From 'My Blue Heaven' to 'Race with the Devil': echo, reverb and (dis)ordered space in early popular music recording. Doyle. P. (2004)

Written by Peter Doyle (2004) Popular Music, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 31-49. Cambridge University Press.

Useful Quotes;

Doyle (2004) discusses that fact that echoes have a mystical quality then analyses various recordings from the period of 1920 through to the 1950’s looking at the use of spatial effects.

“Reverberation does much to define what we perceive as timbre, volume and sound colouration, and largely determines our perceptions of directionality and nearness.” (Doyle 2004 pg.3)

“Recordings became capable of picking up room ambience, of carrying, in other words, significant sonic information about the spaces in which they were made. Of this last point, Gelatt says:... the 'atmosphere' surrounding music in the concert hall could now be simulated on records. Musicians were no longer forced to work ... directly before a recording horn but could play in spacious studios with proper reverberation characteristics.”  (Gelatt 1977, p . 223)

“Increasingly during the late 1940s and early 1950s, some producers and musicians began to use echo effects to render unfixed, or (at least in part) anti-linear, self-consciously weird and/or futuristic spaces. And certain of the older style pictorially anchored spatial recordings during this period began to display an increasingly exaggerated pictorial field, as echo and reverb effects changed (in some cases at least) from being a covertly used producer's technique to an increasingly emphasised, featured gimmick.” (Doyle 2004 pg.9)

“Les Paul arguably did more than any other single operator in the recording industry to break the 'authenticity nexus' between the actual performance and the final recorded product, and some of his most arresting devices involved deliberate spatial plays.” (Doyle 2004 pg.10)