disfigured and barely recognizable instrumental sounds like zombies, back from the dead to terrorize and confuse us? Are Ussachevsky and Murch modern-day Dr. Frankensteins who have reanimated the sonorous corpses of familiar objects merely to remind us of the value of the “real” sound of an untransposed piano note or of a voice not heard through a vacuum cleaner tube? What of the sense of experimentation and enjoyment suggested by the opening anecdotes?
It Is Rendered
There is a third way to encounter the real that is neither the (imaginary) simulacrum nor the (symbolic) code. Evident in many cinematic examples, and discussed in the theoretical literature of film sound and music, rendu, or rendering, goes beyond the fulfillment of fidelity evident in the Memorex example, beyond a simple, exact reproduction of an “original” sound. Sound is rendered through recording when it functions as a reinforcement, interpreting details of an original that wouldn’t have been evident even if we were present at the “reality” of the performance. As an example of rendering, Zizek offers the scenes in David Lynch’s film Elephant Man in which the sonic perspective is “inside” the elephant man’s subjective experience. “The matrix of the ‘external,’ ‘real’ sounds and noises is suspended or at least appeased, pushed to the background; all we hear is a rhythmic beat, the status of which is uncertain, somewhere between a heartbeat and the regular rhythm of a machine” (Zizek 1991: 40–41). Murch used the tape recorder to explore that quality of sound in which “recording magically lifted the shadow away from the object and stood it on its own, giving it a miraculous and sometimes frightening substantiality” (Murch 1994: xvi). For Ussachevsky, with the tape recorder, “[E]ach detail, formerly compressed in the one impression of a whole (or into a single sound) began to be interesting in itself …” (Ussachevsky 1977: 4). Bypassing the imposed order of the symbolic realm and the prediscursive chaos of the imaginary, rendering is a state of sublime enjoyment. But this unfettered enjoyment is necessarily ephemeral, as Murch recalls:
One evening, though, I returned home from school, turned on the radio in the middle of a program, and couldn’t believe my ears: sounds were being broadcast the likes of which I had only heard in the secrecy of my own little laboratory. As quickly as possible, I connected the recorder to the radio and sat there listening, rapt, as the reels turned and the sounds became increasingly strange and wonderful.
It turned out to be the Premier Panorama de Musique Concréte, a record by the French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and the incomplete tape of it became a sort of Bible of Sound for me. Or rather a Rosetta stone, because the vibrations chiseled into its iron oxide were the mysteriously significant and powerful hieroglyphs of a language that I did not yet understand but whose voice nonetheless spoke to me compellingly. And above all told me that I was not alone in my endeavors. (Chion 1994: xiv)
This passage describes perfectly the first steps from youthful, isolated experimentation toward a career as a Hollywood sound designer, as Murch’s play necessarily becomes inscribed within the context of a language, a semiotic formation of sounds that was always already there. Paradigmatically, Murch discovered his Rosetta stone, and the cultural logic disorganized by the increased technological definition was quickly recovered, the changes reinscribed in the discursive network.32
Putting the Real Back into Place
Consumer Culture: Realism and Romanticism
In the case of Murch and, by extension, in mass culture, the practices engendered with the magnetic tape recorder were quickly subsumed into quotidian practices, reasserting a semiotic meaning to recorded sounds. We can see this in the description of these practices. By the end of the 1930s, electricity was introduced into recording and reproduction practices, paving the way for the subsequent improvements that came with magnetic tape recording. Recordings made electrically differed from the discs recorded by the older acoustic methods in three ways, each with an attending audible impact. First, the range of frequencies that could be recorded was expanded, resulting in a noticeable timbral difference. Definition and details previously missing, such as vocal sibilants, were now recordable for the first time (Gelatt 1954: 223). The frequency range of electrically recorded music was improved from 250–2,500 Hz to 50–6,000 Hz, almost four times the range of acoustically recorded sound. Ironically, and not at all dissimilar to the reaction that accompanied the introduction of compact discs, the initial public perception of the quality of electrical recordings was that they sounded harsh and artificial (Read 1959: 373). Second, the condenser microphone drastically altered recording studio practice. When recording with an acoustic horn, musicians were typically forced to crowd together, arranged as closely as possible around the recording horn in order of quietest to loudest with the soloist at the center, who ducked out of the way for ensemble passages (Gammond 1980: 20). Furthermore, to be heard at all, the quieter string instruments had to be reinforced with a “Stroh” attachment—a diaphragm and a horn mounted on the bridge, which added considerable distortion (McGinn 1983: 42). By contrast, with electrical recording practices performers could be arranged in more comfortable and conventional ensemble set-ups, and the microphone placement would compensate. This meant more than simply added convenience. Instrumental balances and spatial effects were dramatically improved, and the acoustics of the recording space, the “room tone,” was now audible on the recording (Gelatt 1954: 223; McGinn 1983: 42). Finally, electrical recording practices resulted in recordings with greater dynamic range. Especially with the introduction of amplified phonographs, the sound level of the original performance could be approximated at playback for the first time (Gelatt 1954: 223). In addition, other technological advances of this time include the beginnings of stereophonic reproduction for spatialization, scratch filters to reduce a recording’s surface noise, and the vertical-cut cellulose acetate disc records that could be played with a lightweight moving coil pickup (McGinn 1983: 39–50).
These technological advances were subsumed, by contemporary critics, into two competing philosophical approaches: “realism” and “romanticism” (Read 1959: 373–89). Realism sought to bring the listener to a concert experience by capturing the hall ambiance and introducing live performances of larger ensembles into the repertory. Freed from the constraints of the recording studio, live recordings in large auditoriums regularly included the acoustic effects of the performance space upon the music as a discernable feature of the recording. Radio broadcasts and recordings of symphony orchestras, operas, and choral work became more viable, and new artists such as Stokowski, Beecham, and Weingartner rose to prominence by producing recordings that were, in part, made conceivable by the aesthetics of realism.33 If realism implied an external, objective reality, romanticism seems designed to contain rendered sound, the subjective experience made manifest audibly. Associated with the affect of an intimate musical experience, romanticism in recording sought to bring the performance into the listener’s living room. In “romantic” recordings, small groups of singers or instrumental ensembles would use a small, non-reverberant studio and work close to the microphone, effectively eliminating any trace of room ambiance. Out of this technique developed the musical style of the popular “crooner” vocalist, where the music as well as the technique strove to reduce the distance between listener and performer. An influx of new popular artists were associated with this technique: Billy Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, and especially Bing Crosby in the Paul Whiteman orchestra were among the first to establish “intimate” recorded musical identities.34 But it was through more than his “romantic” recording that Crosby encouraged the popular acceptance of the tape recorder.
