Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music

摘要

Sound-recording technology profoundly altered musical performance, along with the ways in which music is heard and used. It transformed performance around new criteria of production, and extended musical listening from place-specific and time-bound occasions to an infinitely multiple range of settings and contexts. It is not as though these changes were the necessary and inevitable result of phonograph technologies of recording and feedback, but it is the case that in interactive combination with human agents, such technologies have considerably influenced musical production and consumption. Their influence on this relationship has to be understood both spatially and temporally because, inter alia, they enable music representing one chronologically realized performance or arrangement to move from one place to another, and from one period to another. It is instructive that while the widespread use of sound-recording and sound-playback technologies is roughly 100 years or so old, it is only comparatively recently that serious re-engagement with the nature of the phonograph experience has been made, and new advances in our understanding of its manifold consequences have been realized. It is to this endeavour that Mark Katz brings his discussion in this book.