2.2 The Birth of the Microphonic Process
To understand the significance of the microphonic process and its impact on live performance, it is first necessary to understand pre-electrical audio technology and the singing it captured. The phonograph, commonly known by its trademarked name the Gramophone, was created in 1877 by American inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931). As the precursor to the modern-day turntable, it was the first commercially successful sound reproduction device and was used in homes to listen to pre-recorded music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its early iterations played wax cylinders, followed by wax discs, which made way for the vinyl records we know today. Before electricity, phonographs recorded onto and read wax cylinders through acoustical-mechanical transduction and the tympanic principle. To produce recordings on wax cylinders, performers had to play or sing into a large horn, which fed into a sound box featuring a glass membrane or diaphragm. This diaphragm was designed to be like a drum, in that it was tympanic, and vibrated sympathetically to sound waves it encountered. The sound of the performance coming through the horn vibrated the membrane, which in turn vibrated a “cutting needle” that etched deviations into a turning, warmed, wax cylinder. The diaphragm acted in tandem with the cutting needle as a transducer, transforming the sound from one medium, air pressure waves, to another, etched wax. Cylinders of successful recordings could then be mass produced to be purchased and played at home. To listen to these cylinders, the process was reversed. The cylinder, hardened and made for home use, was turned in the phonograph and the etchings were “read” by a stylus. The etchings moved the stylus, the stylus vibrated the tympanic membrane in the sound box, again transducing the etched wax into air pressure waves, which were then finally sent through the horn to the listener’s ears.1
This early, acoustical method of recording was severely limited in the range of performances it could record. In Chasing Sound, Susan Schmidt Horning details how early recording technology created strenuous conditions under which recording artists had to operate. “The limitations of the acoustical recording apparatus demanded that performers adjust playing style, vocal style, and physical movement to accommodate the available technology. These considerations inhibited spontaneity by forcing the performer to divide his or her concentration between artistic interpretation and recall of the ‘staging’ required before the recording horn.”2 Each step in the acoustical recording process also led to loss of fidelity and the addition of noise to the original performance. To create the best recording then, instrumentalists had to be carefully positioned depending on the dynamic and timbre of their instrument, in necessarily small ensembles. Despite working in small rooms designed to produce the best possible recordings, vocalists had to sing loudly and project their voice directly into the horn, as if performing in a large hall, to adequately move the cutting needle to record. The details of soft, nuanced performances simply could not be captured in acoustical recording, and higher pitched instruments, including, sopranos, violins, and flutes, famously sounded poor on early wax cylinders.3 This “made it impossible for weak, soft, or subtle vocalists to become successful recording artists.”4 The early successful acoustical recording artists, therefore, were ones who could use their powerful performance voices in the studio, such as popular singers like Bessie Smith5 and classical singers like Enrico Caruso.6
Two devices, however, electrified the recording process and, by the late 1920’s, made acoustical recordings practically obsolete.7 The vacuum tube amplifier and the condenser microphone were invented by engineers at Western Electric, a subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company and AT&T, between 1912 and 1916. The vacuum tube originated in a design that Western Electric purchased in 1913, the Audion: an electrical amplification tube created by American scientist Lee de Forest in 1906. At the time of its creation, it was unclear how it could be broadly applied so it was given little attention by those working with sound. When it was improved by the Western Electric engineers and paired with the condenser microphone however, the vacuum tube transformed the entire audio industry, including film, radio, recording, telephone communication, public address systems,8 and eventually, live performance.
The condenser microphone was an improvement of the carbon microphone that was independently developed by David Edward Hughes, Emile Berliner, and Thomas Edison in the late 19th century. The technical limitations of the carbon microphone prevented it from being widely used in recording, and where ribbon and dynamic microphones were not used until the 1930s, the condenser was the first microphone to revolutionize commercial sound applications. Different types of microphones naturally were, and are, best suited to distinct sound environments and applications, whether in recording, communication, or live performance, but their qualities do not explicitly factor into the microphonic process as I describe. Consequently, I discuss microphones in general, rather than specific types, from here on. Similarly, while vacuum tubes were the first widespread method of electrical amplification, many iterations of the technology followed and operated under similar principals with comparable results. Unless I need to specifically address vacuum tubes, therefore, I will henceforth use the terms amplifiers and amplification to speak about audio amplification devices more generally.
