Category Archives: Recording history

The 2018 ARSC Awards for Excellence

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Post submitted by the ARSC Awards Committee (David N. Lewis and Roberta Freund Schwartz, co-chairs)

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.  The awards will be presented at a ceremony on May 11, 2019, during ARSC’s annual conference in Portland, OR.  Additional information about the conference and the ARSC Awards for Excellence can be found at arsc-audio.org.

Begun in 1991, the ARSC Awards are given to authors of books, articles or recording liner notes to recognize those publishing the very best work today in recorded sound research. In giving these awards, ARSC recognizes the contributions of these individuals and aims to encourage others to emulate their high standards and to promote readership of their work. Two awards are presented annually in each category, for best history and best discography, and several others are acknowledged with Certificates of Merit. Awards are presented to both the authors and publishers of winning publications.

Winners are chosen by a committee consisting of three elected judges representing specific fields of study, two judges-at-large, the review editor of the ARSC Journal and the President or past President of ARSC. The 2018 ARSC Awards Committee consists of the following:

Dan Morgenstern (Jazz Music Judge); Jon Samuels (Classical Music Judge); Matthew Barton (Popular Music Judge and ARSC Past-President); Cary Ginell (Judge-At-Large and ARSC President); Richard Spottswood (Judge-at-Large); James Farrington (Book Review Editor, ARSC Journal); Patrick Feaster (ARSC past President); David N. “Uncle Dave” Lewis (Awards Committee Co-Chair), and Roberta Freund Schwartz (Awards Committee Co-Chair).

The 2018 Awards for Excellence honor books published in 2017.

The awardees are as follows:

BEST RESEARCH IN RECORDED ROCK MUSIC

Best History

Duane Tudahl, Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 and 1984 (Rowman & Littlefield)

Certificates of Merit

 

BEST RESEARCH IN RECORDED POPULAR MUSIC

Best History

David Yaffe, Reckless Daughter (Sarah Crichton Books)

Best Discography

Carl Magnus Palm, Abba: The Complete Recording Sessions: Revised and Expanded Edition (Carl Magnus Palm)

Certificate of Merit

Michael A. Amundson, Talking Machine West: A History and Catalogue of Tin Pan Alley’s Western Recordings, 1902–1918 (University of Oklahoma Press)

 

BEST HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN RECORDED JAZZ

Best History

Elaine M. Hayes, Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan (Ecco)

Best Discography

Cary Ginell, The Herbie Mann Picto-Discography (1952-2003) (lulu.com)

Certificates of Merit

 

BEST HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN RECORDED COUNTRY, FOLK, ROOTS, AND WORLD MUSIC

Best History

Roger Steffens, So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley (W. W. Norton)

Best Discography

Nick Leigh, Cajun Records 1946-1989 (self-published)

Certificates of Merit

  

BEST HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN RECORDED BLUES, GOSPEL, SOUL, OR R&B

Best History

Jonathan Gould, Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life (Crown Archetype)

Certificates of Merit

 

BEST HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN RECORDED CLASSICAL MUSIC

Best History

Harvey Sachs, Toscanini: Musician of Conscience (Liveright)

Best Discography

Jerome F. Weber, “Cantigas de Santa Maria” Discography (Plainsong and Medieval Music Society)

Certificate of Merit

Pierre Schaeffer, Christine North, and John Dack, Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay Across Disciplines (University of California Press)

 

BEST HISTORICAL RESEARCH ON RECORD LABELS AND GENERAL RECORDING TOPICS

Best History

David Giovannoni, Patrick Feaster, and Anne Thiollier, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, Inventor of Sound Recording: A Bicentennial Tribute (Archeophone)

Certificates of Merit

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Audio Recording Through the Ages

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This post was submitted by McGowan Transcriptions, and first appeared on their blog. McGowan Transcriptions is an audio and video transcription service provider based in the UK.

For many thousands of years of human history, we had absolutely no way of recording voices and sound for posterity. In fact, we didn’t even start writing things down until 3200BC, when people in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) created the earliest writing system– the cuneiform script. We can only guess just how much of history has been lost to time!

For this reason, the progress that’s been made in audio recording in the past 160 years alone is truly astonishing; technology has advanced in leaps and bounds. Starting with the invention of the somewhat rudimentary phonautograph (which could record sound but not play it back), we’ve progressed to advanced digital recording in less than two centuries. With more storage and digital files, we can carry our entire music libraries around on our smartphones, and even record sound on the go as and when we please.

Audio recording has never been so accessible and it is truly mindblowing to think just how little of spoken human history has actually been recorded in the grander scheme of things. We at McGowan Transcriptions decided to take a look at this fascinating history of audio recording and have created the following infographic to show our findings and the different advances that have been made.