Recorded musical communications

I like Dr Jay Hodgson’s way of explaining ‘music reproduction technology’ in his 2012 book Representing Sound: Notes On the Ontology of Recorded Musical Communications.

It helps me understand what happens in listening with a system of connected transducers and recordings.

A musical performance creates sound waves of compression and rarefaction of the air, which is modified by the sounding environment’s architectural acoustics (materials, dimensions, etc.) and furnishings. Additive and subtractive phase, absorption, diffusion, and other interferences result.

The listener’s psychophysiology, angle of incidence of ears and sound source, and the relation of auditor and source and room acoustics modify the sound. Sound is a dynamic process, not a static object. It occurs in a finite time span in a particular place.

Recording fixes the psychoacoustic profile (the overall modifications of the interferences), as an integral property, and thus making them repeatable.

As Hodgson states it “each psychoacoustic profile on a record combines to form a broader, more global, aural perspective – a hypothetical auditor …. – It is from this hypothetical auditor’s spatiotemporal vantage that every recorded sound is conveyed to listeners …”…”the broader global aural perspective a record construes – let’s call it a mix – simply cannot be moved, modified, or superseded. When we listen to records we listen to unchanging mixes – nothing more, nothing less”.

“Listeners can move about the listening environment and alter their perspective on a mix vis-à-vis room acoustics, to be sure. But they don’t change the psychoacoustic profiles they hear in so doing. What they do change is their perspective on those profiles, their perspective on the aural perspective a mix already construes”.

Records are past-tense auditory narratives comprising entirely psychoacoustic rather than acoustic information. They are not recordings of sound. Recordists don’t lock acoustic phenomena onto a storage medium, so that listeners can simply reverse the process. Records don’t reproduce sounds (i.e., acoustic phenomena). Rather, they model hearing (i.e., auditory phenomena). Recordists orchestrate psychophysiological reactions to disturbances in air pressure that conjure the illusion of sound. This process of programming psychophysiological reactions via vibrations of speaker and headphone diaphragms is psycho-acoustic encoding, and is the basis of every recorded musical communication.

“Sound reproduction technology” is any technology that represents acoustic phenomena as data or that converts that data into acoustic phenomena. “The broadness of this definition emphasizes the interconnectedness of these technologies and their functional interdependencies. It also clarifies their technical raison d’être, which is, again, to represent acoustic phenomena as data and to convert that data into the acoustic phenomena it represents”.