The development of loudspeakers also occurred in the early 20th century and would eventually join the microphone and amplifier in the microphonic process. The first electric speaker capable of producing intelligible speech was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 for use in telephone earpieces for one person to hear. It would be some time before a true “loudspeaker” – named because it could speak loudly to a room of people rather than a single person – would be used in public. Around the turn of the 19th century, there were several designs of acoustical-mechanical loudspeakers powered by compressed air intended for instrumental amplification and public address, but they ultimately failed to achieve commercial success.9 The first “moving-coil” or electromagnetic speakers, which modern loudspeakers are based on, were developed by Peter Jensen and Edwin Pridham in California, 1915. Instead of creating speakers for use in telephone systems, they invented the first public address (PA) system by combining their loudspeaker technology with microphones and amplifiers. That same year, their company Magnavox demonstrated their PA system to a crowd of 100 000, in what was perhaps the first ever public amplified music performance, at a caroling event at San Francisco’s new Civic Centre.10 While Jensen and Pridham may have been the first to publicly demonstrate the “miracle”11 of amplified sound projection, because they failed to patent their speaker technology, it is Edward W. Kellogg and Chester W. Rice who are credited as the true trailblazers. The latter pair’s 1925 patented loudspeaker was the design that went on to achieve commercial success, transforming the musical landscape.
Combining the microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker enabled what continues to be one of the most important functions of electronic media in audio: making sounds louder. Much like the phonograph, these media employ transduction and the tympanic principal. Sound waves encountered by a microphone excite a small, tympanic diaphragm within it, transducing air pressure waves into an electrical signal. The electrical signal is then boosted by an amplifier, vibrating a much larger loudspeaker diaphragm, transducing the electrical signal back into air pressure waves with a greater volume than the originals. This process, carried out by Jensen’s and Pridham’s PA system in 1915, enabled the large crowd in San Francisco to easily hear caroling from a great distance. These new media also impacted recording by allowing for larger ensembles of a wider variety of instruments, and freed singers and soloists from obsessing over the recording horn. This new “Electrical Process” also captured a wider range of dynamics and produced recordings with higher fidelity and far less noise.12
Early iterations of these technologies were incapable of capturing the full range of singing, making it perhaps acceptable for an amateur public caroling event, but unfitting for professional artists. The apprehension many musicians felt towards the recording horn of the acoustical process continued with the appearance of the microphone, leaving some intimidated.13 Singers who were undeterred by the microphone’s presence and limitations learned to use softer dynamics and a narrower range for successful performances. These early “microphone singers” went beyond using the new media in a supporting or reproducing approach, and instead explicitly interacted with the microphone using modified vocal technique. According to Horning, “The [amplified] microphone afforded more intimacy, capturing more subtleties in the vocalist’s performance. Beginning in 1925, singers such as ‘Crooning Troubador’ Nick Lucas, ‘Whispering’ Jack Smith, and Gene Austin had begun to capitalize on the microphone’s sensitivity, singing in ways that would never have gained them entry to an acoustic recording studio.”14 This was the birth of the microphonic process.
Using the microphonic process, singers no longer had to project in halls to compete with large ensembles and, in recording, they could sing softly without concern of moving the needle or being drowned out by loud instruments. Contrary to Stockhausen’s claim that he was animating the microphone from its former “lifeless, passive”15 state, the microphonic process began with these early microphone singers, some 40 years before Mikrophonie I. To understand how the microphone lost its perception as an active musical instrument, even among professional musicians, I now turn to the seminal crooner, Bing Crosby.