{"id":110135,"date":"2017-04-21T15:16:47","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T19:16:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110135"},"modified":"2017-04-21T16:38:05","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T20:38:05","slug":"surface-noise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/21\/surface-noise\/","title":{"rendered":"Surface Noise"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an excerpt from his book\u00a0<\/em>The New Analog<\/a>,\u00a0Damon Krukowski looks at the aesthetics\u00a0of noise in analog\u00a0music\u2014and what we\u2019ve lost in the transition to digital recordings.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Guillermo Galindo, Fragmented Surveillance\/Vigilancia fragmentada<\/em>, 2014, pigment print, 11 11\/16″ \u00d7 16 1\/2.” Currently on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

My favorite records sound the worst, because I\u2019ve played them the most. Each time a needle runs around an LP, it digs a little deeper into the grooves and leaves its trace in the form of surface noise. The information on an LP degrades as it is played\u2014as if your eyes blurred this text, just a bit, each time they ran across it.<\/p>\n

Analog sound reproduction is tactile. It is, in part, a function of friction: the needle bounces in the groove, the tape drags across a magnetic head. Friction dissipates energy in the form of sound. Meaning: you hear these media being played. Surface noise and tape hiss are not flaws in analog media but artifacts of their use. Even the best engineering, the finest equipment, the \u201cideal\u201d listening conditions cannot eliminate them. They are the sound of time, measured by the rotation of a record or reel of tape\u2014not unlike the sounds made by the gears of an analog clock.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this sense, analog sound media resemble our own bodies. As John Cage observed, we bring noise with us wherever we go:<\/p>\n

For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Silence is death, the ACT UP<\/small> slogan painfully reminded us at the height of the AIDS<\/small> epidemic in 1987. Why seek it out as a part of our musical experience?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A\u2013A\u2013D <\/strong><\/p>\n

The switch to digital media for music seems obviously disruptive now, but in the mideighties, it was so anodyne my musician friends and I hardly took notice. CDs arrived on the consumer market like any other hi-fi marketing scheme, with promises of cleaner sound, greater durability, and a smaller footprint in your living room\u2014all at a correspondingly deluxe price. For those of us happily wallowing in LPs, it sounded like a pitch designed to part bored businessmen from their money. Let them have their new toy, my friends and I thought. Whenever one of our favorite used-record stores received a flood of LPs from yet another up-to-date person \u201cconverting\u201d their collection, we congratulated one another on our good sense and helped ourselves to more mint-minus albums at rapidly falling prices.<\/p>\n

Rumors and conspiracy theories about the CD abounded. \u201cThere\u2019s no way to permanently bind metal to plastic,\u201d a friend who majored in the sciences told me authoritatively. \u201cThey\u2019ll separate like Oreo cookies.\u201d \u201cYou know they only cost pennies to make,\u201d said a record store clerk we considered a paranoid hippie because he was a few years older than us. \u201cAnd if you look directly at the red light in the player, you\u2019ll go blind.\u201d Those who had actually heard a CD play\u2014which wasn\u2019t many in my circle, due to the high bar of buying both a new machine and the expensive individual discs\u2014knowingly said they sounded \u201ccold\u201d or \u201charsh.\u201d Hi-fi salesmen explained that the dynamic range available to CDs was greater than our cheap stereos could accommodate; you really had to hear them on an entirely upgraded system to appreciate the difference.<\/p>\n

So when my bandmate at the time announced he had bought a CD player in order to hear one of our favorite albums\u2014the Feelies\u2019 Crazy Rhythms<\/em><\/a>\u2014\u201cwithout the scratches,\u201d I received the news with more than a bit of disdain. And then I eagerly asked to hear it, too.<\/p>\n

It was true. There were no scratches.<\/p>\n

The sensation of first hearing a CD of a recording I had memorized\u2014together with the surface noises on my copy of the LP, and in this case also the (different) surface noises on my bandmate\u2019s copy\u2014was something like driving a late-model car designed for a smooth ride rather than my rusting Fiat 128, which had a hole in the floor and struggled to reach highway speed. Just as in a big new American car, I could no longer feel the surface.<\/p>\n

