testing testing 1-2-3…

In the Professor’s interview, she touches on the unique offerings the medium (or mode) of sound can have in an archival context. She mentions the “medium, material, and volumetric properties of both the recorded sounding subject or object and the space in which that recording occurred”. It is certainly true that analog sound recordings carry a type of metadata about the state of the space, and the world, at the time of recording. Reading the Gammon article, it seems as though the widespread degradation of analog (magnetic) media constitutes a loss of our collective memory of the acoustics (and spacial properties) of all the places at which important sounds have been captured. Even in the digital recording era, there still exists an important relationship between space and sound, although the impacts on audio fidelity seem reduced.

 I just had a relevant experience this past weekend with friends who sat around a studio and mastered an album through digital-analog transfer, and back. In the world of music, the degradative properties of analog mediums are often sought out for use as a post-production filter to bring aesthetic merit to sets of digitally edited and recorded songs. The descriptions of the “improvements” heard when running digital songs through tape, and back again, is often described in terms of increased “dimensionality”. This makes me wonder whether culturally we deeply associate analog grit (the behavior of tape) with the acoustic properties of rooms used for recording at the height of the analog age in popular music (the old recording studio room setups – lots of echoes and phase cancellation, textures of wood, things which many engineers consider a no-no, but which also define the sounds of classic records we all love)…