Computer based recording studios reinvent the music production process

By Grant Derigo, Sarah Johnson and Jackie Rapp

Once technology began to allow performances to be recorded and then sold, the record labels began to replace the sheet music publishers as the music industry’s largest financial force. Radio stations began to spring up around the country as more and more people began to gather around the radio to listen to the latest hits. As production increased so did the demand for better ways to get the job done. The following video explains this in further detail:

One of the first major breakthroughs in audio recording technology came with guitarist Les Paul’s invention of the eight-track tape recorder. Prior to multi-track recording, all audio was recorded in mono. This means that if a song were to be recorded in multiple takes, each take would be permanently recorded onto the original audio. If a musician were to make a mistake, the entire recording would be ruined. With multi-track recording, each instruments part can be recorded separately and perfected before mixing the entire song down to two tracks, stereo left and stereo right.

Digital wave

One of the most recent technological innovations in the music recording industry is the digitization of music. The digitization of music is best thought of in this way: All sound is a result of the compression of air. Every sound is represented by a wave, and the characteristics of each sound are determined by the wave’s frequency and wavelength. When a sound is converted into a digital signal, its natural wave is sampled many thousands of times per second, creating a partial representation of the actual sound. The parts that are left out are so small that the only noticeable difference to the human ear is a slight loss in the quality of the sound. The result is that sound can be stored digitally by logging it in binary as ones and zeros, instead of physically recording it on tape.

Wave sampled at higher rate

This has a number of advantages. The most obvious being storage space. Today someone can buy a hard drive with a terabyte of memory (that’s enough space to hold about 275,000 mp3 songs) for about $100, that’s the same price as a roll of half-inch tape (that holds about 15 minutes). In addition to saving space when it comes to string songs, digital technology saves space on equipment. Digital processors can tailor sounds to replicate those produced by various sizes and models of amplifiers. That means a single processing unit could replace an entire room that housed every possible make and size of speakers.