Reddit mentions of Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

Great pictures!

To anyone interested in the history of recording technology, I would recommend the book Perfecting Sound Forever. I am close to finishing it and it delves into a lot of the history that you touched on in this post.

Perfecting Sound Forever covers the technology part. It takes quite a while to get in to the modern era, but it's a pretty interesting read.

The '80s snare drum sound was due to an effect called a "reverb gate". There was a book I read, Perfecting Sound Forever, that spent close to a full chapter discussing why the reverb gate was commonplace in the '80s.

The idea, if I remember, was that reverb gating on the snare drum was a backlash to the '70s recording ideal of dry and close-miked drums and other instruments. The idea was not to record the room, but to record the instrument in as sterile of an environment as possible. That way you supposedly would get the pure essence of the instrument, nothing else. Back in those days, studios would be deadened with all sorts of soundproofing, and the drums would be recorded in a separate room, the drum booth.

So in the '80s, engineers and producers reacted to this not by naturally recording the room (say, like Steve Albini or any of the Albini soundalike producers that littered the 1990s), but by adding the spatial dimension back to the sound artificially. I guess there was still the idea that sound was meant to be recorded "pure" in the studio, and the effects were supposed to be added in later artificially. Maybe, as I've heard many times, it was the cocaine.

Off topic -- I wonder what our generation's equivalent of gated reverb will be -- the effect that everyone had in the day, but sounds dated 30 years forward. Autotune? Quantization? Drum triggering? I guess time will tell.

Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner

The book details a history of recorded music, and how changes in recording technology, from Edison cylinders to vinyl to tape, to computers, have changed how music is made. It is a really surprising and interesting look at how technology has changed our perception of music, and it's a really great read if you're into that sort of thing.

David Byrne's How Music Works is also an interesting read as he talks about his own process on various albums, and how he took different approaches to the albums, as well as a number of other aspects of music and the music industry in general. If you're a Talking Heads, or just a David Byrne fan, you'll definitely enjoy it, but even if you're not, it's a worthwhile read. Hope this helps!

Check out the first few chapters of this book, if you want to learn more about pre-vinyl music and recording: https://www.amazon.com/Perfecting-Sound-Forever-History-Recorded/dp/0865479380

Really interesting stuff.

Being you're posting on the Critical Theory board, you're probably looking for something more philosophical/theoretical, but since you said you're open to all approaches, Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner is one of my absolute favorite books.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865479380/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0