When in 1967 the Beatles completed their LP Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, studio recording had reached its turning point. It no longer was a routine procedure designed to put recorded music on a support, like a vinyl disc, and it had become a creative process merging musical dexterity and technological ingenuity in a new form of art in its own right.

In this volume Susan Schmidt Horning recounts the historical transitions that enabled the Beatles, and many other groups after them, to experiment in recording studios. She accurately explains technological, social and cultural changes that typified the transformation of these spaces into laboratories devoted to, as the title suggests, chasing sound. The book is rich in detail and analysis, resulting from years devoted to researching into archives and collecting interviews (as well as Schmidt Horning's knowledge of the trade as a musician herself).

Two intertwined transformations in particular emerge as key to the changes that Schmidt Horning describes in the book. The first was the segmentation over several decades of a complex process, studio recording, into sub-procedures which could be separately managed, such as the recording, production and sub-production of a record and its re-production on a support. Along the way, studio recording stopped relying on mechanical devices and benefited from the introduction of electrical equipment to manipulate sound, such as microphones, mixing consoles and many other electronic gadgets.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, sound produced by musical instruments was captured by cones and transferred directly into mechanical record-cutting equipment. This kind of operation meant that the creative process was entirely disjointed from record-making and, unsurprisingly, detested by performers. From the 1930s the development of radio technologies and broadcasting led to the introduction of microphones in the recording studio and the separation of the areas devoted to recording and controlling the sound. After the Second World War, the introduction of the magnetic tape divided instead the two phases of recording and disc-cutting, thus allowing greater freedom for technicians and musicians alike. In the 1950s the spreading of independent studios, especially in the USA, catered for expansion and diversification in recording music. The appearance of multitrack mixers meant that in the following decade the whole process could be completely reconfigured. Each single musician in a band or orchestra now played and had his performance put on a separate track. The engineers would eventually assemble it with other tracks during production.

So what at the beginning of the century was a simple process requiring only one take, by the late 1960s had become a complex operation requiring no less than a dozen intermediate steps. These changes also entailed studio technicians changing their status and acquiring greater influence in studios. A plumber-like figure at the beginning of the century, the ‘recorder’ eventually morphed into the ‘sound engineer’, the real artist and innovator in recording studios. Aptly, Schmidt Horning draws on recent work in the history of technology and recalls the importance of interpretative categories such as tacit knowledge and amateurism to explain the rise of sound technicians. Even after professionalization, they sought to innovate the field by learning how to play with studio equipment rather than through specific training. She also investigates the social and cultural milieu in which these experts operated, analysing, for instance, how race and gender divides informed their work.

Schmidt Horning thus emphasizes the empowering role of technology within and outside recording studios, but also the power struggle that ensued because of the introduction of new sound equipment. By the time Sgt. Pepper was released, the sound engineer was the man in control and would even ‘get the musicians out of the way’ (p. 171) if need be. Jazzman Thelonius Monk, for instance, had a serious altercation with one technician who, by mistake, did not record his last performance. As one swearing Monk fumed and paced around the recording room before the next take, the engineer calmly revealed his newly acquired powers by using three apparently innocuous words: ‘stand by, please’ (p. 196).