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Leonardo Music Journal., 13 Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 02 July 2008 Version of attached le: Published Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Manning, P. D. (2003) 'The inuence of recording technologies on the early development of electroacoustic music.', Leonardo music journal., 13 . pp. 5-10. Further information on publisher's website: http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/journal/toclmj13.html Publisher's copyright statement: Additional information: Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk LMJ13_02body_005-096 11/25/03 2:57 PM Page 5 The Influence of Recording Technologies on the ABSTRACT Early Development of From the earliest experi- ments with the manipulation of 78-rpm disks during the 1920s, Electroacoustic Music the technology of recording has played a major role in the evolution of electroacoustic music. This has extended not only to the recording and Peter Manning reproduction of materials but also to key components of the compositional process itself. Although such influences have become less prominent with the The development of resources for recording served the subjective effects of play- advent of digital technology, and reproducing sound has had far-reaching consequences ing gramophone records at differ- their impact during the formative for the art and practice of music. Hitherto the processes of ent speeds [1]. Their discoveries, years of electroacoustic music synthesis and communication required the physical presence however, were mainly of an ex- was significant and far-reaching. This article examines some key of both performers and audience in a shared experience. ploratory nature, and no detailed aspects of the pioneering era of Today the social intimacy of an unmediated live performance records or artifacts have survived creative development through in the concert hall or opera house is regularly traded for the for further study [2]. Greater sig- the early 1950s, with particular engineered commercial broadcast or CD, where the interme- nificance can be attached to the reference to the Bauhaus sound diate processes of recording and editing have a significant im- work of the Bauhaus artists László artists, Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète, and the pact on what is delivered to the consumer. This intervention Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Fischinger and Cologne studio for elektronische of technology has created an interesting continuum between Paul Arma during the early 1930s, Musik. the quest for authenticity of reproduction and more manipu- seeking in the first instance to mod- lative applications designed for cultivating genuinely new ify the physical contents of the means of musical expression. This article considers pioneer- record groove [3]. However, their attempts to modify this ing composers and artists associated with the latter activity who acoustical data by scratching new vibratory patterns produced embraced many different aesthetics but also a common goal: only noisy distortions of the original material, and their at- the exploitation of recording technology in the pursuit of sonic tention quickly turned to the medium of optical sound record- art. ing, developed in the first instance for the film industry [4]. Two competing systems had emerged, one developed by RCA and the other by Western Electric [5]. In both cases the KEY INITIATIVES: FROM GROOVE physical characteristics of audio signals are registered photo- TO OPTICAL SOUND TRACK graphically alongside the main sequence of film frames on a Matching expectation to reality in the search for genuinely continuous track located towards the edge of the film. The new musical horizons presupposes the ability to hypothesize Bauhaus artists adopted the RCA system, which produces the characteristics of the unknown, and thus many early at- waveform patterns similar in nature to those encountered in tempts to explore recording technology as a creative tool were the record groove, registered as an opaque profile within the motivated by simple curiosity rather than clarity of purpose. track [6]. During the 1920s, for example, Paul Hindemith, Darius Mil- The German filmmaker Walter Ruttman employed optical haud, Ernst Toch and Percy Grainger each individually ob- recording facilities for his pioneering sound-only work Week- end (1930), constructed from urban and recreational sounds recorded over a weekend in Berlin [7]. This imaginative col- lage, however, required only relatively simple editing tech- Fig. 1. Daphne Oram’s Oramics system, circa 1966. (Photo: Martin Cook, © Daphne Oram Estate. Courtesy of Hugh Davies.) niques to juxtapose and overlay the sounds. The Bauhaus artists took an altogether more proactive approach to the ma- nipulation of optical recordings, discovering that the con- stituent wave patterns could be physically altered using a fine paintbrush and suitable masking solutions and solvents. By 1932 Fischinger had established the basic principles of composing with “drawn” sound [8], demonstrating how the basic parameters of pitch, time and amplitude interact to cre- ate a composite optical waveform [9]. The frequency compo- nents of pitched musical sounds exhibit strongly cyclic characteristics, and such features produce distinctive contours when coded in an optical format. Conversely, many percussive Peter Manning (musicologist), Electroacoustic Music Studio, Department of Music, University of Durham, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RL, United Kingdom. E-mail: Ͻ[email protected]Ͼ. © 2003 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 13, pp. 5–10, 2003 5 LMJ13_02body_005-096 11/25/03 2:57 PM Page 6 sounds are discontinuous, exhibiting companying washes of synthetically his formative work between 1948 and noiselike spectra that are much less likely drawn sound. 1952 involved the manipulation of both to produce a similar degree of visual co- The narrow width of the optical sound gramophone and magnetic recordings. herence. There are, however, no guar- track used for standard 35mm film for- The origin of Schaeffer’s interests can antees that attractive patterns will mats proved a major drawback for those be traced back to 1942, when he me- translate into interesting sounds or vice seeking to explore the full potential of thodically began to study the subjective versa, and this lack of continuity led to optical sound synthesis. Having experi- characteristics of natural sounds. His some highly speculative ventures based mented in the USSR with the possibili- training as an electronic engineer en- largely upon trial and error. Experimen- ties of hand-drawn optical sound images couraged him to establish a quantitative tation extended to the use of a variety of in 1929 [14], Yevgeny Sholpo decided to classification of these features, for exam- sources for optical scanning, ranging develop a pioneering audio-only synthe- ple, the attack and decay characteristics from fingerprints and abstract shapes to sis facility known as the Variophone of individual sounds and the nature of letters of the alphabet and photographic (1932), using the full width of the film as their evolving timbres. In January 1948, images [10]. a sound recording area [15]. This desire Schaeffer started a more rigorous series Although this practical linkage of for more controllable composing tools of experiments in his laboratory, con- image and sound broke new ground, im- inspired the Americans John and James cerned not only with creating a mor- portant precedents for such a closely in- Whitney to develop an optical synthesizer phology of individual sounds but also tegrated artistic environment can be in 1947 using a system of pendulums to with the development of re-synthesis found in the work of such artists as Wass- draw waveform oscillations [16]. techniques that would allow the sounds’ ily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, repre- In the United Kingdom, Daphne constituent components to be used for senting ideals close to the heart of Oram took optical synthesis technology the purposes of composition. Expressionism [11]. The use of optical a stage further in the design of her Oram- The evolution of musique concrète was recording technology, however, facili- ics system (Fig. 1), completed in 1966 heavily influenced by the functional char- tated a direct correlation between visual [17]. Ten synchronized strips of 35mm acteristics of an increasingly outdated representations and their sonic realiza- film were used to code control informa- recording technology. Notwithstanding tion. Both Fischinger and Moholy-Nagy tion for the operation of an associated the rapid pace of technical advances dur- experimented with combinations of synthesizer. Three strips were used to ing the immediate post-war years, Schaef- hand-drawn optical tracks and abstract code discrete pitch information using fer had access only to a rudimentary film images. An extreme example of au- rectangular neumes [18] drawn on 78-rpm disk-cutting lathe and four diovisual
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