Living Stereo

Living StereoHistories and Cultures of

Multichannel Sound

PAUL THÉBERGE KYLE DEVINE

TOM EVERRETT

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CONTENTS

Figures vii

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: Living Stereo Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine and Tom Everrett 1

PART ONE (AUDIO) POSITIONS

1 The “Sweet Spot”: The Technology of Stereo and the Field of Auditorship Tony Grajeda 37

2 The Stereophonic Spaces of Soundscape Jonathan Sterne 65

3 Sonar and the Channelization of the Ocean John Shiga 85

PART TWO LISTENING CULTURES

4 Training the Listener: Stereo Demonstration Discs in an Emerging Consumer Market Tim J. Anderson 107

5 Mono in the Stereo Age Eric Barry 125

6 Looking Past the Stereo Loudspeakers: From the Home to the Amplified Concert Hall Jonathan Tee 147

vi CONTENTS

7 Recorded British Folk Song Allan F. Moore 165

PART THREE MULTICHANNEL SOUND AND SCREEN MEDIA

8 Television: Now with Two Channels of Audio David Sedman 185

9 The Grandeur(s) of CinemaScope: Early Experiments in Cinematic Stereophony Matthew Malsky 207

10 Atmos Now: Dolby Laboratories, Mixing Ideology and Hollywood Sound Production Benjamin Wright 227

11 A Symphony of Sound: Surround Sound in Formula One Racing Games Ruth Dockwray and Karen Collins 247

Stereo Timeline 267

Contributors 273

Index 277

FIGURES

1.1. Inhabiting the “sweet spot” of stereophonic sound High Fidelity Magazine 9(3) (1959): 18 38

1.2 The lines have been drawn: mapping acoustic space From Fowler (1959): 41 49

1.3 “Hark Audiophile!” The discourse of audio fidelity appeals to non-technical, “feminized” men High Fidelity Magazine 9(2) (1959): 65 53

2.1 “Real space” and “virtual space” From R. Murray Schafer (1967), Ear Cleaning: 15 72

2.2 Musical composition as a “cone of tensions” From R. Murray Schafer (1967), Ear Cleaning: 25 73

9.1 Grignon’s sound spreading diagram From Grignon, L.D. (1953) “Experiment in Stereophonic Sound.” JSMPTE 61(3): 366 (© SMPTE, used with permission) 216

9.2 Grignon’s sound magnification in close-up diagram From Grignon, L.D. (1953): 369 217

9.3 Apartment sequence From Grignon, L.D. (1953): 367 218

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book stems from a conference that we organized at Carleton University in May 2012. We are grateful to all the original speakers and participants for making the Living Stereo conference such an interesting and enjoyable event. Additional thanks for funding and administrative support go to Carleton University’s Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (especially Dawn Schmidt), as well as the School for Studies in Art and Culture, the Graduate Students Association, and the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs. Thanks, too, to Paul Jasen for help organizing the event and continued discussion about the book.

“Living Stereo” is a trademark introduced by RCA Victor in 1958 to identify its original series of stereo LP releases. We want to thank Sony Classical International (present owners of the RCA catalogue) for allowing us to use the expression in the title of this volume and, especially, Tim Schumacher and Angela Shirley for helping us secure permission to do so. The cover image is based on a 1955 advertisement for the Ampex 612 Stereophonic Tape Phonograph, which was marketed as one of the first consumer stereo machines. Thanks to Debbie Ledesma and the Ampex Corporation for granting us permission to use that image.

David Barker originally approached us about making a book out of the conference, and Ally Jane Grossan took over as our editor when he moved to London. Thanks to them, it has been a pleasure to work with Bloomsbury Academic.

Finally, we would like to extend a special personal thank-you to our families and friends, for all their support through the research, writing and editing process.

Introduction: Living Stereo

Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine and Tom Everrett

Stereo is a living part of sound culture. Most electronically mediated sound comes to us in stereo, whether we are listening on complimentary airliner headphones or expensive hi-fi systems, whether tuning into the radio or streaming a TV program on a laptop, singing along in the car or chatting over background music at the bar. Stereo also dictates how sound engineers set up microphones and mix albums in recording studios, as well as how musicians of all sorts approach songwriting and arranging. Stereo’s multichannel descendants, meanwhile, constitute part of the pleasure of moviegoing and videogaming. In these ways, and many more, entire social and industrial formations have taken shape around the principle of stereophony. Indeed, the proliferation of stereo sound—its techniques and technologies—is so widespread that the term has taken on the character-istics of a generic trademark: in much the same way that, say, all clasping fasteners are referred to as zippers, it is common to call any sound system a “stereo,” regardless of its actual mechanics of sound reproduction.

Given the significance and even, perhaps, the centrality of stereophony in contemporary musical and acoustic culture, it is surprising that stereo’s widespread aesthetic, social and economic implications have been largely ignored in music, sound and media studies.1 It seems that, as with many ubiquitous technological systems, stereo has been “made invisible by its own success” (Latour 1999: 304). While making and hearing stereophonic sound is nowadays taken for granted and second nature, such technical possibilities can also be seen as cultural abilities that have emerged in the conditional and overlapping histories of music, sound reproduction and

1 There are some exceptions here. First, there is an established body of popular and profes-sional writings on the development of stereo, including biographical accounts (e.g. Crowhurst 1957, Sunier 1960, Fox 1981, Alexander 1999). But such works are geared largely toward hi-fi enthusiasts, hobbyists and electrical engineers; they do not adopt the historical, cultural and musical approach that defines the present volume. There are, of course, also a few key works on stereophonic sound in music and media studies (e.g. Keightley 1996, Anderson 2006, Dockwray and Moore 2010, Valiquet 2012), which we will engage with in more detail below.

2 LIVING STEREO

listening. Indeed, while stereo today may be largely “invisible,” in historical and cultural terms it is not instinctive, inevitable or even ideal. Nor will stereo live forever.

The chapters in this volume thus share a similar goal: to make stereo strange. Living Stereo highlights the contingencies and conjunctures that have underwritten the naturalization of stereophonic sound. We want to recover the historical roots of stereophonic listening practices, to analyze the conventions and particularities of stereophony as an aesthetic phenomenon, and to understand what the widespread adoption of stereo has meant for musicians, sound engineers, audio enthusiasts and everyday listeners, as well as the diverse media industries where stereo and multi-channel sound reproduction have become a central feature (e.g. film, broadcasting and videogames). Indeed, the range of perspectives and actors addressed here is broad, given that stereophonic sound both transcends a variety of media contexts and yet is variously articulated to the demands of particular media. Our aim is to understand stereophonic sound as part of a broad multimedia matrix—a matrix that in significant ways has defined aural and musical culture since at least the mid-1900s. Taken together, the chapters here retell a history of music and sound from the perspective of stereo and multichannel reproduction.

For a Deep History of Stereo: Staging, Auditory Perspective, Listening Practices

The history of stereo has many origins. Perhaps the most obvious starting point, for a book like this, would be the launch of stereophonic music recordings in the 1950s, followed by the introduction of affordable stereo-phonic turntable cartridges in 1958 and the subsequent proliferation of “the stereo” in the 1960s home. Indeed, a number of the chapters in this volume focus on this particular historical moment, when stereo was first commercialized (in both the film and music industries) and expressed through notions of realism and high fidelity. Record companies, especially through their promotional campaigns, logos and trademarks, advocated the ideas of spaciousness and presence afforded by the combination of hi-fi and stereo reproduction: terms such as “Living Stereo” (RCA), “Living Presence” (Mercury) and “360 Sound” (Columbia) adorned record jackets, trumpeting the sonic ideals of stereophonic sound.2

2 Many of the recordings made under these imprints have been reissued on CD, singly or in box sets, commemorating the early days of stereo. A number have also become the subject of their own, largely celebratory histories, some focusing exclusively on the early stereo era and others spanning a larger period of time (e.g. Valin 1993, Wilentz 2012).

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 3

But the history of stereo is more multilayered than that. We might, for example, point forward to the belated acceptance of stereo in 1980s television broadcasting. Equally, we might point further back, to the introduction of stereo in early 1950s cinema, or to the release of Disney’s Fantasia, in 1940—or, further still, to the experimental multichannel systems developed by Bell Laboratories in collaboration with Leopold Stokowski during the 1930s. There are also parallel developments in the UK: EMI engineer Alan Blumlein’s 1930s patents, for example, laid the groundwork for many modern stereophonic principles. And, of course, we might see stereophonic precedents in Clément Ader’s two-channeled telephonic transmissions of the Paris Opera in 1881, which paved the way for late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century music subscription services such as the French Théâtrophone and the English Electrophone. Indeed, all of these episodes are integral to the history of stereo; many of them are explored in more detail both here and elsewhere in the book. (For a chronological overview of stereo, see the Stereo Timeline at the end of this volume.)

We want to begin by digging deeper. Each of these potential starting points presumes that stereo is, first and foremost, a technological phenomenon. Such is the usual way of thinking about “stereophonic sound.” For example, one prominent encyclopedia defines stereo as:

A system of sound recording or transmission in which signals are captured, mixed, or synthesized using two or more audio channels in such a way as to deliver a spatial or three-dimensional auditory impression to a listener when these audio channels are connected to loudspeakers in a listening room. (Brook and Ramsay 2006)

Stated more simply in The Audio Dictionary, “‘Stereophonic’ … refers to a sound system that provides the listener with an illusion of directional realism” (White and Louie 2005: 374).

Our understanding of stereo, however, goes beyond the sound system. We think of stereophony as a set of relations between audio technologies, acoustic spaces (physical and virtual), listening techniques, scientific and commercial discourses, economic conditions and reception contexts. Understood in these ways, stereo cannot be said to have a singular or continuous history of development. Indeed, the history of stereophonic sound (and the history of sound reproduction more generally) seldom follows such linear patterns: it is a history of discontinuity, of fits and starts, of movements toward both high and low “fidelity,”3 of confusion and competition between binaural

3 “Fidelity” is a particularly problematic term in sound studies, and we want to emphasize a strong epistemological break with emic understandings of it. For us, “fidelity” is more of a misnomer than a measurement of the degree to which a recording is “faithful” to a source, or

4 LIVING STEREO

and stereo systems; it is a multichannel history consisting of numerous inter-secting flows of sound, music, scientific inquiry, financial investment and invention, and listening contexts and practices that lead only occasionally toward any kind of unitary movement, cohesion or success.

To begin a deep history of stereo we thus feel that it is important not to pursue a linear path that implies an overarching historical trajectory (as the timeline at the end of this volume may suggest) but, rather, to consider stereo as a set of historically specific conceptual problems or propositions.4 To this end, we want to suggest three rubrics that lend themselves to new ways of thinking about stereo, and which might circumvent some of the historical assumptions and discursive tropes of earlier popular and scholarly accounts. In the following section, entitled “Staging Stereo,” we introduce the idea of staging as an alternative to the overwrought distinctions between the real and the virtual, lo-fi and hi-fi, the live and the recorded—distinctions that have tended to distort how we think about the role of stereo reproduction in musical culture. In contrast, staging highlights the constructed nature of both stereophonic representation and that which it represents; the emphasis here is on technical practices that led to our conception of the stereophonic image or sound stage. In “Auditory Perspective,” we begin by examining the development of a cultural–perceptual awareness that predates stereo as a technology. As early as the late eighteenth century, scientific inquiry into the mechanisms of human hearing begins to suggest that listening is essen-tially binaural (two-eared) in character. This insight lends itself to the idea that hearing is, like vision, perspectival and that sounds are received from a specific subject position. These assumptions then form the basis upon which much research and technological development are pursued from the 1930s onward. Finally, in “Listening Practices” we consider the commercial constraints of technological innovation and the contingencies and practi-calities of reception. It is in these contexts that the idealized aesthetic and scientific notions that underwrite stereo are confronted with the realities of commerce and everyday life. Stereo, in its technical execution and its relationship to the demands of particular communities and contexts of use, is molded and transformed to meet the needs of both industry and pleasure.

Collectively, these conceptual frameworks signal that we think of stereo as not simply a technology. It is a constantly changing historical and cultural phenomenon. It is living stereo.

any sense of “absolute sound quality”; is it not an overarching “logic” in the history of sound reproduction. Such critiques are established (cf. Chion 1994, Sterne 2003, Devine 2013). However, this brief note, as well as the flavor of the following discussions, should signal our critical distance from “fidelity” as an analytical term.4 The notion of “deep history” that we employ here is similar to the media-archeological approaches of Zielinski (2006) and Parikka (2012); however, we do not claim to follow their concepts or methodologies in any strict sense.

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 5

Staging Stereo

Notions of realism and fidelity were prominent among the discourses that circulated around stereo during the period of its commercialization in the 1950s and early 1960s. These were in large part inherited from its immediate predecessors in the world of consumer audio: namely, LP records and hi-fi reproduction. In this sense, promotional appeals to “concert hall realism” and the “best seat in the house” were expansions of an already saturated discursive environment within which new audio devices and processes were introduced during the post-war period (cf. Anderson 2006). As several of the chapters in this volume argue (e.g. Dockwray and Collins, Grajeda, Moore, Wright), the legacy of these discourses has resulted in an overly polarized set of debates that pit notions of realism, fidelity and authenticity against the obvious artifices of stereo production practices. We want to skirt these debates, as far as this might be possible, by introducing a way of thinking about stereo that we hope might be more productive and less polarized. With this in mind, we want to introduce the notion of “staging”—a notion that can be taken to indicate both the possibility of an external referent (but one that is not, in itself, wholly synonymous with the “real”) and the processes associated with its technological representation. Furthermore, the idea of staging places an emphasis on the ways in which we might think of stereo not simply as a static space in which sounds are represented (or reproduced), but as a more performative space that is produced through a variety of social and technical practices and, also, a space in which other cultural practices are enabled (cf. Lefebvre 1991). To elaborate the idea of staging, we take as our point of departure an early moment in the disjointed history of stereo: Clément Ader’s experiment in the telephonic transmission of operatic and theatrical performances that took place at the Paris Electrical Exhibition of 1881.

The theatrical transmissions of 1881 are among the first public appear-ances of stereophonic sound reproduction: that they first took place via the telephone rather than sound recording (Edison’s phonograph had been invented in 1877, only a year after the telephone) says much about the wide range of technical and commercial possibilities that were actively pursued during its early days—possibilities that would, eventually, be rendered impossible by the optimization of telephone transmission systems for multiple channels of speech communication (cf. Fagen 1975, Sterne 2012). In this early context of possibility, Clément Ader engaged in a remarkable experiment: not only did he transmit sounds from the Paris Opera and the Théâtre Français to a remote audience via listening stations located in specially equipped rooms at the Electrical Exhibition hall (located approxi-mately two kilometers away), but he did so in such a way as to simulate the effect of sitting directly at the edge of the theater stage, hearing the

6 LIVING STEREO

sounds of the singers and actors as if they were spread out in front of the listener. Ader achieved this effect through a system of multiple microphones placed in pairs on either side of the stage near the footlights; the signal from each pair was fed via telephone wires to multiple sets of paired telephone listening receivers, one for each listener’s left and right ear.

Ader’s accomplishment was significant in a number of ways: his system demonstrated the quality of his newly designed telephone receivers; it offered a practical demonstration of relatively obscure scientific concepts of binaural listening, or what Scientific American referred to at the time as “binauricular auduition” (Anon. 1881b: 422); and finally, we would argue, it suggested that one of the roles of telephone technology would be to transmit and reproduce the cultural space of nineteenth-century spectacle and entertainment, the space of the theatrical stage. Indeed, the popular and scientific accounts of the event published in France at the time (several of which were translated and published almost verbatim in the US)5 all called attention to the remarkable way in which listeners were able to perceive the position and movement of individuals on the stage: “the singers place themselves, in the mind of the listener, at a fixed distance, some to the right and others to the left. It is easy to follow their movements, and to indicate exactly, each time that they change their position, the imaginary distance at which they appear to be” (ibid.). Furthermore, virtually all the accounts compare the phenomenon to another popular device of the day: “we may recall the stereoscope, which allows us to see objects in their natural relief. A similar effect is produced to the ear” (ibid.). But while viewing stereo-scopic images had, from the 1850s onward, become a popular pastime often associated with the reproduction of three-dimensional images of outdoor scenes and far-away exotic places, Ader’s transmissions firmly placed the reproduction of audio space in relation to staged entertainment—in effect, offering a technical representation of that which was already a represen-tation (cf. Altman 1992: 46).

Jonathan Crary has placed the development of the stereoscope within the context of ongoing nineteenth-century debates concerning the perception of space; the stereoscope became central to these debates in the way that it defined “the seeing body as essentially binocular” and the perception of space as resulting from the differences between what each eye sees (1990: 119; we will return to this point below). Similarly, the impression

5 In addition to the article in Scientific American (Anon. 1881b), the magazine Nature had earlier published a series of articles covering the Paris Electrical Exhibition, one of which was largely devoted to Ader’s telephone experiment (Anon. 1881a); the article was largely derived from an account published in French, ostensibly by Count Du Moncel, founder of the journal La Lumière Électrique. Du Moncel later published a book (1887) about the telephone that contained a detailed description of Ader’s invention. More recent assessments of the Théâtrophone can be found in Laster (1983) and Crook (1999).

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 7

of distance and movement afforded by Ader’s apparatus was described, in both contemporary accounts and his patent application, as the result of differences in the perception of loudness by each ear (ibid.; Ader 1882: 1). Referring to the stereoscope and essentially equating the effects of audio and visual perception, Ader described his arrangement of telephones as “auro-stereoscopic” (1882: 3).6

Crary goes on to argue that, while the effect of the stereoscope would become conflated with “the real,” its optical effects are actually quite unnatural and “planar” in character, reducing the effect of traditional perspective (as understood through classical painting and photography), and ultimately resulting in “an eradication of ‘the point of view’” (1990: 124–8). The comparison of Ader’s experiment with the stereoscope breaks down in this instance: certainly binaural and stereo audio would also become conflated with discourses appealing to a kind of audio “realism,” but, insofar as the effect of binaural reproduction would appear to be more cohesive than the planar stereoscopic image, we would argue that it actually enhances, rather than “eradicates,” a sense of the listener’s “point of audition.”7 Thus, binaural reproduction, despite its obvious connections to the stereoscope, was from the outset understood as a singular, ideal listening position in front of a distinct “scene.”

In this sense, Ader’s emphasis on the functional utility of his invention is not without consequence: it insists on a relationship between a particular nineteenth-century conception of the audience before a theatrical spectacle: even the location of the microphones—at the lip of the stage—suggests a “point of audition” that would have been highly unusual for most audiences of the day, providing an experience that might have emphasized the artificial and the spectacular more than the realistic. Indeed, while Ader refers to the stereoscope in his patent, he makes no appeal to the discourse of “realism.” His claims are more modest: “the auditor is enabled to follow the actor’s movements about the stage, and thus receives a more intelligible impression of the performance” (Ader 1882: 1). Significantly, when his invention was reintroduced at the Paris Exposition in 1889 and subsequently commer-cialized, it was dubbed the “Théâtrophone,” thus further distancing it from the popular stereoscope and emphasizing its connection to both the stage

6 Loudness is not, of course, the only factor relating to spatial perception: later studies in physics and psychoacoustics point to time of arrival, phase differences and other factors as contributing to the ability of humans to hear spatially. However, for Ader and his contem-poraries, the phenomenon seemed to be explained most readily as the result of differences in loudness. See below for further discussion of nineteenth-century research into auditory locali-zation and the spatialization of hearing.7 “Point of audition” is a term introduced by Michel Chion (1994) to describe the apparent position from which a character in a film might hear a sound, and is in this way analogous to “point of view” camera work.

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and the telephone.8 This emphasis is not surprising given the historical relationship between live performance and the evolution of operatic, theatrical and concert stages (and venues) in western culture. However, it perhaps also marks the beginning of the long, ambiguous and problematic relationship between live performance and electronic media as described by scholars such as Steve Wurtzler (1992) and Philip Auslander (1999).

Our purpose here, however, is not to take up this binary between the live and the recorded but to think about how discourses and practices associated with technologies such as the Théâtrophone variously and actively construct stereo reproduction as a kind of imaginary “stage,” a specific kind of imaginary space within which musical performances are represented.9 The idea of staging thus refers both to a potential external space—“the stage”—and to a set of technological practices that are, in essence, representational. Understood in this way, the “staging” of stereo can take many forms and, in its broadest sense, ought to also include the idea of the stage in relation to the meta-space of the theater and to audience position (every representational space implies a preferred subject position; cf. Sterne and Grajeda, this volume). For example, even when notions of realism and fidelity are invoked in relation to stereo, they are often combined with terms such as “concert hall” realism, which carry along with them class and high culture connotations, or found in expressions such as “the best seat in the house”—the “best seat” in such instances being that which gives the best listening position with regards to the imaginary stage. The staging of stereo can also take on a very literal meaning in some cases: for example, in some of the promotional events associated with the early stereo experiments undertaken by Bell Labs and conductor Leopold Stokowski during the 1930s (which will be discussed in more detail below), the sounds of an orchestra picked up from the stage of one concert hall were transmitted to loudspeakers installed on the stage of another, remote venue (McGinn 1983: 57). Stereophonic sound was thus “staged” as a kind of spectacle in its own right.10

8 The Théâtrophone had a remarkable run: although it seems to have been adopted in a limited fashion—primarily in public places, such as hotel lobbies, and in the homes of the upper classes—the commercial development of the technology continued until about 1929. The technology was marketed under the name “Electrophone” in Britain, the US and elsewhere; in each instance, the naming of the device does not appear to emphasize the connection with stereo, as such.9 It should be noted that Ader’s invention was essentially binaural in character and its effects should be distinguished from the stereo recording practices described in this section. The distinction between binaural and stereo methods of recording will be dealt with in more detail in the following sections of the introduction.10 Interestingly, Stokowski located himself in the hall with the loudspeakers, balancing and modulating the sounds they produced, rather than occupying himself with the task of leading the orchestra, located elsewhere, thus lending his fame as a conductor to the act of mediation.

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 9

Promotional events of one kind or another have been central to the introduction of new technologies—both industrial and consumer technol-ogies—since the middle of the nineteenth century: Ader’s Théâtrophone was introduced at one of many such events that took place at regular intervals in Paris, and elsewhere, from the 1850s to the 1930s (cf. Williams 1982: 58–66). On a smaller scale, and not unlike the Stokowski/Bell concerts, Edison organized a long series of touring events to promote the phonograph: his famous “tone tests” elaborately staged live performers against their own recordings in an attempt to convince audiences of the “fidelity” of phonographic reproduction (Thompson 1995). With stereo it was the home, as the primary site of consumption, that became a latter-day extension of these promotional events. In this volume, Tim Anderson discusses the role of demonstration records in promoting the ideals of two-channel reproduction in the home: invoking Tom Gunning’s notion of the “cinema of attraction,” he argues that demonstration records were a key vehicle for convincing listeners of the superior spatial effects possible through stereo. Anderson goes a step further in suggesting that the demon-stration records were also significant in the way in which they “trained” the consumer to adopt a new mode of listening.

Of course, with demonstration records, and indeed in most recording and listening situations, a literal stage is not present. Yet many sound recording engineers have nevertheless come to think of (and describe) the metaphorical space of stereo reproduction as a kind of stage. This way of thinking is deeply embedded in engineering practices, where musical instrument sounds, regardless of the circumstances of their recording, are often panned in such a way as to imitate the way one would hear an orchestra or band performing live on stage. And within engineering and manufacturing discourses, the term “sound stage” is commonly employed in describing the audio space of the stereo mix (cf. Moylan 2002). A stage is, of course, a three-dimensional space and, beyond panning sounds from left to right, engineers employ a number of other techniques and devices, such as artificial reverb, to create the effect of greater depth and breadth. For example, in one of its instructional manuals accompanying the release of a line of amateur and semi-professional reverb devices in the late 1980s, the Alesis Corporation described the role of reverb within sound mixing as follows: “These [reverb] programs were chosen for the purpose of creating a ‘sound stage’ for the musical performance. There is a well-defined sense of three dimensional space that is occupied by each instrument: left to right and front to back” (Alesis n.d.: 4). To bring its point home, the manual includes an elaborate, shaded graphic representing the precise location, width and depth of various instrument sounds and reverb effects as they might sound in an audio mix.

While these discourses and practices have been long-standing within a variety of promotional, manufacturing and engineering communities,

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they have also, in recent years, been taken up by a number of scholars in an attempt to analyze and understand the effects of mixing (and audio processing more generally) on listener experience. Serge Lacasse (2000) has analyzed in great detail the various uses of the microphone, signal processing, mixing and panning in what he refers to as the “staging of the voice” in rock and pop music recording. “Staging,” in his usage, places contemporary sound recording within a long history of western theatrical and aesthetic discourse and practice to illuminate their impact on the production of meaning and affect in popular music, especially as they relate to the sound of the singing voice. More broadly, Ruth Dockwray and Allan F. Moore (2010) have described the production of a kind of virtual space that they call the “sound-box,” which appears to have emerged in pop and rock recording during the 1970s. In this volume, Moore extends his analysis to a discussion of British folk music and the transition from mono to stereo recording practices. The aesthetics of the sound-box appear to transcend widely accepted generic boundaries, which says something about the affordances of stereo as a mode of sound reproduction. However, as Moore argues, the use of these recording practices has particular implica-tions for notions of folk authenticity.

The idea of the sound-box is, in many respects, similar to the idea of a sound stage but also suggests that, by the 1970s, sound recordings should be thought of as creating their own, unique type of spatial environment, one that no longer refers to any kind of “real” performance space. Multitrack recording plays a key role in first isolating individual instrument sounds so that they can then be processed and precisely located within the virtual space of the stereo mix. The sound-box/stage that listeners perceive in the stereo mix is thus not predicated on the idea of a “real” stage or a simple pair of microphones used to capture a “real” performance; it is, rather, a highly artificial space created through the layering of multiple audio tracks. In this sense, the “sound stage” has become, in Deleuzian terms, a kind of “deterritorialized” space—one that must be “reterritorialized” for a culture raised on listening to music via loudspeakers (cf. Théberge 1989, 2004; Doyle 2005).

Beyond the virtual space represented by the sound stage, Simon Zagorski-Thomas (2010) further distinguishes between what he calls “functional” and “aesthetic” staging. While Dockwray and Moore clearly relate the “sound-box” idea to the development of a studio-based aesthetic, Zagorski-Thomas’ notion of “functional staging” suggests that certain approaches to sound mixing may be prompted by practical issues related to reception rather than production. For example, he argues that the practicalities of playing dance music through large speaker systems in clubs led engineers to treat and place sounds differently than when mixing rock music for playback in the home; the latter practice often results in an attempt to simulate the sound of large venues—creating the effect of “a stadium in

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 11

your bedroom.” Zagorski-Thomas’ notion of “functional staging” thus makes an important point about the idea of sound staging more generally: “staging” sounds in music recording is a process that variously ties together a sonic aesthetic of “real” performance spaces—along with their attendant ideologies of immediacy and authenticity—with studio production practices and assumptions about the contexts of reception. In this way, we can think of three interlocked “stages”: the stage of performance, the stage created in the mix, and the stage on which sounds are played back.

These observations about the staging of stereo sound suggest that when we think about stereo as simply the left and right tracks of a stereo tape, the two sides of a record groove, or a pair of loudspeakers or headphones, we miss an important fact: that the production of a stereo recording involves the channeling of multiple sources of sound into a single, left–right configuration and, also, that stereo playback can employ multiple speaker arrays. The use of multiple microphone techniques was already common in the days of monophonic recording, whenever it was necessary to highlight the contribution of a singer, soloist or other prominent element in a musical texture, or to create a sense of spatial depth (cf. Doyle 2005). While it was always possible to record even a large ensemble, such as a symphony orchestra, in stereo with only a pair of microphones (as is often done in live radio broadcasts where the multiple microphones might be distracting for the live audience), recording engineers typically used multiple micro-phones to obtain better balances between different sections of the ensemble, and between ensemble and ambient sound. In the case of Decca London’s so-called “phase 4” recording process of the early 1960s, the input from as many as twenty microphones could be routed through a custom-designed mixing console to produce a stereo recording. Indeed, it is important to recognize that the development of commercial stereo recording during the late 1950s and early 1960s occurs simultaneously with the development of multitrack recording techniques: two-, three-, and then four-track recording was common and, by the end of the 1960s, recording on as many as sixteen or twenty-four tracks was possible. The creative and transformative uses of multitrack recording are well known in popular music, but even in classical music recording, multitracking was often used to ease the burden of balancing multiple microphone inputs while recording: “years ago it was either two or three tracks. There wasn’t much to do back then. We could manipulate three tracks and get certain little things, little nuances maybe. But with sixteen tracks, what we’re doing is really recreating the whole orchestra … Of course, sixteen tracks could mean fifty microphones” (in the words of classical music recording mixer Ray Moore, quoted in Harvith and Harvith 1987: 325).

If stereo is actually the meeting ground for multiple channels of sound, stereo reproduction is, likewise, not confined to only two channels. This has been especially true in film sound, where stereo and surround sound

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systems have proliferated, employing multiple speakers in a variety of competing configurations and formats.11 Despite its appeal to a kind of three-dimensional audio “realism,” film sound might still fruitfully be thought of in relation to the framework of staging and audience positioning suggested here. Hollywood cinema has long been thought of as the medium of realism par excellence, but its historical associations with drama, perfor-mance and public exhibition make it almost impossible for cinema to fully extricate itself from its links with nineteenth-century musical and theatrical forms and venues. Indeed, the movie palaces of the 1920s and 1930s, with their elaborate proscenium arches and other architectural details, continued to make an explicit link between film experience and the spectacle of opera and theater long after cinema had parted company with vaudeville and other early entertainment venues. Much later, many theaters of more modern design still contained vestigial markers of theatrical entertainment: e.g. the velvet curtains that hid the film screen until it was time for the show to begin. And today, the popularity of the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcasts and the continued, if occasional, success of musicals such as Les Misérables (2012), exploit connections between cinematic, operatic and theatrical spectacle.

So while the cinematic screen is not a “stage,” it is nevertheless situated in a theatrical context: in an age of television, internet and mobile viewing, theatrical exhibition is still a core component in film production and distribution. Within conventional cinematic exhibition practice, the configuration of audience seating forces a front-facing orientation to the screen and, we would argue, to a large degree this requires that sound projection in the cinema retain the character of a “sound stage”;12 this continues to be true even in an era devoted to the development of an ever-increasing array of loudspeakers and surround-sound configurations. As Benjamin Wright argues in this volume, while manufacturers such as Dolby promote their surround systems on the basis of their ability to place sounds with increasing accuracy within the cinema and to immerse

11 Unlike film, the music recording industry has never fully succeeded in convincing listeners that music requires more than two channels for adequate sound reproduction. For a variety of reasons both Quad recording (in the 1970s) and high-definition, surround audio formats (SACD and DVD-A) introduced in the late 1990s and early 2000s have failed to catch on with consumers. In the latter case, even though a number of high-profile sound engineers actively pursued the idea of creating a new recording aesthetic based on multichannel surround mixing (Cherney 1998), and while a new Grammy award category for “Best Surround Sound Album” was introduced in 2005, consumers had already decided that MP3 files, which feature compressed audio and stereo playback, were more amenable to their interests in music sharing and mobile listening (cf. Sterne 2012).12 In emphasizing the staging framework, we are consciously breaking with the more conven-tional modes of analyzing film mixing practices in relation to realist, narrative and diegetic concerns. For our purposes, the idea of staging might offer a more subtle framework for understanding the role of sound in film than a rigid adherence to the notion of diegesis.

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 13

the audience within a three-dimensional acoustic space, sound engineers are bound by ideologies of speech intelligibility, narrative and diegetic coherence, and the need to tie sounds to the visual frame for fear of distracting audiences from the essential space of representation. Thus the frontal, left–center–right array of speakers—in effect, the stereo sound stage—is always privileged in film mixing, regardless of the total number of sound channels employed in the mix and their eventual configuration in the film (or home) theater.

Other screen media, such as television and computer gaming, have varying and contradictory associations with the traditions of theatrical spectacle. As such, an application of the idea of “staging” may seem more problematic; but as the notion of the stage recedes, the significance of audience perspective and positioning becomes even greater. This is especially the case with gaming, where the real-time modular generation of the audiovisual gaming environment and notions of “interactivity” would seem to work against conventional analysis based on a theatrical model. However, the relationship between gaming and other media is complex: as Alexander R. Galloway (2006) has argued, the origins of the first-person shooter game genre may lie in the radical “point-of-view” (POV) camera style of some film noir and thriller movies. And as Ruth Dockwray and Karen Collins suggest in this volume, game developers are often engaged in creating the audio equivalent of this radical subjective camera style: game developers create three-dimensional audio environ-ments that simultaneously take into account both the position of sound events in the virtual space of the game as well as their distance from the listener/gamer. So while the discourse of computer gaming emphasizes the “immersive” character of gaming experience, the subjective impression of immersion can only be arrived at by a careful calculation and coordin-ation of the user within an apparatus that simultaneously places them both inside and outside the game action. Like cinema, the video screen ultimately limits the ability of the medium to achieve total immersive verisimilitude and, in effect, reduces the virtual world of the game to a kind of stage, albeit one that is highly kinetic and mobile. As Dockwray and Collins argue, sound matters to gamers, perhaps because the deployment of game sounds contributes more to the sense of immersion than does the screen image.

These reflections suggest that, overall, the idea of staging and audience positioning within conventional media is relatively static and singular in character. But we would be remiss if we did not outline, if only briefly, various alternative modes of stereo and multichannel sound projection. We do so, not to valorize these approaches as “avant-garde” or “radical,” but simply to highlight the very conventions within which these alterna-tives must operate. For example, within the world of popular music, Brian Eno introduced a modified stereo system for the playback of his so-called

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“ambient” music of the late 1970s and early 1980s.13 The system used a third speaker that combined both the left and right stereo signals but was wired out of phase with the main stereo pair; placed at the apex of a triangle with the other speakers, the third speaker produced only sounds not common to the main stereo signal. The system resulted in a somewhat more distributed, less focused musical space but, also, one that did not privilege a singular auditory position (i.e. the stereo “sweet spot”). Also during the 1970s, pianist Glenn Gould experimented with a multiple microphone recording technique, similar to that employed in other classical music recording, but instead of using it to render the conven-tional image of the concert hall “stage,” he used the various microphone positions to create the effect of a highly mobile acoustic space—what he sometimes referred to as an “acoustic orchestration” or “choreography” (2012).

As noted above, multichannel audio and surround-sound systems can also situate the audience in a singular, static relationship to a virtual “sound stage” and this has often been a problem even for avant-garde electronic music composers who, despite their efforts to explore multi-channel sound projection as a three-dimensional environment, have typically had to grapple with conventional concert hall settings that assume a seated, immobile audience. As Jonathan Tee argues in this volume, the problem is not simply the legacy of the concert hall, per se, but is a larger, more fundamental problem of the historical and discursive construction of music listening as “an audiovisual practice.” For Tee, both stereo listening in the home and multichannel listening in the concert hall are normative in the sense that they insist that listening takes place before a real, or imagined “visual scene.” In confronting these norms, contem-porary artist Janet Cardiff has used her association with art galleries and other venues to create multichannel audio works, such as her well-known Forty Part Motet (2001), that permit an audience to move freely around an open space punctuated by groups of loudspeakers, each playing a single line of music. While the audio reproduces a musical performance, it does so in a way that breaks with the conventions of concert staging and listening. Cardiff, and partner George Bures Miller, have created a wide range of audiovisual installations that variously play with notions of staging, narrative cinema, soundscape and mobility, constantly opening up our relationship with media and subject positioning to a kind of playful scrutiny.

13 For a detailed description of his three-speaker stereo system, see Eno’s album notes for his fourth ambient release, On Land (1982).

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 15

Auditory Perspective

The idealized subject positions integral to stereo as an aesthetics of staging open out onto a deeper archaeology of listening. Indeed, the history of stereo as an aesthetic phenomenon, as the development of a set of repre-sentational conventions and a system of mediation, is inseparable from a new understanding of acoustic subjectivity that has developed slowly and unevenly since the 1800s. During this period, an epistemological formation that we call the “acoustic sciences” took shape, and conceptions of sound and listening underwent a paradigm shift.14 In particular, we note a transition from sound and listening as non-spatial phenomena to funda-mentally spatial phenomena (Boring 1942: 381–92; cf. Pierce 1901, Blauert 1997). Our argument is that the subsequent development of stereophonic sound participates in a broader and “practically universal acceptance of what might be called the spatialization of thought and experience” (Gross 1981–2: 59, emphasis in original; cf. Kern 1983).

A key aspect of the newly spatialized acoustic subject emerged from research into auditory localization and binaural audition. Such develop-ments can be traced at least as far back as 1796, when Giovanni Battista Venturi published his expressly two-eared experiments on sound locali- zation. While Venturi’s work was largely ignored and quickly forgotten, questions about the acoustic perception of space nevertheless became increasingly prevalent through the nineteenth century, marked by the arrival of devices such as the binaural stethoscope (1851), the differential stethoscope or stethophone (1858), and the pseudophone (1879), as well as the writings of well-known figures such as Charles Wheatstone, Ernst Heinrich Weber, Lord Rayleigh, Alexander Graham Bell and Carl Stumpf.15 Partly through the work of Somerville Scott Alison, by the mid-nineteenth century “the principle of bin-aural observation” was beginning to redefine the medical field (1861: 324). By the late nineteenth century, the “laws of Binaural Audition” were entering the lexicon of the acoustic sciences writ large (Thompson 1879: 385). Indeed, Anton Steinhauser (1879) noted around this time that theoretical approaches to hearing could be fundamen-

14 We think of the “acoustic sciences” as a constellation of disciplines including physical, physi-ological, psychological and musical approaches to sound. In different ways, these disciplines exemplify processes of objectification and subjectification that are similar to those described by Foucault (1970) more generally in terms of the “human sciences.” A fuller archaeology of the acoustic sciences is beyond the scope of our project here.15 Interestingly, while Helmholtz is clearly a key figure in establishing “modern aurality” (Erlmann 2010; cf. Steege 2012, Sterne 2012, Hui 2013), and while he did much to advance the study of binocular vision, Helmholtz contributed very little to research on binaural hearing (Wade and Ono 2005: 646). For additional background on some of the thinkers and technologies mentioned here, see Boring (1942), Rosenzweig (1961), Wade and Ono (2005), Wade and Deutsch (2008).

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tally divided into “Monaural Audition” and “Binaural Audition.” Although Steinhauser exaggerated when he claimed that binaural audition “has never, to my knowledge, been yet developed” (1879: 181), this was nevertheless a significant moment in the crystallization of the idea that human perception of acoustic space and sonic direction was dependent on various differences in the arrival of sound at the two ears. The acoustic subject’s ability to locate sound in space thus becomes “essentially binaural,” in a sense paral-leling Crary’s research into the establishment of an “essentially binocular” subject in the early nineteenth century (1990: 119).16 As we will show below, the (re)discovery of two-eared listening is an ongoing trope in the history of sound reproduction. Here, though, we want to emphasize how the development of stereo as an aesthetics of staging is “inseparable from a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad ways the productive, cognitive, and desiring capacities of the human subject” (3).

It is this spatial, binaural conception of the acoustic subject that undergirds a key forerunner of stereo: the development of “auditory perspective” at Bell Laboratories in the 1930s. Auditory perspective is interesting because, as is apparent in the work of Bell Labs, the phrase simultaneously designates a mode of sound reproduction and a mode of listening. Reflecting on the broad research agenda that nourished the development of this particular technology/technique, Harvey Fletcher notes that Bell’s aim during the early twentieth century was to “make a telephone reproduce the sound so that it sounded like you were talking like we are talking to one another, about a meter away” (1966: 9).17 Summoning a century of change in the acoustic sciences, he says the breakthrough in achieving this goal was binaural: “You would always know it was the telephone until I don’t know who stumbled over the fact that we listened with two ears.”18 This basic idea anchored Bell’s early research into binaural sound reproduction, which used a tailor’s mannequin—“Oscar, the dummy with microphone ears” (Anon. 1933b: 2)—to replicate “the conditions of normal hearing … by modifying the

16 Sylvanius Thompson made this connection in a literal sense: “The Pseudophone is an instrument for investigating the laws of Binaural Audition by means of the illusions it produces in the acoustic perception of space. It is therefore the analogue for the ears of the Pseudoscope of Wheatstone, which serves to illustrate the laws of Binocular Vision by means of the illusions it produces in the optical perceptions” (1879: 385).17 For explanations of why Bell supported such a broad research agenda (one that was sometimes seemingly irrelevant to telephony), see Fagen (1975), McGinn (1983) and Sterne (2012). See also Jewett (1940).18 Fletcher goes on to describe how he invited Bell’s head of research in to listen to the dual-earpiece setup: “I said ‘well how does it sound’ and he said if those damned kids would stop talking like that maybe I could hear. He was completely fooled, for the first time. And of course that became quite a stunt around the Laboratories for many years” (1966: 9–10).

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 17

sound field near them as a human head modifies it near the ear” (Fletcher 1933: 287). In other words, the binaural system “aims to reproduce in a distant listener’s ears, by means of [headphones], exact copies of the sound vibrations that would exist in his ears if he were listening directly” (Steinberg and Snow 1934: 245).

Properly binaural reproduction was of great interest to Bell Labs—not to mention the 600,000 people who listened through Oscar’s ears over the course of Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition (cf. Anon. 1933a, 1933c). However, during this period, for reasons we discuss below, engineers spent at least as much time and effort developing “less ideal arrangements” (Steinberg and Snow 1934: 245). Instead of the “micro-phone ears” and headphones that defined binaural, such arrangements “consist[ed] of as few as 2 microphone–loudspeaker sets” (ibid.). Although these loudspeaker setups were accepted as inferior to “true” binaural, they were nevertheless capable of producing “good auditory perspective” (ibid.). Music critics were less reserved. Writing about early public presentations of the technology, in which a Philadelphia Orchestra perfor-mance was transmitted to a remote and empty stage, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Linton Martin noted: “Employment of the principle of ‘auditory perspective’ through the use of the binoral [sic] system of tone transmission … made possible tonal triumphs which, it may conservatively be claimed, have never before been achieved” (1933: n.p.). The New York Times was similarly gushy: “The new ‘reality,’ described as ‘stereo-phonic’ presen-tation, or auditory perspective … gave the audience an inkling of the music of the near future and introduced a new art—the production of effects no mere human orchestra is capable of producing” (Anon. 1934: n.p.). Crucially, these loudspeaker systems emerged from the same understanding of human hearing that informed the headphone-based binaural experi-ments. Bell’s John Mills was explicit about this: “Through the application of [the] principle of binaural audition,” he said, “it is possible to reproduce with essential illusion an orchestral performance” (1936: 139; cf. Jewett 1933).

Similar connections between the human hearing apparatus and sound-reproduction devices arguably lie at the root of the entire history of acoustic mediation. Going back to some of the earliest experiments in recording and playback, for example, Jonathan Sterne describes a device called the ear phonautograph, which used a severed human ear to inscribe acoustic vibrations on a piece of smoked glass. In this way, Sterne argues, the device “places the human ear … as the source and object of sound reproduction” (2001: 260). Although less grisly than the ear phonautograph, Oscar accomplished something similar. But instead of the singular notion of “the ear” that animated the phonautograph, and which defined certain strains of the modern acoustic sciences (cf. Hui 2013), Bell’s work with Oscar established the ears—and thus both auditory perspective and the essentially

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binaural acoustic subject—as the basis of what would become stereophonic sound reproduction.19

Across the Atlantic, similar conceptions of the relationship between sound technology and human hearing were articulated in the work of Alan Blumlein, who is equally credited with the invention of stereo.20 In a patent filed in 1931, around the time he began working at the newly formed EMI, Blumlein described a two-channel system of sound reproduction that was meant to convey a sense of sonic directionality. He opened the patent by stating that the “fundamental object of the invention” as a technology was rooted in “the physical relations between sound sources, sound waves emitted thereby, and the human ears” (Blumlein 1933: 1). However, whereas Fletcher and his colleagues started from properly binaural sound reproduction, only then moving to dual-loudspeaker models, Blumlein began by rejecting the mimetic binaural model: “it would appear,” he said, “that in reproducing from two loud speakers the differences received by two microphones suitably spaced to represent human ears would give [directional sound effects] to a listener if each microphone were connected only to one loud speaker” (2). What Blumlein found, though, was that a reasonable approximation of the binaural effect could be achieved by arranging loudspeakers “in [a] suitable spaced relationship to the listener” (ibid.). In this way, by conceiving of the listening subject as a stable, ideal auditory position in a spatialized sound field, Blumlein’s understanding of sound perception is equally an outgrowth of the binaural acoustic subject.

Such discourses became even more pronounced in the audiophile litera-ture that served mid-century hi-fi culture. John Sunier, for example, notes in his introductory account of stereo: “The human hearing system simply cannot receive the necessary psychoacoustic cues and stimuli for natural

19 Of course, exclusively ear-based understandings of auditory experience pose their own problems, given that listening is in fact a matter of full-body physiology, from head to toe. Although this is especially apparent in cases of loud music and dance, it is no less true in other listening situations (cf. Jasen 2012, 2014).20 It is unclear the extent to which Blumlein was aware of the work going on at Bell, and vice versa. Amidst the hubbub surrounding the centenary of stereo in 1981, marked by the release of the Stokowski album Early Hi-Fi: Wide Range and Stereo Recordings Made by Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1930s (Bell Laboratories 1979), Bell’s Media Relations department wrote to Bent Hertz of Danmarks Radio in an effort to cement the corporation’s place as the “true” inventor of stereo. Hertz (1981) obliged, noting: “Bell Labs … success-fully [produced] stereorecordings [sic] even before Mr. Blumlein got his patent in 1931.” Hertz went on to suggest in this letter that perhaps Blumlein heard about Bell’s work when he was employed by Columbia in 1929, or when he worked for Western Electric International in London. Further, Philip Vanderlyn speculates that Blumlein had read certain publications of Bell employees and was thus “prompted to consider how some of the spatial aspects of a performance could be communicated through the medium of a recording” (1978: 664). Our point, however, is not to establish linear connections or pride of place but, rather, to under-stand these developments as artifacts of a particular historical conjuncture.

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 19

listening from monophonic or single-channel sound” (1960: 16). He goes on to describe the “naturalness of stereo” and, further, “the stereophonic advantage in human hearing” (ibid.; cf. Crowhurst 1957). Indeed, as Eric Barry notes in this volume, the supposed “naturalness” of stereo became a key selling point during this period, as part of the defamation of mono recording as single-eared, “unnatural,” “inauthentic”—and outmoded. Of course, from our perspective the connection between stereo sound and human hearing is less “natural” than naturalized—the result of a long series of developments in which a two-eared conception of the acoustic subject came to underwrite the development of stereo technology. But the Sunier example is striking because it expresses a kind of reversal: stereo technology also then came to underwrite understandings of human hearing. As with nineteenth-century thinkers who imagined the body as a kind of machine, and like more recent conceptions of the human brain as a kind of computer, stereo thus exemplifies a widespread phenomenon whereby the capacities of media systems, on the one hand, and human subjects and cultures, on the other, become thought of together, in terms of common sets of foundational metaphors (see Shiga and Sterne, this volume; cf. Durham Peters 1999, Kittler 1999, Gitelman 2000, Rodgers 2010, Sterne 2012).

The crystallization of binaural/stereo ideas and technologies was not limited to cinema and music. As part of a set of broader shifts in cultural–perceptual awareness, the history of stereo is also connected to a number of developments in other fields—fields which, though not explicitly concerned with the cultural sphere, or even the acoustic sciences as such, can never-theless be understood as overlapping phenomena in a shared history of listening. For example, Blumlein explicitly identified “sub-aqueous direc-tional detection” as part of the grounds of his invention (1933: 1). His comment evokes John Shiga’s chapter in this volume, which outlines how, in the early twentieth century, both the ocean and techniques for listening to it were articulated to logics of rationalization and militarization. Shiga notes that “many of the First World War developments in sonar technology defined human listening capacities in a way that … exploit[ed] the human operator’s capacity to discern differences in phase and amplitude between left and right ears so that locational information about U-boats could be extracted from incoming sounds.” The Second World War then saw the weaponization of sonar and its listening techniques, allowing military operators not only to identify but actively target enemy vessels. In these ways, stereo represents an acoustic extension of Paul Virilio’s argument that certain aspects of visual culture developed alongside a “logistics of military perception” (1989: 1, emphasis in original). The history of acoustic subject-ivity suggests that such military logistics are also part of the genealogy of contemporary stereophonic microphone techniques and playback systems.21

21 Prior to the invention of more sophisticated electronic radar systems in the 1930s and 1940s,

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In constructing the forerunners of stereo, both Blumlein and Bell were doing more than soldering wires and arranging loudspeakers. They were also participating in a key moment in the articulation of the modern listening subject. Such experiments thus illustrate one of the most important lessons of sound studies: sound technology and acoustic subjectivity are not just connected but mutually constituted. Research at Bell, EMI and elsewhere did more than prefigure the technological arrival of stereo; it also laid the foundation for how stereo sound would be made and heard; it set the stage for both the aesthetic conventions of the stereophonic object and the listening conventions of the stereophonic subject. Indeed, the invention of auditory perspective as a mode of sound reproduction evolved in tandem with the reinvention of auditory perspective as a faculty of hearing.

The history of perspective has typically been the purview of visual culture studies, and it is worth considering how the history of stereo, as an epiphenomenon of auditory perspective, might resonate with the stories that scholars of the visual normally tell about perspective and subject-ivity. Visual studies tends to describe how perspective was invented in the Renaissance and dissolved with the rise of cubism and cinema, alongside parallel changes in the viewing subject or “observer” (cf. Crary 1990). In sound scholarship, we find advocates of a roughly consonant narrative. Steven Connor, for example, argues that with the advent of sound repro-duction “The rationalized ‘Cartesian grid’ of the visualist imagination, which positioned the perceiving self as a single point of view … gave way to a more fluid, mobile and voluminous conception of space … Where auditory experience is dominant, we might say, singular, perspectival [space] gives way to plural, permeated space” (1997: 206–7). Indeed, as can be gleaned from numerous other studies (e.g. Thompson 2002, Doyle 2005, Blesser and Salter 2007, Schmidt Horning 2012, Born 2013, Sterne 2013), sound reproduction in the twentieth century became fundamentally about controlling and manipulating new types of synthetic acoustic space—as well as their implied and multiple auditory perspectives.

There is surely some explanatory power in situating the proliferation of space and perspectives within a history of decentered subjectivity, which is to highlight a kind of parallelism between the histories of auditory and visual subjectivity. Yet the history of stereo resists any facile “postmodern” reading of these developments. In considering the archaeology of the acoustic sciences that subtends multiperspectival audio, it is possible to argue that the stereophonic subject is remarkably stable, even “centered.” Examples here include the implied auditory perspective of stereo as a

binaural acoustic location devices were also widely used on ships and on land to permit the hearing of warning signals at times of poor visibility, or to help locate incoming enemy bombers. These devices generally worked by channeling the sounds captured by two (or more) metal dishes or horns to the corresponding left and right ears of a human auditor.

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 21

staging effect, the hyper-rationalized approaches to underwater sound as a gridded and channeled acoustic space, as well as idealized speaker place-ments in home listening. Tony Grajeda (this volume) identifies this latter instance as part of a “particular stage in the modernization of perception,” in which the “sweet spot” emerges “as the privileged location for the listening experience, the rationalization of an aural field that presupposes as it reproduces a particular relation of subject to world.” In his reflexive critique of “soundscape” as a problematically emic concept, Sterne concurs: “The essence of the soundscape, and indeed the essence of stereo … is a stable audioposition, one from which the entire world is available to be heard” (this volume).

In these ways, the auditory perspective of the stereophonic subject is part of a “distinctively modern set of practical orientations toward listening” (Sterne 2003: 95). Indeed, many scholars identify the years surrounding 1930 as a pivotal moment in the modernization of sound and listening (e.g. Thompson 2002, Erlmann 2010). We similarly find that the discourse networks underpinning the protracted development of stereophonic sound constitute a significant point of definition in our ongoing acoustic modernity. At the level of the history of subjectivity and the epistemology of sound reproduction, stereophony undeniably instances some of the main narratives of modern and postmodern spatial organization: rationalization; the formation of a singular, binocular/binaural subject; the conflation of natural and mediated processes; and the possibility of multiple, overlapping synthetic spaces. Significantly, though, in the world of sound, the relative stability of a singular auditory perspective continues to characterize stereo reception and the (still) modern stereo listener.

Listening Practices

Stereophonic ideals, in the form of subject positions, conceptual orienta-tions and discursive constructions, are only part of the story. The history of stereo is equally about various commercial realities and listening practices, none of which are strictly governed by the representational and epistemological formations mapped in the previous two sections. Indeed, in terms of selling stereo and listening to it, we want to challenge one of the most entrenched ways of thinking about stereophonic sound: the idea that stereo is simply an extension of, or perhaps even a synonym for “fidelity.” Certainly, as noted above, the early promotional appeals of stereo expanded and reinvigorated the discourses of realism and hi-fi sound reproduction introduced a decade or more earlier. But more importantly, stereo came to be seen as the culmination of the post-war development of hi-fi and long-play recording technologies. In the closing chapters of their

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ponderously detailed study of the history of sound recording, Oliver Read and Walter Welch state: “Founded on the early work of A.D. Blumlein, who designed a stereo cutter for the conventional 78-rpm disc, the successful development of minigroove recording by RCA for the 45-rpm discs, and Columbia’s Peter Goldmark for the LP’s, plus light-weight pickups, the use of vinylite and other smooth synthetics made successful stereophonic systems not only possible, but inevitable” (1976: 423). Read and Welch continue their argument by reaching back to Edison, summarizing the entire history of sound recording up to the introduction of stereo, thus explicitly outlining a teleological trajectory that was implicit in the title of their volume: From Tin Foil to Stereo. Notwithstanding the sales pitches of record companies and electronics manufacturers, and the stories of progress told by historians of technology, we want to argue that the history of stereo is neither coterminous with the idea of “fidelity” nor the inevitable outcome of the history of sound recording, per se. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about stereophony is that it became a dominant mode of sound repro-duction despite its connections with notions of fidelity and technological progress, not because of them.

Early sound cinema offers one starting point for our argument. In the 1930s, two main modes of sound reproduction were poised to become standards in the cinema world: the binaural headset system and the stereo loudspeaker system. Although both these modes of reproduction offered enhanced spatial effects that were consonant with emerging concerns for “realism,” “fidelity” and “auditory perspective,” a combination of financial constraints and audience expectations limited the uptake of such technol-ogies during this period. Binaural reproduction, for example, would have required the installation of thousands of headsets into theaters across the US—a significant financial investment at a time when the film industry was still reeling from the cost of upgrading to synchronous sound systems (cf. Gomery 2005). There was an additional disadvantage: listening through binaural’s requisite headphones while watching a moving picture “posed a drastic contrast to preexisting theatrical filmgoing experiences” (Wurtzler 2007: 263). We might therefore expect that the dual-loudspeaker option would have been the more obvious and viable solution in the drive to enhance the realism and three-dimensionality of cinema. Indeed, many venues had already installed loudspeaker systems and audiences were already accustomed to loudspeaker reproduction (Devine 2014). However, the existing infrastructure was monaural and even the shift to a dual-loudspeaker system would have been costly. Cinematic stereo reproduction systems were thus subject to the financial constraints of exhibition, along with its recently installed technical infrastructure (Wurtzler 2007: 264), and did not become standard film equipment until decades later.

At the same time, some engineers suggested that modifications in recording practices could achieve the effects of stereo reproduction without

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 23

needing to overhaul exhibition systems: “voices in Hollywood’s sound practice debates proposed methods of microphone placement, recording, mixing (or rather, avoiding mixing), and set design to simulate monaurally the perceptual experience of binaural hearing” (ibid.). Remarkably, as Matthew Malsky shows in this volume, such uses of mono—the aesthetics of which were now ironically informed by ideas derived from binaural and stereo reproduction—persisted into the 1950s, even after the introduction of CinemaScope and multichannel sound. Malsky argues that the ideals of stereophony, as formulated in audio research and development, were subject to the practicalities of film production and exhibition.22 In these ways, commerce and engineering practices interrupted any strict teleo-logical correlation of stereo and fidelity.

We encounter broadly similar issues where we might least expect them: in mid-century audiophile magazines and the emergent “hi-fi” culture. During the early 1950s, the hi-fi community made a “startling discovery”: “human beings have two ears, and … two are better than one” (Fowler 1953: 48). Of course, Charles Fowler’s probable sarcasm notwithstanding, this represents less a “discovery” than a perennial re-discovery: a 1950s reemergence of a discourse that defines the interwoven histories of listening, science and technology since at least 1800, as described in the previous section. Nevertheless, Fowler, and many like him, sparked a new set of debates about how to achieve the best hi-fi recording and playback. The question, when it came to furnishing the domestic listening environment, was whether to adopt a binaural (headphone-based) or stereo (loudspeaker-based) system. If it had been strictly a matter of “fidelity,” the choice would have been obvious: binaural techniques were said to “reproduce the original sound with depth and realism unequalled by any other recording method” (Cook 1952: 35). But as with the case of cinema two decades earlier, there were other issues at stake. And, once again, it was the necessity of headphones in binaural listening that hampered its viability as a mainstream mode of sound reproduction.

If the problem of binaural reproduction in early sound cinema was commercial inertia, the problem in 1950s hi-fi culture was cultural prejudice. Around this time, headphones were generally seen as unsophis-ticated, “lo-fi” devices that were associated with military communications more than listening to music. Furthermore, headphones had been stigma-tized in the 1920s, when loudspeakers came to prominence, because they were perceived to silence conversation in the home and exclude others from the radio experience (cf. Everrett 2014).23 Headphones retained these

22 For more on the complex historical relationship between mono and stereo, especially with regard to music recording, see Barry (this volume).23 One particularly clear index of the domestic tension surrounding the use of headphones in the 1920s was the emergence of a new cultural figure: the “wireless widow.” She was described

24 LIVING STEREO

negative connotations into the 1950s, as audiophile tastemaker Emory Cook indicated: although “earphones” were the best tool for achieving “three-dimensional sound” (as well as related ideals such as “realism” and “fidelity”), headphone listening was “both uncomfortable and anti-social” (1952: 35). “Using loudspeakers instead of earphones,” Cook thought, would turn “binaural sound at once from a tinkerer’s hobby into a poten-tially popular medium” (ibid.). Hi-fi writer R.S. Lanier was more blunt: “Binaural reproduction … produces an astounding realism,” he said, “but it has never been considered commercial because of the headphones it requires the listener to wear” (1958: X16).

Thus, mainstream hi-fi engineers and tastemakers rejected the use of headphones, along with their negative connotations, and instead explored the seemingly more neutral, loudspeaker-based option. Of course, stere-ophony quickly accrued its own set of cultural meanings, some of which carried a similar range of negative associations in the domestic sphere, as we discuss below. Nevertheless, the stereophonic loudspeaker setup repre-sented the promise and future of hi-fi—and it did so despite widespread agreement that headphone-based binaural reproduction was, technically, better for achieving the qualities of “realism” and “fidelity” that governed the ideology of the audiophile world. Ironically, in an era ostensibly defined by the desire to hear recordings that were “as ‘faithful’ as possible to an original from which it is copied” (Lanier 1958: X20), it was in fact the “lower fidelity” playback technique—stereo loudspeakers—that became standard and achieved vastly greater commercial success (Garner Jr. 1958: 47).24

While the adoption of stereo signaled a fundamental compromise with respect to “fidelity,” the practical challenges of installing a stereo system in the home interfered further with the “true” high-fidelity experience. If the loudspeakers were placed too far apart, for example, the left and right channels would not blend as intended and playback could sound as though the stage had been stretched, resulting in the “hole in the middle” phenomenon. If placed too close together, the perspectival effect of stereo would be diminished and the end result would sound “squashed” or otherwise muddied and indistinct. For these reasons, equipment manufac-turers and record companies went to great lengths to “train” listeners

in one letter to the editor of Radio Broadcast as “sit[ting] mum” while her husband donned the headphones, “consoling herself with a book, or solitaire, having at least the chill comfort of his physical presence, though his soul go marching on” (Harris 1924: 530).24 Today, in what might amount to a kind of double irony, mobile listening has become dependent on headphones as a means of sound reproduction, but there has been little or no revival of the binaural vs. stereo debate. Despite the fact that we increasingly listen to music via earbuds and headphones, our listening experience appears to be largely determined by the long-standing aesthetic norms of recording and mixing for a stereophonic, speaker-based culture. With headphones, we are, in a sense, always in a speaker-defined “sweet spot.”

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 25

in the art of properly arranging their home stereos, so that they might find themselves in the “sweet spot” (cf. Anderson, Grajeda and Tee, this volume).

Even the most committed stereo enthusiasts, though, found it difficult to achieve ideal listening conditions. In addition to the technical issues associated with “proper” speaker installation, stereo enthusiasts had to deal with the specific character of the home as a shared acoustic space. Gender-oriented divisions of this shared space were often presented as a “problem” for audiophiles, especially as stereo equipment became a prominent part of home decor. New York Times columnist Hans Fantel, for example, provides a typically condescending illustration of what Keir Keightley calls the “symbolic destruction of the feminine” (2003: 237) in hi-fi culture:

The lady of the house stands sorely embattled. The double-flank advance of stereo threatens her home with a pincer movement—left and right. But her resistance has stiffened. She won’t let her husband derange their home for sound’s sake. The two-by-two era of stereo, far from producing paired harmony, has put the pitched battle of the sexes into a two-front phase. (Fantel quoted in Keightley 1996: 160)

Of course, the historical connections between audio technology and home decor stretch beyond the mid-century moment (cf. Barnett 2006), as do relationships between technology and gender. But Fantel, in his tongue-in-cheek, masculinist manner, highlights how idealized stereo setups participated in a particularly mid-century renegotiation of gender norms in adult culture and the (typically) suburban domestic sphere (cf. Waksman 2004).25 In this conjuncture, competing demands on the home environment meant that it was not always possible to find a place for “the stereo” in the living room—let alone the ideal configuration necessary for “perfect” stereo reproduction. In short, while audiophiles may have wanted to be in the “sweet spot,” it was difficult to find a “sweet spot” for the stereo itself within the larger space of the home.

Regardless of any “failed” attempts to manifest stereophonic ideals, we also want to suggest that notions such as the “sweet spot” and “fidelity,” while clearly significant in the discourses of audiophile culture, are

25 In addition to gender, there were other issues in negotiating domestic space. Intergenerational clashes, for example, marked the rise of rock culture: “In the privacy of their rooms, kids could listen to the all-rock stations on their own table radios. In more public areas, however, parents and children became locked in mortal conflicts over which stations the family radios would play, with parents usually winning. Small transistor portables, equipped with ear plugs, elegantly solved the rock and roll problem. By bestowing these radios as gifts, parents could wall off the offending music, insulating themselves from its erotic drives” (Schiffer 1991: 181).

26 LIVING STEREO

marginal when it comes to many listening practices. As noted above, Simon Zagorski-Thomas (2010) has argued that the production of dance music entails a very different set of concerns when mixing and “staging” sounds for use in clubs. But beyond this attempt on the part of engineers to mold sounds in particular ways, the deployment of speaker systems in dance venues mitigates against any one, preferred listening perspective. Some DJs, for instance, prefer to play tracks in mono to create an even spread of sound throughout the dance floor. Indeed, one of the primary goals of sound reproduction in dance is to produce a sense of community—it seeks to immerse all participants in a diffuse, common experience. For example, as Julian Henriques (2011) has argued, reggae “sound systems” may use special effects that are dependent on stereo reproduction (e.g. reverb effects), but the deployment of loudspeakers and the intense, amplified bass sound exerts a kind of sonic pressure on listeners, both individually and as a group: dancers do not so much “hear” the music through their ears alone, but “feel” it as a vibrational force on their “sonic bodies” (cf. Butler 2006). In such contexts, there is neither need nor desire for an individualizing “sweet spot”; rather, stereo must answer to a different set of sonic ideals and different notions of acoustic pleasure.

The idea of community or group listening calls into question the solitary, white-male, suburban model upon which much of stereo’s promotional discourse is based. In a provocative essay, Alexander G. Weheliye argues that the character of urban life in most American cities does not fit well with the consumerist ideals and assumptions of “mobile privatization” (2005: 106–44). In urban neighborhoods especially, sound space is more chaotic and loud: with sounds from one space always invading another, public and private merge in unpredictable ways. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) is often cited as the quintessential expression of the use of audio—specifically boom boxes—as a means for laying a territorializing claim to urban space. But Weheliye offers a different example: in Darnell Martin’s I Like it Like That (1994), the main protagonist, Lisette (Lauren Vélez), is deeply attached to music, her cheap all-in-one stereo, and her Walkman-style portable playback device. Listening to music is her one solace and her sole means of achieving any sense of privacy and real pleasure; however, it is not a pleasure that is easily won and it is constantly threatened by the outside world. Weheliye argues that the biracial protagonist in the film—a black Puerto Rican woman—and particularly her attachment to audio technology, challenges the gender and racial norms of both white and black mainstream cinema in America and forces us to reconsider how we think about technology as well as domestic and urban space.

In addition to the specific practicalities associated with dance clubs, and the more general issues of race, gender and urban life, it has to be admitted that, even at a technical level, the majority of stereo setups we encounter in daily life are far from ideal—and most listeners seem neither to notice nor

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 27

care. Take for example “the car stereo” (one of the most ingrained instances of “stereo” as a kind of generic trademark). The car may be one of the most important sonic environments of the twentieth century (cf. Bijsterveld et al. 2014) and car audio is certainly significant both as a commercial application and a means of youth identification (Morris 2014). But no amount of ad copy, wishful thinking or audio engineering can change the fact that, since the very first Stereo 8 cartridges, the so-called “magic” of the “automobile stereo field” (Finley 1965: 10) has been achieved despite the fact that the driver’s seat is obdurately not in the “sweet spot.” Indeed, in many cases the left channel is pointed at the driver’s knees. Similarly, in the context of television sound, as David Sedman shows in this volume, mono persisted into the 1980s, well after the ubiquity of stereo reproduction in other media. Even when Multichannel Television Sound (MTS) did arrive in 1984, a combination of cable infrastructure, networking shortcuts, as well as limitations in VCR and television hardware meant “viewers did not hear MTS audio; rather, they received a substitute … which might have been faux stereo, perhaps even monaural.”26 The point is clear: even in cases such as television, where it should be possible to experience an idealized version of multichannel sound, the evidence questions any teleological conception of stereo fidelity and, furthermore, suggests that in many contexts listeners place relatively little value on experiencing “true” stereo sound.

Our goal here is emphatically not to deride listeners for encountering stereo “incorrectly” or “disrespectfully”—a reheated Adornian complaint that the so-called “distracted” listener both literally and figuratively “blows smoke into the face of the sound” (Goodman 2010: 44). Rather, we wish to erode a trope in popular and scholarly discourse that understands stereo as a kind of culmination in a history of ever-increasing demand for fidelity. While there are understandable reasons for this association, stemming largely from their coincidence in mid-century audiophile culture, at the level of listening practices the histories of stereo and “fidelity” are not synonymous or even fully coterminous. If, as we suggested above, the subject positions implied by stereo can be read as part of an overarching rationalization narrative in the epistemology of sound, stereophonic listening confirms that the story of sound in modernity is equally about a plurality of precepts and practices. Indeed, while scholars have established an orthodox historiography of sound reproduction in which notions such as rationalization and fidelity are identified as central “logics,” our understanding of the deep history of stereo suggests that there are many instances in which such “logics” are less consequential than the practicalities of listening, where idealized stereo reproduction must compete with issues of convenience, efficiency and alternative definitions of acoustic pleasure (cf. Devine 2013). As sound

26 For a broader debate on the question of sonic definition in the history of television sound, see Frith (2002) and Negus (2006).

28 LIVING STEREO

scholarship increasingly recognizes such frictions and perhaps begins to enter a “post-fidelity” paradigm, stereo provides a key part of this shift.27

Conclusion

Decoupling the ideology of fidelity from the history of stereo may do more, we hope, than help to reorient the compass of sound studies as an academic pursuit. It may also open the door to a more pluralist politics of the audible past. If the stereo–fidelity pairing has been principally constructed as the story of the white affluent male, this discourse places various other listeners on the opposite side of a normative division. The three rubrics that define our own thinking on stereo—staging, auditory perspective, listening practices—could contribute to a more fully politi-cized conception of stereo. For example, we argue that stereo can be understood as an aesthetics of staging, in which the presentational norms of stereophonic sound can be linked to a varying set of theatrical practices dating to nineteenth-century western modernity. However, we might also point to the proliferation of stereo sound in the postcolonial world, where the technology is not only articulated to unique logics of desire, consumption and enjoyment, but challenges the modernist western ideals of centralized production and individualized consumption. Further, while our work on stereo as a phenomenon of auditory perspective attempts to unearth the long formation of an “essentially binaural” acoustic subject, we might also question the normative paradigm entrenched by this mode of subjectivity, which only becomes legible against the marginalization of disabilities such as unilateral hearing loss, or single-sided deafness (cf. Mills 2008, Sterne 2012). Finally, our emphasis on the commercial realities and social contingencies that define stereophony as a set of listening practices can also open the door to a variety of other voices—not only alternative masculinities but also feminist historiographies of stereo that move beyond the “symbolic destruction of the feminine” (Keightley 2003: 237). Indeed, our goal is to continue developing critical modes of inquiry that make room for multiple and potentially divergent acoustic subjectivities and technologies. “The alternative,” Sterne notes, “is a sonic monoculture that will be of relevance to an ever-dwindling set of people and contexts” (2012: 28).

27 Our point here is not to be confused with Guberman (2011), who argues that, with the rise of the MP3, the history of sound reproduction has entered a “post-fidelity” era, “a new age of music consumption.” Rather, we are suggesting that “fidelity” has always been a secondary concern in certain contexts. In this way, the more accurate slogan for the history of sound reproduction is not the advertising discourse of “perfect sound forever” but, instead, “imperfect sound forever” (Devine 2013).

INTRODUCTION: LIVING STEREO 29

Our rubrics do not map exactly onto the three main sections of this book. Of course, our own themes weave in and out of each section, as we have emphasized here. But the following chapters do congregate around their own histories and cultures of multichannel sound. Part One, “(Audio) Positions,” interrogates the conceptual terrain and politics of stereo, especially as it inflects controversial issues of gender, class, milita-rization and the supposedly “natural” subject positions inscribed within concepts such as the “soundscape,” which has been widely (and uncriti-cally) accepted across sound, music and media studies. Part Two, “Listening Cultures,” examines the meanings and aesthetics of stereo in a broad range of genres, including jazz, rock, British folk song, the classical avant-garde and demonstration records. Clearly, much work remains to be done in understanding how different music genres, traditions and communities have come to their own specific responses to, and employments of stereo. But each of the chapters presented here provides a model for how such investigations might be pursued in the future. The final part, “Multichannel Sound and Screen Media,” situates stereo most explicitly within a diverse multimedia matrix, expanding on the principally historical focus of the earlier chapters to address issues in contemporary cinema, broadcasting and gaming. The chapters here reach beyond the mid-century audiophile moment and highlight ways in which different media systems place unique demands on multichannel aesthetics and listening practices. At the same time, these chapters point to various continuities in how engineers and users have negotiated the nebulous boundaries of realism and illusion, idealism and practice. It becomes clear in this section—as in the volume as a whole—that even as stereo and multichannel sound continue to evolve as technological and cultural phenomena, they share of a deeper history.

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Stethophone.” Acoustics Today 4(3): 16–27.Wade, N. and H. Ono. 2005. “From Dichoptic to Dichotic: Historical Contrasts

between Binocular Vision and Binaural Hearing.” Perception 34(6): 645–68.Waksman, S. 2004. “California Noise: Tinkering with Hardcore and Heavy Metal

in Southern California.” Social Studies of Science 34(5): 675–702.Weheliye, A. 2005. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham:

Duke University Press.White, G. and G. Louie. 2005. The Audio Dictionary. Seattle: University of

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PART ONE

(Audio) Positions

CHAPTER ONE

The “Sweet Spot” : The Technology of Stereo and

the Field of Auditorship

Tony Grajeda

Who among us would not want to be in the “sweet spot”? It is, after all, the most privileged position, the ultimate vantage point from which to take in sound, whether in the public sphere of a concert hall or the privacy of one’s home audio environment. This precise listener location has long been idealized in aural culture as the best seat in the house: “front and center” of the concert hall. It became part of the imaginary of radio in the 1920s, for example, the discourse of which offered its vast audience a listening experience that was inconceivable in the pre-modern era, a condition only made possible through the radiophonic modernization of listening. Likewise, by the 1950s, that favored seat once more took center stage, becoming more firmly institutionalized as the “sweet spot,” one now made possible through the emerging technology of stereophony.

