If you’re wondering what these visual recordings sound like, they are included in the recent CD-plus-book Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio: 980-1980, compiled, edited, and annotated by Patrick Feaster, one of the sound recording specialists responsible for bringing Scott’s phonautograms to life. ¹Feaster, who has a Ph.D. in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University, is an authority on early phonography and audio archeology, and with this unique collection, he prompts us to rethink the definition of historical audio. As source material he uses pictures—visual representations of sound, music, speech, rhythm—and these pictures get “played” in the same manner as a record player playing a record or an iPod playing an MP3. In Feaster’s hands, mute images that recorded sound graphically get converted back into audio, the result of which is to trouble commonplace ideas about what “sound recordings” are.

The way that Feaster gets sound from the images is tricky business, but not as tricky as one might imagine. Basically, he uses widely available software applications designed to “read” images and convert them into sound, which they do by treating them either as sound spectrograms (i.e., a graphic representation of a sound’s constituent frequencies) or as waveforms. Generally, this type of software is used by sound artists whose source material might be any kind of imagery—the Mona Lisa, a photograph of some kittens, whatever. But Feaster employs it to “read” material that was originally sonic, such as the encoding of a barrel organ as it was played by a celebrated eighteenth-century pianist or the transcription of waveforms from the grooves of a phonograph disc on to paper. Thus, through ingenious repurposing of software, Feaster is able to “play” the images produced through various kinds of experimental graphical recording, ranging from diagrams of the singing of Russian peasants to sound spectrograms prepared by the National Academy of Sciences in connection with an attempt by the FBI to develop a voice recognition program. And this does not mean “play” in some loosey-goosey, figurative sense. It’s quite literal, as evidenced by the results. With a bit of guidance from Feaster’s text, listeners to the CD can make out sounds that stretch from speech exercises and an after-dinner oration to a Bach fugue and the call of a bald eagle. Some examples are clearer or easier to make sense of than others, but Feaster excavates real and meaningful audio in every case.

This synesthetic work has numerous implications, resounds in numerous registers. First, it provokes a radically new periodization of sound recording history, as announced by the thousand-year time frame in Feaster’s subtitle. This does not, by any means, dull the sheen on Edison’s achievement (nor that of Emile Berliner, inventor of the disc phonograph, after him), but rather historicizes them in a new way, establishing a longue durée for ways that people have thought about, and worked on, capturing and preserving aural phenomena. Released from the fetters of modernity, sound recording sings of more varied human impulses. Admittedly, all of Pictures of Sound’s examples are drawn from the West and the lion’s share from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but taken as a whole, they sketch a new history of sound recording not based exclusively on conventional audio artifacts, and not based on the prevailing narrative that runs from Edison to the rise of the commercial music industry.

A second way that Feaster problematizes the concept of sound recording is perhaps even more important. In some of the examples, he produces audio from graphic images that were themselves constructions or composites. In other words, they are “sound recordings” in the sense that they represent sound, but they are not “sound recordings” in the sense that there was no originary event that was literally recorded. This is analogous to a “sound recording” of computer synthesized music today or heavily produced pop productions; we tend to call such things “recordings” but they are “recordings” of something that never existed previously. The same problem inheres in the term “play back,” for it is used even when there is no back—no prior sonic event. To get around this problem, Feaster proffers a new term for the process of bringing sound out of an object. Instead of audio “play back” or sound “reproduction,” he calls it eduction, from the verb educe, meaning “to bring out, elicit, develop, from a condition of latent, rudimentary, or merely potential existence,” ²and hence the subtitle of the collection, “one thousand years of educed audio.” In this way, Feaster can talk about producing audio from his sources without reference to their origins.

This coinage is also useful because it emphasizes the distance between putting sound into an object and drawing sound out of an object. As Feaster’s work demonstrates, these are ontologically distinct phenomena, which can exist entirely apart from each other. Sound can go into an object and not come out, as with a sound spectrogram (barring Feaster’s intervention), and sound can come out of an object with nothing originally having gone in, as with a “recording” of computer music. Thus, here and in his work more broadly, Feaster problematizes a commonplace (and seemingly intuitive) understanding of what a sound recording is, namely, a thing that conveys a sonic event from the past into the present, which it does more or less well, depending on its degree of “fidelity.” Rather, he opens up space to appreciate that what we call sound recordings are particular kinds of constructions, produced by any number of means and methods, and in any number of media. ³

Image by Joshua Wright

Long before “cassette culture” and DIY, there was a distinct culture of homemade media: bootleg records.  Even with the technological limitations of shellac and vinyl, pirates, collectors, and music fans figured out how to reproduce sound.  In doing so, they also invented a unique aesthetic of piracy in the form of the sleeves and liner notes of illicit (or at least unauthorized) records.  Due to a loophole in copyright that left sound recordings unprotected in the United States until 1971, bootleggers could at least claim that they operated in a realm of quasi-legality (though that claim was often disputed, as I explore in my book Democracy of Sound). Legal hijinks notwithstanding, bootleg records still had a touch of mischief about them: one of the most infamous (or celebrated, depending on your point of view) of bootleggers was jazz fan Dante Bollettino, who pressed his records under the “Jolly Roger” label.

