ABSTRACT
The concept of replicable art, art made for reproduction, is particularly apposite for sound recordings. This chapter explains that the various technological, social and economic pressures have acted in a way to bring about this development. The idea of a contemporary musical recording as a reproduction of a real musical event is not tenable as, using multi-track magnetic tape recording, the final recording is assembled and 'reconstructed' from a number of fragments, and so there is no 'original' of which that published recording can be a reproduction. Illusion is fundamental to studio recording. There is a genre of popular music recording which does have the elements of a real performance. The 'live' recording is ostensibly based on actuality, typically a concert, and claims to offer a reproduction of that event yet, even here, the finished recording offers only an illusion of a reproduction, neatly illustrating some of the technical compromises that must be made.