The American acquisition of the improved tape recorder from the Germans began immediately after World War II.35 There seem to be two interlocking histories of how the technology was transferred; these might be called the institutional as opposed to the personal accounts. At the end of the war, the U.S. Army Signal Corps recovered German magnetophons and magnetic tape from the facilities of Radio Frankfort and Luxembourg and the tape manufacturing plant at Wald Mittelbach, and the United States claimed rights to this technology under the War Reparations Act (Gimbel 1990).36 The U.S. government assumed all American patents on the magnetophon and offered the license to any American company. Initially, three took up production in earnest: Magnecord, Rangertone, and Ampex Electric Company.37 The low-grade tape used by the Germans was soon improved upon by the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), with its “Scotch” brand of paper tape, introduced in 1949.38 By 1948 high-quality magnetic tape recorders such as the Ampex 200 and magnetic tape were commercially available in America and were used for measurement, data acquisition and storage, conversion, and analysis in fields such as aerospace and rocket telemetry research, undersea exploration, industrial machine control, medical testing, information storage and processing, and communications (Lowman 1972: 1–7).39
In contrasting accounts, the technology of the magnetophon was introduced to the United States through the initiative of individual G.I.’s John Mullin and John Orr. Both were attached to the Army Signal Corps, which was charged with collecting electronic innovations from the defeated Germans, and each, independently, managed to bring home something for themselves. Orr was involved with reactivating a German tape manufacturing plant after the war and befriended the German head chemist, Pfleumer. As a parting gift, the chemist gave Orr a brown paper bag filled with the iron-oxide formulation BASF had used to make its tape. Orr returned to his native Alabama and started Irish Tape, one of the first American tape manufacturing facilities in the states. Orr reportedly told a committee of the Alabama state legislature that he had initially succeeded in duplicating the German formula by coating a strip of plastic with red barn paint (Angus 1984).
John Mullin disassembled and shipped two complete magnetophons back to the states through the mail—a feat only slightly surpassed by the apocryphal stories of G.I.’s mailing themselves entire Jeeps (Mullin 1976). While presenting his booty to a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers in May 1946, Mullin attracted the interest of a small company that had previously supplied precision motors to the navy, the Ampex Electric Company. Mullin soon put his magnetaphons (later Americanized to magnetophones) to work in radio production. Ampex, meanwhile, with Mullin as a consultant, set to work to improve upon Mullin’s German model and produced one of the first American professional magnetic tape recorders.
Bing Crosby’s influence here extended beyond the mass appeal of his music to the control he asserted as a producer and financier. Through his intervention, the Crosby radio show was the first major network program that was not broadcast live. In 1946, at the height of his career and exhausted by the stress of live radio scheduling, Crosby moved from NBC to the struggling ABC, lured by the new network’s promise to allow him to prerecord his show for later broadcast (Morton 2000: 67). As with the examples of Nazi wartime broadcasts and the Memorex test, Crosby’s shows, “transcribed” with the tape recorder, were initially considered to be indistinguishable from “live” ones. Crosby himself saw and pursued the potential offered by prerecording as a way to control precisely both the content and the length of his show. Mullin was hired to record and edit the first twenty-six shows of the 1947 season and used the original German tape machines and tape the entire time, resplicing the tape back together after each show. His original German equipment was replaced by some of the earliest available Ampex equipment because, in the interim, Bing Crosby had acquired a financial interest in Ampex Electric and had encouraged research, development, and distribution of the tape recorder for use in broadcast. Due in large part to Crosby’s lead in developing the practice of prerecording and editing, professional tape recording equipment was in use in a majority of the commercial radio stations by 1950.40 The unfamiliar degree of definition in the recording initially allowed audiences listening to Crosby’s broadcasts with “old” ears to assume that they themselves were, as they had been before, a remote, technologically produced extension of the “live” studio audience. The process of knowing the difference was one of enculturation, of understanding the “answer.” That came with the mass popular commercial distribution of the machine.
An enormous number of recorders had been sold and were in use by the mid-1950s, and those consumers used these machines in quite varied manners. Harry Olson estimated that by 1952 there were two million tape recorders plus many more wire recorders in use in the United States (Olson 1954: 637–43). With the introduction of stereo in 1955, tape recorder sales benefited from the most dramatic increase ever recorded for a single product in home audio entertainment (Read 1959: 427–28). The education of these home tape recorder enthusiasts was achieved through several cooperative channels. People learned how and what to record by the examples created by professional producers, which were presented to the public and analyzed by the media and equipment manufacturers.
Several forms of print media helped to educate the public as to what was being done professionally and encouraged individual experimentation. Periodicals such as The Phonograph Monthly Review, Musical America, and The American Record Guide had existed almost from the invention of the record itself, but the postwar era saw a boom in the number, and a change in the focus, of these journals. Publications that catered to the concerns of recorded music listeners committed significant space to reports on developing technology, and to editorials with particular emphasis on the tape recorder. Columnists and critics such as Edward Tatnall Canby of the Saturday Review and recording engineer Joel Tall published equipment and “how-to” guides that focused on how this new technology was utilized professionally and how it could be used at home (Canby 1952; Tall 1958). Soon even books explaining tape recorders to children were commercially available (Krishef 1962).
In 1951 a new magazine began that was dedicated specifically to the interests of a newly identified group: audiophiles. The appearance of High Fidelity signaled a critical mass, at least in terms of market targeting, of people interested in the idea of high-definition sound reproduction, since the magazine’s professed goal was the wide dissemination of technical information and advice and equipment reviews, in addition to consumer information such as model numbers and prices.41 Articles often provided detailed equipment specifications and information on engineering topics such as impedance matching, grounding, monitoring, and feedback. In addition to warning hobbyists of potential recording problems, articles often encouraged experimentation. For example, in Alan Macy’s 1952 High Fidelity article on tape recording, he describes the danger of creating feedback by listening to what was being recorded (monitoring through the tape recorder’s playback head). But he also encouraged his readers to experiment, to attempt to create a more controlled version of this phenomenon—an echo effect—themselves.42 Participation in hi-fi for the individual hobbyist was predicated on the knowledge of and ability to replicate, in one’s own home, prevailing recording aesthetics, and High Fidelity magazine and other publications were a primary source for information on what the professionals did.
