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i

Dawn of the DAW

iii

Dawn of the DAW

THE S TUDIO AS MUS IC AL I NS T RU ME NT

A D A M PAT R I C K B E L L

1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Bell, Adam Patrick, author.
Title: Dawn of the DAW : the studio as musical instrument / Adam Patrick Bell.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017025068 (print) | LCCN 2017034672 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190296629 (updf) | ISBN 9780190296636 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190296605 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190296612 (pbk : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Sound recordings—Production and direction. |
Popular music—Production and direction.
Classification: LCC ML3790 (ebook) | LCC ML3790 .B33 2018 (print) |
DDC 781.49—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025068

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
v

Thanks, libraries
I could learn audio technology.
But where?
I’d start at home.
—​Grandmaster Flash
vii

Contents

Preface   xiii

Part I   DO-IT-YOURSELF   

1. A History of DIY Recording: Striving for Self-Sufficiency   3

The Difficulty of Defining DIY   3
DIY Recording Before Records   5
Tinfoil Revolutions: The First DIY Audio Recording   6
Mechanical Recording (Pre-1925)   8
The Electrical Era (Post-1925)   10
Les Paul’s Legacy of Overdubbing   11
Les Paul and the Tale of Tape (Post-1945)   12
Craft-Union Mode: 30th Street Studio   14
DIY Recording Post-1945: Sticking to the Tape Mentality   16
The Escalating Expenses of Equipment and the DIY Hi-Fi/Lo-Fi Dichotomy   18
DIVIDE-AND-ISOLATE    19
DIY HI-FI AND THE MULTITRACK REEL-TO-REEL TAPE RECORDER   22
DIY LO-FI AND THE MULTITRACK CASSETTE TAPE RECORDER   24
DIGITAL DIY: ADAT    26

Space-Less Studios: Dawn of the DAW (1990–Present)   27

Tracking the Twenty-First-Century DIY-er   29

2. The Studio: Instrument of the Producer   31

What Is a Producer?   31
Instrumentality: The Studio as Musical Instrument   33
viii Co ntents

Using the Studio as a Musical Instrument with Others   37

EARLY INCARNATIONS OF USING THE STUDIO AS A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT: ELVIS, LEIBER
AND STOLLER, AND ALDON MUSIC   38
PHIL SPECTOR’S “WALL OF SOUND”   40
BRIAN WILSON AND THE BEACH BOYS’ SOUND   41
BERRY GORDY AND THE MOTOWN SOUND   44
THE JOE MEEK SOUND   46

Producing Without Producers   47

PRODUCED, ARRANGED, COMPOSED, AND PERFORMED BY PRINCE   50
BRIAN ENO AND IN-STUDIO COMPOSITION   51
HAPPY ACCIDENT #1: DUB AND ITS LEGACY OF PRIVILEGING TIMBRE IN PRODUCTION   54
TWEAKING TIMBRES    55
HAPPY ACCIDENT #2: HIP-HOP AND ITS SAMPLING LEGACY   58

The Contemporary Collaborative Producer: Max Martin   63

Different But the Same: Conclusions   67

Part II   MADE IN BROOKLYN   

Brooklyn: The Cultural Capital of DIY   71

3. Track 1: Michael    75
The Car Stereo Classroom: Learning History   76
CASSETTE CREATIVITY SINCE 1977: SELF-LED EXPLORATIONS IN OVERDUBBING   77
GOING CLASSICAL    78
GOING ELECTRIC AND DIGITAL   80
THE SKEUOMORPHIC ADVANTAGE: NEW TECHNOLOGIES, OLD CONCEPTS   83

On the Road . . . Again   85

Alone at the Kitchen Table: Learning Ableton   86
EXPLETIVES! FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH ABLETON   87
READY, AIM, MISFIRE: CLICKS OF INTENT   89
THE TIMBRE TRAIL: TWEAKING SOUNDS   92

Lonely Learning: Conclusions   95

4. Track 2: Tara    97
From Scoring Points to Scoring Films: Learning Background   97
“I JUST LEARNED AS I HAD TO”: KARAOKE COMPOSITION AND REFLEXIVE RECORDING
WITH LOGIC    98

Walking and Writing: Distinguishing the Song from the Recording   101

Packing Blankets and Piano Tuners: Converting the Home to Studio   102
ix

C on t e n t s ix

Preparation (Saturday and Monday Morning)   102

HOME STUDIO HEADACHES   103

Hypercritical: In Pursuit of the Pristine Piano Performance (Monday Afternoon,

Tuesday, and Wednesday)   105
FINDING FAULTS WITH FELIX   107

Recording the Piano for “Chesterfield” (Wednesday)   108

“TRAINS AND STUFF”: BATTLING ENVIRONMENTAL NOISE   111
FELIX AS PRODUCER? DEFINING ROLES IN THE RECORDING PROCESS   111

Technical Difficulties (Thursday)   113

Manufacturing Vocal Perfection: Repeated Takes and Comping (Friday)   114
TECHNICAL DETAILS    116
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN RECORDING   116
“GOTTA HIT THAT”: SINGING PERFECTION   117

Comping (Saturday)   117
Ongoing: Shopping for a Mixer   121
To Be Continued: Conclusions   123

5. Track 3: Tyler    125

“Just Learned It From Doing It”: Learning History   125
“I WOULD GET TOGETHER WITH MYSELF”: MAKING MUSIC WITH ACID PRO   126
TECHNICAL TANGENT #1: MICROPHONE MATTERS   127
“I LEARNED THE HARD WAY”: SELF-TEACHING WITH DAWS   129

The Cartographic Composer: Mapping a Musical Existence   130

AUTODIDACTICISM AND ABLETON LIVE   132

A Guided Tour Through Tyler’s Bedroom Studio   133

TECHNICAL TANGENT #2: MIXING MATTERS   134
STEMS    136

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Social Network: Growing a Fictional Family
Tree   137
SINGING ROBOTS    139

Audio Avatars: Otter, Sumac, and Totem   141

“THIS IS ME WATCHING ME TALKING ABOUT ME”: STIMULATED RECALL   142
EDITING MIDI    143
EQUALIZING BEATS    145
MAKING LOOPS    146
SHIFTING PITCH    147
“IF I CAN GET MYSELF FEELING GOOD ABOUT IT”: REFLEXIVE LISTENING   148
“AND THAT’S IT FOR NOW”: CONCLUDING THE SESSION   150

“Technology is the Reason”: Conclusions   150

x Co ntents

6. Track 4: Jimmy    153

From Scratching to Picking: Learning History   155
“I JUST FOUND IT SO HARD”: LEARNING TO PLAY THE GUITAR   157
THREE HOURS A DAY: PRACTICE   158
“IT WAS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER SERIOUS”: LEARNING THE STUDIO BY OSMOSIS   159

“I Woke Up With the Melody”: The Making of “Lost and Found”   160

“EVERY DAY’S A STRUGGLE”: WRITING LYRICS   161
“IT JUST HAPPENS”: RECORDING = SONGWRITING   162

FINGER DRUMMING    163

TRACKING, LAYERING, AND TWEAKING GUITARS   164

DO IT AGAIN: LAYERING VOCALS   166

“Me and Him Have This Synergy”: Mixing with Bill   167

ANALOG VERSUS DIGITAL ACCORDING TO JIMMY   169
GETTING GUITAR SOUNDS: EQUALIZING AND COMPRESSING   170
“I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD BE A SINGER”: VOCAL DOUBLING AND PROCESSING THE
VOICE    173
FINAL MIX?    174

Recording as Second Nature: Conclusions   175

Part III   LEARNING PRODUCING | PRODUCING

LEARNING   
Going Green: DIY Recording and Informal Learning Strategies   180

7. Mixing the Multitrack: Cross-Case Analyses   185

Conceptualizing the Multiple Case Study as a Multitrack Recording   185
Classifying DIY Studios   186
DIA STUDIOS    186
DIWO STUDIOS    188

Music-Making Models and Digitally Afforded Techniques   189

THE THIRD DIMENSION: BREAKING FROM THE HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL PLANES   190
KARAOKE COMPOSITION AND REFLEXIVE RECORDING   191
PRESET CULTURE    192
UNDO THE UNDUE   193

Producer Pedagogies: Acquiring Skills and Know-How   193

AURAL EMULATION    194
PEER-GUIDED LEARNING    195
SELF-TEACHING    195

TAPE TRAVAILS    195

xi

C on t e n t s xi

DOMAIN OF THE DAW   196

IMMERSIVE LEARNING AND HOLISTIC LEARNING   197

Summing the Tracks: Conclusions   198

8. Mastering the Multitrack: Conclusions   199

Implications for Music Education   199
BY-PROCESSES: TACIT LEARNING    199
MAKING WAVES: MUSIC-INVENTING    202
FORGED WITH ONES AND ZEROES: DIGITAL AUDIO MUSIC-MAKING TOOLS   203
TRIAL-AND-ERROR LEARNING: A NEW SPIN ON AN OLD FAVORITE   204
SONG-MAKERS: MAKING AS LEARNING   206

The Les Paul Legacy of the Producer   207

Bibliography   209
Index    221
xiii

Preface

Home Recording Revelations

I was fifteen years old when I first became skeptical that my favorite album was a
compilation of real-​time performances. Up until this time I credulously believed
that this music, which bleated daily through my earbuds, was the byproduct of tal-
ented and practiced musicians collaborating in a studio to commit their best per-
formances to permanence. I knew that microphones were involved in the recording
process, and that there was usually a man (often with a cigarette dangling from his
mouth) sitting behind a big board of lights and knobs who was obliged to utter
catchphrases such as “Let’s take it from the top” and “We’re rolling.”
My favorite album during this time was by a four-​piece band whose roles were listed
on the back cover as follows:

• guitar, vocals
• vocals, guitar
• bass, vocals
• drums

Whenever I listened to this album, I pictured the band playing together in a recording
studio, resembling what Geoffrey Stokes describes as the typical recording processes of
rock and roll in the mid-​1950s and early 1960s:

Recording was a relatively simple process in which a band lined up in front

of microphones, each one controlled for volume from the control booth,
and played their music. Generally it went right from the microphones
to the final tape . . . when the recording session was over, the record was
finished.1

  Stokes, Star-​Making Machinery, 136.

1

xiii
xiv Prefa ce

With each passing play audiotape gradually erodes, and paralleling this reality, my
adolescent illusion of the studio recording as a real-​time event began to disinte-
grate as I studied the guitar parts of my favorite album. With only two guitarists
in the band, how was it possible that they played three different and distinct guitar
parts simultaneously? I deduced that either a ringer was enlisted—​a mystery third
guitarist—​or some kind of recording wizardry was invoked. Thumbing through my
local library’s card catalogue in search of literature on audio recording proved to
be a fruitless endeavor, and the “information superhighway” I had heard rumblings
about had yet to make a detour to my rural hometown. Lacking the informational
resources to answer my query, I retreated to the basement and took matters into my
own hands.
Armed with a guitar, two tape recorders, and two audiocassettes, I devised my
battle plan to create an audio illusion all my own. I commenced my experiment
by pressing the red record button on one tape recorder and proceeded to play a
four-​chord progression that I repeated for a couple of minutes until the monot-
ony of this exercise begged a quick cadence. I stopped the recording and rewound
the tape to the beginning. On the second tape recorder I pressed record, and then
pressed play on the first tape recorder. The rhythm guitar part that I had just finished
recording now played the role of rhythmic accompaniment; I joined in on the jam
by improvising a guitar solo along with it, all of which was recorded by the second
tape recorder. What I stumbled upon was a crude form of overdubbing. It forever
transformed my musical practices, aiding me in developing my instrumental skills
and songwriting ideas. Ignorant of the history of recorded music and oblivious to
the existence of multitrack tape recorders, I did not realize one person could play
multiple parts on a recording, and that the technology to make this possible had
existed for more than half of a century. By the mid-​1960s the recording process had
changed drastically in popular music, with musicians harnessing recording technol-
ogy to move the conception of recording beyond that of an audio snapshot captur-
ing a moment in time. Referencing the increasingly elaborate studio productions of
the Beach Boys, Virgil Moorefield writes:

Already in 1966, then, the composer, arranger, and producer are melded
into one person . . . Brian Wilson was at the controls himself, making on-​
the-​spot decisions about notes, articulation, timbre, and so on. He was
effectively composing at the mixing board and using the studio as a musi-
cal instrument.2

Since the mid-​1960s, most recorded music has not been made by a group of peo-
ple playing together in the same room at the same time. Instead, like Brian Wilson,

  Moorefield, The Producer as Composer, 19.

2
xv

P re face xv

musicians have used the studio as a musical instrument, either working alone,3 or
in teams.4

Digital DIY-​er
Shuffling forward a few years to the more digitally dependent musical milieu of the
twenty-​first century, my early adulthood years coincided with a critical period of
transition in the music-​recording industry: digital technologies were quickly usurp-
ing their analog predecessors. This change trickled down to the consumer, giving
me access to similar recording technology. A fifty-​dollar computer program that
I purchased at a local mall afforded me to overdub as many as sixteen tracks, open-
ing the portal to a new incarnation of the one-​man band. By routing a few inexpen-
sive Radio Shack microphones to my computer through a battered mixing console
acquired from a thrift shop, I patched together a humble recording studio of my
own. In my parent’s basement, I diligently recorded myself track-​by-​track playing
drums, bass, and guitar to shape the foundations for my not-​so-​original pop songs.
My recordings were not intended for others to listen to; rather they served as sonic
sketches, an aural alternative to writing down musical ideas with pencil and paper.
As I developed my recording skills in tandem with my musical skills, what started
as a hobby evolved into a more serious endeavor. Aside from the skimpy manual
that accompanied the music-​recording software, I had no form of instruction. My
music education took place outside of the classroom, after school, and consisted of
a self-​directed approach to making music with recording technology. I learned to
use the studio as a musical instrument by teaching myself, much of which entailed
a trial-​and-​error approach.

