Sounds of Our Times

At first, the record seemed to give off only a series of rumbles and gurgles. But soon the irregular surges and lulls began to sound like the surf, playing on pebbles, crashing on rocks, growing louder and louder until a big one landed with a thunderous roar, and the listener could almost see the flying spume and the screeching seagulls. Then, evoking a passage into a quiet bay, little waves lapped with a feathery sound on a soft beach, and a bell buoy clanked mournfully. On the other side of the record was a kind of aural shipboard narrative, beginning with the gorgeous sound of the Queen Mary's deep bass whistle, and ending with the horrid harrumph of the West Quoddy Head horn.

The record, Voice of the Sea, is the latest product of a Stamford, Conn, sound engineer, Emory Cook, who got into the record business with an equally unusual record of chiming music boxes, built his label (Sounds of Our Times) up to the point where he is now releasing full-scale symphony LPs, has other record executives keeping a slightly envious eye on him. Cook's market remains mostly "audiophiles," who shiver in ecstasy over a tingling triangle while hardly noticing whether the music is a symphony or a psalm. But the number of listeners who look for realism in recorded sound is multiplying every day. Last year, hi-fi fans bought 100,000 Cook LPs.

Sound Composer. After an engineering education, Cook started out doing radar work with Western Electric, then designed advanced equipment for making records. Next, he turned to making test records ("We've put 20,000 cycles on disks when everybody was crowing about reaching 15,000").

More or less for kicks, he began recording concerts from the radio. In 1950, stubbornly convinced that he could make better records than he could buy (he ridicules most current ''high-fidelity" products as "high fidoodledy''), Cook spent a few rainy nights among the shunting yards of Harmon and Peekskill, N.Y. to record an LP called Rail Dynamics, whose clanking drivewheels and hissing steam valves are just about the most realistic sound effects in the business. For Recordist Cook, the disk represented an attitude. "The basic reason for serious records," says he, "is to preserve something ; a performance, a situation, a sound, an emotion." It also represented a creative act, for in editing down his thousands of feet of tape, Cook found he was forced to "compose" in natural sounds.

Among his other early efforts: a rickety nickelodeon piano, a summer thunderstorm, a parade of an Irish bagpipe band.

Audio Account. Despite the fact that his recordings sounded far more realistic than most commercial releases, Engineer Cook was still dissatisfied. No matter how many microphones he used to pick up sounds--or speakers to reproduce it--everything was reduced to a single groove on the record. It all sounded to him "like listening through a porthole." His solution: adapting binaural or stereophonic sound (picked up by two microphones, fed through two channels and reproduced separately by two speakers) to records. Big companies, including Victor, see the straws in the wind, are quietly making binaural tapes of all their major recordings.

Today, Recordist Cook is busily tracking down musicmakers wherever they are. On a recent swing through the South and Mexico, he taped an old-style blues shouter (Lizzy Miles) in New Orleans, a honky-tonk piano man (Red Camp) in Corpus Christi, a giant organ in Morelia Cathedral. Last week, Sound Hunter Cook loaded his powder-blue Cadillac with recording equipment and set out in quest of another sound composition: an audio account of an evening at Minsky's burlesque theater in Newark.

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