Cap­tur­ing Sound How Tech­nol­ogy Has Changed Music (Roth Fam­ily Foun­da­tion Music in Amer­ica Book)Mark Katz
Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia Press 2004World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

The many var­ied forms of sound record­ing and play­back tech­nolo­gies, begin­ning with Edison’s inven­tion of the phono­graph in the 1870s, have undoubt­edly changed the ways in which we lis­ten to and dis­sem­i­nate music. Mark Katz argues that beyond this, record­ing has in many ways altered music itself: it has changed per­form­ers’ approach to play­ing music, com­posers’ approach to writ­ing music, and has has even spawned com­pletely new musi­cal gen­res. In Cap­tur­ing Sound, Katz pro­vides a num­ber of case stud­ies, each explor­ing one of these “phono­graph effecs,” as he calls them. His dis­cus­sions encom­pass a vari­ety of musics, rang­ing from clas­si­cal and jazz to hip-hop and techno.

Katz begins by out­lin­ing what he sees as the seven most impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics of sound record­ing tech­nol­ogy (e.g. tan­gi­bil­ity, repeata­bil­ity, and manip­u­la­bil­ity). It is these traits, singly and in com­bi­na­tion, that give rise to the var­i­ous phono­graph effects Katz addresses in the remain­der of the book. He then pro­ceeds to give a short his­tory of not of early record­ing tech­nol­ogy, but of the var­i­ous ways in which early record­ing and (espe­cially) play­back equip­ment found its way into Amer­i­can culture.

The first real phono­graph effect Katz tack­les is the dis­sem­i­na­tion and rapidly grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of jazz in the 1910s and 1920s. Jazz was really the first genre to ben­e­fit dur­ing its for­ma­tive years from the porta­bil­ity and repeata­bil­ity of sound record­ings. Katz pro­vides a pretty good sum­mary of this phe­nom­e­non, but I’m not sure he really adds any­thing to what pre­vi­ous writ­ers have done. With his next topic, though, Katz enters what seems to be new ground.

Vio­lin­ists, on the whole, increased their use of vibrato around the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. This fact seems to be widely rec­og­nized, but lit­tle time has been devoted to deter­min­ing the impe­tus for the change. Katz, as you might guess, makes a case for record­ing tech­nol­ogy being respon­si­ble: vio­lin­ists dis­cov­ered that using more vibrato could com­pen­sate for some of the lim­i­ta­tions of early acoustic record­ings. The record­ings they pro­duced were then emu­lated by aspir­ing play­ers, lead­ing to a styl­is­tic shift. This seems a good place to men­tion the CD that accom­pa­nies the book. It con­tains thir­teen musi­cal exam­ples, of which five serve to illus­trate the change in vibrato aes­thetic. It’s quite help­ful to have these; prose descrip­tions of sound are often insufficient.

Katz next dis­cusses the rel­a­tively short-lived idea of Gram­mophon­musik — music in which the phono­graph was used as a tool for com­po­si­tion. This might be done by alter­ing exist­ing record­ings, or by actu­ally attempt­ing to engrave sound forms by hand onto a blank phono­graph disc. The genre was mostly spec­u­la­tive, but a few exam­ples cre­ated by Paul Hin­demith survive.

The remain­ing chap­ters of Cap­tur­ing Sound deal with pop­u­lar music, and mainly with elec­tronic and/or dig­i­tal sound tech­nolo­gies. Katz gives a short his­tory of DJing and turntab­lism, and then out­lines his own field­work in the study of DJ bat­tles or com­pe­ti­tions. He devotes a chap­ter to the “art and pol­i­tics” of sam­pling, look­ing at exam­ples drawn from hip-hop, pop, rock, techno, and art music. Katz’s last chap­ter explores how MP3s (and other dig­i­tal audio files) and peer-to-peer file-sharing net­works are chang­ing the expe­ri­ences of lis­ten­ing to, dis­cov­er­ing, and con­sum­ing music. While these var­i­ous sub­jects have been treated else­where, they have gen­er­ally not been done so with a schol­arly approach.

Over­all, I enjoyed Cap­tur­ing Sound. Katz’s top­ics are inter­est­ing, and his writ­ing style is clear and engag­ing. I found the book as a whole to be a lit­tle uneven, though. Some chap­ters (like those about vio­lin vibrato and DJ bat­tles) involve a great deal of Katz’s own orig­i­nal research, while oth­ers (such as those about Gram­mophon­musik and the rise of jazz) do not. Katz acknowl­edges that his var­i­ous top­ics are “con­nected per­haps by noth­ing save record­ing.” Thus it is per­haps bet­ter to approach Cap­tur­ing Sound as a col­lec­tion of essays rather than as a cohe­sive book. I hope, as does Katz, that his writ­ing will inspire oth­ers to pro­duce work in a sim­i­lar vein — I imag­ine there’s a lot more to be said about technology’s influ­ence on music.