Music Education and Recording

Researchers in music education,5 and popular music,6 have opined that recordings
constitute the primary texts from which popular musicians learn.7 For example,
Susan McClary and Robert Walser assert: “What popular music has instead of the
score is, of course, recorded performance—​the thing itself, completely fleshed

3
  See for example Bell, “Trial-​by-​Fire”; Butler, Playing with Something That Runs; Schloss, Making
Beats; Rambarran, “DJ Hit That Button.”
4
  See for example Hennion, “The Production of Success”; Seabrook, The Song Machine; Warner,
Pop Music.
5
  See for example Campbell, “Of Garage Bands and Song-​Getting”; Green, How Popular Musicians
Learn; Jaffurs, “The Impact of Informal Music Learning Practices in the Classroom.”
6
  See for example Bennett, On Becoming a Rock Musician; Schwartz, “Writing Jimi.”
7
  This section paraphrases parts of Bell, “The Process of Production | The Production of Process.”
xvi Prefa ce

out with all its gestures and nuances intact.”8 “Learn by listening to and copying
recordings” is the second tenet of Lucy Green’s Music, Informal Learning, and the
School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, a model of popular music pedagogy that has
been hugely influential on the field of music education.9 It is undoubtedly true
that popular musicians learn from recordings, but this is not the complete pic-
ture because popular musicians also learn by making recordings. This book aims
to shed some light on the making and learning processes entailed in recording.
Understanding how music-​recording processes work can help music educators to
facilitate learning experiences that reflect this important aspect of how popular
musicians learn.
To the credit of the field, music educators have written about using the stu-
dio as a musical instrument, at least inadvertently, since the late 1960s.10 For
example, in 1970 John Paynter and Peter Aston advocated using tape record-
ers to “make music,” recognizing the technology’s potential to not only record
but to edit, make loops (literally), shift pitches via speed changes, layer sounds,
and play sounds backward.11 Under the umbrella of “composition,” several music
education researchers investigated the music-​making process with computers,12
all of which resemble the practice of using the studio as a musical instrument.
More recent studies have reported on music-​making and learning practices in
which studio technology serves as the instrument, occurring in a broad range
of formal and informal learning settings.13 Despite the significance of these con-
tributions to our understanding of the studio as instrument in music education,
the practices of production that typify how popular music is made remain largely
absent in popular music pedagogies. Music education needs to espouse the pro-
cesses of recording as opposed to the products of recording, and focus on how
popular music is made to create pedagogies that are more reflective of real world
practices.

  McClary and Walser, “Start Making Sense!,” 282.

8

  In a review of eighty-​one articles from 1978 to 2010 related to popular music pedagogy, Roger
9

Mantie reported that over half of these cited Lucy Green. See his “A Comparison of ‘Popular Music
Pedagogy’ Discourses.”
10
  See for example Ellis, “Musique Concrète at Home”; Ernst, “So You Can’t Afford an Electronic
Studio?”
11
  Paynter and Aston, Sound and Silence, 134.
12
  See for example Bamberger, “In Search of a Tune”; Folkestad, Hargreaves, and Lindström,
“Compositional Strategies in Computer-​Based Music Making”; Hickey, “The Computer as a Tool in
Creative Music Making”; Stauffer, “Composing with Computers”; Wilson and Wales, “An Exploration
of Children’s Musical Compositions.”
13
  See for example Egolf, “Learning Processes of Electronic Dance Music Club DJs”; Finney,
“Music Education as Identity Project in a World of Electronic Desires”; King, “Collaborative Learning
in the Music Studio”; Lebler, “Popular Music Pedagogy”; Lebler and Weston, “Staying in Sync”;
Mellor, “Creativity, Originality, Identity”; Tobias, “Composing, Songwriting, and Producing”; Tobias,
“Crossfading Music Education.”
xvii

P re face xvii

DIY Recording Studios

This book is the result of five years of research on the phenomenon of DIY (do-​it-​
yourself) recording. In the age of portable computing, the construct of “the stu-
dio” as a physical space is no longer applicable: “The popularity and portability of
the laptop opens up a series of possibilities for music that sends it beyond spatial
anchorages.”14 The laptop as the DIY studio serves two key functions, as Shara
Rambarran explains:

The laptop as a mobile instrument or music machine means that it not only
helps to produce and play the sounds that the musician has created, but the
device (as a hardware and instrument) can also serve as a virtual recording
studio and digital workstation, anytime and anywhere.15

As portable computing devices enable recording to occur ubiquitously, the more

conventional terms of home recording and project studio have continually been rede-
fined. What I refer to as a “DIY studio” throughout this book is similar in concep-
tion to Mark Slater’s description of the “project studio”:

The “project studio,” as an umbrella term, encompasses an unknowable

range of possibilities and variations. There is no neat designation: project
studios can produce professional-​standard material (though they might
also be the realm of amateur hobbyists); there can be a flow of people and
materials between project studios and professional studios in the overall
process of bringing music into being; project studios may be as stable as
professional studios (architecturally, economically, and in reputation) but
they may also be in a constant state of flux in terms of technologies that
constitute them and the practices and materials that are explored there.16

Only a few decades ago the cost of producing a professional recording was prohibitively
expensive for most, but with the proliferation of personal computing and the associ-
ated exponentiation of processing power, hobbyists were heralding the wonders of
DAW (digital audio workstation) technology by the 1990s. It is fitting that the record-
ing mediums of human history (cylinders, discs, tape reels, and hard drives) are round,
because we have come full circle, back to a point where DIY recordings can go directly
to the radio just like Les Paul and Mary Ford’s 1951 hit “How High the Moon.” The
once rigidly defined spaces and roles of musician and audio engineer are coalescing.

14
  Prior, “OK COMPUTER.”
15
  R ambarran, “DJ Hit That Button,” 596.
16
  Slater, “Processes of Learning in the Project Studio,” 10.
xviii Prefa ce

There is a renewed role in music production reminiscent of Les Paul, a hybrid of musi-
cian and audio engineer, a role where one person is responsible for writing, performing,
recording, and mixing a musical work.
Dawn of the DAW tells the story of how the dividing line between the traditional
roles of musicians and recording professionals has eroded, inadvertently inaugurat-
ing a new music education paradigm. The phenomenon of using the studio as a
musical instrument is illustrated by profiling four Brooklynites who engage in the
practice of DIY recording. Detailing how the DAW is entrenched as an elemental
cog of the twenty-​first-​century music-​making mechanism, Dawn of the DAW illumi-
nates the centrality and criticality of digital recording technologies in the learning
and music-​making processes of DIY-​ers.
Divided into three parts, part I first examines DIY recording practices within
the context of recording history from the late nineteenth century to the present.
Chapter 1 examines the evolving processes and technologies of DIY recording,
which is followed by an explication of the evolving role of the producer and the stu-
dio as a musical instrument in ­chapter 2. Taken together, these two chapters serve
to contextualize the primary focus of this book: the music-​making and learning that
occurs with DIY recording studios.
Part II continues the story of the evolution of DIY recording by detailing cur-
rent practices of using the studio as a musical instrument. How recording technolo-
gies are incorporated into music-​making, and how they are learned by DIY studio
users, constitutes the central focus of c­ hapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. Each of these chapters
chronicles the music-​making processes of a different DIY-​er from the musically chic
borough of Brooklyn, and focuses on a different aspect of the music production
process: getting sounds, tracking, editing, and mixing.
Finally, part III examines the broader trends heard throughout the stories pre-
sented in part II. Drawing on Lucy Green’s model for how popular musicians learn,
­chapter 7 examines the common practices of music-​making and learning with DIY
recording studios. Dawn of the DAW concludes with ­chapter 8, which discusses the
ramifications of these new directions for music educators.
1

Part I

DO-​IT-​YOURSELF
3

1
A History of DIY Recording
Striving for Self-​S ufficiency

The Difficulty of Defining DIY

DIY. Do-​it-​yourself. In the context of recorded music, what does it mean?1 For
some, DIY is the story of independent distribution, embodied by entrepreneurs
like Leonard Chess,2 Berry Gordy,3 and Rick Hall,4 stocking their vehicles’
trunks with records and driving them to radio DJs and stores to promote their
respective stables of artists. Perhaps no one in the history of music distribu-
tion has been more DIY than Ian MacKaye, who founded Dischord Records
and with his peers put together the labels’ first ten thousand records by hand.5
The determination to distribute music—​exemplified by Lookout! Records’
Chris Applegren and Patrick Hynes pushing boxes of seven-​inch records on
their skateboards through the turnstiles of the San Francisco transit system—​is
a hallmark of the DIY-​er.6 For others DIY is about an aesthetic, a quality of
sound that signifies an authenticity that is void in the recordings disseminating
from professional recording studios. R. Stevie Moore, the “Godfather of Home
Recording,” who is reported to have produced and distributed over four hun-
dred albums,7 “celebrated the unburnished, the intimate, the vulnerable, and
the deranged.”8 Oftentimes such an aesthetic is associated with a conception of

1
  Parts of this chapter were first published in Bell, “DIY Recreational Recording as Music Making.”
2
  Cohen, Record Men, 64.
3
  Posner, Motown, 36.
4
  Gillett, Making Tracks, 204.
5
  Cook with McCaughan and Balance, Our Noise, 6.
6
  Boulware and Tudor, Gimme Something Better, 330.
7
  Carson, “R. Stevie Moore.”
8
  Ingram, “Here Comes the Flood.”

3
4 Do-I t-Yourself

what constitutes a professional studio and working in opposition to it, such as

these New York-​based examples:

• Mantronix recording The Album (1985) in Al Cohen Studio, an apartment in the

Chelsea Hotel.9
• Marley Marl producing members of the Juice Crew in his “House of Hits,” which
was the living room in his sister’s Queensbridge apartment.10
• Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin cutting LL Cool J’s “I Need a Beat” in Rubin’s
New York University dorm room.11
• Vampire Weekend recording parts of their debut album in the music rooms of
Columbia University.12

The sound, the space, the selling, and sharing; these are all critical components of
what constitutes DIY, but for the purposes of this book, when DIY is invoked it
refers to making music, specifically with a focus on how music is made in the record-
ing process and the learning that occurs therein. The history of DIY recording that
I present in this chapter is a purposefully skewed one. While it is important to know
what people use to make music, more emphasis is placed on how recording as a
music-​making practice is conceptualized and performed. Therefore, this is a story
about ease of access and ease of use, the two most critical conditions in determining
whether or not a practice can be self-​sufficient, which is the essence of DIY.
At present, the digital audio workstation (DAW) is the bedrock of music produc-
tion, DIY or otherwise. DAW is a generic software categorization that has evolved
since its origins as simply an audio editing application that ran on specialized work-
station computers. Most DAWs now share in common the capability to sequence,
record, and mix music, but increasingly can be played using software-​based syn-
thesizers that emulate existing instruments or create new tones and timbres with
no existing referent. As a tech-​dependent music-​making society, have we adapted
our recording practices in parallel, if at all, with the development of our recording
technologies? In this first chapter, I aim to shine a light on DIY practices since the
inception of recording itself, and trace its path to the present. What ought to be
evident is that relatively soon into the history of recording, an industry is estab-
lished and DIY practices coexist in a world with professional protocols, conven-
tions, and equipment. DIY-​ers and professionals inform and influence each other,
and at times distinguishing one from another is a difficult task. I attribute “profes-
sional” to the music industry, meaning that professional practices exist to produce
recordings to be commodities. DIY covers the spectrum, as some DIY-​ers set out to

9
  Coleman, Check the Technique Volume 2, 351.
10
  Gonzales, “The Juice Crew,” 103.
11
  Considine, “The Big Willies,” 155.
12
  Eells, “Vampire Weekend.”
5

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 5

make money, while others simply see recording as recreation. What these DIY-​ers
share in common is a desire to be self-​sufficient; to engage in recording as music-​
making. “Recording,” as this history will demonstrate, is a moving target, and over
time comes to mean increasingly more than the literal act of recording sound to a
medium. As the acts associated with recording change and evolve, so too do the
roles of the people that engage with these practices. The music-​making and learning
practices of the contemporary DIY-​ers profiled in this book are not the result of a
twenty-​first century DIY recording revolution; rather, they are exemplary of a DIY
recording evolution that started before audio existed.

