At the end of the 1960s, The Beatles decided to quit live performances and concentrate their effort on their recordings, with the idea that the record would be the one that travelled around the world. Popular music fans and scholars tend to assume that Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band started a new moment in the relationship between music, performance and technology, a kind of founding moment. There are several outstanding books and articles devoted to analysing the role of technology in the music produced from that moment on (for example, Zak Reference Zak2001; Zagorski-Thomas Reference Zagorski-Thomas2014), but we tend to forget the history of developments, inventions, tensions and decisions that allowed the Fab Four to use the studio as a laboratory of sound and music. Sgt Pepper also means the end of a historical process of the invention and development of recording studios and techniques ‘from capturing sound to the engineering of an illusion’ (p. 33).

Chasing Sound is about all these years before the invention of the LP, the motivations of the famous producers and the use of the recording studio as a musician's tool. It is a book that goes through the several processes that concluded in the decade of the 1970s, when, as Time magazine pointed out, ‘making music, for the first measurable time in history, is the most popular form of entertainment in America’ (p. 210). These processes are related to the ways music is created and transmitted to listeners and also to the way listeners have been educated to attend to the sound of the records and not only the songs (p. 131). The history of the recording studio is also about the never-ending redefinition of the role of musicians, producers and engineers and the tensions between the concept of music each of them have in their mind. And it is also, of course, about technical devices and inventions and the way these tools have framed the actors’ behaviour in the music business.

Schmidt Horning, who teaches history in New York, has written a very detailed book which is at the same time dynamic, as the main sources are the opinions and voices of the protagonists of the history, both individuals and institutions. There are quotes from interviews and magazines, but there are also a lot of them coming from technical or business newsletters and leaflets that inform the readers about a complex context when two different fields of expertise meet for the first time. Musicians and engineers were, in the beginning, in different businesses, but seven decades of cohabitation concludes with the arrival of a new class of professional, one who needed to ‘possess the brain of an engineer but the heart of an artist’ (p. 102). That cohabitation was not fluid at the very beginning, when singers sang directly to the horn to record on the wax surface while technicians were hidden from the artists’ eyes as ‘how it is equipped and how it does its work are department secrets that even the artist are not permitted to know’ (p. 14). This secrecy disappeared over time, as musicians began to realise that the production of records should be focused not so much on the performance sound but on the ears of the listeners. Orchestral conductors Andre Kostelenetz and Leopold Stokowsky were the first to demand to enter the control room because they realised that ‘what radio listeners heard – that is, what went through the studio mike into the control room and out over the air – was markedly different from what the orchestra played in the studio’ (p. 97). Not by chance, one of the first popular music producers, Mitch Miller, was one of the musicians who had worked with Kostellanetz in the studio. He was one of the ones who guided his work with the idea that to create records in popular music was not about recording certain instruments but about catching a certain feel (p. 92).

The need to capture the feeling of the performance – ‘the illusion of the presence of the artist’ (p. 35) – and to reach a recorded sound as similar as possible to listening to the musician live drove most of the technological developments that have configured the studio as we now know it. The microphone was without doubt the tool that modified popular music's sound the most. As had happened before with the phonograph recordings, the artists that reached popular recognition were those who were able to ‘adapt their skills and talent’ (p. 12) to the exigencies of the new tool. The development of magnetic tape and, later, the possibility of using multitrack recordings gradually liberated musicians to what the pianist Glenn Gould has called ‘the limitations that performance imposes on the imagination’ (p. 5).

But at the same time, during the reading of the book we are also witness to a transformation of the physical space of the studio, from large ballrooms where sound can move in a lively manner to dead rooms. Echo chambers, compressors and equalisers equipped the control room with more powerful tools to manage the sound from an analytical approach. The technician, at that moment, was provided with a console from which s/he can take care, in real time, of each one of the elements of a recording, managing each of them individually. Not surprisingly, ‘recording engineers frequently cite the flight metaphor to describe feelings of trepidation at the responsibility suddenly thrust on them’ (p. 128). The story narrated in Chasing Sound ended precisely when technicians reached a new status and the role of the producers – half musician, half technician – became central in popular music.

The advent of multitrack recording radically changed the way in which music was produced and performed. It also radically changed, as Schmidt Horning insists, the relationship between live performance and recorded sound. When multitrack recording became the rule for studio work, there were ‘no longer reproductions but productions’ (p. 198), as an RCA publication stated. The team work and the tension that eye to eye contact between musicians produced during live performances were removed from the recording when musicians were allowed to lay down tracks separately, days and even months apart. ‘The producer-artist-engineer team and the multiple set of ears that once offered a much needed perspective of the process were no longer there to listen’ (p. 211).

The final result was that popular music ‘ceased to have the same meaning it had before. Artifice is the new nature’ (p. 216). This statement might sound nostalgic, but Schmidt Horning's journey through studio recording does not end with a sentimental touch. Instead, she signals the paradoxical nature of the result of one century of recording. ‘The irony is that, as engineers got ever closer to the ability to capture the essence of a live performance, they did so only by removing the live performance from the recording studio’ (p. 219). The sound that Les Paul and all those who developed the art of studio recording were chasing for decades has been created by the skills, talent and practical imagination of technicians and musicians.