The microphone as we know it – a device for turning acoustic vibrations into electrical signals – was first conceived in the 1850s, when Charles Bourseul described its application to making the voice audible at distance. What Bourseul described was a telephone, and the component we call the microphone was intended to pick up the sounds of speech so they could be reproduced at the same time in another place. The component acquired the name microphone, however, thanks to David Edward Hughes, who in 1878 showed that it could be used to make quiet sounds louder – an application he demonstrated upon the footsteps of a fly. This way of conceiving the microphone – as a device for listening in on the tiny or hidden – predated electroacoustics. In 1827, Charles Wheatstone, unaware of the stethoscope invented some fifteen years earlier, reinvented the device but gave it the more appropriate name “microphone.” Over a hundred years before that, in 1684, the clergyman Narcissus Marsh observed that the ear trumpet should rightly be called a “microphone” on analogy with the “microscope”: it was an acoustical magnifier – a device one put to one’s ear in order to perceive sounds that would otherwise remain inaudible. The microphone, in this sense, was not a device for transmitting one’s voice, but for extending one’s hearing.
Listening to Sad Songs for Cell Phones, we can experience the microphone in its original sense. Though recorded by the microphone built into a cell phone, the songs were not sung to be heard at a distance. The microphone is instead the device that allows us to hear – the ear trumpet we’ve turned upon a hitherto inaudible phenomenon. Weare not there in the room where these songs were sung, but the microphone – the technological extension of our hearing – is. This is what we can experience in the lo-fidelity of these recordings, and in the monoaural listening they invite.
Auto-tune: it’s the ubiquitous digital effect that gives pop singers’ voices that robotic quality, that you may know from the Youtube phenom auto-tune the news, and that recently prompted Alex Pappademas to start a three-part New York Times blog series with the question: “really now, what’s so bad about auto-tune pop?”
Pappademas speaks to the many who find auto-tune repugnant, and especially to those who justify their (dis)taste for the effect as a matter of standards. As he observes in installment #3:
the biggest criticism Auto-Tune’s critics level against it is that it’s the sonic equivalent of plastic surgery or ‘roids, a digital fix that lets lousy singers skip over that whole learning-to-carry-a-tune thing (boring!) and cut straight to pop stardom’s V.I.P. room.
Auto-tune, in short, is a musical cheat, to which Pappademas replies:
The truth is that artists and producers have been using technology (reverb, overdubbing, electronic harmonizers) to change the sound of their voices for decades. The link between “organic” live performance and recorded music was broken in the late ‘40s when Les Paul popularized multitrack recording.
Indeed. But the arguments surrounding auto-tune aren’t unique to vocal effects, and they long predate recorded music. In fact, the same arguments have perennially attended tone-modifying devices of all sorts: many technologies for altering the sound of an instrument were once regarded as crutches but went on to gain acceptance as expressive resources, ultimately becoming part of what it means to know how to play or compose for a given instrument. This is the story of two tone-modifying devices whose detractors have fallen silent: the violin mute, and the sustaining pedal.
The Violin Mute
The violin mute was invented in the seventeenth century, and is a device applied to the bridge of the violin to dampen its sound. The French composer Lully was one of the first to call for muted violins in a written score, pairing them with recorders in a depiction of enchanting, soporific murmurings in the opera Armida (1686):
By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, French critics regarded the mute as a crutch for violinists incapable of playing softly. As one writer remarked in an article on performance in the Encyclopédie:
It is well known that in Lully’s lifetime the violinists needed to resort to mutes in order to play softly enough in certain passages.
If this view of the mute as a substitute for skill had persisted, the mute no doubt would have become obsolete. Elsewhere in Europe, however, composers and listeners perceived the mute as giving the violin a special tonal quality that violinists without mutes could not match. And so composers continued to call for violin mutes for that special tonal quality, often combining it with slow, flowing music to produce the peaceful or dreamy atmosphere pioneered by Lully. Today, critics reserve their venom for violinists who fail to use mutes when they should. Speaking of the violin mutes in Haydn’s Il mondo della luna (1777), period performance specialist Nikolaus Harnoncourt recently remarked:
Players are lazy and think it’s enough just to play very softly. But when composers write ‘con sordino’ — ‘with mute’ — they want a very particular, different sound…The idea was just to hear quivering air.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts “Vado, vado” from Il mondo della luna – with mutes
The Sustaining Pedal
The piano was one of the major technological breakthroughs of the eighteenth century, trumping the harpsichord with its touch-sensitivity and the clavichord with its greater volume. Early on, piano manufacturers experimented with ways of modifying the piano’s tone, eventually arriving at pedals as a hands-free way to apply tone-modifying devices. Many players, however, considered piano technique a matter of fingers only, and pianists who used pedals were commonly charged with charlatanism – with resorting to technological trickery to mask a lack of keyboard skill. Such was the case with the sustaining (or damper) pedal, which when depressed allowed the strings of the piano to resonate even after the finger had been lifted from the key. The sustaining pedal was criticized as a cheat for finger legato, and also for producing a muddled blur of sound. As late as 1828, the pianist-composer Hummel maintained:
a truly great artist has no occasion for the pedals…Neither Mozart, nor Clementi, required these helps to obtain the highly deserved reputation of the greatest, and most expressive performers of their day.
