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Gould didn't inject sex
into piano playing; since 1955, the word "sexy" has taken on
additional connotations in informal conversation. In the 1975 movie comedy
"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother," there's a mock
opera, and Dom DeLuise sings: "Why don't we all try / Some very sexy wine
..." Wine is as non-sexual as piano playing, but "sexy" was now
taken to mean anything unusually thrilling, exciting, colorful, fun,
pleasurable, maybe slightly forbidden or naughty. I think "sexy" first
began to diversify into wine, piano playing, automobiles, vacation destinations,
men's clothing, and mathematical theorems in the heyday of Frank Sinatra, his
Rat Pack, and the "swingers" culture starting around 1966. It's sort
of a Playboy magazine thing. Can openers can be sexy now.
Digital music recording
vs. Analog is one of my favorite controversies, right up there with Vacuum Tube
(Valve) vs. Solid State (Transistor/Chip) electronic processing and
amplification of music. Both controversies bring out the paranoid and
conspiratorial in people; scratch an Analog and Vacuum Tube fanatic, and you
often find someone who believes water fluoridation is a Communist mind-control
plot.
Digital processing of
music began with experiments by Thomas Stockham of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in the 1960s. His first specific challenge was to identify and, if
possible, remove the "Bad Parts" of archival Caruso recordings (from
circa 1905).
He recognized that most
of the bad junk wasn't from scratches or dirt or metal or Bakelite warping in
the original cylinder grooves, but was caused by the primitive sound-collecting
horn into which Caruso and his orchestra all had to shout; the horn funnelled
the music to mechanically wiggle the groove-cutting needle. Digitizing the best
surviving Caruso sources made it possible to remove most of the anti-musical
effects of the horn mathematically.
The comparison of RCA's
vinyl LP releases of Caruso before and after Stockham's "Soundstream"
processing are startling; essentially Stockham was able to send these abusively
squawky, nasal recordings into the future so that they now sound as if they were
recorded in a good studio with electronic processing circa 1935 -- the kind of
very adequate recording technology we associate with early Billie Holiday. For
the first time, listeners were treated to more than just a hint or tease of what
Caruso had been about.
The new digital recording, editing,
processing and playback technology clearly promised many more kinds of miracles,
technological, musical and artistic, and financial, and largely delivered on
many of these promises.
Nevertheless, the world in 1970 was
thoroughly and expensively invested in Analog technology, and people -- experts
and just stereo/hi-fi freaks and music lovers -- were reluctant to submit to
this unexpected revolution.
Many stereophiles were suspicious of
DDA LPs -- recorded and edited digitally, then pressed into ordinary vinyl
analog LPs. Led by one obscure professor of "psychoacoustics," a sort
of underground resistance movement arose that claimed listening to digital music
or sound has negative psychological effects on the human brain -- in effect,
long periods of listening to digital music drive you nuts: depression, epileptic
seizures, that sort of thing.
The idea was that our ears and brains
evolved entirely to receive and process analog sound sources. Although by the
time it comes out of the living room speakers, digital music has been
"blended" and "smoothed" so that it seems to sound exactly
like analog music, it isn't. Deep limbic parts of your nervous system respond to
the purely digital, quantum, discontinuous nature of the digital sound and
music, and the neurological response is all bad.
I haven't heard much from this
particular conspiracy theory cult in a long time; obviously the musical and
music-technology world failed to heed the warnings, and the world went digital
bigtime. But now would be about the time in which all of us would be showing the
neurological and psychiatric effects of the new digital music
world.
Gould would have immediately jumped on
the digital bandwagon because of his commitment to the "perfection" he
believed he could get from heavily edited studio recordings. Compared to
razor-blade analog tape-recorder editing, the digital editing process is an
astonishing revolution. Each mistakes can be instantly "undone"; 90
percent of the tedium and frustration is banished forever; and digital editing
(by the time the supporting software became sufficiently sophisticated) offered
artists and engineers thousands of new possibilities analog editing never
allowed. If you can explain what you want to the computer in mathematical lingo,
you can get the effect you want out of the speakers. A digital splice suddenly
offered the engineer an instant a thousand times more precise and specific than
an analog razor-blade splice.
Less conspiratorial audiophile purists
still invest heavily in analog technology (turntables and still-produced
audiophile analog vinyl LPs) and are still convinced that digital music has
imposed a perceivable harshness and coldness to music reproduction. For them,
AAA is the only way to record, process, reproduce and listen to beautiful (e.g.
symphonic) music, second only to physically being in the audience.
I'll say just a bit about my other
favorite controversy, tubes vs. transistors. Tube freaks maintain that only
vacuum tubes can pass all the higher harmonics of music from stage to stage in a
music reproduction system. Amplification tubes take all the harmonic information
they receive as inputs, block none of them, and merrily pass all of them to
their outputs.
By their fundamental physical nature,
transistors cruelly block whole families of higher musical harmonics. (If you
want to know what effect a lot of this harmonic blocking would have on music,
listen to the "musical" qualities of a pure sine wave, which contains
only its fundamental pitch, and is devoid of all higher harmonics.) So no matter
how much money you pay for a solid-state stereo system, you are brutally forcing
the music through inherently anti-musical electronics.
Does anybody today take this theory so
seriously as to still run a vacuum-tube stereo system in their living room? You
bet! Thousands of people! Communist China has taken over the manufacturing of
(Tiger Brand) vacuum tubes -- very pricy, but you can still buy 'em -- and
audiophile magazines are filled with ads for brand-new vacuum-tube stereo
amplifiers and pre-amps. A typical modern tube power amp sells for $8000 to
$10,000, and nobody's ashamed to ask for it, and nobody in the Audiophile Kult
hesitates to pay.
Unfortunately all the old 1950s-vintage
vacuum-tube hi-fi equipment like Dynaco, Hafler and Fischer tube amps is now
totally worthless, so if your granddad left any in the basement, just e-mail me
and I will be happy to take it off your hands. Also old slide
rules.
Is this harmonic-blocking
transistor-vs.-tube theory true? Is it really supported by physics?
Well, yes. And the effects on music are
immediately clear to all German shepherds and dachsunds.
Elmer (who used to live with audio
engineers)
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