DIY Recording Before Records

It was not until 1877 that Thomas Edison succeeded in playing back a recording of
himself, but many of the concepts present in the modern DAW predate the phono-
graph by hundreds of years. By extension, DIY recording practices predate audio
recording itself. David Bowers details that there are historical records dating to the
era of 1500 to 1800 of automatic musical instruments in Europe, typically reserved
for royalty, such as flute-​players and mechanical birds. By the early 1800s, music
boxes that played melodies using tuned steel combs were being produced by Swiss
and German workshops.13 Handel, C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
all composed for small self-​playing organs,14 which suggests that they were not just
composing for this medium, but programming it, too. This last point is particularly
pertinent to the development of the DIY studio because long before the arrival of
audio recording, composers were bypassing performing musicians to interpret and
play their works in favor of a more direct and self-​sufficient approach.
Even more intriguing from the history of Bowers’ automatic instruments is the
evidence to support the theory that the drum machine predates the drum set. By
the mid-​nineteenth century tuned bells and drums were added to music boxes,15
which effectively meant that a drum pattern could be programmed. Furthermore,
there is evidence of miniature drum machines—​essentially a trap kit triggered by
a small scroll of paper akin to a piano roll—​in existence in the early twentieth cen-
tury,16 which is around the same time the modern trap kit began to take shape as
an instrument unto itself.17 But of all the marvels of automatic mechanical music
technology, the most complex operations were afforded by the player piano, which
for a time rivaled audio recording in the early twentieth century as the preferred

13
  Bowers, Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, 10.
14
  Hocker, “My Soul is in the Machine,” 84.
15
  Bowers, Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, 29.
16
  Ibid., 749.
17
  Avanti, “Black Musics, Technology, and Modernity.”
6 Do-I t-Yourself

method by performers to record the piano. The significance of these perforated-​

scroll-​dependent instruments is that in theory, one could independently record and
reproduce their own musical performance. Making a DIY recording was possible
before “recordings” in the modern sense existed, exemplifying that “the growth,
persistence in our culture, and technological improvement of sound recording
reflect its evolutionary, not revolutionary nature.”18

Tinfoil Revolutions: The First DIY Audio Recording

The first audio recording that could be played back was a DIY job by Thomas Edison.
This inaugural phonograph recording from 1877 was a spoken rendition of “Mary Had
a Little Lamb.”19 With this sonic selfie, Edison set a precedent that you could record
yourself. Initially, Edison did not envision music recording as the phonograph’s pri-
mary purpose; he had other designs in mind than entertainment, such as office dicta-
tion.20 Nevertheless in 1878, listing potential uses of the phonograph, Edison included
recording music:

The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music. A song

sung on the phonograph is reproduced with marvelous accuracy and
power. Thus a friend may in a morning-​call sing us a song which shall
delight an evening company, etc. As a musical teacher it will be used to
enable one to master a new air, the child to form its first songs, or to sing
him to sleep.21

Although the earliest phonographs produced were equipped to record, low pub-
lic demand for this feature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
pushed the phonograph and its competing devices toward being used solely for
sound reproduction. Up until approximately 1900, the phonograph could both rec-
ord and reproduce, and the manufacturers “expected their customers to make their
own recordings.”22 One such example of DIY recording during this era is presented
in How We Gave a Phonograph Party, distributed by the National Phonography
Company in 1899.23 This party is depicted as a fun-​filled evening, with anecdotes
such as: “The most effective records we made during the entire evening were two

18
  Jones, Rock Formation, 14.
19
  Digital restorations of similar tinfoil recordings from 1878 reveal that these recordings were quite
noisy and distorted, making the sound source, such as the voice in this case, difficult to discern.
20
  Morton, Sound Recording, 18.
21
  Cited in Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda, Music, Sound, and Technology in America, 35.
22
  Morton, Off the Record, 14.
23
  Reproduced in Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda, Music, Sound, and Technology in America.
7

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 7

chorus records. All stood close together in a bunch about three feet from the horn
and sang ‘Marching through Georgia’ and it came out fine. Our success lead us to try
another ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and it was every bit as good.”24
During the phonograph’s infancy, people could record themselves. Although
the role of “recordist” existed in professional recording studios, in domestic life the
people operating the recording equipment were the same people performing for it.
Recording in this context was a self-​sufficient process that was intended to be fun.
Despite some critics’ concerns that recording technology would replace recreational
music-​making, “in good part it [music-​making] flourished in response to the pos-
sibilities of these technologies.”25 Emulating Edison—​most likely unknowingly—​
people self-​produced their own recordings in their homes decades before “home
recording” became a household term.
Based on these accounts it seemed that DIY recording was off to a formidable
start in the twentieth century, but with Emile Berliner’s disc-​based gramophone
design supplanting Edison’s cylinder-​based phonograph system—​due to the fact
that it was easier to mass-​produce discs than cylinders—​came a major conceptual
shift. The inability to record on discs

introduced a structural and social division between making a recording

and listening to it. With Edison’s design, access to one assumed access to
the other as well; sound recording was something people could do. With
Berliner’s design, a wedge was driven between production and consump-
tion; sound recording was something people could listen to.26

As a consequence of this conceptual shift, “recordings would be made solely by

manufacturers, not by consumers.”27 The act of recording was no longer participa-
tory, it was proprietary. The story of DIY recording does not end in the early twen-
tieth century with the demise of recording cylinders, but it does drop off the radar
of most accounts of the history of recording, only to resurface mid-​century with
the advent of tape recording. In part, DIY recording’s absence from the annals of
recording history can be explained by the overshadowing presence of the profes-
sionalization of recording—​what would eventually come to be known as audio
engineering. This was a critical juncture: the beginning of the parsing of the tech-
nological from the musical, which over time came to be further entrenched as
recording practices evolved in tandem with the music industry. To understand
DIY recording in its current state, it must be contextualized within the broader
culture and history of sound recording, commencing with the mechanical era.

24
  Ibid., 51.
25
  Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music,” 460.
26
  Suisman, Selling Sounds, 5.
27
  Morton, Sound Recording, 32.
8 Do-I t-Yourself

Mechanical Recording (Pre-​1925)

Recording in the mechanical era necessitated that the physical space of the studio
be large enough to accommodate the performing musicians as well as the person-
nel operating the recording apparatus.28 The musicians performed toward a horn,
which channeled the collective air pressure of their sounds to a membrane that
would vibrate, and in turn move the needle that recorded onto the rotating cyl-
inder.29 A caveat of this mechanical process was that a musician who could not
produce sufficient air pressure—​such as a singer with a soft voice—​could not
be a recording artist.30 Further, musicians often had to adjust their performance
practices to conform to the capacities of the mechanical studio, such as altering
their playing formations to obtain the optimal musical balance on the recorded
medium.31 David Morton provides a description of a typical pre-​electrical era
recording session:

A recording director (who might also be a conductor or serve other func-

tions) physically arranged the musicians and managed the details of the ses-
sion. During the session, the director motioned to vocalists to indicate when
to lean in close and when to duck or step away from the horn during instru-
mental solos, allowing the musicians to come forward.32

In many regards, performing to a horn is similar to performing to a microphone:

A vocalist might literally stick her head inside the horn to ensure that her pia-
nissimo would be heard, but then, with the timing of a lion tamer, quickly
withdraw for her fortissimo, so as to avoid “blasting” the engraving needle out
of its groove.33

Some studios even employed a “gentle pusher,” whose duty was to monitor
the performer’s dynamics and push them away from the recording horn when
they were too quiet, and conversely, pull them away when they were too loud.34
Dynamics notwithstanding, mechanical recording could not capture the full

28
  According to Allan Williams, “Old drawings of an early Edison recording session indicate that
there was no physical division between musicians and the recording devices and technicians who oper-
ated them.” See his “Divide and Conquer.”
29
  Horning, “Chasing Sound.”
30
  Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 30.
31
  Morton, Sound Recording and Off the Record.
32
  Morton, Off the Record, 21.
33
  Katz, Capturing Sound, 38.
34
  Katz, “Introduction,” 25.
9

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 9

extent of the typical human’s hearing range,35 which meant that the frequencies
produced by instruments at the low or high end of the sound spectrum were ren-
dered inaudible. For example, a mechanical recording of a drum set would not be
able to reproduce the low thud of a bass drum nor the high shimmer of a cymbal.
One workaround for this problem was to simply replace an instrument, such as
substituting the double bass line for a tuba part, as was practiced in early-​era jazz
recordings.36
In sum, both whom could be recorded and how accurately they could be
recorded—​with regard to such basic elements of sound such as pitch and perceived
loudness—​were subject to the mediated process of recording. Jonathan Sterne
succinctly concludes: “People performed for the machines; machines did not sim-
ply ‘capture’ sounds that already existed in the world . . . Making sounds for the
machines was always different than performing for a live audience.”37
The perception that the recording studio was once a neutral space where music
was simply captured to a medium is misguided. Recording is not just a product of
performers; it is also a process, one in which participants other than the musicians
as well as the technologies they employ (including the rooms they record in) con-
tribute significantly to the outcome as heard on the final medium. And yet there
remains a longstanding view that recording music is simply the process of capturing
a musical performance in real time.38 Aden Evens suggests that this perception can
be attributed to a cultural bias toward the Western classical tradition: “According
to the audiophile community, every good recording should sound like Beethoven
played live: fidelity = Fidelio.”39
Despite this construct of fidelity being actively promoted by the emerging
music-​recording industry in the early twentieth century,40 an undercurrent of DIY
recording practices that eschewed this take on reality would eventually succeed
in selling recordings that purposely foiled the façade of recordings as unmediated
musical moments captured in real time. This sea-​change shift in perceptions and
practices took decades to reach a boiling point and evaporate the illusion of fidelity
because accessing (or acquiring) and operating the technology to record contin-
ued to present significant hurdles to those outside of the music industry during the
electrical era.

35
  Human hearing is typically 20Hz–​20kHz, although with aging, the ability to perceive high fre-
quencies tends to decline. Mechanical recording could capture a much more limited frequency range
of 200Hz–​3kHz according to Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 37.
36
  Katz, Capturing Sound, 39.
37
  Sterne, The Audible Past, 235.
38
  Kealy, “From Craft to Art.”
39
  Evens, Sound Ideas, 7.
40
  Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever.
10 D o-I t-Yourself

The Electrical Era (Post-​1925)

With the advent of electricity came significant changes in recording technology and
ensuing recording practices. If there is a dark age in DIY recording history, it is this
period from the earliest encounters with electrical recording up until the arrival of
audio tape following World War II. Exceptions existed, notably Raymond Scott,
who in 1935 at the age of twenty-​six “designed and owned one of New York City’s
earliest independent recording studios.”41 By the 1940s Scott, a successful band-
leader whose real passion was electronics and music composition,42 channeled his
wealth toward a lavish recording studio in his Long Island home: “He had . . . a
spacious razzle-​dazzle recording studio with a disc lathe, reel-​to-​reel tape record-
ers, and a wide assortment of wall-​mounted instruments, mixers, and controls that
grew more complex from year to year as he continued to invent new gizmos.”43
Individuals like Scott were anomalies during the electrical era because an industrial
recording complex had been developing at a rapid rate that not only perpetuated
the division of labor between musicians and recordists from the mechanical era, but
increased it. The aural artistry of the mechanical recordist was soon supplanted by
electrical engineers and the science of measuring audio signals.44 A new and more
specialized position in the studio was forged, a hybrid artist–​scientist profession
that came to be known as audio engineering.
Aside from the increases in dynamic and frequency range ushered in by the
microphone and the accompanying electrical recording process, a key difference
in practice established during this era was the separation of the recordist/​engineer
from the musicians in the studio space.45 Gone were the days of the recordist corral-
ling musicians around the recording horn; instead, the engineer could now direct all
involved from a control room via intercom and adjust microphone levels by turning
knobs.46
While it was still possible to make a DIY recording in the electrical era using
a commercially available “instantaneous” disc recording system, it was considera-
bly more difficult compared to the early days of mechanical recording: “They were
far too complex for the amateur.”47 Susan Schmidt Horning details that in the early
1930s one of the owners of Presto Recording Corporation published how-​to guides

41
  Winner, “The World of Sound,” 187.
42
   Chusid, “Beethoven-​in-​a-​Box,” 10.
43
  Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 140.
44
  Morton, Off the Record, 26.
45
  Chanan, Repeated Takes. Although the separation of musicians from recording technicians did
not become a widespread practice until the electrical era, research by Allan Williams reports that as
early as 1906 an Edison recording studio in New York had a partition to isolate the musicians from the
recording equipment and personnel. See “Divide and Conquer.”
46
  Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 41.
47
  Millard, “Tape Recording and Music Making,” 158.
11

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 11

for avid hobbyists such as Home Recording and All About It, touting: “The home
recordist can achieve results that will be almost on par with commercially-​pressed
records.”48 To most people, however, disc-​based recording was unwieldy, and “it was
not until tape recorders became available in the 1950s that home recording became
popular again.”49 Fortunately for the future of DIY recording, jazz guitarist Les Paul
was more than up to the task to tinker with two turntables in his garage.

Les Paul’s Legacy of Overdubbing

Les Paul is the oft-​cited trailblazer of DIY recording mastery, producing record-
ings in the late 1940s and early 1950s that were futuristic to the ears of the music-​
listening audiences of the day.50 He sped up his recorded guitar riffs and solos to
create new timbres played at superlative speeds, and seemed to defy the laws of time
by accompanying himself on guitar, or having his wife, Mary Ford, sing with herself
using a technique he coined “sound-​on-​sound”:

He would record a track onto an aluminum disk, and then record a sec-
ond track on another machine, while the first machine played back his first
track. The second machine would thus capture Paul’s live second perfor-
mance as well as his recorded first performance. Then he’d begin the proc-
ess again with the third performance. In this way, he would layer part upon
part until he had a finished piece.51

It is noteworthy that Paul’s method demanded exquisite execution to be success-

ful because there was no recourse to correct mistakes. With each added layer of
sound, the stakes grew increasingly higher as a single slipup would ruin the entire
recording. Even more impressive is the fact that the parts that needed to be the most
prominent in the finalized recording would have to be recorded last, requiring a
premeditated form of mental mixing.
Accounts of others engaging in a similar recording process affirm that Paul did
not invent sound-​on-​sound or what is commonly referred to as overdubbing. For
example, in 1930, Paul Hindemith demonstrated his “trick music” in Berlin, which
featured himself singing a three-​voice chord, possibly the first overdub recorded.52
Reportedly, the first commercial recording with overdubbing was Lawrence

48
  Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 61.
49
  Katz, Capturing Sound, 70.
50
  Key examples of Les Paul’s disc-​based sound-​on-​sound recordings include “Lover” (1948) and
“Brazil” (1948).
51
  Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 125.
52
  Katz, Capturing Sound, 100.
12 D o-I t-Yourself

Tibbett’s “the Cuban love song” (1931) on which he sang both the tenor and bari-
tone parts,53 and a decade later Sidney Bechet overdubbed the multi-​instrumentals
“The Sheik of Araby” and “Blues of Bechet.”54 Nevertheless, Les Paul, who observed
the use of overdubbing in Hollywood at some point in the early 1930s and honed
his technique using a homemade disc cutter in his garage-​turned-​studio, is the indi-
vidual who popularized this approach: “He was certainly the first to make it a major
selling point of his disks. This studio technique, which took him roughly two years
to perfect, would ultimately force the industry to reexamine its approach to record-
ing.”55 Historians of the Western art music tradition often point to Pierre Schaeffer
and Pierre Henry as the progenitors of collage-​based music,56 but their landmark
works such as Symphonie pour un home seul (1950) premiered after Paul released
tracks like “Lover” (1948) and “Brazil” (1948). Regardless of who was first, the
technique of overdubbing that is now commonplace in music production was pop-
ularized by Les Paul who applied these principles to tape in just a few years follow-
ing his first forays in overdubbing with discs.