For the hobbyist, the tape recorder was the audio equivalent of the photo album; it could be used to preserve and comment upon both special events and daily living, so that they could be relived, scrutinized, or enjoyed later. People used the tape machine to record their children’s performances, to make soundtracks for home movies,43 and to record music from the radio.44 Audio fairs, regular local conventions that already drew New York crowds of as many as eight thousand audiophiles by 1951, communicated the inside information on the latest equipment innovations and served as a meeting ground for hobbyists and professionals [High Fidelity 1 (1952): 3]. Nationwide clubs for tape recordists were advertised in which enthusiasts would record local events, such as concerts, and exchange tapes by mail (Geraci 1961). Hobbyists were also encouraged and instructed how to seek out new environments to record, in imitation of professional ornithologists and ethnographers. Seemingly an international army of amateur recordists was mobilized to preserve indigenous bird songs and folk musics.45 But recording was a way of performing a reality check for oneself too. For example, a captionless cartoon accompanying a High Fidelity article on tape editing showed a grimacing woman in a nightgown holding a microphone over her snoring husband. Finally, academic composers in the United States began to experiment with the tape recorder in the early 1950s, in order to turn the technology to their own particular creative and professional ends. At stake was, as with Murch, the proper way to see their creative efforts made sense of, coded as if on a Rosetta Stone. However, equally important was the effort to communicate that code: to find the right “museum” in which to store their Rosetta Stone.
“The old and the new are the same”: The Structure of Concert Life
This music [both continential and American electroacoustic concert music of the 1950s] was utterly unprecedented. Mostly, these works seemed to escape all conventions of communicability and to operate without any recognizable codes, like a completely hermetic artificial language which was programmed to generate itself. A somewhat baffling condition for semiology and music critic alike—although perhaps no more so than music has always been. (Chanan 1994: 269)
To look at reviews of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) performance of October 1952, the concert that programmed the “premieres” of four musical compositions by Ussachevsky and Luening, one might be inclined to agree with Chanan that this early music produced with tape recorders was unlike anything previously composed and therefore inaccessible and incomprehensible.46 However, as in the realm of mass culture, the appearance of tape music on this program signaled that the product of a tape recorder could be understood—or, at least, it was beginning to be understood. This concert stands as an early indication that Ussachevsky’s experiments could be accepted as musical compositions and included in the structure of American concert life. Rather than open a chasm of incomprehensibility, these compositions helped to affirm that the tape recorder, as a compositional medium, was not antithetical to traditional formal concerns and aesthetic values, and that the electronic music studio was to become a site of cultural maintenance.47
The concerts at MOMA of October 26 and 28, 1952, were organized by the American Composer’s Alliance (ACA) under the auspices (and baton) of conductor Leopold Stokowski, that renowned and tireless champion of “modern” music, and a pioneer in music technology.48 Beginning in 1945, Columbia University, with funding from the Alice M. Ditson Fund, had been sponsoring “mini” festivals of new music (Daniel 1982: 561). The 1952 festival honored Stokowski, who led the CBS Orchestra in the climactic program, which included orchestral works by Alexei Haieff and Roger Goeb. Two days later, the Goeb symphony was recorded by Stokowski and the Orchestra for RCA Victor, as were compositions by Weber and Harrison from the MOMA concerts.49 Oliver Daniel, then the coordinating manager of the ACA, had been recruited by Columbia faculty and ACA members Otto Luening and Normand Lockwood, and it was in the successful aftermath of these Ditson Fund concerts that he and Stokowski began planning further collaborations, first the concert series at MOMA, and then the Contemporary Music Society.
The ACA and its associated Arrow Music Press, a composers’ membership organization and a music publishing company, were formed in 1937 by a group of notable New York composers: Copland, Thomson, Harris, Blitzstein, Piston, and Sessions (Sanjek 1988: 98). Born at the height of the federal ASCAP antitrust probe, the ACA was established to watchdog the performance rights interests of its membership of “serious” concert music composers.50 At issue were royalty rights from the traditional sources (concert licensing and the sale of musical scores) and—increasingly important—from recordings and radio broadcasts. Between 1938 and late 1940, ACA was courted by both ASCAP and the newly formed performances rights organization BMI.51 By October 1952, with the advent of a new distribution system at ASCAP that (based upon its surveys of radio and television performances) disadvantaged “standard-music,” BMI solidified its agreement with the ACA and its members, took over all coverage of ACA’s performance rights interests, and housed the ACA library and its Composers Facsimile editions.
Seeking to produce a series of concerts modeled on Stokowski’s International Composers’ Guild, and the League of Composers concerts of the 1930s, Daniel and Stokowski met with the director of MOMA, René d’Harnoncourt, who enthusiastically agreed to host the concerts (Daniel 1982: 562). Daniel quickly secured funding for the series from BMI, and it was agreed that the ACA would produce them with Stokowski on the podium. While an ambitious start, these concerts were seen by the pair as a stepping stone to a more permanent structure to encourage and support new music: the Contemporary Music Society. As Stokowski said in a press release preceding the October concert, “What the Museum of Modern Art has done for painting and sculpture must be done for music all over the country” (Daniel 1982: 563). Shortly before the concert at MOMA, on October 21, 1952, at the Ford Foundation offices in New York City, Leopold Stokowski met with representatives of fifteen major musical institutions to offer his services as a conductor and champion for new American musical arts (Daniel 1952; Daniel 1982: 575–76). The organizations at this meeting were ASCAP, BMI, the Musicians’ Union, the National Music Council, the League of Composers (represented by Claire Reis), the International Society for Contemporary Music, UNESCO, Columbia University, New York University, Julliard, Eastman-Rochester, the Voice of America, the Musician’s Trust Fund, the Society for the Publication of American Music, the American Composers Alliance, and representatives of the press. BMI, through its “enlightened” president, Carl Haverlin, pledged $5,000 in support of the venture, while Stokowski offered another $1,000 as a personal contribution—nothing else was forthcoming at that meeting. The resulting collaborations, though, were significant, because, as Howard Taubman of the New York Times noted at the time, “it may be the start of a concerted effort by various organizations concerned with the support of the music of our own time to hammer out a united approach” (Daniel 1952: 2–3). Under the auspices of the Contemporary Music Society, in addition to the October 1952 concerts there was a series of four more concerts presented at MOMA as well as two recordings by Stokowski of compositions drawn from these concerts, which were initially released by RCA Victor, then by CRI.
