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Imperfection gets engineered
Tape and its accidents
Fifty years ago, recording ran on tape. Engineers had to decide in the room whether to keep a take, because tape ran out and editing meant cutting it with X-Acto knives and taping it back together. That is why old records, like an Elton John record, keep small accidents, such as a hat falling on the keys during a great take. Now a song can be played pluck by pluck and chopped into the perfect take, and a bad one is fixed by hitting it again.
Staged accidents
As soon as imperfection reads as life, it gets engineered. Someone finds a hat to drop at the right moment. Some Nashville sessions are performative in this way: they want a record to sound natural so badly that they stage it, a kind of artificially natural built on tricks from famous records.
Performed authenticity
The same goes for looking unpolished. Once an authentic look succeeds, teams spot its commercial value, and people begin performing authenticity. For a while he wouldn't run ads at all and drove his team crazy, holding to lines he wouldn't cross.
How did engineers edit tape?
Engineers marked the spot to cut with a grease pencil, laid the tape in a metal splicing block, and sliced it with a razor blade, often at a slight angle. The two pieces were then joined with sticky splicing tape. The method let producers rearrange sections of a recording, but any mistake cut a piece out for good. Bands recorded to tape this way through the 1950s and beyond.
How did Pro Tools change recording?
Digidesign released the first version of Pro Tools in 1991, which let engineers record and edit audio on a computer screen. Cuts, moves, and fixes could be undone, and a performance could be assembled from pieces of many takes, a method called comping. Notes could be nudged into time with a feature called quantizing. By the early 2000s, Pro Tools had become a standard in professional studios.
Why do listeners prize flaws as authentic?
In 1966, psychologist Elliot Aronson found that a highly capable person was rated as more likable after making a small blunder, such as spilling coffee. The result is known as the pratfall effect. It does not hold for people seen as average, who become less liked after a blunder. Flaws can therefore make a very polished performance feel more human.
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