Les Paul and the Tale of Tape (Post-​1945)

Following the conclusion of World War II, the German-​designed tape recorder
came into American possession.57 Within a few years, Les Paul emerged as the
sultan of sound-​on-​sound, apparently intuiting almost immediately how to ret-
rofit the tape recorder to enable overdubbing upon receiving one of the first
American-​made models from Bing Crosby in 1949.58 Much like his disc-​to-​disc
sound-​on-​sound achievements, Paul’s tape-​based overdubbing escapades would
prove to be pivotal in how recording was conceptualized in the postwar period,

53
  Barrett, “Producing Performance,” 91.
54
  Shaughnessy, Les Paul.
55
  Ibid., 143.
56
  Prendergast, Ambient Century.
57
  Morton, Sound Recording, 114–​142. Following World War II, American intelligence investigated
various German technologies including the Magnetophon tape recorder, and one of the investigating
officers, Jack Mullin, shipped two of the units back to the United States. The American-​made Ampex
tape recorder based on the Magnetophon was introduced to Bing Crosby by Mullin after he was hired
to record Crosby’s radio show for NBC. Although the Magnetophon had been unveiled in Paris in
1935, “for reasons that have never been clear, the more creative uses of tape for recording music did
not begin until the tape recorder was wrested from its legitimate corporate and institutional sponsors,
who were mainly in Germany, and distributed around the world to new owners.” Ibid., 142. Notably,
Thom Holmes claims that Raymond Scott invented one of the first multitrack tape recorders in the
United States, having figured out how to record “seven or fourteen parallel audio tracks on the same
reel of tape” in 1953, a year in advance of Les Paul designing the first eight-​track machine. Electronic
and Experimental Music, 141.
58
  Paul and Cochran, Les Paul, 203.
13

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 13

furthering “the process whereby recording tools became considered instruments

unto themselves.”59
Of equal importance to overdubbing was Paul’s advancement of multitrack
recording. Bell Labs in the United States demonstrated multitrack recording with
film in the early 1930s, and Alan Blumlein, working for EMI in England, filed for a
patent for two-​channel recording in 1931,60 but once again it was Paul who helped
to popularize yet another tape-​dependent recording technique. In this process the
recording tape is divided into “tracks” akin to lanes on a roadway. On each track a dif-
ferent performance can be recorded, regardless if these performances occur synchro-
nously or not. For example, suppose Les Paul (guitar) and Mary Ford (vocals) were
to make a multitrack recording. In the first instance, they decide to perform at the
same time. Simultaneously, Ford’s microphone is recorded onto track 1, and Paul’s
guitar is recorded onto track 2. In the second instance, the setup remains the same,
but the process is altered to be asynchronous. First, Paul’s performance is recorded
onto track 2, and once he is finished, Ford’s vocal performance is recorded onto track
1. In either scenario, if Ford or Paul opted to redo any part of their respective per-
formances afterward they could do so without effecting each other’s performances
because they were recorded onto separate tracks. Understandably, the musicians
might prefer one approach over another, but from a technological perspective, there
is little difference. The core principle underpinning multitracking is the isolation of
recorded performances from each other on separate tracks. Timothy Warner outlines
the multifaceted advantages afforded by the tape-​based multitracking process:

First, recording each track separately enables the user to attain a much
higher level of musical accuracy, specifically timing and tuning; second,
each track can be recorded in minute sections, bit by bit and, as a con-
sequence, levels of performance are achieved which would be impossible
“live”; third, the complete separation of each track offers control of vol-
ume, timbre, and spatial positioning of the signal on that track in relation
to the other tracks; and, finally, decisions as to suitability of virtually all the
separate sounds need only be made at the mixdown stage.61

It warrants repeating that Paul’s recordings were produced outside of a professional stu-
dio system without the aid of professional engineers. Paul recalls that he and Mary Ford
often recorded in their kitchen and other rooms in their home to attain different effects:

I would have Mary sing a certain part while standing in the hallway, and
other parts in different rooms to give each track its own sound . . . We had

59
  Waksman, “Les Paul,” 270.
60
  Morton, Sound Recording.
61
  Warner, Pop Music, 23.
14 D o-I t-Yourself

the bathroom, which produced an echo-​like sound, and once I determined

exactly where to position Mary and the mic, the hallway was a great place
for natural reverb.62

Virgil Moorefield suggests that the overdub-​dependent approach to recording

employed by the likes of Les Paul would have been regarded as dishonest by
popular mid-​century producers such as Mitch Miller and John Hammond: “In
this worldview, a valid musician is a virtuoso, and the ability to perform in real
time is paramount.”63 Albin Zak adds: “For classical and jazz recordings, such
trickery rendered the result false, worthless,” but in the case of pop music, “rather
than disguising the overdub, it was highlighted.”64 These hands-​on DIY-​ers were
working in direct opposition to what Edward Kealy labels “craft-​union mode,” a
stratified system in which record company engineers “controlled access to the
technology of recording by forbidding collaborators, such as musicians, com-
posers, and record company personnel, to even touch the studio equipment at
recording sessions.”65

Craft-​Union Mode: 30th Street Studio

As a point of reference to contrast the practices of entrepreneurial DIY-​ers like Paul
with their craft-​union contemporaries in the professional recording studio system,
consider the case of Columbia Records’ famed 30th Street Studio in New York City.
Acquired in 1949 and in operation until 1982, 30th Street Studio was used to rec-
ord Kind of Blue (1959) by Miles Davis, Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations (1955),
and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957). As in-​house audio engineer Frank
Laico remarked, “30th Street Studio was a hundred feet by a hundred feet and had
very high ceilings; the room was just tremendous. We could record [anything] from
solo [musicians] to full symphony orchestras, and Broadway cast albums with forty
or fifty musicians.”66 In an interview with David Simons, Laico revealed that the
studio typically utilized a simple signal flow for recording that included high-​qual-
ity components such as Telefunken U47 and M49 microphones, Pultec equalizers,
Universal Audio limiters, and a custom-​made mixing console.67 Laico routinely
employed an ambient micing technique in which the sounds of the musicians and

62
  Paul and Cochran, Les Paul, 250.
63
  Moorefield, The Producer as Composer, 3.
64
  Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 159.
65
  Kealy, “From Craft to Art,” 210.
66
  As cited in Kahn, Kind of Blue, 75.
67
  Simons, Studio Stories. This list of recording equipment is now highly sought after and very expen-
sive, likely in part due to the acclaimed recordings that they were used on by Laico.
15

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 15

the resulting reflections—​natural reverberations—​were sought after; the room

was an integral part of the recording. The timbral tastes of the time often craved for
added ambience and this desired embellishment was achieved through the use of
chamber reverb. In the case of 30th Street Studio, the audio signals from the micro-
phones were routed to a speaker in a room in the basement with dimensions twelve
feet wide, fifteen feet long, and eight feet high (the chamber). The speaker projected
the sound in the chamber and a microphone captured these additional reverbera-
tions, which were then added back to the mix, giving it a more spacious sound tex-
ture. This approach to recording was typical of professional studios from the 1950s
to the early 1960s:

The companies encouraged their engineers and mixers to develop their

craft skills and strive for a recording aesthetic of “concert hall realism”
and “high fidelity.” This required the construction of large studios and the
development of microphone and mixing techniques in order to record
whole symphony orchestras and dance bands in a way that simulated the
psychoacoustics of a live performance.68

The architectural features of the physical space were central to a recording’s essence;
the aim was to “capture” a “natural” performance: “The art of recording was not to
compete for the public’s aesthetic attention to the art that was being recorded.”69
Whereas an engineer like Frank Laico working for a record label during this era
adhered to a preservationist philosophy in recording—​capturing the performance
unaltered by editing or overdubbing—​DIY-​ers like Paul purposely drew attention
to their technical interventions and alterations:

As record production evolved through the 1950s, the result was not
only new music but a new way of making music. It was perhaps the most
enduring musical concept to emerge from the postwar period: records
were no longer simply aural snapshots but deliberately crafted musical
texts.70

In the decades that followed, the ideal of the real-​time performance recording
eventually became an exception rather than the rule, as the practice of overdub-
bing became standard in the overwhelming majority of recording sessions. In the
span of just a few years, and in the hands of a few DIY pioneers, the window was
again opened to record oneself. Coupled with tape-​recording technology, individu-
als could now produce recordings independently that proffered the audio illusion

68
  Kealy, “From Craft to Art,” 210.
69
  Ibid., 211.
70
  Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 162.
16 D o-I t-Yourself

that they could sing and play multiple parts by themselves without the aid of other
musicians or technicians. These developments would have an immediate impact
on a reinvigorated DIY recording community excited about the prospects afforded
by tape.

DIY Recording Post-​1945: Sticking to

the Tape Mentality
Home tape recording is as simple as clicking a camera shutter for ever-​
increasing thousands of American sound enthusiasts. No matter
how inexperienced or inept the tape-​recorder owner may be, the
chances are overwhelming that he will come up with acceptable sound
on his tapes.71

Upon the arrival of audiotape in the United States following World War II, tape
recording was promoted to the public as an easy-​to-​do hobby. Publications from the
proceeding decades including consumer magazines such as Tape Recording (1953–​
1969), and recreation-​oriented books such as Family Fun in Tape Recording72 and
Tape Recording for the Hobbyist,73 covered a wide range of activities related to record-
ing, with music being one of the many possibilities.
Meanwhile, outside of home life, DIY recording studios began to surface, made
possible by the proliferation of reel-​to-​reel tape recorders. André Millard suggests
that “this was an accessible technology which permitted more people to enter the
professional recording industry.”74 Most DIY studios had little in the way of state-​
of-​the-​art recording technology, lacking the requisite capital to purchase high-​end
(usually German) microphones and custom-​built recording consoles. Instead, they
repurposed ramshackle radio equipment and more affordable American-​made
microphones,75 and set up their studios in “storefronts, garages, and shacks, as well as
radio stations and proper, if spartan, studios . . . Many records were recorded on loca-
tion in a YMCA, church, VFW hall, or house, almost anyplace with roof and walls.”76
In the case of Atlantic Records, the office of Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler dou-
bled as their studio. They pushed aside their office furniture to make space for their
recording artists, and their engineer, Tom Dowd, recorded them with a single micro-
phone.77 In comparison to the professional recording practices of the period, the

71
  Westcott and Dubbe, Tape Recorders, 23.
72
  Ahlers, Family Fun in Tape Recording.
73
  Zuckerman, Tape Recording for the Hobbyist.
74
  Millard, “Tape Recording and Music Making,” 158.
75
  Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound.
76
  Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 80.
77
  Wade and Picardie, Music Man, 34.
17

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 17

“anyplace with roof and walls” approach of the DIY-​ers was a radically different world,
and it was precisely this deviation from the standard that redefined recording practices.
It is at this mid-​century point that determining what counts as a “professional”
recording becomes increasingly difficult. The line demarcating professional is
obscured in the wake of many independent recording companies in the latter half of
the 1950s that realized commercial success in tandem with the rise of rock and roll.
For example, whereas the ratio of major to independent labels was a commanding
40 to 11 in 1955, it was 30 to 40 by 1957.78 In just five years after the introduction of
tape into the recording industry, the number of companies releasing albums jumped
dramatically from eleven to two hundred.79 These newly established startups likely
could not compete with the industry titans’ technical standards of high fidelity, but
it is unlikely that their intended audiences—​lower-​class whites, African Americans,
and teenagers—​were familiar with such stringent standards anyway.80 The inability
for these independents to rival this so-​called realism, opened up an avenue to a new
aesthetic, one in which popular musics, beginning with rock and roll, would flourish.
The tape techniques that Les Paul popularized were referenced frequently in
how-​to guides of the era. For example, consider the following excerpt from ABC’s of
Tape Recording: “You can use a tape recorder to produce your own multiple record-
ings. You can make like a one-​man orchestra or choir (as Les Paul and Mary Ford
did so wonderfully a few years ago).”81 Further, in Tape Recording for the Hobbyist,
Art Zuckerman relates how one could adopt Paul’s tape-​based “speed trick” to imi-
tate the high-​pitched novelty singing of the Chipmunks or feign violin virtuosity by
recording an octave down at three-​quarters of the regular tempo and then speeding
up the tape afterward.82
By the mid-​1960s, recording practices, especially for emerging styles such as
rock and roll, embraced the creative capacities afforded by tape. Recording was no
longer pitted as a process of capturing but as creating. DIY recording guides from
this period such as Creative Tape Recording positioned editing as an integral part of
the recording process: “The recordist should not feel he is cheating in some way, but
that he is using every means available, in this case his editing skill, to get as flawless
a performance as possible on tape.”83
Editing, however, was not as simple as clicking a camera shutter: “When you get
into editing, you pass the thin boundary that distinguishes tape recording as a mere
pastime from a serious hobby.”84 Tape recording was now becoming an increasingly