The programs for the October MOMA concerts were largely drawn from the library of compositions by ACA members.52 While settling the details of the programs in a planning meeting in Zurich while Stokowski was on tour, Daniel and Stokowski, aware of developments in Europe, agreed that one of the concerts at MOMA would introduce electronic music to American audiences (Daniel 1982: 565–66). These innovations seemed to be everywhere at once—in America and throughout Europe simultaneously. Pierre Schaeffer, a radio engineer at Radiodiffusion Française (RF) in Paris, had already coined his term “musique concrete” in 1948 and, working with Pierre Boulez, Pierre Henry, and others, had produced concerts and radio broadcasts of tape recorder “music” in France (Chadabe 1997: 26–44). While lectures on electronic music by Werner Meyer-Eppler began in 1948, construction of the studio at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, initially built around the newly developed vocoder from Bell Telephone Labs, started in late 1951 and lasted into 1952. The first compositions of elektronische Musik follow shortly thereafter. In America, one of the first musical projects using the magnetic tape recorder began in 1951 as the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. Organized under John Cage’s initiative, the project proceeded for several years with the support of David Tutor, Bebe and Louis Barron, and Paul Williams, with occasional access to Richard Ranger’s studio of Rangertone magnetic tape recorders in New Jersey (Chadabe 1997: 56). Daniel initially approached Cage to request a composition for the MOMA concert. However, as the concert date neared, it became clear that Cage would not be ready. (Williams Mix, Cage’s first tape piece, was finished in late 1952.) Instead, Daniel approached Luening and Ussachevsky. While the concerts as a whole were apparently well received by both the public and the press, the works of the “tapesichordists” were clearly the evening’s novelty. So, even though tape music was flourishing in the home market, the MOMA concert is often acknowledged as the successful inauguration of tape music in America.
So how did these recordings themselves differ from what the young Murch produced, or even from the work of contemporary peers of Ussachevsky? The move from “experiments” to “compositions” is audible in these objects themselves, even while, at the level of manipulation of the tape medium, there is an unavoidable resemblance between the techniques of Ussachevsky, Murch, musique concrete, and the “Music for Magnetic Tape” crowd. As Otto Luening explained,
I think from the first moment that Vladimir Ussachevsky and I began working on our first short pieces, although using machines and later developing, finding and using new electronic means of tone production or manipulation, we were interested primarily in making this part of the great stream of music that we had inherited. Our standard did not depend on how much equipment was at our disposal but how well we used what we had. I could never forget that Busoni had said, “The old and the new are the same,” and that he wrote in 1907 that a long period of ear training would be necessary to make electronic sounds useful for artistic purposes. (Ussachevsky 1977: 42)
In Sonic Contours, Ussachevsky balanced a professed fascination with the novelty of the tape recorder with a classically trained composer’s concern for structural coherence, balance, and contrast. The sound sources were local and familiar sounds, mainly recorded piano, supplemented toward the end of the piece with snippets from recordings of voices. The recorded piano and voices underwent the basic manipulations of playing a segment back at altered speeds and lengths, removing the very onset of the sound (its attack), regenerating the recorded signal as a controllable echo, and splicing the whole together from smaller snippets of tape. But unlike other hobbyist’s experiments, this piece was constructed motivically, where the manipulation of a few recorded sounds fed a larger organizing principle: a canon in five voices at three different speeds.53 Such concerns were summed up also in Ussachevsky’s description of his compositional process of audition and decision, what he called “the record-play-listen-examine routine.” In contrast, Cage’s Williams Mix was constructed using chance procedures generated with the I Ching and assembled from haphazardly collected (but assiduously catalogued) pieces of recording tape (Cage and company didn’t even have regular access to a tape recorder as the piece was fabricated). Sonic Contours was assembled from Ussachevsky’s experiments with the tape recorder and microphone; its materials include his improvisations at the piano, some serendipitous recording of human speech and laughter (part of a recording made while demonstrating the feedback effect for his wife), and passages deliberately composed to go with those that were experimentally derived.54
Given the conventional nature of their construction, perhaps the most radical element of these early compositions is their apparent evasion of written form. Through the first half of the century, the role of composer has been, by convention, constrained through standard musical notation (the twelve note per octave tuning system, an additive temporal grid, and timbral limits described through instrumentation, for example). At first glance, then, these compositions seem to owe a greater than acknowledged conceptual debt to musical forms predicated upon improvisation and performance—such as rock ’n’ roll, for example, a contemporary development. However, the limits of musical notation are infinitely elastic in the later twentieth century. What has remained immutable, on the other hand, is the conviction that the critical aspects of a musical idea may be contained and preserved through notation. It is telling, then, that, in an effort to secure legal protection from the U.S. Copyright Office, Ussachevsky laboriously transcribed his recordings into musical notation after the fact, extending conventional notation, for example, by writing notes with wavy stems to indicate sounds created through feedback. If musical compositions are vessels that contain knowledge, then works such as Sonic Contours are predicated on the Enlightenment ideals of structural listening, firmly grounded in accepted musical reality, and part of its ideological apparatus.55 The creators of these sonic experiments were similarly reinscribed.
In the aftermath of the MOMA concert and the Ford Foundation meeting, a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation facilitated the purchase of equipment specifically for electronic music production. Ussachevsky’s work Incantation for Tapesichord was commissioned by Stokowski in the fall of 1953 to be included in a CBS radio program under his direction (Ussachevsky 1977: 9). (The piece was described by one reviewer for the New York World-Telegram and Sun as “[t]he strangest music this side of Paranoia.”) The Louisville and Los Angeles orchestras later provided further performance opportunities. Ussachevsky traveled to Paris and Cologne, supported by BMI, to speak on American tape music in 1953 (Ussachevsky 1953). Again in 1955 Ussachevsky and Luening received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to investigate the state of studio facilities both at home and abroad. Finally, the works presented at MOMA were release on phonograph record on the Innovations label in 1955.56 These efforts are indicative of the institutional effort supporting new music in general and electronic music in particular. In response to a plea to the university president, the Columbia electronic music studio was moved (partly from Ussachevsky’s living room) to more appropriate quarters in 1954—the “Charles Addams” house located on the site of the former Bloomingdale Insane Asylum (Chadabe 1997: 45). RCA demonstrated the Olson-Belar Sound Synthesizer to the director of the School of Arts at Columbia in 1955, and in January 1959 this seed of institutional sponsorship had fully flowered to produce the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center under the auspices of the two universities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the RCA Corporation.
