The question; to what should an audio recording be faithful, seems at first to be one to which the answer is self-evident. Clearly it should be faithful to its source; to whatever is being recorded. But there's an important distinction to be made: is the objective the faithful reproduction of a musical performance, or the faithful reproduction of the electrical audio signal generated by the recording equipment that is itself representative of that performance? And is the former proposition necessarily inherent in the latter? That's to say, do technical developments in those areas of audio recording and reproduction that are objectively quantifiable necessarily lead to greater audio realism?
To have arrived at the point where the electronic means of reproduction assumed equivalence with the more abstract notion of high-fidelity reproduction as it had by the 1950's was remarkable enough given the relatively short life of the recording industry: that it was achieved by means of the subtle elision of two very different concepts and that it seems to have endured, largely unchallenged ever since, indicates, apart from anything else, a piece of remarkably long-legged marketing on the part of the record industry.
Given that the Edison Phonograph was an acoustic recorder/reproducer rather than an electrical device it's reasonable to interpret the term fidelity, in this context at least, as fidelity to its real, living counterpart in the acoustic world; what we might call audio realism. Indeed, Edison's famous Tone Tests, where Edison artists – usually singers – set out to convince the phonograph-buying public that Edison's diamond disc recordings were sonically indistinguishable from live performances by performing on stage alongside a Phonograph reproduction of their own recorded performances. This astonishing marketing coup is widely recognised as having been remarkably effective. Yet today we cannot avoid treating such claims with sage circumspection. There's evidence to suggest that certain singers admitted learning to imitate the sound of their records but even so, to believe that anyone could really find it impossible to distinguish a real, live singer from a pre-First World War recording stretches contemporary credulity.
So how can the success of the Tone Tests be explained? Either the surviving reports are unreliable evidence and just so much hyperbole, or today's public is much less naïve than was Edison's. WhileEmily Thompson does present some evidence to support the former claim, it's too easy simply to dismiss our antecedents as gullible, inexperienced or less refined than ourselves4. But there remains a third possibility to consider: perhaps the Tone Tests were indeed more convincing than we today are willing to credit.
The performer would stand beside the Edison phonograph, which at a height of 4' 3" (143cm), was sometimes of comparable stature. Often, a stage set was constructed to give the impression of the experiment taking place within an elegant middle class drawing room, furnished no doubt, in a style to which potential customers might aspire. With the house lights dimmed, the 'concert' would begin with the artist performing to the accompaniment of their phonograph record. From time to time the performer would mime or stop singing altogether. On other occasions the lights would be extinguished during the performance so that the performer could leave the stage entirely in order to fill the audience with wonder and awe when the lights went up once again to reveal the phonograph playing and the artist disappeared.
What there could not have been though was any cessation in the phonograph's reproduction during a performance. The artist's rendition would therefore have been heard simultaneously with, or superimposed upon the sound of the phonograph. In other words, although the phonograph was from time to time heard alone the artist could have been heard only with the Phonograph's accompaniment. This might not make for a satisfactorily controlled experiment by modern standards but it did play nicely in Edison's favour. The phonograph of the day for all its failings was not wanting in loudness. Providing the performer was able to match his or her volume to that of the phonograph the audience would perceive a comparatively consistent sound characteristic. Moreover, the capacious acoustics in which Tone Tests often took place would further serve to blend and characterise the voices of the singer and the phonograph alike.
The experience, especially for someone who had never before heard a phonograph, might well have been extraordinarily and astonishingly convincing. Accordingly, it is at least credible that the Phonograph's reproduction seemed to a contemporary witness a facsimile of the musician's performance: not because credulous listeners were duped, but because Edwardian listening praxes were paradigmatically different to our own.
The introduction of the microphone and electrical recording in the mid 1920s cast new and brighter light on the concept of audio fidelity even though the primary aim, in classical music recording at least, apparently remained unchanged; to re-create for the listener, the sonic experience of the real musical event. Fundamental problems that had beset acoustic recording, such as the difficulty of capturing low-frequency and low amplitude sound, were readily and effectively resolved by the newer technology. Musicians were no longer obliged to crowd around the recording horn or to supplement soft-toned string instruments with more heavyweight wind or brass. On the whole, recording sessions became less of a circus and more like the traditional concert performance.