78
  Stokes, Star-​Making Machinery, 5.
79
  Kealy, “From Craft to Art,” 212.
80
  Ibid.
81
  Crowhurst, ABC’s of Tape Recording, 71.
82
  Zuckerman, Tape Recording for the Hobbyist, 48.
83
  Capel, Creative Tape Recording, 128.
84
  Zuckerman, Tape Recording for the Hobbyist, 73.
18 D o-I t-Yourself

technical and less accessible pursuit. On the one hand, the more involved discipline
of editing likely alienated some recreational recorders who found it too technical
and thereby less accessible, but on the other hand, it also gave self-​recording musi-
cians new compositional possibilities.
The concept of editing as integral to the recording process constituted a sem-
inal change in both professional and recreational recording practices. Certainly,
recording technologies have changed dramatically since the heyday of Les Paul’s
tape trickery, but the foundational concept that recordings entail a process of crea-
tive construction at the hands of the person wielding the technology perseveres to
the present day. For DIY recording, this development constituted a figurative fork
in the road; with added possibilities beyond simply pressing a button to record
came the necessity for more training.
The DIY-​er wanting to edit multiple takes together had to learn how to splice
tape wielding a razor blade. If DIY-​ers wanted to sing with themselves like Mary
Ford, they had to master the technique of overdubbing. Most books about tape
recording aimed at DIY-​ers from the 1960s and 1970s contained chapters steeped
in more technical topics to cater to this crowd, including but not limited to the
mechanical principles of tape recording, editing techniques, machine maintenance,
acoustics, and microphone selection and placement.85 This more technical and less
accessible path of DIY recording continued along the same trajectory throughout
the remainder of the twentieth century, and in many regards still persists presently
in the digital domain.
It was around this time in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the DIY trailhead
diverged into two distinct paths, the lo-​fi (low-​fidelity) movement, which contin-
ued to value ease of access and ease of use over quality, and the hi-​fi (high-​fidelity)
movement, which remained self-​sufficient, but often compromised ease of access
and ease of use in its pursuit to rival the quality of professional studios. In the case
of the latter, a significant contributing factor was the ability to access or acquire the
increasingly costly equipment used in professional studios including mixers, signal
processors, and specially built recording rooms.

The Escalating Expenses of Equipment and

the DIY Hi-​Fi/​Lo-​Fi Dichotomy
The act of mixing, which in its most elemental form entails balancing the perceived
volume of two or more sound signals relative to each other, was first made possible
in the electrical era. Yet for most DIY-​ers, it would take decades until they were

  See for example Capel, Creative Tape Recording; Crawford, Tape Recording from A to Z; Crowhurst,
85

ABC’s of Tape Recording; LeBel, How To Make Good Tape Recordings; Salm, Tape Recording for Fun and
Profit; Westcott and Dubbe, Tape Recorders; Zuckerman, Tape Recording for the Hobbyist.
19

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 19

able to affordably acquire a mixing console. In professional recording studios up

until the early 1960s, mixers were rather rudimentary with rotary knobs to con-
trol between four to twelve signals.86 These mixing consoles were custom built,
or modified from a broadcast console by a tinkerer proficient with electronics like
Sam Phillips.87
Bill Putnam’s custom built mixing consoles, which he sold under the com-
pany Universal Audio from 1958 to 1967, came to be the standard in the
recording industry. Bruce Swedien, best known for recording and mixing
Michael Jackson’s seminal albums,88 attributes the familiar standardized out-
lay of the console to Putnam: “The design of modern recording desks, the way
components are laid out and the way they function . . . they all originated in
Bill’s imagination.”89 The mixing console as we now know it “remained almost
unchanged from Bill’s first rather small recording consoles.”90 A critical addi-
tion to this design was the replacement of rotary knobs with sliders (faders).
Atlantic Records audio engineer Tom Dowd was driven by his frustrations with
the ergonomics of the console to incorporate the linear fader in order to make
the physical actions of mixing less cumbersome: “Because of the narrow width
of these things, I could fit them into a board half as wide. Which enabled me to
put a whole group of faders in two hands . . . Finally, I could play the faders like
you could play a piano.”91 With most manufacturers of mixing consoles adopt-
ing Dowd’s adaptation, the fader came to be a standard feature. Artists ranging
from the Beatles92 to the Beastie Boys93 have remarked on the phenomenon of
“playing” the mixer. Given the prohibitive cost of purchasing or renting a mix-
ing console, the art of mixing was mostly reserved for those working for record
companies.

D I V I D E -​A N D -​I S O L AT E
Meanwhile, ambient recording spaces like Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, which
were once prized in the 1950s and early 1960s, began to fall out of favor. Taking
their place were studios designed to eliminate or minimize natural reverberations
to enable the isolation of individual sounds. This trend, which was widespread in

86
  Bushnell and Ferree, From Down Beat to Vinyl, 159.
87
  As cited in Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound, 90.
88
  Notable Michael Jackson recordings produced by Quincy Jones, and engineered and mixed by
Bruce Swedien, include Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987).
89
  As cited in Cogan, “Bill Putnam.”
90
  Swedien, Make Mine Music, 123.
91
  As cited in Simons, Studio Stories, 53.
92
  Emerick and Massey, Here, There, and Everywhere, 112.
93
  Brown, Rick Rubin, 45.
20 D o-I t-Yourself

recording studios and practices by the late 1970s, is described by David Byrne as
“divide-​and-​isolate”:

The goal was to get as pristine a sound as possible . . . Studios were often
padded with sound-​absorbent materials so that there was almost no rever-
beration. The sonic character of the space was sucked out, because it
wasn’t considered to be part of the music. Without this ambience, it was
explained, the sound would be more malleable after the recording had
been made . . . Dead, characterless sound was held up as the ideal, and
often still is. In this philosophy, the naturally occurring echo and reverb
that normally added a little warmth to performances would be removed
and then added back in when the recording was being mixed.94

Byrne remarks that in the divide-​and-​isolate approach, reverb would be added dur-
ing mixing, after recording occurred. This was made possible by external reverb
units, which were also prohibitively expensive for the typical DIY-​er. The first alter-
native to chamber reverb to emerge was plate reverb, which came into wide use in
the 1960s and 1970s. Plate reverb works on the same principle as chamber reverb,
but instead of sending sound signals to a room, they are sent along a large four-​
hundred-​pound steel plate measuring three feet wide and six feet long, suspended
by springs within a metal frame and housed in a wooden case. While hardly port-
able, these plate units ushered in a standardization of sorts for reverb. If a studio
could purchase a plate, the unique acoustic properties of its recording space became
significantly less important, effectively devaluing the natural reverberation of a stu-
dio space and its reverb chambers. Essentially, plate reverb led to the homogeniza-
tion of ambience as reverb could now be replicated without using the same studio.
The trend of supplanting the previous technology with a more compact and rep-
licable successor continued with the release of digital reverb in the late 1970s. Using
algorithms to model a surfeit of rooms, digital reverb units expanded the sound
arsenal of recording engineers, displacing the need for older bulkier technologies
like chambers and plates. Using digital models of a room meant that different per-
formances could be recorded in the same room and yet made to sound as if each was
recorded in a different room, all with a turn of a dial or push of a button. Further, the
desired reverb style could be changed quite easily. With chamber and plate reverb,
there was one sound option—​all that could be controlled was the amount of reverb
added to the signal. The precedent had been set with digital reverb that soon enough
the studio would cease to be a space at all.
Within professional recording practices the approach to recording and the archi-
tecture of the studios changed in tandem:

94
  Byrne, How Music Works, 148.
21

A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g 21

Studios that were built in the next twenty years invariably incorporated
designs that led to the complete isolation of musicians and their instru-
ments, one from another. This, along with the ability to overdub on an
ever-​increasing number of tracks, was the seed that eventually became the
common practice of layering-​recording one instrument at a time.95

By isolating instruments acoustically or recording one instrument at a time and

then later adding reverb to these performances, each musician’s part could be scruti-
nized and “perfected,” either with overdubbing or editing. Like cubicles in an office,
baffles and isolation booths were used to compartmentalize a recording studio into
micro recording spaces. Even if the musicians played at the same time, they increas-
ingly played in spaces physically isolated from each other, forcing them to crane
their necks over the enclosing baffles or peer through soundproof glass like marine
life in an aquarium. Louise Meintjes’ detailed description of Downtown Studios
in Johannesburg in the early 1990s serves as a prime example of the extent profes-
sional studios went to in order to secure sound isolation:

Inside the studio, the facility is insulated as tightly as possible from the noise
of its own operation, for both recording and monitoring purposes. Clean
sound separation is an ideal in studio design, from the overall structure of
the rooms down to the minute electronic circuitry. Ambient sound from
such sources as the ventilation is minimized through design and special-
ized insulating materials. Soundproofing in the booths and control room
blocks out as much external sound as possible and absorbs unwanted inter-
nal frequencies. Specialized double-​paned acoustic windows visually con-
nect booths and the control room, while blocking the sound. Additionally,
in a booth large enough to record more than one source at a time, movable,
acoustically insulated baffles partition the area to limit leak-​through from
the sound source of one microphone into another.96

As these technological advancements provided surrogates to natural reverbera-

tion, studios’ dependence on spaces with ambient acoustics were weaned as David
Simons makes the case with New York City: “By the 1990s, nearly all of New York’s
largest studios—​RCA, Mediasound, the Pythian Temple, Webster Hall and oth-
ers—​had ceased to exist, their equipment sold at auction and the buildings trans-
formed into offices, apartments, and nightclubs.”97
From the early 1970s to nearing the millennial mark, the trend in professional
recording culture was to control sound by isolating it one way or another. Simply