Conclusion: It Contains Knowledge
The introduction of the magnetic recorder and tape represented a moment of limitless auditory possibilities. However, that emancipatory moment was brief. Where once the aspirations of the historical avant-garde carried the utopian hope for an emancipatory mass culture (under socialism), this was, in fact, preempted by the rise of mass-mediated culture and its supporting industries and institutions (Huyssen 1986: 15). So too with the tape recorder in America after the war. Murch ultimately found a job that contained his pleasurable activities with sound. As one of Hollywood’s preeminent sound designers, he has produced some of its most unusual and adventurous soundtracks. We need only look to The Conversation for evidence of his continued engagement with rendered sound and technology. But there his play is safely circumscribed by its mass culture frame, the Hollywood film. Conversely, Ussachevsky and Luening, through the assertion of their play as “composition,” were reinscribed in the (slightly modified) established social orders of “music.” Given the acceptance of their “compositions” in the concert hall, their sounds must ultimately be understood in terms of the modernist category of high autonomous works of art. Using a new technology, both were able to imagine “noises” that (only momentarily) evaded the cultural logic of recorded sound.
But we are back where we started—Murch and Ussachevsky on opposite sides of the “great divide.” This essay has examined the historical moment at which a form of free sonorous enjoyment was made possible through the magnetic tape recorder and then brought under control by it. That control was expressed through the supporting industries and institutions of not only mass culture but high art as well. Or, to use Marcuse’s terms, the reality principle necessarily gives rise to affirmative culture. These two anecdotes might be viewed as evidence of a utopian moment followed by order reasserted, by an encounter with the real and the necessary (i.e. healthy) reaffirmation of reality. By imagining creative, singular uses for a new technology, the magnetic tape recorder, both Ussachevsky and Murch were able to “liberate technology momentarily from its instrumental aspects, and thus [they] undermined both bourgeois notions of technology as progress and art as ‘natural,’ ‘autonomous,’ and ‘organic’ ” (Huyssen 1986: 11). Murch and Ussachevsky were able to express what Huyssen has called the hidden dialectic, to articulate the relationship between technology, art, and mass culture that also engaged the historical avant-garde until World War II.57
1. Earlier and abbreviated drafts of this paper were presented at a meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) at UCLA, at a northeast regional meeting of the Society of Composers, Inc., at Connecticut College, and at the Western Illinois University New Music Festival. My thanks to everyone at these gatherings who offered constructive criticisms, and especially to Nancy Newman.
2. As a sound mixer and designer, Murch is well known for his contributions to films such as The Godfather, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. As an explicator of film sound, he is articulate, insightful, and prolific. See Murch 1994; “Interview with Walter Murch,” Positif (1989), no. 338; “Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See,” New York Times, October 1, 2000, Section 2, p. 1; “Sound Design: The Dancing Shadow,” in J. Borrman, T. Luddy, D. Thomson, and W. W. Donohue, eds., Projections 4: Film-makers on Film-making (London: Faber and Faber, 1995); “Sound Mixing and Apocalypse Now,” in J. Belton and E. Weis, eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and “The Sound Designer” in R. Madsen, Working Cinema—Learning from the Masters (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1990). In an industry of specialization, Murch is unique—a respected specialist in two distinct areas. As a film editor, see his extraordinary In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1995).
3. There is an extensive, though somewhat diffused, literature on the development of the magnetic tape recorder. See Angus 1984; Belton 1992; Chanan 1994; Gelatt 1954; Haynes 1949; Jones 1992; Millard 1995; Morton 2000; Read and Welch 1959; and Sanjek 1988.
4. See Day 2000 for an extensive study of the effects of reproductive audio technology on musical repertoire.
5. See Riesman 1953 and Riesman 1950 on the role of popular music (in combination with other mass media) in the socialization of youth.
6. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1964) for a discussion of the role of technology as an extension of the human senses.
7. The equipment consisted initially of a single Ampex model 400 and a Western Electric 639 microphone; see Ussachevsky 1977: 5–6. Ussachevsky has said: “I was the most junior of the music faculty. It was my job to look after all the audio equipment. I was fascinated with the tape recorder—I don’t know why. I immediately did a lot of recording” (Darter 1984: 149). For more biographical information and Ussachevsky’s professional credentials, see Darter 1984: 148–49.
8. Speed variation, or transpositions, meant playing the tape at the speed other than that of the original recording, usually 7.5 inches of tape per second. Not only the pitch but the timbral quality of the recorded sound was affected; the greater the transposition, the more noticeable the apparent change in timbre. However, Ussachevsky couched the musical utility of this technique in terms of its acoustic consistency: the ratios between partials of the overtone series remain unaffected (Ussachevsky 1977). The desired parallel of this spectral alteration to conventional motivic usage and development is apparent.
9. In Ussachevsky’s own words, “[F]eedback is an automatic but controllable repetition of any sound or sounds being recorded on magnetic tape. In the normal magnetic head configuration on a professional tape recorder the tape passes by [the] erase head, then [the] record head and then the playback head. A sound is first recorded and then heard a fraction of a second later through [the] playback head. If the output of the playback head is immediately shuttled back to [the] record head, everything that is being recorded will be immediately repeated. If, as is predominantly the case, the sound pattern is longer than the rate of repetition, then, obviously, overlapping of the original and the subsequent repetitions will take place. The number of repetitions can be regulated but the quality of the recording deteriorates” (Ussachevsky 1977: 5).
10. Also see reviews and articles in Vogue magazine (July 1953), “Tapesichordists” by Peggy Glanville-Hicks, and Downbeat (Chicago, July 29, 1953), “Counterpoint” column by Nat Hentoff.
11. The question of their “official” premiere might be contended because of the Composers’ Forum program, which was reviewed by Henry Cowell in Musical Quarterly (Manning 1993). See, however, the discussion below on the larger institutional significance of their MOMA presentation.
12. See David Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985); Sarah Thornton, “Strategies for Reconstructing the Popular Past,” Popular Music 9/1 (1995): 87–95; and Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England: 1997) for the use of music periodicals in “reading” the popular past.
13. See Schwarz 1997 for a description of the listening gaze and its relationship to subjectivity.
14. For Lacan, it is Marx who “invented” the symptom. The Lacanian notion of “symptom” is derived from what Zizek calls “a fundamental homology between the interpretive procedures of Marx and Freud—more precisely, between their analysis of commodity and dreams.” Alternatively, for Freud, the essential psychoanalytic understanding of dreams aims not at the manifest dream-text or the latent dream-content but at the unconscious desire articulated through the dream’s formal dimensions, or the structures that translate latent into manifest, “consisting entirely of the signifier’s mechanisms, of the treatment to which the latent thought is submitted” (Zizek 1989: 13).
