Despite the slightly paranoid opinions of the more reclusive audiophiles I associate with, I believe that home theater has contributed significantly to the advancement of musical reproduction. For instance, THX standards mandated flat frequency response from speakers. Many "audiophile" speakers deliberately avoided a flat frequency response in order to tailor the tonality, often with a familiar smile curve, to enhance what they felt would be the most impressive aspects of reproduction. Accuracy was a nice selling term, but few agreed on how to define it. THX, whether one agreed with the definition or not, at least set a standard, from which we, the consumers, benefited.
By knowing that speakers we were listening to met certain standards for on-axis frequency response, we knew what flat really meant. It did not ensure musical satisfaction, but did provide a reference for a world of audio in which factions often eschewed references of foreign standards, and baked up their own to taste, with justifications akin to "It just sounds right," or "It sounds more like music." Those statements hold water when made in the context of personal opinion, but is tantamount to, "We think it sounds good." Many audiophiles cued into loudspeakers with flat frequency response, and some found that they could indeed be musically rewarding, in some cases perhaps even more so than those altered to pander to taste.
Similarly, even though low frequency reproduction did exist before the cinematic experience came home, the demand for bass extension and output capability surged forward with the popularity of home theater, not as a matter of standardization, but as a matter of spectacle. Sound systems reproducing high-budget special effects had to keep up with thundering explosions, quaking rumbles, and even the subsonic grunt dubbed into every smack of a fight scene. And so the consumer demanded more. More extension, more output. Television speakers would no longer do, nor would mid-sized bookshelf or floor-standing speakers. Man wanted to move the earth, or at least his house, and the audio industry complied. Enter the "Home Theater" subwoofer, a mid/high-priced accessory necessary to get the most out of any home experience. Again music reproduction benefited. Although some shied away because of negative experiences with overdriven, boomy bass bombs, many enthusiasts realized that when they left the better performing subs online after the theater closed and music resumed, there were some notes on their relatively new digital medium that they hadn't noticed before.
The manifestation of roots music from African immigrants developed into American musical genres such as spirituals, blues, and gospel music. As the centuries progressed, spirituals and work songs extended to comprise distinctive song genres, particularly the blues of southern blacks. Work songs and spirituals from African Americans are regarded as a window into their cultural life, their songs interconnect the optimisms, burdens, and beliefs of slavery. Music was imbedded into life, songs were hummed on front porches, chanted in churches, and caroled in the fields. Melodies were passed down from parent to child and through connotations they mirrored the changing times.
Documentaries serve to draw a response through the use of literary techniques in order to present a particular point of view. Michael Cordell’s Music and Murder subscribes to this principle, the documentary focuses on three men serving prison sentences for taking a life and how music has changed and shaped their outlook on their own lives. Music, structure, verbal language and selection of detail all work on the viewers emotions which serve to draw a positive response towards rehabilitation in prisons.
While it is impossible to specify an exact date as to when the loudness wars began, we can study the trends of mastering over the past forty years, and, from our data, hypothesize when engineers began prioritizing loudness over quality. Before examining the levels of commercially distributed audio, the medium of recorded music must be taken into consideration. The earliest indications that loudness was prioritized in commercial music occurred on vinyl. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, 7” singles were extremely popular among bars, clubs and pubs housing jukeboxes. The jukebox would typically have a pre-set level for playback, so if records were mastered louder, they would...
Watching a movie in the 1920s was a cheap and easy way to be transported into a world of glitz and glamour, a world of crime, or a world of magic and mystery. Some of these worlds included aspects of current events, like war, crime, and advances in technology; while others were completely fictional mysteries, romances, and comedies. Heartbreakers, heartthrobs, comedians and beautiful women dominated movie screens across the country in theaters, called Nickelodeons. Nickelodeons were very basic and small theaters which later transformed into opulent and monumental palaces. When sound was introduced into film by Warner Bros. Pictures, “talkies” took top rank over silent films. “Movies were an art form that had universal appeal. Their essence was entertainment; their success, financial and otherwise, was huge” (1920-30, 3/19/11). Films offered an escape from the troubles of everyday life in the 20s, and moviegoers across the country all shared a universal language: watching movies.
Obviously the television isn't a new technological development; it's been around since at least the turn of the 1920’s and was readily available for public sale by the late 1930’s (Stephens). After the Second World War, the television expanded with its introduction into the commercial mainstream, and by 1955 it was estimated that roughly half of all American homes had at least one (Stephens). Although certainly impressive, this statistic would only continue to burgeon throughout the decades with the rise of color TV and cable b...