95
  Johns, Sound Man, 169.
96
  Meintjes, “The Recording Studio as Fetish,” 273.
97
  Simons, Studio Stories, 160.
Other documents randomly have
different content
his energies which is perhaps his greatest danger. All this is true, but
it does not go to the root of the matter.
Again the educational aspect of the arts is constantly being
stressed, sometimes in a manner which does them disservice.
‘Message’ hunting—the type of interest which discovers in Macbeth
the moral that ‘Honesty is the best policy’; in Othello a
recommendation to ‘Look before you leap’, in Hamlet perhaps a
proof that ‘Procrastination is the Thief of Time’, or in King Lear an
indication that ‘Your sins will find you out*’, in Shelley an exhortation
to Idealism, in Browning comfort for the discouraged and assurances
as to a future life; but in Donne or Keats no ‘message’—this mode of
interpreting the phrase ‘a criticism of life’, though to a minute degree
on the right lines, is probably more damaging than those entirely
erratic theories, of which ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is an example, with
which we have been more concerned.
None the less but in subtler ways the educational influence of the
arts is all-pervasive. We must not overlook bad art in estimating it. “I
should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own
confraternity” wrote a novelist of the 19th century “if I were to
declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle
classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels that they
read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching;
fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the
excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country which has such
mothers, fathers and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer
than the father, closer than the schoolmaster, closer almost than the
mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil
chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson . . .
and there she is taught how she shall learn to love; how she shall
receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to
meet the joy; why she should be reticent and not throw herself at
once into this new delight.”
The influence is also exerted in more indirect ways. There need
be, we must remember, no discernible connection or resemblance
whatever between the experience due to the work of art and the
later behaviour and experience which is modified through it. Without
such resemblance the influence may easily be overlooked or denied,
but not by anyone who has a sufficient conception of the ways in
which attitudes develop. No one who has repeatedly lived through
experiences at the level of discrimination and co-ordination
presupposed by the greater writers, can ever, when fully ‘vigilant’, be
contented with ordinary crudities though a touch of liver may of
course suspend these superior responses. And conversely, keen and
vigilant enjoyment of Miss Dell, Mr Burroughs, Mrs Wilcox or Mr
Hutchinson, when untouched by doubts or the joys of ironic
contemplation, is likely to have as a consequence not only an
acceptance of the mediocre in ordinary life, but a blurring and
confusion of impulses and a very widespread loss of value.
These remarks apply even more evidently to the Cinema. People
do not much imitate what they see upon the screen or what they
read of in best-sellers. It would matter little if they did. Such effects
would show themselves clearly and the evil would be of a
manageable kind. They tend instead to develop stock attitudes and
stereotyped ideas, the attitudes and ideas of producers: attitudes
and ideas which can be ‘put across’ quickly through a medium that
lends itself to crude rather than to sensitive handling. Even a good
dramatist’s work will tend to be coarser than that of a novelist of
equal ability. He has to make his effects more quickly and in a more
obvious way. The Cinema suffers still more than the stage from this
disability. It has its compensating advantages in the greater
demands which it makes of the audience, but hitherto very few
producers have been able to turn them to account. Thus the ideas
and attitudes with which the ‘movie fan’ becomes familiar tend to be
peculiarly clumsy and inapplicable to life. Other causes, connected
with the mentality of producers, increase the effect.
The danger lies not in the fact that school-girls are sometimes
incited to poke revolvers at taximen, but in much subtler and more
insinuating influences. Most films indeed are much more suited to
children than to adults, and it is the adults who really suffer from
them. No one can intensely and whole-heartedly enjoy and enter
into experiences whose fabric is as crude as that of the average
super-film without a disorganisation which has its effects in everyday
life. The extent to which second-hand experience of a crass and
inchoate type is replacing ordinary life offers a threat which has not
yet been realised. If a false theory of the severance and
disconnection between ‘æsthetic’ and ordinary experience has
prevented the value of the arts from being understood, it has also
preserved their dangers from recognition.
Those who have attempted to find a place in the whole structure
of life for the arts have often made use of the conception of Play;
and Groos and Herbert Spencer are famous exponents of the theory.
As with so many other Æsthetic Doctrines the opinion that Art is a
form of Play may indicate either a very shallow or a very penetrating
view. All depends upon the conception of Play which is entertained.
Originally the view arose in connection with survival values. Art, it
was thought, had little practical value of the obvious kinds, so some
indirect means must be found by which it could be thought to be of
service. Perhaps, like play, it was a means of harmlessly expending
superfluous energy. A more useful contribution was made when the
problem of the value of play itself was seriously attacked. The
immense practical utility of most forms of play then became evident.
Characteristically play is the preparatory organisation and
development of impulses. It may easily become too narrowly
specialised, and the impulses active may be such as never to receive
‘serious’ exercise. None the less with our present understanding of
the amazingly recondite interactions between what appear to be
totally different activities of the nervous system, the importance of
play is not likely to need much insistence.
There are many human activities which, fortunately or
unfortunately as the case may be, are no longer required of or
possible to civilised man. Yet their total discontinuance may lead to
grave disturbances. For some of these play serves as an opportunity.
The view that art provides in some cases an analogous outlet
through vicarious experience has naturally been put forward, notably
by Mr Havelock Ellis. “We have lost the orgy, but in its place we have
art†.” If we do not extend the ‘sublimation’ theory too far or try to
bring under this Safety-valve heading work with which it has no
concern, it may be granted that in some cases the explanation is in
place. But the temptation to extend it, and so to misconceive the
whole matter, is great.
The objection to the Play Theory, unless very carefully stated, lies
in its suggestion that the experiences of Art are in some way
incomplete, that they are substitutes, meagre copies of the real
thing, well enough for those who cannot obtain better. “The
moralising force of Art lies, not in its capacity to present a timid
imitation of our experiences, but in its power to go beyond our
experience, satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled activities of
our nature.” † The Copy View, with the antithesis between Life and
Literature which so often accompanies it, is a devastating
misconception. Coupled with the suggestion involved by the word
‘Play,’ that such things are for the young rather than for the mature,
and that Art is something one grows out of, it has a large share of
the responsibility for the present state of the Arts and of Criticism.
Its only rival in obscuring the issues is its close cousin the
Amusement or Relaxation Theory.
The experiences which the arts offer are not obtainable, or but
rarely, elsewhere. Would that they were! They are not incomplete;
they might better be described as ordinary experiences completed.
They are not such that the most adequately equipped person can
dispense with them and suffer no loss, and this loss is not
momentary, but recurrent and permanent; the best equipped are
precisely the people who most value these experiences. Nor is Art,
as by way of corollary is sometimes maintained, a thing which had
its’ function in the youth of the world, but with the development of
Science becomes obsolete. It may very possibly decline and even
disappear, but if it does a biological calamity of the first order will
have occurred. Nor again is it something which may be postponed
while premillennial man grapples with more immediate problems.
The raising of the standard of response is as immediate a problem
as any, and the arts are the chief instrument by which it may be
raised or lowered.
Hitherto we have been concerned chiefly with more or less
specific effects of the experiences of the arts, with the effects, upon
single definite groups or systems of impulses, of their exercise in
these experiences. The Play Theory tends to limit us to these
consequences. Important though they are, we must not overlook the
more general effects which any well-organised experience produces.
They may in certain cases be extraordinarily widespread. Such an
apparently irrelevant test as the ability to stand upon one foot
without unsteadiness has recently been employed, by Mr Burt, as an
index to mental and especially to emotional organisation. All our
activities react upon one another to a prodigious extent in ways
which we can only as yet conjecture.
Finer adjustment, clearer and more delicate accommodation or
reconciliation of impulses in any one field tends to promote it in
others. A step in mathematical accomplishment, other things being
equal, facilitates the acquisition of a new turn in ski-ing. Other things
are rarely equal it should perhaps be remarked. If this is true even
of such special narrowly restricted impulses as are involved in a
scientific technique, it is far more evident when the major, the most
widespread systems, those active in our responses to human beings
and to the exigences of existence, are engaged.
There is abundant evidence that removal of confusion in one
sphere of activity tends to be favourable to its removal elsewhere.
The ease with which a trained mind approaches a new subject is the
plainest example, but equally a person whose ordinary emotional
experience is clear, controlled and coherent, is the least likely to be
thrown into confusion by an unheard-of predicament. Complications
sometimes obscure this effect: a mathematician approaching
psychology may attempt to apply methods which are inappropriate,
and the sanest people may prove stupid in their dealings with
individuals of other races. The specialist, either intellectual or moral,
who is helpless outside his own narrow field is a familiar figure in
inferior comedy. But what would have to be shown before the
principle is invalidated is that, granted equal specialisation, the
successful specialist is not better fitted for life in general than his
unsuccessful confrère. Few people, however, will dispute the
assertion that transference of ability frequently occurs although the
mode by which it comes about may be obscure.
 When very widespread and very fundamental impulses are
implicated, where attitudes constantly taken up in ordinary life are
aroused, this transference effect may be very marked. Everybody
knows the feeling of freedom, of relief, of increased competence and
sanity, that follows any reading in which more than usual order and
coherence has been given to our responses. We seem to feel that
our command of life, our insight into it and our discrimination of its
possibilities, is enhanced, even for situations having little or nothing
to do with the subject of the reading. It may be a chapter of Gösta
Berling or of The ABC of Atoms, the close of the Vanity of Human
Wishes, or the opening of Harry Richmond; whatever the differences
the refreshment is the same. And conversely everybody knows the
diminution of energy, the bafflement, the sense of helplessness,
which an ill-written, crude, or muddled book, or a badly acted play,
will produce, unless the critical task of diagnosis is able to restore
equanimity and composure.
Neither the subject nor the closeness of correspondence between
the experience and the reader’s own situation has any bearing upon
these effects. But indeed, to anyone who realises what kind of a
thing an experience is, and through what means it comes about, the
old antithesis between subject and treatment ceases to be of
interest (cf. Chapter XVI). They are not separable or distinct things
and the division is of no service. In this case the effects we are
considering depend only upon the kind and degree of organisation
which is given to the experiences. If it is at the level of our own best
attempts or above it (but not so far above as to be out of reach) we
are refreshed. But if our own organisation is broken down, forced to
a cruder, a more wasteful level, we are depressed and temporarily
incapacitated, not only locally but generally. It is when what we are
offered, and inveigled into accepting, is only slightly inferior to our
own developed capacity, so that it is no easy matter to see what is
wrong, that the effect is greatest. Stuff of an evident and extreme
badness is exhilarating rather than depressing when taken from a
discriminating standpoint; and there need be nothing snobbish or
self-congratulatory in such reading. What is really discomposing and
damaging to the critical reader is the mediocre, the work which falls
just below his own standards of response. Hence the rage which
some feel at the productions of Sir James Barrie, Mr Locke, or Sir
Hall Caine, a rage which work comparatively devoid of merits fails to
excite.
These effects are not merely momentary or evanescent; if we
would understand the place of the arts in civilisation we must
consider them more closely. An improvement of response is the only
benefit which anyone can receive, and the degradation, the lowering
of a response, is the only calamity. When we take into account not
merely the impulses actually concerned in the experience but all the
allied groups which thrive or suffer with it, and all the far-reaching
effects of success or failure upon activities which may seem to be
independent, the fact that some people feel so keenly about the arts
is no longer surprising.
Underestimation of the importance of the arts is nearly always
due to ignorance of the workings of the mind. Experiences such as
these, into which we willingly and whole-heartedly enter, or into
which we may be enticed and inveigled, present peculiar
opportunities for betrayal. They are the most formative of
experiences, because in them the development and systematisation
of our impulses goes to the furthest lengths. In ordinary life a
thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete
working out of our response; the range and complexity of the
impulse-systems involved is less; the need for action, the
comparative uncertainty and vagueness of the situation, the
intrusion of accidental irrelevancies, inconvenient temporal spacing—
the action being too slow or too fast—all these obscure the issue and
prevent the full development of the experience. We have to jump to
some rough and ready solution. But in the ‘imaginative experience’
these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise
stresses, preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and
interinanimations, what remote relationships between different
systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and
inexecutable connections are established, is a matter which, we see
clearly, may modify all the rest of life. As a chemist’s balance to a
grocer’s scales, so is the mind in the imaginative moment to the
mind engaged in ordinary intercourse or practical affairs. The
comparison will bear pressing. The results, for good or evil, of the
untrammelled response are not lost to us in our usual trafficking.
 CHAPTER XXXII

The Imagination
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded.
The Phœnix and the Turtle.