Beyond the psychoanalytic notion of case study, I am thinking also of the field of sociology of technology, which has recently developed a number of analytic tactics to write technological case studies concerned principally with the social nature of technical innovation. Moving away from a focus on an individual inventor as a central explanatory concept, these analytic approaches emphasize social construction in an attempt to avoid technological determinism and to give equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political aspects of technological development. This attitude has been summarized with the anthropological metaphor of a “seamless web” (Geertz 1973; Pinch 1985; Bijker 1990), where both the impact of technology on society and the influence of society on technology are considered. In this “seamless web” the term “technology” is used broadly, and three levels of meaning in the word have been distinguished (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985). First, there is the level of physical objects or artifacts; second, activities or processes; third, what people know as well as what they do—the know-how of creative application and design. In terms of the technology of the tape recorder, descriptions might include the machine itself; techniques of use, such as editing or recording practices; and the background, ambitions, and attitudes of its designers, builders, and users.
15. The broad organization of this paper, as well as my initial access to these Lacanian concepts, comes from Zizek 1991. In addition to the above, Zizek has a fourth category: the real constitutes knowledge in itself.
16. As Zizek notes, “Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ is usually associated with his motto ‘the unconscious is structured like a language,’ i.e. with an effort to unmask imaginary fascination and reveal the symbolic law that governs it. In the last years of Lacan’s teaching, however, the accent was shifted from the split between the imaginary and the symbolic to the barrier separating the real from (symbolically structured) reality.” (Zizek 1991: viii).
17. See Zizek 1991: 18–20 for a discussion of psychosis in relation to failed attempts to deal with the Lacanian real.
18. See Zizek 1997 for a systematic exploration of the Lacanian category of fantasy.
19. The Lacanian category of fantasy is critical to the structure of desire, and the objects through which those desires are embodied. “[W]hat fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed—and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire” (Zizek 1991: 6). In that fantasy never fully consumes desire, it is self-perpetuating and thus, in the surplus it creates, circular.
20. See MacKenzie 1985 and Bijker 1990 for a theoretical discussion of the social constructivist view of the sociology of technology.
21. The wire recorder was an application of already well established and understood theories of magnetism applied to the new area of sound recording. It developed nearly simultaneously in a variety of places, in manner reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm for “normal science.”
22. See Reynold Weidenaar, Magic Music from the Teleharmonium (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995), for a complete history of this fascinating instrument.
23. Angus reports that the enormous shortwave transmission and antenna station at Sayville, Long Island, was established by the Atlantic Communication Company and was linked to a German receiver in Nauen, Germany, in order to relay commercial messages between America and Europe. This sophisticated system used wire recorders to automate and speed transatlantic transmissions. There was a contemporary suspicion that the company was concealing its true German ownership, and, in fact, espionage was subsequently discovered (see Angus 1985).
24. The U.S. Navy quickly closed down the shortwave transmitter and antenna, secreting the entire episode. Only recently did the Freedom of Information Act (1971) enable the National Archives to make the original cylinders and other documents available. The incident seems to have been suppressed for reasons of national security.
25. See Chion 1994: 98–99 for a further discussion of definition and fidelity.
26. Poulsen’s article in The Electrician of November 30, 1900, alluded to another of their innovations of this time: multiplexing, a technique of critical importance to later communications technology. “An elegant method of compensation has been invented by the engineer P. O. Pedersen and allows several speeches to be intermingled so that they can afterwards be reproduced separately. As it is not feasible to describe this method satisfactorily in a few words, I shall not speak further of it here” (quoted in Tall 1958: 7).
27. Lee DeForest, inventor of the Audion tube amplifier, used a telegraphone in San Francisco around 1912 to demonstrate a high-speed telephone repeater system, though this innovation never went into production (Tall 1958: 9).
28. See the following for details: Haynes 1949; Dale 1952; Gelatt 1954: 284–289; Read 1959: 426–428; Angus 1984; and Holmes 1985.
29. See John Mowitt’s extensive analysis of this example in Mowitt 1987.
30. A wonderfully expressive example of the same challenge can be found in a publicity photography of Frieda Helpel from an Edison Company sound test, c. 1916– 25 (reproduced on the back cover of Day 2000). On the left side of this photograph, Hempel is standing beside a phonograph with an acoustic recording horn visible in the background. Five blindfolded men are seated with pensive expressions while Hempel demurely covers her mouth to suppress a giggle. If nothing else, evident here is the “face” at stake when the gender roles of the test are exchanged.
The literature that presents and analyzes the original/copy problem in recording is quite extensive, particularly from the perspective of film sound. For the most comprehensive treatment see J. Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Also see Theodor Adorno, “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory,” in Radio Research 1941, Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton, eds. (New York: Columbia University Office of Radio Research, 1941: 110–139); Rick Altman, “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” in Sound Theory Sound Practice, Rick Altman, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992: 15–34); Mary Ann Doane, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980: 47–56); James Lastra, “Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound,” in Sound Theory Sound Practice, 65–86; Thomas Y. Levin “The Acoustic Dimension: Notes on Film Sound,” Screen 25/3 (May–June 1984): 55–68; Thomas Y. Levin, “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” October 55 (Winter 1991): 23–47; Christian Metz, “Aural Objects,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 24–32; A. Williams, “Is Sound Recording Like A Language?” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 51–60.
31. For a discussion of the listening subject—particularly in relationship to the acoustic mirror phase and the sonorous envelope theories—see Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Claudia Gorbman, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Philip Brett, “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, Gary C. Thomas, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1994); Guy Rosolato, “La Voix,” in Essais sur le symbolique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); Schwarz 1997; Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
32. A discourse network is an expanding and contracting system of inscription by which the position of subjects is determined in relation to contemporary means of communication, along with the shifting patterns of human sociability. See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).
33. For a further description and analysis of the rise of broadcast and recorded concert music within the context of the music appreciation movement, see Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (London: Faber and Faber, 1987).
34. Often noted as an invention critical to the history of recorded sound, the electrical microphone is a device that is sufficiently sensitive so as to decouple the volume required of live performance from the loudness needed to make a recording. See Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle to Zappa (New York: Penguin Group, 1987), 156; Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (New York: Routledge, 1988) 18–19; and Peter Gammond, and Raymond Horricks, The Music Goes Round and Round (London: Quartet Books, 1980) 23.
35. There were several companies that continued to produce and improve upon magnetic recording during the war, though none improved the system nearly as much as the Germans. The most successful of these were the Brush Development Company (later renamed Brush Electronics Co.), which beginning in 1939 researched magnetic recording systems under the supervision of S. J. Begun. During the war, they improved the coating of paper-backed magnetic tape. From late in 1941, Marvin Camras, a researcher at the Armour Research Foundation of the Illinois Institute of Technology, patented and produced wire recorders that employed AC erasing and biasing. Both of these companies sold machines used by U.S. armed forces during the war.
