I supervising a reading course with Sean Luyk on Music Technology where we read Capturing Sound by Mark Katz. Katz proposes a frame work for understanding what he calls “phonograph effects” which are the effects on music by technologies like the phonograph. The framework is built around the physicality of performance and looks at:
- Portability: phonographs change how music can travel
- (In)visibility: recording technology makes the performers invisible
- Repeatability: phonograph records and later digital sampling allow a performance to be fixed so that it becomes canonical – repeatable – influencing even the original performer. Recording fixes performances and with sampling allows new music to be made out for samples
- Temporality: technology changes the length of tunes as artists fit their music into the medium like the 10 inch 78-speed record that could hold a max of 3 minutes 15 seconds.
- Manipulability: recording technologies then allow users to create new sounds manipulating recordings
Capturing Sound starts by looking at the phonograph and moves quickly through to MP3s. In some ways the wide availability of the phonograph by the 1920s is the most dramatic change. The nineteenth century music culture focused on performance – learning to play and sharing music in settings from the home to the concert hall. The phonograph adds a technological dimension to a subculture considered effiminate. It creates a culture of listeners and collectors that replaces amateur performers. Appreciation replaces performance.
The “Phonograph Effect” turn out to be the digital effects available to make digital music sound like it was off a phonograph by adding static. The recording technology that was designed to capture sound becomes valued for its own texture.
Citation: Mark Katz Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004.