The Framing Part Two

Ok 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 recored music. By which I mean, it often tells you things about the music that the artist themselves is not completely aware of.

As I stated before, at first the people recording the music were usually trying to recreate the actual live performance. Music for movies is where this started to change. On a side note here the way audio was added and recorded for film was different from records. That allowed them to do some different things but the way they recorded the music was largely the same. Because the setting shown in the film would often be a much different place then the soundstage where the music was recorded, they would set up the space to sound like the setting in the film. In music we often will say cinematic as a short hand for music that sounds grand and large. Making the music match large, grand vistas was 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 amount of music, through the early fifties, was recorded in a way to match the sound of a live performance. In the fifties there was Les Paul’s work with early multitracking, tape speed effects and other work on compressors, etc.. Also Sam Phillis’ compressed reverb heavy sound on the Sun Records’ recordings. The cinematic sound of stars like Frank Sinatra’s records. Enhanced by the new recording technologies.

In the sixties and seventies the analog technologies changed rapidly. If you’ve listened regularly  to music from, say 1963 to the 1976 you can usually guess the year it was recorded by the sound of the record alone. It was also during this time that recording studios made a slow transition from predominately large studios often owned or nearly exclusively booked by larger players, like record labels, to truly independent smaller studios. Or even studios owned 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 say the mid nineties, the actual sound of the recordings changed much less. The sound of a recording from 1998 to now changed less than one from 64 to 68. The biggest change was that the sound of a recording made in a multi-million dollar studio and one made in a home studio, even a laptop, in much closer now than ever.

So what has changed in the framing of modern music? Most recordings are much “closer” than they ever were before. Besides how the changes in how music is actually recorded there are two more important factors, at least in my opinion, that also have effected the current sound. First the sampling in early rap and then the change in listeners listening to speakers most often to listening to earbuds, phones or very small, mono, speakers. The samples, in short, made the large vistas of the original recording into post cards. The compression on those samples made them sound like the original recording played in a small place. Which sometimes was even the case. The listening through phones made more highly compressed music common because it often sounds better on these ways of listening.

I think though that these changes have less to do with these factors and more to do with the world people live in now. Music is not usually listened to in a live performance any longer. It’s often not produced or recoded that way either. Also the average young person’s social life is often on their phone. Alone in a room. Popular music is part of social life so compressed, postcard sound connects with listeners.