At least six distinct senses of the word ‘imagination’ are still current
in critical discussion. It is convenient to separate them before
passing on to consider the one which is most important.
(i) The production of vivid images, usually visual images,
already sufficiently discussed, is the commonest and the
least interesting thing which is referred to by imagination.
(ii) The use of figurative language is frequently all that is meant.
People who naturally employ metaphor and simile,
especially when it is of an unusual kind, are said to have
imagination. This may or may not be accompanied by
imagination in the other senses. It should not be
overlooked that metaphor and simile—the two may be
considered together—have a great variety of functions in
speech. A metaphor may be illustrative or diagrammatical,
providing a concrete instance of a relation which would
otherwise have to be stated in abstract terms. This is the
most common scientific or prose use of metaphor. It is rare
in emotive language and in poetry; Shelley’s “Dome of
many-coloured glass” is almost the only example which
springs to mind. More usually the elucidation is a mere
 pretence; some attitude of the speaker to his subject or to
his audience is using the metaphor as a means of
expression. “The freedom of my writings has indeed
provoked an implacable tribe” said Gibbon, “but as I was
safe from the stings, I was soon accustomed to the buzzing
of the hornets”. But metaphor has yet further uses. It is the
supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto
unconnected things are brought together in poetry for the
sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring
from their collocation and from the combinations which the
mind then establishes between them. There are few
metaphors whose effect, if carefully examined, can be
traced to the logical relations involved. Metaphor is a semi-
surreptitious method by which a greater variety of elements
can be wrought into the fabric of the experience. Not that
there is any virtue in variety by itself, though the list of
critics who seem to have thought so would be lengthy; a
page of the dictionary can show more variety than any
page of poetry. But what is needed for the wholeness of an
experience is not always naturally present, and metaphor
supplies an excuse by which what is needed may be
smuggled in. This is an instance of a very strange
phenomenon constantly appearing in the arts. What is most
essential often seems to be done as it were inadvertently,
to be a by-product, an accidental concomitant. Those who
look only to the ostensible purposes for the explanation of
the effects, who make prose analyses of poems, must
inevitably find them a mystery. But why overt and evident
intention should so often destroy the effect is certainly a
difficult problem.
(iii) A narrower sense is that in which sympathetic reproducing
of other people’s states of mind, particularly their emotional
states, is what is meant. “You haven’t enough imagination,”
the dramatist says to the critic who thinks that his persons
behave unnaturally. This kind of imagination is plainly a
 necessity for communication, and is covered by what has
already been said in Chapter XXIV. It has no necessary
connection with senses of imagination which imply value.
Bad plays to be successful require it as much as good.
(iv) Inventiveness, the bringing together of elements which are
not ordinarily connected, is another sense. According to this
Edison is said to have possessed imagination, and any
fantastic romance will show it in excelsis. Although this
comes nearer to a sense in which value is implied, it is still
too general. The lunatic will beat any of us at combining
odd ideas: Dr Cook outstrips Peary, and Bottomley
outshines Sir John Bradbury.
(v) Next we have that kind of relevant connection of things
ordinarily thought of as disparate which is exemplified in
scientific imagination. This is an ordering of experience in
definite ways and for a definite end or purpose, not
necessarily deliberate and conscious, but limited to a given
field of phenomena. The technical triumphs of the arts are
instances of this kind of imagination. As with all ordering,
value considerations are very likely to be implied, but the
value may be limited or conditional.
(vi) Finally we come to the sense of imagination with which we
are here most concerned. The original formulation* was
Coleridge’s greatest contribution to critical theory, and
except in the way of interpretation, it is hard to add
anything to what he has said, though, as we have already
noted in Chapter XXIV, some things might be taken away
from it with advantage.
“That synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively
appropriated the name of imagination . . . reveals itself in
the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant
qualities . . . the sense of novelty and freshness, with old
and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion,
with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and
 steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling
profound or vehement.” “The sense of musical delight . . .
with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect,
and modifying a series of thoughts by some one
predominant thought or feeling † ” these are gifts of the
imagination. It was natural, we shall shortly see why, for
Coleridge to carry his further speculations upon Imagination
into the realms of Transcendentalism, but setting this aside,
there is enough in this description and in the many
applications and elucidations scattered through the
Biographia and the Lectures to justify Coleridge’s claim to
have put his finger more nearly than anyone else upon the
essential characteristic of poetic as of all valuable
experience.
In describing the poet we laid stress upon the availability of his
experience, upon the width of the field of stimulation which he can
accept, and the completeness of the response which he can make.
Compared with him the ordinary man suppresses nine-tenths of his
impulses, because he is incapable of managing them without
confusion. He goes about in blinkers because what he would
otherwise see would upset him. But the poet through his superior
power of ordering experience is freed from this necessity. Impulses
which commonly interfere with one another and are conflicting,
independent, and mutually distractive, in him combine into a stable
poise. He selects, of course, but the range of suppression which is
necessary for him is diminished, and for this very reason such
suppressions as he makes are more rigorously carried out. Hence
the curious local callousness of the artist which so often strikes the
observer.
But these impulses active in the artist become mutually modified
and thereby ordered to an extent which only occurs in the ordinary
man at rare moments, under the shock of, for example, a great
bereavement or an undreamt-of happiness; at instants when the
“film of familiarity and selfish solicitude”, which commonly hides
nine-tenths of life from him, seems to be lifted and he feels
strangely alive and aware of the actuality of existence. In these
moments his myriad inhibitions are weakened; his responses,
canalised—to use an inappropriate metaphor—by routine and by
practical but restricted convenience, break loose and make up a new
order with one another; he feels as though everything were
beginning anew. But for most men after their early years such
experiences are infrequent; a time comes when they are incapable
of them unaided, and they receive them only through the arts. For
great art has this effect, and owes thereto its supreme place in
human life.
The poet makes unconsciously a selection which outwits the
force of habit; the impulses he awakens are freed, through the very
means by which they are aroused, from the inhibitions that ordinary
circumstances encourage; the irrelevant and the extraneous is
excluded; and upon the resulting simplified but widened field of
impulses he imposes an order which their greater plasticity allows
them to accept. Almost always too the chief part of his work is done
through those impulses which we have seen to be most uniform and
regular, those which are aroused by what are called the ‘formal
elements’. They are also the most primitive, and for that reason
commonly among those which are most inhibited, most curtailed and
subordinated to superimposed purposes. We rarely let a colour affect
us purely as a colour, we use it as a sign by which we recognise
some coloured object. Thus our responses to colours in themselves
become so abbreviated that many people come to think that the
pigments painters use are in some way more colourful than Nature.
What happens is that inhibitions are released, and at the same time
mutual interactions between impulses take place which only sunsets
seem to evoke in everyday experience. We have seen in discussing
communication one reason for the pre-eminence of ‘formal elements’
in art, the uniformity of the responses which they can be depended
upon to produce. In their primitiveness we find another. The sense
that the accidental and adventitious aspect of life has receded, that
we are beginning again, that our contact with actuality is increased,
is largely due to this restoration of their full natural powers to
sensations.
 But this restoration is not enough; merely looking at a landscape
in a mirror, or standing on one’s head will do it. What is much more
essential is the increased organisation, the heightened power of
combining all the several effects of formal elements into a single
response, which the poet bestows. To point out that “the sense of
musical delight is a gift of the imagination” was’ one of Coleridge’s
most brilliant feats. It is in such resolution of a welter of
disconnected impulses into a single ordered response that in all the
arts imagination is most shown, but for the reason that here its
operation is most intricate and most inaccessible to observation, we
shall study it more profitably in its other manifestations.
We have suggested, but only by accident, that imagination
characteristically produces effects similar to those which accompany
great and sudden crises in experience. This would be misleading.
What is true is that those imaginative syntheses which most nearly
approach to these climaxes, Tragedy for example, are the most easy
to analyse. What clearer instance of the “balance or reconciliation of
opposite and discordant qualities” can be found than Tragedy. Pity,
the impulse to approach, and Terror, the impulse to retreat, are
brought in Tragedy to a reconciliation which they find nowhere else,
and with them who knows what other allied groups of equally
discordant impulses. Their union in an ordered single response is the
catharsis by which Tragedy is recognised, whether Aristotle meant
anything of this kind or not. This is the explanation of that sense of
release, of repose in the midst of stress, of balance and composure,
given by Tragedy, for there is no other way in which such impulses,
once awakened, can be set at rest without suppression.
It is essential to recognise that in the full tragic experience there
is no suppression. The mind does not shy away from anything, it
does not protect itself with any illusion, it stands uncomforted,
unintimidated, alone and self-reliant. The test of its success is
whether it can face what is before it and respond to it without any of
the innumerable subterfuges by which it ordinarily dodges the full
development of experience. Suppressions and sublimations alike are
devices by which we endeavour to avoid issues which might bewilder
us. The essence of Tragedy is that it forces us to live for a moment
without them. When we succeed we find, as usual, that there is no
difficulty; the difficulty came from the suppressions and
sublimations. The joy which is so strangely the heart of the
experience is not an indication that ‘all’s right with the world’ or that
‘somewhere, somehow, there is Justice’; it is an indication that all is
right here and now in the nervous system. Because Tragedy is the
experience which most invites these subterfuges, it is the greatest
and the rarest thing in literature, for the vast majority of works
which pass by that name are of a different order. Tragedy is only
possible to a mind which is for the moment agnostic or Manichean.
The least touch of any theology which has a compensating Heaven
to offer the tragic hero is fatal. That is why Romeo and Juliet is not a
Tragedy in the sense in which King Lear is.
But there is more in Tragedy than unmitigated experience.
Besides Terror there is Pity, and if there is substituted for either
something a little different—Horror or Dread, say, for Terror; Regret
or Shame for Pity; or that kind of Pity which yields the adjective
‘Pitiable’ in place of that which yields ‘Piteous’—the whole effect is
altered. It is the relation between the two sets of impulses, Pity and
Terror, which gives its specific character to Tragedy, and from that
relation the peculiar poise of the Tragic experience springs.
The metaphor of a balance or poise will bear consideration. For
Pity and Terror are opposites in a sense in which Pity and Dread are
not. Dread or Horror are nearer than Terror to Pity, for they contain
attraction as well as repulsion. As in colour, tones just not in
harmonic relation are peculiarly unmanageable and jarring, so it is
with these more easily describable responses. The extraordinarily
stable experience of Tragedy, which is capable of admitting almost
any other impulses so long as the relation of the main components is
exactly right, changes at once if these are altered. Even if it keeps
its coherence it becomes at once a far narrower, more limited, and
exclusive thing, a much more partial, restricted and specialised
response. Tragedy is perhaps the most general, all-accepting, all-
ordering experience known. It can take anything into its
organisation, modifying it so that it finds a place. It is invulnerable;
there is nothing which does not present to the tragic attitude when
fully developed a fitting aspect and only a fitting aspect. Its sole
rivals in this respect are the attitudes of Falstaff and of the Voltaire
of Candide. But pseudo-tragedy—the greater part of Greek Tragedy
as well as almost all Elizabethan Tragedy outside Shakespeare’s six
masterpieces comes under this head—is one of the most fragile and
precarious of attitudes. Parody easily overthrows it, the ironic
addition paralyses it; even a mediocre joke may make it look
lopsided and extravagant.
This balanced poise, stable through its power of inclusion, not
through the force of its exclusions, is not peculiar to Tragedy. It is a
general characteristic of all the most valuable experiences of the
arts. It can be given by a carpet or a pot or by a gesture as
unmistakably as by the Parthenon, it may come about through an
epigram as clearly as through a Sonata. We must resist the
temptation to analyse its cause into sets of opposed characters in
the object. As a rule no such analysis can be made. The balance is
not in the structure of the stimulating object, it is in the response.
By remembering this we escape the danger of supposing that we
have found a formula for Beauty.
Although for most people these experiences are infrequent apart
from the arts, almost any occasion may give rise to them. The most
important general condition is mental health, a high state of
‘vigilance’; the next is the frequent occurrence of such experiences
in the recent past. None of the effects of art is more transferable
than this balance or equilibrium.
Despite all differences in the impulses concerned, a certain
general similarity can be observed in all these cases of supremely
fine and complete organisation. It is this similarity which has led to
the legends of the ‘æsthetic state’, the ‘æsthetic emotion’ and the
single quality Beauty, the same in all its manifestations. We had
occasion in Chapter II to suggest that the characteristics by which
æsthetic experience is usually defined—that impersonality,
disinterestedness and detachment so much stressed and so little
discussed by æstheticians—are really two sets of quite different
characters.
 One set we have seen (Chapters X and XXIV) to be merely
conditions of communication having nothing essentially to do with
value, conditions involved in valueless and valuable communications
alike. We have suggested above, however, that this kind of
detachment and severance from ordinary circumstances and
accidental personal interests may be of special service in these
supremely valuable* communications, since it makes the breaking
down of inhibitions more easy. This same facilitation of response is
also, it should be added, the explanation of the peculiarly pernicious
effect of bad but competent art.
We may now turn to consider that other set of characters which
have been confused with these communicative conditions, and which
may justifiably be taken as defining a special field for those
interested in the values of experience. There are two ways in which
impulses may be organised; by exclusion and by inclusion, by
synthesis and by elimination. Although every coherent state of mind
depends upon both, it is permissible to contrast experiences which
win stability and order through a narrowing of the response with
those which widen it. A very great deal of poetry and art is content
with the full, ordered development of comparatively special and
limited experiences, with a definite emotion, for example, Sorrow,
Joy, Pride, or a definite attitude, Love, Indignation, Admiration,
Hope, or with a specific mood, Melancholy, Optimism or Longing.
And such art has its own value and its place in human affairs. No
one will quarrel with ‘Break, break, break,’ or with the Coronach or
with Rose Aylmer or with Love’s Philosophy,* although clearly they
are limited and exclusive. But they are not the greatest kind of
poetry; we do not expect from them what we find in the Ode to the
Nightingale, in Proud Maisie, in Sir Patrick Spens, in The Definition of
Love or in the Nocturnall upon S. Lucie’s Day.
The structures of these two kinds of experiences are different,
and the difference is not one of subject but of the relations inter se
of the several impulses active in the experience. A poem of the first
group is built out of sets of impulses which run parallel, which have
the same direction. In a poem of the second group the most obvious
feature is the extraordinarily heterogeneity of the distinguishable
impulses. But they are more than heterogeneous, they are opposed.
They are such that in ordinary, non-poetic, non-imaginative
experience, one or other set would be suppressed to give as it might
appear freer development to the others.
The difference comes out clearly if we consider how
comparatively unstable poems of the first kind are. They will not
bear an ironical contemplation. We have only to read The War Song
of Dinas Vawr in close conjunction with the Coronach, or to
remember that unfortunate phrase ‘Those lips, O slippery blisses’!
from Endymion, while reading Love’s Philosophy, to notice this. Irony
in this sense consists in the bringing in of the opposite, the
complementary impulses; that is why poetry which is exposed to it is
not of the highest order, and why irony itself is so constantly a
characteristic of poetry which is.
These opposed impulses from the resolution of which such
experiences spring cannot usually be analysed. When, as is most
often the case, they are aroused through formal means, it is
evidently impossible to do so. But sometimes, as in the above cited
cases, they can, and through this accident literary criticism is able to
go a step further than the criticism of the other arts.
We can only conjecture dimly what difference holds between a
balance and reconciliation of impulses and a mere rivalry or conflict.
One difference is that a balance sustains one state of mind, but a
conflict two alternating states. This, however, does not take us very
far. The chief misconception which prevents progress here is the
switchboard view of the mind. What conception should be put in its
place is still doubtful, but we have already (Chapters XIV and XX)
discussed the reasons which make a more adequate conception
imperative. The rest of the difficulty is due merely to ignorance; we
do not yet know enough about the central nervous system.
With this preliminary disavowal of undue certainty we may
proceed. The equilibrium* of opposed impulses, which we suspect to
be the ground-plan of the most valuable æsthetic responses, brings
into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences
of a more defined emotion. We cease to be orientated in one
definite direction; more facets of the mind are exposed and, what is
the same thing, more aspects of things are able to affect us. To
respond, not through one narrow channel of interest, but
simultaneously and coherently through many, is to be disinterested
in the only sense of the word which concerns us here. A state of
mind which is not disinterested is one which sees things only from
one standpoint or under one aspect. At the same time since more of
our personality is engaged the independence and individuality of
other things becomes greater. We seem to see ‘all round’ them, to
see them as they really are; we see them apart from any one
particular interest which they may have for us. Of course without
some interest we should not see them at all, but the less any one
particular interest is indispensable, the more detached our attitude
becomes. And to say that we are impersonal is merely a curious way
of saying that our personality is more completely involved.
These characters of æsthetic experiences can thus be shown to
be very natural consequences of the diversity, of their components.
But that so many different impulses should enter in is only what may
be expected in an experience whose ground-plan is a balance of
opposites. For every impulse which does not complete itself in
isolation tends to bring in allied systems. The state of irresolution
shows this clearly. The difference between any such welter of
vacillating impulses and the states of composure we are considering
may well be a matter of mediating relations between the supporting
systems brought in from either side. One thing only perhaps is
certain; what happens is the exact opposite to a deadlock, for
compared to the experience of great poetry every other state of
mind is one of bafflement.
The consciousness which arises in these moments of completed
being lends itself inevitably to transcendental descriptions. “This
Exstasie doth unperplex”, we seem to see things as they really are,
and because we are freed from the bewilderment which our own
maladjustment brings with it,
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.
Wordsworth’s Pantheistic interpretation of the imaginative
experience in Tintern Abbey* is one which in varying forms has been
given by many poets and critics. The reconciliation of it with the
account here presented raises a point of extreme importance, the
demarcation of the two main uses of language.
 CHAPTER XXXIII

Truth and Revelation Theories

Oh never rudely will I blame his faith
In the might of stars and angels! ’Tis not merely
The human being’s pride that peoples space
With life and mystical predominance;
Since likewise for the stricken heart of Love
This visible nature, and this common world
Is all too narrow . . . .
Coleridge, Piccolomini.

