[78-L] surface noise feedback on acoustic recordings

[DAVID BURNHAM]

I think it was Martha who first posted the observation that in the acoustic era, the performer would hear surface noise back through the horn while recording.

This was new to me, I'd never heard of that before, but I can think of at least two uses for this phenomenon: first of all, there would be no need for someone in the control room to tell the artist when to start, they could just start a few seconds after they hear the surface noise.  Secondly, if Patti Page had been recording 30 years earlier, she could easily have done her over-dubbing trick.  After the first take, they could have used the same record to record the second track and she would have heard the first track coming out of the horn while she was singing the second part.

I can't imagine that the noise coming from the horn while recording would also have reentered the horn, unless there was a hard surface close by to reflect it, but I once read an article by Peter Dawson where he said that, before the era of disc recording, he would spend a whole day in a room, surrounded by about a dozen cylinder recorders, singing the same song over and over again, (actually he said the engineer would go around to each machine, start it recording and say into the recording horn the title of the song and that it was sung by Peter Dawson then stop it.  When he had done this to each machine he would operate a master switch which would start all of the machines and Dawson would sing his song.)  But I'm thinking what a lot of noise there would have been in the studio with a dozen machines generating surface noise all at once.

db