Despite my bandmate\u2019s capitulation and the evident truth underlying at least some of the marketing claims for the format, together we continued to make fun of its high-tech, sci-fi image: small silver discs manufactured in \u201cclean rooms\u201d and played with light. We wrote snide liner notes for the first CD to appear with our own music, a European-only release on a small label from Benelux appropriately named, it seemed, Schemer:<\/p>\n

On Saturn they\u2019re only just picking up the signal. And the bartender says: these guys have a sound.<\/p>\n

The sound is today. A few light years away, but it\u2019s still now. Flying out of the mystery and back in your life. By laser beam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although we had agonized over every aspect of our first LP, this first CD we treated flippantly\u2014improvising the silly liner notes together on a typewriter, blithely adding a \u201cbonus track\u201d that had previously been hotly debated and dropped from the LP. We were like those Hollywood stars who protected their image fiercely in the American media but consented to embarrassing commercial endorsements in Japan. A CD felt so remote to our lives in music it might as well have been intended not just for overseas but for another planet, as we teased in the liner notes.<\/p>\n

The joke was on us, obviously. Precisely what seemed most absurd to us at first about CDs\u2014that nothing need touch them as they played\u2014is what made them truly different from LPs and what ultimately ended the musical era we had grown up in. \u201cDigital\u201d was Orwellian in its misdirection: these were objects nobody handled. By contrast, we put our fingers all over LPs. A friend who owns a record store tells me some collectors even lick them.<\/p>\n

If you listen closely enough to an analog recording, you hear all its sounds preserved together: the signal and the noise.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

The Feelies, Crazy Rhythms<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

The Pianolist <\/strong><\/p>\n

This intangibility of digital music has a precedent from the earliest days of sound recording.<\/p>\n

Before the Victrola and the radio, music in the home meant instruments in the parlor. (Parlor guitar<\/em>\u00a0remains the term for a small-bodied acoustic.) The piano was\u2014still is\u2014the grandest, most expensive, and least portable parlor instrument of all. In the United States, the post\u2013Civil War economic boom was marked by a flood of pianos. To this day, many occupy a central place in older American homes, whether or not anyone plays them or even wants them; the website PianoAdoption.com maintains a list of those available for free to anyone willing to move one. (It was developed by a very clever piano mover from Nashua, New Hampshire.)<\/p>\n

All those pianos needed sheet music. As early as the 1830s, Boston composer and churchman Lowell Mason (his settings of hymns are still familiar to many Americans) advocated that music be taught in the newly developed public-school system. By the time Lowell\u2019s son Henry started manufacturing Mason & Hamlin pianos in the 1880s, \u201cAmerica had become the most musically literate nation on earth,\u201d according to the Center for Popular Music. In the Gilded Age, music publishers were as formidable a presence for U.S. intellectual property as piano manufacturers were for the industrial economy.<\/p>\n

Then in 1898, a disruptive digital invention pitted one against the other: the pianola or, as it came to be known generically, the player piano.<\/p>\n

The player piano dispensed with the need for sheet music in favor of a piano roll directing air-powered levers. The piano roll is a preelectronic digital technology\u2014like the Jacquard loom, it uses punches in paper for \u201con\u201d and \u201coff\u201d binary instructions. The first device to make use of this technology, the Aeolian Company\u2019s pianola, proved so popular that by the 1920s half the pianos sold in the country had incorporated it. Even Steinway was making player pianos.<\/p>\n

While piano manufacturers might benefit from this new technology, sheet-music publishers could not. The technology of the piano roll belonged exclusively to its makers. And by 1902, only four years after the launch of the pianola, they were selling more than a million of them.<\/p>\n

So the sheet-music publishers did what any software company would do when a hardware manufacturer threatens to make its product obsolete: they sued. The publishers argued that the digital piano roll violated their copyrights by reproducing the music they printed, even if it didn\u2019t make use of their product to do so. Their case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And they lost.<\/p>\n

In 1908, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Chicago manufacturer of player pianos and piano rolls and against a Boston music publisher who had sued over use of the songs \u201cLittle Cotton Dolly\u201d and \u201cKentucky Babe.\u201d The Court reasoned, in WhiteSmith Music Pub. Co. v. Apollo Co.<\/em>, that music is not a \u201ctangible thing\u201d: \u201cIn no sense can musical sounds which reach us through the sense of hearing be said to be copies,\u201d wrote Justice William R. Day for the majority, reasoning that they were therefore not subject to copyright.<\/p>\n

