Surface Noise
In an excerpt from his book The New Analog, Damon Krukowski looks at the aesthetics of noise in analog music—and what we’ve lost in the transition to digital recordings.
Guillermo Galindo, Fragmented Surveillance/Vigilancia fragmentada, 2014, pigment print, 11 11/16″ × 16 1/2.” Currently on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
My favorite records sound the worst, because I’ve played them the most. Each time a needle runs around an LP, it digs a little deeper into the grooves and leaves its trace in the form of surface noise. The information on an LP degrades as it is played—as if your eyes blurred this text, just a bit, each time they ran across it.
Analog sound reproduction is tactile. It is, in part, a function of friction: the needle bounces in the groove, the tape drags across a magnetic head. Friction dissipates energy in the form of sound. Meaning: you hear these media being played. Surface noise and tape hiss are not flaws in analog media but artifacts of their use. Even the best engineering, the finest equipment, the “ideal” listening conditions cannot eliminate them. They are the sound of time, measured by the rotation of a record or reel of tape—not unlike the sounds made by the gears of an analog clock.
In this sense, analog sound media resemble our own bodies. As John Cage observed, we bring noise with us wherever we go:
For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds.
Silence is death, the ACT UP slogan painfully reminded us at the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1987. Why seek it out as a part of our musical experience?
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A–A–D
The switch to digital media for music seems obviously disruptive now, but in the mideighties, it was so anodyne my musician friends and I hardly took notice. CDs arrived on the consumer market like any other hi-fi marketing scheme, with promises of cleaner sound, greater durability, and a smaller footprint in your living room—all at a correspondingly deluxe price. For those of us happily wallowing in LPs, it sounded like a pitch designed to part bored businessmen from their money. Let them have their new toy, my friends