The widespread promotion and production of stereophonic recording in the post-war period was a key moment in the history of aural culture, often heralded at the time as nothing less than a revolution in sound. Stereo certainly produced a dramatically different perception of sound from monophonic recording, creating a more pronounced spatial dimension in the listening experience. As opposed to the perceived “chaos” of monaural sound, the phenomenology of stereophonic effects constituted a very specific location for a listening subject—effects that sought to place the listener front and center in an aural field [see Figure 1.1].

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FIGURE 1.1 Inhabiting the “sweet spot” of stereophonic sound. (Advertisement, High Fidelity Magazine 9(3) 1959: 18)

THE “SWEET SPOT” 39

In order to receive the greatest stereo effect, according to one expert, “you must be equidistant from the two loudspeakers, and at just the right distance from them” (Pierce 1992: 171).1 Or, in a phrase that commonly appeared in the discourse: “Stereo sound puts you in the Center of Sound” (Columbia Records 1958: 67).

Yet stereo, which has been handed down to us as a natural and inevitable stage in the inexorable march of “high fidelity,” was anything but a smooth step in that familiar narrative of progress. Indeed, the massive shift in just a few short years from mono to stereo was fraught with uncertainty and even resistance, marked not only by uncritical celebration but also by serious confusion and vigorous debate over its apparent virtues—virtues that were heavily trumpeted by the record companies. Heated discussion in audio-phile publications, for example, revealed among other issues the always simmering class politics of musical culture in post-war America: complaints were raised against the latest attempt by the electronics industry to foist a wholesale changeover in home audio equipment—yet another cycle of capital infusion that overnight renders obsolete a lifetime’s collection (as was reprised in the 1980s by the digitalization of sound through the compact disc). Furthermore, the debate accented how the aesthetics of stereo were also at issue, with those seeking ever-greater fidelity to concert hall “realism” set against those who relished the “spectacle” of stereo as a sensational fad. Here, too, stereo challenged even as it shored up taste publics and class boundaries—boundaries demarcating high and low (or mass) culture, separating, for instance, the proper stereo treatment of Schubert from the countless demonstration records of stereo effects for mere amusement. And traversing both the economics and aesthetics of stereo, as always in the world of audio culture, could be found the gendered politics of domestic space. Explicitly attempting to restructure the home as an idealized location in terms of stereophony, this new aural field set conditions on and for a listening subject—a subject resolutely positioned as master of his acoustic domain.

The listening subject gendered masculine here is no accident. The emergence of stereo equipment coincided historically with a post-war US economy that sought specifically to interpellate men as a substantial consumer block. With the explosion in audio fidelity publications geared toward white middle-class men in the 1950s, we can track the extent to which a listening subject has been gendered masculine on two levels: socially, in terms of an economy of leisure (audiophiles as a demographic

1 It bears mentioning at the outset that this notion of the “sweet spot” has become over time an informal phrase used by audio engineers for pinpointing that particular place where stereo-phonic sound achieves its ideal auditory perspective for a listener—“a ‘sweet spot’ at a certain position in the room,” as Pierce claims, “where the effect works quite well” (Pierce 1992: 174–5).

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have historically been, and largely remain, overwhelmingly men), and theoretically, in terms of a libidinal economy of mastery, control and the fetishization of technology.

This class- and gender-bound reception was overdetermined as well by conflicted ways of hearing, separating around the mass culture appeal of stereo’s blatant artifice—the experience of which produced a “distracted” listener—and the high-culture dream of an auditor absorbed into the “sweet spot,” one fully given over to “attentive” listening. By examining the discourse of stereo for what it might tell us about a cultural history of sound and listening, this chapter considers how both a distracted and a contemplative mode of reception were at play in aural culture. This divided acoustical field of what could be termed “auditorship,” which would appear to stage a stereo effect at odds with itself, allows us to speculate on a historically constituted formation of subjectivity through sound—a formation, as we will see, that was not only aural in nature but also mediated by a discourse of vision and visuality. Since the technology of stereo was initially introduced into the cinema, before traveling to the domestic sphere of home audio, my discussion turns to a model of specta-torship developed in contemporary film theory. Adopting Tom Gunning’s notion of a “cinema of attractions,” I suggest that the stereo technology of spectacular effects involved an “audio of attractions,” a spectacle of sound at variance with the more “discriminating” experience of absorption into stereo’s competing “concert hall realism.” Along with this particular stage in the modernization of perception, I aim to explore this technological instantiation of the “sweet spot” as the privileged location for the listening experience, the rationalization of an aural field that presupposes as it repro-duces a particular relation of subject to world.

Traveling Voices: Widescreen Sound and a Listening Subject

I don’t think CinemaScope is a good medium. It’s good only for showing great masses of movement. For other things, it’s distracting, it’s hard to focus attention, and it’s very difficult to cut. Some people just go ahead and cut it and let people’s eyes jump around and find what they want to find. It’s very hard for an audience to focus—they have too much to look at—they can’t see the whole thing.

— HOWARD HAWKS (BARR 1963: 17–18)

The idea of stereo—separate yet simultaneous recording and playback through two distinct channels—had been lurking almost from the outset of sound’s mechanical reproduction. The first known experiment in stereo

THE “SWEET SPOT” 41

took place in 1881 when, according to Michael Arick, “a French scientist, Clement Ader [sic], devised an ingenious exhibit for the Palais d’Industrie in Paris, by which the sounds of a live opera performance were transmitted via telephone wire to primitive stereo headsets”:

Ader’s subjects could clearly distinguish the elements of the performance—voice, orchestra, applause—and from these were able to “imagine” the dimensions and depth of the actual auditorium. Though conceived as a stunt, Ader’s experiment was actually the first use of modern technology to explore psychoacoustics—the natural phenomenon by which the brain takes sound cues from multiple sources, compares them, and then constructs their apparent field of depth. (Arick 1987–8: 36; cf. Offenhauser Jr. 1958: 67, Chanan 1995: 133)

Concerted research on binaural or two-channel sound was underway by the late 1920s, and by the early 1930s the basic principles had taken shape. At EMI’s labs in London, engineer Alan Blumlein successfully developed a disc-cutting technique in 1931 to inscribe two separate channels into one record groove (Millard 1995: 192). Around the same time, audio engineers Arthur C. Keller and Ira Rafuse at Bell Labs in New Jersey were experimenting with stereophonic sound, efforts that led to the famous collaboration with conductor Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1931 (Whyte 1981: 44; cf. Gelatt 1977: 313). Stokowski also conducted the Orchestra’s recording of Bach, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven for Walt Disney’s Fantasia in 1940, which featured a multichannel sound system designed by RCA called “Fantasound” (Farmer 2008: 194). This limited-run presentation utilized up to nine monaural tracks (including part of the mix distributed to surround speakers) to illustrate the “directional” sound of the symphony (Handzo 1985: 418–19; Carr and Hayes 1988: 239; cf. Millard 1995: 283–4). But “true” stereophonic reproduction would not be heard until the emergence of magnetic film sound that accompanied the “wide-screen revolution” of the 1950s.

Launched in 1952 by Cinerama’s documentary travelogues, followed by CinemaScope (1953) and Todd–AO (1955), as well as a brief but noticeable 3D craze, widescreen cinema was promoted at least initially “as a new advance in cinematic realism”; this was exemplified by Cinerama’s claim that it created “all the illusion of reality … you see things the way you do in real life—not only in front of you as in conventional motion pictures, but also out of the corners of your eyes … [and] you hear with the same startling realism” (quoted in Belton 1992a: 207). Embraced immediately by Andre Bazin as something of an antidote to the filmic principle of montage and its “fragmentation of reality,” the widescreen format of CinemaScope,

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he wrote in 1953, “cannot help but hasten what we love within the most modern tendencies of cinema”:

the shedding of all artifice extrinsic to the image’s content itself, of all expressionism of time and space. Cinema will further distinguish itself from music and painting, it will draw nearer to its profound vocation, which is to show before expressing, or more precisely, to express by the evidence of the real, that is to say, not so much to signify as to reveal. (Bazin 1985a: 14)

“Because the cinematic spectacle is not defined solely in and of itself, but also in relation to the public,” “anything which contributes to the ‘partici-pation’ of the spectator is progress” (1985b: 16).

This greater sense of participation for the spectator was due in part to a drastic expansion of the screen itself, with the widescreen format “trans-forming standard, ‘flat’ motion pictures into illusionistic, three-dimensional roller coaster rides,” as John Belton emphasizes, rides apparently capable of “plunging spectators into an illusory reality” (Belton 1992a: 111; cf. Arick 1987–8: 37). Sold explicitly as “participatory events,” widescreen cinema was often said to “put the audience in the picture,” seeking to create an increased sense of “presence”: “Suddenly you’re there,” declared the advertisements for the Todd–AO production Oklahoma!, “in the land that is grand, in the surrey, on the prairie! You live it, you’re a part of it … you’re in Oklahoma!” (quoted in Belton 1992a: 195; cf. Carr and Hayes 1988: 14).

Treated “as if there were an actual copresence between screen and spectator,” the widescreen experience brought forth a different set of perceptual conditions for audiences, conditions that, as Belton argues, “marked a new kind of spectatorship”:

Something basic had changed in the motion picture experience that redefined the spectator’s relationship with the screen, which now entered further into the spectator’s space, and with the soundtrack, which reinforced this extension of the image and exceeded even the image’s border through strategically placed speakers on the sides, ceiling, and rear wall of the theater, surrounding the spectator with sound. (1992a: 187, 192)

This sense of being surrounded, of being immersed in and engulfed by the experience, has proven to be one of the more controversial aspects of wides-creen cinema taken up by film scholars. For example, James Spellerberg, in his 1985 article on the subject and its period, examines the historical discourse on CinemaScope, material that mentions both “the increased realism of the image” as well as “the feeling of engulfment that makes the

THE “SWEET SPOT” 43

viewer lose awareness of the frame and the fact that the world presented is an illusion” (Spellerberg 1985: 30). Yet, according to Spellerberg, these references to realism were problematic: “Realism in CinemaScope was not related to ordinary experience, but, rather, was ‘more lifelike, richer in detail and incident’” (ibid.). Described by one writer as “a monumentally baroque medium,” CinemaScope was also found to be a form of spectacle: “The new process,” wrote one critic, “in striving for more reality, has paradoxically created more artificiality” (ibid.; cf. Malsky 2008). Indeed, rather than being “engulfed” by the image, writers often remarked on the screen’s frame, which was said to have acted as a “proscenium.” A sense of engulfment gave way, then, to a view of the frame as “panoramic,” as “the discourse noted the frame’s usefulness for the presentation of scenery and spectacle” (Spellerberg 1985: 31).

For Spellerberg, the limits to the concept of engulfment—limits that would cast doubt on Bazin’s “myth of total cinema”—were set by the frame’s unavoidable visibility, an impression already conceded by Charles Barr in his classic 1963 essay on CinemaScope:

The problem is to devise some way of surrounding each individual in the audience with a total visual world, in the same way that it’s possible to surround him with a total aural one. A radio play can give a satis-factory total representation of what we would hear in reality. Our visual perceptions are more complex than our aural ones, and are more closely bound up with the other factors in our experience. We can imagine a total visual reality, in reading a book or hearing a play, but even in a Circlorama-type cinema we are still at the center of our own reality—the people next to us, the ground beneath us, the space between us and the screen … so it’s impossible to “submit” ourselves entirely to total cinema as we can to total radio. (Barr 1963: 24)

The differences staked out here by Barr, between the visible and the audible, betray a common assumption over the perceived lack of difference between the representation of sound and “what we would hear in reality.” Their conflation was posited, for example, in Christian Metz’s discussion of “Aural Objects,” where he argues that “auditory aspects, providing that the recording is well done, undergo no appreciable loss in relation to the corresponding sound in the real world: in principle, nothing distinguishes a gun shot heard in a film from a gun shot heard on the street.” When Metz pushes his argument by adding that “sounds of a film spread into space as do sounds in real life, or almost,” it is his qualifier “almost” that lingers in the air, suggesting the very difference his theory set out to obscure (Metz 1980: 29; cf. Lastra 1992: 65–86). Nevertheless, it is the desire itself for immersion that merits further consideration, the willingness, as expressed by Barr, “to ‘submit’ ourselves entirely to total cinema as we can to total

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radio” (1963: 24). And it was this desire for engulfment by sound that widescreen aimed to satisfy.

Anticipating a similar struggle in the debate over aesthetics (to be taken up shortly), the discourse of Cinerama stressed how it created “all the illusion of reality … you see things the way you do in real life … [and] you hear with the same startling realism” (quoted in Belton 1992a: 207). Indeed, that “startling” sound had been transmitted by the emerging technology of stereophonic sound, heralded in particular “for its realistic sense of directionality.” “Sound seem[ed] to come from the exact point of origin,” by one industry account, “as if the words spoken by each actress came from her lips, giving the whole scene a life-like quality” (202).

The difference in reception that sound makes had already been noted by J.P. Maxfield, an engineer associated with Bell Labs and Electrical Research Products, Inc., who had pioneered a “special motion picture [that] had been shot and recorded with twin sound-tracks.” First demonstrated at the Bell Telephone Laboratories auditorium in New York on 11 October 1937, the event opened with the following remarks by Maxfield:

Sound motion pictures, as presented today, are equipped with a single source of sound, a loud speaker usually placed centrally behind the screen. There is therefore no acoustic illusion of sound movement from one side of the screen to the other. As a result, our eyes have been trained to “pull” the sound the necessary distance sidewise, to make it appear to come from the visual image of its source. With stereophonic recording and reproducing, this mental strain is relieved, since the sound, of its own accord, moves back and forth across the screen to follow the image of its source. (1938: 131)

“It is certain,” Maxfield added, “that to obtain the full, ultimate illusion of reality it will be necessary to combine with a colored stereoscopic picture, stereophonic sound” (132).

In contrast to monaural sound, stereo technology attained more direc-tionality at the production end of the recording process (through multiple microphone placement), achieving a separation in the audio elements that could then be conveyed by way of a multiple speaker system. The possibilities for directionality were exploited in the practice of what was called “traveling” sound, perhaps most famously when the sound effects of “footsteps of a character walking across the screen would ‘travel’ from speaker to speaker” in unison with the image track, “effectively binding visual and auditory perspective together,” as Belton contends, thus “putting the spectator in the very midst of the on-screen action” (1992a: 203–4).

Yet when it came to the panning of dialogue, traveling sound turned out to be too “distracting.” For example, in the four-track system of CinemaScope, which utilized a left–center–right–surround speaker

THE “SWEET SPOT” 45

configuration, audiences were apparently “distracted” especially by traveling dialogue—the movement of voices from one area of the screen to another, sharply diverging from the more accustomed position of dialogue played back through a single horn, as Maxfield noted, “placed centrally behind the screen.” This movement of voices across the screen was one of the most noticeable aspects of stereo sound in Maxfield’s original demon-stration film, which included one scene that “showed two men playing a game of table-tennis, or ping-pong”: “Conversation between the players at the same time demonstrated the manner in which the reproduction of the voices would seem to jump from one side of the screen to the other” (Maxfield 1938: 134).

Although this practice of traveling sound contributed, as Maxfield proposed, a heightened sense of realism, “providing exact correspondence between sound and image,” according to Belton “it also functioned as a display of what multitrack stereo magnetic sound could do”:

While undeniably realistic, the practice nonetheless drew attention to itself, violating the time-worn conventions of stylistic invisibility which governed Hollywood filmmaking practice and ensured that the audience’s access to the events unfolding before them would be unmediated (that is, realistic). This self-consciousness remained consistent with Cinerama’s overall marketing campaign, which foregrounded the experience of the process and, as the word Cinerama in the titles of the first two features (This Is Cinerama and Cinerama Holiday) suggests, the spectacular effects of the process itself. (1992a: 203–4)

One way of apprehending this rather abrupt appearance of “traveling” sound would be through Tom Gunning’s notion of a “cinema of attrac-tions,” “a cinema that,” as he puts it, “displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator” (1986: 64, 1994: 189–201, 1995). As what we might call, then, an “audio of attractions,” the employment of stereo sound was soon perceived, in Belton’s words, “not as realistic but as artificial” (1992a: 206), a kind of blatant exhibition of the technology itself, loudly on display for example in the “Stereophonic Sound” number in Silk Stockings (1957). The dissonance here can be understood historically, as monaural optical sound, the established norm since the emergence of the so-called “talkies,” had come to be recognized, according to Belton, “as the realistic form of sound reproduction” (1992a: 208; cf. Malsky, this volume).

What this suggests in terms of the classical film theory of Andre Bazin is that the technological developments of the cinema moving ineluctably toward the production of “greater realism”—with stereo’s achievement of a sound–image match expected to have contributed to a more “complete representation of reality” (Bazin’s “myth of total cinema”)—proved instead

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to be something less than deterministic: less the sound of verisimilitude than the “noise” of artifice. At the same time, stereo’s “audio of attractions” also disrupted the model of cinema sound theory advanced by those scholars adhering to a more materialist perspective, one that holds that the driving force behind technological innovation has been the (ideological) goal of self-effacement, a goal at least temporarily suspended since stereo openly celebrated rather than concealed the apparatus.

With monaural sound culturally coded and generally accepted as a realistic mode of representation, stereo was left to service other needs. “Through its usage as an element of spectacle,” as Belton concludes, “and through its identification with the genres of spectacle”—blockbuster musicals (such as Oklahoma!, South Pacific), historical and biblical epics (Spartacus, Cleopatra, The Robe)—“stereo sound became associated for audiences not so much with greater realism as with greater artifice” (1992b: 158).

The Visualization of Sound, the Mapping of Reception

These developments in technologies of sound reproduction—issuing aesthetic and perceptual distinctions between the reality of monaural sound and the artifice of stereo—functioned differently, however, in the wider aural culture of the time, one often defined as the era of “high fidelity.” In the audiophile discourse around home audio equipment, the technology of stereo produced a similar debate in aesthetics and reception, although here the conflict pitted the desire for “concert hall realism” against that of stereo as a sensational spectacle. Inverting the dichotomy of sound technology in the public sphere of the cinema, stereo in the more private space of home audio became nothing less than the “real,” rendering monophonic sound as not only unrealistic but also unnatural. “With ordinary monaural recordings,” insists the copy from a 1958 advertisement, “you might as well be listening with one ear” (London Records 1958: 74).

Stereo was not immune to a persistent contradiction between the mimetic and the constructed—a contradiction at work since the late nineteenth-century industrialization of sound, since the emergence of what might be called sound’s modernity. The discursive goals of greater realism and fidelity to concert hall acoustics were often at odds with stereo as a technological achievement in its own terms—not as the reproduction of an original sound but as a production of an entirely new sound, a schism that will be taken up later. What at least momentarily elided this conflict was a general agreement hovering over the visuality of stereo: “Spatial perspective describes, perhaps better than any other term, the quality added to repro-duced sound by a good stereo system” (Garner Jr. 1958: 47). Reference

THE “SWEET SPOT” 47

to the visual (if not the visible) rapidly became central to the rhetoric of stereo, typified by the “Seeing Ear” series of stereophonic tapes released by Mercury Records or the recording Liberty Presents a Production in Stereo: The Visual Sound (Mercury Records 1958: 75; cf. Darrell 1959a: 124). In a 1960 article titled “How to Explain Stereo to Your Friends,” Herman Burstein conveys the basic attributes of the new technology: “Stereo, as a means of reproducing the ‘whole’ sound, seeks to impart the sensations of directionality, spaciousness, and solidity. The illusion it creates is the aural equivalent of a three-dimensional image, possessing a high degree of definition” (1960: 123).

The “three-dimensional image” produced by stereo clearly distinguished it from the “flatness” of monaural sound, which rather suddenly was heard to lack depth and spaciousness (corresponding perhaps to how widescreen threw into relief the “flatness” of narrow screen):

If the only thing added by stereo were an awareness of directionality, most people might not consider it worth the increased cost. But the localization of individual performers, instruments, and sections of the orchestra makes possible a genuine improvement in definition of sound also. It is easier to follow separate harmonic or polyphonal lines; the big sound of choral works, for example, emerges fully textured from monophonic confusion. Stereo sound has spaciousness and breadth that results from accurate portrayal of the concert hall’s acoustic properties, and this gives you a far better illusion of reality than mere directionality would seem to imply. Until you hear a stereo system you can’t imagine the full significance of the difference. With good stereo sound it is really possible, for the first time, to get an acceptable illusion of “being there.” (Allison 1958: 132)

Out of “monophonic confusion” emerged not mere directionality through stereo but more precise definition of a sound field. This “localization” of sound meant that a listener could discern what was heard visually, a process of visualization that ultimately made possible the “illusion of ‘being there.’” And “there,” as always in the discourse of audio fidelity, was the best seat in the house. To be sure, this idealized location for the definitive experience in sound long preceded stereo in aural culture: “True high fidelity creates ‘the illusion that the listener’s chair is the most favored seat, acoustically, in the concert hall’” (Westminster Recording n.d.). These liner notes from a pre-stereo 1950s record rhetorically assume, as they constitute, an implied auditor inhabiting a privileged position. What stereo is said to accomplish, then, is an entire world of “favored” seats, technologically installing a phenomenology of the “sweet spot” for every listening subject.

Installing is the operative term here. The early stereo era was marked discursively by astonishingly specific instructions on where one needed to be stationed in order to receive the proper effect:

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Eight feet is considered minimum spacing between speakers for good stereo and they should be placed in a common plane … The effective dispersion angle at high frequencies is usually limited to 90 degrees. To obtain the benefit of the entire audible frequency range, the listener should remain within this angle … the speakers should be directed at the listener and not first bounced off side walls or other reflectors. (Hilliard 1959: 125)

In an article titled “Stereo Today,” Charles Fowler goes to great lengths to illustrate the new phenomenon. Starting with the ever-present concert hall as a model, he suggests that we “envision in the audience only one person, in the best seat in the house, in the center and probably ten to fifteen rows back”:

Visualize, if you will, a line drawn across about two-thirds the width of the orchestra, and then from each end of this line, come back to our single member of the audience. We have a triangle with our listener at the apex. The angle formed at the apex is important [see Figure 1.2]. (1959: 40–2)

With the spatial geometry thus mapped, the article authoritatively declares what happens when speakers are placed either too far apart or too close together, both of which are said to annul the stereo effect. “Basically,” Fowler concludes, “where stereo is today, in the only significant area of experimentation and development, is seven feet apart!” (42).2

The disciplinary procedures here for positioning oneself in relation to home audio technology reveal how thoroughly instrumentalized the listening experience had become by the mid-century era of high fidelity. What also stands out about this sheer rationalization of an aural field centered on a lone auditor is the degree to which stereo consistently operated across

2 It should be added that some sound engineers differed on this configuration, suggesting a lack of consensus not only in the discourse of audio fidelity but also in the degree to which the field remained subjective, even as it reached for scientific certainty. In general, though, the audiophile engineers relied on mathematical measurement as they attempted to map the precise arrangement of one’s equipment, where speakers had to be so many feet apart, at such and such an angle, and so on. This rather fussy approach to the sweet spot was even spoofed eventually, as equipment manufacturers and advertisers played on the limits to being “trapped” in the center of stereo. Nevertheless, the sweet spot remains as something of an ideal for audiophiles, who attend to “the proper angles” of their speakers with careful precision: “this angle may be quite critical and will require considerable experimentation to find the exact angle. Both speakers must be set to the same angle, and have an unobstructed path to the listening area, since objects in the path of the speakers will affect the high-frequency response” (Tremaine 1977: 1141). Or, more recently: “make sure your speakers are placed for optimum imaging. First, position your speakers in two corners of a triangle with yourself at the remaining corner” (Howland 1991: n.p.).

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FIGURE 1.2 The lines have been drawn: mapping acoustic space. (Illustration from Fowler 1959: 41)

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an economy of vision and visuality. In a 1958 ad, the correspondence is made without hesitation: “How do stereo and non-stereo sound compare? The difference between the two is as startling as the change from a black and white movie on a small movie screen, to a dazzling, full color movie on a wide movie screen. It’s overwhelming!” (Columbia Records 1958: 67). Constructed as a profoundly visual medium since its inception, the discourse of stereo—with its didactic fixation on diagramming acoustic space—reminds us that a cultural history of sound and listening is rarely if ever restricted to the aural dimension alone. Indeed, the sound of stereo during this period was clearly accompanied by the sight of stereo, illus-trating how ways of hearing were bound up with ways of seeing (cf. Tee, this volume).

Notwithstanding its recourse to visual metaphors, the discourse of stereo essentially functioned as a formalist project seemingly over and above the differentiation of hearing, with programmatic designs suturing a general mode of perception to the valorized apparatus of sound. Yet even as the stereophonic structuring of a sound field and its precise location for a listening subject appeared to be a matter of audio engineering beyond speci-ficity, somehow reaching for a universal set of ears, the interpellated subject of stereo, as already suggested, was instead explicitly gendered masculine in the altogether male-dominated culture of audio fidelity: “A bachelor friend of mine once remarked that looking for a loudspeaker is like looking for a wife. The quest is for something to delight the senses, something that’s easy to live with, preferably handsome, and a lasting joy. The trick is to pick wisely among a multitude of enticing possibilities” (Fantel 1973: 59). This cheerful conflation of woman and technology is not uncommon in the discourse of audio fidelity. An RCA advertisement from 1959 depicts the silhouetted image of a man who, casually perched upon a bar stool, is apparently courting the naked chassis of an audio component placed coyly atop a nearby table. The text reads: “Ain’t she sweet…! See her sitting there so neat. And I tell you very confidentially … the 6973’s got POWER … real power for such a small ‘bottle’” (RCA 1959: 23). Yet the mischievous courtship motif is co-extensive with an equally blatant gendering—this time masculine—of the equipment as well, as in a Pilot ad from the same time:

Don’t fall victim to the myth that some of your stereo components can be weak links without loss in performance. A boy sent to do a man’s job is still a boy no matter how many men surround him. Pilot stereo components are all “men.” Each is a strong link in any system … each is as responsive an instrument as you could demand. (Pilot Radio Corporation 1960: 6)

In an exhaustive study of a decade of audiophile publications, Keir Keightley examines the pervasive gender politics of aural culture in

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post-war America, demonstrating how “the high-fidelity phenomenon of the late 1940s and 1950s involved not only the masculinisation of home audio technology and the reclaiming of masculine domestic space; it was also part of a significant development in the history of American middle-class culture” (1996: 172). In the 1950s discourse of audio fidelity, for example, distinctions were sharply drawn between hi-fi and “lo-fi”; as one 1954 article on the expanding high-fidelity market stated, “either a set was hi or it was lo” (quoted in 1996: 158). The degraded latter term, unlike the more “discriminating” realm of the former, was beset by crass commercialization and mediocre mass entertainment (often projected onto the emerging medium of television), a form of “passive” consumption, as Keightley notes, gendered feminine: where “high fidelity is cast as high, masculine, individualistic art” (156), it stands “as a means of male liber-ation from feminising mass conformity” (157).

This desire for escaping “low” mass culture and its perceived threat to male identity, already structured through fictions of gender, was over-determined by class relations as well, all of which was played out across audio technology. As a 1959 editorial in what had become the leading audiophile magazine viewed it, the “serious high fidelity public, who bought $400 corner–horn loudspeakers and spent a budgeted $30 per month on LPs of Haydn and Wagner” (remember: this is 1950s dollars), felt “affronted” by “low-fi Pat Boone fans [who] were going stereo” (Conly 1959: 47).3 This resentful depiction of so many “low-fi Pat Boone fans” bothering the “serious” connoisseurs of a besieged high culture, perhaps not unrelated to the “tin-eared ladies” supposedly responsible for Liberace’s fame, not only reveals a class conflict over taste and technology but, moreover, expresses a wider anxiety over the gender relations of aural culture, an anxiety still adhering to many discussions of music and culture to this day.

While the culture of hi-fi rarely seemed to wonder why its rather homogeneous world was so populated almost entirely by men (save for the occasional gesture toward expanding “markets,” with women viewed as potential consumers), a certain amount of variation within this male preserve can still be discerned. A Stromberg-Carlson ad, for instance, picturing two middle-class white men discussing home audio equipment,

3 In a cheeky piece from 1957 (written under a pseudonym “compounded from the names of two famous misogynists”), S. Strindberg Schopenhauer asks, “What shall we do with the tin-eared ladies?” Addressing a self-satisfied audience of “hi-fi husbands,” the author, cracking insults passed off as the bonhomie of middlebrow teasing, insists that “very few women really like music” and “that far more women than men have no better than mediocre taste in music.” After all, he adds, “Who put Liberace where he is today—men?” (1957: 50). As Patrice Petro argues, “it is remarkable how theoretical discussions of art and mass culture are almost always accompanied by gendered metaphors which link ‘masculine’ values of production, activity, and attention with art, and “feminine” values of consumption, passivity, and distraction with mass culture” (1986: 6).

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features a quote in large type, “‘I’m no whiz with the wires—like you,’” followed by an explanation:

Wistful William is going through his usual response to an evening of Hi-Fi listening at your house. Much as he wants good music, he tells you—he just doesn’t have the know-how to line up components, select and balance, until he has a system like yours. For the hundredth time he says—“Isn’t there any ‘ready-made Hi-Fi’ for guys like me?” Now you can give him more than a pitying smile. (Stromberg-Carlson Company 1957: 14)

Similarly, an ad for Norelco loudspeakers plays upon a kind of dread felt by non-technical men in audio culture:

I was almost through with hi-fi … until I heard a NORELCO speaker! My brother-in-law is an electronic engineer. He told me what hi-fi components I should buy. He kept repeating something about series impedance in crossover networks and shunt capacitance with electro-static driver loads. My TV repairman also told me what to buy—only he didn’t agree with my brother-in-law. He was hipped on push–pull–parallel triodes in Class A. The salesman in the hi-fi salon shook his head sadly about both of their recommendations. I was ready to quit. I started to negotiate with the antique shop for their 1906 wind-up gramophone, complete with morning-glory horn. Then, at a friend’s house, I heard a NORELCO speaker in a NORLECO enclosure. Peace swept over me in a warm, caressing tide. Man, this sounded like music! Sweet highs, smooth lows, clean middles—and not an oscilloscope on the premises! I asked my brother-in-law and my TV repairman to stop confusing me, fired my psychoanalyst and bought a NORELCO speaker. I have been a delighted and electronically unencumbered listener ever since. (Norelco Loudspeakers 1958: 129)

As with a Stereo Fidelity ad from the same period that mocks the increas-ingly specialized (and fetishized) discourse of audio fidelity [Figure 1.3], we can read a degree of differentiation into an otherwise monolithic fiction of masculinity in aural culture.

Still, the more specific development of stereo technology carries with it a gendered subject who, like the poor confused fellow in the previous ad, is caught between conflicting impulses of stereophony. This conflict, as already noted, separates around the social categories of high culture and low (or mass) culture. The debate within the discourse of audio fidelity set high-culture aesthetics via stereo against a mass-culture scenario of stereo as spectacle. The paradox of each position is that, while the former claimed realism as the greatest achievement of stereo (a quest only possible

THE “SWEET SPOT” 53

FIGURE 1.3 “Hark Audiophile!” The discourse of audio fidelity appeals to non-technical, “feminized” men. (Advertisement, High Fidelity Magazine 9(2) 1959: 65)

54 LIVING STEREO

through an aesthetics of transcendence), it was the latter’s blatant artifice of spectacular effects (a popularization of stereo helping shed the cultist trappings of high fidelity culture) that eventually led to a realist documen-tation of everyday life through stereo technology.4

The Subject in/of Stereo

The project of stereo’s legitimation through high culture created its share of dissatisfied customers. One commentator, recalling the not-so-distant transition from 78-rpm discs to the long-playing record in the late 1940s, advised caution in trashing one’s pre-stereo collection, arguing how “foolish” it would be “to ignore the fact that Artur Schnabel—although he will never be available stereophonically—gave to recorded music some of its most durable triumphs. If he is obsolete, so is Beethoven” (Marsh 1958: 43; cf. Conly 1957: 43). What was at stake in the upheaval set off by stereo technology exceeded concerns over how best to record and preserve the great musical works of western culture; the more troubling issue had to do with the very nature of technological reproducibility.

Since the beginning of sound’s modernity with early phonography, fidelity to the real was always the ultimate objective, and stereo extended that tradition: “You have never heard anything sound so real” (Sterecorder 1958: 95).5 But the well-rehearsed claims seemed to be reaching a limit, as articulated in the following 1959 letter to High Fidelity Magazine:

Not long ago we read advertisements of high-fidelity equipment promising “Listen to live sound,” “Turn your living room into a concert hall,” “Realistic lifelike reproduction of sound,” and many other fine things. Suddenly we are told that monophonic music reproduction

4 Walter Legge, EMI’s senior classical producer during this period, was one such figure who took issue with the mass cultural “gimmick” of stereo: “My declared principle in recording was: ‘I want to make records which will sound in the public’s home exactly like what they would hear in the best seat in an acoustically perfect hall.’ The increased ambiance of stereo recording gave me the opportunity more completely to realize this aim than ever before. I soon came into conflict with the technical and sales departments over this. They believed that the public wanted the ‘gimmick’ of stereo—would like to listen to the left and right extremes which in these days left a hole (I called it a ‘frozen nose’ or ‘ping pong listening’!) in the space between the loudspeakers. It took a long time for me to induce these people that their ideas of stereo were the very opposite of what musicians and the musical public wanted” (quoted in Schwarzkopf 1982: 73).5 This quote is attributed to Constantin Bakaleinikoff, “world renown [sic] symphonic conductor and Head Musical Director of R.K.O. Motion Picture Studios for 17 years,” in praise of Sterecorder’s stereophonic recording and playback system, the ad copy for which continues: “Discover the exciting realism of recording and listening to your own stereophonic tapes … sound so lifelike, you can almost ‘see’ the performers” (emphasis in the original, Sterecorder 1958: 95).

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is antiquated, inferior, and unreal, that stereophonic music alone is realistic music reproduction. Soon there will be no more monophonic amplifiers in catalogues, and we may have to buy monophonic records in shops for antiques. Allow me to protest emphatically against this development … To say that only stereophonic music is lifelike and that monophonic music appears “to come out of a box” is definitely untrue (Bock 1959: 22)

In this uneasy period of early stereo, the status of the real was not only in question; the aspiration to capture it might not even be the zenith of recording, as emphasized in another letter:

Well, I’ve had it. I welcomed LPs and the expensive equipment for playing them as the genuine advances that they were. During the last decade I’ve junked a fortune in 78s and slowly built up a library of some four hundred LPs, with no regrets, for they bring endless joy. I don’t give a damn about decibels and the like, but I love music and I get it (in both ears!) from the bits of this and that scattered around the room. So now comes something with the magic name of “stereo” that is supposed to bring the concert hall to us at home. Why this mountain-to-Mohammed operation is given such attention I don’t know, for listening to music in a concert hall is by no means an ideal situation. (Moore 1959: 18)

Indeed, the complaint was lodged as much with traditional aesthetics as with economic coercion, but the goal of greater realism nevertheless seemed to be losing its luster: “And in fact, from point of view of pure sound, in many ways stereo is better than hearing it in real life” (Kapp Records 1959: 78).

As the impact of stereo worried defenders of high culture—Should the symphony orchestra be rearranged for stereo recording? Would Wagner approve?—the new technology found eager audiences elsewhere less beholden to the realist imperative. Exploiting the widespread interest in novelty sounds (the first stereo disc made available for “test and laboratory purposes” included material from the previously released monophonic recording Railroad Sounds, Steam and Diesel; Geraci 1958: 72), stereo technology unleashed a torrent of demonstration records, everything from Bongos Bongos Bongos to Music from a Surplus Store. Test records for checking one’s “equipment performance” competed with instructional recordings on the new technology’s potential, such as This is Stereo or, in an echo of widescreen cinema culture, This is Epic Stereorama, described by one reviewer as “strongly stereoistic throughout” (Darrell 1959b: 72; cf. Hirsch 1963: 27). A 1961 release, Musical Merry-Go-Round, “An Adventure in Circular Sound,” exclaimed how “the music goes round and round oho hoho, and if you’re set up for stereo you can actually follow

56 LIVING STEREO

it with your eyes as it spins around the room from speaker to speaker” (Capitol Records 1961a: 62). Familiar sounds of daily life—so familiar they no longer seemed to merit attention—were suddenly “defamiliarized” with stereo treatments, as suggested by a surge in sound-effects records, one of which included such tracks as: “Ocean Liner Whistle Blasts”; “DC8 Jet Taking Off”; “Door—Closing, Opening, Slamming”; “Phone—Dial Tone, Dialing, Busy Signal”; “Hammering Nail (right) Electric Saw (left)”; and “National Cash Register Electric Adding Machine” (Audio Fidelity 1961: 58; cf. Darrell 1961a: 77–8). As with the appearance of the phonograph, and to some extent radio as well, the technology of stereo appealed to a fascination with hearing the sounds of everyday life, sounds now removed from that life and thoroughly mediated for amusement, thus inviting listeners to hear the world anew, a world now represented in stereo.

While “true connoisseurs” held the widespread fascination with the spectacle of stereo at arm’s length, both high and mass culture participated in the technology’s exhibitionism. The Magnavox Concert Grand console was promoted, for instance, through a demonstration record that offered “a superb selection of classical and modern music to demonstrate the dimen-sional realism of stereo.” Likewise, the album Fabulous Bongo Ping Pong Percussion by Kaino and his Afro-Percussion Group, said to be “widely acclaimed for their interpretation of ‘Music-With-That-Jungle Beat,’” includes the following liner notes: “Strange sounds come to life, bongos ring out a message, the listener develops a ‘feeling’ for the music. For the Hi-Fi or Stereo enthusiast, this recording is a must, if he wants to really show off his equipment.” While the technology itself appears to negotiate the stubborn cultural divide, it also throws into relief the competing aesthetics of stereo between concert hall realism and sound deliberately designed for stereo.6

Setting aside for a moment this latest quest for realism, the stereo of spectacular effects would appear to be caught up in something of a paradox. Celebrating the production of sound for its own sake, the spectacle of stereo as an “audio of attractions” foregrounded the very technology that made it possible, drawing a listener’s attention to the apparatus itself. Yet the endless demonstration of locomotives and ping-pong balls entailed its own current of “natural sound” recordings and documentary realism. Parades

6 The emerging technology occasioned new forms of cultural production oriented around its specific attributes, such as the Capitol Records series “Staged for Stereo” (1961b: 75) or “The World’s First Stereo-Scored Orchestra—101 Strings” (1960: 66). The difference between “live” music and that constructed by stereo can be heard in the following letter: “As a high-fidelity enthusiast who was one of the first to convert to stereo, I was particularly interested when I recently had an opportunity to occupy a second-row orchestra seat at the Metropolitan Opera. I must report to you that the effect is only roughly similar to that of stereo! … All of which leads me to believe that stereo recordings should be engineered for their own sake, and not in imitation of live performance, which they can never hope to resemble very closely. Stereo is most valuable when taken on its own terms” (Dumkin 1961: 22).

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and marching bands offered a kind of pageantry and spectacle, an audible attraction moving across the stereo field: for example, the album Pass in Review is said to have been “recorded as if the listener were actually on the reviewing stand watching and listening to the marchers pass in review” (London Records 1961; cf. Darrell 1961b: 113). In Sound Effects—U.S. Air Force Firepower, “the awesome, dramatic sounds of the space age” are on display for one’s enjoyment: “Crackling, screaming, roaring, booming sounds of jets, rockets and missiles as they were heard at the Eglin Air Force Base demonstration for President John F. Kennedy and the Executive Party.” Such recordings that seek to place a listener in the very midst of the action play upon a desire for immersion, even if that fantasy of engulfment involves one’s own annihilation: the U.S. Air Force Firepower closes out with the sounds of “cannons, machine guns and NUCLEAR EXPLOSION!” (Audio Fidelity 1963: 93, emphasis in original).

Another, less apocalyptic version of reality underscores the less spectacular take on stereo, but here too the constant invoking of realism for the “discriminating” market always requires another scene (the opera house, the concert hall). In other words, the listening experience of stereo-phonic sound involves an aesthetics of transcendence, the illusion, as so often stated in the discourse of audio fidelity, of really “being there.” Moreover, this appeal to an “elsewhere,” such as the “reviewing stand” in the above example, serves to bridge the divide of high and mass culture. As one advertisement put it:

Astonishingly realistic presence! Close your eyes ... You are there! Regardless of your taste in music and styling … Front row center at the Philharmonic. Group–side table at your favorite jazz spot. Section A at the Hollywood Bowl. Wherever there are good sounds to hear … you are there … through the magic of this remarkable new STA–2100 tuner/amplifier. (Monarch Electronics 1961: 14)

An even greater divide has been bridged by another record company, which offers the following play on the desire for aural “presence”:

Creating “presence” is the great intangible of recording techniques. It means that when music is recorded that was originally conceived to be heard in a home, like a string quartet or harpsichord suite, it is repro-duced with something more than absolute tonal clarity and realism. Captured also is the atmosphere of quiet intimacy as in the Vanguard records of the Griller String Quartet playing Haydn, or of Anton Heiller playing Handel’s First Book of Harpsichord Suites. On the other hand, in Odetta’s album “My Eyes Have Seen,” of work songs, spirituals and ballads, the sun shines, the walls dissolve and the open air enters. Thus when Odetta sings “Saro Jane” we are on a Mississippi river boat. When

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she sings the “Ox-Driver song,” we are on a pioneer wagon driving over the steep hills. (Vanguard Records 1959: 53)

Given the extent to which listeners of both Haydn and Odetta have been invited to participate in the fiction of aural presence, the discourse reveals how this hegemonic aesthetic of audio fidelity itself functions to blur the otherwise structural distinctions between high and mass culture.

Hearing Historically: The Dialectic of (De)Concentrated Listening

The attenuated class conflict of aural culture in the stereo period was overdetermined as well by often-contradictory ways of hearing, as the historical conditions for a listening subject were caught between a distracted and a concentrated mode of perception. Where it first made its mark, in the cinema, stereo technology “liberated” the voice from its stable position conventionally situated at the center of the screen. Yet this sudden mobility of sound—in particular, an embodied voice that would have appeared more realistic—proved instead to be too distracting, a breach of expectations in the way hearing had been conducted for so long.

With single-channel, monophonic sound established as the norm, as J.P. Maxfield pointed out, “our eyes have been trained to ‘pull’ the sound the necessary distance sidewise, to make it appear to come from the visual image of its source” (1938: 131). While audiences had been “trained” over time to close that gap between sound and image, the technology of stereo aimed to perform that work for them, offering to relieve the spectator of “this mental strain.” However, if audiences found traveling dialogue too distracting, it may have been not only because they were accustomed to the sound itself anchored by a central speaker, but also because the new film sound rendered them more passive, alleviating the “mental strain” of attaching voice to body, a strain that constituted a degree of aural engagement. It was the convention of listening, then, that stereo unsettled: relegated to the duty of servicing spectacle, stereo subsequently became the unrealistic other to monaural film sound.

Meanwhile, stereo technology in the realm of home audio culture also witnessed the mobility of sound, with sound gaining movement in a new aural field even as it assigned a listener to the stationary location of the “sweet spot.” Stereo’s achievement in “directionality,” for example, was heard to be both more realistic and more artificial than monophonic recording:

Stereo Action is a new concept of music in motion; a new dimension in recorded sound. Stereo Action brings you unmatched fidelity through the

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full sound spectrum, plus the exciting new illusion of sound in motion. Soloists and entire sections of the orchestra appear to move thrillingly back and forth across the room. Stereo Action is musical movement so real, your eyes will follow the sound. (RCA Victor Records 1961)

“Meanwhile,” wrote one critic in 1959, in regards to so much “action” in recent stereophonic recording of operas, “I wish someone would invent a method of permitting me to move around while listening to stereo opera without losing any of its effect” (Broder 1959: 60). Indeed, as we have seen, the discourse of audio fidelity became enamored with the sweet spot, that specific location allowing one to be fully immersed in a field of sound. Thus, one of the central contradictions here to the experience of listening involved a motionless auditor surrounded by sound in motion. That is to say, sound had been “liberated” precisely at a moment when the listener had been put in his place.

Against the distraction of stereo voices in the cinema, against the plague of ping-pong records and the spectacle of sound effects—where musical interest had been subordinated to an interest in sound as sound—the culture of hi-fi yearned for “attentive listening,” which stereo seemed to make both possible and impossible. Stereo “grips the attention” even as it exacerbates a more pervasive spectacle, where concentrated listening is believed to be at a premium:

Maybe the cause has been the invasion of our leisure by too much passive entertainment, of which the most passive is always the most seductive (it is so easy not to think!). I do mean television. I have nothing against Major Adams, Peter Gunn, Ancient Archie Moore, or Edward R. Murrow, but my feeling is that when their exploits are done, they should be turned off, the hypnotic tube darkened, before the tawdry Western or the dismal old movie begins. (Conly 1960: 37)

Of course, the distraction of stereo as spectacle—with its sensational artifice of novelty and demonstration records—would run its course. Its audio of attractions would in turn be absorbed into a more sustained desire for a disembodied listening experience unencumbered by any sense of mediation, in thrall to that most golden of oldies, as the following liner notes state: “The Vanguard Stereolab stereophonic disc represents the highest point yet reached in the recording of music on disc with so complete a fidelity to the original performance that all consciousness of an intermediary vanishes between it and the listener, who is enveloped in the glorious sound of living music” (Vanguard Stereolab Demonstration Record n.d.).7 What the

7 The liner notes for this Vanguard Stereolab Demonstration Record (n.d.), which includes a technical text titled “About This Stereophonic Recording,” also state: “The listener can be

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stereophonic structuring of a sound field engenders, finally, is a contem-plative mode of reception. “Enveloped” by and absorbed into the idealized location of the sweet spot—one lodging the auditor-as-subject—this socially and historically constituted subjectivity through sound was perhaps itself distracted, at least momentarily, by a conflicting aesthetic of stereo as spectacle.

But even as the discourse of audio fidelity found stereo a rather quarrelsome issue in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the technological instantiation of stereophonic effects has nevertheless carved out a special place for a listening subject. Recalling the legacy of Ludwig II, king of Bavaria, who had an opera house built with just one seat—for himself—professional audiophile John Pierce posits the “sweet spot” of stereo as an experience best suited for an audience of one: “Is it possible to share electronically reproduced sound ‘equally’? With headphones, perhaps—Using loudspeakers, it is possible in principle, but not in practice” (1992: 172). Through both channels and in both ears, the discourse and the apparatus converge, together seeking to situate a listener in what has been billed as the sweetest of all possible spots: a single point from which a listening subject gathers in a world of sound, and for whom alone it is believed that world of sound exists.

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Magazine 7(1): 14.Tremaine, H.M. 1977. Audio Cyclopedia. Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams and Co.Vanguard Records. 1959. “Recordings for the Connoisseur.” High Fidelity

Magazine 9(8): 53.Vanguard Stereolab Demonstration Record. (n.d.) “About This Stereophonic

Recording.” Liner notes.Westminster Recording. (n.d.) “Natural Balance.” Liner notes.Whyte, B. 1981. “The Roots of High Fidelity Sound.” Audio 65(6): 44.

CHAPTER TWO

The Stereophonic Spaces of Soundscape 1

Jonathan Sterne

What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes,

whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?

—HENRI LEFEBVRE, THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE (1991: 44)

Soundscape: no concept has proven more fertile or ubiquitous in the academic study of sound. The term is everywhere in sound studies, and seems somehow central to everything. For people new to the field, it provides an exciting point of entry. It also graces the covers of some of our important books. As a neologism it is immediately accessible. It sounds like what it means, even though the term lies like a blanket over a field of competing meanings. “The term’s popularity rests precisely on its ability to evoke a whole complex set of ideas, preferences, practices, scientific properties, legal frameworks, social orders, and sounds that the emerging

1 This chapter expands on ideas originally presented in “Escape from Soundscape” (Sterne 2013), in Soundscapes of the Urban Past, edited by Karin Bijsterveld. Thanks to Karin and her collaborators, the editors of this volume, and audiences in Ottawa, Amsterdam and Maastricht. Thanks also to Carlotta Darò and Sabine von Fischer for teaching me about the Schafer-Southworth connection; Olga Touloumi for the wonderful Schafer–McLuhan letter, and to Carrie Rentschler, Emily Raine and Dylan Mulvin for comments on various drafts. This piece benefitted from financial support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec–Société et culture.

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field of sound studies is—and in truth—having a difficult time getting its collective minds around” (Kelman 2010: 228). The word soundscape speaks to the physicality of sonic space; it simultaneously conveys a sense of being expansive and contained. Like landscape, it suggests spaces and people, and at once implies a point of audition and omniscience. For R. Murray Schafer, a soundscape is a sonic environment, “any acoustic field of study” from physical spaces to recordings (1994: 8). In practice, he used soundscape as a total social concept to describe the field of sounds (and possibilities for sound) in a particular place, or an entire culture, “a total appreciation of the sonic environment” (4).

Other writers have used the term soundscape to mean many different things. Emily Thompson follows Alain Corbin (1998) in thinking more analogically, where a soundscape is “an auditory or aural landscape. Like a landscape, a soundscape is simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and culture constructed to make sense of that world” (Thompson 2002: 1). David W. Samuels, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa and Thomas Porcello consider it a useful concept because it objectifies sound for scholarly analysis. For them soundscape “provides some response to the ephemerality dilemma by offering a means to materialize sounds, their interrelations, and their circulation” (2010: 338).

The term has expanded from noun to modifier and even verb: sound-scape recording and soundscape art have emerged both from practices of field recording more broadly and the World Soundscape Project in particular. More recently, in a wonderful essay on Bose noise-canceling headphones, Mack Hagood (2011) has used the term soundscaping to describe the process through which people shape their own sonic environ-ments by using noise-canceling headphones to shut out ambient sound and substitute their own music or content, thereby asserting the privacy of their sonic space through an act of consumption. In a way, Hagood is the yang to Schafer’s yin. Hagood presupposes the implication of scholars in modern, cosmopolitan life: we are as implicated in the desires behind noise-canceling headphones as anyone else, carving out little, privatized spaces of quietude to keep social difference at bay and provide a space of self-constitution. His analysis is grounded in the politics of social difference around gender, race and class. In Hagood’s telling, soundscaping is a lot like landscaping a property. For Schafer, on the other hand, soundscape is meant to invoke nature, as a foil to industrial society, whether as a radical outside, or as something to be cultivated like a garden in the city. Even as it reaches into the modern world to describe its ambience, Schafer’s soundscape carries with it a fairly strict—if sophisticated—antimodernist politics. For him, the concept is meant to light a way out of consumer culture. In both cases, soundscape is an attempt to deal with the problem of representing sonic space.

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In this chapter, I challenge the widely accepted notion that soundscape is both a physical space and its representation. Stefan Helmreich (2011) has argued that the very idea of soundscape—in the later sense of “an auditory environment”—owes a debt to the “stereophonic space of recorded sound.” I will extend Helmreich’s proposition back to Schafer’s more specific defin-itions of soundscape, since Schafer is such an important touchstone for the term, and since he did his readers the favor of being clear about both his sources and his politics. I will reconstruct both that conceptual field, and the set of positions and dispositions from which the soundscape concept (or rather, the soundscape family of concepts now in circulation) emerged.

To follow Henri Lefebvre, the idea of soundscape simultaneously refers to a set of sonic–spatial practices, the metadiscourses that describe them, and the cultural and sensory conditions that make it possible to—even passively—experience sonic space in certain terms (1991: 38–9). We are used to thinking of soundscape as a term of art in acoustic ecology or sound studies. But concepts of soundscape emerge from a wider set of professional and aesthetic discourses that conceive of sonic space. The term, and terms around it, tend to import ways of thinking about sound and space common in what Tara Rodgers has called audio-technical discourse. As Rodgers explains, “The modifier audio-technical encompasses a range of social actors and institutions invested in the technologically-mediated production of knowledge about sound, distributed across such fields as music-making and consumption, acoustics research, engineering, and electronics hobbyist cultures” (2010: 18, emphasis in original).

In other words, the concept of soundscape also partakes of perspec-tives from some of the fields it ostensibly historicizes or critiques. Schafer’s conception of soundscape emerges from a variety of audio-technical sites: radio theater, urban design, consumer electronics, art music and music education. Placed in its intellectual-historical milieu, soundscape as much reflects a set of dominant ways of organizing sonic space—drawn from mid-century, bourgeois, Anglophone settler cultures—as it critiques them. To build on Helmreich’s proposition, soundscape is very much a creature of mid-century sound media culture, first radio, then hi-fi (a term Schafer directly borrows), then stereo. It is part of an electroacoustic moment in sound history. In short, soundscape is a media concept, and it is a concept that demands its listener experience the broader phenomena of sonic medi-ations from a stable and surprisingly delicate position.

Schafer writes that “the three most revolutionary sound mechanisms of the Electric Revolution were the telephone, the phonograph and the radio” (1994: 89). Schafer understands these inventions as fundamentally destabil-izing: the telephone is a challenge because “it is basically unnatural to be intimate at a distance” (89); tape recording allows “any sound object [to] be cut out and inserted into any new context desired” (91); radios “multiply men” (91) and serve as “sound walls” (93). His term “schizophonia,”

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denoting the separation of a sound from its source, was meant to convey nervousness (91).2 At first, it would seem that Schafer’s soundscape concept exists as a platform for a critique of media phenomena. But upon a closer read, it seems that Schafer defines media in the negative: as the alternative to wholeness, integrated subjectivity, and the possibility for perspective. The result is that the edges of his well-centered listening subject are already troubled and shaped by media. Walter Benjamin famously defined aura as that which withers in the age of technological reproducibility (1968: 223). At the risk of mixing sensory metaphors, perhaps soundscape is that which flowers in the distance, at the edges of the electroacoustic age.

***

In the absence of a fuller intellectual history of the term, we can turn to the Oxford English Dictionary for a point of entry. The OED defines soundscape as a “musical composition consisting of a texture of sounds” or “the sounds which form an auditory environment.” The two senses are related. We are familiar with the latter usage, which appears to be derived directly from R. Murray Schafer’s work, but the former sense also has a relationship to sound that is tied to place. The OED cites an unsigned 4 October 1968 Time Magazine review of Debussy’s Images pour Orchestre—Gigues, Iberia, Rondes de Printemps, as performed by l’orchestre de la Suisse Romande and conducted by Ataulfo Argenta. The reviewer writes of Argenta: “in this collection, he proved his mastery of the subtle colors, treacherous rhythms, and delicate contrapuntal lines that fashioned Debussy’s impressionistic soundscapes” (Anon. 1968: 2). The music here is particularly poignant; the first two parts of Debussy’s composition were meant to evoke his memories of England and Iberia. As a composition, at least in its conception, Debussy’s triptych resonates with soundscape recordings that would be produced by acoustic ecologists in the 1970s, which also sought to document time and place through sound.

R. Murray Schafer’s earliest published uses of the term soundscape follow this meaning. He uses the term to argue that music is not just a temporal art, but a spatial one as well: “Every piece of music is an elaborate soundscape which could be plotted in three-dimensional space” (Schafer 1967: 13). Here Schafer extends and breaks with an older metaphor in composition, the “musical landscape,” a phrase often associated with Mendelssohn’s work from the nineteenth century onward (Todd 2005: 260–1). To be sure, Schafer’s soundscape idea is not the same thing as a musical landscape—the conceptions of music and composition are wholly different from the more romantic nineteenth-century context in which the “musical landscape”

2 As Jason Stanyek and Ben Piekut (2010) have argued, the locution “separated from its source” is misleading, since all sounds are by definition separated from their sources.

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emerged. As I discuss below, Schafer’s usage is innovative because of how it understands musical composition as actually creating space.

If Debussy’s musical impressionism is one origin point for our contem-porary notion of soundscape, that 4 October 1968 issue of Time (I consulted the Canadian edition) gives us another. Nestled amidst stories about the US presidential election, the war in Vietnam, the Black Panthers, Quebec politics, the Russian space program and plenty of car and airline ads, one finds ads for the “Accutron: a watch that doesn’t tick,” “fully transistorized” two-way radios, CBC radio’s “The Sound of Sports,” the Mini-Memo portable cassette recorder and the UNIVAC computer (“is saving a lot of people a lot of time”). Issues from other nearby weeks promote hi-fi stereo equipment. Soundscape is a creature of an orchestrated, technologized, managed sonic world.

This use of the term soundscape is tied to another early use of the word in radio drama. A 1958 issue of the BBC magazine, The Listener, uses soundscape in a discussion of the “mise en scene” of the radio script for “The Prince of Homburg”:

Michael Bakewell, who produced this play, was jointly responsible for the broadcast of Schiller’s “Death of Wallerstein” three years ago. Kleist’s drama is in that tradition and Mr. Bakewell was always in command of it. His soundscape of the field of Fehrbellin presented a tremendous panorama to the mind’s eye. “The Prince of Homburg” was a fine example of what the Third Programme can and should do for substantial plays that are almost unknown and underperformed in this country. (Grandsen 1958: 475)

Similarly, Hugh Kenner, from Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, uses the term to discuss the BBC’s production and use of special effects in All That Fall, a Beckett play: “Pulsating in acoustic space, the soundscape asserts a provi-sional reality, at every instant richly springing forth and dying” (1962: 171).

In both cases, soundscape refers to something that is aesthetic and somewhat impressionistic. But it is also endowed with perspective, however mutated or distorted. Michel Chion (1994) used “point of audition” as an analog to the concept of point of view. In doing so, he extended the audio-visual analogies between soundscape and landscape. Mitchell Akiyama has followed this line of reasoning with Schafer, arguing that soundscape might be subject to the same critiques of perspective that landscape has. As he points out, many of Schafer’s terms exposed and inverted visual biases in the description of space: “Landmarks become ‘soundmarks,’ clairvoyance becomes ‘clairaudience,’ and eyewitnesses were recast as ‘earwitnesses’ … Schafer’s neologisms alert us to the invisibility and banality of visual metaphors by reimagining language as implicitly aural” (Akiyama 2010: 56).

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In Theater of the Mind (2012), Neal Verma moves us beyond point of audition as an orienting concept, in part because he rightly argues that film aesthetics may not be the best path into understanding the history of radio—a claim worth extending to all sorts of audio. Verma coins the term audioposition: “I will use ‘audioposition’ to indicate the place of the listener that is carried by coding foregrounds and backgrounds. This term also seeks to make the idea available as a verb, stressing that it is always fabri-cated. Listeners do not just ‘have’ a point of audition; they are ‘positioned’ by audio composition and components of dialogue” (2012: 35). Listeners can also be positioned by the arrangement of speakers in a room, or by the specifications of a sound system. Audioposition is a useful term to begin a critique of auditory fields. While “sweet spots” and the “best seat in the concert hall” were terms of art used in early promotion of stereo (see Grajeda’s chapter in this volume), audioposition suggests the recording and reproduction nexus actually positions the listener to regard it in those terms. Soundscape undertakes a similar operation.

Carlotta Darò notes a Buckminster Fuller essay, published in the Music Educators’ Journal in 1966, that connects soundscape to a concept of totality (2012: 185). Fuller borrows C.H. Waddington’s concept of “epigenetic landscape” to describe the ways in which human and natural environments are co-constructed and mutually implicated. “When, in due course, man invented words and music he altered the soundscape and the soundscape altered man. The epigenetic evolution interacting progressively between humanity and his soundscape has been profound” (Fuller 1966: 52). Fuller’s use is, so far, the earliest I have seen that casts soundscape as a total concept, analogous to a term like landscape, and meant to denote the entire sonic field of humankind as it exists in dynamic relationship with nature.

Schafer’s later use of soundscape is also connected to the use of the term by a geographer and urban planner, Michael Southworth. Reading Southworth’s 1969 essay, “The Sonic Environment of Cities,” one encounters many of Schafer’s core concepts and arguments in a slightly different form. The essay is built around “a field study on perception of the Boston soundscape” (Southworth 1969: 49). His concept of soundscape was taken from his supervisor at MIT, Kevin Lynch, who used cityscape to denote the ease with which the parts of the image of a city could be apprehended (Lynch 1960: 2). Southworth was looking for an aspect of city life that had not been considered yet in Lynch’s model, so he turned to other senses, rejecting touch and smell for their ephemerality, and turning to sound. Southworth was heavily influenced by the new urbanism of authors like Jane Jacobs, and their critique of modernist approaches to architecture and urban planning. He was interested in “how design could serve people” (von Fischer 2013). So he devised a method that today we would call a modified form of soundwalking, involving different groups of

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subjects moving through a range of Boston neighborhoods, listening to the city and noting their observations into tape recorders at regular intervals.3 The walk began in Beacon Hill, both because Southworth lived there, and because “it was one of Jane Jacobs’ favorite neighborhoods” (von Fischer 2013). Southworth’s conclusions nicely anticipate some of Schafer’s more well-known points: apprehension is a problem for sound because of urban noise, which he considers to be the main obstacle to sonic design in cities (Southworth 1969: 49, 67). He argues that high contrast between foreground and background sounds makes sonic spaces more identifiable; and that open space and responsive spaces hold special potential for experimentation and staging sonic events. Finally, he points to sonic signs (what Schafer would call soundmarks) as a key to distinctive sonic experiences of the city (67–9). Arguing for better urban sound design, he concludes: “these steps toward the sonic city would not only enhance city life by helping to overcome the stress and anonymity of today’s visual city, but would be one measure for developing the sensory awareness of city residents and would provide an environment more responsive to human action and purpose” (70).

The exact connection between Schafer and Southworth is not entirely clear. Justin Winkler notes the coincidence of Southworth’s and Schafer’s usages in the course of an argument that the soundscape concept is “historic-ally multilayered” and cannot be reduced to an aural analog of landscape (1995/2006: 10). Sabine von Fischer (2008) argues that Southworth’s adaptation of Lynch’s cityscape maps for sound later influenced the approach of the World Soundscape Project. But when she interviewed Southworth, he demurred on his connection with Schafer, saying he didn’t remember. For his part, in an interview with Darò, Schafer credited his later use of the term to a series of lectures and essays by Southworth (DarÒ 2012: 185).4

Although I have charted published uses of the term to 1958 and 1961, Schafer’s earliest published use—at least that I’ve found—is in his book, Ear Cleaning, which was published in 1967. After making an argument for understanding music as a fundamentally spatial, rather than temporal, art, Schafer offers a definition that is quite a distance from Fuller and Southworth, and also some distance from the usage of the term he would later make famous.

Every piece of music is an elaborate soundscape which could be plotted in three-dimensional acoustic space.

3 Southworth’s “field study” is remarkable for its use of disability, a topic that I am presently pursuing in my research.4 Von Fischer also notes that Schafer’s approach to soundwalking was predated by a similar practice of Max Neuhaus’ that began in 1966 (2008: 57). In fact, Neuhaus (n.d.) credits Schafer with legitimating the practice among academics.

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To speak of a soundscape, of course, is in no way to invoke program music. There is a difference in talking about space and attempting to fill that space with objects. The space to which we refer is empty save for the sounds cutting through it. There is no “land” in a soundscape. (Schafer 1967: 13, emphasis added)

This quote comes right before a series of exercises on amplitude in Ear Cleaning. In one of them, Schafer asks students to “try filling a one-minute container of silence with an interesting one-tone composition” (14), in the service of getting them to employ amplitude, timbre and silence. He then has them repeat the exercise, except this time there are three or four groups in different corners of the room. The goal is for each group to complement the work of the others. He follows it with a fantastic diagram [Figure 2.1] accompanied by an equally interesting note:

FIGURE 2.1 “Real space” and “virtual space.” (From R. Murray Schafer (1967), Ear Cleaning: 15)

Bearing in mind the relationship that has been drawn between perspective and dynamics, it may be pointed out to the class that the sonic tensions they are producing figuratively dissolve the walls of the classroom as they reach back to the horizon of sound (pianissimo) and even beyond the horizon to silence; and then plunge forward again (fortissimo). A distinction may be made here between what we call “real space” and “virtual space”—for the sonic tensions of a soundscape exist in a virtual

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space which pushes through the walls of the classroom and stretches back to the acoustic horizon in all directions. (14–15)

It is hard not to read Schafer’s use of real and virtual space in contem-porary terms, but let us try to think it in his moment instead. Schafer proposes a notion of sonic space that is effectively created through the act of comprehension, and a single comprehending subject—or compre-hending subjects, one at a time. We might call the audioposition created by this particular composition a situated omniscience, one that extends a particular kind of Enlightenment subject into the listening space. As with other Enlightenment subjects, it is grounded in a particular set of contexts and techniques, but like the bourgeoisie of which it is a part, it stretches toward a subjectivity that it is at once somewhere and every-where. Schafer’s “Lecture Nine,” a diagram meant as the grand analytic synthesis in Ear Cleaning, seems to support the situated omniscience reading [Figure 2.2]. It moves from a musical work to the totality of the world and perhaps beyond.

Schafer’s notion of soundscape in Ear Cleaning bears a family resem-blance to the one that he would later make famous in The Tuning of the World and other writings, but in this earlier moment, it is still rooted in the compositional aesthetics and listening practices of western art music. Ear cleaning was a prelude to ear training. He writes of “the opening out of the space–time containers we call compositions and concert halls to allow the introduction of a whole new world of sounds outside them”—from John Cage’s 4'33'' to Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrete to electronic and tape music (Schafer 1994: 5). Further, we should “regard the soundscape of the world as a huge musical composition, unfolding around us ceaselessly. We are simultaneously its performers, its audience, its composers … Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for

FIGURE 2.2 Musical composition as a “cone of tensions.” (From R. Murray Schafer (1967), Ear Cleaning: 25)

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improving the orchestration of the soundscape” (205–6).5 While Schafer’s desire to exceed the “spatial frame” of the concert hall might be echoed by a critic of the western tradition like Christopher Small (1977: 25),6 Schafer retains an essentially heroic model of the composer, “separate from both performer on the one hand and audience on the other” (Schafer 1994: 29), dressed now in the clothes of the acoustic designer. Sounds, “the natural raw material of the art, are thought of as mere recalcitrant matter, to be put in order by the force of will and intelligence” (30).7 In this way, Schafer follows from the Cagean tradition. As Cage wrote in 1937, “The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as music” (reprinted in Cage 1961: 3). Cage’s Imaginary Landscape pieces—which actualize the “all sound is potentially music” agenda laid out in this quote—also provide an interesting stopping point between Mendelssohn and Schafer. Composed between 1939 and 1952, they make use of turntables, oscillators, tape machines, tin cans, wastebaskets and other objects. Schafer’s approach to composition as space can also be traced to another line of avant-garde experimental music, in the early spatial works of Karlheinz Stockhausen such as Gesang der Junglinge and Kontakte. Like the works of Cage, Stockhausen’s works made use of tape and multichannel sound. Schafer’s understanding of composition as an acoustic-spatial practice was thus partly shaped by composers who were directly engaged with media. Indeed, both Cage and Stockhausen proffered their own media theories in their writings as well as their soundworks. Drawing from those influences and many others, Schafer’s notion of acoustic space was an amalgam of ways of thinking about space: compositional, avant-garde and at the dreamy intersection of naturalism and supernaturalism.

Schafer was also influenced by another conception of acoustic space, coming from Marshall McLuhan and his interlocutors. In a 1974 letter asking McLuhan to read and comment on a draft of The Tuning of the World, Schafer wrote:

5 Schafer is ambivalent on the position of the composer. Although he clearly identifies with it in his writings and musical work, he is also aware of the position’s limitations, noting that acoustic design “should never become design control from above” and that acoustic designers must understand “acoustics, psychology, sociology, music, and a great deal more besides” (1994: 206)—a demand that still too often goes unfulfilled in real world practices of acoustic design.6 This desire to escape the frame may well have met an equal, opposite force in Schafer’s conception of soundscape recording as putting a frame around sounds (Akiyama 2010: 57). In turn this opens out into the spatial implications of the enframing function of sound technologies more generally (Heidegger 1977, Sofia 2000, Sterne 2012).7 This stands in contrast to Barry Truax’s more interactional model, where “the individual listener in a soundscape is not engaged in a passive type of energy reception but rather is part of a dynamic system of information exchange” (Truax 1984: 11).

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Ever since I visited your house as a student in 1955, I have been tempted to renew my personal acquaintance—although I am well acquainted with your writings and have been influenced by many of your thoughts. If I could be so bold as to mention one criticism of your work, it would be that for one who believes we are imploding back into an aural-tribal age, your knowledge of aural affairs has always seemed too slight. By aural affairs I am not only referring to music history, but to the whole development of the acoustic environment—which I call the soundscape. (Schafer to McLuhan, 19 November 1974)8

In Schafer’s earlier work like Ear Cleaning we can see he is already strug-gling to get outside the McLuhan–Ong–Carpenter notion of acoustic space, even as he is in dialogue with it. That he would later pose “soundscape” as a path out of McLuhan’s more limited and racially inflected conception of acoustic space suggests a move toward a different kind of totality, one that considers sonic space separately from visual space.9

In soundscape there is a bit of a phenomenological contradiction: while the concept as we use it today is designed to get people to appreciate the sounds of both natural and built environments, to confront the world as it is, the concept demands that the listener relate to the world as if it is a recording or composition—in short, as a work—but a work that is its own means of conveyance, and one that is heard in a particular way. This logic is quite clearly laid out in The Soundscape. Through the terms “hi-fi” and “lo-fi” Schafer explicitly conceives the soundscape as a system for sound reproduction and transmission: “A hi-fi system is one possessing a favorable signal-to-noise ratio. The hi-fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level” (1994: 43). After a series of country–city and night–day comparisons, Schafer writes:

In a lo-fi soundscape individual acoustic signals are obscured in an overdense population of sounds. The pellucid sound—a footstep in the snow, a church bell across the valley or an animal scurrying in the brush—is masked by broad-band noise. Perspective is lost. On a downtown street corner of the modern city there is no distance; there is only presence. There is cross-talk on all the channels, and in order for the most ordinary sounds to be heard they have to be increasingly amplified. (43)

8 My effusive thanks to Olga Touloumi, who came across this letter in her larger research into the history of the idea of acoustic space, and generously shared it with me. The letter is housed in the Marshall McLuhan collection, Archives Canada, correspondence, Schafer, R. Murray (1974–9).9 See Schafer (1986) for how he takes up acoustic space later on; see also Carpenter and McLuhan (1960), McLuhan (1960), Ong (1967), Touloumi (2014).

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Perspective is lost. Here, the interdependence of the soundscape concept and a kind of audioposition begins to become clear. The soundscape requires a coherent, unified, singular listening subject to hear it, to apprehend it, to criticize it, to shape it, to transform it. The subject of soundscape needs stable footing. Anything else is a potential crisis.10

Hi-fi and lo-fi also invoke a way of listening that had come into vogue as Schafer’s ideas first came together, and the terms suggest another important branch in a critical genealogy of soundscape. As Keir Keightley (1996) and Tim Anderson (2006) have argued, hi-fi systems—and the ideas attending them—have their own place in the post-war cultural complex. Writing of the specifically American scene, they describe the ideals of hi-fi as intimately connected both with the escapist affects of middle-class masculine domes-ticity and with a critique of mass culture. “The conception of home audio as a masculine technology that permits a virtual escape from domestic space is a significant development in the history of sound recording. Before the Second World War, the phonograph and recorded music were not especially associated with men. By the 1960s, however, home audio sound reproduction equipment had hardened into masculinist technologies par excellence” (Keightley 1996: 150). Periodicals of the time trumpeted the hi-fi boom as a rejection of the mass, feminized tastes embodied by television; in these articles, “high fidelity is cast as high, masculine, individu-alistic art, and television is portrayed as low, feminine, mass entertainment” (156). Magazines and advertisements presented hi-fi as cultivated, sophis-ticated and edifying. A hi-fi system was said to promise access to the extremes of experience and an escape from the world of middlebrow taste and the leveling effects of mass culture. It offered opportunities for immersion and transcendence through contemplative listening. Although the hi-fi would eventually be superseded by the stereo system, the same logics of gender, domesticity and escape operated within the widespread commercial discourses accompanying stereo equipment (Anderson 2006). While Schafer’s politics are clearly both antimodernist and anticonsumerist, he makes use of the same language of escape, and the very definition of the hi-fi soundscape borrows its morphology from the aesthetics of the hi-fi record and hi-fi system in the middle-class living room.