A musical composition is an intellectual creation which first exists in the mind of the composer; he may play it for the first time upon an instrument. It is not susceptible of being copied until it has been put in a form which others can see and read.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Piano rolls can be seen, to be sure, and it might even be said that they can be read\u2014but not as music, or at least not by a person. Therefore the Apollo Co. could continue to manufacture piano rolls of \u201cLittle Cotton Dolly\u201d and \u201cKentucky Babe\u201d with impunity, said the Court, since \u201cthese perforated rolls are parts of a machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Court went on to note that this same reasoning would apply to another recent invention: the wax-cylinder recording. Here Justice Day approvingly cites language already used by the Court of Appeals:<\/p>\n

It is not pretended that the marks upon the wax cylinders can be made out by the eye or that they can be utilized in any other way than as parts of the mechanism of the phonograph. Conveying no meaning, then, to the eye of even an expert musician, and wholly incapable of use save in and as a part of a machine specially adapted to make them give up the records which they contain, these prepared wax cylinders can neither substitute the copyrighted sheets of music nor serve any purpose which is within their scope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The decision left music publishers empty-handed, as it were. Sound wasn\u2019t a tangible thing, and their copyrights were tactile only. The manufacturers of the new pianolas and Victrolas owned the patents to all the mechanical parts of their devices, and if those parts emanated music, that was their business.<\/p>\n

This didn\u2019t go over well in Congress. The next year, it rewrote copyright law to supersede the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling. Looking to rescue music publishers from the Napster-like chaos of royalty-free piano rolls, yet allow the player piano industry to continue manufacturing without being hamstrung by intellectual-property owners, the Copyright Act of 1909 established a system of compulsory mechanical licenses. Mechanical reproduction of music (i.e., piano rolls, gramophone records) could continue without permission of the music publishers, so long as those publishers were paid a statutory royalty for each \u201cmechanical reproduction\u201d derived from use of their music. (Songwriting royalties are still calculated this way and are known as \u201cmechanical royalties.\u201d)<\/p>\n

However, Congress declined in 1909 to redefine what constituted music, allowing it to remain in the eyes of the law an intangible thing. Surprising as it may seem in retrospect, \u201cmusical sounds which reach us through the sense of hearing\u201d\u2014recordings\u2014 remained outside U.S. federal copyright protection until February 15, 1972. Which explains the twentieth-century music industry\u2019s focus on the \u201clabel\u201d\u2014a tangible and therefore copyrightable object that took on such outsize legal importance it became a metonymy for the record company itself. Since sound could not carry copyright, the \u00a9 ownership symbol on record labels and sleeves applied only to what was printed on them: logos, artwork, liner notes.<\/p>\n

In 1972, the U.S. law was amended to allow for copyright of sound recordings and a separate ownership symbol was established because \u00a9 hadn\u2019t previously applied: \u24c5, for phonogram.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Sticky Fingers <\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s return for a moment to the anechoic chamber with John Cage. Cage entered that room to experience silence\u2014what audio engineers now call digital black, the absence of both signal and noise. But his own living body, he discovered, emitted sounds in time: the sounds of his nervous system in operation, and his blood in circulation. \u201cOne need not fear for the future of music,\u201d concluded Cage\u2014because what is music but sounds in time? \u2028Silence is beyond our corporeal experience, since living bodies occupy not only space (the anechoic chamber) but time (John Cage in <\/em>the anechoic chamber). We can imagine and create the conditions for noncorporeal sound, but we cannot experience it because we hear in time. Our ears are as sticky as our fingers. And what they stick to is time.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is what makes the Supreme Court\u2019s decision of 1908 intuitively wrong, regardless of one\u2019s legal judgment. Sound in the abstract may not be a \u201ctangible thing,\u201d as the Court asserted, but sounds in time <\/em>are. The invention of audio recording made this clear to people immediately. \u201cCanned music\u201d\u2014John Philip Sousa\u2019s term for recordings when they first appeared\u2014is music stored for the future. It is bottled time.<\/p>\n