Knowledge, it is recognised, is good, and since the experiences which

we have been discussing may readily be supposed to give
knowledge, there is a strong tradition in criticism which seeks to
derive their value from the worth of knowledge. But not all
knowledge is equally valuable: the kind of information which we can
acquire indefinitely by steady perusal of Whitaker or of an
Encyclopædia is of negligible value. Therefore a special kind of
knowledge has been alleged.
The problem which ensues is for many people the most
interesting part of critical theory. That so many capital-letter words—
such as Real, Ideal, Essential, Necessary, Ultimate, Absolute,
Fundamental, Profound, and many others—tend to appear in Truth
doctrines is evidence of the interest. This heavy artillery is more than
anything else a mode of emphasis, analogous to italics, underlining
and solemn tones of utterance. It serves to impress upon the reader
that he would do well to become serious and attentive, and like all
such devices it tends to lose its effect unless cunningly employed.
 We may most conveniently begin by considering a range of
representative doctrines chosen from the writings of famous critics
with a view to illustrating chiefly their differences. Some, it is true,
will hardly repay investigation. It is far too easy to write, with Carlyle
“All real art is the disimprisonment of the soul of fact † ” or “The
infinite is made to blend itself with the finite; to stand visible, and,
as it were, attainable there. Of this sort are all true works of art; in
this (if we know a work of art from the daub of artifice) we discern
eternity looking through time, the God-like rendered visible†”.
All the difficulty begins when this has been written, and what has
been said is of no assistance towards its elucidation. Nor is Pater, for
all his praise of clarity and accuracy, of much better quality. “Truth!
there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And, further, all
beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth or what we call
expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision
within” † . It would perhaps be difficult, outside Croce,* to find a
more unmistakable confusion between value and communicative
efficacy. But the Essay is a veritable museum of critical blunders.
The extracts which follow are arranged approximately in order of
obscurity. They rise from the most matter of fact to the most
mystical uses of truth-notions in criticism. All might be taken as
glosses upon the phrase ‘Truth to Nature’; they serve to show what
different things may be meant by what is apparently simple
language.
We may begin with Aristotle. He makes three remarks which bear
upon the matter. The first is in connection with the antithesis
between Tragedy and History.
“Poetry is a more philosophical and a more serious thing than
History: for Poetry is chiefly conversant about general (universal)
truth, History about particular. In what manner, for example, any
person of a certain character would speak or act, probably or
necessarily—this is universal; and this is the object of Poetry. But
what Alcibiades did, or what happened to him—this is particular
truth.” (Poetics, IX).
 His second remark is made in connection with the requisites of
Tragic Character:—
“The third requisite (in addition to goodness in a special sense,
appropriateness, and consistency) of Character is that it have
verisimilitude*”. (Poetics, XV).
Aristotle’s third observation is in the same chapter:—
“The poet when he imitates passionate or indolent men and
such, should preserve the type and yet ennoble it*”.
Wordsworth’s interpretation carries us a definite stage nearer to
the mystical:—
“Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most
philosophic of all writing. It is so. Its object is truth—not individual
and local, but general and operative. Not standing upon external
testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion: truth which is
its own testimony; which gives competence and confidence to the
tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same
tribunal†”.
Wordsworth remains still on the hither side of the gap, as does
Goethe in suggesting that “The beautiful is the manifestation of
secret laws of nature which, but for this disclosure, had been for
ever concealed from us*”. But Coleridge, from whom Wordsworth
probably heard about Aristotle, takes the step into mysticism
unhesitatingly:—
“If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what
idle rivalry!—if he proceeds only from a given form which is
supposed to answer to the notion of beauty—what an emptiness,
what an unreality, there always is in his productions. Believe me, you
must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a
bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man†”.
But Coleridge held many mystical views, not always easy to
reconcile with one another. In the same Essay he continues:—
“In the objects of nature are presented as in a mirror all the
possible elements, steps and processes of intellect antecedent to
consciousness, and therefore to the full development of the
intelligential act; and man’s mind is the very focus of all the rays of
intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature. Now
so to place these images, totalised and fitted to the limits of the
human mind, as to elicit from and to superinduce upon the forms
themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate, to make
the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought
and thought nature—this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts.”
Even when Coleridge is most ‘the God-intoxicated man’ his
remarks to a careful reader suggest that if they could be decoded,
as it were, they would provide at the least a basis for interesting
speculation. Many adumbrations of this mystical view might be
quoted. “There is a communication between mystery and mystery,
between the unknown soul and the unknown reality; at one
particular point in the texture of life the hidden truth seems to break
through the veil”, writes Mr Middleton Murry in an Essay† which as
an emotive utterance disguised to resemble an argument is of
interest. How this feeling of insight arises we have seen in the
foregoing chapter; the sense of immediate revelation of which he
treats as “the primary stuff out of which literature is created” is
certainly characteristic of the greater kinds of art. And there must be
few who have not by one arrangement or another contrived from
these visionary moments a philosophy which, for a time, has seemed
to them unshakable because for a time emotionally satisfying. But
emotional satisfaction gained at the cost of intellectual bondage is
unstable. When it does not induce a partial stupor it breaks down.
The freely inquiring mind has a fatal way of overthrowing all
immediate and mystical intuitions which, instead of being duly
subordinate, insist on giving it orders.
For the inquiring mind is simply the human being’s way of finding
a place and function for all its experiences and activities, a place and
function compatible with the rest of its experience. When the
mystical insight is understood, and its claims fitly directed, although
it may seem to those who still misunderstand it to have lost all the
attributes for which they have sought to retain it, and to be no
longer either mystical or an insight, it does not lose but gains in
value. But this further adjustment is often very difficult to make.
These Revelation Doctrines, when we know what they are really
about, come nearer, we shall see, to supplying an explanation of the
value of the arts than any of the other traditional accounts. But the
process of translation is no easy matter. They are not what they
seem, these utterances apparently about Truth. In interpreting them
we shall find ourselves forced to consider language from an angle
and with a closeness which are not usual, and to do so, certain very
powerful resistances and deeply ingrained habits of the mind have
first to be broken down.
 CHAPTER XXXIV

The Two Uses of Language

The intelligible forms of ancient poets
The fair humanities of old religion . . .
They live no longer in the faith of reason:
But still the heart doth need a language, still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names.
Coleridge, Piccolomini.

There are two totally distinct uses of language. But because the
theory of language is the most neglected of all studies they are in
fact hardly ever distinguished. Yet both for the theory of poetry and
for the narrower aim of understanding much which is said about
poetry a clear comprehension of the differences between these uses
is indispensable. For this we must look somewhat closely at the
mental processes which accompany them.
It is unfortunate but not surprising that most of the psychological
terms which we naturally employ tend to blur the distinction.
‘Knowledge’, ‘belief’, ‘assertion’, ‘thought’, and ‘understanding’, for,
example, as ordinarily used, are ambiguous in a fashion which
disguises and obscures the point which must be brought out. They
record distinctions which are oblique to the distinctions required,
they are cross-cuts of analysis made in the wrong place and in the
wrong direction, useful enough for some purposes no doubt, but for
this present purpose very confusing. We shall do well to put them
out of mind for a while if possible.
The chief departure made from current conceptions in the sketch
of the mind given in Chapter XI lay in the substitution of the causes,
the characters and the consequences of a mental event, for its
aspects as thought, feeling and will. This treatment was introduced
with a view to the analysis which now occupies us. Among the
causes of most mental events, we urged, two sets may be
distinguished. On the one hand there are the present stimuli
reaching the mind through the sensory nerves, and, in co-operation
with these, the effects of past stimuli associated with them. On the
other hand is a set of quite different factors, the state of the
organism, its needs, its readiness to respond to this or that kind of
stimulus. The impulses which arise take their character and their
course from the interaction of these two sets. We must keep them
clearly distinguished.
The relative importance of the two sets of factors varies
enormously. A sufficiently hungry man will eat almost anything which
can be chewed or swallowed. The nature of the substance, within
these limits, has very little effect upon his behaviour. A replete
person, by contrast, will only eat such things as he expects will taste
pleasant, or regards as possessing definite beneficial properties, for
example, medicines. His behaviour, in other words, depends almost
entirely upon the character of his optical or olfactory stimulation.
So far as an impulse owes its character to its stimulus (or to such
effects of past accompanying or connected stimuli as are revived) so
far is it a reference, to use the term which we introduced in Chapter
XI, to stand for the property of mental events which we substitute
for thought or cognition.* It is plain that the independent internal
conditions of the organism usually intervene to distort reference in
some degree. But very many of our needs can only be satisfied if the
impulses are left undistorted. Bitter experience has taught us to
leave some of them alone, to let them reflect or correspond with
external states of affairs as much as they can, undisturbed as far as
possible by internal states of affairs, our needs and desires.
In all our behaviour can be distinguished stimuli we receive, and
the ways in which we use them. What we receive may be any kind
of stimulus, but only when the reaction we make to it tallies with its
nature and varies with it in quasi-independence of the uses we make
of it does reference occur.
 Those to whom visual images are of service in considering
complex matters may find it convenient at this point to imagine a
circle or sphere constantly bombarded by minute particles (stimuli).
Within the sphere may be pictured complex mechanisms continually
changing for reasons having nothing to do with the external stimuli.
These mechanisms by opening little gateways select which of the
stimuli shall be allowed to come in and take effect. So far as the
subsequent convulsions are due to the nature of the impacts and to
lingering effects of impacts which have accompanied similar impacts
in the past, the convulsions are referential. So far as they are due to
the independent motions of the internal mechanisms themselves,
reference fails. This diagrammatic image may possibly be of
convenience to some. By those who distrust such things it may with
advantage be disregarded. It is not introduced as a contribution to
neurology, and is in no way a ground for the author’s view.
The extent to which reference is interfered with by needs and
desires is underestimated even by those who, not having yet
forgotten the events of 1914-1918, are most sceptical as to the
independence of opinions and desires. Even the most ordinary and
familiar objects are perceived as it pleases us to perceive them
rather than as they are, whenever error does not directly deprive us
of advantages. It is almost impossible for anyone to secure a correct
impression of his own personal appearance or of the features of
anyone in whom he is personally interested. Nor is it perhaps often
desirable that he should.
For the demarcation of the fields where impulse should be as
completely as possible dependent upon and correspondent with
external situation, those in which reference should take prior place
from those in which it may be subordinated to appetencies with
advantage, is not a simple matter. On many views of the good and
of what should be, themselves results of subordinating reference to
emotional satisfactions, there could be no question. Truth, it would
be said, has claims prior to all other considerations. Love not
grounded upon knowledge would be described as worthless. We
ought not to admire what is not beautiful and if our mistress be not
really beautiful when impartially considered we ought, so the
doctrine runs, to admire her, if at all, for other reasons. The chief
points of interest about such views are the confusions which make
them plausible. Beauty as an internal quality of things is usually
involved, as well as Good the unanalysable Idea. Both are special
twists given to some of our impulses by habits deriving ultimately
from desires. They linger in our minds because to think of a thing as
Good or Beautiful gives more immediate emotional satisfaction than
to refer to it as satisfying our impulses in one special fashion (cf.
Chapter VII) or another (cf. Chapter XXXII).
To think about Good or Beauty is not necessarily to refer to
anything. For the term ‘thinking’ covers mental operations in which
the impulses are so completely governed by internal factors and so
out of control of stimulus that no reference occurs. Most ‘thinking of’
includes reference in some degree, of course, but not all, and
similarly much reference would not commonly be described as
thinking. When we drop something which is too hot to hold we
would not usually be said to have done so through thinking. The two
terms overlap, and their definitions, if there be a definition of
‘thinking’ as commonly used, are of different types. This is why
‘Thought’ was on an earlier page described as marking an oblique
distinction.
To return, the claims of reference are by no means easy to adjust
with other claims. An immense extension of our powers of referring
has recently been made. With amazing swiftness Science has
opened out field after field of possible reference. Science is simply
the organisation of references with a view solely to the convenience
and facilitation of reference. It has advanced mainly because other
claims, typically the claims of our religious desires, have been set
aside. For it is no accident that Science and Religion conflict. They
are different principles upon which impulses may be organised, and
the more closely they are examined the more inevitable is the
incompatibility seen to be. Any so-called reconciliation which is ever
effected will involve bestowing the name Religion upon something
utterly different from any of the systematisations of impulses which
it now denotes, for the reason that the belief elements present
would have a different character.
 Many attempts have been made to reduce Science to a position
of subjection to some instinct or emotion or desire, to curiosity for
example. A special passion for knowledge for its own sake has even
been invented. But in fact all the passions and all the instincts, all
human needs and desires may on occasion supply the motive force
for Science. There is no human activity which may not on occasion
require undistorted reference. The essential point, however, is that
Science is autonomous. The impulses developed in it are modified
only by one another, with a view to the greatest possible
completeness and systematisation, and for the facilitation of further
references. So far as other considerations distort them they are not
yet Science or have fallen out of it.
To declare Science autonomous is very different from
subordinating all our activities to it. It is merely to assert that so far
as any body of references is undistorted it belongs to Science. It is
not in the least to assert that no references may be distorted if
advantage can thereby be gained. And just as there are innumerable
human activities which require undistorted references if they are to
be satisfied, so there are innumerable other human activities not less
important which equally require distorted references or, more plainly,
fictions.
The use of fictions, the imaginative use of them rather, is not a
way of hoodwinking ourselves. It is not a process of pretending to
ourselves that things are not as they are. It is perfectly compatible
with the fullest and grimmest recognition of the exact state of affairs
on all occasions. It is no make-believe. But so awkwardly have our
references and our attitudes become entangled that such pathetic
spectacles as Mr Yeats trying desperately to believe in fairies or Mr
Lawrence impugning the validity of solar physics, are all too
common. To be forced by desire into any unwarrantable belief is a
calamity. The state which ensues is often extraordinarily damaging
to the mind. But this common misuse of fictions should not blind us
to their immense services provided we do not take them for what
they are not, degrading the chief means by which our attitudes to
actual life may be adjusted into the material of a long-drawn
delirium*.
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