The Framing Part Two

Okay, so this will be part two of my thoughts on the framing of musical recordings.

I think I’m interested in this subject because I believe the framing is the subconscious of recorded music. By which I mean, it often tells you things about the music that the artists themselves are not completely aware of.

As I stated before, at first the people recording music were usually trying to recreate an actual live performance. Music for movies is where this started to change. On a side note, the way audio was added to and recorded for film was different from the way records were made. That allowed filmmakers to do some different things, although the way they recorded the music itself was largely the same. Because the setting shown in a film would often be a much different place than the soundstage where the music was recorded, they would alter the recorded space to make it sound like the setting in the film.

In music, we often use “cinematic” as shorthand for music that sounds grand and large. Making music match large, grand vistas was perhaps the most pronounced version of movie sound design. I would think that is why “cinematic” came to mean what it does in music.

Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of music through the early fifties was recorded in a way intended to match the sound of a live performance. In the fifties there was Les Paul’s work with early multitracking, tape-speed effects, compressors, and other recording techniques. There was also Sam Phillips’s compressed, reverb-heavy sound on the Sun Records recordings, as well as the cinematic sound of records by stars like Frank Sinatra. All of these sounds were enhanced—or made possible—by new recording technologies.

In the sixties and seventies, analog recording technology changed rapidly. If you’ve listened regularly to music recorded from, say, 1963 to 1976, you can usually make a reasonable guess at the year a record was made based on its sound alone. It was also during this period that recording studios made a slow transition from predominantly large studios, often owned or almost exclusively booked by major players such as record labels, to truly independent smaller studios. Eventually, there were even studios owned and run by individual artists or producers.

From the eighties on, we have the transition to digital recording. While innovations continued at a steady pace, from around the mid-nineties onward the actual sound of recordings changed much less. The sound of a recording from 1998 differs less from one made now than the sound of a 1964 recording differs from one made in 1968. The biggest change was that the difference between a recording made in a multimillion-dollar studio and one made in a home studio—or even on a laptop—became smaller than ever.

So what has changed in the framing of modern music? Most recordings sound much “closer” than they ever did before. Besides the changes in how music is actually recorded, there are two other important factors that have affected the current sound, at least in my opinion. The first is the use of sampling in early rap. The second is the change from listeners most often hearing music through speakers to hearing it through earbuds, phones, or very small, often mono, speakers.

The samples, in short, made the large vistas of the original recordings into postcards. The compression and repetition of those samples could make them sound like fragments of the original recordings being played in a small place—which, sometimes, was even the case. Listening through phones and other small devices also made heavily compressed music more common because it often sounds better through these forms of playback.

I think, though, that these changes may have less to do with the technology itself than with the world people live in now. Music is no longer usually encountered through live performance. It often isn’t produced or recorded as though it were a live performance either. The average young person’s social life now also takes place, to a significant degree, through a phone—alone in a room, but connected to other people. Popular music is part of social life, so perhaps this compressed, postcard-like sound connects with listeners because it resembles the space in which much of modern social life now takes place.