David Byrne was not like other boys. When he first heard Purple Haze, aged 14, the precocious future leader of Talking Heads informed his father that "the electric guitar has broken free from history". Two years later he was performing Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on the ukulele. At 18 he travelled from Rhode Island to the Bath festival but "exhausted after hours of listening to music I fell asleep on the damp ground". Rudely awakened by the main attraction, Led Zeppelin, he returned to his slumbers only to be roused by the appalling discovery that Dr John, playing his New Orleans "funky voodoo jive in full carnival drag", was being pelted with beer cans – "the most original act on the bill and he was completely unappreciated".
Ever against the grain, the now 60-year-old Byrne explores a whole symphony of argument in this extraordinary book with the precise, technical enthusiasm you'd expect from the painfully bright art school-educated son – born in Scotland, raised in the States – of an electrical engineer, occasionally mopping his fevered brow in the crestfallen manner of a 19th-century poet. The title is perfectly chosen. Music doesn't just work because of its effect on the senses; every aspect of its sound and construction has an emotional impact, right up to the way it's distributed, even marketed, and the machines on which it's consumed. It's fascinating.
Even before you hear music, Byrne points out, it has been shaped by the environment it was designed to be heard in, and by the equipment employed to make or record it. Much of the slow, stately western music of the middle ages sounds the way it does because it had to work within the four-second reverberations of stone-walled cathedrals (Bach's was more agile because he mostly wrote on a small church pipe organ). Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby capitalised on the arrival of the microphone as it allowed them to reach their predominantly female following with a whisper not a shout.
Arena rock of the early 70s evolved as a way of reaching the back of the sonically unsuitable sports stadia that the expanding market now required its bands to perform in. Talking Heads themselves fashioned their angular funk partly because it suited the acoustics of CBGB, the box-like New York club that launched them. Byrne no longer plays at Carnegie Hall, he explains, because it's designed for opera and thus deadens his current brand of highly percussive "groove music".
No amount of detail seems too much, especially in the section about recorded sound. The arrival of the phonograph in 1878 meant people no longer wrote just for live performance. There's the philosophical issue that "recording uproots music from its place of origin", and the "blasphemous" moral issue of technicians being brought in to hit the high notes that 1940s opera stars could no longer reach. There's a lovely description of the staff employed in early jazz sessions to physically shift the singer so the soloist could get near the only microphone (Louis Armstrong was so loud he stood 15 feet behind anyone else, Byrne marvelling at the logic that "the main guy in the band was stuck at the back!").
American boffins gradually realised the Germans must have cooked up a new recording device – surely their orchestras couldn't be actually playing at three in the morning on Hitler's morale-boosting broadcasts? When this futuristic new secret was uncovered – tape machines! – Bing Crosby insisted his label invest in one as he wanted to spend his daily "live radio shows" on the golf course.
Byrne applies his piercing analysis to each successive format, from the wax cylinder to the shellac and vinyl disc, the cassette, the CD and today's MP3 (about which he is fairly scathing: certain music has a calming and therapeutic influence on psychotic patients when on vinyl but apparently has the reverse effect when played off a computer). He confirms that fewer grooves on a disc allow a greater recording volume which gave shorter pop singles a powerful advantage on the radio and jukebox. He's intrigued by "compression" – like the taste-amplifiers now poured into food, you can make some digital recordings artificially louder than others, Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and most Oasis albums being classic examples. "They seemed amazing on first listen but rapidly wore on the ears."
No aspect of the musical experience is left unexplored, even its political dimension. The teenage Byrne felt Bob Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man opened a door he never knew existed and convinced him "music not only sounded different, it was socially different". The philosopher Theodor Adorno took the opposite view, essentially that "pop music was a drug pacifying and numbing the masses so they could be easily manipulated", and the Soviets had announced in 1928 that anyone caught listening to American jazz would get six months in jail. (The current Pussy Riot controversy suggests things haven't advanced a great deal.)
One word of warning: those looking for personal insights into Talking Heads will be wasting their time. They lived in a flat with no shower, toilet or heating on the Lower East Side in the 70s, Burroughs and Ginsberg over the road, and "you could never tell whether a comatose body on the sidewalk was drunk, high or dead". And that's pretty much all you get. Every other time the band is mentioned it's about the practical application of Byrne's musical philosophy.
But in a strange way this is an advantage too. Anyone can read this book – though, like me, they may tend to skip pages with pie charts on them, and their blood may run cold at chapter headings such as "iTunes Album Revenue" or "Physical Royalty Breakdown". Ignorance of the author and his catalogue won't stop you enjoying it. It may be academic – in fact its photographs are all lettered like footnotes – but Byrne's theories are robust and original, and his writing lucid and even self-mocking. Who wouldn't be gripped by the idea that Pythagoras noticed that the ping of a blacksmith's hammer was exactly an octave higher than the sound of one weighing twice as much? Or that our brains are so confused by certain frequencies that we can't tell the direction of an ambulance siren?
It was wildly ambitious to try and turn this galaxy of theory into a readable work of scholarship but Byrne has done it, and done it with style. Brian Eno might as well cancel that book deal now.
Mark Ellen is a magazine editor and broadcaster