As Jonathan Sterne details in his history of early recording, the invention of canned music was not unrelated to a contemporary fascination with embalming. The Victorians were death obsessed and saw sound recording as another means of preservation: \u201cDeath and the invocations of \u2018voices of the dead\u2019 were everywhere in writings about sound recording in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,\u201d Sterne writes. He points out that even Nipper, famous mascot and logo for HMV (\u201cHis Master\u2019s Voice\u201d), is based on a painting of a dog listening to a gramophone that many assumed was placed on top of a coffin.<\/p>\n

Nipper responds to the recording of his late master\u2019s voice because the sounds it reproduces are tangible in time. It\u2019s just that time has been displaced.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The Splendid Splice <\/strong><\/p>\n

The invention of magnetic audiotape in the 1940s made this displacement of time literally more plastic. While wax cylinders and gramophone records could preserve a solid slab of time, tape could be cut into pieces of time and rearranged. Glenn Gould called this \u201cthe splendid splice,\u201d because it allowed him to perfect a recorded performance by picking and choosing among parts of different takes. A razor blade and some sticky tape was all it took to join one moment in time to another.<\/p>\n

Experimental composers quickly pushed this plasticity to an extreme in the pursuit of abstraction. \u201cMusique concr\u00e8te,\u201d as formulated by French composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer, used the splice to sever the \u201csound object\u201d from its source (an instrument or a field recording location), which might then be rendered unrecognizable by abbreviation or other manipulation. John Cage used the splice to reorder sounds according to chance operations\u2014although the immense labor required to turn the 192-page score of his first tape piece, Williams Mix <\/em>(1952), into the resulting four-and-a-half minutes of music dissuaded him from pursuing the technique much further. Each page of Cage\u2019s score, which specifies multiple splices in two \u201csystems\u201d of eight tracks of tape each, sums to just one and one-third seconds of playback.<\/p>\n

One might assume that the dense number of splices in a work like Williams Mix <\/em>would lead to nothing but a blur of undifferentiated noise. Yet even in such an extreme work, where more than five hundred source sounds have been cut and shuffled in fine detail, there is an unmistakable recognition of sounds in time. <\/em>Our ears catch extraordinarily small moments as they rush by, whether in recorded music or in the world.<\/p>\n

Audio engineers have tested the limits of this perception by looking for the shortest duration of sound we can recognize as a note. The answer is a hundred\u00a0milliseconds. In Microsound<\/em>, Curtis Roads reports that in even less than that amount of time our ears can still perceive \u201cdiscrete events …\u00a0down to durations as short as 1 ms.\u201d Those are heard as clicks\u2014but clicks with \u201camplitude, timbre, and spatial position,\u201d which can therefore be distinguished from one another.<\/p>\n

A millisecond, in case you aren\u2019t familiar with that end of the timescale, is one-thousandth of a second. Imagine Cage\u2019s score for Williams Mix <\/em>stretching to 192,000 pages for the same four-and-a-half minutes of sound. No analog work could begin to approach that level of detail.<\/p>\n

Or we might say: no analog work can exceed our powers of perception for time.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The Foothills of the Headlands <\/strong><\/p>\n

In popular music, tape manipulation pushed toward a different set of conclusions, more superor surreal than abstract. Even before the advent of multitrack machines, artists and audio engineers realized they could \u201cbounce\u201d between two tape decks, overdubbing additional sounds on top of what had previously been recorded. Four-track tape made this process flexible and efficient enough for the Beatles to record their psychedelic masterpieces Revolver <\/em>and Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/em>. After filling all available space, Abbey Road engineers would make a \u201creduction mix\u201d to a single track (either on the same tape or to one on a second machine), and continue adding on top.<\/p>\n

