And in the beginning, there was no recorded sound. For millennia, music lovers had to play songs for each other in order to hear their favorite music. Because of this, perhaps -- as Greg Milner points out in his exhaustive, technically precise and fascinating survey “Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music" -- the primary objective of the earliest sound recording was verisimilitude.
Hence, the term “high fidelity," created for the listener who might fret about impurities that could arise as a consequence of reproducing music.
“Perfecting Sound Forever" frames the divide between authentic reproduction and the willful manipulation of sound as the 100-year dialectic that has spurred every new technological advancement in recording. Certainly, it has stoked an ongoing debate among fans and industry professionals, like a fractal tape loop.
For Milner, it all starts with Thomas Edison, “the first human being to record a sound and reproduce it." In 1915, he sang “Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a mouthpiece; the sound waves were etched onto wax paper and played back by a stylus moving across a cylinder.
The first phonograph, Edison assured his listeners, was guaranteed to “hear" as sensitively as the human ear. He even went so far as to mount “tone tests," where he filled auditoriums full of credulous listeners who beheld famed contralto Christine Miller mouthing along to a phonograph recording of herself.
These lip-sync performances provided a stark example of how closely Edison's recording aligned itself with live performance, and sure enough, “audible gasps" could be heard from audiences up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
Edison had a solid 20-year run with his machine, until a German immigrant named Emil Berliner brought out the Gramophone, which used an electrically recorded disc that sat flat on a turntable. Edison loyalists couldn't fathom how a microphone could capture sound as nature intended.
And it has been ever thus: “The electrical era," Milner notes, “began a process, still being investigated today, of transforming music . . . into 'information' to be manipulated, edited and transformed at will."
“Perfecting Sound Forever" is best when it takes readers on the labyrinthine journey through the tiny warrens and corporate-sponsored laboratories of the inventors, musicians and hustlers who helped advance sound recording. We learn, for example, that microphone technology was perfected at Bell Telephone Labs in the early 1920s, as part of an extensive experiment to improve the reception of telephone transmissions.