Notably, most of Bollettino’s Jolly Roger records had no liner notes on the back and displayed no address–a hallmark of bootleg style that is not surprising.  The Roger bootlegs, though, still possessed the spare and iconic flare that defined numerous releases by Benny Goodman, Jelly Roll Morton, Cripple Clarence Lofton and others.

Other pirates infused their packaging and cover designs with a wry sense of humor, and few were so clever as the famous New York bootlegger Boris Rose, who manufactured countless jazz, blues, classical and showtunes records out of his small Manhattan apartment on 1st Avenue.  Many of Rose’s records were captured from fleeting radio broadcasts and remain invaluable documents of an era of ephemeral media that is largely lost to scholars.  And nearly every record was published by a different fictional label (like Jung Cat Records below), while Rose authored liner notes under phony names like Astyanax Schwarz and Kentwood P. Axtor.  Rose even inscribed humor into the tiniest fine print: a message along the edge promises that the disc is “a good musical record from Duck Run, Ohio”–a village made famous years later as the hometown of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, and even then it was best-known for being extremely tiny and obscure.

By the late 1960s, bootleggers took advantage of the new technology of magnetic tape to get hold of unreleased music that leaked from the studio, as well as to surreptitiously record live performances of artists such as Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix.  The most famous such bootleg was Bob Dylan’s Great White Wonder, the “basement tapes” that the folksinger recorded with the Band in 1967 but opted not to release.  When the recordings leaked in 1969, they touched off a flurry of piracy, as bootleggers embraced a flamboyant rhetoric that mashed together New Left radicalism and countercultural liberation.

The original Great White Wonder bootleg featured a plain white cover, seemingly modeled after the Beatles’ “White album” of the year before, but other iterations of the basement tapes soon became more complex and creative.

Some, though, remained modest and unadorned, like this recording of the San Francisco jam band It’s a Beautiful Day, which resembles nothing so much as a CD-R, hastily labeled with a permanent marker.

Many live bootlegs by the notorious California pirate Rubber Dubber featured the simple black-and-white aesthetic of Neil Young’s I’m Happy Y’all Came Down, though sleeves increasingly featured more abstract and elaborate imagery, such as this bootleg of Elton John and Leon Russell.

Bootlegs also provided an outlet in which pirates (and fans, for many bootleggers were fans and collectors themselves, rather than pure profiteers) could satirize and otherwise tweak the image of the artists whose music they recorded and copied.  The sleeve for Bob Dylan’s Little White Wonder, for instance, had some fun at the expense of the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman, and bootlegs of the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley frequently depicted them in ways that, at the very least, were not the way they chose to represent themselves.

And while bootlegs created a space for critique–quite literally, since the surface of a vinyl LP sleeve offers a bigger canvas than the bootleg cassette ever could–the politics of representation could still be dicey.  Punk pioneer Patti Smith is said to have embraced bootlegging and, in concert, even attributed some of her songs to have come from the seminal bootleg Teenage Perversity and Ships in the Night, rather than their official releases.  The Smith disc below toys with its own status as a pirate record with the seemingly paradoxical idea of a “free music store.”  But as other records showed, pirates’ depiction of Smith could go from punk and edgy to possibly sexist.

Whether their content was Patti Smith or Prince, bootleg records offer historians and music lovers not just a document of long-gone radio broadcasts, concerts, and unreleased records, but a little-known example of a mid-twentieth century folk culture: DIY media in an era before cassettes, four-track recording and iMovie democratized access to media production on a more massive scale.  Paradoxically, perhaps, the medium of vinyl provided an arena for sharing and commenting on music, while stamping the work of pop and punk icons with the listener-pirate’s own unique aesthetic and agenda.

Some records sit in university libraries and archives, largely unnoticed, while others can be found circulating on eBay and other online markets.  They are a prologue, perhaps, to the sharing culture that took shape in a post-punk era of the late twentieth century (or a post-Napster era of the early twenty-first century, if you prefer), but they provide a fascinating window into the ways that fans, collectors, and, yes, outright entrepreneurs threaded their way through a media economy seemingly geared toward standardized, mass production.  As scholars such as James Hildebrand and Brian Larkin have begun to recognize, they represent an archive of primary sources and material culture that deserve a history of their own, and have a lot to tell us about the life of music in the mid-twentieth century.

