Echo and
Reverb, Fabricating Space in Popular Music
1900-1960
by Peter Doyle
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown,
2005
293 pp., Trade, $65.00; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8195-6793-0; ISBN: 0-8195-6794-9.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@hogent.be
The creation, depiction, or representation
of spaces in popular music has never been
studied thoroughly as far as I know. Murray
Shafer has written about it in his groundbreaking
Soundscapes and several other
critics and historians of music like for
example David Toop have touched upon the
subject, but always sideways, as an afterthought
rather than as the centre of their analysis.
Not surprisingly, it took a musician with
the imagination and the sensitivity of
a novelist to bring acoustically imagined
space to the front and to write a history
of popular music recording from this perspective.
Peter Doyle brings in those qualities
and takes us on a journey from the very
earliest recordings of natural
and urban sounds through the
dance halls, jukeboxes and producers
studios of the first half of the Twentieth
Century. And what a journey it is! Exciting
from the first page till the very last,
with a guide who seems to know all the
tricks of recording and performing, who
intimately knows the instruments and the
equipment used at any stage and who clearly
loves to listen to and write about pop
music in all its aspects.
The title of this fascinating book is
just a little misleading. Echo and reverb
are certainly not the only tools engineers
and producers have used to create inner
and outer spaces, though they figure prominently
in productions from the forties on. Long
before that, the placement of microphones
relatively to the soundsource singers
or musicians was extensively used
to invoke a more or less spacious environment
and the addition of extra-musical sound
elements such as whistles, birdsong, trains,
footsteps and the sound of the surf also
helped the listeners imagination.
Echo, reverb and slapback properly came
into their own only later, when tape recorders
made their use easier and practically
ubiquitous in the recordings of Hawaiian
steel guitar bands, harp (the
blues harmonica) masters like Little Walter
and rock stars like Elvis. In fact, echo
and reverb at a certain point became so
common that the lack of it was felt as
a statement, a strong headed choice that
underlined the more marginal position
or attitude of the artist.
Peter Doyle follows a rough historical
line in his analysis. At each stage, he
gives a bar to bar description of some
exemplary recordings to illustrate the
effects used at the time and throws in
his own experience to build some understanding
of the resulting spatialisation. At times,
his analysis goes much further than a
mere description of the relationship between
production technique and imagined space.
In the chapter on Hawaiian bands for example,
he fruitfully and convincingly uses the
myth of Narcissus and Echo to explain
how the music expresses different types
of otherness and how in its
turn, this musical otherness helped listeners
to affirm their own normality
and identity. In a similar way, blues
musicians like the aforementioned Little
Walter and their producers - Doyle discusses
mainly Sun and Chess in this context -
used very different spatialisation techniques
from the mainstream crooners like Sinatra
and prepared the way for a radically new
way of listening by opening up the recording
space to include the audience rather than
keeping the performer bottled up in the
recording. So, this is much more than
a book on acoustically imaging space.
It is a history of the space created and
occupied by performers, producers and
audiences, and how that space evolved
over time.