Eric Barry locates early spectacles of high-fidelity sound reproduction in the longer history of the American technological sublime.11 Like railroads

10 Following Sophie Arkette, Ari Y. Kelman has suggested this aesthetic is tied to an “urban prejudice” in Schafer, a fundamental hostility to the way cities sound (Arkette 2004: 217, Kelman 2010). This is not necessarily the case, since Southworth’s critique of urban noise is not based in an anti-urban bias. Unlike Southworth, Schafer connects his sense of urban alienation with a preference for smaller social groupings, as when he argues that the human voice is the ideal “module for acoustic design” (Schafer 1994: 215–16; cf. Sterne 2003: 242). Again, the unified single subject appears as a precondition of soundscape.11 See Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden (2000) for the classic discussion of this phenomenon.

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and electric lights, hi-fi audio systems became “objects of aesthetic pleasure and symbols of American identity” (Barry 2010: 116). Although Schafer is Canadian, this same logic of technological sublimity in pastoral space guides the move to soundscape recording. Despite somewhat different political motivations, early World Soundscape Project recordings took up the rhetoric already present in recordings like Emory Cook’s Rail Dynamics (c.1951), which was meant to document both locomotives that were going out of use, and the spectacle of hi-fi sound reproduction (see Anderson, this volume). Thus, hi-fi culture informed both the theory and practice of work in acoustic ecology, at least in its earliest formal statements and documents.

In this way, the sociogenesis of soundscape is typical of twentieth-century sonic concepts: despite its appeal to naturalism, its contours are shaped by the orientations and preoccupations of media (Sterne 2012).12 But the naturalism implied here is a very thin slice of nature (if it is a slice at all). As Andra McCartney (2010) argues in her discussion of hi-fi and lo-fi,

In the sound ecology formulation, the hifi [sic] soundscape is most closely associated with sparse wilderness and rural landscapes like mountaintops and pastures, and the lofi [sic] soundscape with urban and industrial soundscapes. Yet if hifi and lofi is to delineate a boundary between modern and pre-modern, industrial and natural, city and countryside, what do we do with noisy nature and sparse city soundscapes? There are many natural soundscapes dominated by overlapping sounds: noisy environments [such as waterfalls and tropical forests] that are very dense and without clear perspective. There are also lofi urban soundscapes that people actively seek out for various reasons, that have a social function in the urban ecology.

McCartney thus represents an alternative position within acoustic ecology, arguing against the ideas of authenticity and purity that attend hi-fi and lo-fi. Instead, she lifts the term ecotone from ecology, a word that describes a border zone where species interact. In arguing for what she calls ecotonality, McCartney privileges interaction and restores a sense of a situated listener.13

Soundscape was shaped by a relationship to recording, reproduction and the western art music concert tradition. The desire for an aesthetic of purity and sonic transcendence that animates Schafer’s cultural criticism seems entirely of a piece with talk of high fidelity and stereophonic

12 See also Lisa Gitelman’s discussion of media concepts in Always Already New (2006).13 Mitchell Akiyama (2014) argues that Schafer’s pastoralism is intimately tied to a particular kind of white Canadian nationalism—his resistance to noise was also a resistance to an emergent cultural diversity in Canada.

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reproduction of concert music in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the cultures surrounding institutionalized art music at the time. Soundscape implies a way of listening to the world that treats it as a compositional work. Soundscape is a totality, whether we consider that totality something small, like a recording or composition, or something huge, like the entire sonic airspace of a town, country or culture.

Of course, nobody has to accept Schafer’s definitions or ways of thinking about soundscape. Surveying the literature today, we have the opposite situation: the term seems to have almost infinite plasticity, and indeed many writers reject some part of Schafer’s terminology or politics, but still find the term incredibly useful. The term is everywhere capable of being mobilized to support a host of positions regarding sonic culture. Outside more restricted academic definitions, the term is everywhere. As Ari Kelman writes,

It regularly appears in the titles of books, chapters, and articles, in the names of CDs, in the monikers of performance ensembles, in pieces by sound artists, depictions of field recordings and field recording techniques, in the vocabulary of sound design for theaters, museums or amusement parks, and even in descriptions of the work of companies that specialize in home theater installation. (2010: 214)

And this is my point: the term has an almost instinctive appeal to academic writers, to journalists, to acoustic ecologists, architects, composers, musicians, music critics, software designers, students and many others. That appeal is directly connected to the second natures—the social positions and dispositions, the habitus—that fill up the hi-fi systems and concert halls invoked in Schafer’s writings. In its stretch toward totality, the term reaches out toward omniscience, but like all proposals for transcendence, it can at best offer a situated transcendence. This is not a problem for or with Schafer, who has always been crystal clear about his political and aesthetic program. But it is a problem for those of us who do not share his political or aesthetic convictions. While soundscape remains a useful term, it raises the question of space, scale and culture without itself giving us the tools to answer it.

Here, we find some unlikely assistance from Martin Heidegger, via Friedrich Kittler and John Mowitt. Kittler (1994) argued that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, and its tendency to encounter being in the experience of nearness, was an artifact of his relationship with radio. So in later work, when Heidegger says that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological” but rather that it is enframing (1977: 3), he is in part describing how his own philosophy was shaped through listening to the radio. That is, radio’s enframing function—its making the world available to be heard—becomes a conceptual model for the working of technology in general. With Mowitt (2011: 14), I am not fully convinced of

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Kittler’s reading, but it is an exciting proposition, and as a detour it allows me to make a parallel if considerably less Heideggerian argument about the concept of soundscape.

The essence of the soundscape, and indeed the essence of stereo is not physical space or the relation between physical space and its representation. Its essence is a stable audioposition, one from which the entire world is available to be heard. Recall that Schafer considered sonic space as something empty, except for the sounds moving through it. It is, in a sense, classic Euclidean space—a set of intersecting flat planes with no contours, curves or densities; a container for action, but nothing more. But of course all sound needs a medium. Stefan Helmreich (2011) and Nina Eidsheim (2011) have brilliantly demonstrated what happens to sound when we substitute water for air. Even air does not fit the Euclidean model very well. As Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter argue, a typical concert hall (or any large space) is better conceptualized in terms of millions of cubes of undulating heat that modulate the sound waves (2007: 267). Sound never travels through empty space. Rather, it is the texture of space that makes sound possible. To put it in John Mowitt’s words, space is the grain of sound.

We could level the same critique at the Euclidean fantasies of stereo, which gives an experience of three-dimensionality but only of a certain kind. Already in the late 1870s, when Alexander Graham Bell was doing his experiments with “stereophonic telephony,” he noted that the technique of reproduction affected the shape, contour and texture of the listener’s acoustic space. Going into the experiments, Bell’s hypothesis was that a stereophonic telephone would provide for directional hearing more like “that experienced by direct audition” (1880: 170). Bell discovered precisely the opposite. Telephony, even when in stereo, transformed the direction-ality of hearing. Listeners could detect the relative latitude of a sound (right or left) but not its longitude. Even “If the sound be caused to move in an irregular or serpentine path—the sensation at C, D [the stereo receiver] is as though the sound had been moved in a straight line—horizontally in front of the observer from left to right, or vice versa” (171). Contemporary experiments with multichannel sound are often authorized on this basis. Stereophonic space is insufficient to the imagined reality it references.

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre (1991) proposes that space is both produced by social activity and productive of it, offering a critique of the Euclidean position as a basis for social theory. Space should not be thought of as a container for social activity, its frame, or its backdrop, but rather must be granted its own contours, activities, affects and tendencies. This model of space, as something having a consistency of its own, as producing social relations, works perfectly for sound, since sound cannot exist in empty space anyway. In Lefebvre’s terms soundscape is no longer a totality, or a physical space and its representation. A soundscape is

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simultaneously a set of sonic-spatial practices, the metadiscourses that describe them and the conditions of possibility for experiencing that space. Because of its roots in audio-technical discourse, soundscape is much closer to “the dominant space” (Lefebvre 1991: 39) of our societies than we might first imagine.14 It may well serve as a platform for critique, but it only offers this critique from a dominant auditory perspective.

Understanding soundscape as a historical artifact of hi-fi culture also offers a possible explanation as to why there is so comparatively little humanistic work on auditory perspective (with notable exceptions: Altman 1985, 1992; Chion 1994). The soundscape concept is attractive because it simultaneously invokes a unified auditory perspective, a stable audio-position, and then hides the work of shaping perspective. Tim Anderson has a telling moment in his history of stereo, where he quotes a 1958 Columbia Records ad, that one of the aims of stereo was “to put you in the Center of Sound” (Anderson 2006: 141, emphasis in original). What if this prop-osition works not only for stereo, but for the entire structure of listening of which it was a part? Indeed, the purpose of Schafer’s ear cleaning exercises and soundscape project was also to put their subjects in the center of sound. When radio engineers audiopositioned their audiences, they created the sonic equivalent of what Paddy Scannell (2000) called the “for-anyone-as-someone” mode of address. According to Scannell, broadcast incorporates the form of interpersonal talk into an utterly impersonal medium. The result is that audiences had intense affective relationships with radio personalities, even though the broadcast was strictly impersonal in orien-tation. Audioposition accomplishes something similar, making the auditory world available for a series of singular, individualized listeners—producing an effect Rick Altman (1985) has called “for-me-ness.” These practices all sound spatial at first blush, but they are ultimately perspectival, and in each case they construct a singularity of perspective and fixedness of perspective. As it were, they put the two ears on their listeners’ heads.

In The Poetics of Perspective (1994), James Elkins suggests that perspective began as a technique for making paintings and ended up as a self-conscious metaphor for subjectivity. I have suggested something slightly different with respect to soundscape and stereo. They begin as terms of art in audio-technical discourse. But we have only just begun to ask after the ways in which they figure and amplify modes of subjectivity. They are ways of hearing the world, rooted in the post-war consumerist structure of listening. If our goal is some kind of epistemic break with our own culture

14 It is worth mentioning—though I cannot develop the point here—that Lefebvre’s discussion of abstract space (1991: 50) borrows a great deal from mid-century mass culture criticism, and thus shares an intellectual history with Schafer, who also frequently criticizes processes of mass production and reproduction in The Soundscape.

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or the cultures of others, among the first steps must be an accounting of the subjective legacies of our sonic-spatial terminology.

Heidegger worried after a “world picture” brought about by the enframing function of modern technology. Perhaps we should worry too. What if, in the guise of critique, we accidentally used the soundscape concept to build a metaphorical “world record collection” to behold, while wearing our metaphorical smoking jackets in our mental living rooms, with “world pictures” hung prominently on the walls, and we didn’t even know it?

References

Akiyama, M. 2010. “Transparent Listening: Soundscape Composition’s Objects of Study.” Revue D’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review 35(1): 54–62.

—2014. The Phonographic Memory: A History of Sound Recording in the Field. PhD diss., McGill University.

Altman, R. 1985. “The Technology of the Voice.” Iris 3(1): 3–20.Altman, R. ed. 1992. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge.Anderson, T. 2006. Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar

American Recording. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Anon. 1968. Review of Images pour Orchestre—Gigues, Iberia, Rondes de

Printemps. “Time Magazine (4 October): 2” (Canadian edition).Arkette, S. 2004. “Sounds Like City.” Theory, Culture and Society 21(1): 159–68.Barry, E. 2010. “High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961.” In

Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, eds D. Suisman and S. Strasser, 115–38. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bell, A.G. 1880. “Experiments in Binaural Audition.” American Journal of Otology, July.

Benjamin, W. 1968. Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken.Blesser, B. and L.-R. Salter. 2007. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing

Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Cage, J. 1961. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middleton: Wesleyan University

Press.Carpenter, E. and M. McLuhan. 1960. “Acoustic Space.” In Explorations in

Communication, eds E. Carpenter and M. McLuhan. Boston: Beacon Press.Chion, M. 1994. Audio-Vision. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia

University Press.Corbin, A. 1998. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French

Countryside. New York: Columbia University Press.Darò, C. 2012. Avant-gardes Sonores En Architecture. Paris: Les presses du réel.Eidsheim, N.S. 2011. “Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing

and Listening.” Senses and Society 6(2): 133–55.Elkins, J. 1994. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Fuller, R.B. 1966. “The Music of the New Life.” Music Educators Journal

52(6–7): 52–68.

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Gitelman, L. 2006. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Grandsen, K.W. 1958. “Drama: Princes in Darkness.” The Listener 59(1511): 474–5.

Hagood, M. 2011. “Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal Space.” American Quarterly 63(3): 573–89.

Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row.

Helmreich, S. 2011. “Submarine Media: Conducting Undersea Ethnography (with Notes on Underwater Music).” Presented at the History and Philosophy of Science Seminar Series, November 16, McGill University.

Keightley, K. 1996. “‘Turn it Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space and High Fidelity, 1948–59.” Popular Music 15(2): 149–77.

Kelman, A.Y. 2010. “Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies.” Senses and Society 5(2): 212–34.

Kenner, H. 1962. Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study. London: John Calder.Kittler, F. 1994. “Observation on Public Reception.” In Radio Rethink: Art, Sound

and Transmission, eds D. Augaitis and D. Lander, 74–85. Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery.

Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Cambridge, UK: Blackwell.Lynch, K. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Marx, L. 2000. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in

America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.McCartney, A. 2010. “Ethical Questions about Working with Soundscapes.”

Keynote presentation at the World Forum on Acoustic Ecology (19 June), available online at http://soundwalkinginteractions.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/ethical-questions-about-working-with-soundscapes/.

McLuhan, M. 1960. “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath.” In Explorations in Communication. An Anthology, eds E. Carpenter and M. McLuhan. Boston: Beacon Press.

Mowitt, J. 2011. Radio: Essays in Bad Reception. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Neuhaus, M. n.d. “Listen.” http://www.max-neuhaus.info/soundworks/vectors/walks/LISTEN/

Ong, W.J. 1967. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rodgers, T.S. 2010. Synthesizing Sound: Metaphor in Audio-Technical Discourse and Synthesis History. PhD diss., McGill University.

Samuels, D.W., L. Meintjes, A.M. Ochoa and T. Porcello. 2010. “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 329–45.

Scannell, P. 2000. “For Anyone-as-Someone Structures.” Media, Culture and Society 22(1): 5–24.

Schafer, R.M. 1967. Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course. Toronto: Clark and Cruickshank.

—1986. “Acoustic Space.” In Dwelling, Space and Environment: Toward a Phenomenology of Person and World, eds D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer, 87–98. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

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—1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.

Small, C. 1977. Music–Society–Education. London: John Calder.Sofia, Z. 2000. “Container Technologies.” Hypatia 15(2): 181–219.Southworth, M. 1969. “The Sonic Environment of Cities.” Environment and

Behavior 1(1): 49–70.Stanyek, J. and B. Piekut. 2010. “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane.”

The Drama Review 54(1): 14–38.Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.

Durham: Duke University Press.—2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press.—2013. “Escape from Soundscape.” In Soundscapes of the Urban Past, ed. K.

Bijsterveld, 181–91. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.Thompson, E. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and

the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1930. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Todd, R.L. 2005. Mendelssohn: A Life in Music. New York: Oxford University

Press.Touloumi, O. 2014. Architectures of Global Communication, 1941–1970. PhD

diss., Harvard University.Truax, B. 1984. Acoustic Communication. Norwood: Ablex.Verma, N. 2012. Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Interiority and Radio Plays,

1937–1955. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.von Fischer, Sabine. 2008. “Versuche, Die Musik Der Welt Zu Erfassen.”

Archithese 6: 56–9.—2013. Interview with Michael Southworth, 13 July, Berkeley.Winkler, J. 1995/2006. Klanglandschaften: Untersuchungen Zur Konstitution

der Klanglichen Umwelt in der Wahrnehmungskultur Ländlicher Orte in der Schweiz. Basel: Akroama, The Soundscape Newsletter Europe Edition.

CHAPTER THREE

Sonar and the Channelization of the Ocean

John Shiga

Histories of the film and music industries have explored the creative and commercial possibilities opened by multichannel sound from the early 1950s onwards. They have highlighted the manner in which stereo and other multichannel systems (such as surround sound) have been shaped by a long-standing tension between realism and spectacle as competing aesthetic models in the discourses of sound engineers, producers and critics (e.g. Chanan 1995). As Rick Altman (1992) points out, multichannel sound was marketed by the cultural industries under the banner of increasing realism; for audiences and critics, however, stereo’s capacity to generate spectacular effects was at least as important as its claims to faithful reproduction of sonic events and spaces. This chapter suggests that, in the context of anti-submarine warfare, the principle driver of multichannel sound research and development was neither realism nor spectacle. Rather, it was the problem posed by the “blindness” of ships to underwater threats, and the potential of multichannel sound to extract locational information about those threats from the noise they unwittingly emitted. By the middle of the twentieth century, “natural” acoustic channels in the ocean became the basis for new command, control and communications systems in underwater warfare. From an impermeable, monolithic body of water, the ocean was redefined in sonar discourse as a vast multichannel sound system.

Although there were many competing figures available to sonar researchers for describing the acoustic space of the ocean (e.g. zones, layers, ducts), the predominant figure of ocean sound in sonar discourse was the channel. I argue that there were two main factors that help explain

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the prevalence of the channel in explanations of how ocean sound worked and how it could be exploited. First, the discovery and military use of underwater sound channels emerged out of a much longer history of the rationalization of space in modern systems of governance, including the development of canal networks and sea lanes as political technologies that anticipated naval models of ocean sound in the form of undersea channels. With the deployment of motor vehicles in twentieth-century warfare, the figure of the channel in land-based communication and transportation was extended to ocean-space in the form of “sea lines of communication.” The “vast logistic tail” across the Atlantic that supplied motor vehicles and other machines of war with “fuel, spare parts, and maintenance and repair services” became a vital component of the Allied war effort (van Creveld 1989/1991: 161). Since sonar was developed to protect these logistic tails from submarines, the design and use of sonar during this period produced an acoustic pathway across the ocean, undergirding the rationalized, linear structures of naval convoys.

The second factor leading to the prevalence of the figure of the channel was its increasing prominence in mid-century sonar research funded by the United States Navy. Such research aimed to develop long-range acoustic detection systems in the Atlantic through the exploitation of a layer of ocean water called the “deep sound channel.” I suggest that the figure of the channel became increasingly legible in sonar discourse during this period owing to broad shifts in understandings of “new” media in the first half of the twentieth century, which centered on the capacity to simultan-eously send, receive and process signals independently of one another and across multiple channels. Initially developed in the wireless industry and subsequently extended to telephony through carrier multiplexing in the 1920s, and to sound recording in the 1950s, the capacity of electrical channels to enable the independent transfer and manipulation of multiple streams of signals had a profound impact on scientific understandings of underwater sound (Schwartz 2008). Additionally, I suggest that channel-oriented concepts of ocean sound in sonar discourse were shaped by new institutional alignments between scientists with expertise in underwater sound at US universities (particularly Harvard and MIT), who carried out basic scientific research for Cold War sonar systems and telecommunica-tions firms (e.g. Bell Telephone Laboratories); in turn, engineers at these firms built a transoceanic infrastructure of acoustic surveillance. The concept of the ocean as a multichannel audio medium was thus a product, not only of the general trend toward multichannel media, but also of a particular institutional and ideological environment. In this environment, sonar researchers engaged with the problem of controlling undersea space while surrounded by the principles, techniques and infrastructures of multi-channel sound.

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From Canal to Channel: Archaeology of Liquid Media

“Channel” and “canal” both have liquid origins. They share the same Latin root, canalis, which translates as “pipe” or “reed.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms “channel” and “canal” emerged in English during the fourteenth century and referred to a conduit for running water, such as a riverbed, or to a tubular structure conveying liquid. It was not until the seventeenth century that the meanings of “channel” and “canal” began to diverge and expand, encompassing the conveyance of ideas as well as water. By the nineteenth century, “canal” lost these associations, while the predominant meaning of “channel” became that of a circuit or band of frequencies for the “transmission of communications” in telecommunications and broadcasting.

We should understand the close connections between “canal” and “channel” not only as a matter of common cultural origins, but also as a consequence of the emergence of new modes of governance in which power came to be exercised through the directed flow of people, things and ideas—both within and across the borders of the modern state. In other words, the meanings of canal and channel have been shaped in similar ways by military and political efforts to control territory through the expansion of rationalized networks of waterways, roads and other lines of communi-cation. Both sets of meanings were shaped by what Armand Mattelart calls the new “ideology of communication,” which rested on the insight that the “means of decentralization that permit escape from confinement and from mental and physical barriers allow both the unleashing of movement and the consolidation of the center with the support of the periphery” (1996: xvi).

In eighteenth-century scientific discourse about electricity, the channel and other circulatory metaphors acted as conceptual relays between organic, technological and social systems, enabling those systems to be understood in terms of one another (Otis 2002). These figural links in turn supported new modes of governance, oriented toward the optimization of the “free flow” of capital, goods and ideas (though the latter tended to be downplayed in its importance). They achieved this both through the construction of new infrastructure and through the elimination of barriers to movement. From canals to highways to frequency bands, what might be described as the channelization of space became one of the hallmarks of rationalized governance that was based not so much on prohibition but on continuous and directed movement through closed systems. The canal networks in the eighteenth century, as documented by Mattelart, were centralized around the capital city and in this way supported dominant visions of modernity. “Canals,” wrote the eighteenth-century historian

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John Phillips, “may be considered as so many roads of a certain kind … Bad roads, and a difficulty of communication between places remote from each other, occasion a kind of sterility in a country, and render most things much dearer and scarcer than they would otherwise be” (1795: xii). For Phillips, the canal provided “easy and secure communication of the different parts of the country one with another,” which enhanced commerce and trade, created jobs and bound together disparate regions (viii). But the canal was also deployed as a means of social control, not only through its rationalized and centralized architecture, but also through the processes of canal construction, which involved the rationalization of labor, the standardization of tasks and the division of spaces for workers and supervisors.

In Allied anti-submarine campaigns during the First and Second World Wars, the free flow of people and things across the ocean surface came to depend on the subsurface flow of information along channels of sound and ultrasound. Rather than building networks of canals, warfare strategy in the twentieth century increasingly centered on the control of natural and artificial channels in ocean water. Owing to the poverty of light in the subsurface ocean, American and British scientists focused on the development of acoustic means for detecting undersea threats. In the context of sonar development, the channel was one of many “fluid media” metaphors, along with “current” and “flow.” Such metaphors, as Jonathan Sterne and Tara Rodgers point out, enabled sound and electricity to be understood in terms of each other in the discourse of acoustics (2011: 45). But whereas channel, current and flow typically acted as metaphors when applied to electricity or sound in audio-technical discourse, in sonar discourse these figures were applied to structures in the ocean that were literally liquid. As a “symbol of maritime voyage,” Sterne and Rodgers argue, the channel renders sound through “a masculinist and colonial rhetoric that promotes the bold traversal and technological mastery of turbulent waves and maritime frontiers” (47). Nowhere, perhaps, were such symbols more potent than in the context of sonar research, where the liquid properties of both the vehicle (the ocean) and the target (ocean sound) of the metaphor gave the channel the appearance of a natural and neutral description of the external world. But the channel was not a neutral description of the world: as I discuss below, the channel helped promote a view of the ocean and the human binaural sense as components of a vast audio surveillance machine that could be violently monopolized by military institutions.

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Binauraling Ocean Sound

In his discussion of Freud’s concept of memory-traces, Derrida fleshes out the many interconnections between writing and violence:

We ought thus to examine closely … all that Freud invites to think concerning writing as “breaching” … opening up of its own space, effraction, breaking of a path against resistances, rupture and irruption becoming a route (rupta, via rupta), violent inscription of a form … The route is opened in nature or matter, forest or wood (hyle), and in it acquires a reversibility of time and space. We should have to study together, genetically and structurally, the history of the road and the history of writing. (1978: 214)

Following Derrida’s call, it is useful to examine how the relationship between violence and navigational practices of inscribing space became particularly clear, during the First World War, in the struggle for control of transatlantic shipping lanes called “sea lines of communication” (SLOCs) in naval discourse. For the Allies, SLOCs were a key part of the “logistic tail” along which fuel, parts and equipment flowed into the machine war raging in Europe. The German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare aimed to disrupt merchant shipping and trade between Allied countries by severing these transatlantic SLOCs. To manage this threat, the American and British navies organized merchant ships into convoys protected by naval escorts equipped with underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to detect U-boats. According to Malcolm Llewellyn-Jones, transatlantic convoys consisted of

a line of escorts, spaced a mile apart, across the front of the convoy at a distance of 600–800 yards. By zig-zagging, these escorts would provide a physical obstruction to U-boats about to fire at close range. Escorts would also be stationed on the flanks and, where sufficient forces were available, one or more were placed astern where they could respond to a torpedoing with a broadcast barrage of depth-charges. (2004: 9)

Convoys of up to ninety ships had the effect of compressing shipping into a relatively small geographic space, which reduced the U-boats’ probability of finding targets in open water, facilitated the flow of information between ships, and reduced the need to communicate over long distances. As the British Royal Navy’s Historical Section put it in a 1939 monograph on the First World War, the convoy system ensured that ships “kept in touch with the latest intelligence” and could thus avoid U-boats by altering routes on the basis of this intelligence (quoted in Llewellyn-Jones 2004: 10).

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Early twentieth-century conceptualizations of the ocean’s acoustic space were thus shaped to a considerable extent by nautical systems for circulating people and things—in particular, the sea lines of communi-cation and the transoceanic convoy. Although U-boat sightings could be communicated between naval ships almost instantaneously by means of wireless telegraph, underwater acoustic detection was limited to the immediate area surrounding the convoys (Hackmann 1984: 69). Even during the Second World War, visual spotting and eavesdropping on wireless telegraphic communication between U-boats remained crucial to the anti-submarine campaign; at least half of U-boat detections were made by these visual and electric means, with underwater acoustic means accounting for the other half. The material and semiotic elements of early underwater listening systems were deployed along the SLOCs and were shaped by the nautical organizations that controlled these routes. In this way, the spatial distribution of underwater listening paralleled the arrangement of the SLOCs and helped reinforce the long, thin lines of rationalized and calculated space carved into the North Atlantic by navies and shipping organizations.

While the introduction of electrical media (telegraph, telephone, radio) in the decades prior to the First World War had inaugurated the separation of communication and transportation, and had in this sense “annihilated” space, many of the most promising early-warning techniques in the first half of the twentieth century—techniques that were deployed on both land and sea—relied on the integration of amplifying and focusing techniques with human directional hearing to “bring things closer” without electrical transducers or amplifiers. These nonelectrical, acoustical techniques, or channels, did not annihilate space (communication was not instantaneous and the distance across which communication occurred was still very limited in comparison with electrical channels); they did, however, extend the range of hearing as well as the period of time between the detection of a threat and the moment of attack or collision. Examples of such acoustic channels included Alfred Mayer’s topophone (or “sound placer”), which worked like a binaural stethoscope for detecting the grumbling of icebergs at sea and later the engine sounds of approaching war planes, as well as the gigantic concrete “sound walls” built by the British military to amplify the distant engine sounds of incoming bombers (Case 2013). Motor power increased the speed of attack during the First World War and generated demand for “logistical media” which, as Judd Case writes, ordered and arranged “people and objects through feedback, remote control, and technological grids” (2013: 392). By making distant sounds audible, and by correlating those sounds with movement in quantified and calculable forms (e.g. coordinates, bearings, ranges, trajectories), nonelectrical acous-tical channels “bought time” for decision-making in an era of terrifyingly accelerated warfare.

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To enhance their control over the sea lines of communication, the American and British governments created new institutions to steer scientific research toward the general problem of the U-boat, and toward undersea acoustics in particular. In July 1915, the British government created the Board of Invention and Research (BIR) to promote and direct scientific research for the war effort. Of the BIR’s six divisions, the “submarines and wireless telegraphy” division received the largest grant, with much of its funding going toward underwater acoustic research at universities, telecommunications and electronics firms, and naval research facilities (Hackmann 1984: 18–19). Following the sinking of the Lusitania by a U-boat in May 1915, the US government mobilized scientists with expertise in underwater sound into newly formed research and development organ-izations, such as the Naval Consulting Board (NCB) (under the direction of Thomas Edison) and the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council (NRC), both of which attracted scientists from industry and the academy (Weir 2001: 6). New research facilities were created for work on U-boat countermeasures at a facility in Nahant, Massachusetts (financed by the Boston-based Submarine Signal Company) and in New London, Connecticut.

The production of acoustic channels in the ocean for anti-submarine warfare depended on the formation of transdisciplinary identities and discourses that would open channels of communication between naval and scientific cultures. While rival firms such as General Electric, Western Electric and the Submarine Signal Company initially showed great enthusiasm for working together on the U-boat problem, the NCB did not set out any specific arrangement for patent rights to underwater technologies developed through these collaborations (Frost 2001: 480). As Gary Frost argues: “Far from inducing Submarine Signal and General Electric to cooperate, the attempt to compel collaboration without resolving the patent issue forced competition between them” (ibid.). As a result, the larger firms involved in these collaborations (e.g. General Electric) tended to dominate government-funded, anti-submarine research, and systems developed by scientists associated with smaller firms tended to be neglected or actively suppressed.1 In this way, institutional, political and personal factors (such as squabbles over patent rights) obstructed channels of expertise and knowledge between the Navy and the scientific community. It was not until the interwar period that such channels were opened by scientists who were comfortable in both naval and scientific cultures, whom Gary Weir describes as “translators.”

1 Such was the case with Canadian inventor, Reginald Fessenden, who was affiliated with the Submarine Signal Company but whose increasingly antagonistic relationship with other scien-tists at the Nahant facility ensured that his echo-ranging “oscillator” system—which offered an alternative to “listen-only” systems that were then dominant in antisubmarine warfare—remained obscure and unexplored as a means of undersea detection until the 1920s.

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“[T]ranslators became a critical channel of communication,” he writes. “In suggesting solutions from engineering practice or scientific research they promoted the flow of ideas across a distinct but ill-defined boundary between two communities of practitioners” (2001: 105).

Although collaboration between military, industrial and academic institutions was limited during the First World War,2 military-supported acoustics research led to a growing appreciation of the complexity of acoustic channels that cut through water, metal and air to make underwater sound audible to listeners inside a ship. Research during this period also led to the development of novel ways of integrating the heterogeneous elements of these acoustic channels. In particular, many of the First World War devel-opments in sonar technology defined human listening capacities in a way that facilitated optimal “splicing” of human hearing into mechano-acoustic and electro-acoustic channels. Mechano-acoustic channels were configured in pairs to exploit the human operator’s capacity to discern differences in phase and amplitude between left and right ears so that locational infor-mation about U-boats could be extracted from incoming sounds. Among the best known of these devices was the Walser apparatus, developed by French Lieutenant Georges Walser in 1917. In this system, two blister-like “sound lenses” were installed on each side of a ship: made of metal and containing many diaphragms, each sound lens was three to four feet in diameter (Hackmann 1984: 55). Inside the ship, an air horn was placed at the focal point of each lens to capture incoming sound and a “trumpet-like arrangement” of metal tubes carried the sound to a stethoscope worn by the listener (ibid.). The length of the channel to each ear could be adjusted by moving the tubes and had a similar effect on the sound as electrical delay lines in a telephone system (Lasky 1977: 286). Using this system, the operator could determine the bearing of the target within a few degrees and could also determine when the target was directly below the search vessel (an ideal position for the use of depth charges). Moreover, the apparatus was relatively easy to use and was less plagued by noise than other listening systems, owing to its focusing capability.

Increasingly, American sonar research, too, shifted from the problem of detection and early warning to the problem of extracting directional or locational information from ocean water. The solution to this latter problem was by no means clear at the outset of war. While experiments with sound-ranging gear (which sends acoustic pulses or “pings” into the ocean at regular intervals and listens for echoes bouncing off objects in the water), in combination with adjustable listening channels, demonstrated the advantages of binaural techniques for locating targets as early as 1915, such equipment was expensive and required major modifications to ships.

2 This was primarily due to weak channels of communication between institutions and the lack of influential “translators” between military and naval cultures.

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Instead, “drifter set” hydrophones (portable, non-directional detection devices that could be easily lowered over the side of a ship) were produced en masse in 1916 and used on fishing boats enlisted in the anti-submarine campaign. British engineers modified the American drifter set by replacing the bidirectional hydrophone with a unidirectional hydrophone, which enabled the direction of the target to be roughly estimated (Lasky 1977: 287). Another widely used device, introduced in 1917 as the US entered the war, was the “SC tube.” This consisted of a T-shaped piece of metal installed through the hull of a ship with a rubber bulb at either end of the upside-down “T” connected to a stethoscope.3 The direction of a target could be judged by rotating the “T” until the sound had the same intensity and phase in both ears (Hackmann 1984: 56). However, range “could only be crudely estimated” by manually rotating the “T” and noting the point in the rotation at which the sound became loudest (Lasky 1977: 287). By 1917, a consensus began to form around binaural techniques at conferences organized by the NCB and NRC and attended by American, British and French scientists (Weir 2001: 8–9). From these discussions there emerged a number of proposals for systems that integrated binaural techniques to extract locational information from underwater sound (Lasky 1977: 287). The advantages of binaural listening led the US Navy to develop its own version of the Walser apparatus, called the MV-tube. The key component in this system was its “American binaural compensator,” which “consisted of two metal plates with circular grooves” (Hackmann 1984: 57). By rotating the upper plate, an operator could adjust the length of pathways of the sounds picked up by each hydrophone. Once the sounds were binaurally centered, the bearing could then be simply read off a scale.

Two-channel sonar systems enacted powerful models of underwater sound as a rich source of locational information that could be tapped through “binauraling.” However, these channels increased the flow of both wanted and unwanted sound into the ears of operators: while the channels were intended to increase the circulation of submarine sounds into the ship, binaural systems also increased noise, making it harder for the operators to listen. Based on discussions at the joint conferences of 1917, American scientists experimented with towed hydrophones in combin-ation with either binaural listening or multiple hydrophone arrays. Towed

3 To enhance the flow of sound from the water into anti-submarine ships, new acoustic channels were developed between ship and water, which involved cutting holes in the hulls of ships for sound lenses and other gear and thus had the potential to make those ships fragile at sea. Capturing and focusing distant sounds in non-electrical systems required large lenses, which hindered large-scaled deployment, since “Royal Navy ship architects had a great reluc-tance to cut holes in the hulls for any form of extraneous apparatus” (Hackmann 1984: 57). Taken too far, the punctuation of space through channels transecting the air–water boundary would optimize one form of circulation (the movement of information) and destabilize the other (the movement of ships).

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hydrophones had two main advantages over the existing systems such as the drifter sets and the SC tube. First, they eliminated the need to cut holes in the hulls of ships and thus allayed fears among naval officials and ship architects that listening gear would make ships flimsy and vulnerable at sea. Second, by setting the hydrophone apart from the ship, “self noise” could be prevented from entering the listening channels. Based on sugges-tions from the international conference on undersea acoustic detection, American scientists developed a number of towed devices, including the “Rat” (consisting of non-directional hydrophones that were made direc-tional by installing them in geometric configurations and by means of a compensator), the “Dinosaur” (three hydrophones spaced four feet apart, of which the operator would use two in combination with an electrical delay line to determine the bearing of the target), and the “Eel” (with each ear connected to six hydrophones towed 100 feet below the surface, the operator using an electrical compensator to focus and binaurally center the sound) (Lasky 1977: 287, Hackmann 1984: 58). The Royal Navy found that two Eels used in combination with an MV-tube (the American version of the Wasler “blister” apparatus) enabled the determination of relatively accurate bearings through the triangulation of the sound source.

The sounds produced through single-channel and multichannel hydro-phone arrays may have seemed very similar to untrained ears: auditors would have heard a similar mixture of sea noise, self noise and the distant engine sounds of U-boats or other ships through both systems. But as N. Katherine Hayles argues in relation to a much more recent and general transformation of representational practices by information-based technologies, “the technological processes involved in this transformation are not neutral” (1999: 28). Beginning with binaural hydrophone systems, multichannel sonar was shaped by, and contributed to, military efforts to exploit underwater sound for information about the location and identity of objects in the water. There is thus a significant shift in the logic or ration-ality guiding the development of underwater listening channels during this period. Drifter sets and other devices based on pre-war, single-channel systems sought to increase the range of detection (by distributing them en masse to hydrophone flotillas) so that ships could take evasive action. With the introduction of binauraling and triangulation, the main concern of scientists and engineers began to shift to the recognition and localization of U-boats. As channels proliferated, the purpose of the underwater listening gradually moved from early warning to targeting.

The main driver of these changes was the transition from non-directional, single-channel techniques to binaural listening as the appropriate mode of sensing, signifying, recognizing and locating underwater objects. While non-directional and binaural hydrophone systems may have produced sounds that were very similar, the latter was linked with new lines of scientific inquiry into the sound spectrum of submarines and new

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techniques of sound analysis to discern threats in the broad spectrum of underwater noise (Hackmann 1984: 50–1). In Lisa Gitelman’s terms, the multichannel transition in underwater sound technology is suggestive of sonar’s “material meanings” or the “nexus of cultural practices, economic structures, and perceptual and semiotic habits that make tangible things meaningful” (2004: 203). Mechano-acoustical channels—and in particular the expandable and collapsible air columns contained in adjustable tubes or grooved plates—embodied a new disposition toward underwater sound as a signal to be decoded (rather than listened to “directly”) through human sensing, in conjunction with mechanical compression and decompression of space in the channel. The figure of the channel in the discourse and process of binauraling becomes more than just a delivery system linking two points in space. Channels become signal-processors: they split the sonic event into two transmissions and manipulate their arrival time and phase by compressing and decompressing the spaces across which these transmis-sions occur.

Nuclear Submarines and the Deep Sound Channel

In the 1950s, military officials and underwater sound researchers feared the Soviet Navy would soon develop long-range submarines that would undermine the SLOCs between the United States and its European allies. By the late 1950s, the Soviet Navy developed nuclear-powered submarines that could remain submerged indefinitely and which were much less prone to visual and acoustic detection; in the early 1960s, nuclear-powered submar-ines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles were added to the Soviet fleet. The rapid speed of nuclear attack, combined with long-standing anxieties among military and political officials about the vulnerability of the SLOCs, led to the development of techniques for exploiting the “tonals” that Soviet submarines unwittingly emitted into a layer of ocean water—called the “deep sound channel”—that can carry sound for thousands of kilometers (Weir 2006). Scientists at MIT, Columbia and Harvard carried out basic research on ambient ocean noise, sound propagation in the ocean, and sound signatures of vessels, while engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories developed infrastructure based on this knowledge. The result of this intensi-fication of sonar research and development was SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System). This was, by far, the largest underwater listening system that had ever been built. During the construction of hydrophone networks for the US Navy, the figure of the channel thickened and became increasingly complex, particularly with the emergence of a new conceptualization of the ocean as a channeled audio medium. Borrowing a variant of the term “channel” that

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was popular during the 1950s, this section traces the “channelization” of the ocean’s acoustic field. I suggest that ocean channelization shaped, and was itself shaped by, ongoing efforts in naval bioacoustics to incorporate ocean sound into intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance and targeting systems for the destruction of submarines.

In October 1941, the US Secretary of the Navy requested that the National Academy of Sciences form a committee—chaired by Edwin Colpitts, the former vice-president of Bell Laboratories—to investigate the German submarine threat and the degree to which the US Navy would be prepared to confront this threat in the event that the United States entered the war. In its report, the committee emphasized the need to study the “sound propagating properties of oceanic waters over the entire frequency range likely to be involved in the use of detecting devices” (quoted in Weir 2001: 112). Improved training would be necessary to avoid a condition of sonar “blindness” due to poor weather and water conditions. The key problem highlighted by the report was that operators required extensive training to identify the sound signatures of friendly and enemy vessels in different water conditions. Such training depended on oceanographic research and a massive sound inventorying program which did not yet exist; this was a troubling finding for Navy officials and one that helped bolster oceanography and its wartime model of oceanic water as an acoustic weapon. Other prominent scientists, such as Columbus Iselin, director of the recently formed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, noted that, unlike the military scientists with whom they frequently worked, fleet officers did not accept the idea that underwater sound could act as a weapon. In Gary Weir’s terms, fleet officers did not share the scientists’ view of “the potential of employing the characteristics of the ocean environment as a shield, or perhaps even as a lethal weapon” (2001: 114). The report prompted the US National Defense Research Council (NDRC) to create a five-branch anti-submarine research organization with laboratories on the East and West coasts, which were supported by researchers at universities and firms such as Western Electric, RCA and General Electric (117).

Conceptualized as a homogeneous and bounded space enabling directed flow of objects or information, scientific thought suggested that the figure of the undersea sound channel might enable acoustic positioning and targeting in the “third dimension” (depth). But a number of insights into the material structure of the ocean during the Second World War challenged this idea. One such complication was the “deep-scattering layer,” first noted by American biologist Martin Johnson, who was contracted by the US Navy to search for possible sources of ambient noise hindering sonar operators in the Pacific. The noise, “not unlike the crackling sound of dry burning twigs,” was sufficiently intense (around thirty decibels) to interfere with anti-submarine listening and seemed to move closer to the surface at night. Johnson determined that shrimp were producing this white noise and

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subsequent studies identified numerous other organisms that contributed to the deep-scattering layer (Weir 2001: 166). Other zones of inaudi-bility (or “shadow zones”) produced by layers of sharply declining water temperatures, called thermoclines, also blocked and distorted sonar trans-missions (Llewellyn-Jones 2004: 31). Considerable military funding was directed toward geophysical research on thermoclines and on techniques for mapping temperature zones. This knowledge became critical to sonar design and operation, “since changing temperature zones deflect sound waves and can create sonar ‘blind spots’” (Burnett 2012: 538).

During an experiment to test the utility of seismographs and explosives to explore the ocean floor, Maurice Ewing and his collaborator, J. Lamar Worzel, began to rethink the problem of the ocean’s material heterogeneity. What if layers of water differentiated by pressure and temperature—which muted the sounds of submarines beneath them and which had therefore been long regarded as barriers to sound transmission or as sources of distortion—were in fact elements of larger structures that conducted sound over extremely long distances? With his ear to the railing of his ship, Atlantis, Ewing listened to TNT explosions reverberating between the seabed and the ship and hypothesized that a layer of water that minimized energy loss, by preventing contact between sound waves and the ocean surface and floor, would also permit sound to travel great distances (Weir 2001: 172). Ewing called this layer of water the “deep sound channel” and in a report to the Bureau of Ships, in 1943, proposed the use of this channel for long-distance communication using “time-coded explosive charges in the sound channel itself” (Whitman 2005: para. 7). In 1944, as proof of concept, Ewing detonated one pound of TNT underwater off the coast of the Bahamas and monitored the ocean with a hydrophone 2,000 miles away, near West Africa (Smith 2004: 54). Instead of hearing one explosion, the hydrophone picked up a multitude of explosion sounds traveling along different pathways in the sound channel, with different times of arrival. The explosion was nevertheless easily heard on the other side of the ocean with “judiciously located hydrophones” at the correct depth for tapping into the sound channel (Whitman 2005: para. 4).

New devices for measuring temperature and sound velocity developed at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute began to confirm Ewing’s explanation for the incredible distances across which sound could be detected: water does not absorb or scatter low-frequency sound as much as it does high-frequency sound, which means that low-frequency sound can travel further without losing as much energy. This alone, however, did not explain the incredible distance traveled by the sound of the explosion. What Ewing had discovered (Soviet scientists made the same discovery independently of Ewing) was a layer of ocean water sandwiched between the warm, surface layer and the cold, high-pressure deep layer. Sound speeds up in both the warmer surface layer and in deep, high-pressure

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water. These two “high-speed” layers act as the floor and ceiling of the deep sound channel. Sound that enters this layer tends to stay there, bouncing off the warm water above and the high-pressure water below, thus avoiding “lossy encounters with the surface and bottom” (Whitman 2005: para. 2). This permits sound to travel with “minimal loss of signal over thousands of kilometers” (Smith 2004: 55).

To interest the Navy, which was at this time funding research with immediate applications in ending the Second World War, Ewing suggested that the deep sound channel could be used to locate downed pilots in the ocean. (The idea of using the channel for submarine detection and targeting did not emerge until after the war.) Based on Ewing’s work, the US military was able to construct an air–sea rescue system—dubbed SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging)—by the end of the War (Weir 2006). The key to this system was a network of hydrophones cabled to shore stations where incoming signals would be monitored. If a pilot crashed or ejected into the ocean, he would drop an explosive package set to detonate in the deep sound channel. The sound of the explosion would be picked up by several hydrophones and the time differential would enable operators at shore stations to triangulate the pilot’s location.

The SOFAR channel was not easily monopolized by the US Navy: marine mammals, the Soviet Navy and, more recently, bioacoustics researchers and marine scientists have also made extensive use of it. However, it wasn’t the layer of water that needed to be monopolized but rather the acous-tical knowledge and techniques that enabled low-frequency sounds to be captured and analyzed as indices of the position of sound sources within it. As Hackmann notes, “It was no easy matter to unscramble the complex low-frequency sound signals repeatedly subject to multipath reflection and refraction which were found, for instance, in the SOSUS long-range sound channels” (1984: 342).

Although the channel itself was difficult to control, the US Navy attempted to monopolize knowledge about the channel and about how to interpret information flowing through it. At the request of the Chief of Naval Operators, the National Academy of Sciences investigated the threat posed by long-range Soviet submarines to the North Atlantic supply lines. MIT professor Jerrold Zacharias agreed to organize a summer study group, known as the Hartwell Project, to explore the problem posed by the “inter-ruption of intercontinental supply of men, material, and civilian supplies between the US and its allies” by the Soviet Union (Project Hartwell 1950: 1). The circulatory imperative is clear in the basic assumptions of the Hartwell Project: “It will be imperative for the U.S. and allies to keep open the sea lanes to harbours in its areas of interest … and to protect shipping against submarines and mines” (ibid.). However, the group underscored the limitations of surface sonar for securing overseas transportation and noted that “sonar performance can be very greatly improved and underwater

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sound, in general, can be made much more useful to the Navy than it is now” (7). Low-frequency (under 500 Hz) sound detection systems, the group concluded, had enormous potential to detect and target submarines. However, since very little was known about such frequencies in the ocean, the system envisioned by the group would require a large-scale research and development program to investigate geophysical elements of the ocean affecting sound transmission, sound signatures of vessels and undersea weapons, and new data presentation techniques.

For the Hartwell group, the problem of Soviet disruptions of overseas transport seemed to require the production of scientific knowledge about the ocean as a system of low-frequency, acoustic communication. The main advantage of low-frequency arrays was that they could “furnish infor-mation accurate enough for closing and attack” on submarines (Project Hartwell 1950: B-4). Hydrophones and other equipment for tapping into low-frequency emissions trapped in the sound channel would need to be designed in tandem with “effective weapons [that] are necessary to success-fully conclude an attack once the target has been brought into range,” such as high-speed torpedoes and underwater rockets (ibid.). In the Hartwell group’s vision of the Atlantic under US control, surface-level circulations of people and things would be secured by channels of low-frequency sound integrated into underwater weapons systems.

After the war, the US Navy commissioned classified sound channel research at university laboratories in what became known as Project Jezebel, aimed at developing infrastructure that could reliably exploit the deep sound channel as an instrument of anti-submarine warfare. The Office of Naval Research funded a contract with AT&T to construct a subsea surveil-lance network that would use low-frequency sound propagation to identify, locate and track Soviet submarines. AT&T modified its sound spectrograph technology for a new device called LOFAR (LOw Frequency Analysis and Recording), which consisted of a console that produced a visual represen-tation of incoming sound using a stylus running across sensitized paper, the inscriptions of which darkened according to the strength of the signal (Whitman 2005: para. 12). Echoing the Hartwell group’s recommendation to integrate the human operator into the system by “tailoring the output of the gear to the sensory capacities of the operators,” new techniques of sound analysis and display were developed, including maps of the sound channel throughout the world’s oceans (the channel’s depth varies from region to region), ray-tracing techniques which plotted each ray or path of the multipath transmission through the sound channel, and low-frequency signal processing techniques designed specifically for this environment (Project Hartwell 1950: 9). It was a knowledge monopoly preserved through secrecy until 1991, when SOSUS was declassified by the US government.

After spending $51 million on research and $375 million on the devel-opment of the initial network, the SOSUS network began to take shape.

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New hydrophone arrays were designed that activated in response to low-frequency sound waves, moving the hydrophone’s diaphragm and generating current. Each hydrophone was connected to a cable that ran hundreds of miles to purpose-built shore stations called, simply, Navy Facilities or NAVFACs. Developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric, these facilities were where signals from the hydrophone arrays were collected and translated into “lofargrams” for visual analysis (Hackmann 1984: 342). NAVFACs identified and tracked objects picked up by hydrophones by generating smaller and more focused sound channels in the ocean. This was done using “beam-forming” techniques, that time-delayed signals coming from different hydrophones in order to “focus” the hydrophones in particular directions.

But since underwater sound typically radiates in multiple directions rather than moving in a narrow and directed way, deep sound channel may seem to be an odd name for this structure. Why, then, did the term “channel” seem so fitting for this particular structure or set of structures in the ocean?

The deep sound channel and the broader concept of the ocean as a channeled audio medium were shaped by cultural assumptions about new media in the 1950s. That is to say, they enabled transmission and recording on discrete channels, and that multiple flows of sound streaming from the same source implied not only direction but also location or position. This was particularly clear in the case of new audio media in the 1950s, with the laying of the first undersea coaxial cables, which drastically increased the number of voice channels that could be carried by a single cable, as well as the transition to stereo in the recording industry, the first stereo television broadcasts and the first commercially available four-track tape recorders (Chanan 1995: 8, 143). The ubiquity of channeled communication technol-ogies during the post-war period shaped concepts of communication and social processes in terms of the channel: complex economic, political and cultural processes were commonly described in terms of flows or movement within and between multiple channels throughout the 1950s.4 The same institutions that developed the multichannel techniques and infrastructures of the telephone and radio networks were contracted by the US Navy to build sonar networks that would tap into the deep sound channel. Bell

4 Perhaps the most well-known instance of this turn in communications thought emerged in sociology, where Kurt Lewin’s theory of gatekeeping proposed that any given idea, object or event can be traced back to the flow of its constituent parts through parallel channels, governed by individual or institutional “gatekeepers.” Operating as a kind of master concept for theorizing social processes, the channel’s appeal in this period derives in part from the apparent balance it strikes between the multiple structures that enable and guide movement from one place to another (the channels) and agency of those who occupy these channels whose collective action determines what moves forward through the channel and what does not.

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Telephone Laboratories played a key role in this massive engineering undertaking and virtually all of the technical components of SOSUS were “off the shelf” technologies repurposed from the telephone networks (Weir 2006: para. 3). As Weir notes, “Even the LOFAR actuator, which recorded on paper the submarine detection data for SOSUS, emerged from a desire at Bell Laboratories to examine more closely human voice patterns with an eye toward enhancing basic customer services” (ibid.). The idea of the deep sound channel was in this sense overdetermined: researchers working to exploit this deep ocean structure were steeped in a scientific and engineering culture in which the “channel” was a foundational concept for thinking about flows within and across organisms and machines; the broader cultural associations between multichannel media and directivity and positioning meant that the figure of the channel could communicate across scientific and naval culture; and organizations, such as the Hartwell group, seeking to persuade political and military administrators that domination of the ocean and its soundscape was indeed feasible, could point to the telephone network and its constituent parts as ready-made models and material resources for the channelized ocean.

Conclusion

If the figure of the channel embodied by canal networks underscores the importance of rationalized movement in the domination of land-space by emerging nation-states, the concept of the channel developed in the 1950s articulates a growing concern on the part of Cold War military officials and scientists with the optimization of information flows between ocean water, human operators and machines. The domination of deep ocean space and the monitoring, measurement and reconfiguration of information across human and machine elements became intertwined in the discourses of military-funded scientists and engineers in the 1950s as they worked on the urgent problem of how to detect submarines carrying nuclear missiles in deep ocean environments, where it is difficult to hear and even more difficult to see. In this context, the channel was not only a description of sonic movement as directed flow but also a diagram for the reconstruction of the subsurface ocean as a striated space in which wars could be fought and political power could be projected. Perhaps more than any other development during this period, the deep sound channel demonstrates the critical role that the figure of the channel played in the mid-century rethinking of borders between human “operators” and machines as permeable and reconfigurable.

The discovery of the “deep sound channel” in the late 1930s, and its subsequent use in ocean surveillance, thus highlight the ongoing centrality of channel-oriented thinking about sound in the military and scientific

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communities during this period. The channel metaphor is not an after-the-fact translation or simplification of pre-existing knowledge about an acoustic phenomenon to non-experts. Rather, the channel metaphor is a crucial part of what might be called the “poetics” of underwater communi-cation and navigation, or the “figural dimensions of the process itself as well as the modes through which the process is represented in audio-technical discourse” (Sterne and Rodgers 2011: 35). While other metaphors were conceivable for oceanic structures (zones, layers, ducts, etc.), the channel was quickly installed as the central metaphor in both the process of acoustic surveillance in the ocean and the audio-technical discourses surrounding that process. Such metaphors, as Paul Edwards argues, are “part of the flesh of thought and culture, not merely its communicative skin. Therefore the politics of culture is, very largely, a politics of metaphor, and an inves-tigation of metaphor must play an integral role in the full understanding of any cultural object” (1996: 158).

Through SOSUS, the US Navy, university research laboratories and telecommunications firms enacted what was then a new model of the ocean as an audio medium suitable for real-time monitoring of subsea entities and events. By opening up the ocean’s acoustic environment as the “hunting ground” for Navy-funded research—and by repurposing elements of commonplace, multichannel media such as the telephone to exploit this new understanding of long-distance information flows in ocean sound—the US Navy channelized the ocean. The ocean’s soundscape was segmented and could now be treated as a set of discrete sound channels for the purpose of rendering the sources of sound more detectable, predictable and control-lable. SOSUS split ocean sound into a series of frequencies with different propagation properties; it mapped the ocean in the form of a diagram resembling a multichannel audio medium; and the system was designed to enclose the ocean in its network of hydrophones, listening stations, satellite relays and surveillance aircraft. In these ways, SOSUS embodied a militar-ized concept of the ocean soundscape as a series of quantified, addressable and locatable points where no sound would go unheard, undetected or unidentified—and where no sound would escape the Navy’s underwater ears or the conceptual categories of signal and noise that guided both the design and use of this infrastructure.

Since the declassification of SOSUS in 1991, the Navy has been providing data to civilian researchers working on Navy-approved projects, including acoustic studies of ocean warming, monitoring of undersea earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and the communication and migration patterns of whales and other marine mammals. This changing of hands has opened up deep-sea listening techniques and infrastructure to groups and organizations that sometimes use the channels in ways that conflict with the military’s interests. But new techniques of controlling ocean space by monopolizing particular sonic frequencies have emerged in the form of

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giant, towed sonar arrays, which are “portable” in the sense that they are not permanently fixed to the ocean floor like the SOSUS network and can be deployed on what is called a theater basis.

Sonar, and SOSUS in particular, constructs the ocean not only as rational—this, Burnett tells us, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the figuration of the chronometrical sea or the use of the ocean as kind of clock (2003: 12-13)—but rather as a part of the closed world in Paul Edwards’ sense of a cybernetic space of perfect prediction. And yet, as one digs further into the SOSUS episode of sonar history, one encounters unexpected turns toward a conceptualization of the ocean as radically open—open, for example, to an assortment of “mystery sounds” that for decades both fascinated and frustrated sonar operators and SOSUS analysts. The ocean soundscape in SOSUS also became open to new sensings and intuitions about nonhuman intelligence, such as the long-distance communication of whales, which also use the deep sound channel to communicate from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. This, in turn, inspired musicians along Canada’s West Coast in the 1970s to use Navy-derived hydrophones to broadcast music to whales. Over time, the multiple uses of SOSUS highlight growing tensions between the ongoing preoccupation with the channel as a modality of prediction and control, and the exploratory, affective and often spiritual associations with the channel on the margins of mainstream military and scientific activity.

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the Ocean Environment. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.—2006. “The American Sound Surveillance System: Using the Ocean to Hunt Soviet

Submarines, 1950–1961.” International Journal of Naval History 5(2). http://www.ijnhonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/article_weir_aug06.pdf

Whitman, E.C. 2005. “SOSUS: The ‘Secret Weapon’ of Undersea Surveillance.” Undersea Warfare 7(2) http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_25/sosus.htm

PART TWO

Listening Cultures

CHAPTER FOUR

Training the Listener : Stereo Demonstration Discs in an Emerging Consumer Market

Tim J. Anderson

Writing about the temporal logics of the post-war US recording industry, Keir Keightley argues that the long-play institutions that came to dominate rock by the 1970s were fully articulated during the 1950s, “with the adult-oriented popular music of singers such as Sinatra leading the way” (2004: 376). Keightley’s argument is compelling and suggests that scholars inter-ested in music and media history could mine a deep vein to discover the many experiments—successful and failed—that established the LP’s specific aesthetic, promotional and retail formations. This kind of genealogy of a popular music infrastructure has real potential, which I would like to embrace in discussing the arrival of in-home stereo technologies. As part of the many promises of high-fidelity technologies, stereo offered consumers not only new modes of listening but, as I argue elsewhere, “a diversified set of aesthetic trajectories” (Anderson 2006: 117). The combination of new technological arrangements and sonic ambitions, both of which were dedicated to domestic spaces, demanded a complex negotiation in an industry that wished to expand by making previous audio arrangements obsolete for in-home listening.

For example, Keightley argues that North American hi-fi culture competed with television for its place in the home and was viewed as part of a larger “conflict between the sexes over domestic space” (1996: 156). High fidelity provided a masculine promise of escape from the ostensibly feminine confines of televised lowbrow conceits, such as mass advertising

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and conformity (157). However, to make this promise, systems and records needed to demonstrate the possibility of reproducing concert-hall audio in consumers’ living rooms. Indeed, throughout the late 1950s and 1960s the introduction of stereo to the consumer market was marked by a continual series of spectacular audio demonstrations, directed at a substantially masculine public.

So persistent was this need to demonstrate stereo that almost two decades after the initiation of this practice it was not only remembered but could be parodied with significant affection. To gain a basic understanding of these issues, this chapter examines how demonstration discs were positioned in the US trade magazine Billboard between 1957 and the late 1960s. In doing so, it aims to invigorate some of the general discussion regarding the importance of stereo demonstration records, in order to understand how and why the issue of demonstration was such an important aspect of early stereo consumer culture.

Many demonstration records linger in consignment shops, thrift stores and dollar bins as hi-fi detritus. The fact that these records are not only forgotten, but have been all but ejected from collections and popular memory, poses significant problems for researchers. Anyone with an interest in this period is necessarily reliant on the less-than-systematic collections of enthusiasts, which all too often reflect personal preferences and idiosyn-crasies. These kinds of collections are helpful but they have a tendency to collapse a number of distinct commercial and aesthetic ambitions. From a contemporary position there is a temptation to simply conflate stereo with issues of high fidelity and easy listening, as part of a popular culture that permeated a North American set of musical goods following the Second World War. True, the issues of hi-fi, easy listening and stereo commingled. However, each topic was surrounded by its own constellation of concerns and investments. Bringing historical specificity to this period is key for a number reasons.1 Perhaps most importantly, this work can unearth otherwise buried understandings of “easy listening,” providing lessons for those of us who have picked through bins of records that for years were dismissed simply because they bore labels such as “Quadrophonic Sound” or “Living Presence.”

1 For example, Keightley has examined the term “easy listening,” arguing that the phrase once used to praise oratory and musical performance changed so much “[in] the immediate postwar years, [owing to] the massive amount of promotional discourse,” that it effectively eroded this previous meaning (2008: 312). Instead, Keightley points out, “the usage of ‘easy listening’ shifted toward the promotional description of forms of commercial music, [and] its valence also moved from assuredly positive to increasingly ambiguous, becoming at times tinged with disdain. By circa 1960 it was widely recognized as a name for a series of popular music products [that] deployed a central trope of consumer marketing: the idea of the ‘easy,’ a word already possessing a centuries-old complex of associations with comfort and luxury” (312–13).

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Similarly lost to our collective memory has been the long out-of-print Official National Lampoon Stereo Test and Demonstration Record (Subitzky 1974). Conceived by Ed Subitzky, a writer who would go on to work for David Letterman and eventually publish in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Billboard reported in June of 1974 that National Lampoon’s fourth long-playing record was initially set to be titled “Stick it in Your Ear” (Radcliffe 1974: 40). The same article also noted that the album would come with a book, “a specially prepared hi-fi primer,” that would “entertain as well as inform readers about their hi-fi equipment” (ibid.). With a release planned for that summer’s gathering of dealers and consumers at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, the humorous demonstration record would be part of a unique promotion. The National Lampoon would draw from its magazine’s advertisers, sell ad space to them in the hi-fi primer record insert, and provide 15,000 gratis copies of the LP to in-home audio dealers (including both the booklet and order forms for the LP). In turn, if a dealer found that the LP was popular, they could purchase more LPs at the discount rate of $1.50 per unit. The idea was to stock them and sell them to the upscale, college-educated readers who purchased the high-end, component stereo systems they supplied (ibid.). Subitzky’s record was eventually released and retitled as the Official National Lampoon Stereo Test and Demonstration Record, which included the aforementioned thirty-two page, somewhat serious hi-fi primer filled with ads.2

As a narrator, Subitzky acts as a guide for listeners. He leads them through one sonic scenario after another, illustrating the power of high-fidelity stereo as a source of fantastic realism, while also ridiculing the sonic absurdities that stereo often celebrated. Throughout, Subitzky’s position as an audible “straight man” mocks the earnestness of the demonstration. Part of the record’s humor comes from a 1970s counter-cultural imperative to tweak what was viewed as an uncritical embrace of consumer culture. The dark humor of presenting listeners with the sound of a train wreck that is inflamed by an incendiary bombing parodies many sound effect records and demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s. Still, as the LP’s primer book underscores over and over, this is a serious demonstration disc and the National Lampoon viewed stereo as anything but a disposable good: its glossary includes basic audio terms, explains their applicability and is positioned as a humorous yet serious educational tool replete with actual

2 Although a parody, the album was an actual stereo demonstration record. Much of its humor stems from the way it mined the same vein of New Frontier naïveté and optimism that P.J. O’Rourke and Doug Kenney explored a year before when they edited the company’s hit book, the National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody (2003). Subitzky contributed to the book, a parody of the American high-school yearbook of a fictional school. Just as the parodic yearbook formally mocks the typical format, the LP offers a send-up of the many stereo demonstration records produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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advertisements for leading hi-fi and stereo component manufacturers of the day (Subitzky 1974).

The importance of this record is not that it sold numerous copies (it didn’t); nor is it a classic piece of humor (that’s debatable). Instead, it should remind us that stereo demonstration records were once such a common facet of the US audio landscape that one of the leading American comedy franchises believed it could profit from such an elaborate joke. It is the popular ubiquity of this form that I would like to underline, as what is perceived as a novelty from a historical distance was in fact important to the industry as a whole. Indeed, the form of the demonstration record was viewed as a marketplace necessity, developed to convince a public to invest in a new set of sonic techniques and listening technologies. By placing these forgotten objects into a specific historical moment of ignored practices and past consumer goods, we can begin to tease out some of the anxieties, promises and purposes that these demonstration discs contain and attempt to allay.

Take for example London Records’ 1958 release of their demonstration record, A Journey into Stereo Sound. Billboard reported in June 1958 that the record would initially be priced at $4.98 (equivalent to $40.00 in 2015) and would include eighteen selections taken from the “initial general release by London stereo LPs to be issued in July” (Anon. 1958a: 2). These included sets by Mantovani, Edmundo Ros, the London Philharmonic, tracks of tap dancing, racing cars and other sounds. Titled “Train Sequence,” the opening selection begins with the sound of a train going over the tracks, followed by the voice of the narrator, played by British actor Geoffrey Sumner, and then proceeds to present the sound of what is apparently the same train pulling into a station. While somewhat forgotten, Geoffrey Sumner’s voice became enshrined as a sample for Coldcut’s remix of Eric B and Rakim’s 1987 single, “Paid in Full.” This may simply be considered by some as nothing more than an odd connection brought about by a DJ’s skill as a digger. However, these two seemingly disparate records, from two different eras and two different genres, actually point to a similar understanding of what popular records can be: explicit repositories of various sonic spaces whose pleasures are predicated in listening to and identifying such audio snippets. While “Paid in Full” is from an era of sample-heavy, popular hip hop—an era that has been practically legislated out of existence—and A Journey into Stereo Sound is openly utilitarian as a promotional product, both embrace a fragmented presentational aesthetic.

This presentational aesthetic should not be ignored. The emphasis on fragmented presentations in this and other stereo demonstration records reminds us not to privilege a narrative that understands stereo as a technical improvement designed to produce better musical products. While the production of sonic fragments may not have been the aim of these recordings, their presentations of spectacular moments point to a form of

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listening pleasure that is neither “easy” nor relaxing. In fact, the devel-opment of stereo demonstration discs in the 1950s and 1960s follows the logic of earlier stereo demonstrations in the 1930s and 1940s, which foregrounded two distinct but parallel aims: to educate the public on what stereo is and how to listen to it, while also persuading the public to invest in these new technologies. The importance of these demonstrations cannot be overstated. To be sure, early stereo’s promotion—via live, staged presen-tations—provided a means to generate moments of verification that are an important part of this history. In the Audio Dictionary, Glenn White notes a large-scale test that took place in 1933, which demonstrated an early form of multichannel reproduction that was developed by Harvey Fletcher and his co-workers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (1987: 318–19). Russell Sanjek notes that while experiments with two-channel sound began in the early 1930s (with British EMI), it was not until April 1940 that an audience at Carnegie Hall heard a “practical true stereophonic recording” (1988: 358–9). Presented by technicians from Western Electric–Bell Laboratories, the experience consisted of two hours of music and speech that came through a wall of hidden speakers and included the likes of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Paul Robeson.

Yet, as important as these and other public demonstrations were for engineers and producers, it is not clear what effects they had in priming the consumer market. Indeed, consumer level stereophonic sound was not developed until 1952, when Emory Cook premiered a dual-stylus system whereby each stylus played a separate track. Although the system never achieved significant popularity, Cook developed a catalog of twenty-five dual-stylus records. Two years later, magnetic reel-to-reel stereo tape found its way into the US marketplace. However, reel-to-reel tape always posed a number of problems for consumers: the relatively fragile quality of magnetic tape, coupled with the difficulties involved in storing and playing the medium (new equipment, threading, tapes that “unspool”), meant that it would never be user-friendly enough to catch on at a mass level.

It was not until 1957 that Audio Fidelity, an independent record label with a very limited number of musical assets led by Sidney Frey, would demonstrate and produce the first single-track stereo record. With side one including Dixieland jazz selections played by the Dukes of Dixieland, and the second side offering various sounds of steam and diesel engine trains, the record was explicitly positioned as a demonstration of Audio Fidelity’s ability to produce a quality hi-fi product—stereo in particular. Debuting the record at a public event at New York City’s Times Auditorium, Billboard reported that what made this record distinct was that, unlike earlier stereo discs which had been made for past special demonstrations, this one had been made “in quantity,” with 500 in the label’s first run (Anon. 1957b: 27). Furthermore, the stereo disc was backward compatible with even the

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most “elementary hi-fi rig.” While Billboard reported that when played on stereo equipment the record sounded “too broad” to be considered “good stereo,” the LP lost none of its punch when played monaurally. Billboard also noted that Frey himself called the disc a “hi fidelity” curiosity. For Frey, widespread sales of the disc seemed “impossible,” as the equipment needed to play it properly was not yet available in the consumer market. As such, the single groove LP utilized a special cartridge and tone arm, developed in Holland by Fairchild Recording Equipment. Thus, Frey informed Billboard that the disc would be freely available to “interested people in the record industry at no charge” to help “engineers test proto-types for stereo cartridges” (ibid.).

The event was clearly memorable for at least one writer, who viewed it as something of a tipping point. Five years after the event, Ralph Freas wrote about the release of the demonstration record, pointing out that the Audio Fidelity disc had “set off a chain of events that resulted in the intro-duction of stereo phonos from every manufacturer—Admiral to Zenith. And six months after that, stereo records were hitting the market in a steady stream. The record and phonograph business hasn’t been the same since” (1962: 36).

The importance of the event was twofold, as echoed by Ren Grevatt, who wrote an adjacent column to Freas’ Billboard remembrance. First, it provided retailers with a specific reassurance about making future invest-ments in stereo discs. Unlike the past, this format would not repeat the mistake of the speed wars that occurred during the switch from 78-rpm to 45-rpm and 33⅓-rpm records in the late 1940s. That competition had required retailers to make dual investments that left them with the long-term inefficiency of doubled inventories (Grevatt 1962: 36). Indeed, consumers could purchase these recordings and find that they worked fine on their mono equipment, thus offering record retailers a convenient and assuring sales pitch. Secondly, this investment in stereo would also provide an incentive for retailers to sell new audio equipment that could replace their hi-fi investments of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Much like the boom period of the 1990s, when recording and consumer electronics industries sported unparalleled profits from the sale of CD players and discs under the promotional thrust of technological progress, stereo retailers and manufacturers were given a similar opportunity to upsell consumers to a new “real thing” (37).

In order to achieve this upsell, in the face of consumer ignorance and reluctance to adopt a new format, the proponents of stereo developed an extensive educational program that also embraced the most ad hoc experiments. It is in this context that the creation of numerous types of demonstration records occurred. In many such records, the reproduction of various sonic scenarios, selections of diverse and exotic musical genres, audible spaces, everyday sounds—both modern and mundane—were

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presented through the newfound detail of high-fidelity stereo; they accented explicit presentation, thereby opposing any aesthetic of absorption. Often, demonstration discs also employed audible narration, which connected the various segments and explained the value, benefits and appropriate use of stereo recordings. In some cases, labels such as Audio Fidelity would produce albums dedicated to little more than discrete sets of audio effects. Designed to present the power of their stereo processes, Audio Fidelity’s Sound Effects record series boasted that these technologies fulfilled a promise for a new type of listening through a newfound sense of sonic purity—a sonic purity that was almost redemptive in character. As claimed on the jacket of Sound Effects Volume 1, “Sound was not really born until the coming of high fidelity recording.” Indeed, this Audio Fidelity sound effects record was purposefully “designed to showcase dozens of sound effects people hear every day, but never really listen to either because they are taken for granted or are distilled by a thousand and one things that contribute to their impurity.”3 The record claimed that “one cannot help but identify oneself with the environment of the sound”—whether the roar of a lion, ringing bells, trains, various jet planes or shattering glass—“and its individual impact on the emotions” (Frey 1960).

The emplacement of self embraced by these records was the result of a commercially incentivized pedagogy, which aimed to train listeners to hear the many differences provided by quality stereo discs and equipment. This emphasis on new technologies is an important point, and one that is all too often forgotten in popular music studies: the consumption of new popular music technologies is just as vital to the electronics industry as the production and sale of music is to the music industry itself.4 These goods should not be bracketed off as “givens” by popular music scholars: whether they are placed in studios, on stage or in living rooms, music technologies have histories that include the circumstances and strategies of their promotion. Furthermore, these technologies have histories that

3 The importance of stereo sound in general was not simply redemptive audio; it also highlighted the distinctions achieved by US consumer culture in a manner that had geopolitical resonance. For example, Billboard noted that in at least one case stereo was considered such a significant material and cultural improvement that the US State Department would promote it as an official part of the American Dream (Anon 1959e: 58). With the responsibility of presenting a positive vision of the United States in the American Exhibition of 1959 in Moscow, the State Department chose to include members of the Institute of High Fidelity Manufacturers and charge them to “put on a stereo exhibit” as part of what is the most famous exhibition of consumer goods in twentieth-century history—as well as the site of Vice President Nixon and Premier Khrushchev’s “kitchen debate” (ibid.; cf. Hall 1959).4 Simon Frith argues that the music industry is comprised of three distinct considerations: musical cultures, popular economics and the effects of technological change. The three are intertwined and cannot be wholly separated in any informed discussion of a modern music culture industry. The record industry in this sense has always been part of the “electrical goods industry” and is related “to the development of radio, the cinema and television” (1988: 13).

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include other sets of objects and terms that circulate around them. In the case of in-home stereo, the demonstration record was one such object. Its function was not only to educate listeners about the sounds and the lexicon of stereo, but to allay the multiple anxieties about how stereo should be used and discussed.

