Sounds of Our Times

JOSHUA JELLY-SchAPIRO SOUNDS OF OUR TIMES EMORY COOK, A DACRON-WEARING AUDIO GeeK FROM UPSTATE NEW YORK, WAS The PERfecT MAN TO RecORD The SOUNDS OF TRINIDAD’S INdePENdeNce Discussed: A Velvety-Smooth Complexion, Dead Rooms, The World of the Ear, Kilts on Parade, Royalty-Free Records, Presence, Denizens of Panyards, Rum and Coca-Cola, Gin and Bitters, A Historic Verbal Duel, White Sounds, A Pure Heart 43 n the spring of 1952, as a genera- to spend their disposable dollars on home tion of young men boosted by the “hi-fis.” These developments didn’t just GI Bill began buying new homes, transform the soundscape of the United and new big-finned cars to park States; the rise of the LP shaped the culture outside them, the last great era of and politics of hundreds of nations just then IAmerican capitalism was getting under way. transforming themselves from colonies of The American business of recording and selling sounds was old Europe into new member states of the U.N. In March also changing. In 1952, teen fans of pop music, like “ethnic” of that year, the New York Times published a column (under fans of country western and rhythm and blues, were still the headline high fidelity—does it exist?) that laid wearing out 78-rpm singles, or lightweight 45s, on their out a new philosophy of sound for a hi-fi world. barroom’s jukeboxes or bedroom consoles. But a new vinyl The column’s author, though hardly a household name format—the 33⅓ Long-Play record—had begun appearing today, was as instrumental as his better-known contempo- in stores, and a new consumer audio-equipment market raries were in shaping the LP age. Emory Cook began his was on the rise, aimed at getting those prospering veterans Times column lamenting the fact that the phrase high-fidelity, 43 Emory Cook recording storm sounds, circa 1954 Photo by Walter D. Bursten. Courtesy of High Fidelity magazine which was at the time plastered onto the flesh.” A high-fidelity recording, American recreational life”—was audio equipment and records of wide- in other words, should capture not built around Cook’s ideas. And by ranging quality, had become “a banal merely a sound itself but the context the end of the 1950s, interest in high expression.” In the early ’50s, adver- of its airing in the world. fidelity would forge the economies of tisers were selling everything from Since Thomas Edison’s inven- scale needed to make high-end audio “high-fidelity” lipstick to “high-fidel- tion of the phonograph, in 1877, equipment a part of many Americans’ ity” Dacron shirts. Cook counseled his many of Edison’s followers had pur- lives, midwifing the emergence of a readers that anyone could become an sued a recording ideal the obverse new social type—the audiophile— expert at recognizing “the fearful dis- of Cook’s—the idea, as Edison put and fostering the advent of “live” crepancy between reproduced music it, that “I can record the voices bet- recording and stereophonic sound. and music.” To do so, he suggested, ter than any person in a theater can Cook shaped these trends as a devel- they need only go to a concert: hear them”: that the aim of record- oper of high-end audio equipment, ing a voice or viola should be to cap- and then as a maker of records— Listen there for the velvety- ture its “pure tones,” without earthly which captured sounds ranging from smooth complexion of the echoes or extraneous sound. Cook choral singing to bullfrogs croaking overtones of the string section; was hardly the first to reject this ideal: in a pond—to evince his ideas about hear the abrupt rubbery sound the debate over whether one could (or how best to use it. But perhaps the of the rosin on the soloist’s bow; should) “record the room as much as most interesting and persistent aspect commit to memory the make-up the music” had enflamed audio engi- of Cook’s influence is the resonance of the piano note, especially the neers since the advent of electronic his ideas—and records—found in “attack,” or beginning of each recording. In the postwar years, true- another place entirely. note. Feel the physical sensation blue Edisonians may have been on the Cook spent the early 1940s of bass in pitch, not boom. Listen, wane, but there remained plenty of aboard U.S. warships, working as a if you can, less for enjoyment this enthusiasts for the foam-walled “dead radar engineer, where he honed his time, and more for memory—and rooms” they favored. Cook’s Times skill with electronics. The experi- for days afterward you will be an column was notable not merely for the ence broadened his awareness of a expert judge of high fidelity. depth of its animus