As I tightened the final screw and heaved the turntable onto a shelf, another piece of the vinyl puzzle suggested itself: the utter lack of portability. The music is anchored in a physical place, typically in one’s home. How terribly limiting, I know. But could it also be that this adds to its appeal, that something in music pushes back against our impulse to stick it in our pocket and carry it along? The question may have deeper roots. “Originally,” the composer R. Murray Schafer has written, “all sounds were original.” In other words, you once had to be at a performance to hear what was played. Schafer coined the term “schizophonia” to describe the fundamental breach introduced by the advent of recordings: a separation of sound from its original source. In the early years of the phonograph, marketers seemed to intuit that the mind still needed a source onto which it could map what it was hearing. In his book “Capturing Sound,” Mark Katz describes the range of attempts made to close the gap, from the Illustrated Song Machine, which would cycle through images in time with the music, to something called the Edison Realism Test, offered in local record stores across the country. Customers were encouraged to sit in a quiet area and picture in their minds a live concert they had recently attended. Then — and only then, presumably — would they be able to grasp the recorded sounds as documents of an authentic performance, capable of moving a listener like the original. These days we may trust our recordings more intuitively, but newer habits of far-flung listening would seem to have only increased our collective schizophonia, precisely in ways that the digital revolution has loved to celebrate. (Your music — set free! At the beach, in the park, or while conducting your research on the North Pole!) Yet while this radical portability of listening can enable a pleasant embubbling of the self in public spaces, our connections to the music’s origins — as an actual event in sound — become that much more tenuous. Moreover, when music becomes a background soundtrack to life, it becomes easier to regard it as many people regard background soundtracks, which is to say, to barely notice it at all. By comparison, it was rather hard not to notice the freshly pressed and very hefty LP in my hands: a new recording of a live recital by the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov. Had vinyl in fact grown heavier, or did it only seem that way given the shrink-to-nothing tendencies of the journey from LP to CD to MP3 to the cloud? Yes, in fact, it has grown heavier — thanks to a new audiophile standard of pressings at 180 grams, up from the older 120 grams. The bulking up is said to have many sonic advantages on its own terms, but it is also, incidentally, a striking departure from the digital world’s guiding obsession with thinness. (Here’s some ad copy you won’t be hearing for the next iPhone: “Now 50 percent heavier than before!”) It’s not just the tactility of LPs, but also the experience of playing vinyl, that would seem to discourage the casual, ear-budded, aural-wallpaper approach to listening. Vinyl rewards close attention. The playing of the record is the event. The salience of this fact returned to me as I inaugurated my new turntable not with Sokolov, but instead with a favorite old recording of Brahms’s B-flat Major Sextet (with the Cleveland Quartet joined by Bernard Greenhouse and Pinchas Zukerman). There it was, the sound I still recalled: warm and uncompressed and present in the room. E-mails queued up and calls went to voice mail. I had no desire to do anything but listen. The Sokolov recording, in addition to being a dazzling performance, conjured a similar island in time. Listening, it turns out, is built into the early pre-history of the phonograph itself, and not in incidental ways. Historians of early sound reproduction tell of an obscure and long-vanished invention called the “ear phonautograph,” built by Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Blake as part of the journey toward the first telephones and phonographs. This device attached a stylus to the small bones and the ear drum of an actual severed human ear, and transformed speech through a horn into the sketchings of sound on smoked glass. In short, as Jonathan Sterne illustrates in his book “The Audible Past,” before we wanted machines to play us sound, we wanted them to listen. Sterne’s book and others in this genre are full of examples of famed inventions whose meanings and uses have evolved over time: telephone lines, for instance, that were once used to broadcast performances from the opera in Paris, or phonographs that people dreamed might one day be placed in post offices to record and play messages for those who could not read or write. In this spirit, and after playing as many old and newly pressed records as I could find, I realized that with vinyl, both nothing and everything has changed. It appeals today for the same reasons as it did back then — the warmth, the sound, the euphony, the presence — but also for a set of entirely new reasons. Or, better said, old reasons given new valences by the wake of technologies that were supposed to have taken its place.
That latter category of charms flows from the pleasures of slowness, tactility, intentionality, historical resonance, and a firmer anchoring of sound in a particular space. Perhaps vinyl is best thought of as the scenic footpath that still improbably wends its way in the shadows of the superhighway. Small wonder, actually, that so many are now treading it once more, or for the first time. Back in my own living room, the Mac’s sleep light appeared to have returned to its normal glow, apparently resigned to peaceably sharing its access to the amplifier. That’s good, because my newest addition to the stereo, this time, is here to stay. | 
發表於 2015-5-31 15:26
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