For example, a staple element of the demonstration record—one that was parodied by the previously mentioned National Lampoon disc—is the balance track. The balance track is designed to help the listener discover and adjust the appropriate levels from each channel of sound. Take for instance the introductory track to Columbia Records’ Listening in Depth (Various 1958b). The album opens with the voice of Goddard Lieberson, Columbia Records’ then president, who explains the utility of the unearthly rever-beration contained in the balance track. Although the balance track lasts for almost a minute and a half and leads into the Philadelphia Orchestra’s rendition of Respighi’s Fountains of Rome, its position as an introductory track announces that this disc includes a new type of experience. In the album’s accompanying booklet, Lieberson writes that “the new depth of stereophony offers the possibility of listening ‘actively.’” To be sure, Lieberson claims that these new depths could be well within the reach of any person who measured their speaker placement and placed themselves in a solid, “unchanging relationship” with them. While the speaker placement was “not absolutely essential,” proper speaker placement would allow the listener to experience “a dimension probably not experienced before.” Indeed, Lieberson’s emphasis on the effect that it would have on music placed him in similar standing with his independent brethren. As Lieberson wrote, “no matter what sensations one may experience in stereophonic listening, it is well to remember that the ‘effects’—the airplanes, trains, and startlingly real ‘sounds,’ natural or machine made—are but momentary pleasures, and that the real value of reproduced sound is furnishing the sublime experience of music” (1958).

While Lieberson’s promise of novel and uniquely stereophonic listening experiences could redeem music, and while Frey concluded that everyday sound would be purified, both emphasized improvements their companies made in long-play discs. However, other demonstration discs were developed to highlight stereophonic hardware. Take for example the Admiral Stereophonic Demonstration Record. Pressed in 1958 by RCA Victor, the record includes a variety of the label’s popular artists from numerous genres (e.g. Arthur Murray, Chet Atkins, the Three Suns, Carol Channing, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops) as well as a balance track. However, the record was developed not to highlight those artists but to explain how Admiral, a US electronics and appliance brand based in Chicago, had produced a noteworthy system. The audible narrator on the record appears after a brass and percussion introduction and spends his time describing the merits of the Admiral kit—specifically how the

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solid-state upgrade solves the problem of vacuum tube amplification and the system’s “phantom third channel” (Various 1958a). The inclusion of a narrator, which Admiral touted as their “sonic salesman” technique, was ballyhooed in a Billboard article that announced how “Admiral’s stereo sets [would] speak directly to the customer via a new ‘turntable salesman’: a 12-inch record included with the sale of every Admiral stereo set. According to the article, “Stereo requires much explanation to the uninitiated [and Admiral] believes this demonstration record will be a successful educational medium” (Anon. 1958b: 12).

The inclusion of extensive liner notes, salesmen and booklets in the three examples mentioned above clearly illustrates the importance of educating and assuaging the fears of consumers. For electronics firms and record companies of the late 1950s, such education was imperative, as a new market of consumers was emerging. With census projections in hand, Billboard noted in early 1959 that the prospect for audio dealers and record retailers was “dreamy,” as there would be 19 to 26 million new households forming between 1959 and 1980. Perhaps most interestingly, Billboard underscored that the five- to thirteen-year-old age group was 40 percent larger than in 1950, and that “earliest education in stereo would logically have to be directed at [this group and] the 14 to 17 age bracket, which will be aiming at households of their own in another short span of years.” Billboard further remarked that, “for the small fry, the idea of the two-gun draw could conceivably make transference to the two ear listen. For the teeners, a favorite platter that sends them on one speaker, could presumably send them twice as far on two” (Anon. 1959a).

The pitches from the Admiral and Columbia demonstration records emphasized new norms for listeners, including the ways they ought to acquaint themselves with their equipment and how they should use it. Both demonstration records also provided samples that could help listeners create a new audible space, a middle or third space, which would only result from a proper stereo setup. However, audio is always a temporary phenomenon and involves numerous contingencies, such as a room’s acoustic signature. Indeed, the always-fluid nature of sonic standards and practices is nothing new, as Jonathan Sterne reminds us. Sterne notes that, even before sound “could be captured by electric devices … fidelity was [always] an amazingly fluid term, signaling the plasticity of practices of and around sound repro-duction” (2003: 216, emphasis in original). Furthermore, “During the early history of commercially available sound reproduction technologies, from roughly 1878 through the 1920s, these issues were both practical and philosophical. People had to learn how to understand the relations between sounds made by people and sounds made by machines” (ibid., emphasis added). If we accept Sterne’s premise that “sound fidelity is a story that we tell ourselves to staple separate pieces of sonic reality together” (219), we can begin to see how these and other demonstration records act as extensive

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narrative devices that frame stereo as an important improvement for both music and sound.

Assuaging a Marketplace

David Tandy’s Guide to Stereo begins with the question, “When you buy a stereo today, what do you get?” His answer: “You get a lot of different things” (1960: 3). While his response is framed positively, Tandy also understood that stereo was still in a developmental stage: “one probable result of the present-day lack of standards of quality,” he said, “is that consumer stereo may be subject to much-needed change and development” (4). This lack of standards, coupled with the fluid character of fidelity, was part of the reason stereo books could never offer a definitive list of compo-nents to create an ideal listening scenario. Thus, electronics firms had to continually generate their own specific listening guides and demonstration materials.

Certainly, most firms grasped the need to repeatedly frame stereo as an improvement. Billboard reported in April 1959 that General Electric was offering an initial run of free twenty-six-page booklets, so that dealers could provide potential buyers with “a layman’s complete basic guide to stereo hi-fi” (Anon. 1959d: 58). In fact, by the late 1950s explaining how to execute these demonstrations became a key point of discussion. For example, in March of 1959 Billboard quoted Bob Farris, Motorola’s director of advertising and sales promotion, who explained why the electronics firm produced a stereo demonstration disc in conjunction with both Sonic Arts Inc. and Robert Oakes Jordan and Associates: “Stereo sales are largely made thru demonstration” (Anon. 1959c: 15). As such, the demonstration disc was simply one among many demonstration tools and techniques, including demonstration showrooms at appliance dealerships, displays at department stores, and staged “stereo parties” where pitches could be made to prospective listeners gathered together in a soft-sell environment. Billboard also reported on the development and use of special kits, such as Columbia Records’ “The Educator,” a relatively portable model that would be sold to schools with a demonstration disc titled Stereo is Hear (Anon. 1958d, Latimer 1958: 18, Anon. 1959f, Anon. 1960c: 21). In 1960, Billboard published an article consisting of “store-tested profit pointers for dealers,” wherein the author indicates that sales can be broken down into “portables and consoles.” The article asserts that once the salesperson understands which category to sell, the key to making the sale comes from determining, first, how to speak to the customer, and then, when you should “explain stereo” by playing “a demonstration record.” Furthermore, if the listener seemed hesitant, the sales personnel could ask “for the names of some of

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his favorite records” so that the store might play a “stereo version” (Scott 1960: 16). “[I]f your store doesn’t have a record department,” the article continues, “it’s wise to keep such favorites as the original cast albums of ‘Sound of Music’ and ‘My Fair Lady’; classical rousers such as Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ and Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’ should [also] be kept on hand for such demonstrations” (ibid.).

By the late 1950s it had become clear that portable home demonstrations were among the more successful techniques available, as they often allayed worries that equipment purchased on a retailer’s floor would actually work in one’s own domestic space. Writing in November of 1958, hi-fi writer Ralph Freas noted that Bright’s Manhattan, a New York hi-fi and appliance outlet, had developed a special demonstration technique with sales people trained to sell both on the shop floor and in prospective homes (1958: 20). Other Billboard reports included variations on the home demonstration technique, such as allowing the rental of a stereo system over a three-week period at a rate of five dollars per week. According to one sales manager in Sioux City, Iowa, this method was simply another form of the soft sell. Instead of pressuring the client to make a decision about purchasing a set after one demonstration, after three weeks the buyer would ideally come to the table with more confidence in his decision (Latimer 1960: 26). In May 1960, Billboard reported that one Miami retailer decided the best way to provide home demonstrations was to acquire and remodel an actual home, to which they could take their prospective customers. The specific house in question included five rooms, each of which could be used for demonstration purposes. And when all were being used at once, which was often, the intermingling clients could develop a sort of “party atmosphere” that “breaks down sales resistance” (Formby 1960: 14, 16). By 1960, Billboard could list what they observed had become a set of demonstration techniques that retailers found successful. These included one retailer that kept monaural sets on hand to play mono records, and then played the same records on a stereo system to “show the improvement that [it] gets.” Others claimed that the best way to sell stereo systems was to keep the demonstrations “brief” because “customers can lose themselves listening to a record and the sale flies out the window.” And in Philadelphia one observer claimed that there was “one universal plea from dealers: ‘Give us good demonstration records’” (Anon. 1960a). The necessity of these demonstrations was amplified in the same issue of Billboard, in an article titled “Public Still Has Plenty of Questions on Stereo” (Anon. 1960b).5

5 Of course every demonstration did not succeed. In 1959, Billboard began to report on failed demonstrations, or what they labeled “goofs” (Anon. 1959g). One such report listed all of the checks that a demonstration should take to succeed, stressing the numerous details that could quickly sour these events. Issues such as blown loudspeakers and no backup systems were flagged as especially problematic (Anon. 1959h).

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Stereo: Demonstrating an Oddity

One of the reasons stereo demonstrations were such a widespread and necessary phenomenon is that many listeners found stereo odd; it was unlike anything they had heard before. In this context, the sizeable number of stereo demonstration discs and other “sound-oriented records” that are now deposited in the used bins and thrift shops of countries such as the United States may seem strange. But they should not be considered naive. Instead, when one understands why such records emerged, they demonstrate a new set of popular listening practices and potentials, as well as the rather strange possibility of a domesticated sonic spectacle. In this sense, these discs were not simply sales pitches for sound systems. Instead, the discs—and the elaborate instructions they contained—were designed to create sonic exhibitions that could address consumers through direct display. This is the reason these records and their accompanying paratexts, such as liner notes and booklets, often emphasized proper installation, correct speaker placement and the creation of specific sonic spaces.6 The records, liner notes and booklets worked together to promote a new set of listening and exhibition practices that were paradigmatically different, and which demanded the concerted negotiation of multiple actors.

This proliferation of demonstrating new listening and exhibition practices is reminiscent of another medium that provided a new, spectacular mode of vision: the emergence of cinema in the early twentieth century. As Miriam Hansen notes, “A different notion of cinema can be inferred … from exhibition practices that were denounced or became the object of conflicts between individual exhibitors and producers” (1991: 44). For Hansen, this involved processes of negation, such as

representational strategies aimed at suppressing awareness of the theater space and absorbing the spectator into the illusionist space on screen: closer framing, centered composition, and directional lighting; contin-uity editing which created a coherent diegetic space unfolding itself to an ubiquitous invisible observer; and the gradual increase of film length culminating in the introduction of the feature film. (ibid.)

6 Notwithstanding some key works in literary studies, classical musicology and film/television studies (e.g. Genette 1997, Symes 2004, Gray 2010; cf. Tee, this volume), scholarly discussion of audio “paratexts” seems long in coming. This is especially true in an era where liner notes, gatefold sleeves and other texts that accompanied so many audio productions have seemingly disappeared as MP3 files and streaming services now dominate the music ecosystem. Investigation into the paratexts that are emerging in this new ecosystem of recorded music and sound may offer clues about the reception of audio writ large. This includes how best to use recordings and what to listen for, as well as when, where and with whom one should listen to recordings, and other issues surrounding their care.

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The most important factor was to systematically generate a “vehicle of absorption” that could deliver “the story” in a manner such that, as one commentator observed in 1909, “people forgot the film, forgot the screen, and forgot themselves” (ibid.). As such, previously short and discrete sets of moving pictures, many of which were self reflexive about the power of this new viewing technology, were purposely reshaped into a mode of lengthy, contemplative cinema where both viewers and films became more absorbed into narrative.

As a category, demonstration records openly reject such an aesthetic of absorption. Instead, they exist as liminal products that are partly educa-tional and partly involved in a pronounced reflexivity about the exhibition of sound. These and other records, including those containing specific categories of sounds rather than those dedicated to inviting listeners to forget their surroundings and immerse themselves in a specific piece of music, provided novel entertainments through their commitment to audio spectaculars. Indeed, just as Hansen notes that early American cinema embraced “the ‘thrill of display’ [and] an explicit exertion of ‘an exhibi-tionist attitude’” (34), demonstration discs championed the distractions provided by sonic effects, excessive sound exhibitions, and presentation above representation. And like early cinema’s interest in the presentation of visual attractions, these demonstration records and their sonic gimmickry are anathema to a middlebrow culture that promoted LPs designed for a non-distracted form of listening. Just as early cinema changed throughout the 1910s and 1920s to encourage narrative absorption, early stereo and hi-fi culture began to focus more on music and created a discourse and a listening practice that emphasized relaxation and immersion. This rhetoric is part of what Keightley identifies as key to the creation of background mood music, a musical commodity that he argues was a distinct part of the “middlebrowing” North American post-war record and music culture of the 1950s. Furthermore, it is this growth of a middlebrow record culture that prefigured the culture of “concept albums,” a form of recorded music that would become dominant during the late 1960s and through the 1970s, as the rock genre reached maturity. Such albums demanded to be under-stood and experienced as a serious art form, with contemplative listening as a necessary practice (Keightley 2008). By adapting Tom Gunning’s (1990) concept of the “cinema of attractions” as an analytical category through which we might position the demonstration disc, we may begin to understand these records as key avenues through which alternate visions of popular music and sound recording were produced. Specifically, we may begin to better apprehend the pleasures and intentions of those records as aesthetic investments not affiliated with domesticated contemplation and immersion but, rather, varieties of foregrounded audible spectacle.

One particular type of spectacular audio that reoccurs on many stereo records is the figure of the moving train. I referred earlier to the example

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of the crashing train on the Official National Lampoon Stereo Test and Demonstration Record. Indeed, it is not only a sonic joke, but an invocation of an audio scenario that was itself a popular trope. So popular was this trope that reviews of records emphasizing train sounds appear frequently enough in Billboard between 1957 and 1962 that the magazine said the “train record” had become something of a subgenre (Anon. 1957a, Anon. 1958c, Anon. 1959b, Anon. 1962a, Anon. 1962b). In some cases, these records wrapped such sonic demonstrations within a nostalgia borne out of the impulse to preserve the sound of a dying era. “The steam locomotive lately has been riding the disc track more than its own rail bed,” announced a review for the 1958 record A Farewell To Steam: “It’s a sound documentary which records for all time the sad adieu and era as the last Santa Fe steam-powered locomotive makes the Los Angeles–San Bernardino run” (Anon. 1958c: 30). A 1962 Billboard review of Sunday Only claimed the disc was “a gasser for nostalgic rail buffs” and provided stereo sound of the Burlington Route “from various perspectives—close alongside, on a mountain, near the tracks, on the tender during a mountain grade, etc.” (Anon. 1962b: 74).

Because none of these are positioned as “demonstration records” per se, they do not owe their existence to a specific sales pitch. Instead, they are records that Billboard often labeled as “Sound” or “Specialty” records. For example, in their review of Audio Fidelity’s Railroad Sounds: The Sounds of a Vanishing Era, Billboard notes: “the disk faithfully reproduces the sounds of the railroads (whistles, the shriek of steel against steel, hissing steam, bells, etc.) but it also manages to express the mass, the Gargantuan weight, and the almost overwhelming power of the vanishing Titans of the tracks” (Anon. 1957a: 28). Without an “audible guide,” the record presents these sounds as they travel in and out of sonic space, creating a specific sense of animation and a variety of audio perspectives as trains arrive and depart (Frey 1957). The emphasis on audible presentation and departure repeatedly places these trains and their movements into the foreground. Such a foregrounding of sound distinguishes this and other “train records” precisely because the audio spectacle is so explicit.

The absence of a specific narrative force or mediating practice on Railroad Sounds distances it from any association with travel media. Indeed, audible guides, as a trope of travel and tour media, have a substantial history.7 In the case of guided tour demonstration records, the

7 Drawing from Charles Musser’s work on early cinema’s audible guides in travelogues, Hansen notes that exhibitors used these guides to mediate the image on the screen to the audience. Yet these lecturers, musicians and sound-effect specialists were nothing new: early cinema’s “mediating activities” drew explicitly from “long-standing practices of screen entertainment. For two centuries magic lantern shows had presented fictional narratives, allegorical themes as well as documentary interest. With the increased availability of photographic slides in the second half of the nineteenth century, the travelogue became a more prominent and elaborate genre, in many ways anticipating a mode of presentation for films” (Hansen 1991: 43).

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assistance of audible narration appears regularly. For example, side one of Bel Canto’s Stereo Demonstration Record (1959) offers an extraor-dinary case of audible narration in its “stereophonic tour of the city of Los Angeles.” The first side includes narration by Jack Wagner—an actor best known as the official park announcer of Disneyland from the opening of the park in July 1955 until 1993—which takes the listener on a driving tour of the city, highlighting various destinations such as the Hollywood Park Races, LA International Airport and the Riverside Race Track (Various 1959). So common was the trope that the radio comedy team of Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, or “Bob and Ray,” quickly identified it as a source for parody and made it a significant element of Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular (Goulding and Elliot 1958).

Released in 1958 by RCA, the comedy duo’s demonstration record contains five skits “with sound effects” that connect the ten other musical selections (from popular singers, orchestras and bands) with a travel narrative. The record begins with the sound of a horse-led coach approaching a castle, which houses the “crazed electronic genius Dr. Akbar.” In this opening cut, we are guided through a set of sounds including right-to-left and left-to-right movement of doors closing and footsteps. In the record’s second skit, we are presented with movement through stairwells and forced exposure to a set of bagpipes, which move through a large circular sonic space that repeatedly brings the sound from left to right and from the background to the foreground.

While Bob and Ray’s mockery of the audible tour guide trope reminds us of the seemingly excessive sound that stereo initially presented to listeners, it also suggests a new type of listening that, while odd, would soon become embraced as a norm by a generation raised on stereo. These artists would take such techniques not only into musical experiments, but also into comedy albums produced by the likes of the Firesign Theater and, of course, the National Lampoon. As the National Lampoon demon-stration record reminded the listener in its liner notes, the record was designed to “offer a potpourri of very loud songs, very deep sounds, and very high-pitched sounds” to help “determine how well your stereo system is working” and “whether your sense of humor is in or out of tune.” It also allowed the listener to “fulfill one of the primary attributes of man: showing off” (Subitzky 1974).

Again, this pronounced emphasis on sonic exhibitionism stands in contradistinction to what many present-day listeners consider to be a sign of an album’s artistic allowance: its sustained artistic and musical unification. Indeed, just as Hansen argues that early cinema’s role as an exhibitionist series of objects distinguishes it “from the voyeuristic ceremonies” that form the classical model of film—including both the devices and rituals that work toward moments of representation rather than presentation (1991: 42)—these records and their presentational aesthetic are at odds with the

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emphasis on immersion that is stressed by most music albums. There is thus little wonder why so many demonstration records have been dismissed. However, in dismissing such records we have ignored a world of recordings invested in moments of artifice and sonic presentation—recordings that are distinctly different than many albums that have come before and after.

References

Anderson, T.J. 2006. Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar Recording. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Anon. 1957a. “Spotlight on Sound: Railroad Sounds (Steam and Diesel) Audio Fidelity AFLP 1843.” Billboard (14 October): 28.

—1957b. “Mass Produced Stereo Disk is Produced.” Billboard (16 December): 27.

—1958a. “London Sets Hi-Fi Stereo Demo Record.” Billboard (16 June): 2.—1958b. “Dealer Aid: Admiral Sets ‘Talk’ Stereo by Demo Disk.” Billboard (20

October): 12.—1958c. “Sound: A Farewell to Steam, Railroad Sounds.” Billboard (27

October): 30.—1958d. “Col. Debs Dealer Demo Stereo Kit at Cost.” Billboard (17 November):

4.—1959a. “Census Estimate Cues Stereo Sales Dream.” Billboard (12 January):

n.p.—1959b. “Low-Price Sounds: Stereo Sounds. Rondo-lette SA 46.” Billboard (23

February): 36.—1959c. “Motorola Cuts New Demo Disk.” Billboard (2 March): 15.—1959d. “GE Offers Stereo Sales Aid Booklet.” Billboard (6 April): 58.—1959e. “Reds Get Look At Component High Fidelity.” Billboard (6 April): 58.—1959f. “Macy Branch Sets Stereo Phono Show.” Billboard (14 September): 10.—1959g. “Editorial: Gains and ‘Goofs’.” Billboard (28 September): 16.—1959h. “Trouble Spots: Watch Out! Stereo Demos Have Pitfalls.” Billboard (28

September): 16, 18.—1960a. “Dealers List Stereo Demo Techniques.” Billboard (11 January): 16, 26.—1960b. “Public Still Has Plenty of Questions on Stereo.” Billboard (11

January): 16.—1960c. “Soft Sales Approach: ‘Stereo Parties’ Seed Buyer Crop.” Billboard

(18 April): 21.—1962a. “Specialty: Steam Railroading Under Thundering Skies. Stereomonic MF

8.” Billboard (22 September): 72.—1962b. “Specialty: Sunday Only. Stereomonic MF 9. ” Billboard

(22 September): 74.Formby, J. 1960. “Home Atmosphere: House Ideal Spot for Stereo Demo.”

Billboard (23 May): 14, 16.Freas, R. 1958. “Home Demo Method Spurs Phono Sales.” Billboard

(3 November): 20, 26.

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—1962. “Audio Fidelity Bombshell Had Industry Agog.” Billboard (22 December): 36.

Frey, S. 1957. Railroad Sounds of a Vanishing Era. Audio Fidelity, AFLP 1843.—1960. Sound Effects, Volume 1. Major Records, 1016.Frith, S. 1988. “The Industrialization of Music.” In Music for Pleasure: Essays in

the Sociology of Pop, 11–23. New York: Routledge.Genette, G. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press.Goulding, R. and B. Elliot. 1958. Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular. RCA

Victor, LSP-1773.Gray, J. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media

Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.Grevatt, R. 1962. “Sales Impact On Record Dealers Still Being Felt.” Billboard

(22 December): 36–7.Gunning, T. 1990. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and

the Avant Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. T. Elsaesser, 56–62. London: BFI.

Hall, M. 1959. “Doughnuts for Russkys; Lid on Jazz, R&R.” Billboard (6 April): 1, 4.

Hansen, M. 1991. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Keightley, K. 1996. “‘Turn it Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space and High Fidelity, 1948–59.” Popular Music 15(2): 149–77.

—2004. “Long Play: Adult-Oriented Popular Music and the Temporal Logics of the Post-War Sound Recording Industry in the USA.” Media, Culture and Society 26(3): 375–91.

—2008. “Music for Middlebrows: Defining the Easy Listening Era, 1946–1966.” American Music 26(3): 309–35.

Latimer, B. 1958. “New Demo Room Cues Phono Sales Spurt.” Billboard (27 October): 18, 20.

Latimer, R. 1960. “Prospect Convincer: Home Rental Stereo Demo Clinches Phono Customers.” Billboard (25 April): 26.

Lieberson, G. 1958. “The New Listening.” In Listening In Depth: An Introduction to Columbia Stereophonic Sound. Columbia Masterworks, SF 1.

O’Rourke, P.J. and D. Kenney. 2003. National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody. New York: Rugged Land.

Radcliffe, J. 1974. “Lampoon’s Demo to Stick In Ear.” Billboard (8 June): 40.Sanjek, R. 1988. American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four

Hundred Years. New York: Oxford University Press.Scott, R. 1960. “Store-Tested Profit Pointers for Dealers: Show ’Em Technique

Adds Stereo Sales.” Billboard (3 October): 16, 39.Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.

Durham: Duke University Press.Subitzky, E. 1974. The Official National Lampoon Stereo Test and Demonstration

Record. New York: National Lampoon Records, NLR 1001.Symes, C. 2004. Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical

Recording. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.Tandy, D. 1960. Guide to Stereo. Chicago, IL: Radio Shack.

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Various. 1958a. Admiral Stereophonic Demonstration Record. RCA-Victor.—1958b. Listening In Depth: An Introduction to Columbia Stereophonic Sound.

Columbia Masterworks, SF 1.Various. 1959. Bel Canto Stereophonic Demonstration Record. R. Molloy.White, G. 1987. The Audio Dictionary. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mono in the Stereo Age

Eric Barry

In 2009, one of the few record companies still standing tapped the Beatles catalog, its most valuable resource, for a lavish remastering campaign. Fans had been clamoring for this sort of sonic update, from which less iconic bands had already benefitted, since the music of the Beatles appeared on CD back in 1987. The campaign was multiyear and multiformat, including deluxe box set and individual album reissues in stereo, remixes for the video game Guitar Hero, a limited edition USB stick inside a green plastic apple (all in 2009), iTunes downloads (2010) and vinyl (2012). Casual observers might have expected that EMI would also offer multichannel editions of the world’s best loved rock music, in order to take advantage of the millions of surround sound systems that had been installed since 1987. Yet they went in the opposite direction: mono. Specifically, EMI produced a thirteen-disc monophonic box set covering Beatles’ works through 1968. The release went gold, prompting other labels to follow suit. As a result, numerous mono mixes that had been deleted in the 1960s were brought back into circulation, the most prominent of which was a box set of Bob Dylan in mono.

On its face, the resurgence of interest in mono recordings fits patterns of nostalgia for other discarded technologies. Technostalgists including monophiles typically associate outmoded technologies with a lost golden age and perceive expressive possibilities in them that they believe newer technologies have eliminated (Taylor 2001, Bijsterveld and Van Dijck 2009). The music fans who prefer mono identify themselves as proper curators of the musical heritage of this golden age, as rebels against the soulless and crass technocrats who insisted upon stereo as the latest thing. Simon Frith’s seminal article, “Art versus Technology: The Strange Case of Popular Music” (1986), gives purchase on this dynamic in which pop audiences fear that technology “is somehow false or falsifying”

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and sands the expressive rough edges out of music. Mono vs. stereo fits within this dynamic not only because stereo represents a more advanced technology. More importantly, connoisseurs have argued that mono mixes best represent the intent of the artist because in the 1960s, mono—via AM radio and cheap phonographs—was the medium of the people. Stereo versions were an afterthought, often created without band supervision, and aimed at upscale audiophile buyers. Monophiles describe the sound of mono mixes as more coherent and punchy than stereo, which is received as dissected, thin and overly clean.

Yet the current correspondences of mono–stereo to raw–cooked repre-sents a turnabout, not a natural order. This chapter will trace the original connotations of mono as artificial and stereo as natural and show how these associations reversed. Mono once signified a lack—the absent channel that impeded our ability to reproduce sound naturally, as we hear it, with two ears. Audiophiles bristled at the corporate monopolies that delayed the commercial introduction of stereo discs for twenty-five years after Western Electric and EMI made their first stereo recordings in 1932 and 1933. In particular, pop recordings in mono were understood as inauthentic kitsch whose implicit claims to represent the reality of a musical performance were suspect. Stereo, by contrast, was welcomed as the final frontier of fidelity, offering pure, natural sound reproduction at long last. When stereo arrived in the late 1950s and 1960s, monophonic recordings were deemed degraded carriers unworthy of preservation. Record labels, fans and critics showed little compunction about the adulteration of old mono recordings in a process by which they were “electronically re-channeled to simulate stereo,” to use a phrase that was emblazoned on thousands of LPs and advertise-ments. Thus, despite its senior status, in the mid-1960s, mono carried the stigma of inauthentic technology, chopping the music’s body to fit within a single procrustean loudspeaker. Mono was heard as muddy, distorted and claustrophobic in comparison to stereo’s pristine clarity and spaciousness.

Beginning in the early 1970s, however, record labels looking to exploit an expanding nostalgia market turned back to historically authentic mono recordings. By the time the back catalog was transferred to digital media in the 1980s, electronically rechanneled, ersatz stereo was seen as one of the industry’s greatest misdeeds and mono’s cachet substantially expanded. New technologies of fidelity prompted a revival of old technology.

Though the art vs. technology dynamic described by Frith is an important one in the history of music, its meanings must be traced rather than assumed. Two important cultural shifts enabled mono and stereo to take on the valences that seem natural to us today. First, critics and fans bestowed legitimacy on pop and jazz music as art to be cherished and preserved rather than disposable flotsam. Without this step, faithful presen-tation of the original sound mix would be unnecessary. Second, music fans since the 1960s have transformed their expectations of the recording

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arts. For a century, the idée fixe of the recording industry was transparent mediation, i.e. “reproduced music indistinguishable from actuality,” as the first chronicle of sound reproduction put it (Gelatt 1955: 270). But in approaching the music of the past, fans have increasingly focused not on the sound as originally created by the musicians but on the sound as played back. Whether they yearn for the sound of the finely honed final mixes as heard over the studio monitors or from the original vinyl records that consumers bought, fans have come to accept the recording process as an indispensable element of the musical arts. In doing so they have also come to recognize the commodity form of music—even a mono record—as an authentic work of art rather than a degraded copy.

The Final Frontier

In the post-Second World War era, a heady combination of feelings about music and technology coalesced around the quest for high-fidelity sound. The music industry (including the concert, instrument and sheet music business as well as music educators) promoted the transcendent value of classical music and opera to a growing audience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Seeger 1957, Levine 1988, Roell 1989, Greene 2008, Suisman 2009). This message of music’s almost sacral function was carried far and wide by new technologies such as the phonograph and radio (Horowitz 1987, Carlat 1995, Douglas 1999). Music fans of the 1920s and 1930s, influenced by powerful ideals of technological progress, wanted and expected the recording industry to improve the quality of sound they heard at home. Shellac, 78-rpm records of the day were limited to five minutes per side and around 5,000 Hz in the treble; like radio, they were saddled with distortion and background noises including hum, static and needle scratch; they carried only one channel of sound. Ultimately, as Frith (1986) notes, at stake in technological concerns was the “authenticity or truth of music” which was put at issue in critiques of mass culture in this era. In a culture suspicious of marketplace manipulations such as song plugging and payola, the promise of high fidelity acted as an objective assurance of the “truth” of music released under capitalist auspices. After the War, dreams of audio progress were quickly actualized with a cluster of new technologies of recording, including magnetic tape, condenser microphones and the long-playing microgroove record, as well as new technologies of playback, such as low-distortion, wide-bandwidth amplifiers, speakers and phono-graph pickups. High fidelity sizzled and boomed, becoming a billion-dollar industry in the 1950s (Gelatt 1958: 39).

Having achieved nearly full-frequency response and low distortion, at least on the behalf of enthusiasts who could bear the expense or had the

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wherewithal to build their own equipment, space was the final frontier. Audiophiles felt one channel of reproduced sound could not convey the immersive breadth and depth of sound perceived without electronic mediation. When it came to the reproduction of high fidelity’s holy grail, the symphony orchestra, this deficiency was acutely felt. Critics and enthu-siasts long lamented the inherent deficiencies of monophonic sound and welcomed stereo’s arrival as a triumph. To audiophiles who lived through the dawn of consumer high fidelity in the late 1940s and early 1950s and of stereo a decade later, the notion that monophonic mixes of the 1960s would stage a second act would surely have seemed bizarre. To them, monophonic records were debased carriers of the original sound.

“Presence” was a keyword for audiophiles of the mono era. Literally, it meant a convincing illusion of actual musicians performing (Canby 1962: 14).1 In the concert hall, a sense of presence derived from loudness, dynamics and especially the reverberation of sound from all around. Record labels in the mono era promised this immersive quality with brands such as “Full Dimensional Sound” (Capitol), “360 Sound” (Columbia), and “Living Presence” (Mercury). To justify the sloganeering, recordists enriched the balance of sound with increasing amounts of reverberation in an attempt to deliver a sense of dimension and presence (ibid.). As Peter Doyle (2005) shows, in the mono age listeners obsessed over the feeling of immersion in the recording space, even if they remained unaware of how engineers conjured that sense.

With stereo expected to “complete” the recorded soundscape, monophony served as a scapegoat for many of audio’s failings. A popular hi-fi primer from the editors of Saturday Review explained in 1952 that recording must be done in strange ways because we have two ears, while the microphone is singular (Canby, Kolodin and Burke 1952: 85–104). Most notably, microphones were placed much closer to instruments than any concert-goer would sit. The book further explained that the direct sound from the instruments and the reflections from the walls of the concert hall are both reproduced in the home from a single speaker, which failed to convey the sense that the reverberation comes from all around. The authors state without qualification, “your ears cannot stand this … you are hearing a source of extra-blurred music, confused music, out-of-focus, all coming from one spot” (94–5). These claims were misleading: a mix of direct and reflected sound is unavoidable when recording one or more channels. Furthermore, in playback, be it mono or stereo, the sound from the speakers is augmented by the reverberation of the listening room, which

1 As deployed by Edward Tatnall Canby and others, this meant conveying a sense of the original recording spaces, a reverberant halo of sound. It was also deployed to mean a bright, alive sound of the instruments themselves, which could be enhanced by amplifying the “presence region” of frequencies.

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makes sound come from all around the listener regardless of how many channels are reproduced, albeit not in the proportions heard in the concert hall or studio. The mischaracterizations of mono’s deficiencies highlight the yearning of 1950s music lovers to hear the sense of ambience of a concert hall when playing records at home.

Confusions in nomenclature likewise indicate the freight borne by stereo. Canby lamented the “dismal hodge podge of terminology” used to describe two-channel recording and its single-channel counterpart (1953: 47). Two-channel recordings were initially referred to as “binaural,” but an association with the contemporaneous marketing of 3D stereoscopic cinema eventually tipped the balance toward the term stereo. Alluding to the arbitrary and unsatisfactory nature of the nomenclature, one engineer joked that the proper name should be “bistereonauralphonic” (Tinkham 1953), a slur repeated and explained in a book about stereo for technic-ally adept hobbyists (Sunier 1960: 20–4). That neologism referred to the technical shortcomings of two-channel systems, which could offer only an “illusion of realism” compared to the more accurate localization possible with a third, center channel. The feeling of deprivation before stereo arrived was contained in the term used to indicate single-channel sound: “monaural.” Meaning “one ear,” it was a misnomer since we do actually hear all sounds, whether from one speaker, or two, or more, with both ears. Nonetheless, not only was monaural used in lieu of the more apt “monophonic,” but the hi-fi press frequently translated the error into plain English by deploying the phrases “for one ear” or “for two ears.”2

Listeners commonly reported being bowled over by the sound of stereo. Based on testimony from auditors at experimental demonstrations of three-channel sound in 1933, AT&T (Bell Labs) researcher Harvey Fletcher reported that stereo could “create even greater emotional appeal than that obtained when listening to the music coming directly from the orchestra” (1934: 9–11). J.P. Maxfield, another pioneering audio researcher at AT&T, opined that he preferred two channels of low-fidelity sound with treble response only to 6,000 Hz to a single high-fidelity channel that reached to 15,000 Hz (Moir 1958: 555–6). Fletcher’s empirical subjects went even further, showing a preference for two channels reaching only to 2,700 Hz versus a single full-range channel of sound (1933: 289). Other studies concluded that in mono, listeners could not tolerate reproduction of an orchestra at full volume, which hobbyist literature attributed to the missing channel (Moir 1958: 555).3

2 The term monophonic itself is imprecise. Not only does more than one sound come from the loudspeaker, but the “loudspeaker” is often a composite of multiple loudspeakers such as woofers and tweeters.3 Audible distortions were the more likely culprit.

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With consumer stereo on the horizon in the 1950s, consumer expect-ations were fueled by demonstrations and spread by journalists. For instance, the rising stars of the audio press, Julian Hirsch and his partner Gladden Houck, pronounced Emory Cook’s experimental stereo demon-stration at the 1954 Audio Fair “the closest approach to absolute realism” they had ever heard, adding that those who hadn’t experienced it “can’t possibly appreciate what they have missed” (1954: 8, emphasis in original; cf. Barry 2010). While admitting the literal fidelity of the system was lacking, the dean of audio critics, Edward Tatnall Canby, crowed that the “realism was still terrific” (1952: 28, emphasis in original). Where one channel sounded cramped, two projected a “tremendous bursting-outward into space.” Such demonstrations could unsettle perfectionist audiophiles. As another attendee of a Cook demonstration put it, “I’m sorry I heard it. I shan’t be satisfied with my present system any more” (Fowler 1953: 47). Canby similarly expressed a sense of yearning based on the same demon-stration, saying stereo gave the ear “a wealth of something that it hugely needs and dotes on when it gets it” (1952: 28).

For a few years before the appearance of stereo LPs, which trickled onto the market in 1957, audiophiles indulged their yen for stereo by purchasing expensive stereo tape decks and pre-recorded tapes. Some made their own recordings of local ensembles, while others bought pre-recorded commercial albums, of which 650 titles had reached the market by the fall of 1957 (Sunier 1960: 78). When stereo LPs arrived in force in 1958 and 1959, audiophiles received them with open arms and open wallets. Record reviews noted some audible problems, but generally reveled in the new spaciousness and clarity afforded by two-channel reproduction. Listeners cited stereo’s improvement over the muddled contrivance of monophonic sound. “Before stereo,” noted Audio contributor Norman Crowhurst, “the hi-fi addict could only hear the more remote parts of the music by playing it louder—and louder—and louder. Now he can hear them by use of separation” (1962: 6, emphasis in original). Record reviews of new stereo LPs deployed phrases such as “unerring truth” (e.g. Hall 1958: 6). Even Consumer Reports, always vigilant against technological humbug, reported that stereo “vastly enhances the immediacy of the music experience” and approved the new format despite its increased cost (Anon. 1959).

Stereo fidelity inspired hyperbole. Composer Igor Stravinsky asked, “can we continue to prefer an inferior reality [the concert hall] to ideal stere-ophony?” (Gelatt 1961). The coming of stereo occasioned declarations that contrasted the audiophile’s active engagement with sound technology and music to the passivity of a feminized mass audience (Keightley 1996, Barry 2010). For instance, writer, editor and record producer David Hall asserted that with stereo, “Now you don’t dare sit back” because it “demands undivided attention” (1959: 6, emphasis in original). Perhaps the keyword in describing stereo was “natural.” In The Story of Stereo, John Sunier

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explained, “the human hearing system simply cannot receive the necessary psychoacoustic cues and stimuli for natural listening from monophonic or single-channel sound. The naturalness of stereo, which provides these cues, causes a listener, under perfect conditions, to forget eventually that he is listening to recorded sound at all” (1960: 16). In a typical record review which compared mono and stereo versions of a 1961 classical release, High Fidelity called the mono release “admirable” but effused about the stereo counterpart, specifically the “open, natural quality of the stereo” which made the effect of presence “very strong” (Anon. 1961a: 64). In the minds of early adopters, stereo fulfilled and maybe even transcended its promise of reproductions that would sound just like the real thing.

“They Said You Were High Class”: The Story of Rechanneled Stereo

Given the hype about stereo, the experience it provided, and the profit-ability of the new gear and records it required, it is perhaps no surprise that stereo sales took off. Audiophiles were first on the bandwagon, and classical music and opera sold more stereo than other genres. By 1960, nearly all new all-on-one phonographs and hi-fis were nominally stereo (Anon. 1960); in 1967, 60 percent of all phono equipment and half of record sales were stereo (Anon. 1967).4 Large numbers of customers appeared to be buying into the promise of the most up-to-date sound quality. The downside for retailers and labels was that mono-era catalog staples sold poorly in compe-tition with stereo titles. The upside was that the extra dollar charged for stereo LPs greatly enhanced the profitability of the record business. As a dealer told Billboard, “We must sell stereo disks, it’s the only way we can make a real profit. On monaural records we only make a couple of pennies unless we have a high volume” (Anon. 1958: 24).

The solution was to somehow transmogrify dusty old mono recordings into high-class stereo. Unfortunately, there was no way to separate the discrete instruments on a mono recording into two channels.5 As Columbia engineer William S. Bachman, one of the inventors of the long-playing record, told Time, “You have a single signal to start with. We don’t think there is any honest way to make two out of it. It’s like separating mush

4 By dollar volume and profit margin, stereo enjoyed a much larger advantage.5 In the twenty-first century, the quest to stereoize old mono recordings continues. New digital techniques of spectral analysis have been employed to extract instrument sounds from mono recordings in such a way as to simulate multitrack recording techniques. The resulting stereo image sounds more similar to contemporary mixing techniques than do older, pseudo-stereo methods.

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and milk; once you get them together, you can’t get them apart” (Anon. 1961b). Nonetheless, consumers were hungry for fodder to feed their new stereo sets, including recordings that were specifically designed to show off the directional capabilities of their new stereo gear, from the light, big band music of Enoch Light and Esquivel to bombastic recordings of planes, trains and automobiles (Barry 2010, Anderson this volume). Few thought of old monophonic recordings as landmarks of the audio arts that demanded preservation. Beginning in 1959, record labels applied techniques for creating a sense of stereo separation by filtering various frequency bands and applying reverberation. Dubbed “duophonic” by Capitol and “electronically reprocessed” or “rechanneled” by other labels, ersatz stereo was a technological wonder that was subject only to minor criticisms, at least initially. Customers purchased updated versions enthusiastically, the press accepted and often praised them, and every label bent to demand.

In preferring updated stereo recordings, consumers treated records as avenues to a lost original performance rather than carefully crafted works of art that represented the intent of the performers. Had this legitimacy been conferred on any monophonic recordings, it would have been RCA-Victor LPs of America’s most celebrated conductor, Arturo Toscanini. The maestro, who retired in 1954 before the advent of stereo, earned fame for his fidelity to the musical score and the fantastically clear balance of sound he achieved with his orchestra. In the face of stereo competitors, however, Toscanini’s best-selling monophonic LPs, commonly regarded as definitive interpretations, lagged. So in 1961, RCA-Victor altered the sounds he had recorded in mono, making a big promotional splash for rechanneled stereo by giving it the implied imprimatur of the deceased conductor.

Life magazine portrayed the twenty-six-year-old engineer in charge of the process of “electronic stereo reprocessing,” Jack Somer, as the ideal technocrat to marry the latest technology to America’s most sacred cultural achievements. A boy-next-door engineering wunderkind, he was so dedicated to music that he disdained age-appropriate nightclubbing for libretto-writing (Anon. 1961c). His nervous system was apparently incredibly sensitive—he told Life that he felt nauseous in the presence of off-key music. Here was a man who could be trusted not to ruin America’s most celebrated contribution to classical music by tone-deaf application of newfangled technology, implied the press.

Somer explained his techniques in a self-penned article for High Fidelity (1961: 40ff). His method of “reprocessing for stereo,” which took over two years to develop, aimed to attain the “spread, depth, and reverberant qualities typical of true stereo reproduction.” The starting point was to filter different frequency spectrums, corresponding to different instruments, into one channel or the other, i.e. highs on the left and lows on the right. This division mimicked the typical seating plan of an orchestra with violins and

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woodwinds left and basses right, and the filter points were varied according to which instruments were playing at the moment. Second, in order to mimic the way the left microphone picks up some sound from the right and vice versa, Somer added some highs to the right channel and some lows to the left channel and some of the full monophonic signal to each. Finally, in order to feign the acoustics of the concert hall, Somer used three channels of signal treated in echo chambers of different decay times, altering the phase in order to simulate the way reverberation from different walls of the hall is picked up by stereo microphones. In sum, Somer explained to High Fidelity, he could “manipulate these six signals to produce an effective simulation of a stereophonic recording.”6 More evocatively, he described his battery of controls to Time as a “rat’s nest” (Anon. 1961b).

Over and above the technical jargon, RCA-Victor and their intrepid engineer pledged fidelity to the intent of the original compositions and the sound of Toscanini’s masters even as they adulterated the original recordings. Somer (1961) and Victor (1961) both emphasized that he was “fully acquainted with the score of the work he is converting.” Somer also studied “the essential elements of the original performance” and pledged fealty to “orchestral balances and dynamics” (Anon. 1961c). A final check on the preservation of the maestro’s art came from “rigid supervision” (Victor 1961), which Somer (1961) explained came from Toscanini’s son Walter as well as the original recording engineer. Victor (1961) was sensitive to the sentiment that the maestro’s recordings were not to be altered, assuring “The performances are musically unaffected, but enhanced by the added spaciousness.” Somer did admit to Time, “you can spread the sound around the room, but there is no way to get the feeling, as in true stereo, of the proper positioning of the individual instruments” (Anon. 1961b). Instead, as listening indicates, the process brought a complex reverberation to the sound of old master tapes as well as an increase in high frequencies, bringing the revamped issues in line with contemporary recording norms. The goal, in other words, was not to preserve the monophonic master tapes but to evoke the experience of an ideal audition, as imagined in the 1960s.

A Billboard headline soon confirmed that the refurbished Toscanini was “Back as Sales Winner,” noting that the reissued discs were “sufficiently effective so that the average listener will be unable to determine how, if at all, it differs from true stereo” (Anon. 1962b). Time admired the “effective

6 Toscanini’s recordings and broadcasts were originally known for their exceedingly dry, non-reverberant acoustic qualities, though this was mitigated somewhat in later years when recording sessions were moved from Studio 8-H at Radio City to Carnegie Hall. Emily Thompson (2002) explains how NBC engineers (who were responsible for the maestro’s broadcasts from 1937 until his retirement) sought studio spaces with a dry acoustic that would facilitate control by the engineers in the booth. The dry recording characteristic aided Somer’s efforts to simulate the reverberation of a real space in his pseudo stereo.

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illusion of true stereo separation” as well as a new luster to the sound, though they did allow that the “Somerized” orchestra “had a habit of wandering about the stage” (Anon. 1961b). High Fidelity’s Robert C. Marsh wrote that a Toscanini collector of his acquaintance “took them for genuine stereo discs of recent vintage” (1961: 53). Despite one title’s lack of “brilliance, focus, and weight” and another marred by “changes in tonal coloring,” overall the series “was a tribute to Victor’s engineers” (ibid.). Even the underground magazine Stereophile, whose critical stance toward the hi-fi and recording industry distinguished it from the field, grudgingly accepted the fake stereo Toscanini. Their 1963 review praised the “sense of reverberant spaciousness,” though it remonstrated against the emphasis on the highs that upset the maestro’s “marvelously controlled balances” (Anon. 1963b: 12). Stereophile also noted that the frequency splitting of treble to the left and bass to the right falsified Toscanini’s unconventional seating plan, which placed the low strings on the left and the violas and second violins on the right.

The lack of hue and cry over the modernization of Toscanini—even when significant failings were observed—is noteworthy. The combination of his rabid fan base, his ideology of total fidelity to the written score, and the unique clarity he labored to achieve in the sound of the orchestra seems custom-made to serve as grist for the mill of an anti-technology defense of the maestro’s art. High Fidelity, in fact, predicted a frenzy among “critics who regard the originals of the Toscanini recordings as a sort of holy writ which cannot be altered in any way” (Marsh 1961: 53). However, no frenzy materialized, at least not in print. Apparently, listeners in the 1960s remained wedded to the notion of fidelity to the performance instead of the recording. Though Victor’s original engineers had worked hard to create the best sound they could at the time, whatever could be done to leaven the maestro’s rendi-tions with some sense of the acoustic atmosphere present in a performance was justified. Otherwise, worried Marsh, buyers would choose “a mediocre performance with spectacular sound,” over a monophonic Toscanini disc whose musical value was not likely to be surpassed “for a long, long time” (ibid.). Stereophile agreed: “if RCA Victor feels it is necessary to stereo-phonize Toscanini’s recordings in order to keep them in the active catalogue, then I’ll happily go along with them” (Anon. 1963b: 12). To these critics, maintaining musical tradition meant bowing to the latest technology.

“That Was Just a Lie”

Despite the hype about stereoization, which associated it with the stability and legitimacy of high-class European classical music, in reality most of the early rechanneled releases from the record industry—and most of the

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sales—came from adult-oriented pop (Anon. 1962a). Billboard reported in early 1961 that many dealers were hungry for updates to “warhorse merchandise,” sales of which had been dampened by the hype about stereo (Grevatt 1961: 52). Early recordings to get the treatment included original cast recordings from South Pacific and Peter Pan, as well as middle-of-the-road (MOR) titles from the likes of Doris Day, Mitch Miller, Harry Belafonte and Bing Crosby (Anon. 1962a). Retailers felt that “All that is required to ease the selling job … was some new type of sales peg” (Grevatt 1961: 52). Capitol’s pitch for their “Duophonic” process aimed at dealers reading Billboard thus hit all the right notes. With Duophonic, Capitol promised, “there is … none of the disappointing letdown often experienced in hearing mono discs on stereo equipment” (1961: 7). The process would “enrich monophonic ‘hi-fi’ performances” with “a bigger, fuller sound.” Dealers too would be enriched, opening a new market for evergreen works. While “technically not stereo,” the “sum total” of Duophonic meant “new profits for you!” (ibid., emphasis in original). Billboard confirmed the “upsurge in sales” when dealers placed reprocessed sets on display (Anon. 1962a: 5). “Rechanneling” for stereo thus not only moved sounds from the center to the left and right. It also moved old releases from the back of the bins to new prominence in the distribution channel via advertising and store display. The record labels expanded their bets on a sure thing: rechanneling LPs of country, rock and jazz.

While Elvis Presley’s pre-Army RCA sides may not have been exactly the catalog material that record dealers considered “warhorse merchandise,” the 1958 compilation of his 1956 and 1957 monophonic singles, Elvis’ Golden Records (Presley 1958), proved stalwart. The album certified gold in 1961, and in early 1962 RCA-Victor decided to class it up by releasing an electronically reprocessed stereo version (Presley 1962), which stayed in the catalog into the 1980s. As intent listeners have long complained, the mutated version put boom in one channel and scratch in the other. Even more plainly, it sounds louder than the mono original. Because of the reverb and delay applied, sounds explode all over the place. Absurdities abound: for one, though the meaning of stereo in the original Greek is solid, the fake stereo Elvis is highly unstable. Yet the volatile instrument placement, blasting percussion and explosive reverberation carry a certain appeal, particularly on the raucous cuts. Ironically, after having famously entombed Presley’s voice in heavy reverberation in a failed effort to duplicate the mysterious aura of Elvis’ legendary Sun sides, here RCA had finally created an echo that successfully signified the sizzling excitement of rock ’n’ roll.7 The current verdict is to malign them for it, though at the

7 Elvis’ Sun recordings are famous for their “slapback” echo. Sun’s Sam Phillips used tape delay to evoke the reverberant sound of a large studio recording space that he did not possess, but came up with something uniquely tremulous and eerie. Unable to duplicate that sound, RCA’s

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time, the press was quiet. Billboard did take note that teens were buying old rock LPs, “which sounded rather quaint from a recording standpoint when they were first issued” (Anon. 1962a: 5). If the sound of the great Toscanini could be updated without protest, who would object to the modernization of “quaint” rock ’n’ roll recordings?

Current views taken from a high-traffic record collector internet community run the gamut. The majority are negative, even vitriolic. Sounds “like it was filtered through a water well with echo,” writes one (howlinrock 2008). “Enough to make a cockroach puke,” concludes another (theoxrox 2008). A third fan recalled his dismay at being misled by the record industry:

When you went to the record store and saw an LP of your favorite artists with a big “STEREO” banner, you got excited. Imagine the disap-pointment when you got home, threw on the Lp and expected to hear the vocals in the middle, the strings coming from the left speaker, and guitars and drums for the right speaker, but instead................heard a big glob of crappy EQ’d audio. I CANT TELL you how many times that happened to me, and to this day, it upsets me. (RetroSmith 2004, sic throughout)

Occasionally, readers’ letters to audio magazines at the time complained about the deceptive labeling of rechanneled stereo (Anon. 1963a). Several state agencies and, in 1964, the Federal Trade Commission, published guidelines for labeling stereo records, requiring two independent channels of sound. In 1968, the FTC went further, objecting that common phrases used to indicate pseudo-stereo were deceptive and suggesting the word “simulate” be added, in a type size that was “readily apparent” (Anon. 1964). At the same time, many of those who recounted their experiences as young buyers of fake stereo records hadn’t objected at all. “I thought the echo laden stuff was SO cool!” enthused one fan of Elvis’ Golden Records. “I didn’t KNOW any better” (fabtrick 2009). Audiophile ideology generally entails despising the ersatz, yet as one fan of the “stereo” version asserted, “nostalgia is a funny thing” which can occasionally “trump fidelity and audio purity” (-Alan 2009). A very few profess that they continue to prefer the fake stereo mixes as more exciting than the mono, at least on the rocking tracks. As they tell their tales, many of these fans explain how learning the proper disdain was a step in their path toward connoisseurship.

In the 1960s, Elvis’ Golden Records and countless other pop, rock, jazz and country recordings were available in both mono and reprocessed stereo versions. If record labels believed an old title would still sell, they typically

engineers recorded Elvis in the type of large reverberant spaces that Phillips had aimed to mimic and, failing to achieved the eerie “slapback” sound, added further artificial reverb that connoisseurs feel muddled the sound of the King.

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reprocessed it for reissue. This was as true for enthusiast-run independents on the margins of popular music, such as jazz stalwarts Prestige and Blue Note, as it was for major labels handling million-sellers. In 1967 record labels raised the price of mono LPs a dollar to match stereo releases and then discontinued mono alternatives in 1968. Into the 1970s and 1980s, fake stereo was the only way to buy many evergreens from the devel-oping popular music canon, including artists such as the Rolling Stones, Patsy Cline, Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra. Modern buyers, the industry presumed, wanted to hear the spaciousness and excitement of simulated stereo, not the original sounds crafted by the artists and their engineers.

Prestige and the Return of Mono

As popular music was granted aesthetic legitimacy by increasing numbers of critics and listeners in the 1970s, record collectors began expressing the desire to experience the music of the past via the commodity form in which it was originally recorded and released. Jazz listeners led the way. The entertainment industry took note, particularly entrepreneurial firms, which restored old mono recordings to their original single-channel sound and, eventually, facsimile cover art as well.

The path through stereoization and back to mono illustrated different approaches to the past. Ersatz stereo jazz reissues offered fidelity to the music as played in the studio instead of as it was originally distributed and heard on mono record. In the late 1960s, Prestige took this nostalgia for the studio sound to an extreme with its Historical Series. Many Prestige 12-inch LPs of the mid-to-late 1950s were hodge-podges, in the original mono sound, but repackaged from earlier 10-inch releases and 78-rpm singles, sometimes with alternate takes added willy-nilly. The Historical Series rationalized track listings according to order of recording, symbolic-ally undoing the arbitrary commercial decisions that created the original sequencing and packaging. The new version of jazz history treated each session as a concert, implying that the proper way to enjoy jazz classics was to contemplate the progress of an artist from take to take and session to session, providing fidelity to the recording logs of classic artists. Likewise, fake stereo attempted to undo the technical limitations of the 1950s. Echoing the reaction to Toscanini in stereo, opponents of rechanneling in the jazz press grudgingly accepted its commercial logic rather than counseling readers to boycott the ersatz and seek used copies in mono. Nonetheless, critic Nat Hentoff hit the nail on the head when he argued in 1968 that jazz buyers did not “have to be conned into believing that a stereo imprint on the envelope will prevent the album from becoming ‘obsolete’” (1968: 132).

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Hentoff was prescient. Jazz fans were the first record buyers to hop on the mono bandwagon, and they moved toward memorializing not just the music, but also the original LP issue. Their valorization of mono sound dovetailed with the jazz audience’s legacy as the first and most vociferous advocates of canonizing “popular classics,” dating to their glorification of 1920s “hot” jazz in the 1930s and their subsequent enshrinement of bebop in the pantheon of American art. In the 1970s, the independent Fantasy label proved to the industry that even young buyers could be brought into the nostalgia fold—with a series of monophonic reissues. The fervor of the jazz fan soon extended to canonizing recordings as they had first appeared.

A general wave of mid-century nostalgia in the early 1970s framed the move toward mono. This trend, which brought popular success to the musical Grease (1971), the television show Happy Days (1974) and movies such as American Graffiti (1973) and That’s Entertainment (1974), swept over the record industry too, as a Billboard special report explored. An important distributor attributed the shift to a change in the record business: the resurgence of the full-service record store as a retail outlet for back catalog (Anon. 1974b). As Billboard detailed, with outlets to take their merchandise, entrepreneurial labels and the enthusiasts who ran them showed the record industry that buyers of reissues from the 1940s and 1950s were interested in the past as past, be they youngsters seeking roots or elders reliving their own early years. A psychologist asked by Billboard to speculate on the meaning of the nostalgia fad gives us purchase on how it was understood at the time: “Our generation,” he said “is ripe and ready for the day of the popular classic to take its place in our cultural life” (Hatterer 1974: N5). Nostalgia’s link to the past provided security and, for youngsters, “that ‘old feeling’” (ibid.). Though the psychologist did not address audio qualities, one could suppose that as an imposition of modern aesthetics, ersatz stereo as well as new cover art and reconfigured track listings could sever that connection to the past.

The jazz industry took heed. In 1971, west coast jazz indie Fantasy, flush from the wild success of their rock act Creedence Clearwater Revival, acquired independent jazz mainstay Prestige, whose back catalog included Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. The next year they also added Riverside, whose catalog included Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans. Fantasy retained Prestige’s management but announced a new direction: two-fer reissues that returned original mono versions to the catalog.8 With Miles Davis’ current jazz fusion success as a “springboard,” Fantasy’s two-fers made a splash with a new generation of jazz fans. Now legendary and seminal, old albums were to be curated accordingly. Soon, nearly every jazz imprint, from Columbia to Blue Note to Savoy, was mining its jazz

8 The “two-fer” packaged two older LPs or two LPs worth of older tracks together and priced them like a single new release. Titles that were recorded in stereo were released accordingly.

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catalog to create two-fers. According to Bruce Lindvall, then Columbia VP of marketing, “The very serious contemporary music buyer wants to know about all the influences he hears in his music today” (Tiegal 1973: 48). In Billboard’s analysis, the jazz collector was “either out to study or simply enjoy music he considers to be immune to obsolescence” (McDonough 1974: N12). Though two-fers were aimed at college-aged buyers, the label explained “we’re not schlocking them out” (Tiegal 1973: 48). Serious listeners did not want schlocky fake stereo, and the industry followed Fantasy’s lead in using mono masters when authentic stereo was unavailable.

Still, the two-fer, even when it repackaged two complete LPs in the original mono sound, didn’t go whole hog in satisfying nostalgia for a past embodied in the original record. New titles and cover art made it difficult to identify which original LPs were represented; sidemen and recording dates were not usually displayed on the exterior, and original release dates were not included at all. For serious jazz fans, it turned out, the first pressings, many of which had become collector’s items, were holistic works of art. Fantasy’s Japanese licensee in the 1970s presented them that way in facsimile editions of original 1950s and 1960s Prestiges and Riversides. These editions utilized original track order, pristine vinyl pressings and high-quality reproductions of original graphics pasted on stiff cardboard sleeves. Only a distinctive “obi,” a paper sash which slid over the jacket, plus tiny print on the back, betrayed the provenance. Producers used mono masters for pre-stereo recordings.9

Japanese fetishization of the record itself as an authentic artistic creation, rather than just the music borne in its grooves, is perhaps explained by their relationship to American and European music, which was distanced by time and place, characterized by reverence, and fed almost entirely by the consumption of record albums. By the 1970s, of course, much the same conditions applied to new American fans of bebop, who avidly purchased these Japanese reissues as premium-priced imports. In buying facsimiles, listeners wherever they lived could fantasize about having been hip enough to experience now canonized jazz when it was fresh and progressive, to hear it as the musicians influenced by it had. The pastness of old records had become a major part of their appeal.

The success of these reproductions in the US prompted Fantasy, which distributed some of the imports, to ape their presentation (Sutherland 1983). Thus, in 1983, the budget-priced “Original Jazz Classics” debuted, adopting the distinctive obi sash, on which new commentary and old quotes from Down Beat hyped the record. Soon, Billboard pronounced that Fantasy’s trailblazing efforts had shifted the emphasis in jazz reissues to

9 Other Japanese labels did the same with Blue Note, Atlantic, Verve and Mercury. In some cases artwork said “mono” even when the stereo masters were used.

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original packaging (Sutherland and Keepnews 1984). While many early CD releases of back-catalog recordings continued the two-fer modus operandi of shoehorning as many tracks as possible onto a disc and breaking up the original flow of an album with bonus tracks, the trend toward facsimiles continued. Since the 1990s, record labels have expanded their offerings of CDs in cardboard “digi-pak” cases or “mini-lp” sleeves that evoke the bygone days of vinyl. New editions on LP have become common too, typically eschewing bonus tracks, often duplicating details down to the label design.

The wave of nostalgia, respect and curiosity about popular culture in the early 1970s hit rock ’n’ roll too. Slowly but surely, beliefs about the sins of rechanneled stereo and the virtues of monophonic mixes spread to rock ’n’ roll collectors. As happened with jazz, the enshrinement of 1950s and 1960s rock ’n’ roll in the popular music canon undergirded this shift, transforming old recordings into objects of preservation from a heroic past. But the battle to restore mono mixes in rock ’n’ roll took longer than for jazz in part due to the fact that major labels had acquired the rock back catalog from the entrepreneurial firms who originally released it. The idea that fans would care about hearing the original mono mix rather than a modernized stereo version filtered up slowly from the music enthusiasts, who produced reissues, to the corporate decision-makers, who had learned in the 1960s to equate stereo, whether ersatz or not, with sales.

As rock criticism developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, remon-strations about fake stereo found a venue. For instance, the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics, Robert Christgau, complained that too many rock ’n’ roll repackages transformed “honest mono into muddled artificial stereo” (1973: j17). The issue took on greater weight for rock ’n’ roll than for jazz because the aesthetics of rock were much less grounded in live performance and fidelity thereto. In contrast to jazz, where in the period of mono’s overlap with stereo, Rudy Van Gelder recorded almost every note released on Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy and Impulse while a handful of other labels covered the rest of the field, regionalism in early rock ’n’ roll gave voice to a greater variety of engineering techniques. The rock ’n’ roll aesthetic, which aimed at creating records that sounded new and different by hook or by crook, likewise engendered technical diversity. The sounds achieved by producers such as Sam Phillips (Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash), Leonard Chess (Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry), Phil Spector (the Ronettes, the Righteous Brothers) and George Martin, aka the Fifth Beatle, became an indelible part of rock ’n’ roll music. Some styles even entered the parlance of rock fans, like Spector’s “Wall of Sound.” Hence the adulteration of original monophonic master tapes was easy to construe as an aesthetic dilution of the power of the record as a work of art. In “Mono Si Stereo NO!” critic Greg Shaw explained

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how rechanneling produced a “tinny, sterile sound” that “emasculates the original music” (1972). But, as Shaw happily noted, in 1972 a few labels recognized new public awareness of the issue, releasing series such as “Legendary Masters,” whose name implied both the newly elevated status of early rock ’n’ roll singers such as Gene Vincent and the utilization of original mono master tapes. Sun Records even released fake stereo, i.e. records that declared stereo on the cover—as distributors demanded—but had mono in the grooves. The complaints about fake stereo attached a new cachet to monophonic recordings as authentic and legitimate rather than technologically obsolete and “quaint.” As the digital age dawned, such criticisms heightened fan consciousness of the original recording as an intentionally created work of art.

Conclusion: Modern Mono

Into the 1980s, many pre-1968 albums and cuts by major artists such as the Rolling Stones and even the Beatles remained in print only on fake stereo LPs. Compact disc gave the record industry a blank slate to rebuild their back catalog. With few exceptions, labels restored mono-only recordings to circulation. Elvis Presley provided the cautionary tale that killed fake stereo in the digital era. When Elvis’ Golden Records was put out on CD in 1984, RCA used reprocessed stereo (Presley 1984a; cf. Hirsch 2009). After all, they might have figured, who would want old-fashioned mono on shiny high-tech CDs? But the outcry from fans and critics prompted RCA to pull the album and re-reissue it in mono. Apparently, the collectors who were CDs’ early adopters wanted the original sound mix that the artist crafted in the studio, preserved perfectly, forever on digital media. For them, digital’s promise of fidelity clashed with after-the-fact enhancements. They saw the mono master tape as the authentic work of art. With its second chance, RCA reissued Elvis’ Golden Records in mono (Presley 1984b) and issued an LP edition (1984c) that aped the “Original Jazz Classics” presentation right down to the obi. In an ironic twist, RCA could not locate the mono masters. In a bind, and unbeknownst to the public, their engineers created “fake” mono Elvis from fake stereo tapes, squeezing some mono milk from the stereo mush Jack Somer’s process had created. Only in 1992 were the true masters restored to the catalog. Finally, CD collectors could enjoy thirty-five-year-old monophonic recordings in the most technologically advanced way possible.

As in the Presley case, the transition to digital media occasioned a reconsideration of sound and fidelity. The promise of transparent trans-mission of the sound of master tapes via digital technology prompted discussion of LP sound. What made original LPs sound distinctive and how did they differ from new CD versions? Journalism about prominent

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CD reissues, such as that of the Beatles in 1987, attempted to answer some of these questions, pulling back the veil on the recording process in general. Listeners who followed this discussion were encouraged to replace the traditional standard—the sound of the (oft-illusory) perfor-mance—with the sound of the painstakingly crafted recording itself as the work of art.

As part of this discussion, the 1970s rejection of fake stereo and valoriza-tion of mono as authentic spilled over into critiques of true stereo. Since the 1970s, word has spread that many artists focused their attention on the mono versions of their 1960s work and still consider them definitive. Interviews with artists and engineers and promotional efforts on behalf of mono reissues have further spread the word in the press, collector fanzines and internet communities. Based both on this testimony and the sonics of vintage records, today’s most sophisticated fans increasingly subscribe to the notion that mono versions of classic rock and jazz favorites, where available, best represent artistic intent and sound better than stereo. In audiophile and record collector internet communities, fans who espouse a preference for the stereo version of canonized albums like Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow (1967), Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966) or the Beatles’ Rubber Soul (1965) are on the defensive. Prices of original mono jazz and rock LPs have skyrocketed and sales of mono reissues have grown tremendously.

Sonic differences, some obvious, others subtle, ground judgments that mono mixes offer more punch and coherence while stereo sounds clear but thin and strange. The distinctiveness of mono mixes stems largely from the recording and mixing techniques employed during the period of simultaneous stereo and mono release. Early stereo pop recordings often projected a “dual-mono” soundscape that trapped most of the sound in the loudspeakers, with a “hole in the middle” or “ping-pong” effect, as critics often complained. This method made it easy to combine the two channels into the mono mix that would be heard on the radio and by most buyers, and exaggerated the sensation of two channels for those taken by stereo’s novelty. Later, engineers developed norms for stereo that projected a continuous curtain of sound, firmly anchored in the center by drums and bass (cf. Dockwray and Moore 2010). These norms have made the wide-panned, drums-to-one-side sound of early stereo sound artificial where mono merely sounds diminished spatially.

In many ways, the framing of monophonic sound as “authentic” in the stereo era looks like other forms of nostalgia for an ostensibly purer past. True, monophilia correlates to an extent with consumption of other throwbacks to the hi-fi golden age, such as vinyl records and vacuum tube electronics. Yet the enjoyment of mono is accomplished in modern ways. Most strikingly, mono is heard almost exclusively over two speakers or headphones. Most listeners today get their mono from contemporary LP

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pressings, CDs and digital files mastered with the latest technology.10 Fans distribute their own digital transfers from mono records on file-sharing networks and blogs, often in MP3s that can be easily enjoyed on smart-phones and iPods. Audiophile “needle droppers” record fifty-year-old collector’s items, as reproduced by current high-end phono equipment, to digital files that use higher data rates than CDs. The sonic data is then processed with cutting-edge software algorithms to remove the clicks, sibilance and background noise characteristic of mechanical repro-duction. Stereophonization is now rejected, but “click repair” is welcomed. Stereophonic sound is suspect but the latest digital media and distribution methods promise the highest fidelity possible to the sound of an original record as played on high-tech equipment.

The shape of nostalgia is always contingent. At stereo’s introduction, the vast majority believed it transcended its status as mere technology by offering transparent, natural sound; mono was seen as such a contrivance that few objected to its radical adulteration into ersatz stereo. Subsequently, stereophonization was welcomed for adding dimensionality and then rejected for its adulteration of the sonic mix that the original artists and engineers had intentionally constructed for phonographic reproduction. This transformation of attitude toward mono encompassed a revaluation of the music that had been rechanneled and a re-evaluation of the meaning of mediation. As electrified popular music has become something to be cherished, recording has become accepted as part and parcel of the process of artistic creation.

References

-Alan. 2009. “Re: RCA reissued fake stereo Elvis CDs in Japan. Why?” [comment on online forum], 5 January, http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/rca-reissued-fake-stereo-elvis-cds-in-japan-why.170809/#post-4080475

Anon. 1958. “Lusty Stereo Baby Sparks Biz.” Billboard (13 October): 24.—1959. “Complete Hi-Fi Stereo Record Playing Systems.” Consumer Reports

(November): 560–5.—1960. “Packaged ‘Stereo’ Phono Consoles.” Consumer Reports (March):

114–20.—1961a. “Records in Review.” High Fidelity (January): 59–62, 64, 66–8, 70–81.—1961b. “Pseudo Stereo.” Time (20 January): 54.—1961c. “Young Man with a Good Ear.” Life (22 September): 133–4.—1962a. “New Sound Adds New Life to Catalog Sets.” Billboard (6 January): 5.

10 In particular, most mono masters are transferred with a stereo (two-track) tape head; “mono” LPs are cut with stereo cutterheads and made for modern styluses, both of which lead to tiny differences between left and right channels not possible in true mono transfers.

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—1962b. “Toscanini Back as Sales Winner.” Billboard (30 January): 11.—1963a. “Artificial Stereo.” Gramophone (February): 98.—1963b. “Stereophile Reports on Recordings.” Stereophile (July–October):

12–13.—1964. “New FTC Rules are Summarized.” Billboard (22 February): 6.—1967. “Spinning Out.” Time (9 June): 78.—1974a. “A Perspective on the Future of Nostalgia.” Billboard (4 May): N1–N56.—1974b. “Variety is Truly the Spice of Life for R&R Distributing.” Billboard (4

May): N4, N36.Barry, E. 2010. “High Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime.” In Sound in the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction, eds D. Suisman and S. Strasser, 115–38. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bijsterveld, K. and J. Van Dijck. 2009 (eds). Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Canby, E. 1952. “Record Revue.” Audio Engineering (January): 28, 30, 40–3.—1953. Audio Engineering (September): 47–51.—1962. “Audio ETC.” Audio (May): 12, 14, 76–8.Canby, E., I. Kolodin and C.G. Burke. 1952. The Saturday Review Home Book of

Recorded Music and Sound Reproduction. New York: Prentice-Hall.Capitol Records. 1961. Advertisement. Billboard (12 June): 7.Carlat, L. 1995. Sound Values: Radio Broadcasts of Symphonic Music and

American Culture, 1922–1939. PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University.Christgau, R. 1973. “Tiptoeing Through the ‘Best-of’ Albums.” Los Angeles

Times (4 January): j17.Crowhurst, N. 1962. “The State of the Art.” Audio (May): 6, 88–90.Dockwray, R. and A.F. Moore. 2010. “Configuring the Sound-box 1965–1972.”

Popular Music 29(2): 181–97.Douglas, S. 1999. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. New York:

Times Books.Doyle, P. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording,

1900–1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.fabtrick. 2009. “Re: RCA reissued fake stereo Elvis CDs in Japan. Why?”

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Fletcher, H. 1933. “An Acoustic Illusion Telephonically Achieved.” Bell Laboratories Record (June): 286–9.

—1934. “Auditory Perspective—Basic Requirements.” Electrical Engineering (January): 9–11.

Fowler, C. 1953. “Hi-Fi for Two Ears.” High Fidelity (January–February): 46–8, 108–9.

Frith, S. 1986. “Art versus Technology: The Strange Case of Popular Music.” Media, Culture and Society 8: 263–79.

Gelatt, R. 1955. The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

—1958. “The Pangs of Progress.” High Fidelity (January): 39–41, 131.—1961. “Ten Years of High Fidelity.” High Fidelity (April): 39–40.Greene, S.R. 2008. Visions of a “Musical America” in the Radio Age. PhD diss.,

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Grevatt, R. 1961. “Victor Up-Dating Toscanini Wax.” Billboard (23 January): 3, 52.

Hall, D. 1958. “Opera—Fulfilment [sic] of the Stereo Promise.” Hi-Fi Review (November): 6.

—1959. “Stereo—A Spur to Music Listening.” Hi-Fi Review (March): 6.Hatterer, L. 1974. “Nostalgia: The Song Lingers on in a Search for Old Values.”

Billboard (4 May): N5, N50.Hentoff, N. 1968. “The Decca Jazz Heritage Series.” Stereo Review (February):

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CHAPTER SIX

Looking Past the Stereo Loudspeakers : From the Home to the Amplified Concert Hall

Jonathan Tee

“I don’t hear any music,” said Milo.“That’s right,” said Alec; “you don’t listen to this concert—

you watch it. Now, pay attention.”—THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH (JUSTER 2008 [1961]: 121)

Domestic stereo equipment in 1950s Britain was accompanied by two apparently conflicting discourses: advertisements showed visual represen-tations of stereo listening in which the equipment featured prominently, while instructional guides recommended a listening practice that occluded the immediate physical reality of the loudspeakers. Both, however, were engaged with the material listening environment and suggested or depicted listening practices in which the interleaving of an imagined or represented visual scene was prominent. In the home environment, for example, the concert hall often served as a visual and spatial model—and not only for listening to classical music. Within the concert hall itself, composers of electroacoustic works were also experimenting with multichannel presenta-tions and wrestling with the problem of sustaining listener attention when loudspeakers disrupted the familiar visual spectacle of live concert hall performance. An examination of discourse around domestic and concert hall listening practices shows that even as stereo and multichannel technology

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apparently disconnected sounds both from their ostensible “originals” as well as from the location of the loudspeakers producing them, imagined or actually present visual contexts remained signally important.

