[78-L] BACKGROUND ARTIFACTS (WAS Hal Kemp record question)

[David Lennick]

And then there's the Bruno Walter/Paris Conservatory Orchestra recording of the 
Berlioz "Symphonie Fantastique" made in the late 30s, where all through the 
slow movement you can hear somebody banging away on the roof (or trying to dig 
his way out of the tower).

And the famous dog barking during an Ormandy Columbia LP..this happened when 
they transferred the lacquers to 33RPM and ran it through their "echo chamber" 
which happened to include an air vent open to New York street sounds.

Over the years we've documented buzzer sounds, a "how was that" at the end of 
one of Robert Wildhack's monologues, foghorns in the East River audible on a
Caruso record and the like....

I still have to dig out that Harry James record.

dl

JACK DANEY wrote:
> 
> 
> As Dave Lennick pointed out it's not likely you're  "hearing things". Around
> 1944 I had Miller's Bluebird 78 of the "Anvil Chorus." On side two behind
> the softer passages I could  hear an animated conversation going on. It was
> plainly audible but too much in the background to make out any details or
> discern whether there were one or two persons. The reissues I have are minus
> the artifact.  I've come to suspect that it was probably a one-sided
> dialogue of someone in the vicinity of the recording lathe talking on the
> phone and as the result of some leakage somewhere it wound up on the disc.
> In a recording studio, almost anything was possible and Murphy's law was
> always at the ready.
> 
> Better than that is Harry James' 1941 recording of "The Devil Sat Down &
> Cried." On the instrumental interlude between vocals one can (almost)
> plainly hear someone way off mike shout, "Aw, go F...yourself!"  I'd never
> noticed it until it was brought to my attention by the local small record
> shop proprietor in the mid forties. Once having heard it it was impossible
> to miss. I asked Helen Forrest (who is on the record) about it when I worked
> with her in 1956. She was unaware but said that with that band in those
> days, anything could happen. It's on all the reissues I've heard, btw.  Next
> case....
> JD
> 
> 
>