OFF THE RECORD (David Morton)
These readings focused on recording culture. The “Introduction” provides an overview of the historical development of recording technology. “High Culture, High Fidelity, and the Making of Recordings in the American Record Industry” talks more about the cultural development and acceptance of the recording technology. An interesting part of the introduction is its early emphasis on mechanical recording was not for mass media or entertainment purposes, although a majority of the research is on the music industry and the production of records. The introduction also provided the development of recording technology from Edison’s phonograph, to Smith’s telegraphone, to wax cylinder recordings, to record discs.
To me, the most interesting section of the introduction is “Recordings, Culture, and the Culture of Recording,” because it provides me with a solid starting off point for a project I have been trying to get started for like a year now. The section discusses records as “cultural artifact[s]” (7) and suggests theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, Barzun, McLuhan, and Boorstin to understand recording culture. He asks the question: “What, then, was the relationship between music, performance, business, and technology” (7)? Which, is close to the relationship I am interested in between vinyl records, film music, affect, and business/industry.
Chapter 1 talks about the cultural influence on the recording technology. It especially stresses the impact that classical (high culture) music had on the development of technology. Many of the advances in recording equipment and practices had the goal of recording classical music in high fidelity. The chapter goes on to explain how strange this is, considering that popular music (at that time, that meant jazz and swing music) was what was financially successful, as that was the music sold for jukeboxes; whereas classical music only accounted for a fourth of the sales. However, as technology developed, it was always tested and improved with classical music in mind — setting up recording horns for classical orchestras, is one example from the chapter.
The chapter discusses the improvements made to phonograph recording (such as different cylinders and discs to record on, the use of recording horns, and the strength of the material of the recording discs, as well as the adoption of tape recording as the step before the master cut was transferred to disc. The chapter also covers the implementation of multiple recording tracks so elements of the song could be recorded separately — singers from instruments or different sections of instruments in an orchestra.
“THE COLOR OF NITRATE” (Paolo Cherchi Usai)
This chapter talked about different coloring techniques during the silent film era. It opens up using The Lonedale Operator as an example. The key information from this article is understanding the different methods of coloring film in the silent era. They are as follows:
- Hand coloring – “color was applied directly onto the print” (23).
- Tinting – “a method of applying color to the surface of the film without alterning the physical structure of the emulsion… the entire picture is colored uniformly, and the area around the perforations is also colored” (25).
- Toning – featured “a more sophisticated range of color variations…. the print was immersed in a chemical bath that substituted a colored compound for the silver in the emulsion. This dyed only the darker areas of the image, leaving the rest of the gelatin completely transparent” (26).
The chapter ends discussing the importance of film restoration in archives. Usai notes that much of the colored silent film has been lost and that the film only has a lifetime of 100 years. The film becomes sticky and degrades to the point that it is unwatchable and is lost. One of the manuals cited in the section talks about how a black and white print of the film should be made before colorizing it, in order to aid in archiving it.