In this chapter I explore the ways in which, during the 1950s, stereo sound in the home and multichannel electroacoustic works performed in the concert hall were both widely conceptualized through, and perceived to be disruptive of, established visual frames. Stereo and multichannel sound required a reconfiguration of attentional strategies in which the traditional concert hall remained prominent as a visual and spatial template for domestic stereo listening while also being a problematic site for the performance of multichannel electroacoustic works. I trace the centrality of the visual in how stereo listening was articulated in advertising and instructional guides for stereo equipment as well as in the disruptive visual effect of multichannel amplified sound on concert hall performance practices. Against Pierre Schaeffer’s influential claim that the loudspeaker could help to facilitate an acousmatic listening practice—one of listening to sound purely as sound without seeking to connect it back to a likely visual/material cause—I argue that stereo and multichannel practices more often revealed the importance of the visual domain to listening both in the home and in the concert hall.

Instructional Guides to Domestic Stereo

During the 1950s a plethora of specialist magazines, articles, books, and public and private demonstrations offered guidance on how to implement stereo in the home. Such instructional material frequently emphasized that, when correctly configured, stereo equipment could transform the sound of the home, creating a sonic environment that would transport the listener to another place. According to this literature, such effects were best achieved when the listener was seated at the apex of a triangle formed from the two loudspeakers at its base (e.g. Anon. 1959). Late 1950s guides to stereo listening practices described how stereo equipment should be set up to enable the representation of a virtual “sound stage,” which could be perceived as spread out between the two loudspeakers (Briggs 1959). These stereophonic “paratexts” sought to train consumers in an emergent practice of stereo listening (Symes 2004: 5–10).

An ideal stereo listening practice therefore required both physical self-discipline and space. Dictates as to where the equipment and the listener should be located implied a reconfiguration of furniture and listening within the home. The listener who wanted to experience the best stereo effect had to comply with the requirements and limitations of the equipment and technology. Until the development of smaller “bookshelf” loudspeakers in the second half of the 1950s, high-end consumer loudspeakers were

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typically large, floor-standing objects that took up significant floor and vertical space. Those who wanted good-quality sound in their homes had to give up physical space to achieve this. Loudspeakers were sizeable visible presences in their own right in rooms and constituted their own visual environment. While such ideal sedentary stereo listening may well have been in reality a minority pursuit, the discourses surrounding it are instructive for they shed light on the difficult relationship between the physical and visual presence of the loudspeakers and the perceived sounds.

Guides to stereo listening typically suggested that the listener should avoid associating the perceived sounds with the loudspeakers producing them. The loudspeakers should be placed far enough apart that the sound stage appeared to a centrally seated listener to extend up to the edge of the loudspeakers but not overlap with them, so that the sonic space repre-sented by stereo sound could be the focus of listener attention. In his article depicting the orchestral stereo soundstage, for example, sound engineer H. Burrell Hadden noted that “the best stereo effect is produced when the sound stretches between the two loudspeakers … but does not appear actually to come from either of them” (1960: 26). Some guides suggested that to help achieve this disassociation, and to minimize their potentially disruptive visual presence, listeners should keep loudspeakers hidden from sight. Douglas Gardner, for example, suggested that listeners should hide their loudspeakers behind “acoustically transparent curtain material” so that “any temptation to associate the sound with the two speakers” is avoided (1959: 111). If they remained visible, the loudspeakers should function like the pillars demarcating the edges of the proscenium, framing the visual focus of attention, but intended to vanish from it.

Late 1950s guides to stereo listening practice were typically aimed at a readership expected to be purchasing classical music recordings and described the desired stereo experience as producing the impression that the orchestra was spread out between the loudspeakers in front of listeners, as they would perceive the distribution of sounds across the stage of a concert hall performance (ibid.: 99–101). When listening to such recordings the represented space, into which the listener was to be transported, was precisely that of the concert hall. By focusing on the spatial represen-tation of the orchestra, this discourse of self-disciplined stereo listening constructed it as a visual as well as auditory experience.

The model of the concert hall has been central to spatial representation in stereo classical music recordings (Symes 2004: 79). In addition, in the 1950s it was also a demonstration site for stereo reproduction technologies, for example in Gilbert Briggs’ 12 May 1956 stereo demonstration concert in the Royal Festival Hall.1 A stage had also been the location for Alan

1 Gilbert Briggs was founder of the British Wharfedale loudspeaker company.

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Blumlein’s early experimental stereo recordings at EMI in 1933 (Burns 2000: 138). The concert hall provided a template for a paradigmatic domestic stereo listening practice containing a number of the character-istics of concert hall listening practice, in particular seated, attentive and concentrated listeners frontally oriented toward and focused on the stage. In stereo classical recordings the intent was to transform the horizontal space between the loudspeakers so that it was perceived as spatially akin to an orchestra’s sound spread on a concert hall stage. The appropriately seated and located listener should, in theory, feel transported from their living room into the concert hall.

An obsessively realistic representation was, however, only one possible goal for stereo sound reproduction in the home during the 1950s. Stereo increased the range of ways in which a spatial sonic representation could be created in order to transport the listener, in Eric Barry’s felicitous formulation, “from the comfort of their living rooms to a place beyond the concert hall” (2010: 138).2 Even Gardner—who typically advised home listeners to try and obtain a “realistic” impression of the concert hall stage in their stereo setups—acknowledged the potential for what he called a “strong element of fantasy,” noting in 1959 that “perhaps the finest results in this field will come from a combination of forces, including moving electronic sounds and some adroit manipulation by the recording engineers” (1959: 104–5).

Stereo equipment could be installed in unconventional ways, despite the exhortations of stereo guides and equipment manufacturers. In 1960 two almost identical plans for corner rooms were published separately in the British Stereo Sound and Music Magazine (Freeth 1960) and the American HiFi/Stereo Review (Anon. 1960). These both depict an L-shaped room with a large loudspeaker located in the ceiling projecting sound downwards, a mid-sized loudspeaker located in the upper corner of the room projecting sound across the room and a third tweeter located either on the top of the bookshelf or next to the large loudspeaker on the ceiling. The loudspeakers are not hidden from view, although the placement of the loudspeaker in the ceiling is described in the American magazine as a solution to its “elephantine bulk” (Anon. 1960: 50). Chairs form a circle within the room, with the seating arrangement suggesting that no attempt is being made to create a “sweet spot” listening position; the creation of a well-focused stereo image is not the object here. Conrad F. Freeth, in the article accompanying the British version of this illustration, suggested that the listener “should create as many sound sources as you can afford—you can get a ‘wrap-around’ that gives the music great depth” (1960: 18–19).

2 As Peter Doyle (2005) has argued, however, stereo was only one technique for achieving spatial representation within recordings.

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Freeth’s comment suggests a different kind of listening practice to that recommended in most guides to stereo equipment: one seeking to create an immersive and enlivening sonic environment rather than one trying to achieve a mimetic sound stage representing the spatial distribution of sound in the concert hall. These corner rooms are spaces within which listeners are expected to be mobile, the area left in the center of the rooms empha-sizing the anticipated flow of people through them. Alongside a normative discourse concerned with a disciplined, sedentary, critical listening practice, other listening practices were also evolving. These may be characterized as synthetic, motile: incorporating and structuring hybrid activities through and in sound.

A variety of recording and listening practices therefore coexisted, informed by divergent discourses, genre norms and listener preferences. For some listeners the quality of the listening experience was in part measured by the degree of verisimilitude obtained between listening at home and listening in the concert hall. Others took the home as the primary listening location and deployed recordings and radio to transform the sonic environment of the home in new kinds of ways without being overly concerned as to whether these perceptually matched any prior frame of reference. The tensions between these different listening practices and discourses can be traced out in late 1950s advertisements for stereo equipment.

Advertising Stereo Equipment

Depictions and descriptions of listening to stereo sound in 1950s adver-tisements for stereo equipment rarely showed listeners without either representing them looking at visual objects such as record sleeves or suggesting a listener’s imagination of a visual scene. In particular a relatively formal, seated, attentive listening was typically depicted in terms of an imaginative transportation of the listener to a performance venue or of a representation of a cinematic scene spread out in front of the listener. Period advertisements contained a large body of textual explication around listening to the equipment and how listeners should position themselves in relation to it.

A new kind of visual/material environment was emerging for listeners to recorded and broadcast works in the home. The space for listening within the home was usually shown as precisely that which was visually framed by the loudspeakers, and within which the listener would sit. Stereo and high-fidelity listening, in particular, were often represented in advertisements with listeners sat facing the loudspeakers located in an audiovisual scene partly constituted by the equipment itself. Interleaved with this actually

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present visual scene in which the loudspeakers were located, and to which they contributed, was the imagined visual scene represented and evoked by the amplified sound between and beyond the loudspeakers.

Advertisements frequently displayed tensions between different kinds of stereo listening. For example, an image of a man reclined in a comfy seat, looking into the mid-distance, in a 1956 advertisement for the Gramophone Company’s Stereosonic Tape Records, depicts a visually imaginative listening drawing on the concert hall. The man faces a photograph of an orchestra that has been crudely cropped within an outline of a house, presumably to suggest both the realism and the consequent non-domestic scale promised by stereo (the orchestra is too big to fit within the frame of the house) as well as the way it could imaginatively evoke this distant visual setting. Unlike many later advertisements, however, the equipment itself is not shown. The clumsiness of this early depiction of stereo listening does, however, illustrate the frictions that would emerge in later depictions of possible domestic stereo listening practices.

Advertisements were often ambivalent as to whether the listener should imagine that they were transported into a distant performance venue or whether they should imagine that the musicians were brought into their living room. Two advertisements by UK manufacturer Pye, in Hi-Fi News in 1958, illustrate this point. In the first (1958a), the image shows a man seated at home. Two Pye loudspeakers are placed against the back wall of his room. A ghostly, translucent eight-piece jazz group is shown as surrounding him as he listens. White lines representing sound waves emerge from the loudspeakers to overlap the musicians and these connect the faintly grayed-out image of the band with its source (the stereo loudspeakers). The accompanying text spells out the implication that the listener will feel “sound all around you.” There is also the suggestion that this impression will be so strong that the listener will, almost, be able to see the musicians around him. The listening position suggested here is seated, facing the sound stage; however the text acknowledges the possibility of a mobile listener: “move around and it is just like changing your seat in the auditorium.” The text of the advertisement recognizes that a listener at home might well be mobile; but the visual representation of the more prestigious concert hall listening practice advocates a critical, singularly focused listening while sitting in the stereo sweet spot.

In the second Pye advertisement (1958b), a silhouette of a dancing couple is blanked out from a photograph of people in front of a jazz band on the dance floor of the Café de Paris in London. The silhouette leaves a space into which the reader can imaginatively insert him- or herself. The advertisement’s tagline, “with Pye Stereo you are there,” suggests that the listener should be able to feel themselves transported into the middle of the dance floor as they listen to a recording of a dance band on a Pye stereo. The text below the image declares that “suddenly you are there with the

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artist … the sound is all around you,” continuing: “sitting between the two loudspeakers, the listener hears a different sound with each ear as he would in an actual performance” (emphasis added). A dual listening position is thereby constructed between, on the one hand, the listener lost in the music and imaginatively transported to the Café de Paris, and, on the other, a seated listener concerned with careful and critical listening, evaluative of the degree to which the atmosphere of the Café de Paris had been accurately reproduced by the equipment within the home. A third, intermediate possi-bility is evoked by the implied position of the photographer, on a balcony above the dance floor within the Café de Paris, of a listener observing the scene within the Café rather than participating as a dancer. This third position suggests the evocation of a visual scene for the listener at home: a cinematic experience of recorded sound wherein, rather than having been transported into the scene, the listener imagines the sonically represented scene in front of them, as if on a screen. Such advertisements presented the listener with a number of different possible listening practices, and ways of understanding stereo sound.

A Decca (1959) advert for its SRG300 Stereogram, placed in the Gramophone, also gestured toward these different kinds of transportation and suggested a screen-based, or cinematic listening. The image in the advertisement shows two stereo loudspeakers in the corners of a room with the stereogram placed in the center. Across the three visible walls of the room, a social gathering is depicted: people are grouped together, gesticulating, talking, perhaps dancing, or watching a performance. Unlike in the Pye advertisements the image does not feature any performers, bar the equipment itself: it positions the stereo equipment as a performer on a stage that is the listener’s room. The image suggests alternative readings: a listener—not shown—imagining the scene visually depicted on the wall behind the equipment; but also a listener partaking of a similar kind of activity to that visualized cinematically across the wall, a domestic social gathering, perhaps, with the stereo equipment taking star billing.

On the one hand, this Decca advertisement suggests that listeners will be able to imagine themselves transported into this public scene and that, by extension, Decca’s new stereo equipment will transport them to the other exciting places represented in its new stereo recordings—the image wrapping around the walls of the room suggesting the sound wrapping around the listener. On the other, the equipment stands as a physical barrier to the listener entering this visual scene. The placement of the equipment in the center of the image, in front of the wall on which the scene is depicted, suggests that the equipment will always remain in the foreground. Unlike the recommendations of the instructional guides to stereo listening discussed earlier, and unlike Benjamin’s characterization of cinema as presenting an “equipment-free aspect of reality” (1999: 226), Decca’s advertisement explicitly puts the equipment at the center of this

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amplified audiovisual scene. Listeners, it suggests, will perceive a place always just out of reach, beyond the loudspeakers, which they will neither be transported to nor fully immersed in. It suggests—as an advertisement might be expected to suggest—that the listener/viewer should pay attention to the equipment itself and that the look of the equipment is a central part of the visual scene of listening.

A new kind of visual scene was therefore emerging for listeners to stereo equipment through contextualized representations of equipment in adver-tising material. Stereo listening was frequently represented with listeners sat facing the loudspeakers located in an audiovisual scene constituted by the equipment itself. Once again, overlaid with this actual visual scene was an imagined visual scene, represented by the amplified sound between and beyond the loudspeakers.

While the concert hall often served as a model for paradigmatic stereo listening practices, the composition and performance of works in the concert hall itself was at the same time undergoing change through experi-mentation with the use of multichannel amplified sound by composers of electroacoustic works. The discourses and practices of such 1950s composers exhibit concerns similar to those voiced by writers on domestic stereo, with the disruption to the visual scene of listening implicit in the use of loudspeakers. They also suggest the centrality of the visual when listening.

Multichannel Electroacoustic Works in the Concert Hall

A notable aspect of many of the electroacoustic works produced by the post-war musical avant-garde was experimentation with new ways of spatially distributing sounds using multiple channels of amplified sound (Manning 2004: 25–6, 60–2). Composers often described their use of sound spatialization in such works in terms of innovation in musical form; Patrick Valiquet (2012) has argued that this was done, in part, to establish an aesthetic distinction between an avant-garde use of multichannel technique and more mainstream uses of stereo. The discourse of composers and engineers involved in the production of these works nonetheless exhibits a strikingly similar matrix of concerns to that evident in writings on consumer stereo equipment in the period. In particular, key figures such as Boulez, Schaeffer, Stockhausen and Varèse were often explicitly engaged with the attentional issues created as a result of the perceived disruption to the visual field associated with the use of loudspeaker reproduction.

In an interview in which he reflected on his multichannel electroacoustic piece Poèsies pour pouvoir (1958) Pierre Boulez stated:

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I, personally, have never been much of a believer in taped music played in a concert hall. I have always … found the absence of action a redhib-itory [sic] vice. Playing a tape where people are walking about, or for a small group of professionals, is a quite different matter. But for a larger audience—let alone huge crowds—it is a very lame, one-sided affair, with nothing visual to correspond to what is heard. (Boulez 1986: 201)

Presentations of recordings through loudspeakers to a seated audience in a concert hall lacked, for Boulez, the spectacular visible movements of live performance that could help engage the attention of listeners. His claim is that such performance environments required a dynamic visual as well as auditory aspect. In Poèsies pour pouvoir Boulez sought to create “an extended hearing space” while retaining a visual spectacle through a frontally located orchestra, emphasizing what he perceived to be the loudspeakers’ lack of visual interest by placing them behind the audience and therefore out of sight:

The orchestra was to be in front of the audience—or to be more precise it was to be a circular arrangement with the orchestra in the middle, on three platforms and in a mounting spiral. The platforms were one above another and there were orchestral groups rising finally to a group of soloists … I placed the loudspeakers behind the audience, because I wanted to demonstrate that a loudspeaker has no visual significance and can be properly listened to only with one’s back to it. The spiral started from the floor, with the orchestra, and at the same level as the upper orchestra there were the first loudspeakers, the remainder continuing up into the roof immediately above the upper orchestra. That is to say, there was also an attempt to make use of “spatial-ization” and the relay principle, consisting of a kind of visual refusal/visual acceptance. (ibid.)

To place loudspeakers out of sight while using them to project sound from areas of the concert hall (behind and above the audience) where sound production was traditionally absent was to make a claim for the import-ance of the spectacular visual aspect of orchestral performance. It was also a striking inversion of the frontal orientation toward the loudspeakers recommended for stereo listening in the home. For Boulez, loudspeakers were good for sound spatialization, for generating illusions of auditory movement, but were fundamentally uninteresting to watch and could be removed from sight without detracting from the listening experience—if there was an engaging visual performance on the concert hall stage for the audience to watch. The implication is that, for Boulez, the visual aspects of a work were an essential part of the musical experience of listeners in a concert hall.

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Stockhausen’s work Kontakte (1958–60) illustrates a different approach to this perceived problem of providing an engaging visual scene for a concert hall audience in the presentation of electroacoustic works. Kontakte employs sound spatialization in complex counterpoint to a carefully struc-tured visual performance without apparent anxiety as to the visibility or otherwise of the actual loudspeakers. The work exists in two versions, an electronic-only version and a version with live performers. It is this latter version, first performed on 11 June 1960 at the thirty-forth Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) World Music Festival, that I consider here.

The performance score of Kontakte minutely illustrates how performers and sound amplification equipment were to be located within the concert hall (Stockhausen 1995). On stage, performers play piano and a range of percussion instruments while a sound projectionist located in the center of the hall controls a mixing desk, picking up signals from microphones located on stage and from a four-track tape recorder playing pre-recorded electronic material. Each of the four tracks of the pre-recorded material drives pairs of loudspeakers in each corner of the hall. Ten microphones are situated to pick up sounds from the various instruments on the stage and are projected through the four loudspeakers in the hall so that the sound appears to come from fixed locations within the hall. Signals from six of the ten microphones are presented solely through the two pairs of loudspeakers situated on either side of the stage and so present sounds across a left–right “virtual stage” that coincides with the actual physical stage in front of the audience. The other four microphone signals make use of the two pairs of loudspeakers located at the back left and back right of the hall. The live sounds are mixed with the pre-recorded sounds through the four pairs of loudspeakers, the latter being distributed in a range of “spatial movement-forms” including rotating, looping and flood patterns.

Stockhausen meticulously detailed the visual aspects of Kontakte, as the score indicates:

Piano: 2 spotlights, 1000 watts each, from above, shining onto the keyboard and player (avoid double shadows of the black keys). 1 x 1000 watts from the upper left in front of the stage; 2 spotlights, 500 watts each (with dimmers), on stands in front of the stage at stage height, pointed at the pianist and piano lid from below. (Stockhausen 1995: xi)

Similar instructions are provided for the percussion, with Stockhausen requiring that the spotlights for these throw “a circle or ellipse of light which encloses all of the instruments.” A particular mix of yellow, pink and orange colored filters are specified to light the tam-tam and gong in order that a “warm gold-red hue” is thrown onto the instrument while “on the rear wall of the stage two black shadow circles with sun coronas are visible.” The score stipulates that the general lighting in the hall before

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the performance begins should be “about 50%, so that it is just possible to read the programme. All stage spotlights should be as bright as for the performance. Just before the beginning, the hall lighting is slowly faded out, and only after the final applause is it again faded in to about 50%”

(ibid.). The visual aspects of the performance are carefully thought through and minutely specified, with both visual and auditory elements controlled by the sound projectionist (who was Stockhausen himself at the 11 June 1960 premiere). The entirety of the concert hall auditorium is constructed, through a combination of lighting and sound, as a visual performance area as well as a listening space. The work establishes audiovisual counterpoints: between the visual foci (the performers on stage) and the distribution of sounds (around the audience seated in darkness).

A third approach is illustrated by Poème électronique, a work comprising a performance venue purpose-built for the presentation of this explicitly audiovisual work. Commissioned by Philips for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, the venue was designed by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis and combined visuals projected on the interior surfaces of the building with spatially distributed electroacoustic music composed by Edgard Varèse. It sought to combine light, color, rhythm, image and sound into a unified work (Le Corbusier 1958: 27). At each performance at the World Fair—lasting around eight minutes—the audience watched a series of dramatic images projected upon the vast internal surfaces of the pavilion to the accompaniment of Varèse’s piece. The experience of Poème électronique was, therefore, very much a visual as well as an auditory one. Photographs of the audiences all show individuals craning their necks to look up at the images projected on the insides of the pavilion.

Varèse’s music was distributed from an array of over 400 loudspeakers placed within the building. In his description, the piece:

consisted of moving colored lights, images projected on the walls of the pavilion, and music. The music was distributed by 425 loudspeakers; there were twenty amplifier combinations. It was recorded on a three-track magnetic tape that could be varied in intensity and quality. The loudspeakers were mounted in groups and in what is called “sound routes” to achieve various effects such as that of the music running around the pavilion, as well as coming from different directions, rever-berations, etc. (Varèse 1998: 207)

The performance was highly automated so that, once begun, minimal human intervention was required. However, neither the equipment used to spatialize the sound nor a score of the spatial patterns deployed has survived. In a discussion of their recent virtual-reality reconstruction of the work, Lombardo, Valle, Aldred, Tazelaar, Weinzierl and Borczyk describe how they of necessity “speculated,” “guessed,” relied on “personal

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interpretation” and made “arbitrary” choices in order to spatialize the sounds contained on the original production tapes (2009: 40–1). In Poème électronique the sounds proved to be the most persistent aspect, while the spatial, architectural and visual aspects were the most ephemeral.

Contemporary reports suggest that visitors experienced Poème électronique, if anything, as a primarily visual installation with sonic accompaniment rather than as an electroacoustic work with visual accom-paniment, although the piece has subsequently become most well known as an essentially musical work as a result of the ready availability of recordings of Varèse’s contribution. For example, a contemporary review of Poème électronique in Hi-Fi News stated that:

Accompanying and punctuating the pictures was an electronic music composition by Edgar Varese [sic] which, to our untrained ears, could have been a rehash of earlier Musique Concréte [sic] and Electronic Music—with this difference: the sounds emanated from 425 loudspeakers distributed in groups and “routes” all around us … Most of the visitors … were frankly “agin it,” and it was interesting to notice that the sound worried them much more than the vision. We saw plenty of hands clapped over ears, but no one kept his eyes shut! (Anon. 1958: 405, emphasis in original)

Here the sounds of Poème électronique are characterized as intrusive, disruptive and interruptive of the visual experience of the work, dimin-ishing enjoyment of it. Peter Manning notes that a subsequent performance of Varèse’s piece in a Greenwich Village theater, reproduced through a single loudspeaker and without lighting effects, was less successful (2004: 83), which also suggests the importance of the spatialization and the visual for the overall effect of the work.

Poème électronique represented a move away from the concert hall into a custom-built performance environment within which sounds and visuals could be distributed in counterpoint to each other around the audience. The auditory and the visual were closely intertwined elements of the original site and performance of Poème électronique. The piece is now typically either heard as Varèse’s contribution (the electroacoustic work now itself simply described as Poème électronique) or seen through images of the pavilion structure (which was destroyed at the end of the Brussels World Fair). Its sounds, visuals and material architecture have been split apart, and this aspect of the performance history of Poème électronique is in fact emblematic of a more general tendency in writing on western classical music in the second half of the twentieth century: to theorize a separation of the sonic from its embedded audiovisual context, an uncoupling of the heard from the seen. This isolation of the heard from the seen is, in particular, central to the influential theory of acousmatic listening set out by

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electroacoustic composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer in his treatise, Traité des objets musicaux (1966).

Stereo and Acousmatic Listening

In discussing his compositional practice, Schaeffer relates how, with his early works of musique concrète, he sought to elide the representational aspects of sound by processing and transforming recordings so that the listener could focus on their sonic and not their referential aspects:

For the traditional musician and for the acoustician, an important aspect of the recognition of sounds is the identification of the sonorous sources … In listening to sonorous objects whose instrumental causes are hidden, we are led to forget the latter and to take an interest in these objects themselves. The dissociation of seeing and hearing here encourages another way of listening: we listen to the sonorous forms, without any aim other than that of hearing them better … If someone plays us a tape which records a sound whose origin we are unable to identify, what are we hearing? Precisely what we are calling a sonorous object, independent of any causal reference … Deliberately forgetting every reference to instrumental causes or pre-existing significations, we then seek to devote ourselves entirely and exclusively to listening. (Schaeffer 2008: 78–9, 81)

According to Michel Chion, Schaeffer aimed to “[isolate] the sound from the ‘audiovisual complex’ to which it initially belonged” using sound recording and loudspeaker presentation (2009: 11).3 The listener was to complete this sundering by developing a new kind of acousmatic or “reduced” listening. Schaeffer’s aim was to create works in sound that would be heard purely as sound—as “sound objects”—rather than in terms of their visual/material causes. For Schaeffer, the tape recorder and the loudspeaker functioned like the curtain that was reputed to have separated Pythagoras from his students so that they could only focus on the sound of his voice. He noted that “in ancient times, the apparatus was a curtain; today, it is the radio and the methods of reproduction, along with the whole set of electro-acoustic transformations, that place us, modern listeners to an invisible voice, under similar conditions” (2008: 77). When listening acousmatically an auditor

3 As well as being a writer on sound in film and electroacoustic composer, Michel Chion was a former colleague of Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). His Guide to Sound Objects (originally published in 1983 as Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale) is a guide to Schaeffer’s Traité des objects musicaux (1966).

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should, in theory, become more attentive to the sonorous itself without being distracted by, or having what they hear affected by, the visual. In other words, Schaeffer recognized that the perception of sound was strongly influenced by its visual context (1966: 93). His objective in using recorded sound was precisely to help listeners focus exclusively on their auditory perception of sound.

Schaeffer recognized that acousmatic listening was hard, and an unusual approach. He thought that the practice could be made easier by the use of recording and loudspeaker presentation (although a listener could, with effort, listen acousmatically to any sounds at any time, whether presented through a loudspeaker or not). By preventing the listener from being able to see a corresponding visual source for the sounds other than the stationary loudspeakers, Schaeffer hoped to help the listener hear sounds as pure “sound objects.” Repeated listening to recordings could also help to defamiliarize sounds so that interest in their origins might dissipate through this repetition (Schaeffer 2008: 78).

But even in an acousmatic presentation—i.e. with amplified sound produced through loudspeakers—the visual sphere remained present. While the “original” sources of the sounds were occluded by the physical interven-tions and manipulations of the recording process, a new visual scene was nonetheless interposed, to which the listener could pay attention (rather than exclusively listening to the “sonorous object”). Musique concrète and acousmatic music came with its own distinctive visual scene of listening: the loudspeakers, tape recorders (and in the background the recording studio) comprised their own particular visual loci. Just as the stereo loudspeakers in the home constituted a visible frame, so the sounds of musique concrète heard from loudspeakers could be heard and described by listeners precisely as amplified sound produced by tape recorders and loudspeakers.

Acousmatic music was certainly perceived by some as occurring in a new and distinctive visual/material scene comprised of the equipment producing the sounds. For example, a review of a concert of musique concrète at the 1954 Aldeburgh Festival, which included a performance of Pierre Henry’s Veil of Orpheus, described how the piece was constructed:

for manipulation and assembly on magnetic tape … On a recording equipment known as the “Phonogene,” designed by M. Schaeffer and his colleagues … any noise or sound effect can be mixed, transposed, reversed … reverberation added or removed, speeded up or slowed down, to produce the final “composition.” This tape synthesis is repro-duced on a high-quality “playback” apparatus through loudspeakers. (Anon. 1954: 5)

The equipment used to create and perform the work is strongly at the fore of this review. Ironically, given Schaeffer’s aspirations for attentiveness

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to the sounds themselves rather than their causes, here the sources of the sounds, the loudspeakers and tape recorders, featured more prominently than any description of the sounds contained in the piece. For listeners to recordings and broadcasts, the equipment used was both visually present and imaginatively accessible through the many descriptions and images of studios and of studio equipment published in contemporary magazines and other publications. While the presentation of amplified sound through loudspeakers may have been disruptive to familiar modes of attention, the loudspeaker did not remove the visual scene; it merely reconstituted it, in ways that were potentially challenging for some listeners who required new kinds of listening strategies, additional visual performance elements, or a combination of both.

Schaeffer’s theorization of acousmatic listening in fact seems at odds with the use made of the potentiomètre d’espace, a multichannel sound distri-bution facility used for a number of performances of works by composers, including Henry and Schaeffer, at the RTF, the French national public broad-caster, in the 1950s (Manning 2004: 21–9, Valiquet 2012: 410–12). In this, a performer, placed in front of the audience, provided a visual focus and visibly controlled the spatialization of the sound within the performance environment. Two loudspeakers were placed at just above head height to the left and right at the front of the auditorium, another loudspeaker was placed on the ground at the center back, and a fourth loudspeaker was placed in the center of the ceiling above the audience. A five-track tape recorder was connected to the loudspeakers so that each of four channels drove a single loudspeaker, with the fifth track dynamically and spatially distributed across all four loudspeakers. The performer, situated directly in front of the audience, controlled the distribution of sound of this fifth track between the four loudspeakers by moving a handheld metal coil between four circular metal rings, each corresponding to a loudspeaker (Poullin 1954: 289).

RTF sound engineer Jacques Poullin claimed that this live projection and movement of sound within the performance environment was important because it helped to provide, through the visual presence of the sound projectionist and the connection between the visually perceived physical gesture and the aurally perceived trajectory of sound, an otherwise absent human presence for listeners during the performance of such works (1954: 290). This performance environment therefore explicitly addressed the challenge of maintaining interest in amplified sound in the absence of a spectacular visual. The use of a visible performer indicates that in the mid-1950s these composers believed that a visual stimulus was needed to sustain audience attention in a genre presenting sounds made unfamiliar through the manipulation of sound recordings. The potentiomètre d’espace was designed to focus the attention of the listener on sound through the gestures of a visible performer: sound experienced both visually and aurally as in a traditional orchestral concert hall performance.

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Roger Scruton (1997) has argued that the theory of acousmatic listening is a good characterization of the general condition of listening to music. For Scruton, musical experience is essentially acousmatic and musical sound is always heard as separate from its causes (2–3). But if it is the case, as the evidence presented in this essay suggests, that seeing a performance is a substantive and important part of musical experience, then the experience of listening to works performed by performers on a stage in a concert hall is poorly characterized as being exclusively acousmatic. In a critique of Scruton’s claim for the general acousmatic nature of music, Andy Hamilton has argued instead that both the acousmatic and the non-acousmatic should be acknowledged as part of music and musical experience (2007: 108–11). Hamilton’s thesis seems to account for the concern with the visible, non-acousmatic aspects of musical performance evident in the practices of composers experimenting with multichannel electroacoustic presentation during the 1950s. In addition, electroacoustic composer Dennis Smalley has argued more generally that gesture—whether seen or not—is central to the experience of music and that therefore “music, and electroacoustic music in particular, is not a purely auditory art but a more integrated, audio-visual art, albeit that the visual aspect is frequently invisible” (1996: 90). Electroacoustic performance practices in the 1950s suggest that perception of sound is better characterized, in general, as multi-modal, encompassing both the visual and the auditory.4 As Schaeffer well understood, acousmatic listening is listening against the grain.

Conclusion

The visual was central both as an interpretative frame and as an attentional anchor in the practice and discourse of multichannel and stereo listening both in the home and in the concert hall in the 1950s. Composers of electro-acoustic works for the concert hall found that sustained listening was hard to achieve without a dynamic visual scene to engage listeners’ attention. In the home, the spatial elements of stereo sound were from the outset closely enmeshed in a tapestry of interwoven texts and images visually interpreting stereo listening and which frequently drew on the visual model of the concert hall. Depictions of stereo listening as framing a representation of a performance environment underline the ways in which domestic stereo sound was also often conceptualized in relation to, and through, the visual. Together these show that while domestic stereo and other multichannel sound technologies were partly innovations to do with the sonic, they can

4 I have adopted the term “multi-modal” from Casey O’Callaghan’s discussion of “Cross-Modal Illusions” (2007: 163–80).

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be better understood when their multiple visual aspects—both actual and representational—are also kept in play.

Discourse and practice around the early adoption of stereo and multi-channel performance environments therefore also pose a more general challenge to theorization of music as an “art of sound.” The concert hall as a historical institution emerged in the late eighteenth century as an environment designed for a special kind of concentrated listening. But it was also an environment that structured the visual aspect of a musical performance in particular kinds of ways. Concert hall auditoriums oriented listeners so that they were looking at the performers rather than elsewhere. The concert hall was a place to look at as well as listen to the performance of music and was, in the twentieth century, adopted as one model for a normative domestic stereo listening practice that was also closely engaged with the visual. In the range of strategies deployed to address the perceived attentional challenge created by multichannel stereo, the visible emerges as a central aspect of musical experience. Listening to music is thereby revealed as an audiovisual practice.

References

Anon. 1954. “Musique Concrète.” The Times (1 July): 5.—1958. “20,000 Watts of HiFi?” Hi-Fi News 3(6): 402–3, 405.—1959. “Music in the Round.” Good Housekeeping 75(5): 104.—1960. “Stereo and the Environment.” HiFi/Stereo Review 4(2): 50–1.Barry, E. 2010. “High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961.” In

Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, eds D. Suisman and S. Strasser, 115–38. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Benjamin, W. 1999. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, 211–44. London: Random House.

Boulez, P. 1986. Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. J.-J. Nattiez. London: Faber.Briggs, G.A. 1959. Stereo Handbook. Bradford: Wharfedale Wireless Works.Burns, R.W. 2000. The Life and Times of A.D. Blumlein. London: Institute of

Electrical Engineers.Chion, M. 2009. Guide to Sound Objects: Pierre Schaeffer and Musical Research.

Paris: Éditions Buchet/Castel.Decca Record Company. 1959. “Decca SRG300 Stereogram.” The Gramophone

(January): advert 1.Doyle, P. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music,

1900–1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.Freeth, C.F. 1960. “Open-Plan Homes Call for Bold Ideas.” Stereo Sound and

Music (Spring): 18–19.Gardner, D. 1959. Stereo and Hi-Fi as a Pastime. London: Souvenir Press.Gramophone Co. 1956. “Stereosonic Sound Brings the Realism of the Orchestra

into Your Own Home.” Hi-Fi News 1(3): 88.

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Hadden, B.H. 1960. “Adapting Studio Microphone Methods to Home Conditions.” Stereo Sound and Music (Spring): 24–6.

Hamilton, A. 2007. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum.Juster, N. 2008 [1961]. The Phantom Tollbooth. London: HarperCollins.Le Corbusier. 1958. Le Poème électronique. Paris: Editions de Minuit.Lombardo, V., A. Valle, J. Aldred, K. Tazelaar, S. Weinzierl and W. Borczyk. 2009.

“A Virtual-Reality Reconstruction of Poème Électronique Based on Philological Research.” Computer Music Journal 33(2): 24–47.

Manning, P. 2004. Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

O’Callaghan, C. 2007. Sounds: A Philosophical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Poullin, J. 1954. “L’apport des techniques d’enregistrement dans la fabrication de matières des formes musicales nouvelles. Applications à la musique concrète.” L’Onde Electrique 34: 282–91.

Pye Limited. 1958a. “Pye Leads with Stereo.” Hi-Fi News 3(2): 136.—1958b. “With Pye Stereo You are There.” Hi-Fi News 3(5): 290.Schaeffer, P. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux. Paris: Seuil.—2008. “Acousmatics.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, eds C.

Cox and D. Warner, 76–81. New York: Continuum.Scruton, R. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Smalley, D. 1996. “The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic

Era.” Contemporary Music Review 13(2): 77–107.Stockhausen, K. 1995. Kontakte: für Elektronische Klänge, Klavier und

Schlagzeug. Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag.Symes, C. 2004. Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical

Recording. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.Valiquet, P. 2012. “The Spatialisation of Stereophony: Taking Positions in

Post-War Electroacoustic Music.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43(2): 403–21.

Varèse, E. 1998. “Spatial Music.” In Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (expanded edition), eds E. Schwartz and B. Childs, 204–7. New York: Da Capo Press.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Recorded British Folk Song

Allan F. Moore

Recordings of British folk song go back to the first, “Edwardian” decade of the twentieth century as an outgrowth of the practice of song collecting.1 While some collectors (such as Lucy Broadwood, 1907) went to great lengths to notate songs, as sung, as accurately as possible, it was Percy Grainger who first ventured out with an Edison cylinder machine, recording in Lincolnshire the singing mainly of Joseph Taylor. Grainger’s purpose was still one of collection and preservation (the latter appearing even stronger since it was now possible to preserve the actual sounds of the singer, not just the notes and words the singer sang). Although this process did not continue uninterrupted, by the 1940s the BBC had amassed a number of recordings made in the field, recordings that proved a spur to the Second Revival of English folk song in the 1950s. And it was at this time that Alan Lomax journeyed to the UK to discover whether any sources remained of the American songs he had been collecting, thereby meeting the instigators of this second, post-war revival, fellow socialists Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd.

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the dominant aesthetic strains present in the making of such recordings from this period to the present. The preservationist approach just mentioned can be seen simply as documen-tation of the sounds of folk song singing, and this approach sits at one end of a continuum that I shall employ. At the other end of this continuum is the use of the recording studio as an instrument in itself for the construction of the virtual spaces that recorded sounds inhabit—spaces that I have

1 The term “British,” for the purposes of this chapter, refers to the geographic region known as the British Isles (sometimes, and perhaps more usefully, simply known as the Western Isles), not to that political entity known as Great Britain.

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explored in previous work, foremost among which are the spaces created by stereophonic recording (Moore 2001, 2010). The model I use is that of the “sound-box,” a notional three-dimensional space mapped out by the recording, in which the left–right dimension, the most apparent to many listeners, equates to stereo placing. These spaces often bear problematic relationships with the actual spaces in which live performance takes place, and yet for many contemporary genres of music their construction repre-sents a normative function of record production. Because of the wealth of folk song recordings over this period, I have restricted my narrative and have chosen those that appear at the greatest distance from a pop music aesthetic, i.e. the stylistic tradition of solo singers usually accompanied by one primary instrument (normally their own).2

Documentary Realism

Although Bert Lloyd began developing a career as a journalist and critic prior to his first encounter with English folk song in the 1930s, it was through his activities as organizer, singer and apologist that he was particularly known in the 1950s and 1960s. His recording of “The Trees They Grow So High” (Lloyd 1960) typifies the way that the early revivalists acted in front of the microphone. He sings unaccompanied and is recorded in a single take in a largely dry acoustic. The absence of difference between this and the source singer Pop Maynard singing “William Taylor” (Various 1998) at about the same time, is notable.3 While Lloyd has come to the tradition from outside, both recordings have the same primary function, which is to document first the respective songs, and only second the manner of singing. Indeed, in the background to Maynard’s singing can be heard the ticking of a mantelpiece clock, guarantor of the recording’s documentary status but simultane-ously signaling its absence as an aesthetic document. Elsewhere on Lloyd’s Selection from the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1960), Lloyd is accompanied by concertina player Alf Edwards. Of particular interest in this context is the song “Salisbury Plain”: while Edwards is foregrounded when outlining the tune (in the introduction and between verses), he slips into the background during the verses, a functionalist relationship inherited from live performance. The function of this recording is the same, although we should note that the provision of an accompaniment, which was seen as

2 I have discussed elsewhere the distinction between generalized pop and folk performance aesthetic positions: see “The End of the Revival: Contextualising the Folk Aesthetic” (Moore 2011).3 There is doubt as to whether this recording, which was probably made at Maynard’s Sussex home, was actually made in 1959, rather than a year or so either side.

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a revivalist development of the tradition,4 was in part intended to make the material more palatable for then contemporary audiences. A larger purpose for this particular release was to provide an aural analog to the collection of folk songs Lloyd had recently edited with Vaughan Williams (1959), a staple source of material for many singers in the 1960s and beyond.

In an interview dating from 2006, the accordionist John Kirkpatrick commented on the resource that historical recordings of singers such as Maynard made available to heirs to the tradition:

There’s a canon in this country of recorded material that’s there for us to keep going back to. It’s a bit like the works of Shakespeare: a massive body of work frozen in time, captivating stories told in beautiful language and extraordinary melodies. You can be inspired by it to create new work, or adapt it to new situations, but that archive is still there, and you can always go back and start again. (quoted in Peters 2006: 31)

The references to Shakespeare and to going back and starting again carry the implication that, for Kirkpatrick as arguably for many other musicians, this resource represents an un-interpreted original as much as it might an interpreted version, a starting point as much as it might a link in an unbroken chain of performances. In making use of a recording in this way, singers like Kirkpatrick would need to listen through the recording to the voice itself, situated in a virtual space behind the materiality of the recording. The possibility of so doing must always remain open, and yet in this chapter I want also to trace what can be gained if one were to listen to the recording, to hold fast, without peering behind the recording at that voice itself.

The Scots singer Alex Campbell was one of a number who rose to prominence during the post-war revival. His recording of “The Bluebells of Scotland” (1963) was part of a similar enterprise to that of Lloyd’s Selection album (i.e. promoting Scottish songs). Campbell sings to the accompaniment of his own guitar, a rather resonant banjo and a tin whistle doubling the tune. We can hear that by the early 1960s, with the exception of MacColl’s inner circle, the “authentic” mode of singing unaccompanied has been marginalized. (For both Lloyd and MacColl, the practice of singing to a guitar smacked too much of American and, hence, commer-cialized practices.) Campbell is in the foreground of the recording’s virtual space. The reason for this would seem self-evident: as the singer, his persona carries the song’s content, which for the listener would be the focus of the performance. The recording has no real sense of depth; it appears to be a

4 Printed collections of folk songs had, for decades, appeared with piano accompaniments of greater or lesser suitability, but the purpose of these had been to enable performance in new (i.e. bourgeois) social contexts, such as the drawing room or the recital hall.

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live recording, particularly from the way it is miked: the resonance of the performance space can be heard in the sound of Campbell’s voice as it is picked up by the microphone. While this recording is too early for stereo treatment, observation of the prehistory of stereo in folk recording is a necessary precursor to consideration of how stereo is employed. Campbell’s accompaniment has no bearing on how we might construe the song’s meaning. An accompaniment can carry a number of roles in relation to the performance persona adopted by the singer, but the normative role of an accompaniment in folk performance from this period forth has been either inert or quiescent—either “contributing nothing specific to the meaning of the song” or “merely setting up the (largely attitudinal) expectations through which a listener may listen” (Moore 2012a: 191).5

Guitarist Davy Graham’s early career coincided with that of Campbell, though he subsequently became far better known for his pioneering use of altered tunings. His version of Cyril Tawney’s standard, “Sally Free and Easy,” was recorded in 1964, apparently on two-track tape and initially issued in mono (Graham 1964). Frequent practice at the time was to place the voice on both tracks, with various instruments on one or other. In the reissued CD version, we can hear bongos to one side and guitar to the other (each having been recorded on one of the original tracks) with Graham’s voice taking center stage (having been recorded on both). This use of re-engineered stereo is in line with that for subsequent reissues of mono pop recordings (Moore 2001: 122). There is a slight sense of reverb on the melodic high C that opens Graham’s melody, a measure of room ambience that I suspect listeners would have heard had they been in the room during Graham’s recording. It appears to be a pretty empty room and so, while recorded live, it was probably recorded without an audience. Graham’s parallel plucked thirds as part of his between-verse material identifies what is new in the recording of this standard—Graham’s own idiolect. What is being documented here is as much musical performance as the musical experience, in that Graham’s version, his arrangement, of “Sally Free and Easy” is more salient to a contemporary listener’s experience than had been Lloyd’s rendition of “The Trees They Grow So High.” While each singer has her or his own idiolect, their own individual approach to the perfor-mance of a song, Graham’s is foregrounded whereas Lloyd’s is not. Lloyd remains the medium for “The Trees They Grow So High”; “Sally Free and Easy” begins to approach the pop music model of being the medium for Graham.

Two early recordings by Scots singer Archie Fisher demonstrate that although folk recordings take part in the general development of a non-classical recording aesthetic through the late 1960s and into the 1970s,

5 I develop a typology of relationships between the performance persona and the sonic environment in Moore (2012a: 188–206).

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the development is far from monolithic. Fisher’s version of “Reynardine” was recorded in 1968 and illustrates a further stage in the development of an individual idiolect. Although his delivery is straightforward, with his guitar very low in the mix, the incorporation of a sitar, slightly to the left of the stereo field, is idiosyncratic and aligns Fisher at this point with the contemporary psychedelic folk movement. He is closely miked, as evidenced by the clear lipsmack at 1'09'' on “her cherry cheeks,” betokening a realist authenticity—we are hearing Fisher’s delivery exactly as it was made. Two years later, on his landmark Orfeo (Fisher 1970), his “Tak’ the Road” returns to a much more straightforward combination: with bass and guitar slightly to the left of the sound-box, his voice in the center, and mandolin to the right. In using stereo space in this way the recording conforms, as far as instrumentation allows, to the normative diagonal mix I explore elsewhere for mainstream pop genres (Dockwray and Moore 2010).

For all my examples so far, because the mode of recording is direct, I want to propose that the aesthetic be understood as realist, that it functions as a documentary record of the way Maynard, Lloyd, Campbell, Graham, Fisher and their fellow musicians sounded at precisely those moments in time. These recordings maintain the illusion of the listener’s unmediated access to the performance. In saying this, I am suggesting a rethinking of key categories developed by Peter Doyle in his landmark study of early recordings, Echo and Reverb (2005). In his book, Doyle points to a fundamental difference between two positions in recording aesthetics. Although he writes of pre-stereo recordings, his point remains relevant to later work. He notes the difference between what he calls a realist recording aesthetic, by which he means the practice of recording “dry,” i.e. incorporating as little room ambience as possible, and a romanticist aesthetic, which includes room ambience. Doyle notes that these different aesthetic positions originated in recording practices for popular music and classical music respectively: “the realist approach … provided ‘an effect of intimacy … the singer or soloist singing just for you’ … Romanticism conversely had the effect of seemingly ‘bringing the listener into the studio or auditorium’” (57). Simon Zagorski-Thomas (2010) proffers a similar distinction, between music recorded for replay in a large space, which is mixed dry, and music recorded for replay in small spaces, such as the living room, where reverb is added to simulate the atmosphere of larger venues. Doyle’s analysis is far more complex than my brief excerpt makes out, but the distinction between, perhaps, an implied fidelity to the aural source and its imaginative, fantastic, employment, has far wider repercus-sions. The basic distinction between realist and romanticist positions can be maintained in recording the folk tradition, but it needs to be constituted with respect to more than simply room ambience. A key reason for this is that folk song cuts across the popular/classical divide that animates Doyle’s discussion—abandonment of the composer’s autonomy situates

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folk song as non-classical, but veneration of the material situates folk song as non-popular. I shall therefore reformulate Doyle’s distinction, suggesting that with folk song, a realist recording performs a documentary function, even if that recording accommodates some room ambience. With contemporary production techniques, the romanticizing element of a studio-constructed recording goes far further than the simple admission of room ambience. Thus, to return to the Campbell example above, in its incorporation of some room ambience, it would correspond with Doyle’s identification of a romanticist recording aesthetic, but in its presentation of the performance as it actually took place, it represents what I am calling the “documentary realist aesthetic.”

This recording aesthetic remains a viable option through subsequent decades and is still found to this day, as a couple of more recent examples show. Indeed, in the latter 1980s, particularly in response to the more down-to-earth performance aesthetic adopted by punk, and which eventually had its impact on mainstream folk music (on Steeleye Span and the Oysterband in particular, perhaps), it enjoyed something of a resurgence even in this marginal genre. In Pete Morton’s recording of the classic ballad “Tam Lin” (1987), Morton appears some way from the microphone, and slightly behind his rather skeletal guitar. Very little attack is audible, the microphone picking up what room ambience there is. Although both voice and guitar are very central, one can just about position the guitar sound fractionally to the voice’s left, the stereo placement thus exactly reconstituting the live setup, since a guitar’s acoustic body will appear to an audience fractionally (a matter of inches) to the left of the voice of a right-handed player. The aesthetic is one of a realist authenticity, as already described. The aesthetic similarity between this and Benji Kirkpatrick’s recording of “The Bold Princess Royal” (2006) is striking.6 Kirkpatrick sings and accompanies himself on bouzouki:7 both sound sources are central in the stereo space and of roughly equal volume (perhaps the bouzouki recedes slightly), both are some distance from the microphone, and there is minimal room resonance. A very recent example, demonstrating the continued currency of this aesthetic, is provided by Stephanie Hladowski and C. Joynes’ playing of “Died for Love” (2012), in which no production attempt has been made to correct the guitar’s slightly wayward tuning. All three are as “documentary” as they come.

6 Benji is the son of John Kirkpatrick, referred to earlier.7 This may seem a strange choice, but the bouzouki was introduced into Irish folk music in the 1970s, particularly by Johnny Moynihan, Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine, and has more recently been taken up by a number of English musicians too, albeit with tuning patterns altered.

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Indirect Realisms

A timbrally richer example is provided by the singer Jo Freya, who, in 1993, produced a set of English songs for a non-specialist label, Saydisc, and hence (presumably) a non-specialist audience. One might therefore expect the production to be straightforward. On “Though I Live Not Where I Love” (Freya 1993), her rich voice is recorded at a slight distance, combined with a plain guitar accompaniment and a fiddle counter-melody. All sound sources are at the center of the sound-box, with the fiddle slightly to the left and the guitar fractionally to the right, very much as a live setup might appear. Later, the recording finds the incorporation of a rich cello, both pizzicato and double-stopped, further still to the right, balancing the fiddle to the left. Maintenance of such stereo balance is normative in most popular styles (cf. Moore and Dockwray 2010: 219–41, Moore 2012a: 255). A more problematic example is presented by Dave Burland’s singing of Cyril Tawney’s “Grey Funnel Line” (Burland 1979). This recording adds a second guitar: Burland’s main finger-style guitar appears slightly to the right of the sound-box, with his voice centered and a second, busier guitar to the left. We might note that Burland’s voice is foregrounded in relation to the guitars and his tone is rather weary, which matches the sense of expression of the lyric, although its resonance appears entirely natural in a small space. What is easily overlooked, though, is that the second, busier guitar is not, as might be assumed, overdubbed Burland. Instead, it was played by a guest musician, in this case Nic Jones. Indeed, overdubbed instruments remain rare in such recordings until the past couple of decades, something that cannot be said for the voice, as can be heard on Bert Jansch’s early song “Rabbit Run” (1967), in which his voice provides both the main tune and a counterpoint. I shall return to this issue below.

While Benji Kirkpatrick’s recording seems to belong to a historically earlier period, much of Martin Simpson’s work updates this particular aesthetic. Simpson is a key figure in the contemporary folk scene. In his singing of “Little Musgrave” (2007), both his voice and guitar have great presence, as if projected right in the listener’s face (more like sitting in the front row of a club rather than near the back). Indeed, the richness of his technique almost gives the effect of more than one instrument playing. Simpson’s voice is closely miked, but with no resonance, unlike the guitar, which in a sloppier recording might imply that they operate in different physical spaces. The guitar appears very slightly to the right of the stereo space, and the voice very slightly to the left, but the guitar’s reverb, and the intricacy of Simpson’s finger-picking, hide the absence of any other instrumental resources. Ewan MacLennan’s more recent version of “Jamie Raeburn” (2012) is not dissimilar. Both his voice and guitar are highly reverberant and yet closely miked—in the second and third verses, the noise

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of metal on string can be heard in his slide guitar, sweeping to the right as the bottleneck leaves the strings. There is some slide guitar-work during the break, also very central.

Dick Gaughan’s “The Floo’ers of the Forest” (1983) also updates this basic documentary aesthetic but in a subtly different way. For much of the song he accompanies his own voice on a typical acoustic guitar, joined by an electric bass and minimal electric piano, and toward the end by further atmospheric keyboards. During the break, however, we hear an evocative electric guitar line replace the voice, still laid over Gaughan’s acoustic guitar, with which it shares the same acoustic space. At this moment, it is as if the voice has become the guitar, in an outpouring too precise for words. Throughout, the aesthetic is realist, but at this point it becomes problematic because the electric guitar, too, is in the hands of Gaughan: his expression moves from his own voice to his own electric guitar, but, in this latter moment, the documentary element of the recording vanishes for the two parts—acoustic guitar, electric guitar—must be overdubbed in order to be realized.

It now becomes important to recognize a distinction between two terms I have hitherto treated as synonymous: documentary and realist. In order to make this distinction, I propose two different orders of realism, recog-nizing that the realist aesthetic aim appears to be to present the illusion of a recording as if we were listening live, but with increasing psychological distance.8 Thus, first-order or documentary realism attempts no production intervention, no mediation: Lloyd, Maynard, probably Campbell, Morton, Kirkpatrick, Burland. All these recordings promote this aesthetic position. The Simpson and Raeburn recordings present a heightened reality, one in which the realism of the recording is preserved, but is demonstrably enhanced, as the recording is mediated by its acoustic aura, which could not be reproduced in live performance: a second-order or enhanced realism. The Gaughan and Jansch examples present a further stage in the development of this position. In Jansch’s case, the addition of his own secondary vocal line would not be reproducible in a live situation, but in that it is Jansch’s body that authors all the music we hear, we have not moved into a qualitatively different world. In the case of Gaughan the experience is perhaps richer, as we hear the movement of his expressive focus from his voice to his electric guitar. Both of these tracks exemplify what I would therefore call a third-order or blended realism. Cognitive theory explains why we do not find a situation such as this (where either Jansch or Gaughan seem to be under-taking two mutually incompatible activities simultaneously) unnatural, uncomfortable; it involves the idea of blended conceptual spaces, the workings of which need not concern us here, but the ready operation of

8 Inevitably, this formulation raises issues of authenticity (which I have exhaustively addressed elsewhere), but for purposes of exposition (and space), I leave this dimension out of consider-ation here.

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such “spaces” in both verbal and visual spheres encourages me to view this as an order of realism.9

A more common and perhaps more subtle manifestation of blended realism can be heard on the track “Blarney Roses,” by Irish musicians Tom McConville and Kieran Halpin (1980). The instrumentation is straightforward: McConville’s fiddle, Halpin’s voice and guitar, with choral voices added on the chorus. This recording points to the second major function of stereo usage in folk recordings. I have already made reference to the specificity of locational identification which stereo helps enable. In this recording, however, we are not aware of individual choral voices appearing at particular locations. Rather, we hear a body of sound, created by these massed voices being positioned across the stereo space, enhancing the realism of the vocal production in a way that is beyond the mono production of such as Alex Campbell, above. Between 3'6'' and 3'18'', as we enter the final chorus, the texture changes. The guitar and fiddle slowly recede into the background and disappear, while the chorus voices move subtly forward, a simple thing to achieve at the mixing desk but impossible to execute in a live performance, because while Halpin’s body (represented by his guitar) recedes, his voice, leading the chorus, advances. In the same way as Gaughan’s and Jansch’s bodies appear in two “places” simultan-eously, that is how we encounter Halpin’s body. A comparable but subtly different example is found in June Tabor’s “Admiral Benbow” (Tabor and Simpson 1980). She is accompanied by Martin Simpson’s guitar, and latterly by a bass, through most of the song. In its last minute, the texture thickens (adding vocal echo and piano) until, for the final verse, we have that same choral conclusion as in the McConville and Halpin example. In Tabor’s case, however, the instruments simply finish what they were playing, rather than being faded out. With the exception of a momentary vocal echo, Tabor’s recording essays documentary realism.

To summarize thus far, perhaps rather crudely: first-order documentary realism tells us we could have been there; second-order enhanced realism tells us we can imagine being there; third-order blended realism adds to these the use of a blended conceptual space.

Approaching a Studio-Conceived Aesthetic

I now want to introduce a second approach to recording British folksong, which may seem to operate at the other end of a continuum from the

9 Elsewhere I discuss the ecological basis for such listening, and the notion of conceptual blending, borrowed from the field of embodied cognition, to explain why we unthinkingly accept the unrealistic nature of such aural appearances (see Moore 2012b: 108–9).

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realist approach already discussed. This is the equivalent of the roman-ticist aesthetic Doyle describes, although in this new context we might best describe it more neutrally as conceived in the studio, rather than for live presentation. In a sense, my distinction is artificial since, as any engineer will know, achieving fidelity to a recorded source is not automatic, it is equally a construction made on the recording; but of course what matters most is the aim, the nature of the illusion concerned. At this point, I want to discuss three recordings that depart markedly from a realist ideal—recordings that, indeed, rely on changing studio practice for the conception of their very existence (a mode that I describe below as fantasy). This mode of recording is most commonly found in those areas of folk song closest to a prevailing pop aesthetic during periods of rapid change of recording technology. The era of the rise and decline of first-generation folk rock, the music of Steeleye Span (1976), in particular, develops studio construction of the soundworld to a high level on a track like “Fighting for Strangers.” Such a recording clearly originates in the studio (even if the songs from which it is built date to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). However, this aesthetic can also be found in more intimate performance practices, such as those of the solo singer with notionally simple accompaniment.

The piano is not infrequently found as a chief accompanying instrument from the late 1970s forward. Kathryn Roberts’ singing of “The Plains of Waterloo” (Rusby and Roberts 1995) displays the piano spread across the center of the stereo space, with the bass to the left and treble to the right. This is a cross-genre convention operating particularly where minimal instrumental resources are deployed, in which the conceit places the listener facing the virtual piano keyboard. In the second verse (from 1'29'') the texture thickens slightly and while Kathryn Roberts’ voice stays central, the piano seems to shift somewhat to the left (the texture becomes thicker at the piano’s bottom end) and to recede, to accommodate the denser movement. After the second verse, a soprano saxophone enters center-left, with slight, occasional bleeding on the right. In the third verse, the piano texture slims down, concentrating on the treble, and accordingly the instrument appears to have moved to the right. Finally, the sax returns to the left (with right-channel bleeding again) and the piano entirely shifts to the right to accommodate it. Although the recording values are close to the music already discussed (recognizable instruments, conventional spacing, minimal sonic treatment), on three very different levels the aesthetic is no longer realist. The first is the piano spread.10 If you face a piano to play it, it encompasses a great deal of your aural awareness, more than is the case in this recording, where its spread, while noticeable, is not extensive.

10 I shall use this term subsequently to identify a locational positioning whereby successive pitches, from bass to treble, appear not in the same place in the stereo spectrum, but laid out across a portion of this spectrum, normally from left to right, bass to treble.

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Moreover, in live situations, one’s relationship to the instrument is almost certain to be very different—either side-on or front-on, but certainly not with the performer’s back to you, the situation portrayed here. The second concerns the movement of the piano, in its entirety, within the stereo space, not something achievable live, and the sense in which it occupies a different, less resonant space than does Roberts’ voice. The third is the bleeding of the sax from one channel to the other, a device (or even perhaps a mistake) that makes no sense outside a studio situation. We should note an interesting characteristic of the instrumental resources here, for not only does Roberts sing the song, but she also plays the piano and saxophone on the recording. By no extension of the imagination could she do this concurrently, but we have already noted Bert Jansch and Dick Gaughan performing in an equivalent fashion. And yet this is not an example of blended realism, despite its initial appearance, because in the piano spread, its movement across the sound-box, and the sax’s bleeding, this recording operates by being first imagined as a virtual, unreal space and then constructed within that space.11

In the past decade or so, it has become common even for established singers to be distanced from realism. Norma Waterson has been singing, prominently, since the early days of the revival. Her recording of “Barbary Allen” (2000) positions her voice very, almost uncomfortably, far forward and fractionally to the right. Although the dominant accompanying instrument is a harp, it is initially smothered by her vocal presence. Indeed, it is hard to hear it initially as a harp (it sounds more like a portative organ); moreover, it receives a slight bass–treble spread, as discussed above, which, like the guitar, has no ecological basis (indeed, when playing a harp, bass pitches are closest to the player, treble furthest away). Daughter Eliza Carthy sings slightly to the back and left. To the right can be heard a cello, as deep in the mix as the harp, and sounding with a viola’s slightly thin tone. Everything sounds quite resonant, the stereo spread is balanced, but neither Waterson’s voice nor the harp’s playing are marked by audible attacks – the sense of proximity is therefore revealed as an artifice, while the resonance suggests a block of sound behind Waterson. At around 3'35'', the harp changes position—the texture thins leaving us with just Waterson and the harp, as at the opening, but now the harp is miked more closely, since the vibration of the plucked strings can be heard. Subsequently, at around 4'20'', a hurdy-gurdy makes its entrance to the left, matching Carthy’s fiddle to the right. The overall sense is one of stasis—there is no strong rhythmic or metrical profile to the track, and yet the shifts of texture imply a strong element of design over sheer performance.

11 To further distance this example from a realist position, we might note that pianos, because they are not portable, are very unlikely to be heard in the sort of intimate, folk club setting that the recording’s space seems to inhabit.

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A very different example can be found in the early work of Jim Moray. Moray’s normal instrument is the guitar, and on “The Seeds of Love” from his first album (2003) his voice is positioned centrally in the sound-box, as one would expect. The instrumental accompaniment, however, is formed from a string orchestra, a drum machine, a variety of synthesized timbres and his own electronically treated voice. In popular music writ large, such rich textures are by no means unusual, though they are rarely authored by the track’s singer, which is the case here. There is a high degree of attention to detail, in terms of both the prominence of individual sound sources and their stereo location, and although Moray’s authorial voice is evident, the recording documents nothing more than the result of its own construction. This is more overtly not music for live performance.

This pole of the continuum is present in folk song recording, then, even if its appearance is (at least until the past decade) more rare. We might hazard two principal reasons for this rarity. The first recognizes folk as a genre that prizes instrumental technique. By this I do not mean instrumental virtu-osity, but the simple somatic experience of the movement of the fingers, arms, body, in the production of sound. A large number of regular listeners to the genre are themselves players (and singers), with highly varying degrees of expertise, producing a self-evidently participatory music. The second recognizes the settings for public performance of this music, which, even today, are frequently small, intimate affairs.

Timeless But New

I have suggested, then, that we recognize a continuum of recording positions, moving from very common documentary and enhanced realisms through rarer blended realism and studio-conceived aesthetics. A sizeable number of recordings made since the 1960s have operated inconsistently, somewhere between the two extremes (documentary realism and studio-conceived) of this continuum. In order to ask questions about the consequence of this assertion, I want to address a range of examples.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the subtle individuating elements that I have already noted in the work of Graham or Fisher (and which are found in the work of countless other musicians) are taken to a new level. Martin Carthy had spent time playing with Steeleye Span; on his 1976 solo recording of the ballad “Willie’s Lady” (1976), his solo guitar accompa-niment acquires an audible aura whereby his open bass strings continue to resonate despite there being active melodic lines in the guitar’s upper range. Carthy’s voice appears slightly off-center to the right of the sound-box, with his guitar an equivalent distance to the left. Once his singing ends at 6'29'', the bass strings (and a couple of higher strings) are picked up in a

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sustained synthesizer tone which gives a slight aura of otherworldliness, presumably appropriate to the song’s magical conceit. The synthesizer is a definite addition to a live setup. While the recording begins as documentary realist, the synthesizer tones are wholly studio-conceived.

Show of Hands’ (1995) recording of the Civil War anthem “Dominion of the Sword” comes from 1990. At this point the band was a duo, essen-tially a singer/guitarist and a fiddler. Although the aesthetic seems to be documentary realist, there are some important differences. There is a drum slightly off-center to the left, with the guitar slightly off-center to the right, each side of Steve Knightley’s voice. His guitar, however, is recorded with a slight spread—treble pitches are slightly further to the right than bass pitches, across a continuum, with Phil Beer’s lightly compressed fiddle further to the right (and, as it happens, generally higher still in pitch). Knightley’s guitar is miked very close—the action of the fingers in lifting from the fingerboard to deaden individual strings is clearly audible. Knightley’s voice is dead center, Phil Beer’s backing voice slightly back and to the right. When they turn into a chorus at c.2', their voices do not quite emanate from the same place, but are perhaps too close for real life. On two levels, then, fantasy intercedes here: minimally in the case of these multiplied backing voices (the band could not quite sound like this in live performance); more importantly in the case of the guitar spread. While applying this sort of technique to the piano seems to have an ecological basis, it certainly does not do so on the guitar, where the relationship between high and low pitches is not linear.

Emily Portman’s recent recording of the classic “Two Sisters” (2010) uses a highly resonant harp as its main accompanying instrument (presumably for programmatic reasons, given that in the latter part of the narrative the murdered sister’s bones are used to construct a harp). Portman is positioned directly in front of the harp, closely miked (we can hear her lipsmacks and breathing) and central, whereas the harp leans to the right. At around 1'45'', we hear two additional Portmans at extremes of the stereo space, distanced with extensive reverb, wisps of which voices remain through much of the rest of the track. At around 4'30'', unusually audible harp harmonics are employed illustratively to make the sound “melt the heart of stone,” leading to the harp moving to the bass end as Portman’s voice gains reverb. A very different use of the harp to Waterson’s, then, but one that combines enhanced realism with a studio-conceived aesthetic.

Guitarists, too, are used to exploring this dynamic. Bob Fox is another well-seasoned performer normally heard in realist mode. On his political anthem “One Miner’s Life” (2006), he sings to a rather fat, ringing guitar sound. There is a marked difference between the production of his voice between verse and chorus—the verse is very dry, the chorus highly resonant, as the verse’s observer/narrator becomes the chorus’ protagonist. Later, the chorus becomes enriched by three-part singing, all overdubbed by Fox. This raises the question of where the guitar belongs, and perhaps

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of what it symbolizes. At the opening, it is closer to the dry presentation of the verse, but the final chord suggests a shift toward the world of the protagonist. In this example, we begin with a sharply produced enhanced realism, shifting perspective toward the studio-conceived, but for symbolic rather than ornamental reasons.

Seth Lakeman has recently become perhaps the most visible contem-porary folk singer within mainstream circles. While his background is impeccably part of the folk community, the production values on his recordings help cement his visible position. On “The Setting of the Sun” (2006), his reworking of the traditional ballad better known as “Molly Bawn,” we can hear initially two guitar parts, very forward, and not clearly distinguishable from each other, together with a bass.12 Lakeman’s voice is also far forward, but is higher in register and therefore there is none of the masking audible in Waterson’s “Barbary Allen.” There is also some hand drumming, not particularly distinctive, but supportive of the very rhythmic guitar playing. What is of particular interest to me here is the location of these guitars. They are fat sounding, covering quite a wide range of the center of the stereo spectrum, such that there is a sense of their wandering out slightly to both left and right at different points. The effect seems to be of their moving aside slightly when Lakeman is singing (although, as I say, there is no risk of masking), and then back toward the center when he is not.13 In the coda, however, when Lakeman backs himself vocally, the guitars do not move aside for him.

Through this last group of examples, then, we can hear either documentary or enhanced realism combined with a studio-conceived texture in a mode that, to my ears, has come to dominate contemporary folk song production. How might we explain what is going on here? In a different context, Timothy Taylor has written about the difficulty “world music” performers have faced in addressing the larger audience enabled by the genre label. In a telling passage he poses the dilemma of appearing both timeless and new:

The central problematic in [the marketing of world music] revolves around the necessity for demonstrating that world music [is both] timeless and new at the same time. This results in some odd linguistic juxtapositions in all arenas of the marketplace. For example, the recipe of my favourite pancake mix was altered recently, the new but familiar box proclaiming both “Original Recipe” and “New and Improved.” World music is timeless, but fresh; fresh but timeless. You have heard it before (almost), but you haven’t heard anything like it before. (1997: 28)

12 Elsewhere, “Molly Bawn” is also known as “Polly Vaughan,” “The fowler,” and “The shooting of his dear.”13 I suspect this is a perceptual illusion.

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It is this contradictory insistence on both timeless and new, finds expression in the simultaneous presentation of realism (these songs have been sung for generations, and are being sung still, like this, at this moment of recording, to audiences in intimate proximity to singers) and fantasy (some of the sounds you are hearing, integral to the recorded performance, have not been heard before), that lifts the performance of songs from the tradition into the contemporary milieu. This is no longer merely the old tradition.

A most extraordinary manifestation of this particular aesthetic mix can be found on Jim Moray’s most recent album (2012). The track “Seven Long Years” begins in documentary realist mode, with Moray’s comfortably, slowly strummed guitar and voice in the very center of the stereo space. The voice is slightly drier than the guitar and on long vowels perhaps appears disembodied from it, a symptom of what will ensue. As early as the introduction to the second verse, we hear odd, properly disembodied, synthesized sounds with extensive reverb to the far left. The introduction to the third verse (at 1') adds a piano balancing to the right, with a held chord pad in the center. The production path of the track is at this point one of progressive enrichment, a counterpart to the cumulative form found in many genres of popular music (e.g. Spicer 2011; cf. Moore 2012a: 287–90). At 1'25'', the word “spied” is echoed by a second Moray, softer and to the left, and this echo sets off its own echoes in turn, a motif that continues to play a part in the rest of the track. It would be possible, I think, to hear this as the “real” Jim Moray, i.e. Douglas Oates, appearing in the mix. At 2'07'', immediately after the song’s protagonist has announced he is just a ghost, the texture suddenly changes to the sort of oceanic, all-encompassing, majestic richness familiar from other genres of popular music—think My Bloody Valentine, Doves, U2 or even Coldplay or Sigur Rós.14 The constant avoidance of a root position chord at the beginning of the sequence, which has underlain the verse and which is excerpted and repeated here eight times (Ib–IV–V–V), leads to the reappearance of the narrative more than a minute later, but it almost overwhelmed by this rich texture. The tonic root is finally achieved at 3'39''. This fantastic texture dissolves, however, into a repeat of the opening verse at the very end. First-order realism bookends the track, whose main trajectory is a smothering of realism within different levels of fantasy and extra-generic reference. It is a clear instantiation of Taylor’s “timeless and new,” and yet makes no overt reference to world music discourse. This points us to another source for this thinking, for which we have to move back to the Edwardian Revival and the thinking of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Vaughan Williams was active mainly as a composer, but in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras he was a noted collector of songs, an activity

14 My thanks to Sean Albiez for this latter suggestion; Sigur Rós are perhaps generically closer to Moray than are Coldplay.

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that furnished him with an aesthetic position from which he was able to promote a new voice in English music—the critically much derided (but perhaps “therefore” very popular) pastoral voice. In his writings collected under the title National Music and Other Essays (1987), Vaughan Williams suggests that the musical life of a nation is like a pyramid: “at [the] apex are the great and famous; below, in rank after rank, stand the general practi-tioners of our art … the musical salt of the earth … Lastly we come to the great army of humble music makers, who, as Hubert Parry says, ‘make what they like and like what they make’” (239).15 In this vision, Vaughan Williams sees the “common people” being rescued from their obsession with the burgeoning commercial music market (particularly music hall and its offshoots) through the activity of composers who are to return to a child-like state of musical immediacy (the folk-singer’s “state of grace”) before combining this with their own technique.

Vaughan Williams’ theories begin from two assumptions, both denying fundamental precepts of bourgeois aesthetics, and here lies his ideological contribution. First, he refuses a key assumption of modernist aesthetics, namely that the artist creates from a position of idealized individual autonomy. Vaughan Williams argues that the process of invention itself necessitates an audience (rather than the audience being an afterthought) and is built on the work of predecessors: “Supreme art is not a solitary phenomenon, its great achievements are the crest of a wave; it is the crest which we delight to look on, but it is the driving force of the wave below that makes it possible” (50). Secondly, in a move well before its time, he denies the universality of a musical “language”: “It is not even true that music has an universal vocabulary, but even if it were so it is the use of the vocabulary that counts” (1). What seems to be important to Vaughan Williams is the “rootedness” of a music in shared practices with an observable history: “The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of the nation, and by a nation I mean … any community of people who are spiritually bound together by language, environment, history and common ideals, and above all, a continuity with the past” (68). Thus his aim of uniting the social function of music (folk song, founded in the above values) with the transcendent claims of a functionless art music, is a music both timeless and new.