The history of sound in movies is very peculiar. It is hard to say when the first movie was made because of arguments to determine which was made first. Films were created between the late 1870s and the 1890s. Drawing the line to determine the definition of a film can be difficult. To define a film as a set of moving pictures, then the first movie would be Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion in 1878. Yet, there are other ways to determine the first movie such as the first home movie, Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888; the first movie ever shot using an ongoing film strip, Monkeyshines No. 1 in 1889 or 1890; the first movie ever copyrighted, Fred Ott’s Sneeze in 1894; the first movie that was ever projected, Workers Leaving Lumiere Factory in 1895; or even the first movie projected to a public audience, Berlin Wintergarten Novelty Program in 1895 (Wright). D...
Ever since humans first learned how to make music with their voices and with instruments thousands of years ago, music has been changing. Some changes took place over hundreds or even thousands of years, stunted by human isolation or by guidelines set in place by religious institutions. The 20th century, in contrast, experienced several rapid, radical changes in the popular genres of music. This made the 20th century a very rich time period for musical culture. These remarkable genres--including, but not limited to jazz, rock and roll, and the music of the “British invasion”--all influenced one another, and all influenced the culture we still live in today.
Music has been ingrained in the American heart for generations. From African American slaves singing songs to boost the overall happiness of the people they worked with (Songs in Slave Society, 2009) to the Beatles performance on The Ed Sullivan Show that was seen by 73 million people, or 40 percent of the U.S. population. (Lule, 2012) With the explosion in the popularity of owning a home radio, it has further shaped American culture and its values. In 1922 there were 60,000 households in the United States with radios; by 1929 the number had topped 10 million. (David Marc, 2000) When radio stations started, creating programming, it started breaking down racial bonds, not immediately there were still white only radio stations, yet Black radio became more common on the AM dial. (Lule, 2012) With varying musical styles that could be picked up on any radio by any race, enabling people to gain insight into different cultures, bringing with it, acceptance of those differences. Early Black disc jockeys even began improvising rhymes over the music, pioneering techniques that later became rap and hip-hop. This new personality-driven style helped bring early rock and roll to new audiences. (Lule, 2012) Between the years 1960 and 1966, the number of households capable of receiving FM transmissions grew from about 6.5 million to some 40 million. (Lule, 2012) During the sixties music was a platform for artists to share their feelings on many different social issues, including civil rights and race relations; drugs, affluence, and consumerism; the Cold War; Vietnam and the peace movement; the sexual revolution; women’s liberation; and ecological and environmental concerns. (Ward, 2002)
Before analyzing the history of Rock n’ Roll television, the history of how watching television came to become a popular must come into question. To summarize briefly, the invention of television was in development since the 1870s, however the first demonstration of live transmitted images in motion was in 1925 lead by Scottish inventor John Logie Baird (Radio Shows Far Away Objects in Motion). The image was of Baird’s business partner Oliver Hutchinson (Television), showing a mere five frames per second, it was an impressive sight for the time. With perfection of the invention, electronic televisions had been developed by Vladimir Kosma Zworykin with the help of the RCA radio...
Film was not always as it is today due to the digital sounds and graphic picture enhancements of George Lucas's THX digital sound in the late 1970s to enhance the audience's perceptions. Sound was first discovered in 1928 and the first films before that were silent. There is a social need to heighten an audience's film going experience and it allows each person to color their own views of what they see and presents either directly or indirectly society's moral values.
In Don DeLillo’s eighth novel: White Noise, warmly accepted by critiques, the author exposes, that the money gained colossal meaning during our time, plunging down other values like freedom of customer choice and respect for shoppers. In his work of fiction he illustrates how current world of commerce impacts our minds by manipulating our decisions, and also he indicates that a human nature demonstrates immense vulnerability for such attack. Moreover the ubiquitous commercials lead us to desire of having things we never tried before, to see things not worth seeing, to buy stuff we really do not need. The novelist tries to open our eyes to identify and understand how works this commercial destructive mechanism.
Beaver, Frank. "The Hollywood Studio System adapts to Sound." The 1930s. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000. 280-319.
As a musician, I always related to sounds in terms of musical application. The only sounds I paid attention to were those involved in creating and performing music. Musical sounds were the most important to me. Well . . . actually, as a traveling musician, any troubling sounds my car made were almost as important. The only other sound I appreciated was silence - something I valued after six nights of rhythmic and melodic saturation and the babble of three hundred or so party drunks.
Basoglu, M. et al., (2007) Torture vs Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment: Is the Distinction Real or Apparent? Archives General Psychiatry 64 277
Radio was at the top of its game during the 1930’s and 1940’s (Potter 226). In 1930 50% of all households had at least one radio, and by 1947 this had increased to 93% (Potter 226). Bye 1936, there was an average of one receiver per household, and in ten years, this had doubled (Potter 226). Sports fans loved the radio because not only could they hear live broadcast but if they missed the game they could get stats all day long. There was only one catch to sports fans listening to games on the radio. Some radio stations did not have enough money to broadcast the games live so they would have a telegraph operator transmit information back to the studio where sounds such as crowd noise, the crack of the bat, and other sounds of that nature were being generated while the game was being played elsewhere (“Going, Going, Gone!)).