This piece is cross-posted from Tropics of Meta with permission from the author.

I have been collecting vinyl since the days when it was just called “buying records.”  My first purchase at age 5, made via my Dad, was The GoGos’ Beauty and the Beat, which I still own, now carefully tucked into a plastic sleeve.  And, thanks to my Dad’s gentle lesson in how to handle vinyl, it isn’t in very bad shape, either.  Record collecting was a thrill my father shared with me, creating a connection between us that sometimes held when other bonds were endangered.  No matter what, I always wanted to call him and tell him when I finally found a mint copy of Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall at a thrift store or Prince’s Purple Rain with the poster still inside.

A number of weeks ago, I was on a routine summer Saturday morning mission: trolling the yard sales in my neighborhood for kid’s stuff, used books, and vinyl.  While I never expect to find the holy grail of record albums at a yard sale, I am always willing to flip through piles of Barbara Streisand, Eddie Rabbit, Billy Joel, and Herb Alpert in the hopes I might uncover it.  Usually, I just end up taking in the ripe dusty smell and silently cursing the sad condition of the vinyl I find there, hating to leave even the most scratched-up Mantovani warping in the full summer sun.  But you never know.

On this particular Saturday, I was vinyl hunting with my infant son strapped to my chest and had my dog, He Who Cannot Be Named, pulling at the leash.  In effect, I had suburban motherhood written all over my body as I strained on my tip-toes to reach records at the back of the pile and whispered to my sleeping son about why I was so excited to find a Les Paul and Mary Ford record.  In the midst of my record reveries, I overheard a man next to me begin telling the proprietor of the yard sale about his record collecting habit.  He went on and on about how long he has been collecting, how many records he has, how he “just got back from buying a thousand records off a guy in Appalachin.”

My hackles were instantly raised by this conversation about record-size. I already felt a bit left out, as this man obviously chose to ignore the woman actually looking at the records in favor of the only other man around.  Vinyl collecting remains an overtly male phenomenon, as Bitch Magazine discussed in their 2003 Obsession issue. Although I am embodied evidence that women do collect vinyl, I am used to being in the complete minority at record shows, music conferences, and dusty basement retail outlets and overhearing countless conversations just like this one.  In spite of myself, I decided to jump in to the conversation. .  I thought I would cast out a lifeline to my fellow vinyl junkie, as the yard sale guy was obviously not interested and just humoring the record geek in front of him in the hopes that he would cart away the entire stack.  Plus, I miss geeking out with someone else who loves records.  After a lifetime in urban California, I now live in a small town in Upstate New York.  While the record bins are not so tapped out here, it is lonely going for a record head.  So I said to him, “I collect records too.  I can’t believe you found so many records in Appalachin.”  My invitation down the path of geekdom, however, was rebuffed.  “Oh,” he said, barely looking up, “yeah. It happens all the time.”  And then back to yard sale guy.

I tried not to take it personally, but it became impossible after this same scene was re-enacted at four or five different houses down the block.  This guy was like a cover version of the Ancient Mariner, compelled to tell man after man all about the size of his enlarging record collection, the beloved albatross around his neck:  “Man, have you ever tried to move a thousand records all at one time?  They are so heavy and they take up so much space!”

And, I was the invisible witness to his tale of obsession, love, and woe, silently flipping through records just a few steps ahead of him.  That is ultimately how I knew he did not see me as an equal rival in the world of vinyl hunting—he let me get ahead and stay ahead in the bins, neither sneaking peeks at what I pulled or, fingers flying, moving faster and faster in the hopes of overtaking me.  He just assumed that I, dog in hand and baby on chest, would pull complete crap.

My listening ears then, bear the weight of my gender and the limited ways in which women are expected to engage with music.  Women remain perpetually pegged as teeny-bopper fan club leaders and screaming Beatle fans, perpetually deafening themselves to the “real music.”  Despite the deft critiques of Norma Coates, Susan Douglas, and Angela McRobbie, in which the early Beatles audience is re-imagined as proto-feminist and teenaged girls’ bedrooms are viewed as sites of cultural competency rather than deaf consumerism, my female ears remain cast as those of a groupie but never an aficionado, as if the two are somehow mutually exclusive.  Imagine the Ancient Mariner’s surprise when this vinyl mama plucked pristine copies of The Cure’s Faith, The Fania All Stars Live at Yankee Stadium, and Aretha Franklin’s Live at the Fillmore West right out from under his own blind ears.

This piece is cross-posted from Sounding Out! with permission from the author.