36. Along with a multitude of other wartime German innovations, tape recorder technology became the focus of U.S. government scrutiny after the war. The results of reports, investigations and government-supported research were made public through a multitude of Congressional committee hearings and defense department symposium proceedings. Unfortunately, the bulk of this material, while it probably still exists, is almost totally inaccessible. The government system of document identification changed during the 1960s, and no index was created to translate the older PB designation to the current Superintendent of Documents Numbering system. With only contemporary citations of the older PB numbers, most of these documents are unlocatable. Some examples are Report to the British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee of 1945 by M. J. L. Pulling, entitled “The Magnetophone Sound Recording and Reproduction System,” which was available through the Department of Commerce, Office of Technical Services, government document P.B. 60899; the same office produced Reports Resulting from Investigation of German Technology 1945–46, “The ‘Magnetophon’ of A.E.G.,” 150 Hohenzollern Damm, Berlin, Grunewald, B.I.O.S. Report 207, H.M. Stationery Office and U.S. Department of Commerce, 4 pp. (1946), “Magnetophon Sound Recorder and Reproducer 1939–1946, A.E.G. Berlin and Kiel,” Office of Publication Board Report, P.B. 95210, 711 pp. (in German and English), and Reports: An Index to Bibliography on Magnetic Recording and Reproduction 1947; also the Proceedings of the Department of Defense Symposium on Magnetic Recording of March 1954, Government Publication P.B. 118037, part of the Fifth Symposium on Acoustic-In-Air Research and Design.
The U.S. government and industry’s interest in the technology of the tape recorder grew with its expanded field of application. Immediately upon its introduction in America, the tape recorder was a focus of scientific, military, and medical research, as well as of the music industry.
37. Before 1948 there were no professional magnetic tape machines available in the United States. Some broadcasters used wire recorders, such as the General Electric Model 50 in the studio, and the Pierce Wire Recorder for field recording. In 1946 and 1947, the Brush BK 401 was introduced for home use and subsequently adopted for use in many broadcast studios.
38. The 3M Labs under the direction of W. W. Wetzel improved upon the German formula with acicular red oxide (Tall 1958: 34). The eventual solution was to produce a durable base for tape from a petroleum-based plastic (in place of paper) and to impregnate that tape with a different magnetic material: magnetite, a gamma ferric oxide. 3M, with its Scotch 111 product, set the standard for all American recording tape until the introduction of chromium dioxide-based tape in 1969.
39. The periodical writing about magnetic tape recorders, in both the scientific and popular press, began immediately after the war and quickly became a regular magazine feature. Here is a representative bibliography: “German Magnetic Tape,” Science 48 (December 1945): 399; “It Pays to Listen,” Scientific American 173 (July 1945): 18–20; “The Magnetic Tape Recorder,” Radio News 55 (June 1945): 32; “Sound on Paper,” Scientific American 174 (April 1946): 156; “Recent Developments in the Field of Magnetic Recording,” Journal of the SMPTE (January 1947); Joel Tall, “The Art of Tape Recording,” Audio (May 1950); “Inventory Taking Speeded by Wire Recorders,” Electrical World (December 18, 1948); “Magnetic Tape and the CBC,” Radio News (June 1952); “Using the Tape Recorder,” Curriculum and Materials (New York Board of Education) 7/1 (September 1952): 4–5; “Sound Inscribed on Paper Tape,” Business Week (January 26, 1946); “Tape for the Networks,” Newsweek 52 (May 3, 1948).
40. Soon after, under the auspices of Bing Crosby Enterprises, John Mullin and Wayne Johnson demonstrated the fruits of their further research in magnetic media: the first video tape recorder was demonstrated in 1952.
41. The concept of high fidelity seems to have begun circulating in 1935 as a record marketing ploy to advertise the improved quality of electric phonograph records, but it quickly became associated with a “modern” listener’s concern and active participation in the best, most professional reproduction possible. Victor’s 1935 recording of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra was billed as “high fidelity,” with “the greatest crescendo ever recorded” (Gelatt 1954: 269).
42. High Fidelity 1 (1952): “From the Editor,” 3.
43. Private conversations with Donald Whitfield.
44. In contrast to more recent recording industry tactics regarding MP3 audio files, this last practice was one actively encouraged by manufacturers in the 1950s through their advertising, which advocated the “personalization” of home listening by making one’s own tapes. Choosing the repertory and setting the musical sequence of pieces was equated with musical self-determination and creativity. Beginning in the early 1940s, equipment manufacturers began selling home entertainment packages that included both a radio and a recorder (first wire, then, following the war, tape). The design was to facilitate one of the primary uses of the recorder: to record from the radio. See Gelatt 1954.
45. See E. T. Canby, “Recording Nature’s Musicians,” High Fidelity 2/4 (January–February 1953); Peter Paul Kellogg, Ph.D., “Recording Sound in Nature,” in Tall 1950; and The Collecting of Folk Music and Other Ethnomusicological Material: A Manual for Field Workers, Maud Karpeles, ed., issued by the International Folk Music Council in 1951, as representative examples.
46. See Daniel 1952 for reprints of concert reviews from the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Time magazine, and the New Republic. Also see the citations in note 10 and the epigraph that opens this essay.
47. For a booklength study of the logical consequences of this trend, see G. Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
48. See McGinn 1983 for an expansive history of Stokowski’s collaboration with the Bell Telephone research labs.
49. In 1954, with funding from the ACA and the Ditson Fund, Douglas Moore and Otto Luening formed with Oliver Daniel Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI), a vanity recording label. As Daniel reports, the impetus for this new venture came as a result of RCA Victor’s practice of dropping recordings from their catalog because of poor sales. When Victor discontinued Stokowski’s recordings of works from the MOMA series by Harrison, Weber, and Goeb, ACA retained “all rights to the works, including tapes, masters, etc.” As a result of a clause in the recording contract with Victor, the ACA was in sudden possession of valuable master tapes of recordings by Stokowski, but they had no means to distribute them. CRI was formed as a reliable and enduring means of distributing these and subsequently many other recordings of contemporary music (Daniel 1982: 568).
50. See John Ryan, The Production of Culture in the Music Industry: The ASCAP-BMI Controversy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), for more on the breakup of ASCAP and the formation of BMI.
51. Copland was represented by ASCAP, and he negotiated unsuccessfully with ASCAP president Gene Buck to have ASCAP support ACA.