As his critics have noted, this program was unsustainable in practice—unsustainable, that is, for Vaughan Williams working when and where he did. The inevitability of the failure of his program is, though, far less important than the desire to formulate it. It seems to me that this simul-taneous exploration of rootedness and transcendence is precisely the effect achieved by Jim Moray’s “Seven Long Years” and, perhaps a little less

15 I am very grateful to Charlie Ford for first bringing these details of Vaughan Williams’ remarkable philosophy to my attention.

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obviously, by both other mixed-aesthetic tracks I have discussed above, as well as a whole range of others easily encountered. Among these, one will find recordings of folk rock bands, of vocal trios and quartets, of larger instrumental groupings of various sorts—in this chapter I have merely mapped the achievement of this approach in the simplest possible case. In part, this new approach may be related to the newly growing public for this particular version of the folk tradition.16 Whether or not that is the case, the evidence I have presented above should make it clear that this quintessential live music has been engaged in a long process of re-conception and that any study of contemporary folk music must take into account its identity as a recorded art. Key to this re-conception is the realization that the effects achieved by this music are not (simply) the result of its particular melodies, harmonies, lyrics—a realization even more marked with larger ensembles. Modeling the stereo space of a recording is an indispensable aspect of understanding its effects, and this is as true of recorded folk song as it is of any other contemporary genre.

References

Broadwood, L. 1907. “Songs from County Waterford, Ireland.” Journal of the Folk-Song Society 10(3/1): 3–38.

Burland, D. 1979. You Can’t Fool the Fat Man. Rubber, RUB036.Campbell, A. 1963. Best Loved Songs of Bonnie Scotland. Society, SOC936.Carthy, M. 1976. Crown of Horn. Topic, 12TS300.Dockray, R. and A.F. Moore. 2010. “Configuring the Sound-Box, 1965–72.”

Popular Music 29(2): 181–97.Doyle, P. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording

1900–1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.Fisher, A. 1968. Archie Fisher. XTRA, matrix no. unknown.—1970. Orfeo. Decca, matrix no. unknown.Fox, B. 2006. The Blast. Topic, TSCD555.Freya, J. 1993. The Traditional Songs of England. Saydisc, CD–SDL402.Gaughan, D. 1983. A Different Kind of Love Song. Celtic Music, CM 017.Graham, D. 1964. Folk, Blues and Beyond. Decca, LK 4649 (CD reissue: Topic

1999, TSCD820).Hladowski, S. and C. Joynes. 2012. The Wild Wild Berry. Bo’Weavil, Weavil 49.Hodgkinson, W. 2009. The Ballad of Britain: How Music Captured the Soul of a

Nation. London: Portico.

16 This cautious growth has been widely noted by commentators across the past decade or so, and in part accounts for a plethora of new journalism, most notable perhaps Rob Young’s mammoth recent study, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (2010), and Will Hodgkinson’s more focused The Ballad of Britain: How Music Captured the Soul of a Nation (2009).

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Jansch, B. 1967. Nicola. Transatlantic, TRA 157.Kirkpatrick, B. 2006. Half a Fruit Pie. Fellside, FECD181.Lakeman, S. 2006. Freedom Fields. I-Scream, ISCD007.Lloyd, A.L. 1960. A Selection from the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs.

Collector, JGB5001. Reissued as England and Her Traditional Songs (2003), Fellside, FECD173.

Lloyd, A.L. and R. Vaughan Williams. 1959. The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

MacLennan, E. 2012. The Last Bird to Sing. Fellside, FECD 250.McConville, T. and K. Halpin. 1980. Port of Call. Rubber, RUB041.Moore, A.F. 2001. Rock: The Primary Text. Farnham: Ashgate.—2010. “The Track.” In Recorded Music: Society, Technology and Performance,

ed. A. Bayley, 252–67. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.—2011. “The End of the Revival: Contextualising the Folk Aesthetic.” Popular

Music History 4(3): 289–307.—2012a. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song.

Farnham: Ashgate.—2012b. “Beyond a Musicology of Production.” In The Art of Record

Production, eds S. Frith and Z. Zagorski-Thomas, 99–111. Farnham: Ashgate.Moore, A.F. and R. Dockwray. 2010. “The Establishment of the Virtual

Performance Space in Rock.” Twentieth-Century Music 5(2): 219–41.Moray, J. 2003. Sweet England. Niblick is a Giraffe, NIBL003.—2012. Skulk, Bandcamp.Morton, P. 1987. Frivolous Love. Harbourtown, HAR001.Peters, B. 2006. “Simplicity Man,” fRoots 282 (December): 31–3.Portman, E. 2010. The Glamoury. Furrow, FUR002.Rusby, K. and K. Roberts. 1995. Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts. Pure,

PRCD01.Show of Hands. 1995. Backlog. Hands On Music, HMCD06.Simpson, M. 2007. Prodigal Son. Topic, TSCD567.Spicer, M. 2004/2011. “(Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music.” Reprinted in

Rock Music, ed. M. Spicer, 295–330. Farnham: Ashgate.Steeleye Span. 1976. Rocket Cottage. Chrysalis, CHR1123.Tabor, J. and M. Simpson. 1980. A Cut Above. Topic, 12TS410.Taylor, T. 1997. Global Pop: World Musics, World Markets. New York:

Routledge.Various 1998. Voice of the People 18: To Catch a Fine Buck Was My Delight.

Topic Records, TSCD668.Vaughan Williams, R. 1987. National Music and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.Waterson, N. 2000. Bright Shiny Morning. Topic Records, TSCD520.Young. R. 2010. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. London,

Faber and Faber.Zagorski-Thomas, S. 2010. “The Stadium in Your Bedroom: Functional Staging,

Authenticity and the Audience-Led Aesthetic in Record Production.” Popular Music 29(2): 251–66.

PART THREE

Multichannel Sound and Screen Media

CHAPTER EIGHT

Television: Now with Two Channels of Audio1

David Sedman

Stereo has been the missing link since TV began. Audio has always been a stepchild. Finally it’s beginning to turn around.

—WXEL-TV PRESIDENT DONALD SUSSMAN (QUOTED IN HOBAN, 1986)

Television has often been called a modern miracle; indeed, it is one of the most successful consumer electronics devices ever brought to market. From television’s earliest days, consumers marveled at the live video pictures that magically appeared on the box in the living room, so enchanted that they sat, unmoving, until staring at the appearance of the test pattern signaling the station’s sign-off time. Television audio, on the other hand, was serviceable but no novelty after so many years of radio. What’s more, when stereophonic recording formats became available in the late 1950s, prompting comsumers to improve their listening options by equipping their homes with high-fidelity audio systems, the sound of mid-century tele-visions still generally emanated from a single small speaker built into the video receiver. As means of better audio reproduction were now at hand, we might expect that television, too, was ripe for an audio upgrade. But that

1 This chapter expands on ideas originally presented in Sedman (2012), “The Legacy of Broadcast Stereo Sound: The Short Life of MTS, 1984–2009,” Journal of Sonic Studies 3(1), http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol03/nr01/a03

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upgrade turned out to be non-existent, and television remained puzzlingly monaural for years to come.

It took three decades after stereo became an established feature in consumer electronics for television audio to receive a second channel, thereby making stereophonic TV sound available to the mass market. There is no doubting that when stereo television was introduced in 1984 in the United States, it was a revelation. This chapter examines the first stereo television experiments in the 1950s and explains why they were not immediately successful in leading to the integration of stereo sound into television viewing. It then details the period of experimentation and simulcasting that occurred between the 1950s and 1980s. While this period witnessed noteworthy artistic and technical innovations in two-channel television sound, as well as substantial promotional efforts, such activities were not persuasive enough to secure endorsement either by the regulatory or the consumer market. Next, the chapter outlines the Multichannel Television Sound (MTS) era, from 1984 to 2009, during which producers regularly developed stereo TV series and events for home viewers. This section is especially concerned with the industrial and work-related shifts brought about by the addition of a second channel of television audio. The chapter concludes with a description of the legacy of stereo television.

The Slow Move Toward Stereo Television

Television began as a small-screen device, with a black-and-white picture and monaural sound. By 1950, the notion of graduating TV’s picture from monochromatic to color was seen as nothing short of essential, even overdue, given that the first tests of color television occurred during the medium’s “laboratory period” in the 1920s and 1930s. In the US, the imperative of color television eventually compelled the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to hold hearings and adopt a standard for color telecasting in 1950, followed by another key meeting in 1953, after objections to the original color standard were raised (cf. Sterne and Mulvin 2014).

During the transition to color, there were two distinct schools of thought regarding television’s auditory dimension. The first looked into methods of transforming television into a stereo medium. The second, more influential school believed that television’s sound was good enough, and that the addition of “accessories” such as stereo would only drive up the cost of a unit. Indeed, a television was an expensive device in its formative years, generally found only in prosperous homes. As such, cost control was central in the drive to turn TV into a mass medium—and reciever costs were

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paramount in this regard.2 While color television did emerge as an option during this period (albeit an expensive one), even cutting-edge sets used the same low-resolution speakers found in standard models. Meanwhile, inexpensive black-and-white sets with low-fidelity speakers were available to the average consumer, which led to the medium’s mass-market adoption in the 1960s. Whether seen in color or black-and-white, then, television’s low-fidelity audio future was concretized for the moment.

For those in the first school of thought, hoping for advances in stereophonic television broadcast sound, the wait was long. While radio broadcasting incorporated stereo on the FM band during the following decade, beginning with the FCC’s adoption of a stereo transmission standard in 1961, television (as well as AM radio) was not “blessed” by FCC standards. This meant that over twenty years would pass before stereophonic protocols were standardized and widely disseminated. But that did not stop stereo enthusiasts from trying to incite change, using on-air experimentation to drum up interest among both the listening public and the broadcast industry. Not surprisingly, a number of the pioneers of early stereo television experiments had already used stereo sound in other media.

In 1952, from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, the first televised test of stereo opera was simulcast in theaters using RCA stereo sound systems. But the influence of the test was limited, and broadcast television remained primarily monaural for the rest of the decade. Certain local stations, however, did experiment with stereo through the 1950s. For example, Benton Harbor’s WKZO offered a program called Stereo Showcase, which worked by simulcasting with an AM/FM combination station in the same local market, while Indianapolis’ WFMB-TV teamed with WFMB-AM to air a stereophonic Christmas music special in 1957. Referring to this latter case, WFMB’s chief engineer, Robert Flanders, noted: “Home listeners get a Cinerama effect making the chorus seem to be in the same room with home viewers” (Anon. 1957: 1). The first broadcast network test occurred a year later, courtesy of bandleader Lawrence Welk. Welk originally moved into television as means of showcasing his recordings—especially his Lawrence Welk Presents… releases, which included artists such as the Lennon Sisters and Dick Kesner. After two successful television series, Lawrence Welk’s Plymouth Show debuted in 1958. The show was simulcast on ABC, with one channel airing on television and the other on radio. It was the first in the US to transmit nationally in stereophonic sound.

The year 1958 was poised to become the breakout year for broadcast stereo. Nearly fifty radio stations began experimenting with stereo transmis-sions, while stereophonic recordings started to take hold in the consumer

2 Television set manufacturers also balked at adding UHF tuners for fear of driving set costs higher.

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market. Indeed, since the beginning of the decade the high-fidelity market-place had grown thirteen-fold, to a quarter-billion dollar industry, and was supported by a $10 million television advertisement budget that was projected to grow at least 10 percent by 1959 (Anon. 1958b: 35). It was this momentum that ABC and Welk wanted to capitalize on with the Plymouth Show. The general feeling was that the experiments would spur the viewing public into action by increasing demand for both stereophonic albums and stereo telecasts. With Welk as the catalyst, ABC believed it would “halve the time for the public to go stereo” (Anon. 1958a: 13). Seventy-five markets covering 80 percent of the country offered the series, in association with a local broadcaster, in order to provide two channels of simultaneous audio (Anon. 1958c: 13). Newspapers around the country covered the audiovisual event, including some articles that gave instructions on how to prepare for stereo. According to one such instructional guide, “You can receive the three dimensional sound by placing your radio set 7 to 10 feet to the right of your TV” (Anon. 1958a: 13).

Later that month, NBC set out to introduce as many as 45 million viewers to the “magic” of RCA Victor—which had recently launched its “Living Stereo” line of record albums—with a stereo simulcast of the George Gobel Show on 21 October 1958. The presentation was designed to stimulate interest in stereo and was called “the most ambitious one-shot promotion in RCA history” (Anon. 1958d: 12). The network repeated the stereo simulcast with its Perry Como Show on 28 February 1959. Como’s television-themed Saturday Night with Mr. C was his first stereophonic album under the “Living Stereo” moniker and was still being marketed a year after its release—as was his second “Living Stereo” effort, When You Come to the End of the Day. To emulate the spatial separation of his recordings, advertisements instructed viewers to place the radio receiver a minimum of eight feet away from the television set. For viewers, it was probably a curious experiment, given that the means of filling a room with sterephonic sound—by creating a wide spatial separation—would have made picture on their receiver seem off-center (as the stereo sound would appear to emanate from an empty space between the television and radio) and diminutive (as most television screens measured twenty-inches or less).

So why pursue a means of television stereo for purposes other than experimentation? There was a great deal of self-interest at NBC and ABC to promote stereo. For NBC, it was selling RCA consumer electronics with stereo components and its “Living Stereo” recording catalog, which was launched in 1958 and featured TV stars such as Como, as well as programming soundtracks for series such as Peter Gunn and M Squad (as well as occasional specials). For ABC, it was to spur stereophonic record sales. Stereo pressings of Dance with Dick Clark were released in stereo in 1958 to capitalize on the network’s hit program, American Bandstand, while Welk’s stereo albums were released on Paramount’s Dot Records

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beginning in 1959. Additionally, ABC completed a landmark deal with the Walt Disney Company, another producer of soundtrack and licensed-character records. Within four months of the Welk broadcast, Disney himself introduced an episode of Walt Disney Presents using simulcast stereo. Disney spared no detail in explaining how viewers could experience the “Peter Tchaikovsky Story” in stereo using both an AM and an FM receiver. “We like innovations,” he said, citing previous Disney landmarks such as Steamboat Willie (the first sound cartoon) and Fantasia (the first multichannel sound film), and further boasting: “Now … we’re the first to bring you stereo and widescreen to television” (Disney 1959).

While NBC and ABC were promoting simulcast television stereo, a national US move toward a stereo standard would not be as easy as a Welk-led, “Ah-one: we release music in stereo”; “Ah-two: we have stereo simulcasts”; “Ah-three: the public and consumer electronics industry demand that the FCC mandate that all television broadcasters provide high fidelity stereo sound transmission.” Yet stereo held some promise, from the perspectives of both the artists trying to promote and sell stereo recordings, and the electronics companies hoping to explore new, marketable technology. With the country more interested in the benefits of color television, television stereo appealed to a much more fringe market. The most obvious target audience for an improved audio delivery system would appear to have been audiophiles and hi-fi enthusiasts. For these stereo pioneers, who had already adopted stereo-ready consumer electronics such as receivers, speakers, turntables and reel-to-reel recorders, the potential transition to stereo television might appear to be a natural progression—an easy addition to their sound systems. But for a subset of these early stereo adopters, an integration of the family television viewing of, say, Howdy Doody might have been seen as an encroachment on their sophisticated sound environments. Partly for this reason, consumer demand for robust television audio did not reach a level that would have triggered mass-marketing efforts among consumer electronics manufacturers or broadcasters.

Not surprisingly, the initial broadcast transition to stereo was found in the medium of FM radio rather than television. The FCC standardized systems proposed by General Electric (GE) and Zenith, stating that “there must be a single set of national standards” to help speed up the adoption of FM stereo, and taking action in April 1961 (FCC 1961: 1615). The move proved successful: audiophiles were fond of the medium’s sonic “presence” and adopted the technology because they liked the sensation of being surrounded with music (Loehwing 1962). Genres that took advantage of stereophonic FM sound included classical and easy listening music. A GE press release in Audio Magazine suggested that the corporation would lead the way to a compatible television stereo standard in 1962 (Canby 1962). While the technology was within reach, the author of the press release,

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Edward Tatnall Canby, made a prescient prediction: until television became a large-screen, ultra-sharp definition medium, it would be unrealistic to have a stereo television standard when TV sets had such small speakers. Canby’s prediction had little to do with the ability of audio practitioners to create a dynamic and even marketable sound for the industry. Rather, it was related to cognitive dissonance between sound and picture, in which audience members would have high-fidelity audio but generally a dimin-utive picture that was also often indistinct, owing to poor signal quality or substandard equipment. “I am highly skeptical of ‘hi-fi’ TV sound, repro-duced flawlessly … [It d]estroys the blend, breaks the fusion between the two elements,” Canby said. “[V]ia big hi-fi speakers your sound suddenly is huge, loud, wide broad, tall, space filling. And the TV picture? Suddenly, you have a fuzzy little thing by comparison lost within its narrow angular dimension” (1962: 12).

One result of television’s continued attachment to “lo-fi” sound was its designation as an “appliance.” This is in contrast to another important piece of home electronics at the time—the hi-fi system—which was thought of as a “technology.” Indeed, the television was a mass marketed, turnkey device in which feature control was in the hands of the manufacturer, while hi-fi systems were a source of individual pride in which the individual could “one up” his (and it was almost universally “his”) neighbor with specific component choices. Keightley refers to this as the “de-technologizing” and domestication of television. He concludes that “the conception of hi-fi as the ‘opposite’ of television constructed a significant and ‘masculinized’ technological–discursive realm whose mere existence helped naturalize the lack of male investment in post-war television as hobby or technology” (2003: 253). Sadly, then, for television performers and audiences hoping for improved fidelity, Canby’s prediction was correct and the medium’s transition to stereo was still more than twenty years away. The most profound impact of this lengthy wait was that the era of hi-fi system builders and enthusiasts would pass long before high-fidelity sound would be integrated with television. These “cult-like” (Keightley 1996) audio fanatics, who often built their own tube-based receivers from modular Heathkit systems, would be supplanted by an entirely different consumer marketplace.

Two Channels of Audio on Two Devices: A Simulcast Stereo Era

The performers and enthusiasts who longed for two-channel television had a long wait for an integrated stereo broadcast standard. But they did have a simulcast era between the 1960s and the 1980s, which was similar to the

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trials offered by Welk, Como and Disney in the 1950s. The advent of FM had made the concept of simulcasting much easier, because a program could be broadcast in FM stereo on the radio at the same time as the visual portion was aired on TV. This simulcast era often found pre-recorded television programs synchronized to a stereo reel-to-reel tape at an FM station, before live satellite feeds became a more common delivery standard. Series such as ABC’s In Concert and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert were promoted with ads and on-air characters that highlighted the FM station on which stereo transmissions could be heard. These series were generally owned by ABC in large markets, though PBS was also a leader in simulcasting arrangements, using public radio stations to broadcast various events and series (e.g. its distribution of WTTW’s Soundstage concert telecasts).

With the advent of satellite and microwave devices, the latter half of the simulcast era offered an expanded range of programming that could reach up to half of the audiences in the United States (Schubin 1977: 9). Exploiting the simulcast era were cable companies such as Group W in Chicago, which offered a tiered FM radio service to make simulcasts easier to transmit and less susceptible to interference (Ripco 1988). The simulcasts may have been an inconvenient substitute for integrated stereo television; but they did evidence an interest on the part of both audiences and program distributors to improve the television audio aesthetic. “With stereo simulcast the viewers’ enjoyment is tripled,” said an Australian broadcaster that simulcasted events such as Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park and Diana Ross in Central Park, “[because] listeners are able to enjoy the full range of the product. You wouldn’t buy Wagner in mono if you can have [Wagner] in stereo” (Coller 1986: 58). Eventually, though, simulcasting was overshadowed. One significant factor was the increasingly important role of film and home video in establishing audience expectations of dynamic stereophonic content.

Because films were commonly mixed in stereo and multichannel sound, consumer awareness of enhanced audio aesthetics was raised, not by broadcast networks or consumer electronics makers per se, but by feature filmmakers and audio post-production artists. For example, theaters playing 1977’s Star Wars publicized Dolby Stereo in their advertisements. There was also an aggressive marketing campaign for the surround sound format used in 1979’s Apocalypse Now, which led to the development of a 5.1 multichannel system. Theatrical movie ads commonly listed a theater’s ability to play back stereo or multichannel audio in the presentation of a given film. This helped shape consumer experience with both stereo and multichannel sound.

During the early- and mid-1980s, consumer electronics devices were developed for the emerging home theater marketplace. Innovation in the home theater space was promoted especially by Japanese consumer electronics companies such as Sony and Panasonic. Indeed, the Electronic

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Industries Association of Japan (EIAJ) standardized stereo audio for TV in January 1979 (Holley and Jameson 1978). A similar stereo experiment, called “displexing,” was introduced by AT&T in the US, though it failed to gain traction with the FCC (Anon. 1989). Nevertheless, audio innovation was on the way.

Following the success of stereo in Japan, the US consumer electronics sector began to introduce “stereo-compatible” equipment for use with VCRs, while cable television systems were rapidly adopted. Sound engineer Josiah Gluck published a white paper that explained the importance of stereo VCRs in promoting consumer awareness of stereo in the realm of television (2009). Indeed, by the mid-1980s nearly 40 percent of the US audience had cable TV, while about 15 percent had a VCR; by the decade’s end, cable reached more than 50 percent of the nation and VCR ownership grew even more rapidly, above 60 percent saturation (Anon. 2001). Though the audience’s aesthetic expectations of television sound were now being dictated less by simulcasting and more by home video and the cable industry, there was a halo effect that increased desire for stereo television receivers.

The time seemed right for the industry to fight for television stereo. In addition to producing content in stereo since the 1970s (e.g. simulcast series and events such as the Grammy Awards), the broadcast industry was acquiring television broadcast rights to contemporary films that had stereo and multichannel mixes. Indeed, audiences increasingly began to expect stereo reproduction on their TV sets. For example, when Star Wars debuted on television in the 1980s, promotions alerted viewers to which station was carrying the stereo audio signal, so that they could have an experience that was closer to that of a theatrical presentation. The move toward integrated television stereo was finally just around the corner.

Sound the Trumpets in Stereo: TV Multichannel Sound Arrives

In 1983, Soundstage producer WTTW adopted a prototype broadcast stereo modulator using a standard created by the Broadcast Television Systems Committee (BTSC) to help garner engineering support for a television stereo standard. The move by WTTW was partially motivated by the FCC’s decision not to promulgate standards for AM stereo just a year earlier. The lack of a clear standard for AM radio proved unpopular and the TV and consumer electronics industries wanted to be more aggressive in finding a solution that the FCC could support. That proved to be a successful tactic, as the FCC was satisfied that action was needed. The agency ultimately concluded, unanimously, that a system created by Zenith

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and dbx was robust enough to be standardized, and became only the third major technological enhancement in television since the introduction of a color standard and the addition of UHF channels back in the 1950s. The stereo standard was referred to as Multichannel Television Sound (MTS) and effectively ushered in the stereo television broadcast era in the United States (FCC 1986).

“The addition of stereo to television broadcasts could be as significant to the consumer as color TV was years ago in enhancing the enjoyment of TV,” said Zenith’s sales president Gerald McCarthy (Anon. 1984a: 1). The press was equally excited. For example, Stereo Review noted that MTS was “the most significant step taken yet toward the final integration of audio and video” and that the impact on the medium would be not dissimilar to the effect that FM had on the radio industry (Feldman 1984: 39). To consumers and the consumer electronics manufacturers, “MTS” was not as marketable as selling stereo television. MTS could also be used as a second audio program (SAP) side-channel for stations that wanted to place alternate content in the side channel, such as a sister radio station or a sporting event aired in a different language. As acronyms go, MTS and SAP were not the most memorable of terms. That said, MTS’s SAP was important in that it allowed for real-time foreign language audio tracks. This was seen as crucial during a time when Hispanic audiences were among the fastest-growing populations in the United States. ABC station KTLA in Los Angeles carried the Love Boat in English on its main service and Spanish on its SAP channel; later, ABC offered Spanish play-by-play for Monday Night Football.

Ironically, the era of standard definition, which was set by the National Television System Committee (NTSC), was nearing its conclusion when stereo sound made its entrance into the television arena. Experiments were already beginning on an advanced, high-definition television system. The FCC famously did not try to force cable systems into carrying standard-definition stereophonic transmissions. So as the stereo television period progressed, it was possible that the 60 percent of the nation with cable might either not receive stereo telecasts or would receive indication of a stereo signal that was not actually MTS. Prentiss accurately predicted this situation in the mid-1980s. He said that cable providers “will likely provide multichannel sound where it is technologically feasible but that the decision should be left up to the cable operators” (Prentiss 1985: 119). Trade press articles focused more on adoption patterns and marketing within the consumer electronics industry than on looking at the somewhat fragile position in which the nascent technology had been placed.

It was ABC that seemed best positioned to usher in the new era of commercial stereo broadcasting, with its Summer Olympics telecast of the opening ceremonies. The excitement of this achievement was covered by the trade press much like a horse race. In one article, the author predicted

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that ABC was the “odds-on favorite” to be the first network to commence stereo broadcasting, placing NBC as the runner-up, sometime in 1985, with CBS showing as a distant third (Anon. 1984b: B7). But at NBC, its tradition in consumer electronics meant that it did not want to be the second horse in a three-horse race. The network pressed Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show into broadcast stereo production, in a maneuver so covert that even its own affiliates were unprepared for the quick action taken by the NBC team. One of television’s MTS pioneers, audio director Ron Estes, was key to the establishment of the stereo era. The transition was no simple process, as Estes had to add more than thirty microphones to properly bring out the sounds of the band; but he and others believed it was a worthwhile under-taking (Joy 1986). In a sense, their work paid off: with an iconic “Here’s Johnny,” the MTS era of multichannel sound was firmly inaugurated.

But was it? The New York Times posed an interesting question: “If The Tonight Show is transmitted in stereo and nobody hears it, did it really happen?” (Kaplan 1984: 46). With affiliates not ready to carry—let alone promote—the event, few could possibly have heard NBC’s stereo efforts, given that only viewers with stereo televisions living in the New York City area could have received it. NBC’s president of opperations and technical services, Michael Sherlock, tried to put the Times’ criticism to rest, stating simply that “stereo is here.” Experimentation, though, was just a first step; his network’s goal was a full deployment. “It’s one thing to bring it here and another to do it right,” he said. “It’s going to be expensive getting stations ready for stereo—$100,000 to $200,000 per station. But once we do, we’ll be broadcasting” and changing the way the audience receives music and sports (ibid.).

The Times’ question was reasonable, because broadcast technologies must adhere to a rather unique three-tiered adoption pattern. The public is generally reticent to purchase broadcasting hardware until there is some “killer application” that comes in the form of programming. The broadcast industry is often conservative in the outlay of funds until it can see a potential return on investment. Such foresight is difficult when market size and advertising dollars are small, and until consumer electronics manufacturers commit to producing devices within the financial reach of the masses. Because NBC and RCA were linked from the outset of MTS, it was apparent that NBC would have to continue as an industry leader in its broadcast schedule and that RCA would have to be a leading innovator in manufacturing stereo-ready TVs and VCRs.

RCA did indeed heavily promote its new (and unfortunately named) “Dimensia” line of television sets, attempting in its marketing to show consumers the benefits of a stereo-centric home theater. The idea was to transform one’s mundane living room, which was typically furnished with a free-standing monaural television, into a luxurious space with a large-screen stereo TV, receiver, turntable and additional electronics—including a

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large “Digital Command Center” remote that put the user in control of all home audiovisual components. While the gargantuan remote might appear to be overkill to contemporary audiences, the device was clearly designed so that an early adopter could impress family and visitors. It appealed to an audience that recalled the hi-fi era, in which creating a technologically advanced space in the domicile was a source of pride for male members of the household. As another leading promoter and inventor of the stereo TV format, Zenith also marketed its System 3 model stereo televisions with a set of commercials that showed how the transition from mono to stereo would improve one’s satisfaction with the medium of television. At the very least, such marketing campaigns raised awareness of the creative potential of MTS-era TV and successfully paved the way for the multichannel home theater era that soon followed.

On the program production and distribution side, NBC was easily the most creative of the broadcast networks in its marketing of stereo TV, using a clever peacock logo with stereo headphones to alert viewers that a series or event was being telecast in stereo (where available). On the cable side, MTV was the most aggressive in terms of trumpeting its conversion to stereo sound, given that the network wanted viewers to hear music videos in the mode of sound reproduction in which the record labels were providing them: stereo. Though MTV was not using the MTS standard, consumers were barraged with reminders that stereo had finally arrived in television. Possibly the more important aspect of MTV’s stereo marketing was that it spurred NBC, which developed its most potent stereo series since the Tonight Show in the form of an edgy crime drama that was heavily influenced by the success of MTV.

Miami Vice was famously pitched as “MTV Cops.” Music that was featured on the show not only received airplay on MTV and NBC’s late-night stereo video show, Friday Night Videos; it was also compiled onto a soundtrack that went multi-platinum and remained at number one on the Billboard charts for eleven straight weeks—making it the most successful TV soundtrack ever (Rosen 1994: 81). Stereo music was an integral component throughout the series’ run. Creator Michael Mann said, “The intention of Miami Vice was to achieve the organic interaction of music and content” (Newcomb 2004: 1577). Episodes were built around dynamically mixed songs that were suited to showcase television stereo, and which were produced by artists that were popular at the time, including Glen Frey and Phil Collins.

In the words of Steve Sykes, who mixed the music for three seasons of Miami Vice: “I can tell you that much care and attention to detail was put into the  most dramatic stereo imaging possible” (2011). Audiences took notice of this attention to sonic detail. Critics and writers agreed that if there was one series that functioned as the “killer application” in the marketing of stereo television, it was Miami Vice. Authors David Marc and

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Robert J. Thompson wrote of the series, “it almost singlehandedly created the consumer market for stereo television” (Marc and Thompson 2010: 24). Stereo television sales support this view: when the series premiered in 1984, stereo-equipped TV sales were slow, at 240,000 units (just 1.5 percent of all sets sold); they then surged to 1.5 million in 1985 (representing nearly 10 percent of total set sales) and, in 1986, doubled to 3 million (almost 20 percent of set sales)—which, not coincidentally, was the series’ best ratings year (Altaner 1986).

While not at the same level as Miami Vice, NBC’s Friday Night Videos also played an important role in audience recognition of stereo broad-casting. MTV’s market penetration in 1985 was under 50 percent among teenagers, leaving many broadcast-only teens longing for music video content (Paskowski, 1985: 66). Stations not broadcasting the series in stereo were required to look for simulcast stations in their market, so that viewers could get the show on NBC. The series adopted a strategy that followed in the footsteps of MTV, whose growth in the 1980s was aided by the rallying cry of art director Georg Lois, “I Want My MTV.” The promotion encouraged unserved audiences to call their cable operators and demand they offer MTV. Viewers of Friday Night Videos were urged to telephone their NBC-affiliated station with a message imploring them to transmit the late-night series in stereo. For stations that had answering machines, the volume of late-night Friday calls was large enough to tax the memory of the machines. Miami Vice was not the biggest commercial hit for NBC, finishing just once in the Top Ten in annual ratings, and outside of the Top 25 in three of its final five years. But as it left the airwaves by the 1989–90 season, televisions with stereo sound were the preponderate format for color receivers that were 19'' and larger. In addition, more than 15 million households had MTS stereo sets (Hilliard, 1989: 85) and nearly 500 stations were then equipped to transmit stereo sound, representing more than 90 percent coverage of television-equipped homes (Anon. 1989: 3).

NBC had clearly become the leader in MTS television by 1986, earning Technical and Engineering Emmy Awards for broadcasting 24.5 hours of stereo programming each week. That compared well to ABC, which had only one prime-time half-hour slot in MTS: namely, the sitcom parody Sledge Hammer! (Hoban 1986). Creator Alan Spencer said of stereo’s influence on his ABC series, “It was one of the reasons I killed the laugh track [after the first twelve episodes ran with canned laughter] as the stereo made it sound particularly tinny; there was never a good mix” (2013). Spencer is proud of the dynamic separation he brought to Sledge Hammer!: “The separation was something I focused on as the surrounds were serviced back [in 1986–88], just the left and right … like politics” (ibid.). And when the series was released nearly two decades later on DVD, Spencer was able to remove the laugh track on the early episodes, thanks to

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production techniques brought about by MTS. Though ABC and CBS were not leading the way in stereo series production, they did have a marketing plan that utilized sporting events, telecast in stereo, as the key to devel-oping interest in the MTS stereo market. Stereophonic broadcasts were integral to CBS productions of the Masters Tournament and the National Football League, while ABC concentrated on the Olympics and auto racing. Producers pooled knowledge, publishing white papers that both assisted and encouraged audio professionals to take advantage of MTS in their coverage of sporting events. An infamous example occurred when CBS used recorded bird sounds in its broadcast of the PGA Championship, hoping to offer greater sonic “realism” and “presence.” The plan backfired when bird lovers heard a particular bird in an area that was outside of its habitat, which mushroomed in online conversation to the point that viewers eventually called the network, which in turn had to admit to using the recorded sound effects (Wolfley 2000). Despite that widely publicized misstep, sporting events were still integral in department store displays designed to highlight the excellence of stereo in the home theater system.

The “Golden Age” of MTS

Television stereo matured in the 1990s. By the start of the decade, stereo speakers were a standard feature on large-screen televisions. Major networks such as ABC and CBS had transitioned their schedules to stereo, while Fox began its stereo telecasts in 1990.

The early 1990s also brought about a period of experimentation in MTS stereo. Fox, for example, was known for adding whooshing sound effects to sports coverage, in order to add excitement as well as aural distinctions between live coverage and instant replays (Sandomir 2002). The network also used multiple, creatively placed microphones at virtually every sporting event that it covered. One of the best examples of MTS experimentation came not from sport, though, but Rick Dee’s regularly scheduled series, Into the Night. The popular Los Angeles radio disc jockey hosted a late-night talk show on ABC. From the outset, there was no question about the presence of stereo sound: Into the Night’s show opener had gratuitous sound effects and movement of sounds from left channel to right channel, coinciding with graphic movements on the screen. TV critic Rick Kogan (1990) noted, “There is nothing subtle about … its sound-effects gizmos,” calling the show a “noisy” exercise. Despite the gizmos and noise, the live mix of the series was in keeping with the essence of Dees’ radio show and his on-camera persona. Since Dees had established connections in the music world, musical guests were also an important component of the series. As such, each night the show’s audio engineers found themselves crossing a

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kind of stereophonic line, between the gimmickery of the opening sequence and the established forms of craftsmanship used to capture the performance of the musical guest.

Yet despite a certain degree of maturation and experimental excitement surrounding the possibilities of stereo engineering and broadcasting, it was not always clear that stereo sound was correctly transmitted to television viewers. Take for example the remarks of Gluck (2011), an Emmy Award-nominated audio mixer. Gluck began mixing in stereo during the 1980s, with the late-night NBC music show Night Music, and has since worked on series such as 30 Rock, Last Call with Carson Daly and Saturday Night Live. He notes that a significant amount of the transmission upmixing during this period was done by “trial and error”—meaning that properly stereophonic sound mixes were not necessarily reaching consumers. What’s more, some local shows, such as newscasts, would perform tricks in order for their broadcasts to appear properly stereophonic. The goal here was simply to ensure that the home stereo receiver’s LED indicator was engaged, signaling stereo reception, because broadcast stations wished to avoid complaints. That is, stations believed that audiences would be satisfied as long as they saw the LED light—regardless of what they heard. Gluck refers to this as the “Blue Light Special mentality.” To those stations with such a mentality, it made no difference during the experimental MTS period whether the quality of the stereo mix was perfect or even accurate. Broadcast consultant John F.X. Browne similarly pointed to a “lights the light theory” (1989). He said that when audience members saw an illumi-nated stereo light indictor, they sensed a return on investment for that piece of broadcast hardware and, further, that the stereo television station was superior to those stations that failed to light the light.

As the 1990s wore on, experimental MTS gave way to a more advanced audio production and post-production industry. For example, Fox’s Late Night, then hosted by Arsenio Hall, took home the 1990 Emmy for sound mixing. It utilized spatial separation to send the woof calls of Hall’s “Dog Pound” from one side of the set to the host’s location in the center, and to the location of the band on the other side of the audio mix. In this way, based on the audio alone, one could probably draw an accurate represen-tation of the look, feel and even position of the series’ visual elements. Moreover, because the Fox talk show attracted a young audience, its producers booked musical acts ranging from hip-hop artists to heavy-metal acts, which challenged audio professionals as they attempted to cater to a target audience with high expectations for quality sound. The Emmy-caliber delivery of audio on this series demonstrated that television stereo was moving past its experimental and “light the light” era, toward a “golden age” of stereo television audio.

A variety of programs illustrate this point. For instance, drawing on his experience with MTS and his work on the Tonight Show, Ron Estes

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applied his craft to a musical police series, Cop Rock, produced by Steven Bocho. The series was widely seen as a misfire, though the audio design demonstrated a leap forward in the maturation of TV stereo sound. Audio professionals such as Estes were becoming much more focused on the art of stereo, and less on the struggle to understand it from the craft perspective. Estes and his colleagues Robert Appere, Gary Rogers and Mark Server earned an Emmy nomination for their audio mixing on Cop Rock. Media scholar George Plasketes states that although the series ultimately failed, its ability to solve complicated post-production issues, including musical direction and mixing, should be noted and that the series should be remem-bered for its “cross-genre formula and aesthetic advances” (2004: 65).

The audio mixers who collaborated on Cop Rock, which pushed the boundaries of sound mixing within MTS, transitioned to other series and helped to establish television’s multichannel audio-mixing practices. Server, for example, moved on to both NYPD Blue and Law and Order. He received Emmy nominations for his creative audio work on both series. Rogers went on to receive eight Emmy nominations and three Emmy awards for his work on three long-running television series: NYPD Blue, The West Wing and Mad About You. Finally, Appere went on to receive another seven Emmy nominations, six of them for his work on NYPD Blue. Though Cop Rock failed to receive its 1991 Emmy for sound mixing, its engineers exerted a strong influence on stereo and multichannel sound during this period. The same can be said for the program that did win the Emmy that year, and for the next three years in the drama category: Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG).

Star Trek: TNG’s sound mixer, Alan Bernard, had completed his Emmy Award-winning work on Crime Story for NBC, his first stereo series experience, in 1986. Then, from 1987 to 2001, he became one of the most prolific MTS era artists, mixing more than 300 combined episodes of Star Trek: TNG and Star Trek: Voyager. Bernard’s work earned him eight Emmy nominations, three Emmy awards, five Cinema Audio Society (CAS) nominations and one CAS award. “Star Trek shows are a lot harder to do than street shows or any other kind of shows,” he said, noting that not only were the audio artists improving but that the technology of the MTS era was much more sophisticated than what had been available in the 1980s (quoted in Spelling 1996: B6). Perhaps nowhere was the improved technology more prevalent than in the live sports coverage of the 1990s.

In the 1980s, an NBC Sports executive said that “audio advancements are the next frontier” and that “eventually stereo could be as important an innovation as color video” (Anon. 1985: 15). At the time of his prediction, just seventy out of more than 1,200 US stations were equipped with MTS. Within five years, multiple microphones were being placed throughout sporting venues—to pick up stadium ambience, for example, or to follow gameplay action—as surround-sound was increasingly promoted as the

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best way to experience televised sports at home. Dennis Baxter, sound designer of the 2012 London Olympics, said that while the Olympics of 1984, 1988 and 1992 were delivered in stereo, it was the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta that progressed stereo TV audio into “the golden age of teleproduction” (Baxter 2000: S10). Earlier novelty approaches had been supplanted by improved microphone placement, which in turn led to a more natural sound that had a “continuity that had never been heard before” on broadcast television (ibid.). The audio techniques of the stereo era were not only appreciated by the home audience; they also set the stage for the 5.1-channel audio used in sports coverage during high-definition television (HDTV) era of the late 1990s and into the post-MTS era.

As the medium improved, audio professionals stoked creativity and collegial competitiveness in stereo sound delivery. When Fox Sports obtained the telecast rights to professional football and baseball, both audiences and critics noticed the careful attention paid by Fox to aural presentation. The network’s goal was not to make viewers feel like they were in the stands but to make them feel like they were on the field. Referring to Fox’s coverage of the 1994 football season, senior vice president Andrew Setos noted: “We’re doing some super secret stuff to bring this experience to people’s homes” (quoted in Krehbiel 1994). Punctuating the impact of creative competition in the industry, he said, “I don’t want to go into details now. We do have competition, after all” (ibid.). The bag of tricks developed by Fox in that generation—including sound effects, creative sound sweetening in replays, creative and omnipresent microphone placement—are still in use today.

Stereo television thus reached maturity in the mid-1990s, during what I have suggested was the “golden age” of MTS. One marker of this maturity and widespread acceptance was mundanity: MTS no longer represented a selling point for consumers purchasing televisions, and no longer acted as a motivator for audiences to watch particular programs. Additionally, stereo’s various glitches and bugs, which were common earlier in the decade, started to disappear. This was partly due to technical improve-ments, and partly because certain segments of the audience became more sensitive to quality stereo mixes. Yet the “golden age” was short-lived, in the sense that the format’s dominance was being undercut at the same moment it was being established. For example, multichannel 5.1 audio was launched in 1992, with the advent of Dolby Digital sound in movie theaters, while Digital Theater Systems (DTS) and Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) were competing theatrical sound formats offering 5.1 and 7.1-channel sound. Additionally, consumers quickly adopted home theater DVD players in the late 1990s, which offered 5.1-channel audio delivery and 16:9 theatrical aspect ratios. When Warner Bros. announced that it was converting virtually its entire television series production to widescreen format and 5.1 audio, it was clear that MTS would be supplanted by multi-channel in the forthcoming HDTV broadcast era.

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The End of MTS

Large amounts of effort and publicity were necessary to prepare US analog television owners for the fact that their video receivers would become obsolete when television moved to digital transmission. In 2009, analog NTSC TV was over. But little fanfare was given to MTS, which also ended at this time. The digital 5.1 mix had replaced MTS, but its legacy survives into the modern era. In drawing audience attention to the aesthetics of television sound in new ways—ways that had previously only been prevalent in music and cinema—MTS contributed improvements in television audio design that are influential to this day.

Evidence of the pivitol role of stereo is found in an Academy of Television Arts and Sciences award ceremony that took place in 1986, just two years after stereo television began. The Academy awarded multiple Technical and Engineering Emmy Awards to entities that furthered stereo sound. Awards went to NBC, which aggressively utilized and marketed stereo sound in their broadcasts, as well as to Zenith Electronics, RCA, dbx and the Electronics Industries Association, for their efforts in promoting a voluntary standard for the broadcast industry (NATAS 2007: 6). Further acknowledgment came when Carl Eilers of Zenith, television stereo’s co-inventor, was honored with an induction into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, for both his stereo television soundwork and contributions to stereo FM broadcasting (Iverson 2000).

Another of stereo television’s legacies is found in the eight-channel mix instituted during the second season of Miami Vice, which aided the industry as it made its transition to 5.1 sound. The economics of this change were particularly beneficial. “Because all the negatives to Miami Vice are [multi-channel mixes],” noted series creator Michael Mann, “they [would] be far more valuable” in repurposing the show for syndication and home video (quoted in Farber 1984). Thus, the return on investment would be greater. Similar stories are found regarding virtually all of the stereo series of the era, such as Star Trek: TNG and Voyager. Paramount’s former vice president of preservation and restoration, Ronald Smith, was tasked with restoring titles, including twenty-four-track TV series such as Star Trek: Voyager. In re-releasing series on 5.1-channel DVDs, Smith (2012) says that MTS-era stereo mixes are used as the guide to the remastering, especially in situations where the personnel from the show are not involved in the process. The integrity of the re-release’s sound is guided by the mix designed for MTS delivery, in the hands of professionals who likely grew up or were practitioners in the MTS era. The MTS period thus eased the transition to the HDTV 5.1-channel era.

There remains an oddity about the legacy of MTS and the enjoyment of stereo television: although statistics are unavailable, it is doubtless the case

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that many audience members have never heard any actual MTS. While it is true that certain viewers might recall the illuminated LED indicator on their VCRs, the only people who could possibly have received MTS were those receiving transmission over the air and from stations actually trans-mitting in stereo. The majority of US audiences, however, were watching cable television, which had reached 60 percent penetration by the end of the MTS period (NCTA 2012). And cable viewers did not hear MTS audio; rather, they received a substitute audio signal provided by a cable service, which might have been faux stereo, perhaps even monaural. The majority of Americans also had VCRs during the MTS era. Owing to a lack of inputs on most televisions in that period, many simply routed the signal through their VCRs, and many VCRs were not MTS stereo-compliant. Finally, those who did not have cable, often owing to financial concerns, were actually the most able to receive MTS but the least likely to own contemporary MTS-capable receivers. As a result, they also may have never actually heard MTS.

Additional complications existed in MTS reception, given that the broadcast cycle of MTS was dependent on a wide array of television stations, program syndicators, and regional as well as national networks responsible for maintaining MTS requirements. Some stations simply multiplexed their audio signal on the left and right channels, creating “pseudo-stereo” that was not MTS sound. Others had satellite equipment that did not represent the proper MTS audio signal. So, in contrast to our knowledge of experiences in the recorded music industry, where everyone gets the same recording and has the ability to play it on a stereo-compatible system, we will never know how many listeners actually received the best audio available during this period, much less how it was perceived.

One might wonder why a larger number of viewers weren’t more savvy about their audio universe and didn’t demand better MTS audio. Certainly, in the 5.1 home theater environment, consumers generally had to go to great lengths to set up speakers and test their systems, and could identify subwoofer sounds from surround speakers. But stereo setups generally did not come with easily identifiable test material, or all-in-one television receivers with integrated speakers that required no installation expertise. Even among the audience segment that did consciously decide to adopt stereo television, there were thus difficulties that betrayed a limited under-standing of true stereophonic sound. This was confirmed in a study of the period by researchers at the MIT Media Lab. Subjects were provided with mono, stereo, low-fidelity and high-fidelity audio, which covered the spectrum of what would have been in television audio systems at that time. The results were surprising in that audiences were found not to be very discriminating and had a “difficult time distinguishing mono from stereo and even low fidelity from high fidelity sound” (Neuman, et al. 1991). Only 41 percent preferred stereo sound over mono and just 43 percent chose high

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fidelity versus low fidelity (ibid.). At the consumer level, the untrained ear, combined with an uneven broadcast system, suggests that relatively few people heard stereo television during its first twenty-five years.

Nevertheless, the legacy of MTS is profound. It ushered in industry audio practices that led to television’s second “golden age” and served as a transition point for consumers who would eventually equip their home theaters with 5.1 and 7.1 audio systems. Television audio design was forever altered in episodic and event programming that was measured not only by the addition of a second channel but by an exponential creative leap that has propelled both audiences and sound artists into the digital, multi-channel audio universe of today. The impact of stereo television was just as revolutionary as visionaries had predicted back in the 1950s. There is no data on how many viewers actually heard authentic MTS stereo sound. But the technological change and creative audio practices that developed during the MTS era energized what had been one of television’s more stagnate presentational elements: its audio.

References

Altaner, D. 1986. “Stereo Sound TV is Not a New Universe, Just a Rising Star.” Chicago Tribune (14 November): F-94.

Anon. 1957. “D.L. Boyes to Present Chorus.” Anderson Herald Bulletin (21 December): 1.

Anon. 1958a. “A TV First: Welk Goes Stereo.” The Oregonian (1 October): 13.—1958b. “Stereo Cues Two-Way Air Media Buys.” Sponsor (4 October): 35.—1958c. “Lawrence Welk Leads in Stereo.” Billboard (13 October): 13.—1958d. “Expect Giant TV Audience.” Billboard (20 October): 12.—1984a. “Zenith Introduces New Stereo Color Television Products.” Business

Wire (10 May): press release.—1984b. “Stereo Television.” Globe and Mail (30 May): B7.—1985. “Television Sound in Stereo is Coming at Today’s Viewers Left and

Right.” Houston Chronicle (10 July): 15.—1989. “Beat Goes On: Up to 23% of U.S. Homes Equipped for Stereo TV.”

Communications Daily (14 February): 3.—2001. “Television Set Ownership.” Television History: The First 75 Years.

Accessed online at: http://www.tvhistory.tv/TV-VCR-Remote-Cable_Ownership.JPG

Baxter, D. 2000. “The Olympics and Stereo Sound.” Videography (August): S10–13.

Browne, J.F.X. 1989. Personal interview (18 July).Canby, E.T. 1962. “Audio Etc.” Audio (December): 12–14, 73.Coller, S. 1986. “How to Make $5,000 a Minute: The Art of the Simulcast.”

Sydney Morning Herald (21 April): 58.Disney, W. 1959. “Peter Tchaikovsky Story.” Walt Disney Presents (20 January).

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Farber, S. 1984. “‘Miami Vice’ is Being Filmed with Sound for Each Ear.” Eugene Register-Guard (25 August): 30.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC). 1961. “Amendment of Part Three of the Commission’s Rules and Regulations to Permit FM Broadcast Stations to Transmit Stereophonic Programs on a Multiplex Basis.” Docket 13506 (April).

—1986. “Multichannel Television Sound Transmission and Audio Processing Requirements for the BTSC System.” OET Bulletin 60 (February).

Feldman, L. 1984. “Stereo TV Here at Last.” Stereo Review (July): 37–9.Gluck, J. 2009. What You Hear Is Changing The TV Viewing Experience.

Southfield, MI: ENCO.—2011. Personal interview (2 September).Hilliard, R.L. 1989. Television Stations and Operation. Boston: Focal Press.Hoban, P. 1986. “Sound Effects: Video Goes Stereo.” New York Magazine (10

November): 28.Holley, H. and D. Jameson. 1978. “Japan’s Multiplex: TV’s Future World is

Here.” Los Angeles Times (1 October): G1, G12.Iverson, J. 2000. “CEA Honors Hall of Fame Inductees at 2000 CES.” Stereophile

(16 January 2000): online.Joy, K. 1986. “Stereo TV Turn ‘Two’ and Steps Closer to Going Nationwide.”

Billboard (19 April): A2.Kaplan, P. 1984. “TV Notes: Competing with ABC during the Olympics.” New

York Times (28 July): 46.Keightley, K. 1996. “‘Turn it Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space and

High Fidelity, 1948–59.” Popular Music 15(2): 149–77.—2003. “Low Television, High Fidelity: Taste and the Gendering of Home

Entertainment Technologies.” Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media 47(2): 236–59.

Kogan, R. 1990. “Everybody Up.” Chicago Tribune (26 July): online.Krehbiel, T. 1994. “Surrounded: Fox is Bringing More than Picture from NFL

Games.” Buffalo News (26 August): G24.Loehwing, D. 1962. “New Sound of Music: FM Stereo May Give Mellower Tone

to the Radio Industry.” Barron’s Weekly (8 January): 42.Marc, D. and R. J. Thomspson. 2010. “I Want My MTV Cops.” In Miami Vice,

ed. J. Lyon. Madlen: Wiley-Blackwell.NATAS (National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences). 2007. “Outstanding

Achievement in Technical/Engineering Development Awards.” Access online at http://www.emmyonline.org/tech/applications/engineering_award_winners_rev6.pdf

NCTA (National Cable Television Association). 2012. “Cable Video Customers: 1975–2011.” Accessed online at http://www.ncta.com/Stats/BasicCableSubscribers.aspx

Neuman, W.R., A.N. Crigler, V.M. Bove. 1991. “Television Sound and Viewer Perceptions.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Media Lab.

Newcomb, H. 2004. Encyclopedia of Television (2nd edition). Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

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Plasketes, G. 2004. “Cop Rock Revisited: Unsung Series And Musical Hinge In Cross-Genre Evolution.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32(2): 64–73.

Prentiss, S. 1985. Audio Modulation Stereo and Television Stereo: New Sound Dimensions. Blue Ridge Summit: TAB Books.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (8 September): 25.

CHAPTER NINE

The Grandeur(s) of CinemaScope :

Early Experiments in Cinematic Stereophony

Matthew Malsky

The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), an early CinemaScope offering from 20th Century Fox, opens with a bit of cartoonish humor. A prologue before the main titles announces the importance of sound to the story even while it inadvertently (and perhaps ironically) reveals the redundancy of a major technological advance in sound: stereophony. Accompanied by an unseen orchestra, a suave and tuxedoed Tom Ewell walks toward the camera on a sound stage. It is lit in royal blue, and empty but for a drum kit on a riser and ten or so instruments suspended inexplicably in mid-air behind him. He proclaims through direct address to the audience, “The motion picture you are about to see is a story of music.” He begins to explain with gravitas, but cuts himself short to elucidate enthusiastically some technical features of the film itself. Though disguised as a joke, this prologue has a serious purpose: to showcase features of CinemaScope and educate consumers on its irresistible virtues. Ewell continues, “This motion picture was photo-graphed in the grandeur of CinemaScope, and …”—with a flick of his finger toward the edges of the frame, Ewell pushes the sides out to move us from Academy to 2.35:1 aspect ratio: widescreen cinema. He continues:

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“and gorgeous, lifelike color by DeLuxe.”1 With an admonishment to an unseen crew, color is magically added. The underscoring swells with the schmaltzy strains of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” presumably to express the audience’s blooming affection for CinemaScope, and the camera pans out to reveal a juke box. Little Richard’s “The Girl Can’t Help It” roars from it, and drowns out both Ewell and the underscoring as we shift quickly to the true start of the film. It is striking and significant that, even as this opening draws attention to the role of sound as well as introduces and promotes CinemaScope, a critical early component of that format is already absent. Any reference to stereophonic sound is missing both from the promotional rhetoric and from the soundtrack itself, which is monophonic. Only two years after its introduction as an essential component of 20th Century Fox’s widescreen process, in a film that foregrounds sound, stereophonic sound is already inaudible.2

This is in marked contrast to a group of early shorts and features that distinguished themselves in their engagement with this new sound technology through unusual “experiments” with the stereophonic capacity of the soundtrack. Beginning with test scenes conducted by 20th Century Fox engineers before the CinemaScope demonstration reel in March 1953, through the first several dozen features and shorts, stereophonic sound was prominently featured and implemented in ways that explicitly exceeded monophonic practices.3 An early example is How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). The film begins with a large studio orchestra grandly displayed with the patrician composer Alfred Newman conducting his music “Street Scene.”4 This concert prelude precedes the opening titles and is seemingly outside any diegetic frame, just as the opening of The Girl Can’t Help It. Similarly, its function was promotional and didactic. It sought to inform the audience of a newly introduced technology and to instruct them in a new method of experiencing reality, seemingly reproducing sound’s physical nature with “fidelity” to the diegetic world. For example, when the camera jumps from an establishing shot of the whole orchestra to a medium shot,

1 20th Century Fox releases in 1953–4 were processed by Technicolor. They included three CinemaScope and several non-CinemaScope titles. Most 20th Century Fox films after 1954 used DeLuxe Color, which was a process created by Eastman-Kodak, with certain adaptations for improved compositing for mass-production of exhibition prints.2 20th Century Fox abandoned in April 1954 its requirement of exhibitors that all CinemaScope installations include magnetic stereo. Subsequently, films could be issued as either monophonic, stereophonic or dual prints. These dual prints consisted of a double “mag-optical” stereo-phonic-monophonic format. Gradually, CinemaScope’s four-track 35mm stereo magnetic sound was eclipsed by several different 70mm widescreen systems (Belton 1992b: 157).3 20th Century Fox issued at least forty-seven shorts in the first two years after the introduction of CinemaScope in 1953. The studio produced virtually all of its shorts in CinemaScope by the end of 1954.4 See Malsky (2008) for the history of this music in multiple Hollywood films, and an analysis of the uses of stereophonic sound in this sequence.

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the trumpet player with the solo appears on the right of screen and the sound emanates from that position at a volume appropriate to the camera’s distance from the performer. Bosley Crowther, experiencing stereo at the premiere, was convinced that “the sound [comes] naturally and clearly from the sections of the orchestra where it was produced” (1953: 10).5

However, stereophonic sound was not a reproduction of an original sound. From the earliest public presentations, CinemaScope films experi-mented with what Rick Altman has dubbed “sound space” (1992: 46). Focusing on the period of the late 1920s when synchronized soundtracks were first added to films, Altman and James Lastra (2000) have considered how representational norms develop when a technical community wrestles with the possibilities presented by a new technology. Conventional under-standings of cinematic sound were reconsidered in the early 1950s. In the case of stereophonic sound (as with the development of monophonic sound), the specific issues considered were the correlation of scale of sound and image, and the placement of sound in relation to image on the exhibition screen. As the technology of stereophonic sound developed, researchers, engineers and manufacturers negotiated the manner in which it could engage “reality” in a new and different way. Stereo was implemented in early CinemaScope releases in ways that were both cognizant of and comple-mentary with existing monophonic sound practices even while it exceeded them. As a result, these experiments changed the representational norms for Hollywood sound—even when stereophonic sound wasn’t literally present.

In this chapter I will explore these developing representational norms by considering the engineering discourse around the new technology of stereo-phonic sound. The first section will briefly introduce the theory, research and development that led to CinemaScope’s sound component. The second section will explore the basic theoretical formulation of stereophonic sound and compare that to stereo’s implementation in CinemaScope. The final section will explore the new production techniques developed by 20th Century Fox for recording stereophonic sound, and illustrate these proposed practices for making stereophonic films with examples in early films released in the new format.

Engineering Stereo in CinemaScope

In September 1953, the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (JSMPTE) published a special issue consisting of six papers on the theory and practice of stereophonic sound, and advances

5 For a thorough consideration of the categories of reproduction versus representation, see Wurtzler (1992).

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in associated recording and playback equipment.6 This issue represented a culmination of research and development on stereophonic sound for cinema that stretched over twenty years, conducted by a community of interested parties: researchers and engineers from the Bell Laboratories, the 20th Century Fox Research and Development Unit and sound engineers engaged in recording sound and music for film production, and manufac-turers of the commercial apparatus necessary for both cinematic production and exhibition.7 From 1931 until this issue of JSMPTE, thirty-three articles directly related to the theory and implementation of stereophonic sound appeared in the pages of JSMPE (or JSMPTE after 1950). In addition, JSMPE/JSMPTE published articles on affiliated developments such as booms, microphones, the acoustics of sound stages, competing recording and playback systems, and equipment for exhibition, plus dozens of convention summaries and convention reviews, committee progress reports and “Engineering Activities.” Furthermore, developments in stereophony were covered in Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, the Bell System’s Technical Journal, the Technical Bulletin of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, IRE Transactions on Audio of the IEEE, International Sound Technicians, The American Journal of Psychology, trade journals such as Motion Picture Daily and Motion Picture Herald, and other profes-sional association and scientific publications. This substantial publication history represents work on many competing conceptions and systems. The SMPTE special issue was a summation of this work, which had finally produced a commercial exhibition system that was, if only briefly, an industry standard.8 The contents of this issue were all closely associated with the development and implementation of the sound component of 20th Century Fox’s widescreen process, CinemaScope.

CinemaScope is often described as an amalgam of pre-existing technologies, supplemented by new developments.9 For example, the anamorphic lens that formed the basis of the visual system was developed

6 These papers were presented by their authors at the Convention of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in Los Angeles held from 27 April to 1 May 1953. Each paper was followed by a discussion, transcribed with the presented article. Many of these researchers, engineers and technicians also participated at the 74th Semi-Annual Convention of the SMPTE held in New York City, 5–9 October 1953. The extensive papers and discus-sions on multichannel magnetic reproduction systems and their applications at this convention were summarized by J. Postal (1954).7 For a complete account of this research and development history, see a paper I am developing, “Engineering Stereophonic Sound for CinemaScope.”8 Soon after its development, 20th Century Fox licensed the process to many of the major film studios including Columbia, Warner Bros., Universal, MGM and Walt Disney Productions.9 For further technical details of the CinemaScope format for sound, see Sponable, Bragg and Grignon (1954) and Sponable (1954). For historical background and industrial analysis of the sound component of the CinemaScope format and its attendant technologies see Hincha (1989), Beck (1985) and Belton (1992a).

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by Henri Chretien in the late 1920s, and licensed by 20th Century Fox for CinemaScope in 1952 (Bragg 1988, 360–1). This was also true of the sound component, which galvanized around several slowly developing technol-ogies, some of which had no previous commercial application. Designing the CinemaScope sound component involved the creation of a magnetic sound format that worked in tandem with the visual medium. This required integration of the theory of stereophonic sound with practical implemen-tations, such as the creation of the audio media for both recording and playback in exhibition and the redesign of a plethora of supporting devices (e.g. recorders, re-recorders, mixers, microphones and booms, reproducers, sprocket assemblies). Discussions of these technological innovations were at the heart of the 1953 JSMPTE special issue on stereophony, and connote a summary of much previous work.

Replacing the convention of a monophonic soundtrack broadcast through one or more bridged loudspeakers behind a sound-permeable screen, CinemaScope in exhibition used four channels: three loudspeakers across the centerline of the screen at the left, center and right, as well as a supplemental surround channel with speakers located at the rear corners at the back of the theater (Sponable 1953, 1954). This arrangement of speakers in conjunction with stereo recording practices produced a stereo sound stage, a three-dimensional sound space across the proscenium arch, in which sounds could emanate accurately from any position in relation to the image on the screen. Sounds could even be perceived as extending back into the image and past the edges of the screen. The surround channel was intended to bring the sound out into the theater itself, beyond the plane of the image. Though CinemaScope is only occasionally referenced explicitly in the articles of this JSPMTE issue, this implementation of sound in cinematic production and exhibition was clearly their concern.

The contents of the JSPMTE issue reflected the variety of participants and a range of concerns from research through industrial design. The issue was framed by a brief foreword entitled “Developments in Stereophony,” supported by a historical description of the two predominant media for multichannel recording (sound-on-film and magnetic tape) and supple-mented by three papers on auditory perspective reprinted from the January 1934 issue of Electrical Engineering (Fletcher 1953a, 1953b; Snow 1953a). A second group of papers reported on research and developments in equipment for use in stereophonic motion-picture sound production and exhibition (Frayne and Templin 1953, Hilliard 1953, Singer and Rettinger 1953, Volkmann, Byrd and Phyfe 1953). The writers were industrial engineers from allied companies that included Westrex, RCA and Altec Lansing. Building on work of the Fox Research and Development Unit, this was the group that designed, manufactured and installed equipment for CinemaScope’s stereophonic sound recording, post-production and

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exhibition.10 These papers described the design and operation of new equipment such as a six-position mixer, a portable three-channel recorder, and two competing designs for multiple-track magnetic heads used in recording on 35mm perforated magnetic film. Two other articles detailed the loudspeakers and amplifiers installed in New York’s Roxy Theater and the Paramount Theaters in Hollywood, and outlined a new “building block” sound system concept for both indoor and drive-in theater use (Hilliard 1953, Wente and Thuras 1953). Together, these articles comprehensively described new technological advances made in the service of recording and editing sound for Hollywood films, and supporting the installation of the stereophonic sound component of CinemaScope in movie theaters.

The Foundations of CinemaScope Sound

In 1944, the management of 20th Century Fox requested that Earl Sponable of their Research and Development Unit began to experiment with recording stereophonic sound for film (Grignon 1953c: 5).11 Sponable assigned the task to Lorin Grignon, a recording engineer based in Hollywood.12 Along with E.H. Hansen and C.W. Faulkner, Grignon presented the early results of this work in a paper entitled “Experiments in Stereophonic Sound” on 18 May 1948 at the SMPE Convention in Santa Monica. It was subse-quently published in JSMPE in March 1949.13 This paper reported efforts to adapt this new sound technology in the filming of two one-act sketches and several musical numbers, examples that Grignon called “conventional motion pictures” (1949a: 280). These were shown to a large number of people in the industry over a three-year period as test-of-concept. The recording methods using in making these tests would become by 1953 the

10 Though 20th Century Fox’s Research and Development Unit was in the lead, the devel-opment of the CinemaScope format was itself a collaborative process. See Bragg (1988: 363) for a description of how particular design decisions were made, and by whom.11 Sponable was Chemist, Chief Engineer and Director of Research for 20th Century Fox Film Corporation and its subsidiaries, 1926–62. For a comprehensive account of Sponable’s role in the design and implementation of CinemaScope see Huntley (1993) and Bragg (1988).12 Grignon was a graduate of the School of Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley (in 1925). A former transmission engineer with the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph at San Francisco, where he was in charge of radio-wire telephony and public address systems, he joined the Sound Department of Paramount Studios in April 1929 as a transmission engineer. After ten years he joined the sound engineering staff of 20th Century Fox Studios where he engaged in sound engineering development work (Grignon 1953a, Bragg 1988: 365).13 A slightly different version with a different title was published the next month in the trade journal FM-TV (Grignon 1949b). The final paper, adapted for a general audience, was published in the 1953 book New Screen Techniques (Grignon 1953b).

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basis for an evolving production standard for stereo sound film. As the technology for the sound and optics of the CinemaScope format settled into place through 1952, the Studio was concerned to formalize the imple-mentation. Herbert Bragg, Assistant Director of the Fox Research Unit, described the work leading up to the first CinemaScope release: “In the Studio, sound recording facilities were being expanded to take care of the stereophonic multiple channel requirements; set techniques were studied, story-telling and directing techniques were being revised; cameramen were being retrained; and all the special effects departments were being revised” (Bragg 1988: 363). As these practices advanced with production experi-ences after 1949, Grignon documented these changes and emendations.14 He subsequently expanded and published a final version in the 1953 JSMPTE stereophony issue, which indicated in brackets the additions since the 1949 version. These versions of the article present a developing picture of the production practices that emerged with the new stereophonic sound technology. Grignon’s paper represented this new work by the studio in adapting recording techniques through a reconsideration of microphone selection, placement and movement. What emerges is a set of concerns in recording practice that are distinctly different from monophonic practice.

Yet basic established stereophonic theory grounded emerging practice. This theory had been presented to the readership of JSPMTE over the course of many years, scattered through many publications going back to the early 1930s. Presumably in response to reader interest in the September special issue on stereophony, William Snow, a Bell Labs engineer in acoustics, summarized the state of the field in the November 1953 issue as “Basic Principles of Stereophonic Sound.”15 This paper outlined “the fundamental theory underlying stereophonic sound so far as it has been published and gave examples of how the theory is employed in representative practical situations” (1953b: 567). Snow’s task was to recast basic stereophonic theory in the light of the new industrial application, CinemaScope. There is a productive pairing here. Grignon’s more practice-oriented approach from the September issue along with Snow’s November article articulate the collabor-ation of theory and practice that can be found in CinemaScope sound.

Snow’s objective can be read from the manner in which he answered this question: “What does stereo do?”16 He invoked the predominant metaphor

14 Presumably these early production experiences included the first CinemaScope releases The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire.15 Seemingly as service to the field, this article included a bibliography of sixty-seven items that range from Alexander Graham Bell’s “Experiments Relating to Binaural Audition” of July 1880, to de Boers and Vermeulen’s work at Philips from the 1930 through the 1940s and the Bell Labs work.16 Snow began by summarizing the various types of electroacoustic reproducing systems, providing data not only on binaural and stereophonic sound, but on several flavors of monophonic reproduction—which included the contemporary cinematic practices that

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from the 1934 research: “It has been said aptly the binaural system trans-ports the listener to the original scene, whereas the stereophonic system transports the sound source to the listener’s room” (ibid.).17 Lorin Grignon concurred but expanded on this slightly:

single channel methods intend to transport all listeners to the same microphone location and do this as though they were one-eared; binaural systems transport all listeners of an audience to the same micro-phone location but permit them to use two ears; stereophonic methods transport the original performance to the location of the ultimate audience. The differences are subtle but important. (1953a: 364)

Here, Grignon recapitulated the function of more than twenty-five years of monophonic Hollywood soundtracks and equated these practices with mono and binaural recording: both moved listeners into the auditory scene of the recording, while the claim here was that stereo could move the scene literally to the auditor’s space—the movie theater. This was a substantial change of mission for a cinematic soundtrack.

Earl Sponable argued that CinemaScope’s wider image required a “wider” sound to distribute dialogue, music and sound effects across the larger projected image (Bragg 1988: 369). For Snow, the advantages of stereo sound were increased fidelity, depth and spatial effect. That is, it offered noticeable quality improvements as well as angular and depth localization.18 Snow retained a screen analogy first introduced with the original research on stereophonic reproduction done at Bell Labs in the early 1930s:

A screen consisting of an extremely large number of extremely small microphones is hung in front of a sound source. Each microphone is connected to a corresponding extremely small loudspeaker in a screen of loudspeakers hung before an audience. Then the sound projected at the audience will be a faithful copy of the original sound and an observer will hear the sound in true auditory perspective. (1953b: 570)

CinemaScope sought to displace. He also included “pseudo- or bridged stereo,” by which he undoubtedly was referring to Paramount’s competing soundtrack system, PerspectaSound. This was a “directional sound system” which used a monophonic source but panned it to multiple loudspeakers in exhibition via subaudio control tracks. White Christmas, The Barefoot Contessa and the reissue of Gone with the Wind are examples of films released in 1954 in this format.17 There is a similar formulation in Wente’s article. “In ordinary radio broadcast of symphony music, the effort is to create the effect of taking the listener to the scene of the program, whereas in reproducing such music in a large hall before a large gathering the effect required is that of transporting the distant orchestra to the listeners” (Wente and Thuras 1953: 431).18 Paul Klipsch (1960) later described these categories as tonality and geometry.

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Essentially, following Fletcher’s earlier work, Snow imagined a perfect reproduction of a sound event: if transmitting and receiving planes of transducers covered every surface of the stage and auditorium, and were operationally transparent and effectively inaudible to the listener, someone sitting in the room of audition would use their ordinary hearing physiology to experience a reproduction accurate in every way.

However, researchers quickly concluded that imperfect spaces and fewer than the ideal number of transducers could still produce acceptable stereophonic sound. From an infinite number, researchers presented in the Bell Labs research a model in which a minimum of three transducers (microphone–loudspeaker circuits) could accomplish accurate repro-duction. Similarly, every graphic depiction in the original research showed recording and audition spaces of differing sizes and dramatically different dimensions.19 Though the theory is cast in terms of an “idealized” stereo-phonic system, as a practical matter mismatched sending/receiving spaces would have been an unavoidable concession during film production and exhibition. A real film production stage with sets would never be acous-tically identical to the exhibition space occupied by the audience (Snow 1953b: 572). Snow’s assumptions about space and transducers in his 1953 article were as dramatically pragmatic as his original experiments at Bell Labs: both featured a mismatched recording stage and auditorium as well as a significantly reduced number of transducers. In this way, Snow supported Grignon and others’ practical consideration of stereo recording in film production and exhibition. In effect, the theoretical ideal conformed to the practicalities of CinemaScope.

“Another Major Advance”: Stereophonic Sound Production Techniques for Motion Pictures

Grignon presented the results of early production experiences—what he called “experiments.” These experiments revealed, as he said, “methods for recording dialogue and music for use in motion pictures without basically changing accepted fundamental forms which include the use of long, medium and close shots and intercutting techniques” (1953a: 365). Among other conclusions, Grignon claimed three cardinal rules in adapting monophonic microphone pickup methods to stereo—lessons learned through the previous nine years of development. First, “there must always be correct placement of the apparent sound reproduction

19 This important feature of Fletcher’s earlier description was not depicted in the diagrams that accompany the Bell Labs articles. However Wysotsky does capture the identical nature of the sending and receiving spaces in a later book (1971: 327).

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to correspond to picture.” Second, “with actor movement there must be smooth transit from one to any other microphone meaning there should be no change in quality nor in sound level.” Third, “there must be pickup in all microphones at all times” (1953c: 6). The last rule is a basic requirement to maintain stereophony and distinguish it from monophonic recording; the first two require explanation.