Overdubs make different use of the time embodied on magnetic tape than a splice. While a splice joins one discrete moment to another, overdubs layer multiple moments atop one another to make a super-real environment\u2014one in which string orchestras and backward guitars move together through the same space of time, on a single piece of tape unspooling at fifteen inches per second.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Listeners to these imagined soundscapes seized on their hyperreality rather than their impossibility. \u201cLucy in the Sky with Diamonds\u201d is an archetypal song of the era, perhaps not only for the implicit drug reference (which singer\/songwriter John Lennon always denied) but because it describes what it\u2019s like to hear a multitrack recording. \u201cPicture yourself in a boat on a river,\u201d it begins, as you might have done while listening to Debussy. But it then adds an unforeseen layer of color: \u201cwith tangerine trees and marmalade skies.\u201d As you adjust to this synesthesia and begin to focus on \u201ca girl with kaleidoscope eyes,\u201d Lennon\u2019s voice suddenly moves much farther away, singing:<\/p>\n

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, Towering over your head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Evidently, it may be you who has moved by growing very small; Lennon\u2019s voice might well have remained where it was. But where does that put the girl we were just getting to know?<\/p>\n

Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, And she\u2019s gone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Boom\u2014boom\u2014boom. Not only the girl but everything in the soundscape disappears, cleared away for a chorus that emerges in an entirely different space again. A space you enter, too, as inevitably as one moment follows another.<\/p>\n

John Lennon pulls us through the shifting perspectives of \u201cLucy in the Sky with Diamonds\u201d as if guiding us through the multiple layers of time and space the Beatles added to their multitrack tapes. Like John Cage\u2019s 192-page score for four and a half minutes of music, each of the brief pop songs on Sgt. Pepper\u2019s <\/em>represents hundreds of hours of labor. But rather than compressing that time by cutting it up as Cage had, the Beatles layered over and over the same length of tape, until it was so thick with time that listening to it reminded people of an acid trip.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Tape Hiss <\/strong><\/p>\n

Just as there is a physical limit to the number of splices that might occupy a given length of tape\u2014a limit John Cage seemed to approach on his very first pass, in Williams Mix<\/em>\u2014there is a limit to the number of overdubs possible in an analog medium. Tape itself is not silent as it moves through a recording machine; no more than we are in an anechoic chamber. Which means each overdub adds not only more signal but more noise, in the form of tape hiss. And layers of hiss don\u2019t get more trippy, they just get louder.<\/p>\n

One reason the great works of multitrack analog recording were made by artists with tremendous resources\u2014the Beatles, the Beach Boys\u2014is that it took the finest analog equipment to keep tape hiss at a minimum for that many passes through the machines. \u201cLo-fi\u201d artists have made equally dense and psychedelic works; the Elephant 6 collective of the 1990s were still in high school when they started making theirs, on four-track cassette. But in analog recording, overdubs and tape hiss necessarily go hand in hand; only capital (or Capitol) can keep the latter manageable as the former pile up.<\/p>\n

Even so, Sgt. Pepper\u2019s <\/em>and Pet Sounds <\/em>are works of noise as well as signal. Those noises are not limited to tape hiss\u2014they include all the many aural artifacts of the various times and spaces layered onto these short lengths of tape. A well-known example on Sgt. Pepper\u2019s <\/em>is the studio air-conditioning audible at the end of the album\u2019s dramatic final chord. And obsessives have made use of Internet crowdsourcing to catalog all the many noises married to the signals on Beach Boys recordings. Here is the list just for the song \u201cHere Today,\u201d from Pet Sounds<\/em>:<\/p>\n

1:15 Mike starts singing the chorus too soon. \u201cShe made me feel\u201d and then someone else says something to make Mike stop<\/p>\n

1:27 Something metallic is dropped at the point: \u201cShe made my heart feel sad. Sh(drop)e made my days go wrong . . .\u201d of the second chorus.<\/p>\n

1:46 Brian says \u201cTop\u201d as soon as the second chorus ends to rewind the tapes and start the take over<\/p>\n

1:52 Someone says something supposedly about cameras<\/p>\n

1:56 Someone else replies to the person at 1:52<\/p>\n

2:03 Brian says \u201cTop please,\u201d probably because he realizes the tape is still rolling after all these noises<\/p>\n

2:20 Talking<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These inadvertent noises are inseparable from the intended signals on the tape. Had Brian Wilson wanted to get rid of them, his only option would have been to rerecord the entire track on which they occurred. Had that track already been bounced along with others in a reduction mix, it would mean rerecording all those tracks, too. And had the unintended sounds gone undetected until the final mix, as often happens, it would mean throwing away the complete recording and starting all over again.<\/p>\n