52. The programs at MOMA were as follows: On October 26, 1952, Henry Cowell, Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2 and Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 5 (first New York performances); Ulysses Kay, Suite for strings (first New York performance); John Lessard, Cantilena for oboe and string orchestra; Wallingford Riegger, Study in Sonority; and Alan Hovhaness, 30th Ode of Solomon; on October 28, 1952, Lou Harrison, Suite for solo violin and solo piano with small orchestra; Elliot Carter, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for woodwind quartet (first performance); Vladimir Ussachevsky, Sonic Contours (first performance); Otto Luening, Low Speed, Invention, and Fantasy in Space (first performances); and Ben Weber, Symphony on Poems of William Blake, opus 33 (first performance).
53. Ussachevsky 1977; for an interesting parallel, see James Tenney, “Conlon Nancarrow’s STUDIES for Player Piano,” in Conlon Nancarrow Selected Studies for Player Piano (Berkeley: Soundings Press, 1977), for discussion of similar formal concerns in the music of Conlon Nancarrow, who was composing for modified player piano.
54. The recordings consist of Ussachevsky, his wife (unnamed), and Peter Mauzey “sharing in verbal comments on the strange sensation of listening with earphones to the feedback of one’s own speech. Everything we said and each note that I played as an illustration came back in psychologically disorienting fashion that made one stutter and struggle to continue speaking. The louder one spoke or chuckled, the longer the repetition. The tape was preserved” (Ussachevsky 1977: 9).
55. See Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976 [1962]), 7; and Rose R. Subotnik, “The Challenge of Contemporary Music,” in Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991), 265–94.
56. The works were reissued in 1991 by CRI as part of their American Masters Series (CRI CD611: Pioneers of Electronic Music), along with works by Smiley, Arel, Davidovsky, and Shields.
57. Murch and, in different ways, Ussachevsky might be seen to embody the Americanization of the historical avant-garde’s project—transformed by the intervening war.
Since it has become more difficult to share the historical avantgarde’s belief that art can be crucial to a transformation of society, the point is not simply to revive the avantgarde. Any such attempt would be doomed, especially in a country such as the United States where the European avantgarde failed to take roots precisely because no belief existed in the power of art to change the world. Nor, however, is it enough to cast a melancholy glance backwards and indulge in nostalgia for the time when the affinity of art to revolution could be taken for granted. The point is rather to take up the historical avantgarde’s insistence on the cultural transformation of everyday life and from there to develop strategies for today’s cultural and political context.” (Huyssen 1985: 7)
References
Angus, Robert. 1984. “History of Magnetic Recording.” Audio 68. 27–330.
A Tradition of Vision and Innovation. CRI, Inc., webpage (1998). <www.cri.org>.
Beckett, Samuel. 1958. Krapp’s Last Tape. Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove Press. 53–64.
Belton, John. 1992. “1950s Magnetic Sound: The Frozen Revolution.” In Sound Theory Sound Practice. Rick Altman, ed. New York: Routledge. 154–70.
Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds. 1990. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Canby, Edward Tatnall, C. G. Burke, and Irving Kolodin. 1952. The Saturday Review Home Book of Recorded Music and Sound Reproduction. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Chadabe, Joel. 1997. Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Chanan, Michael. 1994. Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism. London: Verso.
———. 1995. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music. London: Verso.
Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dale, C. B. 1952. “What About Wire Recording?” High Fidelity. 2/4 25–26.
Daniel, Oliver. 1952. “A Laurel Leaf for Stokowski.” American Composers Alliance Bulletin 2/4. This newsletter includes reprints of reviews of the Oct. 26 and Oct. 28 MOMA concerts by Oliver Daniel in Time magazine, Nov. 10, 1952; Olin Downes in the New York Times, Oct. 27, 1952; Virgil Thompson in the New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 27, 1952; Howard Taubman in the New York Times, Oct. 29, 1952; Jay S. Harrison in the New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 29, 1952; Robert Evett in the New Republic, Nov. 10, 1952; and uncredited in Time magazine, Nov. 10, 1952.
———. 1982. Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company.
Darter, Tom. 1984. The Art of Electronic Music. New York: GPI Publications.
Day, Timothy. 2000. A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gelatt, Roland. 1954. The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.
Geraci, Philip C. 1961. “The Home Recordist … Hobbyist or Hoodlum?” The Stereophile 1/1 (September 1962): 3–6.
Gimbel, John. 1990. Science, Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Haynes, N. M. 1949. “Modern Achievements and Trends in Magnetic Tape Recording.” The American Record Guide 15:
Holmes, Thomas B. 1985. Electronic and Experimental Music. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. “The Hidden Dialectic: Avantgarde—Technology—Mass Culture.” In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Jones, Steve. 1992. Rock Formations: Music Technology and Mass Communication. Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
Krishef, Robert. 1962. Playback: The Story of Recording Devices. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Co.
Lowman, Charles (Manager, Instrumentation Technical Writing, Ampex Corporation). 1972. Magnetic Recording. New York: McGraw-Hill.
MacKenzie, D., and J. Wajcman, eds. 1985. The Social Shaping of Technology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Manning, Peter. 1993. Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
McGinn, Robert E. 1983. “Stokowski and the Bell Telephone Laboratories: Collaboration in the Development of High-Fidelity Sound Reproduction.” Technology and Culture (January). 38–75.
Millard, Andre. 1995. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morton, David. 2000. Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America. New Brunswick, N.J.:Rutgers University Press.
Mowitt, John. 1987. “The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility.” In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Susan McClary and Richard Leppert, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mullin, John T. 1976. “Creating the Craft of Tape Recording.” High Fidelity 26/6 (April).
Murch, Walter. 1994. Foreword. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press.
Olson, H. F. 1954. “25 Years of Sound Reproduction.” Journal of the Acoustic Society of America (September). 637–43.
Pinch, T. J. 1985. “Recent Trends in the History of Technology.” BSHS Newsletter (January 16). 19–21.
Read, Oliver, and Walter Welch. 1959. From Tin Foil to Stereo. Indianapolis: H. W. Sams & Co.
Reisman, David. 1990 [1950]. “Listening to Popular Music.” In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, eds. New York: Pantheon.
Riesman, David, Nathan Reuel, and Denney Reuel. 1953. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Sanjek, Russell. 1988. American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schwarz, David. 1997. Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Struble, John Warthen. 1995. The History of American Classical Music: MacDowell through Minimalism. New York: Facts On File.
Tall, Joel. 1958 (1950). Techniques of Magnetic Recording. New York: Macmillan Company.
Ussachevsky, Vladimir. 1953. “As Europe Takes to Tape.” American Composers Alliance Bulletin 3/3 (autumn): 10–17.
Ussachevsky, Vladimir. 1977. 1952 Electronic Tape Music by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening: First Compositions. New York: Highgate Press.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
———. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
———. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.