Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music

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Summary: When music began to be recorded, everything changed
Review: This is a book about what audio recording has done to our minds, our culture, our economy, and most of all to our relationship with music. Along the way, Chanan gives an excellent short history of "phonography --" the art of recording sound, from 1902 when Caruso's voice was found to perfectly suited to drowning out surface noise, up to the '90s, when Chuck D of Public Enemy explains that the sound of New York City rap is "more of a headphone thing" because people in the Big Apple don't drive much. Songs from places where you need wheels, like Philadelphia or L.A. are made to be heard on car stereos instead.

The advent of the Edison cylinder, and later the 78 rpm disc, forever changed the fundamental relationship of musician, music, and listener. Prior to recordings, music was etherial, gone forever when the performance was over, and known only to those who were there. When music became a commodity, the performance was separated from a time and place. Moreover, it provided a way to "notate" musical forms (like the blues) that had been transmitted only in person.

Early on, it became apparent that there was big money to be made if one had a hit record -- Caruso personally made over $2 million between 1902 and 1921, when he died -- and corporations were quick to start what we now know as the Record Business. Chanan describes the confluence of technology, copyright law, and popular culture that has made the music scene what it is today: a massive multinational machine, that requires a steady stream of fresh, disposable product.

We are musically different creatures then our ancestors of a century ago. A hundred years ago, no one could have imagined music being used as aural furniture, as it is in an elevator, airport, or dentist's office. Not a single one of our great-great-grandparents ever had the experience of intimately *knowing* a performance as we do -- of having the first note of an overheard Motown song germinate inside your head with 20 years worth of memo! ries, and "hearing" every nuance of horn, snare, and reverb before they occur.

This isn't a book that one blows through in a hurry. I had to keep stopping to reread sentences and let them sink in, and adjust to some new perspective on a topic I thought I knew all about. My modest recording studio seems different now; somehow more powerful and more miraculous. I don't know if I'm a better phonographer for having read _Repeated Takes_, but I do know a lot more about the implications of pressing "Record."