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Timothy Day: A Century Of Recorded Music – Listening To Musical History (Yale University Press)

David Toop, The Wire, February 2001

BANISH RECORDED MUSIC and 41 pages, including record company advertisements, vanish from the pages of last month's Wire. Erase any evidence, awareness or memory of recorded music and there goes the rest. Our perception of music — what it sounds like, how it's made and what it's for — is conditioned so thoroughly by the recording process that we can only guess at what the world was like when music was available only by attending a live performance or reading a score.

Total word count of piece: 1131

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