Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP

Studies in Industry and Society

by Susan Schmidt Horning

How technically enhanced studio recordings revolutionized music and the music industry. In Chasing Sound , Susan Schmidt Horning traces the cultural and technological evolution of recording studios in the United States from the first practical devices to the modern multi-track studios of the analog era. Charting the technical development of studio equipment, the professionalization of recording engineers, and the growing collaboration between artists and technicians, she shows how the earliest efforts to capture the sound of live performances eventually resulted in a trend toward studio creations that extended beyond live shows, ultimately reversing the historic relationship between live and recorded sound. Schmidt Horning draws from a wealth of original oral interviews with major labels and independent recording engineers, producers, arrangers, and musicians, as well as memoirs, technical journals, popular accounts, and sound recordings. Recording engineers and producers, she finds, influenced technological and musical change as they sought to improve the sound of records. By investigating the complex relationship between sound engineering and popular music, she reveals the increasing reliance on technological intervention in the creation as well as in the reception of music. The recording studio, she argues, is at the center of musical culture in the twentieth century.

Genres: Music, Academic, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2013

Reviews

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

’ve read many books about the history of the recording industry that focused on the hardware and technology developments, patents and competion with radio. Chasing Sound is about the development of the recording studio and the importance of the recording engineer in the process. Studio professionals can appreciate the detail, but the book is never didactic. It is well researched, and the anecdotal quotes from multiple sources breathe life into what could be a stuffy subject. Susan mentions that she was once in a band that recorded in a studio. She does not say that she was in the Cleveland, OH band Chi-Pig, contemporaries of and friends with the band Pere Ubu, Peter Laughner et al.
Specific to her Cleveland roots, a highlight is the history of the Cleveland Recording Company, starting out by recording local polka acts and later hits for sixties and seventies bands. Bands with strong record sales were sometimes able to demand what studio they would record in, sometimes against the wishes of a record label exec. Grand Funk Railroad preferred Cleveland Recording Company. Eventually the studio owners son, opened his own studio, Suma Recording, with some of the CRC equipment. I still marvel at how clean and deep the early Pere Ubu records sound.

[Mills College Library]

781.49097 S3519 2013