In explaining the first rule, Grignon drew a direct parallel between the positioning and effect of the camera and microphones. “Since various camera lenses are used to give emphasis or localize action, magnifications or distance, distortion exists and a similar effect was necessary in the sound pickup” (1953a: 365). He used two terms to explain this: “sound spreading” and “sound magnification.” For the sound of a speaking actor to come from a side loudspeaker, the actor, microphone and loudspeaker must be all positioned along the dotted line in his diagram [Figure 9.1]. That is, the sounds recorded from a particular microphone would eventually connect to a corresponding loudspeaker, and a linear relationship between the loudspeaker and the microphone was considered a “normal” positioning. In making stereo recordings of dialogue, the spatial sense of the set as well as directionality of the sound was both proportional to the spacing between the microphones and dependent upon the direction in which they pointed. This was a fundamental means of controlling what Snow termed angular and depth perception. But Grignon was primarily concerned with

FIGURE 9.1 Grignon’s sound spreading diagram From Grignon (1953a): 366

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the proper match in relation on the screen of image and sound. He eluci-dated: “By separating the microphones farther apart than dictated by the loudspeaker positions, the sound localization can be minimized or squeezed together. Thus, the principle of sound spreading may be explained” (366). In his “Scene A,” a long shot, the image on the screen was exactly the same size and scale as the original set and actors. Meanwhile his “Scene B” was a medium shot. In both cases, space between microphones were appropriately set so that the sound “spread” to allow it to come from the appropriate loudspeaker. Deviations from this norm would produce distortion.

Magnification was the closeness of the microphone position to the actors relative to the image size. A long shot with the microphones positioned closer than was dictated in this diagram yielded an apparent “sound magni-fication,” a distortion of the original scale. Grignon provided an example: the typical microphone arrangement for a close-up of two actors. First, to emphasize the intimacy of a close-up shot sonically while preserving stereo-phonic sound spreading, the microphones must not only be positioned close to the actors but the directivity must be crossed (i.e. the left mike picks up the right actor, while the right mike captures the sound of the actor on the left). As an alternative, sound placement may be sacrificed. Grignon described this arrangement as “an effective means to maintain stereophonic

FIGURE 9.2 Grignon’s sound magnification in close-up diagram From Grignon (1953a): 369

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quality without the sound placement other than center screen” (1953a: 370). The diagram for this setup [Figure 9.2] positions the microphones similarly, but their direction of reception was directly forward rather than crossed. Additionally Grignon presented a diagram that represented the normative method of positioning microphones to capture a medium shot [Figure 9.3].

The second of Grignon’s conclusions concerned actors in motion, and challenged sound engineers to maintain classical notions of intelligibility while remaining within the bounds of acceptable stereophonic practice. Grignon described the typical microphone arrangement for a complicated large-set long shot: “the usual equidistant, in-line microphone technique can be used in long shots of large sets with wide separation of actors and broad movements. Even then, to have smooth dialogue transition, some microphone movement may be required” (1953a: 368). This is a complicated and fascinating example that balanced the practical, “normal” concerns of Hollywood sound practice with stereophony. For example, a prime directive in the Hollywood style was to maintain intelligibility of the recorded dialogue. Yet as actors moved and faced away from the camera, their speech would necessarily be less accessible to the microphone. The solution historically was to move the microphone on a boom to follow the actor. Here, as the actor on the left entered and moved, the left microphone moved position and was reoriented toward the actor’s face. Though this was antithetical to the screen analogy model, which required fixed trans-ducers (not to mention an infinity of them), Grignon maintained that a complicated dance of mobile microphones could produce a stereo recording consistent with the theory. In Hollywood’s narrative system, audiences needed to understand fully what characters spoke more than they needed to be immersed in the spatial sense of the scene.

Though the scenes produced for test-of-concept by 20th Century Fox are lost or inaccessible, there are many examples in early CinemaScope

FIGURE 9.3 Apartment sequence From Grignon (1953a): 367

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releases that illustrate the practices Grignon described.20 The first sequence after the orchestral prelude and main titles in How to Marry a Millionaire is an enlightening example of both the implementation of these guidelines and the challenges that real shooting posed. This sequence introduces a swanky Lauren Bacall renting a posh, fully furnished East Side Manhattan apartment. The scene opens with Bacall and her realtor entering through the door on the right and moving to the left side of the screen. The realtor trails and stays on the right. Framed within a standard long shot, the two are recorded so that microphones are positioned to allow for sounds to spread properly to their correct position. Bacall’s voice comes from the left, the realtor from the right. This conforms to Grignon’s description of “normal” sound spreading and magnification in a long shot. As the actors move left and come forward, the camera pans and the angle shifts to a medium shot. The microphones are clearly in motion here, and briefly magnify the sound. Is this a distortion to emphasize the dialogue or a clumsy audio transition? As Bacall walks back into the set, the standards of the long shot are restored. A 1968 JSMPTE article by sound engineers James Corcoran and Douglas Williams reported that, after the first three CinemaScope features, all three microphones were mounted on a single boom without any negative effect on the quality. “The boom operator, keeping in mind the camera angles, and aided by stereophonic headphone monitoring, manipulated the microphones to record stereophonic sound, which was, in general, compatible with the action from the screen” (1968: 1292). The lines “Where’s that lease? Oh, never mind,” are spoken with Bacall’s back turned to the camera. A careful audition reveals a change in audio quality. These lines were undoubtedly re-recorded in post-production. There is anecdotal evidence that by 1956, microphone placement was standardized to a half-dozen fixed left–center–right positions to facilitate exactly this type of re-recorded dialogue in post-production.21 The opening sequence in The Robe, an open-air marketplace, similarly features complicated microphone movement. These techniques to record moving sound are corroborated by more sophisticated examples in subsequent films. For example, River of No Return (1954), released less than a year later, includes a sequence that more seamlessly incorporates these traveling sound techniques.22 In the complex panning sequence that follows the main titles, Matt (Robert Mitchum)

20 I have not located the early stereophonic sound experiments described by Grignon. Several of these may have been used in the CinemaScope demonstration reel, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive owns a copy. However, the film is damaged (as is much film stock from this time), and technical problems with equipment have thus far prevented the Archive Research and Study Center staff from transferring this footage onto a viewable medium.21 Personal correspondence with Nicholas Bergh, Endpoint Audio.22 “Traveling” sound is sometimes used to indicate the use of the fourth channel at the rear of the theater, while “directionality” indicates the movement of sound among the three behind-the-screen loudspeakers (Belton 1992a: 203–6).

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enters the camp settlement in search of his young son. The visual movement of the character from right to left across the screen is supplemented by a complex composition of off-screen sound effects that move on-screen as their sources are revealed visually when Matt approaches them.

Grignon provided information on how stereophonic techniques altered all major production tasks. As suggested above, voice dubbing or post-recording of dialogue and music continued to be necessary and was possible with slight adjustments. Voice looping was achieved, as before. An added challenge was to match the acoustics of the original scene so as not to introduce a noticeable disruption in the sound. This required that the acoustics of re-recording stages be malleable, tunable from “dead” to “live” (Grignon 1953b: 167). These changes in working procedure were to facilitate matching sound quality, volume and spatial signature when re-recording dialogue in post-production.

Grignon observed that, “Regarding effects, it is very likely that the realism of the picture can be greatly enhanced if some of the more important effects are specifically created and recorded to fit the picture” (1953a: 371). Studios had tremendous investments in their sound-effects libraries, which were monophonic. Owing to cost constraints in early CinemaScope produc-tions, only sound effects that met the bar of “showmanship value of the improvement” could be justified.23 One striking example occurs in How to Marry a Millionaire as Pola Debevoise (Marilyn Monroe) prepares to fly to Atlantic City. Following an establishing shot of an airport terminal that identifies the location as La Guardia Airport, a slow pan by the camera to the left reveals an airplane emerging from the back right of the screen and taking off through the screen’s long diagonal to the top left. Even more striking than the dramatic emphasis of CinemaScope’s new horizontal dimension is the extraordinary enlargement of the audition space that is created by this sound effect. The plane’s trajectory accentuates its flight path with a crescendo and a Doppler shift. But it is the sound that literally travels across the screen that is most striking. Though no specific production history is available for this sequence, Grignon tellingly described a test very similar to this sequence. “One experiment using such a pickup [in a long-shot configuration] consisted in recording airplane takeoffs, wherein the microphones were placed along the runway. The microphones were spaced 150 ft apart” (1953a: 368). While stereophonic-effects libraries were slowly assembled, it was necessary to devise a way to re-record the monophonic sounds onto the stereophonic effects tracks using pseudo-stereophonic panning effects to create spatial congruences with on-screen positions and motions. Grignon gave the example of horse-hoof sounds, an effect well represented in the monophonic-effects library. “By the use

23 Otherwise monophonic library sounds were used with a pseudo-stereo panning technique.

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of the special control, offstage horses were made to sound as though they approached from a distance to the left and came to a point just off the stage” (371). The early CinemaScope Western Garden of Evil (1954) used such panned effects frequently.

Stereophonic music recording for underscoring was “straightforward,” with marked improvements in the quality of the sound (Grignon 1953b: 168). When musical performance was shown on screen, Grignon found that a temporary pre-scoring method worked best to facilitate careful matches of instrument positions on screen. “When the orchestra location has been established by some previous scene in the picture it becomes necessary to record or somehow provide that the music seems to originate from the established location even though this location may be offstage in some scenes” (1953b: 169). In this procedure, a scratch track of the music was recorded and the image track shot while that music played in the background. Finally, the scratch track was replaced with a stereophonic version. In the stereophonic version of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” with Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) made for the CinemaScope demo reel, the same problem of recording music with vocals was present to a greater degree (Lev 2003: 116). Grignon systematically answered questions of working procedure for these recording practice issues.

Conclusion: Greater Realism or Illusion?

Early in The Girl Can’t Help It, a tipsy Tom Ewell returns to his empty flat after a night out, and puts on a Julie London LP record. Languid and sensual, the pop/jazz star croons her signature song of betrayal and hurt,  “Cry Me a River.”24 When Ewell goes to the kitchen in search of something more to drink, an apparitional London, his lost love, appears. She haunts him in evening wear. She follows him as he moves from room to room. He becomes increasingly agitated and tries to flee. Finally blocking his escape on the stairs to the front door, she chastises him in the last strain of the song and fades away in a wash of reverberation. This sequence is marked visually by movement and shifting space similar to the apartment scene in How to Marry a Millionaire or the bazaar sequence in The Robe.

24 Though the song is presented here as source music, it has all the sonic markers of under-scoring. Julie London was an American jazz and pop singer and actress. Noted for her smoky, sensual voice and languid demeanor, her voice benefited on this soundtrack from the recording techniques of crooning, and evoked a familiar sense of intimacy appropriate to this portrayal of memory. London said of herself, “It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone” (1957: 74–8). Her performance in The Girl Can’t Help It helped to make this single London’s biggest chart success.

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Ewell’s movement from room to room and the sudden reappearance of the ghost in various locations on screen play a critical role in creating a sense of emotional drama.25 While there’s striking choreography and spatial variety, actual stereophonic sound was absent, even redundant. Though this film was produced in the midst of 20th Century Fox’s stereophonic experiments, the soundtrack does not literally support any spatial cues or directionality because it is monophonic.

Maybe this is why, when I approached Michael MacKinnon at 20th Century Fox to ask about the possibility of an unreleased stereophonic print of The Girl Can’t Help It, he remarked that it was a funny coinci-dence. “Marty” had just asked him about the same film.26 Martin Scorsese, remembering with conviction that he had seen a stereo version of this film as a teenager, had sent the 20th Century Fox restoration and preservation staff into the vaults in search of a non-existent stereophonic print. This was an important and influential early rock ’n’ roll film. It featured not only a popular music soundtrack but cameo appearances by stars such as Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, the Platters, Fats Domino, and Gene Vincent and His Bluecaps.27 Multiple scenes depict the practice of making music in the recording studio, and music distribution via jukebox is a major plot concern. Perhaps the decision to present this film monophonically was influenced by domestic consumption. Commercial stereo recordings on vinyl were coming, but still a few years away. But a stereo rock ’n’ roll film might have sped that process. So why wasn’t this film produced in stereo? In an important sense The Girl Can’t Help It marked the boundary of experiments with stereophonic sound. What is evident here is a new type of filmmaking, influenced by the possibilities introduced with stereo-phonic sound but minus the literal technological application. In Scorsese’s conviction that he heard stereo we can conceive of the audience’s desire for that expanded form of representation. In the context of CinemaScope stereo experiments, a contemporary viewer of this film could listen and imagine

25 See Cossar (2011) for an extended discussion of stylistic experimentation with the film frame in early CinemaScope films, and analyses of the manner in which the expanded screen offered increased creative possibilities for directors.26 Personal correspondence with Michael MacKinnon, Film Preservation and Restoration at 20th Century Fox. I had been in contact with Mr. MacKinnon and Schawn Belston (Senior Vice President, Library and Technical Services) to confirm that recently released DVDs of early CinemaScope films had indeed used restored versions of the original four-track soundtracks. Many thanks to both Mr. MacKinnon and Mr. Belston for their gracious assistance and information.27 One possible explanation for this film’s monophonic soundtrack is that, given budget constraints, the production sound was made to conform to the format of the pre-existing recordings used for the production numbers. However, all of the performers on the soundtrack appeared in the film. With 20th Century Fox’s commitment to stereophonic sound at this time, a stereophonic version with newly recorded production numbers was at least a possibility both technically and logistically.

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the additions to the narrative provided by the developing representative norms of stereophonic sound—even when they were not literally present.

Cinematic widescreen processes of the early 1950s sought to lure post-Second World War audiences back to the theater to fulfill a long-standing promise. By almost entirely filling the audience’s peripheral vision, and engulfing them in multichannel, stereophonic sound, widescreen processes promised total immersion of the senses, a complete transportation of the audience out of their surroundings, to bring an alternative imaginative world to the audience, one so convincing that they can virtually inhabit it. John Belton has summarized the debates in film theory over techno-logical change, and stereophonic sound in particular, as arriving at one of two conclusions. Either “technological innovation in the cinema has traditionally been associated with the production of ‘greater realism,’” or the increased screen size and additional sonic facilities could be under-stood in terms of excess, artifice, epic proportions and spectacular effects (1992b: 159–67). Yet the language of experimentation used by Grignon suggests an alternative formulation: stereophonic sound offered extensions to Hollywood’s narrative system. These early CinemaScope experiments were an opportunity for practitioners to assess the challenge of the new technology to the representational norms of Hollywood film-making and came to conclusions about its proper usage and function. Snow’s word, “illusion,” is an apt description for stereophony in cinema at this historical moment (1953b: 567). For several years after CinemaScope’s introduction, the new technology issued a multitude of challenges to producers, exhib-itors and audiences. Researchers and engineers at Bell, 20th Century Fox and companies such as Westrex were clearly working toward creating a commercial system that implemented aspects of Fletcher’s auditory perspective, but one that was also eminently pragmatic and commercially viable. While CinemaScope strove to be true to this basic stereophonic research, it did not seek an “ideal transmission” of sound. Instead it presented a negotiated compromise. The technical papers of the JSMPTE special issue embodied a systematic consideration of the expanded creative affordances of the new stereophonic technology within the context of existing Hollywood practice. The early stereophonic experiments confirmed the effectiveness of that compromise.

The contribution of stereophonic sound was, ultimately, to the narrative of the film itself. But rather than make the jump toward a reproductive experience, CinemaScope’s sound sought a more convincing illusion over a more accurate replication of “reality.” CinemaScope sought to reinscribe—though in an expanded form—the established stylistic norms of Hollywood sound. These articles, both theoretical and practical, acknowledge the distance between a pure theoretical notion of stereophonic sound’s repro-ductive potential and the desired effect in these experiments—support of a fantasy through narrative. Through an examination of technological,

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scientific–theoretical, aesthetic and commercial formations, these engineering endeavors set the tone for future professional practices, stylistic conven-tions and audience experiences in modern multichannel/stereophonic sound cinema. They also showed how considerations in venues such as JSMPTE played an important role in negotiating opposing expectations.

References

Altman, R. 1992. “Sound Space.” In Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. R. Altman, 46–54. London: Routledge.

Beck, P. 1985. “Technology as Commodity and Representation: Cinema Stereo in the Fifties.” Wide Angle 7(3): 62–73.

Belton, J. 1992a. Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.—1992b. “1950s Magnetic Sound: The Frozen Revolution.” In Sound Theory/

Sound Practice, ed. R. Altman, 154–67. London: Routledge.Bragg, H. 1988. “The Development of CinemaScope.” Film History 2(4): 359–71.Corcoran, J. and D. Williams. 1968. “The Recording and Re-recording of

Stereophonic Sound for Wide-Screen Motion Pictures” JSMPTE 77(12): 1292–4.

Cossar, H. 2011. Letterboxed: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Crothers, B. 1953. “CinemaScope Seen at Roxy Preview.” New York Times (25 April): 10.

Fletcher, H. 1953a. “Stereophonic Recording and Reproducing System.” JSMPTE 61(3): 355–63.

—1953b. “Basic Requirements for Auditory Perspective.” JSMPTE 61(3): 415–19.Frayne, J.G. and E.W. Templin. 1953. “Stereophonic Recording and Reproducing

Equipment.” JSMPTE 61(3): 395–407.Grignon, L.D. 1949a. “Experiments in Stereophonic Sound.” JSMPE 52(3):

280–92.—1949b. “Stereophonic Sound Recording.” FM-TV 9 (April): 28–30.—1953a. “Experiment in Stereophonic Sound.” JSMPTE 61(3): 364–79.—1953b. “Sound for CinemaScope.” In New Screen Techniques, ed. M. Quigley,

159–70. New York: Quigley.—1953c. “Stereophonic Sound.” International Sound Technician 1(2): 5–7, 19.Hilliard, J.K. 1953. “Loudspeakers and Amplifiers for Use with Stereophonic

Reproduction in the Theater.” JSMPTE 61(3): 380–9.Hincha, R.E. 1989. Twentieth Century-Fox’s CinemaScope: An Industrial

Organization Analysis of Its Development, Marketing and Adoption. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Huntley, S. 1993. “Sponable’s CinemaScope: An Intimate Chronology of the Invention of the CinemaScope OpticalSystem.” Film History 5(3): 298–320.

Klipsch, P.W. 1960. “Experiments and Experiences in Stereo.” IRE Transactions on Audio 8(3): 91–4.

Lastra, J. 2000. Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Lev, P. 2003. The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950–1959. Berkeley: University of California Press.

London, J. 1957. “Films Find a Singer.” Life Magazine (18 February): 74–8.Malsky, M. 2008. “Sounds of the City: Alfred Newman’s ‘Street Scene’ and Urban

Modernity.” In Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, eds J. Beck and T. Grajeda. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Postal, J. 1954. “Audio Aspects of the SMPTE 74th Convention—A Review.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 2(2): 119–32.

Singer, K. and M. Rettinger. 1953. “Multiple-Track Magnetic Heads.” JSMPTE 61(3): 390–4.

Snow, W. 1953a. “Foreward—Developments in Stereophony.” JSMPTE 61(3): 353–4.

—1953b. “Basic Principles of Stereophonic Sound.” JSMPTE 61(5): 567–89.Sponable, E.I. 1953. “CinemaScope for the Theater.” In New Screen Techniques,

ed. M. Quigley, 187–92. New York: Quigley.—1954. CinemaScope Information for the Theater: Equipment Installation

Procedures, Maintenance Practices, Operating Considerations, Demagnetization. Second edition/third revision. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox.

Sponable, E., H. Bragg and L.D. Grignon. 1954. “Design Considerations of CinemaScope Film.” JSMPTE 63(1): 1–4.

Volkmann, J.E., J.F. Byrd and J.D. Phyfe. 1953. “New Theater Sound System for Multipurpose Use.” JSMPTE 61(3): 408–14.

Wente, E.C. and A.L. Thuras. 1953. “Loudspeaker and Microphones for Auditory Perspective.” JSMPTE 61(3): 431–46.

Wurtzler, S. 1992. “She Sang Live, But the Microphone was Turned Off: The Live, the Recorded, and the Subject of Representation.” In Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. R. Altman, 87–103. London: Routledge.

Wysotsky, M.Z. 1971. Wide-Screen Cinema and Stereophonic Sound. New York: Hastings House.

CHAPTER TEN

Atmos Now : Dolby Laboratories, Mixing Ideology

and Hollywood Sound Production1

Benjamin Wright

In 2012, Pixar Animation Studios and Dolby Laboratories collaborated with sound designer Gary Rydstrom on a sixty-second promotional film for Dolby Atmos, a new multichannel audio process that Dolby hopes will become the standard for next-generation cinema sound. The short, which was shown theatrically in front of Pixar’s Brave (2012), begins with a floating camera ascending through an impressionistically animated maple tree with warm sunlight shining against billowing leaves. The camera comes to rest on a lone “helicopter” seedling that breaks off and journeys down to the ground. It gains speed as it spirals downward and flies out of frame only to re-enter it from the other side. It finally lands in a puddle where a rippling effect gives way to the familiar “Double D” Dolby logo.

What is immediately striking about “Leaf” is that its detailed sound world pushes beyond the confines of the frame. An entire forest full of insects, birdsong, rustling leaves and gentle wind animates the sequence with evocative, room-filling sound. The maple seed’s flight is punctuated by a rhythmic whir that resembles a helicopter blade’s chop, growing more

1 Special thanks to Pascal Sijen and Bruce Mazen of Dolby Laboratories, Patrick Cyccone, Kevin O’Connell, Mark Stoeckinger, William Whittington and Monica Champagne.

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insistent as it exits the frame, moves around the room—beside, behind and above—and then returns to the screen. As conceived by Rydstrom, the seed’s journey recalls the opening moments from Apocalypse Now (1979), which featured the heavily modulated sounds of a Huey helicopter moving around the four corners of the theater. Given that film’s experimentation with one of Dolby’s earliest forays in multichannel sound, “Leaf” is both an echo of Dolby’s past and a statement about its future.

Atmos is Dolby’s latest innovation that seeks to give audiences a new reason to go to the movies by providing an immersive digital sound format that is equivalent to the many image-based novelties that currently saturate the multiplex marketplace—4K projection, IMAX screens and digital 3D to name just a few. Ioan Allen, the patriarch of the company’s film program, suggests the new system aims to give the illusion of an infinite number of channels throughout the listening “hemisphere,” around the audience and above them (Dolby Laboratories 2012). More than a technical novelty or specialized exhibition format, the company’s long-term goal is to feature Atmos in “every movie and every theater” (Fuchs 2012). According to film historian Gianluca Sergi, Atmos represents Dolby Laboratories’ larger goal of recapturing “the prime position that it held in the cinema market, both internally to the company and externally in the industry” after more than two years of revenue decline in its digital cinema division (2013: 109).

Between 2010 and 2013, Dolby reached out to sound practitioners, directors, studios and major theater chains using financial incentives, complimentary training sessions and a barrage of trade advertisements to promote the format as the future of cinema sound production and exhibition. To accomplish this widespread adoption and implementation strategy, Atmos proposes a re-evaluation of Hollywood sound mixing conventions and practices, many of which are rooted in the professional identities, social organization and creative work of mixers themselves. Despite Dolby’s claim that their new platform allows mixers to retain more artistic control over their work at different stages of production and exhibition, there is considerable evidence that Atmos actually limits a mixer’s creative role in authoring soundtracks.

This chapter considers the large-scale technological, occupational and aesthetic implications of the Atmos format on the art and craft of Hollywood sound mixing. It accounts for three distinctive features of the Atmos system that seek to vividly reshape the demands of creative sound labor in different ways. The first is based on what Dolby claims is the “intuitive” design of the format, which uses a digital rendering algorithm that is responsive to variations in theater room size and loudspeaker configuration. The backward-compatible system aims to simplify distri-bution with a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) that outputs to different digital sound configurations, including 5.1 and 7.1, in a process Dolby calls “Author Once, Optimize Everywhere.” The second feature is a shift in

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creative workflow that requires mixers to adapt their professional style to the nuances of the Atmos system. In some cases, Dolby has offered training sessions at their San Francisco and Burbank offices to familiarize mixers with the format. While Dolby engineers and consultants claim not to place creative constraints on how film-makers use the system, some mixers have already expressed frustration with the automated algorithm that automatic-ally down-mixes an Atmos pass to 5.1 and 7.1 configurations. In this way, mixers “capture their creative content” and then let the algorithm “generate” alternate versions in the box (Dolby Laboratories 2013a: 1, 14). Finally, the persistent strains of “realism” and the promise of “lifelike audio” continue to shape Dolby’s aims for Atmos and multichannel film sound in general. These discourses, which feature prominently in the Dolby Atmos White Paper, emphasize the format’s ability to place sounds around the auditorium with a greater level of screen accuracy, leading to what Dolby believes is a “heightened sense of realism without being obvious” (7). However, sound mixers often avoid “realism” in favor of dramatic “feel” and other aesthetic factors that push beyond accurate representations of sound/picture scale.

Together, these three features constitute an attempt to remap sound mixing ideology and undermine the conventions and creative workflow of Hollywood sound production. While Dolby engineers claim to simplify and refine the processes by which sound editors and mixers go about their work, Atmos actually prescribes a set of technical and aesthetic solutions that run counter to mixing protocols and professional identities within the Hollywood post-production sound community. The tenor of its advertising campaign and industry outreach suggests that Atmos is a fait accompli, but an analysis of contemporary sound mixing practices and Dolby’s historical relationship with the sound community suggests that the future of Dolby’s next-generation platform actually depends on its adaptability to the shared networks, resources and collective conventions of Hollywood sound production.

The Channel Wars

The past decade has seen the growth of high-definition video, the resur-gence of 3D and experiments with higher frame rates, but in contrast to these innovations in image technology, commercial film sound remains tethered to a digital exhibition format developed in the 1980s. The hallmarks of digital sound were, in fact, codified in 1987 when a subcom-mittee of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) considered ways of integrating digital sound with film (Holman 1992: 140). There was consensus that a minimum of five discrete loudspeaker

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channels and one low-frequency channel would be needed to satisfy the technical and creative demands of audio manufacturers and Hollywood film-makers.2 The committee’s findings laid the groundwork for the indus-try’s voluntary adoption of what would become known as “5.1” audio: a delivery format that incorporated three screen channels (left, center, right), two surround channels (rear left and right) and a low-frequency channel for bass response. Although a number of companies developed systems that met SMPTE requirements, including Cinema Digital Sound (CDS), Digital Theater System (DTS) and Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS), it was Dolby Digital that gained the most traction among major studios and exhibitors due, in no small part, to its backward-compatible functionality. Dolby engineers hid its digital codec between the sprocket holes of standard 35mm film and alongside its stereo optical track, which meant that any theater not equipped with a digital processor could still play the traditional optical version (Kerins 2010, Whittington 2013).

The basic blueprint of 5.1 represented a modified version of six-channel optical stereo formats popular with 70mm releases in the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1970s, Dolby initially relied upon older theaters with six-channel capabilities to showcase their four-channel Dolby Stereo process, which featured a single surround channel in a U-shaped array and a low-frequency channel, nicknamed the “baby boom” (Allen 1977). The digital format, which was introduced in 1992, replaced Dolby Stereo’s mono surround channel with a split surround array (left and right), added a dedicated low-frequency channel and provided a wider frequency response among the five main channels. In 1999, Dolby introduced 6.1 EX, which added a third surround channel between the left–right array that aimed to provide smoother panning across the back of the sound field. In each case, the optical and digital formats were designed to work with existing delivery methods (35mm prints) and loudspeaker arrangements to minimize the cost of adoption for exhibitors.

In 2008, Dolby Labs was asked by AMC Theaters to brainstorm ideas on the next wave of multichannel audio for film. At that point, the migration from 35mm to all-digital delivery was already underway, and by 2010 there were nearly 16,000 digital cinema screens worldwide (Christie Digital Systems 2013: 5). With a single Digital Cinema Package capable of accommodating up to sixteen channels of digital audio, executives at AMC sought a premium digital format for their ETX auditoriums that could do for sound what digital 3D had done for picture: boost ticket

2 The SMPTE Digital Sound on Film Subcommittee sought to provide a way to ensure that the original intent of a soundtrack was preserved during post-production creation, release printing and exhibition. According to Tomlinson Holman, “digital technology [provided] a way to make a great many copies of an original which have all the properties of the original—copies that can be considered clones of the source if certain conditions are met” (1992: 140).

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sales. During the same period, several other manufacturers experimented with expanded multichannel applications. Tomlinson Holman, who had previously coined the term “5.1” and created the THX sound standard for Lucasfilm, developed a 10.2 sound format with additional screen channels, two height channels positioned above the screen, and two subwoofers (Holman 2000). In Germany, Karlheinz Brandenburg (one of the creators of the MP3 compression standard) developed IOSONO, as both a cinema audio process and live event format. Based on techniques developed in the Netherlands, IOSONO used 64 channels and 600 speakers to reproduce a “high-dimensional experience” (Taub 2009). More recently, the technology company Barco obtained the license for Auro, a Belgian format developed by Galaxy Studios, which features an 11.1 process that adds multiple height channels to a traditional 5.1 array.

Dolby responded to AMC’s challenge with a modest revision of its digital process called Dolby Surround 7.1. Still retaining the infra-structure of its existing loudspeaker configuration, Dolby split the rear array into four zones: left side, left back, right side, right back. The format, which premiered with Toy Story 3 (2010), was promoted as a means to improve panning and positioning of audio elements in the surround field. However, the development of 7.1 meant much more than surround zones: it represented a cautious entry point into digital cinema that, if successful, could provide the springboard for more audacious audio experiments. After two years of additional research and devel-opment, Dolby unveiled Atmos.

Not unlike IOSONO and Auro, Dolby Atmos expands the 5.1 and 7.1 sound array with a native 9.1 layout fed to up to sixty-four loudspeakers. The two additional channels include a split array of top speakers that hover over the audience in parallel fashion. While the overhead addition seemed like the next logical step in what one Dolby executive called the “channel wars,” early testing proved it to be a hard sell to re-recording mixers (Sijen 2013).3 Their solution hinged on moving away from the previous channel-based systems they had successfully innovated in both optical and digital formats. In addition to the new overhead channels, Atmos maintains the scaffolding of a channel-based format with its emphasis on a U-shaped surround field for ambiences and a trio of behind-the-screen channels (left–center–right) for major dialogue, music and effects, but it refashions how sounds function within the array.

3 An overhead sound source had been attempted once before in 2002 with We Were Soldiers, which used the Dolby 6.1 codec to supply sound to a single top channel above the audience. Two reels of the film featuring combat sequences were remixed by supervising sound editor Mark Stoeckinger to take advantage of what was called the “Sonic Whole Overhead Channel.” According to Stoeckinger (2009), We Were Soldiers was a “one-off experiment” and the top channel was never used again.

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In a 7.1 environment, surround sound material is fed to four distinct zones, all of which contain the same audio information within each zone. That translates into clusters of loudspeakers along the side and back walls of a theater reproducing the same set of sounds. By contrast, Dolby engineers argue that “in everyday life many sounds originate from randomly placed point sources” (Dolby Laboratories 2013a: 7). Similarly, in the new system “audio objects,” as Dolby calls them, can be panned to the channel zone or sent to an individual speaker. Audio objects are described as sound elements that can be static or can move, and are controlled by metadata that controls the position of a sound at any given time. Using a panning device that resembles a small joystick, objects can be sent anywhere in the sound field and still remain distinct from the channel-based stems or “beds” of audio content. These audio objects are packaged as digital metadata in the DCP, along with 9.1 stems and automation data that determines where every sound element is placed in the sound field.

In addition to audio objects, Atmos features the Dolby Rendering and Mastering Unit (RMU), a fully automated component of its audio authoring system. After an Atmos mix is created, the RMU algorithm automatically generates 5.1 and 7.1 room configurations based on a theater’s loudspeaker layout. The renderer also automates the placement of audio objects in non-Atmos environments by intuiting how each sound element should be reproduced in theaters of various sizes and layouts. According to Stuart Bowling:

What this really means is, in essence, author once and render anywhere. That we’re taking and controlling the true intent of the mixer and now allowing that single, distributable package, our file, to play out in multiple different environments. So they’ll be able to play the 7.1 in the main screen, and as the movie plays down in size, they may have to provide another version of the movie in 5.1. So now the same film can play out during its lifespan inside that movie theater. (quoted in Dolby Laboratories 2012)

This end-to-end philosophy is rooted in Dolby’s long-term efforts to ensure backward-compatibility with its earlier formats, and assuage exhibitors’ fears of a costly new process that is markedly different from traditional multichannel systems.4

Bowling’s statement also attempts to assure mixers that their aesthetic intent would remain intact in different configurations. In this way, Atmos is a significant innovation in digital cinema storage and delivery. The format’s ability to produce multiple configurations of a sound mix represents a

4 Industry estimates place the average cost of an Atmos theater system at between $20,000 and $30,000 (Graser and Idelson 2012).

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bold attempt to simplify the delivery system to major exhibitors and independents using a single DCP file package. However, the format’s optimization technology, which automatically renders different sound configurations based on theater specifications, is a more problematic feature of the new process.

Unbaking the Cake

Director Robert Zemeckis calls the sound mix “the final rewrite,” as it offers him one last opportunity to make adjustments to his film (“The Sound of Flight”). The mix, or dub, represents one of the final stages of the post-production process, where dialogue, music and sound effects are brought together by a team of two or three mixers before a film is locked and prepared for release. Re-recording mixers are tasked with creating a cohesive and balanced soundtrack from the hundreds of individual music, dialogue and effects elements that are prepared for them by a film’s super-vising sound editor, sound designer and music editor. Randy Thom, who often collaborates with Zemeckis as both sound designer and mixer, adds: “Mixing is about deciding what to focus on from moment to moment and how to filter that focus. I always say that mixing is mostly about getting rid of things. It’s figuring out what is essential to the moment and subordin-ating everything else” (quoted in Fluhr 2010: 17). In addition to creating and refining the aesthetic contours of a soundtrack, mixers also must keep an ear open to creative input from their client—a director, producer or studio executive—who hires them onto a project, as an employee of a mixing facility or freelancer. Mixers, like most other below-the-line workers in the film industry, must balance their own artistic sensibility with the client’s creative direction.5 In an appropriate parallel, Robert Faulkner, who has written about the social organization of composers in Hollywood, argues that the craft belongs to the craftsperson, but the finished work almost always belongs to someone else (1978: 126).

The creative labor of contemporary sound mixing is as much about aesthetics as it is about creating professional relationships with clients. After the dissolution of the major Hollywood studio sound departments in the 1950s and 1960s, re-recording mixers transitioned from salaried studio employees to independent subcontractors and freelance workers, hired by producers for individual film projects as part of the emerging “package-unit system” of production (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1985: 330). No longer tethered to a particular studio, mixers were able

5 “Below-the-line” refers to all workers who are listed below (“above-the-line”) actors, writers, producers and directors on a film’s budget sheet.

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to work with different studios and filmmakers at will, but they also lost the stability of a steady paycheck and a permanent workspace. Susan Christopherson and Michael Storper have argued that during this time the film industry shifted from a mass production model to a post-Fordist form of production organization that they call “flexible specialization.” Flexibly specialized workers remain flexible to changes in technology and workflow, but retain a specialized set of skills that are applicable to a smaller and more collaborative product base than is required by the segmented labor division in a Fordist model of production (Christopherson and Storper 1989; Storper 1989).

After most studio sound facilities were shuttered in the late 1960s, independent mixing facilities sprouted in and around Los Angeles, including Ryder Sound Services, Glen Glenn and Todd-AO, which became temporary foster homes to freelance mixers. In the early 1980s, George Lucas started Sprocket Systems, later renamed Skywalker Sound, in northern California, which remains a one-stop shop for sound editorial and mixing services for major studio films. By the 1990s, major studios such as Disney, Universal, Warner Bros., Sony and 20th Century Fox began a “reintegration” program that involved building new sound editorial and mixing facilities on their backlots (Kenny 1994: 13). Realizing that studio dollars were going to independent facilities for soundwork, studios hoped to be able to recoup some production costs by leasing their own stages to both in-house film projects and off-the-lot productions. As part of the back-to-the-lot strategy, studios invited high-level mixers to staff their new facilities in an attempt to entice film-makers to use their new stages. However, in continued attempts to pare down production workforces, most studios, including independent facilities such as Skywalker Sound, did not actually employ re-recording mixers; instead, these remained freelance workers who received compen-sation from packaged deals negotiated between a studio’s post-production sound services department and filmmaker clients. As Susan Christopherson has argued, this strategy allowed major studios to spread the financial risk by forging alliances with reputable mixers without having to pay them directly. Having a roster of well-known mixers also meant that studios could depend on mixers to bring potential clients to their facilities based on their professional reputations and recurrent relationships with directors and producers (2008: 75).

Flexible specialization in the film industry has reconfigured how re-recording mixers shape their own professional identities. Since film-makers and production companies can shop around for a mixer with the best credits or the most competitive pay rate, most mixers aim to set themselves apart from the competition by developing a distinctive artistic identity. One way this is accomplished is by honing a particular aesthetic mixing style that is both economical and artistically novel. Kevin O’Connell, a thirty-year veteran mixer with credits including Top Gun (1986), The

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Rock (1996) and Transformers (2007), attributes his personal style to finding “definition” on the soundtrack: “My style is to focus on the most important element of that shot at that one time. So I look at every single shot in the movie and determine what’s the most important thing there. Detail is key” (2009). O’Connell’s meticulous aesthetic reflects the broader artistic sensibilities of mixers who have fought against the technician label by emphasizing their aesthetic contributions to the craft.

Others seek clarity and concision with the final mix. Richard Portman, who mixed The Godfather (1972) and Star Wars (1977), sought to convince clients that more sound wasn’t necessarily a good thing: “You can’t have clarity with lots of sound. We’re looking for subtlety more than we’re looking to pound you over the head. The picture—the story—will tell you what to do” (Weaver 1995: 27). In each case, different mixing styles function as professional signatures where aesthetic choices reflect highly personal expressions of craft and experience that are rooted in the shared conventions and collective actions of the Hollywood sound community.

In his study of “art worlds,” Howard S. Becker argues that the creation of any art is governed not only by a shared set of conventions among artists, but also by the networks, resources and interactions involved in its collective production (1974: 775). In this way, re-recording mixers like O’Connell and Portman achieve distinctive professional identities by refining and simplifying conventions of intelligibility and clarity. Not unlike re-recording mixers in the film industry, sound engineers in the recording industry in the 1960s and 1970s, suggests Edward Kealy (1979), transformed themselves from technicians to artists based on the technical demands of mixing and the complexity of their aesthetic decisions at the mixing console. At the same time, Paul Hirsch (1975), Richard Peterson (1979), Susan Schmidt Horning (2004) and Nick Prior (2010) further suggest that recording studio engineers are part of an organizational system characterized by economic pressures and decision chains that work to reduce demand uncertainty in the marketplace, where conventions are valuable hallmarks of individual or group style. Consequently, the Atmos rendering tool, which automatic-ally derives 5.1 and 7.1 versions from an original Atmos mix, challenges the ways in which mixers author their work and maintain competitive artistic identities. As film sound mixing has become more dependent on the specialized knowledge of digital formats and platforms, and as mixers have been tasked with consolidating and balancing more sound elements in novel ways, Dolby has conflated technical control with creative control.

Stuart Bowling maintains that Dolby’s rendering algorithm creates a duplicate copy of the mixer’s “true intent” and downsizes it for theaters with different loudspeaker configurations; hence the promotional tagline, “Author Once, Optimize Everywhere” (Dolby Laboratories 2012). In fact, the renderer reworks a mixer’s workflow to create a 5.1/7.1 output by “intelli-gently [using] the surround speakers in the theatre to their best effect” (Dolby

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Laboratories 2013a: 10). Its algorithm essentially finds a way to position audio objects according to the “speakers that are present, rather than neces-sarily being output to a physical channel” (8). Emphasizing a mixer’s desire to control the position of sound elements, Dolby engineers insist that the rendering algorithm provides mixers with more control over their creative decisions, since it intuitively maps their choices onto 5.1 and 7.1 formats: according to Dolby senior platform manager Nicolas Tsingos, the algorithm “basically selects the most appropriate set of speakers, and plays the sound from those speakers” (quoted in Dayal 2012). But, given its automated “selection” process, the renderer has the potential to reduce a mixer’s ability to control how his or her work is translated from one format to another.

In a traditional channel-based system, mixers prepare sound and music “stems” that “bake” all the sounds and their positional data into 5.1 or 7.1 channel arrays. After the stems are prepared, it is virtually impossible to remove or “unbake” individual elements from the channel layout. In other words, the stems provide a concrete way for directors and mixers to control the scope and balance of the soundtrack. By contrast, Atmos “unbakes the cake” by keeping audio objects and sound elements flexible during the dubbing process so the rendering algorithm can create virtual 5.1 and 7.1 stems. There are ways to manually override the rendering unit to provide custom 5.1/7.1 channel outputs, but Dolby has promoted the algorithm to studios and film-makers as a time- and cost-saving technology designed to work in tandem with the creative demands of both mixers and film-makers.

If the sound mix is the “final rewrite” of a film, as Robert Zemeckis describes it, then Dolby Atmos is potentially leaving the final word to be rewritten by a computer algorithm that approximates the location of individual sound elements. While the number of Atmos-ready theaters worldwide is relatively small (approximately 200 in late 2013), several mixers have already expressed skepticism toward the rendering unit, claiming that it has the potential to dramatically alter how their work is reinterpreted for different theaters; however, the same mixers also admit that it is virtually impossible to control how any theater reproduces their work. What matters most is their ability to retain a sense of creative autonomy from a technology that appears to impose a particular aesthetic arrangement on their workflow.

There is a significant parallel to the development of Dolby Stereo in the mid-1970s, when re-recording mixers faced a similar challenge to their professional routine. As film historian Jay Beck has noted, playback of surround channel information was inconsistent for theaters with different projectors and sound decoders. There was a much higher probability that when a stereo optical print with surround information was played back on a mono projector, the surround channel information would be canceled out completely as a result of phasing problems (2004: 134). The early glitch-prone surround process forced mixers to avoid placing important

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story information, namely character dialogue and music cues, in the rear channel. Although this meant that mixers worked more conservatively with their sound elements, it was closer in style and practice to what they had been accustomed to in the largely monophonic era of sound mixing that preceded Dolby’s foray into multichannel sound.

Though Dolby Digital 5.1 solved phasing problems with surround channel information, mixers have not altogether abandoned their conser-vative treatment of the rear channels. With Atmos, Dolby is asking mixers to rethink their relationship to rear channel information with the flexible audio objects that can be panned and positioned anywhere in the front or surround sound field, including sound elements that carry crucial narrative information (Dolby Laboratories 2013b: 1). And the rendering algorithm will reposition audio objects with mathematical precision to the loudspeakers that work the best for that particular configuration. Not unlike the problems of Dolby Stereo, contemporary mixers are largely hesitant to turn over their workflow to a technology that approximates the position of sound material within the sound field, no matter how precise the mathematical algorithm may be.

Erik Aadahl, a sound designer and re-recording mixer, downplays the deterministic qualities of the Atmos system when he says, “This is like an instrument. At first we’ll be just cracking the surface of what this format can do. But it itself is an instrument” (in Dolby Laboratories 2012). Aadhal is confident that Atmos and its rendering technology will ultimately serve the creative needs of the sound community, including mixers. In a telling statement about the early days of digital sound, mixer Larry Blake, writing in Mix magazine, notes that no digital format “can be protected against bad mixes with inaudible, thin dialog and obnoxiously loud music and effects” (1993: 92). Adding to what amounts to a taste judgment on mixing aesthetics, Blake echoes Aadahl’s suggestion that mixing tools have little impact on matters of style and practice.

However, that is not to say that technical proficiency is not part of a Hollywood mixer’s occupational identity. In addition to the social and aesthetic functions of film sound mixing, the third element of re-recording involves proficiency with digital tools, including mixing consoles from different manufacturers, editing software such as Pro Tools, and sound formats such as Dolby 7.1 and Atmos. Since most stages and facilities operate with different consoles and configurations, Hollywood mixers must be acquainted with various console brands (Neve, Harrison, Euphonix) and be ready to adapt to different configurations based on a client’s requests. With the virtual extinction of professional apprenticeship programs that once provided the training ground for studio-based engineers, contemporary re-recording mixers must educate themselves on console technology and release formats, either by learning on the job or attending training classes sponsored by their labor union, the Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700.

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The Atmos format provides a clear example of how technical proficiency is a distinguishing and often necessary feature of a mixer’s professional identity. During its development, Dolby invited mixers to their San Francisco and Burbank, California offices to learn how to operate the Atmos system. In one test case, mixers were given a four-minute sequence from Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) to remix in Atmos.6 At the same time, Dolby personnel reached out to major studios with financial incentives to bring Atmos into the workflow of films such as Brave (2012), Life of Pi (2012), A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), Oblivion (2013), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) and Gravity (2013). Offering to pay for additional time on mixing stages, Dolby incentivized, “out of necessity,” in order to provide Atmos content for exhibitors without forcing cost-conscious studios to foot the bill (Sijen 2013).7 According to one Dolby executive, the company is cautiously optimistic that their early sponsorship efforts will lead to the wider adoption of Atmos within the industry, but it remains unclear how more mixers will learn to use the system if the company abandons its training efforts. The incentivizing model benefitted a very small group of mixers who received training on the Atmos platform and additional time to build Atmos mixes for films like Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) and Man of Steel (2013), leaving the majority of Los Angeles-based mixers without the technical proficiency to handle Atmos workflow. At the moment there is a sizeable gap in technical knowledge and experience between mixers who have worked with the format and those who have not.

Realism in Theory and Practice

Like most other below-the-line craft occupations in the contemporary Hollywood production chain, re-recording mixers work within a set of artistic conventions. According to Howard Becker, “Artistic conventions cover all the decisions that must be made with respect to works produced in a given art world, even though a particular convention may be revised for a given work” (1974: 771). In this sense, conventions regulate the formal parameters of a work by providing artists with a way of doing things that also regulates the ways in which artists in the same field can coordinate

6 This training session provided a testing ground for mixers at Skywalker Sound in northern California who were preparing to build an Atmos mix for Pixar’s Brave.7 Dolby has worked with film-makers and studios in the past. During the development of Dolby Stereo in the mid-1970s, Ioan Allen, Steve Katz and a team of Dolby engineers worked with George Lucas and Gary Kurtz on the production of Star Wars (1977) and, in the same year, Steven Spielberg on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The commercial success of both films helped Dolby Stereo reach a global audience, and ultimately convinced exhibitors to invest in the multichannel format. See Allen (1977).

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and work together. Indeed, the conventions of mixing sound for film have changed very little over the craft’s eighty-year history.

In the late 1920s, the task of re-recording film sound elements into a cohesive track required conversion-era sound engineers to experiment with different representational models. In his study of early sound practices, James Lastra observes that a debate emerged among engineers from the music recording and telephone industries. At the heart of the debate were two different understandings of realism in sound representation. The first camp, led by Bell Laboratories engineer Joseph P. Maxfield, recommended that sound recordings duplicate the original event with the audience, in Lastra’s words, “conceptually and practically a part of the space of repre-sentation” (2000: 163). However, the idea of maintaining absolute fidelity was antithetical to the demands of film narration, which necessitated that separately recorded sound elements, including dialogue, music and effects, be re-recorded into a single track. The second camp was led by engineers from AT&T and the telephony industry, which valued intelligibility over fidelity and stressed the importance of clear, unencumbered speech for their telephone technologies. From as early as 1930, film sounds were divided into separate, hierarchically ordered tracks, with dialogue taking a leading role. Rick Altman (1985) has noted that early studio engineers had one goal in mind, to maintain dialogue intelligibility. In most cases, this led them to abandon accurate notions of sound and picture scale in favor of a hierarchized soundtrack that privileged narratively significant sound elements (Doane 1985).

The convention of intelligibility has coordinated the practices of Hollywood mixers for nearly nine decades, leading to the routinized, though hardly rigid, coordination of activity among sound professionals. The goal of an intelligible soundtrack has been absorbed into the training, equipment, materials and personal styles of re-recording mixers. Intelligibility can also be articulated as a sign of “tacit knowledge” among mixers, whereby skills are gained through implicit, unarticulated experience (Schmidt Horning 2004: 707). Working within such a coordinated set of practices, contem-porary mixers have the creative flexibility to craft artistic solutions that offer customized interpretations of the intelligibility model.

Similarly, mixing conventions specifying codes of realism are embodied in the constraints of intelligibility and are built into sound mixing materials and equipment. Most digital mixes begin with a series of pre-dubs where individual tracks are grouped into smaller categories such as dialogue, Foley, backgrounds, weapons and automobiles. Reducing the number of tracks for the final mix can provide a manageable alternative to monitoring dozens, if not hundreds, of individual sound elements on a set of console faders. Pre-dubbing also constitutes a convention that aims to refine and clarify the goals of an intelligible soundtrack. As Richard Portman notes, “Motion pictures are not reality. The best you can do is be sparing. If

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someone is walking down the street, I know I need traffic, but I don’t need a car effect for every one I see” (quoted in Weaver 1995: 27).

In this way, mixing for realism often means making choices about what to feature against the picture. Film historian and theorist John Belton has argued that classical and contemporary sound editing and mixing conven-tions suggest a “quest” for an “idealized reality,” a soundtrack that is “carefully filtered to eliminate the sounds that fall outside of understanding or significance; every sound must signify” (1985: 66). Not surprisingly, most mixers embrace intelligibility as a means to control their aesthetic involvement in the dubbing process. According to re-recording mixer Patrick Cyccone: “You have to pick and choose your moments. One moment, let the music take the lead dramatically; the next moment let the sound effects take the lead. It’s your choice as an artist to decide what’s appropriate for that particular moment” (2013). The reality that is repre-sented is one that is appropriate and proportional to the demands of the narrative. What is implicit in Cyccone’s statement is a convention that is rooted in the “idealized reality” of film sound but embedded in a separate quest for dramatic “feel.”8

Mixing for “feel” encompasses the artistic identities of contemporary mixers who must decide what is appropriate for a scene. Sometimes clarity is needed to convey a crucial plot point; at other times, density is needed to convey a sense of disorder and chaos. Mixers refer to these decisions in terms of feeling the dramatic textures of a scene and trusting their instincts to what is appropriate. By looking at the artistic identities of Kevin O’Connell, Richard Portman and Patrick Cyccone, the overlapping practice among their individual styles is that of dramatic feel. Of course, feel is governed by the cooperative networks of mixers who share and coordinate their own artistic activities around conventions of intelligibility. As much as O’Connell, Portman and Cyccone distinguish themselves by emphasizing “definition,” “clarity” and “appropriateness” in their work, they are all organized around the basic tenets of classical film-making where realism represents not the real world but a film-maker’s representation of it.

Within this context of mixing practices, it is interesting that the Dolby Atmos White Paper should emphasize the format’s ability to render “lifelike” audio that “takes realism to a new level” (2013a: 7). It goes on to note that the system’s top loudspeaker channel mimics the activity of sound in the real world, where sound originates from all directions, including the

8 Dramatic “feel” can be considered one of the many metaphorical phrases adopted by sound engineers in the film and recording industries that describe their work in creating sounds. Metaphors such as “warm,” “bright” and “full” connote the abstract technical demands of sound production. Thomas Porcello argues that such “talk about sound” is crucial in under-standing the professional world of recording engineers (2004: 735).

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upper hemisphere. Expanding the top and rear channels not only creates a more fluid passage of audio objects around the theater but, in Dolby’s view, prevents the audience from having to mentally create a phantom image of sound moving above and around the theater space. One of the distin-guishing features of the format is its positional sourcing of audio objects anywhere in the sound field, which Dolby engineers relate to a broader definition of cinematic realism:

The ability to precisely position sources anywhere in the surround zones also improves the audio/visual transition from screen to room. If a character on the screen looks inside the room toward a sound source, the mixer has the ability to precisely position the sound so that it matches the character’s line of sight, and the effect will be consistent throughout the audience. (ibid.)

This is not dissimilar from early sound practices that attempted to match sound/picture scale with an aim toward preserving fidelity. Atmos attempts to preserve a strict correlation between sound/picture point sources on screen and in the theater space.

By literalizing the position between sound and picture, Atmos aims to place the audience within the three-dimensional space of the original sound event, even though no such event actually exists. At the same time, Dolby engineers have conceived of Atmos as a format that brings film-makers and audiences closer to how we experience sound events in everyday life:

Consider the example of being in a restaurant. In addition to ambient music apparently being played from all around, subtle but discrete sounds originate from specific points: a person chatting from one point, the clatter of a knife on a plate from another. Being able to place such sounds discretely around the auditorium can add a heightened sense of realism without being obvious. (ibid.)

To suggest that mixers can obtain a “heightened sense of realism” by panning sound to particular speakers at the expense of narrative trans-parency is at odds with Hollywood mixing conventions. This is largely due to the gap that exists between Atmos as a theoretical concept and as a practical mixing tool.

When re-recording mixers Chris Jenkins and Frank Montaño created their 9.1 Atmos mix for Man of Steel (2013), there was an opportunity to aggressively explore the multi-dimensional sound field with point-source panning, especially during the film’s many action sequences. Instead of filling the surround sound field with discrete sound effects, Jenkins and Montaño filled the room with composer Hans Zimmer’s percussive score. According to Jenkins:

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My hope was that we could be subtle with it and not be like 3-D, even though we have the opportunity to do it. So what we ended up doing was taking music and using the whole room, so we have percussion and strings and brass up front. Long strings stay in the front, but short strings you can bring back to a quarter way back of the room. Choirs can play overhead. What you end up with is like a cathedral. (“The Sound of Man of Steel”)

Pushing music into the surround zones not only conforms to the historical practice of positioning ambiences in the surround field, but also undermines Dolby’s intention of bringing audio objects into the sound space.9 What Jenkins achieves is something more unique: the separation of Zimmer’s score into different audio zones with choir, synths, strings and brass assigned a specific position in the sound field.

Ironically, the epic scope of Man of Steel inspired Jenkins and Montaño to bring a leaner package of sound elements to the mixing stage. As Montaño describes it:

Sometimes we get lost in the novelty of what we bring to the table. I’m always conscious of the first-time viewer. Are we getting the story? Are we clearing dialogue? We don’t want anybody to lean over and say, “What did they say?” So I always try to err on clarity. If that means sacrificing whatever is at your fingertips, so be it. You have to be sensitive to all the disciplines of dialogue, music, and sound effects. (“The Sound of Man of Steel”)

As a practical tool, then, mixers like Jenkins and Montaño circumvent point-sourcing effects in favor of an approach that de-emphasizes off-screen audio objects. In pulling the musical score off the screen and into the surround zones, Jenkins opens up the front three screen channels for a roomier dialogue and effects track, which supports the ideology of intelligi-bility over greater realism. Ultimately, these strategies forgo Dolby’s call for “lifelike” audio to better reflect the demands of the narrative and to satisfy their own professional tastes.10

9 What Jenkins avoids by not placing point-source effects in the surround field is what Tomlinson Holman calls the “exit sign effect” (2000: 47). In his study of psychoacoustics in film sound, Holman admonishes sound mixers for treating sound effects as audio objects to be placed in the surround array, suggesting that when audience members turn their heads to follow a sound, they end up looking to the exit sign of the theater.10 To be sure, there have been several Atmos mixes that experiment with audio objects and aggressive panning strategies. Re-recording mixer Will Files, who has publicly supported the format in interviews with Wired (Dayal 2012) and The Hollywood Reporter (Giardina 2013), has experimented with sound/picture placement and point-sourcing objects in Brave and Thor: The Dark World (2013).

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Conclusion

When asked about the technological demands of contemporary sound editing and mixing, Randy Thom expressed sincere disappointment with the industry’s focus on technical novelty over artistic practice: “Sound people tend to be pigeonholed as technicians, which is a tragedy, because we’re artists first and foremost. I honestly don’t think adding more channels to a movie theater are [sic] going to improve movies significantly—5.1, 11.1, or 101.1” (quoted in Fluhr 2010: 19). Thom’s sentiment crystallizes the skeptical, if not entirely nervous, attitude of contemporary re-recording mixers toward Dolby Laboratories’ Atmos format. Given that it took Dolby Digital 5.1 nearly twenty years to become a ubiquitous feature of motion picture mixing and exhibition, it is far too early to predict the fate of Atmos and its place within the sound community and among theater owners worldwide. Even with endorsements from high-profile directors like Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, Dolby executives admit that it is still too early to deem Atmos a commercial success as they continue to train mixers, convince exhibitors to install the costly system, and manage competitors.

This chapter began with a brief description of “Leaf,” the promotional short created by Gary Rydstrom and produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Dolby Labs. The sixty-second trailer illustrates the architectural latticework of the expansive 9.1 system with its four surround zones and two overhead channels. The animated maple seedling flutters and twists around the sound field in a display that is both immersive and disruptive. By all accounts, it was designed as a showcase for the format’s most obvious component: the sixty-four loudspeakers positioned above and around the four corners of the theater. Beyond the dramatic and immersive functions of the short, however, Atmos proposes a re-evaluation of mixing ideology and practice among re-recording mixers that has not occurred since the introduction of four-channel Dolby Stereo in the 1970s.

Although Dolby hopes to redefine the technical, practical and experiential properties of cinema audio, its success as a viable digital sound format is largely dependent on the creative community of re-recording mixers who, along with other practitioners in the production chain, are responsible for creating the content for Dolby’s next-generation sound format. This chapter has shown that the networks of cooperation among mixers are bound to conventions of practice that are embedded in their professional identities and technical skills. Contemporary mixers participate in a freelance market-place where distinctive professional identities and technical proficiency are necessary components of the job. Their creative work depends on a shared set of conventions, inherited from the conversion era, that emphasize a cinematic realism based on clarity, intelligibility and the demands of the narrative.

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With its digital rendering algorithm that automatically reconfigures a mix based on room size and format compatibility, Atmos challenges the creative and professional norms of Hollywood sound mixing. By virtue of its design, Atmos not only encourages mixers to treat sound elements in a way that is contrary to mixing ideology, but it also asks them to allow a piece of automated software to author different versions of their work. In large measure, Atmos reveals a great deal about the material conditions of sound mixing within Hollywood, not to mention the aesthetic contours that define the work of re-recording mixers. Dolby Atmos may be an instrument that requires a player to learn its design, but its function remains fitted to the constraints and possibilities of re-recording mixing conventions and the ideologies of practice that govern them.

References

Allen, I. 1977. “The Dolby Sound System for Recording ‘Star Wars.’” American Cinematographer 58(6): 709, 748, 761.

Altman, R. 1985. “Technology of the Voice: Part I.” Iris 3(1): 3–20.Beck, J. 2004. A Quiet Revolution: Changes in American Film Sound Practices,

1967–1979. PhD diss., University of Iowa.Becker, H.S. 1974. “Art as Collective Action.” American Sociological Review

39(6): 767–76.Belton, J. 1985. “Technology and Aesthetics of Film Sound.” In Film Sound:

Theory and Practice, eds E. Weis and J. Belton, 62–72. New York: Columbia University Press.

Blake, L. 1993. “Digital Sound in the Cinema.” Mix (November): 87–97.Bordwell, D., J. Staiger and K. Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood

Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press.

Christie Digital Systems. 2013. “Christie: High Frame Rate Technology Overview for Exhibitors.” White paper.

Christopherson, S. 2008. “Beyond the Self-expressive Creative Worker: An Industry Perspective on Entertainment Media.” Theory, Culture and Society 25(7–8): 73–95.

Christopherson, S. and M. Storper. 1989. “The Effects of Flexible Specialization on Industrial Politics and the Labor Market: The Motion Picture Industry.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 42(3): 331–48.

Cyccone, P. 2013. Personal interview (5 May).Dayal, G. 2012. “3-D for Your Ears: Building Dolby’s Atmos System for Brave.”

Wired (28 June): online.Doane, M.A. 1985. “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing.” In

Film Sound: Theory and Practice, eds E. Weis and J. Belton, 54–62. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dolby Laboratories. 2012. “Dolby Atmos: A Revolutionary Approach to Sound.” Promotional film.

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—2013a. “Dolby Atmos: Next Generation Audio for Cinema.” White paper.—2013b. “Authoring for Dolby Atmos Cinema Sound Manual.” Technical user

manual.Faulkner, R. 1978. “Swimming with Sharks: Occupational Mandate and the Film

Composer in Hollywood.” Qualitative Sociology 1(2): 99–129.Fluhr, D. 2010. “Randy Thom: A Master of the Craft.” CAS Quarterly (Winter):

16–19.Fuchs, A. 2012. “Soundsational! Dolby Atmos Delivers Exciting New Audio

Platform.” Film Journal (24 April): http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/esearch/e3i6bc2381e4316e9773b5d74a8c3c72916

Giardina, C. 2013. “‘Star Trek’ Sound Mixer Will Files Talks Dolby Atmos.” Hollywood Reporter (23 May): http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/star-trek-sound-mixer-will-556809

Graser, M. and K. Idelson. 2012. “Fox Signs on for Dolby Atmos sound System.” Variety 10 (September): http://variety.com/2012/film/news/fox-signs-on-for-dolby-s-atmos-sound-system-1118059051/

Hirsch, P. 1975. “Organizational Effectiveness and the Institutional Environment.” Administrative Science Quarterly 20: 327–44.

Holman, T. 1992. “The Digital Future of Sound.” Cinema Technology (October): 140–1.

—2000. 5.1 Surround Sound: Up and Running. Boston: Focal Press.Kealy, E.R. 1979. “From Craft to Art: The Case of Sound Mixers and Popular

Music.” Sociology of Work and Occupations 6(1): 3–29.Kenny, T. 1994. “The Return of the Lots: A Tour through L.A.’s Post

Community.” Mix (September): 6–14.Kerins, M. 2010. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Lastra, J. 2000. Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception,

Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.O’Connell, K. 2009. Personal interview (20 June).Peterson, R. 1979. “The Simplex Located in Art Worlds.” Journal of

Contemporary Ethnography 7 (January): 411–39.Porcello, T. 2004. “Speaking of Sound: Language and the

Professionalization of Sound-Recording Engineers.” Social Studies of Science 34(5): 733–58.

Prior, N. 2010. “The Rise of the New Amateurs: Popular Music, Digital Technology and the Fate of Cultural Production.” In Handbook of Cultural Sociology, eds J.R. Hall, L. Grindstaff and M.C. Lo, 398–407. New York: Routledge.

Schmidt Horning, S. 2004. “Engineering the Performance: Recording Engineers, Tacit Knowledge and the Art of Controlling Sound.” Social Studies of Science 34(5): 703–31.

Sergi, G. 2013. “Knocking at the Door of Cinematic Artifice: Dolby Atmos, Challenges and Opportunities.” The New Soundtrack 3(2): 107–21.

Sijen, P. 2013. Personal interview (5 June).“The Sound of Flight.” Soundworks Collection, video featurette.“The Sound of Man of Steel.” Soundworks Collection, video featurette.Storper, M. 1989. “The Transition to Flexible Specialization in the US Film

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Industry: External Economies, the Division of Labour, and the Crossing of Industrial Divides.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 13: 273–305.

Stoeckinger, M. 2009. Personal interview (1 June).Taub, E.A. 2009. “Will Sound Be Cinema’s Killer App?” New York Times (27

October): online.Weaver, J.M. 1995. “Master Re-Recording Mixer: Richard Portman.” Mix

(September): 20–30.Whittington, W. 2013. “Lost in Sensation: Reevaluating the Role of Cinematic

Sound in the Digital Age.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, eds C. Vernallis, A. Herzog and J. Richardson, 61–74. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Symphony of Sound : Surround Sound in Formula

One Racing Games

Ruth Dockwray and Karen Collins

We listen to the sound of your car at a minimum, while accelerating and while running at full speed. We listen carefully to the sound of the engine. And we wonder, isn’t it turning too fast?

Isn’t this an engine that is crying out in protest? No, this is the sound of an engine howling with joy. A sound that no composer

could reproduce, that no orchestra could play. A symphony of sound that brings joy to the mind and a smile to the face.

— ANONYMOUS DRIVER’S LETTER TO FERRARI (CITED IN BORGOMEO 1997: 117–18)

In 2014, Formula One racing underwent a major change. New regulations dictated the end of unboosted 2.4-liter V8 engines that peaked at 18,000 rpm, and the introduction of much quieter 1.6-liter V6 turbocharged engines, limited to 15,000 rpm. The move was designed to reduce noise disturbance and environmental damage associated with the motorsport, and to bring the engine technology closer in line with that of road vehicles (Caswell 2011). The exhaust-driven turbocharger will suppress some of the noise and lower the overall frequency of the sound of Formula One cars. This change in engines—most notably the difference it will make to the sound of the sport—has been much lamented by racing fans and sports

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critics alike, as described by Sydney Morning Herald sports writer Mark Fogarty:

The new configuration will radically alter the most elemental appeal of F1—the acoustic assault that accentuates the cars’ speed—as part of the sport’s biggest technical shake-up in years … It will mean the end of the piercing wail emitted by the engines since 1989, when the previous gener-ation of turbo motors was outlawed in favour of a return to normally aspirated powerplants … But with its impellers spinning at 100,000 rpm, the turbocharger will add a distinctive whooshing sound to the muffled mechanical snarl as the engine revs rise and fall. While residents of Albert Park and surrounding areas will rejoice at the prospect of the sound of the F1s being dialed down from 11 to perhaps eight or nine, racing enthusiasts are apprehensive. The banshee-like shriek is a big part of the attraction, emphasising the sheer speed of the cars as they rocket from one corner to the next and bullet down the straights. (2013)

Indeed, sound is so important to the audience of motorsport that many fans obsess over minute details in engine audio. For example, various iPad applications like Crankcast Audio’s Rev and 2XL Games’ XLR8 have been released, which allow users to interact with audio-based Formula One car engines. Such apps consist of essentially just a few buttons and the sound, putting all of the focus on the audio. Moreover, countless online video and audio recordings feature the sound of the individual cars and their components.

Formula One engines have always been, and will remain, loud machines. However, the V8 era’s “symphony of sound” has given way to a new era of turbocharged engines (or rather “power units”), which offer what for many fans is a less appealing sonic signature. Rob White, the deputy managing director of Renaultsport F1, has explained that engine noise remains a crucial component to the sound of the new power units (although the new sound is a turbocharged noise, rather than a naturally aspirated noise). White promised fans that although the overall “sound pressure level (so the perceived volume) is lower and the nature of the sound reflects the new architecture … The engines remain high revving, ultra high output compe-tition engines” (Renault 2013).

It is clear that the sound of Formula One is an integral part of the experience. For racing spectators, there is nothing more thrilling than experiencing the sound of twenty-two engines revving simultaneously on the start line in anticipation of the impending race. The multisensory aspects of live racetracks attract many fanatics to fill large-capacity racing circuits. And the growing number of circuits worldwide allows an increasing number of fans to experience firsthand the live aspect of racing.

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But being a live crowd participant is just one of several ways to experience the thrills of fast cars racing for the coveted top spot on the podium. Many fans also experience Formula One through television and video games, where surround sound is often used to compensate for some of the loss of the multisensory aspects of live circuits. While there has recently been growing interest in cinema surround sound (e.g. Sergi 2004, Manolas and Pauletto 2009, Kerins 2010, Atkinson 2011, Collins 2013), the impact of surround sound on media experiences remains surprisingly underexplored, and the study of surround sound in games in particular has been neglected.1

In many ways, video games have been a driving force in new approaches to surround sound, as experiments with binaural, ambisonics and “real 3D” surround have been fairly common interests of sound designers at game companies (see Tsingos, Chabanne and Robinson 2010, Heinen 2013). According to a survey of game players by Australian game company Codemasters, about 90 percent felt that surround sound was “important” or “very important” to game playing (Goodwin 2009). Bearing in mind that this data is now out of date, we can expect these numbers to be even higher today, since prices of surround sound systems have dropped and quality of sound in games has improved. This does not mean, however, that all players set up the surround system in the ways recommended by the manufacturers or surround standard developers. Nevertheless, Formula One game fans, as with Formula One fans generally, tend to be quite obsessive about engine sound and we can expect many of them to have gone to the trouble of calibrating surround sound setups. It is common, for instance, for racing game fans to purchase peripheral devices like steering wheels, pedals or racing seats to improve the playing experience. Likewise, we assume that the use of surround sound loudspeakers is common among hardcore fans (particularly since many racing seats include built-in speakers).2

In this chapter, we explore the role of sound—particularly surround sound—on the Formula One gaming experience. Formula One gaming represents a distinct tension between realism (simulation) and entertainment (games).3 On the one hand, game developers go to great lengths to provide

1 There are a few exceptions, including Stockburger (2003), Grimshaw (2007) and Kerins (2013).2 We could find no statistics on the number of players using peripherals, but judging by the number available on the market and our own experience talking to fans of the games, we can assume that many players use these devices. For an example of just how far fans will go to enhance their experience, see the RSeat Gaming Seat (http://www.rseat.net/), which boasts fiberglass and carbon steel adjustable seats with leather upholstery, racing wheel and shifter set, Clubsport pedals, and speakers, for a price of $1,500, not including the accessories. The price and detail in the peripheral suggests a fanaticism not found in most types of games.3 In addition to broadcast and gaming contexts, Formula One simulators represent another important and related topic, though it is one that we largely bracket in this chapter. We should note, however, that simulators are designed according to more strict conceptions of realism.

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fans with a “realistic” experience; on the other, this “realism” is often not a live simulation but what Collins calls a “cine-real”: that is, “a sense of immersion and believability, or verisimilitude, within a fantasy world” (2008: 134). The cine-real space of Formula One game sound is one that combines an authentic simulation of the cars, with televisual presentation of the races, and a cinematically designed emotional quality not experienced in either live or television experiences. Here, we first explore the televisual presentation of Formula One, followed by an overview of current audio technology in Formula One games. Finally, we examine the implementation of sound in games, and the artistic license taken by sound designers in presenting the auditory experience to listeners. We will show how surround sound is a key element in the negotiation between realism and fantasy in racing games and an important component of the gaming experience.

Television Presentation of Formula One Racing

One of the most obvious sounds that you experience as a Formula One spectator is the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect (the change in frequency of a sound as a moving object, such as a vehicle, approaches and passes) empha-sizes the extreme speed and power of the Formula One car. Watching the race from the stands or the trackside offers a limited view of the road and cars but an enhanced olfactory and auditory field that calls attention to the smell and sounds emanating from the cars as they approach and pass by. Spectators are treated not just to the sound of the cars, but also to the pit-lane warning signals, crowd noises, overhead helicopters and multiple announcers.

In contrast to the live experience, watching Formula One racing on television can be largely a visual experience, accompanied by the presen-tation of various camera viewpoints and race analysis. Throughout the race weekend, the qualifying and race sessions are transmitted, offering in-car perspectives, long shots of sections of the track and close-ups of pit stops. This pre-race material, coupled with driver interviews, commentary and driver strategies, is combined with data analysis (G-force, maximum speed, tachometers, etc.), delivered as on-screen graphics, constantly informing the viewer of ongoing changes as the session develops, and is often presented as if the viewer can see some of the driver’s controls. Digital interactive television today offers the viewer a choice between camera angles, such as on-board feeds for multiple drivers, leaderboards, rolling highlights, pit channel and driver trackers. Indeed, the number of controls on-screen (currently nine in Sky TV’s “mosaic viewing”) has increased in the past decade with the rise of digital television. Combined with greater choice of cameras (drivers now have a camera housing on top of an air box behind their heads, facing them behind the wheel, on the wing mirrors and nose

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cameras), the additional visual material has undoubtedly enhanced the audience experience.

Likewise, television audio now consists of multiple streams of two or more announcers, pit reports and online reports from drivers, along with car noise (both internal and external; Petković, Mihajlović and Jonker 2002). Improvements in noise-canceling technology and the incorporation of microphone arrays inside crash helmets have greatly improved on the performance of the older radio microphones used to transmit sound from inside the vehicle, where the background noise can reach 140 dB.4 This higher-quality transmission means that not only can the audience hear more of what is occurring inside the car, but the drivers engage in much more conversation with their crew while driving, as described by Bell Laboratories researcher James West:

In the past, drivers in a race spoke to their pit crews and team managers only when they slowed down for difficult corners—a quieter moment, perhaps, but given the amount of driving skill needed to handle corners, a less than ideal time for shop talk. With the [new] microphone array, drivers can now communicate with members of the team at any point in the race. (quoted in Austen 2001)

Cameras on the car, as well as on the track, also tend to have microphones associated with them: for example, there are currently 160 audio signals that are mixed in real time in the Italian broadcast of F1 (PSNEurope 2013). Thus, television viewers can potentially hear inside the car, outside the car alongside the track, in the pit, in the crowds, from announcers and from helicopters taking overhead shots. All of these sounds are mixed live, with real-time envelope generators and digital signal processing (DSP) effects to enhance the experience for the audience (Stevens 2011).

Television clearly offers an audiovisual experience that is distinct from those of the live spectator and the Formula One driver. The multiple visual and auditory perspectives available ensure that the audience receives a broad spectrum of the many experiences associated with Formula One. And it is this broad perspective that is carried over into racing games.

