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SONIC EXPERIMENTATION
By Ed Ward
In addition to the traditional instruments that they played, the Beatles, in collaboration with their producer George Martin, also pioneered the use of an instrument that had been around for a while but never exploited: the recording studio. Before the Beatles came on the scene, a record's aim was to sound as much like a live performance as possible. That's what the whole "high fidelity" movement of the 1950s was all about: make the technology invisible so that the listener could at least pretend that the artists were performing in the living room. As recording technology got better, it became more refined, and true audiophiles bought reel-to-reel tapes of treasured recordings because they wouldn't get scratched and the perfect sound would be preserved.
But tape was also at the core of the transformation of recording. The Nazis developed it during World War II so that radio stations could broadcast speeches by Hitler and other top officials at any time, without their actual presence. There were other media available -- magnetized wire and paper tape with a thin magnetic emulsion -- but the former was very low fidelity and the latter extremely fragile. The first tape recorders were seized by Allied troops in 1945, and the invention quickly found its way into common use.
Tape democratized the recording process. No longer was a precision disc-cutting lathe necessary, just an electronic device and some relatively inexpensive tape. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, avant-garde composers in France, most notably Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaefer, started building compositions out of tape-recorded sounds that had been sped up, slowed down, played backward, and mixed with one another. The result became known as "musique concrète" and was famously brought to the public's attention at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, where Edgard Varèse's "Poem Electronique" emanated from 425 speakers in a pavilion designed by composer/architect Iannis Xenakis.
As tape recorders got cheaper and cheaper, people experimented with the technique. Les Paul, guitarist and tinkerer, made some good pop records with his wife, Mary Ford, overdubbing instruments and vocal lines, but it was still something of a novelty. Enter the Beatles. By 1965, they were two years into their run as the most popular act in the world and realized that this gave them unprecedented freedom to record what they wanted -- their fans would buy it. Their sonic experimentation can be dated to "I Feel Fine," with its squeal of guitar feedback at the start, a "mistake" that worked. But the development of their relationship with George Martin was what really helped the band start experimenting.
Like most people who inhabit the place where creative energy meets technology, Martin was always eager to see what the machines he worked with could do. There is little doubt that he knew about the experiments the musique concrète composers had done or, closer to home, the work of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, which used electronic technology to produce music for jingles and BBC shows -- most notably DR. WHO. At Abbey Road Studios, Martin helped the Beatles take their first step away from the "live" sound fiction in RUBBER SOUL, with its close-in, intimate sound. By the end of 1965, the band had released "We Can Work It Out," with heavily compressed vocals that couldn't be reproduced on stage. He was also working with them on the REVOLVER album, utilizing numerous musique concrète techniques, in particular running tape backward, which was also a major feature of their 1966 single "Rain," the entire last part of which is the chorus run backward.
Top banner photos: Paul McCartney |
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McCartney was knighted by the Queen of England in 1997. |
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The Beatles recorded at Abbey Road from 1962 to 1969. |
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The CD is available from Amazon.com. |
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