Such is our familiarity with recorded sound, it is easy to underestimate the extent to which it changes our understanding of past performance styles. Many of the imperfect attempts in written media to capture and elucidate aspects of performance before the recordings era began were in a way rendered obsolete by the ability to hear the playing itself. Similarly, the facility to replay a recording ad infinitum has a profound effect on performance studies. It is perhaps an obvious thing to consider how inadequate words are to convey a detailed qualitative assessment of a lived experience, and the resort to hyperbole, simile, metaphor, and indeed declamatory exaggeration might be seen as attempts to parse a vivid aural experience in a different form. An aspiration towards ‘historically informed performance’ in the environment of the ‘silent ages’ before recording is therefore perhaps little more than an unrequited hope. In terms of studying posture and inferring technique the nineteenth-century invention of photography mitigates this situation to a small extent in the immediately preceding decades to the pioneering of recording technologies in the 1880s, but, even so, can in itself only deliver a limited scope of information for the historical performer.

With recorded sound, then, we can hear actual aural traces of the application of ideas in performance itself, and how aspects of organology, treatise advice/ judgement, and score publication, for example, created performances themselves. This may be via the ghostly remoteness of an acoustically limited early recording; it may also be via the piano roll (which can be ‘performed’ in the present time but, obviously, is historically revealing only in so much as the technology is able to replicate the original performance). There are issues here with two basic elements: the ‘recording’ itself, and the means of transmission or ‘playback’ a considerable time later. In the case of both piano rolls and acoustic recordings, for example, doubts can be cast on the ability of such technologies to elucidate faithfully the sounds themselves, due to technological limitations of recording and playback equipment.