against those engi- world beyond America’s shores, and neers (“It’s like dying, being in a dead by the late ’50s Cook’s sonic passions Cook bewailed the fact that room”), but for heralding an emer- led him far afield of his Connecticut “modern studios have evolved to gent consensus among high-fidelity lab—most notably, to the Caribbean the point where they are unnatural enthusiasts that sound and space island of Trinidad. Entranced by the places in which to originate sounds.” were intrinsically linked: that a great challenge of capturing Trinidad’s He contended that recording music recording could make of a listener’s great steel bands on record, Cook also in an acoustically “flat” studio—a living room another place and time. fell for the buoyant sounds and intri- sound-absorbent space free from the During the following half decade, cate wordplay of the island’s other world’s overtones and echoes—was Cook came to be recognized as both great music, calypso. Impassioned a practice to which all music lovers the leader and primary symbol of by this aural world, Cook set up a should object. “We listen to [music] the high-fidelity craze. That trend— company in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s for its emotional or spiritual impact,” which attended the large-scale move- capital, to record and press records he wrote; “and, to be effective in that ment of America’s populace from city of the music Trinidadians played direction, the reproduction must lead apartments to new suburban homes, during their yearly carnival celebra- us back in fancy to some concert where, as the editor of High Fidelity tions, creating the definitive records hall or auditorium—or night spot— magazine put it, “the living room was of those traditions just as Trinidad where once we heard it alive and in establishing… itself as the center of was gaining national independence. 44 His records played a crucial role in he landed a job helping to operate a the doctor is gradually drawing far- cementing those traditions’ touch- radio transmitter at WESG, in Ithaca. ther and farther away from me.” As stone status in the island’s culture, The job required him to keep an ear an audio engineer intent on captur- proving the power not only of Cook’s cocked to WESG’s wavelength from ing spaces whole cloth, this skill was ideas about how to record the world seven in the morning until nine at a great boon. Cook would go about but how vinyl LPs could help shape it. night, listening for signs that its sig- creating what audiophiles described nal had strayed from its allotted fre- later as “presence” precisely by includ- orn in 1913, Cook was quency. On his second college try, ing “foreign sounds” on his records, raised a pampered only Cook was able to wed his extracur- pace Edison, giving listeners a real- B child in upstate New York. ricular passions to passing grades. istic sense of where the sounds were “Mine was a case of an early trauma,” Spending nearly all his waking hours made, along with their spatial rela- he told the New Yorker in 1956, when outside class on a cot at the station, tions to one another. “Memories are the magazine ran a two-part profile he did his calculus problem-sets to motionless,” the French philosopher on the hi-fi king. “I never wanted to the steady hum and murmur of its Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics grow up to be a baseball player or a programs. The monitoring job fed of Space, “and the more securely fixed trolley-car conductor. Right from his interest in what he later called they are in space, the sounder they the start, I knew that whatever I was “the world of the ear.” It also provided are.” Emory Cook, for whom sound going to do would have to be done the means for him to nurture one of could be “an escape into the wild blue,” indoors.” Like many introverted boys his most renowned traits among his leading listeners back to where they born to the shortwave era, Cook future acolytes: his famously sensi- first heard them, certainly agreed. spent hours assembling and disas- tive ears. After Cornell, Cook worked sembling radio sets. His parents— Cook’s fabled sense of hearing briefly for CBS as a studio technician, unimpressed when he emerged from had been apparent from his boyhood. and then took a job with Western their cellar with an electronic burglar It had led his parents—who often Electric; after Pearl Harbor, he was alarm he’d made for them—didn’t had to repeat what they were telling assigned to the company’s Audio encourage his radio-head pursuits, him—to grow concerned that their En g ineer Force.

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