Importantly though, electrical recording also facilitated the demarcation and measurement of many aspects of sound recording. Amplitude could be measured and controlled; tonal characteristics could be altered or equalised and the new recording equipment could be finely calibrated. In short, what had formerly been a mechanical craft passed into the realm of scientific enterprise. In turn, the pursuit of audio fidelity which, until now had been a turbulent voyage of subjective exploration, would become a quantifiable, objective, linearly progressive quest.
With the parameters and limitations of audio recording and reproduction defined according to established objective standards it became both less necessary and less possible for a listener to evaluate recorded sound subjectively; that's to say, to asses its verisimilitude by comparing it in their own mind to recalled real world acoustic experience. Indeed, the various parts of the audio industry have consistently discouraged such critical assessment by declaiming the obvious merit of each new product in advertisements and the media with such conviction and supported by such a plethora of technical data that the industry's assertions have always seemed as irrefutable as its authority.
Once an engineer has learned to listen phonographically, they can proceed to forge recorded sound accordingly.
So, one has to wonder; after a century of ostensible improvements in fidelity, how much nearer we are now to achieving the presumed objective of audio realism. And before we are tempted to assume the superiority of refined contemporary listeners presuming the manifest superiority of modern hi-fi, we might consider whether we would be any more likely than Edison's audiences to differentiate a live performance from a contemporary recording. Success would perhaps depend upon the type of instrument or ensemble chosen; Edison generally favoured the voice or violin, instruments best captured by his pre-electrical recording technology. Our choice of instrument or ensemble would be similarly circumscribed, not because audio reproduction is technically flawed, or because we are unable to reproduce a significantly wide frequency spectrum or dynamic range, but because the objective itself has been superseded: fidelity to actuality is no longer the real objective of recording.
As Mackenzie perhaps foresaw, with continued exposure to developing audio technology and its associated media, listeners and practitioners alike, have come, not merely to understand idealised sonic representation as emblematic of unmediated acoustic sound, but to conflate it with actuality itself. Constant textual invocation in print advertising and the Hi-Fi magazines have reinforced and entrenched this perception. The more firmly embedded a stylisation becomes, the more difficult it is to recognise as such; the primacy and distinctiveness of actuality deliquescing as the idealisation is embraced.
So long as the signifiers of a particular idealisation are recognisable, actual verisimilitude is of diminished importance. Consider for example the sound of a symphony orchestra recording replayed over a telephone. Almost no listener would be in doubt as to what the recording represented notwithstanding severe limitations in dynamic range, replay level, frequency range, transient response or any other of the determinable characteristics that would naturally be associated with the faithful reproduction of orchestral sound. Appreciation of modern day recordings – perhaps most particularly orchestral recordings – depends on a cognisance and an intuitive understanding of certain ideological stylisations; stylisations to which, due to the ubiquity of recorded music, the modern listener has become inured.
so we are directed, and our predilections informed, largely through exposure to recorded music in its myriad variety of stylisations.
The human mind's ability to make sense of its perceptions depends upon learned responses to familiar experiences. Knowing what to listen for is integral to recognition. Furthermore, our experience goes a long way towards explaining our tastes. The personal aural experience of each of us is in a state of continual evolution; that's to say, change, if not necessarily progressive development.
It was a step away from reality and from realism; an abstraction, perhaps even a new art, but if so, one that has been thoroughly subsumed into the mainstream.
The enduring if limited appeal of early pre-electrical recordings meanwhile, is attributable to more than the simple antediluvian attraction of antiquities. The guileless humanity conveyed by these acoustic documents surely gives them a claim to fidelity at least as great as anything produced since. Musical artists approached the recording horn with an innocent naïveté, comparable to the way in which we see blank, quizzical faces peering out from early photographs at a time when folks had yet to learn to grin winningly for the camera. For these artists, power lay in their art; in their musical performance. The message of the medium itself, had yet to be discovered.
14. H. Stith Bennett – On Becoming a Rock Musician, (Recording Consciousness): University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1980.