By this time, however, the tides were turning. As Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny observed:
by means of the pedal, a fullness can be attained which the fingers alone are incapable of producing.
Initially, composers used the sustaining pedal primarily for special effects, reserving them for unusual passages that stood apart from their surrounding context. One of Beethoven’s comparatively rare indications for sustaining pedal, for example, occurs in the opening of the Tempest Sonata, where it sets off slowly accumulating chords from the hurried Allegro theme.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31 No. 2 (Tempest), first movement, first edition (Bonn, 1802)
The mid-1800s, however, witnessed a period of “pedal mania” during which pedaling became ubiquitous, and composer-pianists developed not only modern pedal technique but also new musical styles premised on use of the sustaining pedal. Chopin and Liszt were two of the chief architects of this development. The nocturne style that became Chopin’s trademark, for example, required the pedal to sustain the down-beat bass notes while the left moved to play mid-register chords, and to continue the cantabile legato across large (highly expressive) leaps in the right hand melody:
Arthur Rubinstein plays Chopin’s Nocturne Op.9 No.2
What we’re seeing with Auto-tune, then, isn’t just a discussion of taste masquerading as a discussion of standards. It’s part of the process by which new technologies are incorporated into musical practice, transforming from crutches (which replace something old) into expressive resources that enable new musical styles and require new musical skills.
Everything is an idea
Technology drives creativity
Pushing us
And the bounds of our
Imagination
Technology inspires composers
Technology inspires children
Technology inspires closet rock stars
And even nations
Opening up broader, richer frontiers
Challenging what can be
This is the beauty of technology
Evolving how we create
One idea at a time
Where will we go next?
Technology transforming creativity
Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth. Technology doesn’t do anything for creativity. Yeah, it makes things easier and you can get home sooner. But it doesn’t make you a more creative person. That’s the disease we have to fight in any creative field – ease of use.
As I’ve been eagerly awaiting the publication of the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (due out in October), I was pleased to discover one of the articles I’m most interested in – Myles W. Jackson’s “From Scientific Instruments to Musical Instruments: The Tuning Fork, Metronome, and Siren” – in the form of a talk at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center. It’s a fascinating presentation on how “nineteenth-century acoustical instruments meant to standardize musical aesthetical qualities such as pitch and beat were a century later put to use as musical instruments themselves.”
The stars of the story are the tuning fork and metronome. Jackson takes us from Maelzel’s successful commercialization of the metronome (1815) to Ligeti’s Poeme symphonique for 100 metronomes (1962); and from Johann Heinrich Scheibler’s tonometer (a set of 52 carefully calibrated tuning forks) and proposal to standardize A’ at 440 Hz (1834) to Warren Burt’s Music for Tuning Forks (1985). Along the way, we learn about conflicting demands for standardization and individual freedom, competition between composer, performer, and scientist for authority over musical parameters, and the use of tuning forks and metronomes by twentieth century composers “to subvert the very notions they were created to define and reinforce.”
I was most struck, however, by Jackson’s conclusion: “by the twentieth century, the metronome and tuning fork were transformed from the visible into the invisible.” He elaborates: in the nineteenth century, metronomes and tuning forks were mechanical contraptions never to be used during performance and potentially depriving performers of freedom. In the twentieth, they became a resource for composers to explore new musical realms – music between the standardized pitches of the scale, and outside the confines of a beat. These erstwhile regulators even, in cases such as Ligeti’s Poeme symphonique, replaced performers.
I was struck by this because to my mind, Jackson described precisely the reverse of the process he named. Where he saw metronomes and tuning forks becoming invisible, I saw them becoming visible: they moved from the practice room and laboratory into the concert hall, from behind the scenes to center stage. In fact, the visibility of instruments in both figurative and literal senses (we are conscious of them and we see them) is integral to Ligeti’s Poeme symphonique. His score not only discusses how performers should go about acquiring 100 metronomes, with instructions to advertise the need for and/or sources of the instruments; it also specifies, “it is preferred that pyramid-shaped metronomes be employed.” However, the score does not specify how the metronomes should be arranged spatially, leaving this to the discretion of the performers. As a result, the piece has been performed with various arrangements, each putting its own visual aesthetic stamp on the work.
In what way, then, did the metronome become invisible? I suspect Jackson’s conclusion turns on a certain idea of the aesthetic. We could say that in Poeme symphonique, the instruments disappear in the aesthetic effect: we no longer see or hear metronomes as such – we see and hear art. The process is something like when one repeats a word over and over again until it ceases to be meaningful as a word, becoming pure sound. The amassing of 100 metronomes aids this process, as instead of recognizing individual metronomes, we see and hear their combined effect – a visual and auditory gestalt that directs our awareness away from the material instruments.
This argument makes a certain amount of sense – at least it is one way to experience Poeme symphonique. But to say the metronome became invisible obscures what I consider one of the more important aspects of the work: the use of instruments for both musical and visual effect. What Ligeti accomplished with 100 metronomes continues today with San Francisco sculptor-scientist-musician Oliver DiCicco, who, as the New York Times put it, creates “musical objects that are both sonically and visually arresting.” His 2008 installation Sirens, with its “u-shaped pieces of metal and wood that resemble undulating tuning forks,” continues the story of nineteenth-century acoustical instruments being transformed into musical instruments. It also beautifully demonstrates that instruments can be simultaneously visible and musical, material and aesthetic.
