Listening Assignment

I really enjoyed this listening assignment of the Beatles’ Revolver and and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album! It forced me to focus on so many things that I normally don’t think about when listening to music… What especially stood out to me was is how present all the instruments are. In Tomorrow Never Knows, there is a sort of echo sound to the voices, and the instruments are very present but at the same time sound distant from the voices. I read that there were a lot of technical techniques that went into the recording of Tomorrow Never Knows. For example, the song includes four different tracks, and each track is compressed in its own unique way. In Eleanor Rigby, the violin really seem to be the base of the song, but I noticed that there seem to be a lot of different violin sounds, some louder than others.

A lot of the songs on the Pet Sounds album are very harmonized and reminds me of Christmas music, I think this is because of the sleigh bells in tracks such as God Only Knows and You Still Believe in Me. As the Beatles’ album, the instruments in Pet Sounds is very present and if you focus on the music, you can hear how each instrument goes in harmony with the other instruments. I read that the producer of the album, Brian Wilson, was one of the first to record his work in fragments, which is really how most records are made today.