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This week has seen the passing of Geoff Emerick, who served as sound engineer on The Beatles' Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road albums, starting at the age of just 20. His death hasn't generated as much interest as those of George Martin or George Harrison, partly because his role was junior to other people working on the record, but mainly because even now most people are not fully aware of what the job of a sound engineer entails or why it is important. Songwriters have ideas, producers have a grand plan, musicians perform, but it's the sound engineer who allows these things to come together to make a recording. They may view themselves as technicians, aiming to reproduce a sound accurately (though 'accurately' is one of those things that means very different things to different people) or they may be working to mould the sound in subtle, often barely audible ways. 'Revolver', for example, has been called a "concept LP about close-miking," after Emerick insisted on breaking EMI rules to give the album that distinctively vibrant, intimate sound.

This tension between the technical and the creative has been there since the start. The father of sound engineering is a man called Fred Gaisberg, a piano player from New York who found himself working first for Berliner Gram-O-Phone, then its successor company, The Gramophone Company, later known as HMV. He viewed himself very much as outside the creative process, hoping to faithfully capture as many performances as he could with the limited time and materials available. Even with this approach, however, he managed to set up many of the standards which would be used by sound engineers for the rest of the acoustic era. Here is his description of the setup of a studio in New York, based on one of Gaisberg's technical drawings

"Two recording horns are used, with the violins (which recorded least well) nearest to them. Squashed around them are the woodwind players, who would have been reinforcing the string parts. Behind them, but higher, were most of the brass, with the French horns facing backwards in order to direct the sound from their bells into the recording horn, the players following the conductor in a mirror. The conductor is pushed out of the way to the side where he can be seen but doesn’t obstruct the sound. Bassoons reinforce the ‘cellos, and a tuba and contrabassoon replace double basses, which would not have recorded adequately. Another surviving photograph shows Paderewski recording into a pair of horns and, unusually, it allows us to see something of the coupling mechanism. For a typical studio layout for a recording of voice with piano accompaniment, the horn is hung right in front of the singer’s mouth, and the upright piano is set above and behind the singer at a height that ensures that the maximum amount of piano sound enters the horn. Pianists were instructed to play fortissimo throughout. Singers, on the other hand, had to move towards the horn for quieter passages, and away for louder notes to avoid distortion. Inexperienced soloists were guided back and forth by an assistant, sometimes on a form of trolley!"

from "A Brief History of Recording to ca. 1950" by Roger Beardsley and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music

We have already encountered Fred's work in a few different forms. It was he who fought to standardise releases as shellac records to be played at 78rpm, and he who set out to travel the world, recording Alessandro Moreschi and the first discs by Caruso, and doing much to set in motion recording in Asia and South America. It's due to him that this mix has such an international feel - not only in anthropological recordings, but in capturing exciting new kinds of music from Mexico, Cuba and Argentina. The third track in this mix, from the orchestra of Enrique Peña Sánchez, sounds for all the world like a frantic early jazz