An Overview of Sound in Racing Games

Racing games have been common since the earliest days of video games. The first racing game, Gran Track 10, was released by Atari in 1974, along

4 “The noise inside the race car is about the same as a 747 jet if you’re 300 feet away” (Austen 2001).

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with a space-themed racer, Space Race. Racing games remain extremely popular and are often one of the few types of games still released for arcades.5

Before we delve into surround sound in racing games, it is worth exploring in general terms the use of sound in racing games. In the early days of games, the sound of the car usually consisted of just a few sounds, synthesized with a simple frequency-to-revs or frequency-to-speed ratio. Today, sound in racing games tends to be physics-based, in the sense that the real-world laws of gravity, scale, movement and friction drive the sounds. Creative audio director Nick Wiswell explains the complications with and level of detail required for implementing sound in racing games:

Most games require lots of one shot sounds for things like character movement, footsteps, weapons, [voice over], world objects and object interactions etc. with a small number of constant sounds for moving objects, vehicles or background ambience. With a racing game most of the objects in the game [are] making sounds created from many layers of continuously changing sounds. (quoted in Nichols 2012a).

The sound of the car itself is the most important element in a racing game. Drivers listen to the sound of the engine and tires for key information about their speed, driving tactics and potential problems with the vehicle:

Obviously, the fundamental frequency is based on the engine’s rotational speed, or RPM. A driver will often memorize the pitch of the engine when it’s time to shift, and will wait for the sound he or she hears to match with that in his or her memory, and use that as a shift indicator (since rarely will the driver be looking at the instrument panel). After a number of hours in the same car, a driver will also know much of the harmonic content of the engine’s sound when it’s running at its peak. The driver can use this to tell if the sound changes as a possible indicator of a malfunction. For example, an oil leak will make things like valve tapping much more clicky. A cylinder that is no longer firing will interrupt the fundamental frequency. A good driver can use these sonic clues to help diagnose a failure even before the car returns to the pits. (Kastbauer and Nichols 2012)

The sound in a racing game today is thus never a single sound, or even a series of sounds “baked” into one (cf. Wright, this volume). They are nearly

5 For a historical overview of racing game sound, and some excellent related resources, see Kastbauer and Nichols (2012). We are indebted to Kastbauer and Nichols and the related Game Audio Podcast (Kastbauer and Woldhek 2012) for much of this section.

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always constructed of multiple layers of effects that will alter depending on the players’ selections, actions and the state of the car: driven by physics, at any one time there may be twenty to forty different layers of audio making up the sound of the car (Nichols 2012b).

Sound in racing games must also try to compensate for the loss of physical (haptic) interaction with and feedback from the car in the virtual realm. Tire sound, in particular, explains Forza sound designer Mike Cavieziel, “is a very important part of the game for us, as it’s a main source of feedback for the player while racing.”

Real-life drivers can feel G forces to know when things are about to get loose, and we use audio and rumble to help communicate that information in Forza. We’ve done numerous tire recording sessions, on numerous different surface types, to try and cover the full range of grip and traction sounds that you need to really get around a circuit quickly. (quoted in Nichols 2011)

Indeed, tire sounds have become a particularly important element of providing the player with sonic feedback. The most recent development in racing games has been the introduction of four-wheel independent sound models—models that allow players to hear, for example, that the front-left tire is squealing more than the rear-right (e.g. Forza Motorsport 3, GranTurismo 5, Shift 2: Unleashed). When listened to on a surround playback system, the appropriate wheel’s sound is played primarily through the corresponding surround location. Tire sounds can be a useful substitute, in this regard, for G-force, with tire audio letting the player know when the car is about to spin out. As Wiswell explains, “in the new tyre model, we have hundreds of different sounds and skids for each surface type” (in Kastbauer and Nichols 2012). He continues:

In fact, it’s more complex than the engine model overall because we’re tracking lateral and longitudinal forces as well as the amount of load on each tyre—there are different sample sets for loaded/unloaded. As you go into a corner and turn, one tyre’s being forced into the ground, while another’s being slightly lifted off the surface and the sonic characteristics in each case are completely different. (ibid.)

A low-frequency howling also emanates from tires as they reach their grip limit:

When a driver, say, turns too fast, the amount of lateral static friction is exceeded and the tire begins to slide … It is therefore absolutely crucial that the driver can distinguish exactly how close to that limit he or she is. In the real world, the driver can feel his or her body (and by extension

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the car itself) shifting in all directions and know from that what’s going on with the tires. In the absence of physical communication, sound fills the void in an auditory language the player can learn through practice. That language mimics sounds that real tires make, but in general are exaggerated in games. As the tire approaches the grip limit, the sound starts as a lower-frequency hum or growl. This will get louder and hissier the closer to the limit the tire is. When the tire exceeds the grip level, you hear the squeal. (Nichols 2012b)

Despite attempts to create such highly realistic sounds as independent tire detail, there is, as mentioned above, also considerable artistic license in racing games. Racing games are not realistic simulators of the driving experience. Although such simulators exist and are in use by race teams to help drivers learn tracks, track metrics and improve race times, games serve a different purpose: they are entertainment, and despite some of the attempts described above to create an accurate-as-possible reproduction of the car, many sonic elements in the game are not realistic. Physics-based, realistic sound is not always desired when it comes to representing real-world acoustics: although a few players may want sound to be as close to the real experience as possible,6 for the most part sound is adjusted to ensure an entertaining experience and to compensate for the loss of other sensory modalities. What matters in the acoustic space, then, is not so much fidelity to a real-world event but, rather, an appearance of truthfulness and believability—the cine-real. Moreover, some of the sound can be faked, since “nobody knows what it sounds like to stand behind a [car] going 100km/hour” (Kastbauer and Woldhek 2012).

However, some sounds are drawn from the real world, such as the sound of vehicles chosen by the player: in these instances, close attention is paid to simulating actual sounds. Often the sounds of the engine are recorded on a dynamometer, where sound recordists can get the sound of the car from multiple microphones without any road sounds interfering. With Formula One cars, though, the cost of the cars is prohibitively expensive, and thus they are usually recorded while driving on the track, instead of being put through the stresses required to record cars on a dyno, such as high rpm revving (ibid.). There is, however, some artistic license, particularly in the use of distortion to give the car a larger, more powerful feel than the real thing: for example, Forza Motorsport 5 incorporated non-automotive sounds into the cars, such as human screams in the tire screeches, and lion roars in the sound of the engine. Wiswell asks, “how can we use non-real-world sounds to deliver that experience at a primal level[?] It’s all sort of a

6 As mentioned in the Game Audio Podcast special on racing games (Kastbauer and Woldhek 2012), one player wanted the sound to be as if heard by the driver, through earplugs, balaclava and helmet!

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psychoacoustics where certain sounds will evoke certain emotions in people and mixing them at a level where it’s not necessarily audible but it still evokes that emotion in people because it’s there subconsciously” (quoted in Evans-Thirlwell 2013).

There are some other distinct differences between racing games and their simulator or real-life counterparts. Crowd noise, for instance, can often be heard in racing games. The roar of the crowd as one passes the stands toward the finish line can be an invigorating aspect of play. However, race-car drivers (at least, Formula One drivers) cannot hear the sounds of the crowd over the noise of their own cars (Nichols 2012c) and thus strict simulation would make for a less exciting auditory experience for players.

Most racing games do not have any kind of commentary track, unlike other sports games. Many players do not want the commentary as they find it too distracting (Kastbauer and Woldhek 2012). While football or other sports games may be equally complex for the player in terms of the amount of on-screen content, in racing games, as described above, it is particularly important to be listening to the sound of the car for key cues as to what is happening: a simultaneous commentary would disrupt this listening process, as it is difficult for our brains to tune out verbal cues.

Another significant distinction between driving, television viewing, simulations and games is the presence of music. Drivers never use music when driving real Formula One cars (or in simulators) and music is rarely used in television broadcasts during the race. Studies have shown that driving ability in simulations and games decreases with the presence of music. In particular, tempo influences driving speed and speed estimates (Brodsky 2001; cf. North and Hargreaves 1999, Cassidy and MacDonald 2010). Many games, however, use (or at least allow for) continuous background music. We suspect that there are several reasons for this use of music. First, the entertainment factor, whereby playing for long stretches may not be as enjoyable without music. Secondly, most of our real-life driving experience as players would be in our own cars with music playing, and therefore music may be expected by the player. Thirdly, music may enhance the sense of speed of driving.

In Forza Motorsport 5, released for the Xbox One in 2013, rather than use licensed music (as is typical for racing games) the music is entirely procedurally generated based on factors in the game, such as position of the car. Wiswell explains:

If you’re towards the back we can dim it out, if you’re towards the front we can push it up. When you’re out on your own we can alter the mix compared to when you’re in a dense pack. If you start to mess about and go the wrong way, we can bring in some negative element. We even have an element where, as you hunt down the guy in front, there’s a sort of “tension layer” we build up, which releases when you pass the other

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guy and starts up again as you get to the next car. (quoted in Evans-Thirlwell 2013)

This careful balance between matching an expected cine-real experience with that of the actual experience is carried into the use of surround sound in racing games.

An Overview of Surround Sound in Games

Surround sound offers key insights into how video games are designed, developed, presented and played; yet it remains an overlooked element of video game studies. While surround sound was designed originally for film, games are now a significant part of the continuing industry-led movement toward greater numbers of speakers and new technological standards. Three-dimensional audio, with speakers above and below the commonly used plane of loudspeakers, has been a subject of ongoing discussion for many years in the game audio subgroups of the Audio Engineering Society and Interactive Audio Special Interest Group. Game console maker Microsoft even filed a patent in 2012 designed to detect player position and adjust that position so that the player is always in the sweet spot, indicating a high degree of interest in creating an optimal listening environment for players (Flaks et al. 2012). Binaural recording in games has also been a growing interest, with some game development companies coming out with specially designed binaural game engines (such as the Papa Engine). Moreover, regular updates are made to the hardware and software capabil-ities of games and their platforms to enhance the surround experience for players.

There are three primary considerations when it comes to surround sound in games: the technology used, the implementation of the sound, and the impact of sound on the player (the last consideration will be dealt with separately below). Although racing games are certainly available on other devices, such as the iPad, most racing game players invest considerable time and money into their systems, to play on the most advanced console systems available (currently, and for the purposes of this analysis, the Xbox360, XboxOne and Playstation 3 and PlayStation 4). Each of these consoles fully supports up to 7.1 surround sound.7

7 The 5.1 standard surround sound system places three loudspeakers at the front (left, center and right channels), and two in the rear (rear right, rear left), as well as one subwoofer (the .1). The 6.1 format adds a rear center loudspeaker, which improves localization and panning from front to back. The 7.1 format varies widely, with more frontal speakers, two extra channels on the side or rear, or even two at the front at a height above the other speakers, which commonly exist on a horizontal plane.

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However, surround sound playback varies greatly, and can depend on the player’s setup at home, the environment of that setup, and the decoding method. Assuming that the player is using loudspeakers (rather than virtual surround headphones), the decoding method is perhaps the most important element in playback. The ways in which the sound is distributed depends on the decoding system used. This means that what the listener hears when they play a song mixed in stereo over their surround sound setup may be very different from what the recording engineer heard in testing the stereo mix in the studio. Game surround is mixed as discrete or matrixed. In discrete mixes, individual channels are all unique in terms of the information they provide. Since 5.1 has six channels of sound, there are six different signals being sent to the channels. A matrixed system (such as Dolby Pro Logic) encodes extra information into a stereo signal and recovers those channels through a mirror-image decoding. Many video games now use matrixed surround sound: if the user has a decoder (Pro Logic or Pro Logic II), audio information will play back as a surround mix; but if the user only has a two-channel stereo system, the information can still be played back through a process in which amplitude adjustments and phasing have been employed to re-create the effect of the original mix. Moreover, if the user is playing a game that was only mixed in stereo, the Pro Logic II system will guess where the sounds should be routed and will transform the stereo mix into a surround mix; the problem with this approach is that there is often crosstalk between the stereo channels (meaning the stereo image is less discrete) and this results in less accurate localization. Game consoles therefore typically allow for both discrete and matrixed mixing.

There are a variety of surround formats currently in use: on consoles, the most common are the Dolby and DTS standard 5.1 and 7.1 systems. But it is also worth discussing the ambisonics format since, to date, the most common use of ambisonic surround has been in racing games (notably those developed by Codemasters, who developed the majority of major console racing titles such as the DiRT [2007], GRID [2008] and F1 [2009] series). Ambisonics consists of four channels of audio, but the outputs are calibrated into a matrix designed to accommodate an unknown speaker setup (potentially allowing for a nearly infinite number of speakers). In order to create this system, Codemasters had to develop their own audio engine and use third-party software like Blue Ripple Audio’s Rapture3D, also used in F1 2011 (Codemasters 2011).

Sounds in games need to be mixed in terms of priority to the listener, often with the prioritization of sound tied to the space (i.e. proximity: closer sounds being given greater priority). The location of sounds, therefore, needs to be constantly updated as the game is played. Commonly, surround sound is programmed into the game engine using DirectSound (on Xbox) or OpenAL (cross-platform), or using one of the middleware engines, such as Fmod or Wwise, which allow for considerable design control without

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the need for the implementation specialist to write much code. In the middleware software, surround sound is commonly created using a three-dimensional graphical representation of the audio listener (player position). Both the actual position in the virtual space and the distance from the listener must be taken into consideration in order to create the auditory perspective; this is done through attenuation (natural weakening of signal tied to distance) and spatialization (the position within the 3D world). Distance attenuation is common, where the signal is simply attenuated based on the distance from the emitter. Most 3D game engines have some form of attenuation cone—an algorithm reducing attenuation of the audio file based on proximity and location—that can be used to simulate the propagation of sound in a particular direction. Since many sound sources have a defined facing angle, the sound will need to be attenuated or filtered at the back, so a front and back source is defined in the engine. Attenuation cones can be specified, allowing the designer to determine angles of attenu-ation (inner and outer angle parameters) and the type of roll-off effect (as the volume attenuates), along with various filters to alter the sound depending on distance (such as low-pass filters, amount of low-frequency effects and spread among the speakers).

Most surround sound layouts have been designed with movies in mind, and for various reasons these are not always the best setups for games. But since game developers cannot expect game players to reconfigure their home theater systems every time they switch between playing a game and watching television, game sound has been designed to work with existing systems. The front-left and -right channels are commonly used for music and Foley sounds that might extend to the edges or off the screen (such as footsteps, cars, etc.). The most important channel, however, is the center channel, which is used for dialogue and Foley, as well as the menu interface and player-generated sounds. The rear channels (also known as the “surrounds”) add a sense of envelopment but may draw the listener’s attention away from the screen if there are discrete sounds placed in those channels (sometimes called the “exit sign effect”—see below), which in film is to be avoided but can be a useful technique for games. In games, discrete sounds can be placed in the surrounds to give the player a full 360-degree sonic space.

Surround Sound’s Impact on the Player

Surround sound is, arguably, more important in video games than in film (depending of course on the genre of the game). Studies have shown that surround sound is noticed by players, improves their enjoyment of games and has an impact on their ability to play (Goodwin 2009, Skalski and Whitbred 2010, Kerins 2013).

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One of the key functions and effects of surround sound in games is to immerse players in a virtual world through a sense of sonic envelopment. In relation to spatial sound, envelopment has been used to describe sometimes overlapping and even contradictory concepts. Berg (2009) summarizes some of the ways in which the term has been used in the scientific literature to refer to: the sense of spaciousness; the subjective immersion of the listener; the “fullness” of sound images around a listener; the sense of being enveloped by reverberant sound; and the sense of being surrounded by sound. Here we define envelopment as the sensation of being surrounded by sound and/or the feeling of being inside a physical space (whose boundaries are delineated by that sound). Envelopment has been shown to be important to listeners in creating a sense of presence (Rumsey 2002), which is to say, in reducing the sense of mediation between audience and virtual space. Sound is thus responsible to a significant extent for the sensation of being present in a virtual environment through the sensation of envelopment (Berg 2009).

A second key function of surround sound in games is to improve localization: the ability of the listener to locate the sound in the three-dimensional space around them. Localization is of particular importance in games where the player is positioned in first-person visual perspective. In the words of Kerins, “In 5.1-equipped [first-person shooter] titles, this visual aesthetic is usually mirrored with an aggressively ‘first-person’ approach to the sound design that pans all sounds around the 5.1 sound-scape to correspond with their position around the player’s avatar; for example, sounds that originate in the diegetic world from somewhere behind and to the left of the avatar are played through the left surround speaker” (2013: 589).

It is this “aggressive” approach to using the surround sound speakers for discrete effects (spot sounds) that distinguishes the use of surround in games from that of film. Take for example the “exit sign effect”: this term refers to a phenomenon whereby any discrete sounds placed in the rear surrounds, or any pans of fast-moving sounds that move beyond the left or right screen boundaries, lead the viewer’s eye to follow the sound around the space of the theater, away from the screen (cf. Wright, this volume). For this reason, surround loudspeakers are not usually given discrete sound information in films, because the surround sounds draw the viewer’s attention away from the screen. But with games, the player’s attention need not physically draw their vision toward the loudspeaker, because they can move their character to look in the direction of the sound. In this sense, the surround speakers may in fact alter the ways in which they move the character or camera to attend to that sound event. Typically the field of view in a first-person game is between 65 and 85 degrees (Stevens and Raybould 2011: 90), meaning that the majority of the virtual space (i.e. the other 275–295 degrees) is created through the use of off-screen sound. Moreover, players are able to

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“de-acousmatize” that space—in other words, they are able to discover the source of the sounds that they are hearing off-screen (Stockburger 2003).

Implementation of Surround Sound in Racing Games

There are many reasons for the use of surround sound in Formula One games. Perhaps the most important is the ability of surround sound to employ low-frequency effects (LFE) through the subwoofer channel. LFE is particularly useful in creating a sense of power and an added weight, which is especially important when attempting to re-create the sound and feel of a powerful engine (cf. Hope 2009). The inability of human beings to localize low-frequency effects means that LFE tends to permeate the space around us, creating a feeling of envelopment and immersion.8 Moreover, LFE tends to vibrate the air in a way that resonates in our bodies, creating tactile feedback that, when the speaker is positioned near the player, can be felt as much as heard.

Surround sound systems are perhaps more realistic than two-channel stereo when it comes to Formula One in particular. This is partly because actual F1 engines are located behind the driver, rather than in front. Thus, much of the car’s noise occurs behind the driver, which makes the rear audio channels more important in creating a sense of believable vehicular space. Surround sound can also be helpful in games where the viewpoint is through the front windscreen without the benefit of wing mirrors, which allows players to hear—rather than see—cars coming up from behind. Again, the rear channels are particularly helpful in locating where other cars are in relation to the player character.

Also important in developing a sense of believable physical space is the use of sound propagation techniques to create the environment in which the car is driving. Although open-ground circuits such as the Mosport International Raceway in Canada may not have much in the way of reverberation from walls, on closed-in tracks such as Monaco, the car’s sounds bounce off tunnels, walls and buildings as the car moves around the track. Although it is possible to mimic some sense of three-dimensional space using stereo reverberation, surround sound is particularly important in creating three-dimensionality through the use of multiple channels—creating reverberation effects not just on the sides but also in front, behind

8 Sounds with frequencies below about 2 kHz have wavelengths longer than the distance between our ears, and thus our brains cannot determine the location of the source. This is because our brains respond to differences in sound between our left and right ears as a means to locate sounds.

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and around the driver. Of course, simply being able to hear the sound outside the car is another matter of artistic license, as described in a podcast on racing sound audio by two game sound designers: “If you were to strap yourself into a Formula 1 car with a 136dB engine right behind your head, and drive from an echoey stadium and then out to open air, chances are you would never be able to hear the change in ambiance. However, on quieter cars or in a 3rd person perspective, it becomes more appropriate that a change in environment should have a similar change in sound” (Kastbauer and Nichols 2012).

In most racing games, camera position can be selected by the player, who is typically given a choice of several views. For example, the player can select the “helmet cam,” a view from the back of the car, as well as a more zoomed-out version of that angle and a camera angle from the front bumper of the car (on the hood). Often, we hear the important sounds such as gear shifting as if we are in the car even when we are visually above the car, behind the car, and so on. Logically speaking, behind the car we should hear a lot of exhaust sound and none of the internal cues. But we don’t. The auditory position often remains stable, regardless of visual position, or there are only minimal shifts in the auditory perspective. In the words of technical sound designer Damian Kastbauer,

It sounds to me like for most games, the “nose cam” and “hood cam” sound identical. In games with multiple interiors like NFS Shift 2U, both interiors sound the same. For games with multiple 3rd person views, both views sound the same. This basically leaves all the games with 3 “mixes” to spread across all the views. The games that transitioned from one view to the next like the F1 games were much more pleasant than the hard jumps when scrolling through, though this is a feature I assume is rarely used as most gamers will find the view they like and stick with it. (Kastbauer and Nichols 2012)

As above, we see here a balance between what is believable (the cine-real) versus what is actually realistic. Player expectations and experiences of Formula One, through older games and television, clearly influence sound design in these more recent games.

Conclusions

Sound is an integral part of Formula One racing. The current debate about the 2014 change in engines is a clear indicator of how strongly fans of the motorsport feel about the importance of the sound of Formula One. But beyond the visceral experience of being a sonic spectator to racing, sound

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is a critical component of the driver’s awareness of her or his car and performance, indicating speed, faults, tire grip and gear shifting. Although surround sound is critical to neither the live nor televised experience of Formula One, it is a critical component when it comes to games.

As we have shown, Formula One racing games combine both the driver and spectator experiences of racing (including televisual and live experi-ences), striking a delicate balance between realism and fantasy. Surround sound plays a key role in the feelings of immersion and envelopment in the game, in the excitement and feeling of power associated with driving a Formula One vehicle and, perhaps most importantly, in providing critical information about the game environment and the proximity of other drivers to the player. Without surround sound, the player lacks key information about where other cars are located, which tires on their car are squealing, and what other changes are occurring in the driving environment.

The surround mixing of racing games is an indicator of how important surround sound is to the video game experience. In racing games, the auditory perspective rarely makes significant changes between viewpoints (whether the point of view is inside, on top of, or behind the vehicle), suggesting that the auditory information given to the player is deemed critical even if it conflicts with our viewpoint: we can often hear the gear shifter outside the vehicle, for example, or hear crowd noises inside a very loud vehicle. Similarly, the sound of the exhaust may not change whether we position our player-camera directly behind the vehicle or on top of it. This more uninterrupted auditory vantage point suggests that the player is, in a sense, simultaneously placed in an auditory first-person and omnis-cient perspective, even though the visuals can only adopt one of these perspectives at a time. The reason for this uninterrupted auditory vantage point is clear: without this sonic information, game designers feel that users would be missing key components of the driving experience. Indeed, surround sound, as we have shown, contributes greatly to the sense of realism experienced by the player, even though that realism is a fictional cine-real that relies more on subjective expectations than actual physics. By combining realistic recordings of the car engines with more subjective sounds, the end result is a sound that feels more real for the player than if the sound relied on physics or on fantasy alone. This illusory aspect of sound design is a critical component in understanding how sound functions in all media.

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Evans-Thirlwell, E. 2013. “Forza 5’s Audio Revolution—Lion Roars, Human Screaming and Dynamic Scores.” Xbox Official Magazine. http://www.totalxbox.com/57555/forza-5-gameplay-video-and-interview-turn-10s-audio- revolution/

Flaks, J., A. Bar-Zeev and J. Tardif. 2012. “System and Method for High-Precision 3-Dimensional Audio for Augmented Reality.” US Patent Application 20120093320.

Fogarty, M. 2013. “Formula One’s Quiet Revolution.” Sydney Morning Herald (March 16): http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac;jsessionid=71DCA23E312275B38288E79120A4D0CD?sy=afr&pb=all_ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=1month&so=relevance&sf=text&sf=headline&rc=10&rm=200&sp=brs&cls=844&clsPage=1&docID=SMH1303161A7804I7SID

Goodwin, S.N. 2009. “3-d Sound for 3-d Games – Beyond 5.1.” Paper presented at the Audio Engineering Society 35th International Conference: Audio for Games. London, February.

Grimshaw, M. 2007. The Acoustic Ecology of the First-person Shooter. PhD Diss., University of Waikato.

Heinen, M. 2013. “Audio Special: The 3D Future of Game Sound.” Develop Magazine. http://www.develop-online.net/analysis/audio-special-the-3d-future- of-game-sound/0117609

Hope, C. 2009. “The Bottom End of Cinema: Low Frequency Effects in Soundtrack Composition.” In Sound Scripts Vol 2: Proceedings of the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference, eds C. Hope and J.W. Marshall, 74–9. Sydney: Australian Music Centre Press.

Kastbauer, D. and D.A. Nichols. 2012. “Racing Game Sound Study.” http://blog.lostchocolatelab.com/2012/05/racing-game-sound-study.html

Kastbauer, D. and A. Woldhek. 2012. “Game Audio Podcast #18.” http://www.gameaudiopodcast.com/?p=399

264 LIVING STEREO

Kerins, M. 2010. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

—2013. “Multichannel Gaming and the Aesthetics of Interactive Surround.” In The Oxford Handbook of Audio-Visual Aesthetics, eds C. Vernallis, A. Herzog and J. Richardson, 585–602. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lanier, R.S. 1958. “Hi-Fi: The A.E.S.” New York Times (September 7): X20.Manolas, C. and S. Pauletto. 2009. ‘Enlarging the Diegetic Space: Uses of the

Multi-channel Soundtrack in Cinematic Narrative.” The Soundtrack 2(1): 39–55.

Nichols, D.A. 2011. “Mike Caviezel: THE Mike Caviezel.” TrackTime Audio. http://www.tracktimeaudio.com/?p=207

—2012a. “Interview with Nick Wiswell, Audio Director of Turn 10: Part 2.” Designing Sound. http://designingsound.org/2012/04/interview-with-nick-wiswell-audio-director-of-turn-10-part-2/

—2012b. “Nick Wiswell Returns for Part 2!” TrackTime Audio. http://www.tracktimeaudio.com/?p=411

—2012c. ‘The FM4 Great, Nick Wiswell.” TrackTime Audio. http://www.tracktimeaudio.com/?p=365

North, A.C. and D.J. Hargreaves. 1999. ‘Music and Driving Game Performance.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 40(4): 285–92.

Petković, M., V. Mihajlović and W. Jonker. 2002. “Extending a DBMS to Support Content-Based Video Retrieval: A Formula 1 Case Study.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer.

PSNEurope. 2013. “Against the Clock: Formula One Coverage in Italy.” http://www.psneurope.com/newsletteraudio4broadcast-content/full/against-the-clock-formula-one-coverage-in-italy

Renault. 2013. “Come on Feel the Noise…” RenaultSport. http://www.renaultsport.com/Come-on-feel-the-noise,2630.html?lang=en

Rumsey, F. 2002. “Spatial Quality Evaluation for Reproduced Sound: Terminology, Meaning, and a Scene-Based Paradigm.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 50(9): 651–66.

Sergi, G. 2004. The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Skalski, P. and R.T. Whitbred. 2010. “Image versus Sound: A Comparison of Formal Feature Effects on Presence and Video Game Enjoyment.” PsychNology Journal 8(1): 67–84.

Stevens, P. 2011. “Using a New Formula: TVBEurope: The Workflow.” http://www.vialite.com/content/downloads/SIS_Live_Formula_One_Coverage.pdf

Stevens, R. and D. Raybould. 2011. The Game Audio Tutorial: A Practical Guide to Sound and Music for Interactive Games. London: Focal Press.

Stockburger, A. 2003. “The Game Environment from an Auditive Perspective.” In Proceedings of Level Up, Digital Games Research Conference, November 4–6, in Utrecht. http://www.audiogames.net/pics/upload/gameenvironment.htm

Tsingos, N., C. Chabanne and C. Robinson. 2010. “Surround Sound with Height in Games using Dolby Pro Logic IIz.” Paper presented at the Audio Engineering Society 129th Convention, November 4–7, San Francisco.

A SYMPHONY OF SOUND 265

Audio-Visual References

DiRT (2007) Codemasters.F1 2011 (2011) Codemasters.Forza Motorsport 3 (2009) Turn 10.Forza Motorsport 5 (2013) Turn 10.Gran Track 10 (1974) Atari.Gran Turismo 5 (2010) Polyphony Digital.GRID (2008) Codemasters.Space Race (1974) Atari.Shift 2: Unleashed (2011) Slightly Mad Studios.

STEREO TIMELINE

1796 Early theorization of two-eared hearing (Giovanni Batista Venturi, Italy)

1816 Experimentation with monaural stethoscope begins (René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, France)

1839 Discovery of binaural beats, a phenomenon whereby two different frequencies played simultaneously and separately to each ear produce a combined frequency perceived as different than the original two (Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, Germany)

1851 Development of first binaural stethoscope to come into mainstream use (Arthur Leared, Ireland)

1852 Introduction of improved binaural stethoscope, which is still the basis of today’s models (George Cammann, USA)

1858 Differential or “double” stethoscope (also called the “stethophone”) is introduced, which uses two independent tubes (one per ear) that can be placed simultaneously on different places of a patient’s body. Permits the auditor to more easily compare two sounds or assess time differences between them (Scott Alison, England)

1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, the first device to successfully transmit speech electronically

1877 Thomas Edison invents the phonograph, a monophonic recording and playback medium popularly referred to as the “talking machine” (USA)

1879 Alfred Mayer files for a patent for the Topophone (USA). The device uses two shoulder-mounted sound receivers, connected separately to each ear via stethoscope-like rubber tubes, to permit the localization of sound in conditions of poor visibility. It is designed specifically to assist captains with locating foghorns, whistling buoys, steam whistles, icebergs and other ships at night or in fog

1880 Alexander Graham Bell publishes “Experiments Relating to Binaural Audition” in the American Journal of Otology

1881 Théâtrophone makes its debut at the World Expo in Paris. Commercialized from 1890–1932 (Clément Ader, France)

1887 Emile Berliner obtains his patent for the gramophone, a disc-based, monophonic sound reproduction system (USA). Unlike Edison’s cylinder,

268 LIVING STEREO

the disc system is designed for duplication and mass production, laying the basis for the sound recording industry

1916 Diotic–dichotic–monotic distinctions made in psychophysics (Carl Stumpf, Germany)

Early land-based acoustic location device is developed by Alfred Rawlinson (UK) to protect against aerial attacks during the First World War. The device consists of two gramophone horns connected to a differential stethoscope, with the left and right tubes leading to the corresponding left and right ears of an operator

1917 Early underwater-based acoustic location device is developed by Georges Walser (France). The device consists of two hydrophones, or sound “lenses,” mounted on either side of a ship, which funnel sounds through a system of metal tubing connected to a pair of stethoscope-like ear tubes worn by an operator

1922 Pallophotophone (later incorporated into RCA’s Photophone system) is introduced. This is an early multichannel sound recording system that captures sound on film (Charles Hoxie, USA)

1924 Radio compass is tested by the Army Air Service and Signal Corps as a means to guide pilots through conditions of poor visibility. A “dash” signal heard in the pilot’s headset indicates that the plane is on course, whereas a “dot-dash” or “dash-dot” signal communicates that the plane is headed too far left or right of its desired destination. Similar systems were used widely on ships through the 1940s

1925 BBC’s 5XX (radio station) broadcasts a Manchester concert in stereo. Widely recognized as the first stereo radio broadcast

1931 Composer Arnold Schoenberg critiques an early stereo experiment at Ultraphon

Alan Blumlein (UK) files for his patent of a two-channel sound reproducing system; patent is issued the following year

1932 Harvey Fletcher and Leopold Stokowski’s experiment with multichannel equipment at Bell Labs in addition to their own work with binaural reproduction

1933 Bell Labs stereo demonstration (Philadelphia Orchestra)

Early demonstration of binaural (via a tailor’s mannequin called “Oscar”) takes place at Chicago World’s Fair

1937 Bell Labs demonstrates a two-channel motion picture sound in NYC

1940 Disney’s Fantasia is released (Fantasound), with limited exhibition in specially-equipped theaters

1943 Multitrack audio recording system is established in Germany

STEREO TIMELINE 269

1948 Columbia introduces the LP (Long Play) microgroove vinyl disc format, initially a mono-only technology

1952 This Is Cinerama introduces stereo to general movie-going public

TV closed-circuit broadcast of Carmen takes place

Emory Cook pioneers a two-channel system of disc reproduction

Pierre Schaeffer, Herbert Eimert, Karlheinz Stockhausen and other avant-garde composers theorize and later experiment with multichannel sound diffusion of electronic music

1953 Remington Records realizes stereo on tape, releases on reel-to-reel

CinemaScope is introduced, employing wide-screen image and multichannel stereophonic sound

1954 Ampex introduces multitrack audio recorder

1955 EMI introduces stereo, experiments recording Ludwig van Beethoven

1957 Audio Fidelity Records releases first mass-produced stereo LP

1958 Numerous stereo releases and general acceptance of stereo LPs (Audio Fidelity in US; Pye in UK)

Stereo turntable cartridge prices fall, initiating stereophonic “turn” in hi-fi industry

Koss Stereophones debut, initiating move toward general acceptance of headphones for domestic hi-fi listening

1961 FM stereo standards are approved by FCC (Federal Communications Commission)

Stereo television experiments begin via simulcasting with FM radio stereo

1964 Compact cassette launched by Philips

1965 RCA introduces Stereo 8 tape cartridge (introduced into Ford 1966 automobile models)

1967 Pink Floyd perform in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall with a custom-made quadraphonic speaker system; the concert is widely held to have been the first live, surround-sound event of its kind

1968 Major labels stop making mono LPs (but still make mono 45s)

1969 Quadraphonic FM broadcasting begins (Louis Dorren, USA)

Vanguard Recording Society introduce quadraphonic reel-to-reel tape recordings to the US market

1970 Quadraphonic sound recordings introduced on 8-track tape by RCA

1971 Sansui and Columbia release the first matrix systems for encoding

270 LIVING STEREO

quadraphonic sound onto vinyl records, offering some degree of compatibility with conventional stereo

1972 JVC and RCA introduce CD-4, a discrete quadraphonic sound system for vinyl records that is incompatible with matrix systems. The cost of implementation and incompatibilities between competing systems led to limited adoption in the home market and the eventual failure of quad by the late 1970s

Atari introduces Pong, which becomes the first commercially successful arcade video game; it incorporates a mono pinging sound each time the digital ball is hit

1973 Clinical origins of the use of binaural beats (Gerald Oster, USA)

1975 Dolby Stereo, a four-channel matrix system for cinema, is introduced. The system becomes a major success in 1977, with the stereo release of Star Wars

Sennheiser makes significant advances in binaural recording

1977 AD8 music synthesizer sound card developed by ALF Products, for use with S-100 bus computer, the first micro-computer for hobbyists and enthusiasts. The AD8 was prohibitively expensive for most users and few were produced

1979 Sony Walkman is introduced, popularizing mobile stereo headphone listening for the first time

ALF Products introduces a less-expensive and lower-powered version of their music synthesizer sound card for the Apple II. The sound card achieved success with Apple users but two cards were required to produce stereo sound

Soundfield microphone is introduced; capable of mono, stereo and surround pickup (including height information). The design was intended as a complement to the Ambisonics surround reproduction concept, developed earlier in the decade (Michael Gerzon and Peter Craven, UK)

1983 Sony and Philips introduce the Compact Disc, a digital, primarily stereo music format

First stereo arcade games begin to appear, including Dragon’s Lair and Spy Hunter

Holophonic Sound is introduced by Hugo Zuccarelli (USA)

1984 Multichannel Television Sound (MTS) era begins

1985 Commodore Amiga line of home computers introduced with “Paula” 8-bit sound chip, including stereo output

1987 Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) meet to consider minimum standards for digital surround sound, laying the basis for several commercial systems that followed

STEREO TIMELINE 271

NEC “TurboGrafx-16” gaming console debuts, producing six channels of sound through a stereo output

1988 Mathematical basis of wave field synthesis is developed at Delft University of Technology. The technique allows for the reproduction of audio through many speakers (around and above the audience), creating a larger listening area than the “sweet spot” of conventional multichannel sound (A.J. Berkhout, the Netherlands)

1989 Nintendo Gameboy, a handheld, portable game device, is introduced with stereo sound

1991 Foundation of DTS (Digital Theater Systems, Inc.). With financial backing from director Steven Spielberg and others, DTS developed multichannel audio systems for cinema and home use, competing directly with Dolby for market share

1992 Dolby Digital is introduced, solidifying the now-familiar 5.1 channel system, with low-frequency effects channel and extended frequency response across front and surround channels

1995 MP3 audio compression format is introduced

1997 AAC audio compression is developed as a higher-quality successor of MP3. Later versions are capable of carrying multiple channels

1998 Music Producer’s Guild of the Americas (a trade organization for record producers and engineers) meets in New York to discuss the possibilities of multichannel music mixing in anticipation of the arrival of DVD-Audio and other high-definition audio formats

1999 SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc) is introduced by Sony and Philips. The new disc format offered higher-quality digital audio than the conventional CD and multichannel surround capability

2000 DVD-Audio is introduced. Also offering high-definition audio and surround sound capability, the format is widely regarded as a direct competitor to SACD

Sony PlayStation 2 released in Japan. The PS2 was the first gaming console to support true multichannel surround sound

2004 IOSONO is founded by Karlheinz Brandenburg in Germany to create 3D multichannel sound systems based on wave field synthesis techniques; product line includes systems for cinema, live events, gaming and business applications

2005 Introduction of Grammy Award for best surround sound album. The award is open to both classical and popular music, new and reissued recordings

2012 Dolby “Atmos,” a 9.1 theater surround sound system, is introduced. The system distributes sound over multi-speaker arrays located around and above the listener

CONTRIBUTORS

Tim J. Anderson is Associate Professor of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University, where he studies the multiple cultural and material practices that make music popular. He has published numerous book chapters, refereed journal articles and two monographs: Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (University of Minnesota Press 2006) and Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry (Routledge 2014). His latest research project focuses on recordings, musicians, listeners and the public sphere. Visit his website at timjanderson.weebly.com.

Eric Barry studies modern US history, history of technology and consumer culture. He is working on a book project entitled Sonic Boom: The Business and Culture of High Fidelity Sound, 1925–2000, which argues that hi-fi’s path from marginal hobby to mainstream appliance illustrates a distinctive pattern of modern culture in which ground-up technological enthusiasms synthesize romantic, technocratic and commercial values. His Rutgers dissertation under the direction of Jackson Lears, “Fidelity and the Marketing of Music, 1925–1945,” charts the rising importance of fidelity to music lovers, both in performance practice and standards of electronic reproduction.

Karen Collins is Canada Research Chair in Interactive Audio at the Games Institute, University of Waterloo, where she is also Chair of the Advisory Board. She has published four books on video game sound: Game Sound (MIT Press 2008), From Pac-Man to Pop Music (Ashgate 2008), Playing With Sound (MIT Press 2013) and the Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio (co-edited with Holly Tessler and Bill Kapralos, Oxford University Press 2014).

Kyle Devine is Lecturer in Music at City University London and a research associate with the Music and Digitisation Research Group at the University of Oxford. His work on music, sound and technology has appeared in venues such as Popular Music and Popular Music History. He also co-edited The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music (Routledge 2015). His current book project—Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music—looks

274 CONTRIBUTORS

at the history of what recordings are made of, and what happens to those recordings when they are disposed of.

Ruth Dockwray is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Chester. She is on the editorial board of the journal Popular Music: In Practice and has contributed to several BBC radio and television documentaries on popular music and, more specifically, rock anthems. She previously worked at the University of Surrey on spatialization in pop music tracks and is currently researching spatial representations of sound and music in racing video games.

Tom Everrett teaches in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. His research focuses on the relationship between sound, morality and technology design, with a special emphasis on the history and material culture of headphones. He is also a member of the Carleton Hypertext and Hypermedia Lab, where he has co-developed web- and location-based mobile applications for organizations such as the Virtual Museum of Canada.

Tony Grajeda is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of English, University of Central Florida. He is co-editor of Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (University of Illinois Press 2008) and co-editor of Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (Duke University Press 2012), and was also guest co-editor of a special issue on “The Future of Sound Studies” for Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (2008). His work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice (Ashgate 2013).

Matthew Malsky is the George N. and Selma U. Jeppson Professor of Music at Clark University. His writings on film music and sound have been published by Illinois University Press, Wesleyan University Press, Reconstructions and World Picture Journal. He has released, as a composer, two compact discs of his music. The first was a volume of string quartets with Centaur Records. In July 2014, PARMA Recordings issued Geographies and Geometries, a collection of his chamber music.

Allan F. Moore is Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey. He is coordinating editor of the journal Popular Music, author of a number of edited collections and monographs, including Rock: The Primary Text (Open University Press 1993) and Song Means (Ashgate 2012), is series editor of Ashgate’s Library of Essays in Popular Music, and is author of some sixty academic articles. He is currently writing revisionist histories of both modernist concert music and English folk song: a lifelong devotee

CONTRIBUTORS 275

of English folk clubs, he felt it was about time this fascination bore some academic fruit!

David Sedman is the Director of Technology and Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He has published articles related to new technology in venues such as the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, Standards Engineering and the Journal of Media Economics. He has also authored numerous book chapters on topics ranging from video production to telecommunications regulation. His teaching areas include new communication technology, media production and electronic media policy.

John Shiga is Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University. His research and teaching focuses on communication and media in intercultural, political and scientific contexts, and his current project focuses on global sonar networks and other underwater surveillance technologies.

Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press 2003) and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge 2012). His new projects consider: instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.

Jonathan Tee completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London in 2013, with a thesis titled Looking and Listening Past the Loudspeaker: Amplified Sound in Britain, 1922–1960. His research investigates the intersections of technology and culture and is particularly concerned with the work done by representations of sound and sonic culture in different media.

Paul Théberge is Professor and former Canada Research Chair at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture and the School for Studies in Art and Culture (Music), at Carleton University. He has published widely on issues concerning media and technology, including research into the history of sound recording, the role of sound and music in visual media, and the evolving relationship between music and the internet. He is author of Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Wesleyan University Press 1997) and producer of Glenn Gould: The Acoustic Orchestrations, released by Sony Classical (2012).

276 CONTRIBUTORS

Benjamin Wright is Lecturer of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and writes on production culture and sound studies in contemporary American film and television. He received his PhD from the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University and was a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. His work has appeared in numerous journals and book collections, and he is currently completing a monograph on professional style and practice in film sound production, titled Hearing Hollywood: Art, Industry and Labor in Hollywood Film Sound.

INDEX

2XL Games 2484'33'' 735.1 system 201, 202, 203, 228, 229,

230, 231, 232, 236, 237, 243, 257, 259

7.1 system 203, 228, 229, 231, 232, 236, 237, 256, 257

9.1 system 24110.2 system 23130 Rock 19878-rpm records 54, 127“360 Sound” 2, 128

ABC see American Broadcasting Company

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Technical Bulletin 210Academy of Television Arts and

Sciences 201acousmatic

listening 148, 158, 159–62music 160

acoustic see also space/spatializationchannels 92detection systems 86surveillance 86, 95–6, 99–103

acoustic ecology 67, 77acoustics 88, 254

undersea 91acoustic sciences 15, 17, 20

psychoacoustics 41, 255Ader, Clément 3, 5–9, 41Admiral 114–15“Admiral Benbow” 173Admiral Stereophonic Demonstration

Record 114

advertising 38, 50–4, 57, 76, 147–8, 151–4, 188

Alesis Corporation 9All That Fall 69Altec Lansing 211Altman, Rick 85, 209, 239ambient music 14ambisonics 249, 257AMC Theaters 230, 231American Bandstand 188American Broadcasting Company

(ABC) 187–97American Graffiti 138anamorphic lens 210–11Anderson, Tim 76, 80Apocalypse Now 191, 228Appere, Robert 199Argenta, Ataulfo 68art music 67, 73, 77

concert tradition 77AT&T 99, 129, 239 see also Bell

Laboratories/Bell Telephone Laboratories

Atari 251Atmos see Dolby AtmosAudio 130Audio Dictionary 111Audio Fidelity 111, 113

Railroad Sounds 120Sound Effects record series 113

audio of attractions 40, 45–6, 56, 59, 119

audiophiles 23–5, 39–40, 46, 48n. 2, 50–1, 126, 128, 130, 136, 189

audioposition 70, 73, 76, 79–80auditory perspective 4, 15–21, 22, 28,

80, 211, 223

278 INDEX

aura 68Auro 231

“baby boom” 230Bacall, Lauren 219Bachman, William S. 131background mood music 1, 119balance track 114“Barbary Allen” 175, 178Barco 231Baxter, Dennis 200Bazin, Andre 41–3, 45BBC see British Broadcasting

CorporationBeatles 125, 141, 142bebop 138Beckett, Samuel 69

All That Fall 69Beer, Phil 177Bel Canto

Stereo Demonstration Record 121

Belafonte, Harry 135Bell Laboratories/Bell Telephone

Laboratories 3, 8, 16–17, 20, 41, 44, 86, 95, 100–1, 111, 210, 214, 215, 223, 239 see also AT&T

auditorium 44concerts 9

Bell, Alexander Graham 15, 79Bell System 210

Technical Journal 210Belton, John 42, 44–6, 223, 240Benjamin, Walter 68Bernard, Alan 199Berry, Chuck 140Bijsterveld, Karin 65n. 1Billboard 108, 109, 110, 111, 112,

115, 116, 117, 120binaural see also headphones

acoustic subject 16–18military technique (binauraling)

19–20n. 21, 89–95model of hearing 4–8, 15–21, 28video games 249, 256vs. stereo 22–4, 129, 214

bioacoustics 96, 98

BIR see Board of Invention and Research

“Blarney Roses” 173Blonde on Blonde 142Blue Note 137, 138, 140“Bluebells of Scotland, The” 167Blumlein, Alan 3, 18, 20, 41, 149–50Board of Invention and Research (BIR)

91Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo

Spectacular 121Bocho, Steven 199“Bold Royal Princess, The” 170Bongos Bongos Bongos 55Bose 66Boulez, Pierre 154–5Bragg, Herbert 213Brandenburg, Karlheinz 231Brave 227, 238Briggs, Gilbert 149Bright’s Manhattan 117British Broadcasting Corporation

(BBC) 165Broadwood, Lucy 165Brussels

World Fair of 1958 157–8Bures Miller, George 14Burland, Dave 171, 172

Cage, John 73, 744'33'' 73Imaginary Landscape 74

Campbell, Alex 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173

canal networks 86, 87–8, 101Canby, Edward Tatnall 130, 190Capitol 132, 135Cardiff, Janet 14

Forty Part Motet 14car stereo 27Carson, Johnny 194Carthy, Eliza 175Carthy, Martin 176CAS see Cinema Audio SocietyCash, Johnny 140CBS 194, 197CDs 2, 112, 125, 140, 141–3CDS see Cinema Digital Sound

INDEX 279

channel see also multichannel; stereochannel wars 229–33channelization see ocean

Chess, Leonard 140Chicago, Century of Progress

Exhibition, 1933 17Chion, Michel 7n. 7, 69, 159, 159n. 3Chrétien, Henri 211cine-real 250, 254, 256, 261cinema 12, 19, 20, 22, 26, 40, 59,

118–19, 153, 207–24, 227–44 see also film

3D 129, 228, 229, 2304K projection 228IMAX screens 228,multiplex 228,

Cinema Audio Society (CAS) 199Cinema Digital Sound (CDS) 230cinema of attractions 40, 119CinemaScope 23, 41, 42–3, 44,

207–24Cinerama 41, 44cityscape 70, 71class 8, 29, 40, 51, 58, 66classical music 127, 131, 134, 149–50,

158, 189Cleopatra 46click repair 143Cline, Patsy 137Cochran, Eddie 222Codemasters 249, 257Cold War 86, 101Coldcut 110Coldplay 179Collins, Phil 195Colpitts, Edwin 96Coltrane, John 138Columbia 2, 115, 116, 138

advertising 80Listening in Depth 114

Como, Perry 188, 191computer gaming see video gamesconcept albums 119concert hall model 14, 54n. 4, 56,

56n. 6, 128–9, 130, 147–63concert tradition 73, 77–8, 127, 132,

134consumer electronics 67, 185, 190

industry 39, 91, 112, 113–15, 116, 188, 189, 191–2, 193

Consumer Reports 130Cook, Emory 111, 130Cop Rock 199Corcoran, James 219Crankcast Audio 248Crary, Jonathan 6–7, 16, 20Creedence Clearwater Revival 138Crime Story 199Crosby, Bing 135Crowhurst, Norman 130Cyccone, Patrick 240

dance clubs 10, 26Dance with Dick Clark 188Dasein 78Davis, Miles 137, 138Day, Doris 135dbx 193, 201DCP see Digital Cinema Packagedeafness 28dealers 109, 115–17, 131, 135Debussy, Claude 68, 69

Images 68Decca 11

advertising 153decoders 236, 257Dee, Rick 197Deleuze, Gilles 10demonstration records 9, 39, 55, 56,

59, 107–22demonstrations 118, 130

home demonstrations 117, 148Derrida, Jacques 89“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”

221Diana Ross in Central Park 191“Died for Love” 170Digital Cinema Package (DCP) 228,

233digital signal processing (DSP) 251Digital Theater Systems (DTS) 200,

230, 257directionality 18, 44, 47, 58, 79, 92,

216, 219DirectSound 257DiRT 257

280 INDEX

Disney (studio) 189, 191, 234Fantasia 3, 41

Disney, Walt 189DJs 26, 197Do the Right Thing 26Dolby Atmos 227–44Dolby Digital 200, 230, 237, 243Dolby Laboratories 12, 191, 227–44,

257Dolby Pro Logic 257Dolby Stereo 191, 230, 236–7, 243Dolby Surround 21, 25, 39, 46, 58,

76, 107, 115, 117, 118, 147–51, 190 see also 5.1; 7.1; 9.1; 10.2; surround sound

“Dominion of the Sword” 177Doppler effect 250Dot Records 188–9Doves 179Doyle, Peter 169, 170, 174DSP see digital signal processingDTS see Digital Theater Systemsdual-stylus system 111Dukes of Dixieland 111Duophonic 135, 132DVDs 200–1Dylan, Bob 125, 142

ear phonautograph 17ear training 73easy listening 108, 189ecotone 77Edison, Thomas 22, 91

phonograph 5Edison cylinder machine 165Edwards, Alf 166EIAJ see Electronic Industries

Association of JapanEilers, Carl 201Electric Revolution 67Electrical Research Products, Inc. 44electroacoustic music 154–9Electronic Industries Association of

Japan (EIAJ) 192electronic music 14, 73, 126, 131–7,

141, 142, 143, 168electronically rechanneled stereo see

stereo

Electronics Industries Association 201electronics industry see consumer

electronicsElectrophone 3Elvis’ Golden Records 135, 136, 141EMI 18, 20, 41, 125, 126, 150Emmy Awards 196, 199, 201engineers 1, 1n. 1, 9–11, 12n. 11, 13,

17, 22, 24, 26, 39n. 1, 48n. 2, 80, 86, 93–5, 101, 111–12, 128, 133n. 6, 133–4, 135–36n. 7, 141–3, 150, 154, 197, 199, 208–11, 218–19, 223, 229–30, 232, 235–7, 239, 240n. 8, 241

Eno, Brian 13–14envelopment 258–9, 260, 262ersatz stereo see stereoEsquivel 132Estes, Ron 194, 198–9Euclidean space 79Evans, Bill 138Ewell, Tom 207, 208, 221–2Ewing, Maurice 97, 98

F1 257Fabulous Bongo Ping Pong Percussion

56Fairchild Recording Equipment 112Fantasia 3, 41, 189Fantasound 41Fantasy 138, 139Farewell to Steam, A 120Farris, Bob 116Fats Domino 222Faulkner, C. W. 212FCC see Federal Communications

CommissionFederal Communications Commission

(FCC) 186, 187, 189, 192Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 136Festival Hall,

demonstration concert 149fidelity see hi-fi/high fidelity; stereo“Fighting for Strangers” 174film 11–12, 41, 70 see also cinemafilm noir 13Firesign Theater 121Fisher, Archie 168–9, 176

INDEX 281

Flanders, Robert 187Fletcher, Harvey 18, 111, 129, 215,

223“Floo’ers of the Forest, The” 172Fmod 257folk song 165–81Formula One, racing games 247–62

see also video gamesForty Part Motet 14Forza 253Forza Motorsport 3 253Forza Motorsport 5 254–5Fountains of Rome 114Fox, Bob 177Fox 197–8, 207–9, 211–12, 218,

222–3, 234research department 210–13

Fox Sports 200frequency bands 87Freud, Sigmund 89Frey, Glen 195Frey, Sidney 111, 112, 114Freya, Jo 171Friday Night Videos 195, 196Frith, Simon 113n. 4, 125–7FTC see Federal Trade CommissionFull Dimensional Sound 128

Galaxy Studios 231gaming see video gamesGarden of Evil 221Gaughan, Dick 172, 173, 175GE see General ElectricGelder, Rudy Van 140gender 25, 26, 28, 29, 39–40, 50–2,

51n. 3, 66, 76, 88, 107–8, 190 see also domestic space

General Electric (GE) 116, 91, 96, 189

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 221George Gobel Show 188Gesang der Junglinge 74Girl Can’t Help It, The (film) 207,

208, 221, 222“Girl Can’t Help It, The” (song) 209Glen Glenn 234Gluck, Josiah 192, 198Godfather, The 235

Good Day to Die Hard, A 238Gould, Glenn 14Graham, Davy 168, 169, 176Grainger, Percy 165Gramophone Company 152

Stereosonic Tape Records 152Gran Track 10 251GranTurismo 5 253Gravity 238Grease 138“Grey Funnel Line” 171GRID 257Grignon, Lorin 212–21, 223Group W 191Guitar Hero 125

Hall, Arsenio 198Hall, David 130Halpin, Kieran 173Hansen, E. H. 212Happy Days 138Hartwell Project 98–9, 101HDTV see televisionheadphones 16–17, 22–4, 60, 66, 142

noise-canceling 66hearing 4, 15–20, 40, 50, 58, 79, 90,

92 see also listeninghearing loss 28Heidegger, Martin 78–9, 81Henry, Pierre 160, 161hi-fi/high fidelity 5, 21, 23, 24, 25, 39,

46, 51, 67, 75, 76, 77, 80, 107, 108, 111, 119, 127, 128, 190, 202

engineers 24systems 76, 77, 78

high-definition television (HDTV) see television

Hirsch, Julian 130Hladowski, Stephanie 170Hollywood 12, 23, 45, 208n. 4, 209,

212, 214, 218, 223, 227–30, 233, 235, 237–41, 244

Holman, Tomlinson 230n. 2, 231, 242n. 9

home demonstrations see demonstrations

home listening see domestic space

282 INDEX

Houck, Gladden 130How to Marry a Millionaire 208, 219,

220, 221Howdy Doody 189hydrophones 93, 94, 99, 100, 102, 103

I Like it Like That 26IEEE

IRE Transactions on Audio 210Images 68Imaginary Landscape 74Impulse 140In Concert 191Incredibles, The 238Interactive Audio Special Interest

Group 256Into the Night 197IOSONO 231iPad 256

applications 248Iselin, Columbus 96

Jackson, Peter 243Jacobs, Jane 70“Jamie Raeburn” 171Jansch, Bert 171, 172, 173, 175jazz 111, 126, 137–42Jefferson Airplane 142Jenkins, Chris 241, 242Jezebel Project 99Johnson, Martin 96Jones, Nic 171Journal of the Society of Motion

Picture and Television Engineers (JSMPTE) 209–10, 211, 212, 213, 219, 223–4

Journey into Stereo Sound, A 110Joynes, C. 170JSMPTE see Journal of the Society of

Motion Picture and Television Engineers

Kaino and his Afro-Percussion Group 56

Keightley, Keir 25, 50–1, 76, 107–8, 119, 190

Keller, Arthur G. 41

Kirkpatrick, Benji 170, 171, 172Kirkpatrick, John 167Kirshner, Don 191Knightley, Steve 177Kogan, Rick 197Kontakte 74, 156KTLA 193

Lakeman, Seth 178Last Call with Carson Daly 198Lastra, James 209, 239Late Night 198Law and Order 199Lawrence Welk Presents… 187Lawrence Welk’s Plymouth Show 187,

188Le Corbusier 157“Leaf” 227, 243Lee, Spike 26

Do the Right Thing 26Lefebvre, Henri 5, 65, 67, 79–80Legendary Masters 141Lewis, Jerry Lee 140LFE see low-frequency effectsLiberty Presents a Production in

Stereo 47Life of Pi 238Light, Enoch 132Lindvall, Bruce 139Linton, Martin 17listening 4, 21–8, 40–6, 58–60, 73,

76, 80attentive 40, 59, 150–1distracted 27, 40, 51n. 3, 58–60,

119Listening in Depth 114“Little Musgrave” 171Little Richard 208, 222“Living Presence” 2, 108, 128“Living Stereo” 2, 188Lloyd, Bert 165, 166, 167, 168, 169,

172localization 259 see also auditory

perspectiveLOFAR see Low Frequency Analysis

and Recordinglo-fi/low fidelity 51, 75, 76, 77, 190,

202

INDEX 283

Lois, Georg 196London, Julie 221London Records 109long-playing records (LPs) 5, 54, 21,

119, 127, 130, 139loudspeakers 12, 14, 20, 21, 23, 24,

58, 128, 129, 142, 147, 148, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 185, 211, 232, 241, 259

placement 48, 118, 149, 150, 151–2, 153–4, 155, 156, 216, 230

systems 17, 18, 22, 26, 44Love Boat 193Low Frequency Analysis and

Recording (LOFAR) 99low-frequency effects (LFE) 260LPs see long-playing recordsLucas, George 234Lucasfilm 231Lusitania 91

M Squad 188MacColl, Ewan 165, 167MacKinnon, Michael 222MacLennan, Ewan 171Mad About You 199Magnavox Concert Grand console 56magnetic tape 127Man of Steel 238, 241, 242Mann, Michael 195Martin, Darnell 26

I Like it Like That 26Martin, George 140mass culture 39–40, 51n. 3, 51–2,

54n. 4, 56–8, 76, 80n. 14, 127, 130, 190

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 97

Media Lab 202Masters Tournament 197Maxfield, Joseph P. 44, 129, 239Maynard, Pop 166, 167, 169, 172McConville, Tom 173Mendelssohn, Felix 68, 74Mercury Records 2, 47Metropolitan Opera 187

HD broadcasts 12

simulcasts 187Metz, Christian 43Miami Vice 195, 196, 201microphones 6, 10, 11, 19, 44, 127,

128, 156, 170, 251mobile 218–19positioning 216–18, 220

Microsoft 256military applications see oceanMiller, Mitch 135Misérables, Les 12MIT see Massachusetts Institute of

TechnologyMitchum, Robert 219Mix 237mixing see sound mixingmonaural see monomodernism 70“Molly Bawn” 178Monday Night Football 193Monk, Thelonious 138mono 10, 11, 19, 23, 26, 27, 37,

39, 44, 46, 55, 58, 112, 117, 125–43, 186, 202, 213, 230

Monroe, Marilyn 220, 221Montaño, Frank 241, 242Moray, Jim 176, 179, 180Mormon Tabernacle Choir 111Morton, Pete 170, 172Motion Picture Daily 210Motion Picture Editors Guild 237Motion Picture Herald 210Motorola 116MP3s 143MTS see Multichannel Television

SoundMuddy Waters 140multichannel see also 5.1; 7.1; 9.1;

10.2; Multichannel Television Sound (MTS); multitrack recording; ocean; stereo; surround

media 85–6, 100–2recording 14, 22–3, 41, 210–11,

227–44, 251–8, 260–2sound/reproduction 1–4, 12n. 11,

13–14, 23, 27, 29, 41, 74, 79, 85, 94–5, 111, 125, 147–8, 154,

284 INDEX

161–3, 189, 191–5, 199–201, 210n. 6, 211, 223–4, 227–32, 237, 238n. 7

Multichannel Television Sound (MTS) 27, 186, 192–203

multitrack recording 10–11, 45, 131n. 5 see also overdubbing; realism

music education 67Music from a Surplus Store 55Musical Merry-Go-Round 55musicals 12musique concrète 73, 160MV-tube 93, 94My Bloody Valentine 179

National Academy of Sciences 96, 98National Research Council (NRC)

91National Broadcasting Company

(NBC) 188, 189, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199

National Defense Research Council (NDRC) 96

National Football League 197National Music and Other Essays 180National Research Council (NRC) 91,

93National Television System Committee

(NTSC) 193naturalism 77Naval Consulting Board (NCB) 91, 93Naval Research, Office of 99Navy Facilities 100NBC see National Broadcasting

CompanyNCB see Naval Consulting BoardNDRC see National Defense Research

Councilnetworks 143Newman, Alfred 208Night Music 198noise 71, 76n. 10, 77n. 13, 143, 248,

260ambient 96background 127, 251noise-canceling 66, 251oceanic 94–5white noise 96

Norelco, advertising 52nostalgia 120, 125–6, 136–40, 142–3NRC see National Research CouncilNTSC see National Television System

CommitteeNYDP Blue 199

O’Connell, Kevin 234, 235, 240Oates, Douglas 179Oblivion 238ocean 85–103

acoustic space 90channelization, militarization

85–103ocean sound 85–6, 89–95oceanography 96undersea acoustics 91undersea channels 86underwater sound 21, 86, 92

Official National Lampoon Stereo Test and Demonstration Record 109, 121

Oklahoma! 42, 46Olympic Games 197, 200“One Miner’s Life” 177OpenAL 257opera 59, 127, 131Orfeo 169Original Jazz Classics 139Oscar (binaural recording system)

16–17overdubbing 171–2, 177Oysterband 170

packaging 137–40“Paid in Full” 110Panasonic 191panning 9, 10, 44, 220–1, 230–2, 237,

241Papa Engine 256Paramount 188Paramount Theaters, Hollywood 212Paris

Electrical Exhibition of 1881 5Exposition of 1889 7

Parry, Hubert 180Pass in Review 57Perry Como Show 188

INDEX 285

perspective 7, 13, 15–21, 69, 72, 76, 80 see also auditory perspective

Peter Gunn 188Peter Pan 135PGA Championship 197Phase 4 11Philadelphia Orchestra 41, 111, 114Philips 157Phillips, Sam 140phonograph 5, 9, 54, 56, 76, 126,

127, 131Pixar Animation Studios 227, 238,

243“Plains of Waterloo, The” 174Platters 222Playstation 3 256Playstation 4 256Poème électronique 157–8Poésie pour pouvoir 154–5point of audition 7, 7n. 7, 13, 66,

69–70 see also audiopositionpoint-of-view (POV) 7, 7n. 7, 13, 20,

69, 262pop music 10, 13, 126, 166, 169, 174Portman, Emily 177Portman, Richard 235, 240potentiomètre d’espace 161Poullin, Jacques 161POV see point-of-viewpresence 2, 42, 57, 58, 128, 131, 189,

259Presley, Elvis 135, 140, 141Prestige 137, 138, 139, 140

Historical Series 137Pro Logic 257Pro Logic II 257Pro Tools 237Project Hartwell 98–9Project Jezebel 99pseudophone 15psychoacoustics see acoustic sciencespunk 170Pye 152

advertising 152, 153Pythagoras 159

Quadraphonic Sound 12n. 11, 108

“Rabbit Run” 171race 26, 66, 75racing see Formula One; video gamesradio 37, 56, 67, 78, 80, 90, 126, 127,

187AM 187, 189, 192FM 187, 189, 191, 193

radio theater 67Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française

(RTF) 161Rafuse, Ira 41Railroad Sounds 55, 120Rayleigh, Lord 15RCA/RCA Victor 2, 41, 50, 96, 114,

121, 132, 133, 134, 135, 141, 187, 188, 194, 201, 211

advertising 50realism 2, 5, 7, 21, 24, 39, 45, 46, 52,

55, 56, 57, 85, 109, 129, 152, 171–3, 221–4, 229, 238–44, 249–50, 262

blended 172–3, 175–6documentary 56, 172–3, 176–9enhanced 172–3, 176–7

reception 46–54rechanneled stereo see stereorecording practices see microphones;

realism; sound-box; stereoreggae 26Renaultsport F1 248Rendering and Mastering Unit (RMU)

232Respighi, Ottorino 114retailers 112, 115–17, 131, 135Rev 248reverb/reverberation 9, 26, 132, 133,

135, 168, 171, 260“Reynardine” 169Righteous Brothers 140River of No Return 219Riverside 138, 139RMU see Rendering and Mastering

UnitRobe, The 46, 219, 221Roberts, Kathryn 173, 175Roberts Oakes Jordan and Associates

116Robeson, Paul 111

286 INDEX

rock ’n’ roll 10, 25, 107, 119, 135–42, 222

Rock Concert 191Rock, The 234–5Rogers, Gary 199Rolling Stones 137, 141Rollins, Sonny 138Ronettes 140Roxy Theater, New York 212RTF see Radiodiffusion-Télévision

FrançaiseRubber Soul 142Ryder Sound Services 234Rydstrom, Gary 227, 228, 243

sales and marketing 115, 116, 117“Salisbury Plain” 166“Sally Free and Easy” 168SAP see second audio programsatellites 191Saturday Night Live 198Saturday Night with Mr. C 188Savoy 138, 140Saydisc 171SC tube 93, 94Schaeffer, Pierre 73, 148, 154, 159,

159n. 3, 160, 161Schafer, R. Murray 67–8, 70–3, 77,

80schizophonia 67–8Scorsese, Martin 222Scott Alison, Somerville 15Scruton, Roger 162SDDS see Sony Dynamic Digital Soundsea lanes 86, 98sea lines of communication (SLOCs)

89, 90, 95second audio program (SAP) 193Selection from the Penguin Book of

English Folk Songs 166, 167Server, Mark 199“Setting of the Sun, The” 178“Seven Long Years” 179, 180Shakespeare, William 167Sherlock, Michael 194Shift 2: Unleashed 253Ships, Bureau of 97Show of Hands 177

signal processing 10, 95, 99, 133, 251, 257

Sigur Rós 179Silk Stockings 45

“Stereophonic Sound” (song) 45Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park

191Simpson, Martin 171, 173simulcasts 186, 187, 189, 190–2Sinatra, Frank 137Skywalker Sound 234Sledge Hammer! 196SLOCs see sea lines of communicationSmalley, Dennis 163SMPTE see Society of Motion Picture

and Television EngineersSnow, William 213, 214, 215Society of Motion Picture and

Television Engineers (SMPTE) 212, 229–30

SOFAR see Sound Fixing and Rangingsoftware 143, 237, 244, 256–8Somer, Jack 132, 133, 141sonar 85–103

multichannel 94technology 19

Sonic Arts, Inc. 116Sony 191, 234Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS)

200, 230SOSUS see Sound Surveillance Systemsound effects 44, 57, 59, 113, 121,

197, 200, 220records 57, 109, 113, 121

Sound Effects—U.S. Air Force Firepower 57

Sound Fixing and Ranging (SOFAR) 98

sound mixing 9–10, 199, 201, 228, 229, 232, 233, 235, 237, 239–40

sound stage 4, 9, 10, 12, 148, 149sound studies 20, 28, 65–7Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS)

95, 99–103sound-box 10, 166, 169, 171soundscape 65–81Soundstage 191, 192

INDEX 287

South Pacific 46, 135space/spatialization 7n. 6, 10–11,

14–15, 18, 22, 37, 48, 64, 68, 71, 74, 80–1, 90, 156–8, 161, 214, 218, 222, 258–9 see also domestic space

Space Race 252Spartacus 46speakers see loudspeakersSpector, Phil 140Spellerberg, James 42–3Spencer, Alan 196Sponable, Earl 212, 214Sprocket Systems 234SRG300 Stereogram 153staging 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16,

26, 71 see also sound stageStar Trek Into Darkness 238Star Trek: The Next Generation 199,

201Star Trek: Voyager 199, 201Star Wars 191, 192, 235Steamboat Willie 189Steeleye Span 170, 174, 176Steinhauser, Anton 15–16stereo see also auditory perspective;

binaural; fidelity; listening; multichannel; staging; subjectivity

broadcasting 151, 187–8, 193–7, 198, 201–2

defined 2–4, 40electronically rechanneled/ersatz

126, 131–7, 140–3fidelity 3, 5, 22–4, 26–8,

39, 46, 52, 54, 60, 77–8, 107–9, 113, 126, 128, 130, 169, 214

stereophony 1–2, 3, 21, 22, 23, 28, 37, 39, 52, 211–13, 218, 223

vs. binaural 22–4, 129, 214Stereo 8 cartridges 27Stereo Demonstration Record 121Stereo Fidelity

advertising 52Stereo is Hear 116Stereo Showcase 187stereophonic see stereo

“Stereophonic Sound” 45stereophony see stereostereoscope 6, 7Sterne, Jonathan 17, 88, 102, 115stethophone 15stethoscope 15, 90Stockhausen, Karlheinz 74, 154, 156,

157Stokowski, Leopold 3, 8, 9, 18n. 20,

41, 111Stravinsky, Igor 130“Street Scene” 208Stromberg-Carlson

advertising 51–2Stumpf, Carl 15styluses 111Subitzky, Ed 109subjectivity 15, 20, 40, 68, 73, 60, 80

see also auditory perspective; binaural; stereo

Submarine Signal Company 91submarines

nuclear 95, 101warfare 88–9

subwoofer 202, 231, 256n. 7, 260Sumner, Geoffrey 110Sun Records 141Sunday Only 120Sunier, John 18–19, 130–1Surrealistic Pillow 142surround sound 11–14, 247–62surveillance 86, 95–6, 99–103sweet spot 14, 21, 24n. 24, 25–7,

37–60, 70, 150, 152, 256Sykes, Steve 195symphony orchestra 11, 41, 55, 128,

214n. 17

Tabor, June 173“Tak’ the Road” 169“Tam Lin” 170tape 67, 74, 111

decks 130music 73recorders 100, 160, 161

Tawney, Cyril 168, 171Taylor, Joseph 165telegraphy 90

288 INDEX

telephone 5–6, 8, 16, 67, 79, 90, 102television 3, 13, 27, 76, 100, 107,

185–203, 249, 250–1cable 193, 195–6, 202color 186, 187digital transmission 201“Dimensia” 194high-definition television (HDTV)

200interactive 250simulcasts 189, 190–2System 3 195

test records 55–6That’s Entertainment 138Théâtrophone 3, 5–9This is Epic Stereorama 55This is Stereo 55“Though I Love Not Where I Love”

171THX sound standard 231Tire sounds 253Todd-AO 41, 42, 234Tonight Show 194, 195, 198Top Gun 234topophone 90Toro, Guillermo del 243Toscanini, Arturo 132, 133, 134, 136,

137Toy Story 3 231train sounds see demonstration recordsTraité des objets musicaux 159Transformers 235traveling sound 44–5, 58“Trees They Grow So High, The” 166,

168Tsingos, Nicolas 236Twentieth-Century Fox see Fox“Two Sisters” 177

U2 179U-boats 19, 89–90, 91, 92, 94UHF channels 193undersea/underwater see oceanUnion of Soviet Socialist Republic

(USSR), navy 95, 98United Kingdom (UK), navy 89, 94United States of America (USA), navy

86, 89, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102

Universal 234urban design 67urban planning 70

Valiquet, Patrick 154Varèse, Edgard 154, 157–8Vaughan Williams, Ralph 167, 179–80VCRs 27, 192, 194, 202Veil of Orpheus 160Venturi, Giovanni Battista 15video games 13, 125, 247–62

simulation 249–50, 255surround sound 256–8

Vincent, Gene 141, 222virtual space 72–3visualization 46–54

Wall of Sound 140Walser apparatus 92–3, 94Walser, Georges 92Walt Disney Company see DisneyWalt Disney Presents 189warfare see oceanWarner Bros 200, 234Waterson, Norma 175, 177, 178WDR see Westdeutscher RundfunkWeber, Ernst Heinrich 15Welk, Lawrence 187, 188, 191West Wing, The 199Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)

World Music Festival 156Western Electric 91, 96, 100, 111, 126Westrex 211, 223WFMB-AM 187WFMB-TV 187Wheatstone, Charles 15When You Come to the End of the

Day 188widescreen sound 40–6“William Taylor” 166Williams, Douglas 219“Willie’s Lady” 176WKZO 187Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

97World Soundscape Project 66, 71, 77World War I 88, 89, 90, 92World War II 19, 88, 90, 96, 98

INDEX 289

Worzel, J. Lamar 97WTTW 191, 192Wwise 257

Xbox 257XboxOne 255, 256Xbox360 256Xenakis, Iannis 157XLR8 248

Zacharias, Jerrold 98Zagorski-Thomas, Simon 10–11, 26,

169Zemeckis, Robert 233, 236Zenith 189, 192–3, 195, 201Zimmer, Hans 241–2