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The received assumption that the sound recording is basically a documentation of a certain performance has been recently put in question within the framework of the growing interest in sound studies. What we call a record is indeed an entirely constructed artefact. Intrinsic technical limitations of the medium, such as the maximum duration of a few minutes on each record side and, especially in the acoustical era (up to the late 1920s), poor frequency response and dynamic level, and also the discomforts of the recording sessions, have strongly conditioned the attitude of the artists toward the record, at the point that this has necessarily resulted in a substantially different musical product than the live performance. This fact has had distinctive consequences within different repertoires such as the written music of the Western canon, or jazz and popular music. Subsequently, when the previous limitations were removed and finally, after 1950, the recording artist could take advantage of far more flexible technologies, notably the magnetic tape, an entirely different way of dealing with the recording took place, which didn’t primarily aim at an improvement in the „fidelity“ to the live performance, yet on the opposite set higher and higher levels of artificiality.

Semesterprogramm FS 2016 — 29.01.2016 PDF 479KB