#the goal is stylization/recognizability/speed

[suburbanbonfire]

kailer yamamoto for the portrait reqs? :D

A few people asked for Yams! He was not around when I did the Kraken Orb so he's one of the few I have not drawn yet. Very fun!

[acetheartisan-blog]

First Post; Vinyl LP’s role in the way we make music

     In my listening and analysis class at The Art Institute of Seattle, I was instructed to start a website/blog of my choice (as you can see I chose Tumbr) and we would be given topics to research and write about. I was asked to “Describe an important advancement in music technology that had profound effect on how music was/is created and perceived. In what way is this advancement representative of a symbiotic relationship between music and technology?” I decided to talk about the advancement of flat records that eventually led to the LP 33⅓ “microgroove,” and the way the LP shaped what we know today as an album.

     “In the 1890s, the transition to using flat-disc records began. The recording was etched onto a disc that would be recognizable even today as a record. Interestingly, the dominance of the record over the phonograph cylinder didn’t come down to audio fidelity: the main advantage of the disc record was that it could be more easily mass-produced. By creating a master stamp, a number of records could be stamped in a short period of time, whereas each phonograph cylinder had to be recorded individually, significantly slowing the process. Discs were first released in a five-inch version, then in a seven-inch, a ten-inch, and finally a 12-inch version in 1903. Around this time, interest in double-sided records started to pick up, and Edison realized that the cylinder was dying. He shortly switched to the Edison Disc Record (seen below), a 1/4-inch-thick piece of shellac that could only be played on Edison Disc Phonographs (makeuseof.com).”

     “Shellac, the standard material of the day, wouldn’t be replaced by vinyl, a lighter and more durable material, until after World War II. After a decrease in sales during the war, record sales got a big boost, with more and more families having phonographs with automatic record changers in their homes (makeuseof.com).” Those things are seriously thick compared to the vinyl record tech that we’ve been listening to for decades. It’s interesting to think that while the “western world” began the switch to vinyl, the rest of the world stuck with shellac. It’s no wonder vinyl quickly took over though because of its durability, flexibility, the number of grooves it could hold, and if you add that along with the double sided record technology, that’s a serious upgrade in the song length capability. “Record companies had tried and failed to add more grooves to records to increase their playing time, but the shellac surface could not effectively hold all of the sound information of the smaller grooves. One of the major advances that had been made in the 1930s was the introduction of vinyl resins. These records consisted of mixture of vinyl chloride and vinyl acetate, known as Vinylite, which was harder and finer than shellac, and allowed the discs to be cut with 224 to 226 grooves per inch, which was a massive improvement over the former 80 to 100 grooves per inch (umwblogs.org).

    The first double sided records and the advancement of electric microphones had to have opened up so much potential in different ways to record and stylize music in order to make it appealing to consumers. With the advancement of electric audio recording, surely the next thing to talk about is stereophonic sound. Here’s a quick little timeline (aes.org) of the advancement of stereo recording and record production:

1931 - In December, Harvey Fletcher and Arthur C. Keller of Bell Labs with Leopold Stokowski used improved electrical recording equipment in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to record and transmit monaural and binarual sound. Also in December, Alan Dower Blumlein filed a patent application in Britain for stereo recording.

1934 - Jan. 19 Alan Blumlein recorded Thomas Beecham at the Abbey Road Studio in stereo, conducting Mozart's "Jupiter Symphony" with a vertical-lateral technique using a stylus to vibrated in 2 directions, first recording one channel of sound in a groove laterally and then recording another channel of sound in the same groove vertically

1945 - Decca's early stereo LPs used a Teldec/Neumann Stereo cutter to record one channel lateral and another vertical, each on the opposite wall of a groove; but the dual tracks could not be reproduced with heavy mono pickups on the turntables and record players.

      “This first successful LP record was developed by Columbia Records, under the direction of Dr. Peter Goldmark, a Hungarian-born electrical engineer in his late thirties who had been delegated the task of developing a practical slow-speed microgroove record with a team of co-workers and Bill Bachman, Columbia’s research director. The team’s goal was to find a way to increase the number of grooves per record without injuring the sound quality of the record. Goldmark also spent time improving the duplicating techniques for the new records because he had been appalled by the lack of concern for foreign particles introduced during this process when he had visited the Columbia Record plant. He understood that these new microgroove records could produce recordings that had less background noise if they were created in cleaner recording rooms (umwblogs.org).” 

     To the average music listener now-a-days the idea of having to clean your music must be quite strange. Most people stream music or buy albums digitally but the closest they may get (if they don’t own records) is wiping off a CD. But thanks to Dr. Goldmark (pictured below), the quality of sound that would come from LP’s would significantly improve from production to commercial home listener use. 

The LP really shaped the way musicians formed songs (actual song form and song time); not only that but LP’s and mic advancements affected producers roles as well. Producers went from organizing people stepping in front of a large cone to making sure a band’s song set on an LP spoke to an audience in an effective manor. The LP gave the musicians a whole new way of conveying their music to give their fans a whole new type of intimate listener experience, all without seeing them preform live. 

Here are my sources:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-evolution-of-music-consumption-how-we-got-here/  

http://www.recordcollectorsguild.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=44&page=1

http://lprecord.umwblogs.org/history/invention/#_ftnref3

http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/recording.technology.history/stereo.html ´