The birth of pet sounds

Sean O'Hagan goes on a journey into sound, from Edison's wax cylinders to Jamaica's dub mastersSean

The history of recorded sound begins, funnily enough, with a nursery rhyme. In 1877, Thomas Edison recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" very loudly into a mouthpiece. "The sound was etched on to wax paper and played back," writes Greg Milner, in Perfecting Sound Forever, "making Edison the first human being to record a sound and reproduce it."

Edison continued to be involved in the evolution of the phonograph, and by 1915 he was demonstrating the superiority of his Diamond Discs to disbelieving audiences in a series of "tone tests". The most famous of these featured contralto Christine Miller singing along in Boston's Symphony Hall to a recording of her voice, then stopping suddenly so that the audience could hear how close the recording was to reality. Alas, Edison did not record their gasps of astonishment. The quest for what came to be known as high fidelity begins at this moment.

Perfecting Sound Forever is a history of recording technology since then. It takes in the coming –and going – of the gramophone, the cassette recorder and the CD player, as well as the advances in studio technology that matched, and sometimes outstripped, each shift in format. It is exhaustive and, at times, exhausting. You will learn far too much about the recording of Def Leppard's Hysteria and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' equally mindless Californication than you will ever need to know, and way too little about Brian Eno's influential adventures in ambient sound or Lee "Scratch" Perry's groundbreaking sonic experimentation.

For all that, the book is illuminating. Its main subtext concerns the notion of what Milner calls "presence" – the human element in recorded music that makes Bruce Springsteen's technically primitive Nebraska so much more fascinating than all the big production bluster of Born in the USA or, for that matter, the over-rated Born to Run.

Milner has interviewed the leading players in the fight against digital tyranny, the most unyielding of all being the American alt-rock musician and producer Steve Albini, who often prefers not to be credited at all on the records he works on, so disdainful is he of what the term "producer" has come to mean. Oddly, though, there is nothing here on the rise of the lo-fi musical genre that erupted in America indie-land in the late 1980s, part-influenced by Nebraska, in which artists such as Pavement and later Will Oldham and Bill Callahan rejected the airbrushed and multitracked for the raw and supposedly authentic.

Milner does give long overdue credit to the late King Tubby, the radio repair man who became a studio pioneer of Jamaican dub reggae, and without whom it would be hard to imagine hip-hop, techno and all their sub-genres. For technology freaks, the book provides a veritable history of gadgetry, from the four-track mixing desk to the advent of Pro Tools, software that allows the recording engineer to, as Milner puts it, "see the sounds as digital waveforms on a computer screen and move them around with the click of a mouse… and try 10 variations of an edit, and decide which one worked best". Pro Tools has made the business of recording much simpler, but, as with all such advances, something has been lost in the process. That something is "presence"; the ghost in the machine that makes recorded music sound almost human.

The last word goes to Neil Young, who, as contrary and observant as ever, once said of the digital recording revolution: "We'll look back [on it] and go, 'Wow, that was the digital age. I wonder what the music really sounded like?' We got so carried away that we never really recorded it. We just made digital records out of it." Edison would so not have approved.