Skip to main content

White Christmas

Today I learned how the song White Christmas helped make Silicon Valley.

I picked this tidbit up because I subscribe to The Honest Broker1 written by Ted Gioia2. I've now read so many good pieces by him that I always pause to take the time to read his essays. Gioia helped start the jazz studies program at Stanford, makes great music recommendations, writes interesting cultural pieces, and his brother was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

I've always kind of understood the effect that broadcasting, recording, and amplification had on music and I've even gone so far as to compare those advances to my career in an essay3. During the 1920's Bing Crosby learned to capitalize on microphone and amplification technology. No longer having to shout to sing is how he became the king of cool crooning. Crosby's "White Christmas", the best setting piece of recorded music ever made4, couldn't have been recorded otherwise with his vocals over the orchestra.

White Christmas was recorded in 1947 while Crosby was doing two live radio shows for audiences on both coasts. Bing was a pioneer in radio. Crosby wanted to pre-record the shows so he commissioned Ampex5 to build the recording technology and they shipped their first two units in April 1948. Crosby gifted his friend Les Paul an Ampex recorder and he began experimenting with overdubbing and mixing which by the early 1950s became multi-track recording. Les Paul had the very first Ampex 8-track recording machine in his home. Sam Phillips bought one in 1950 to open Sun Studios in Memphis. Ampex technology led to the VHS tape and the instant replay in sports broadcasting. Dolby was an engineer there. Ampex technology would become indispensable for music, film, and television. It changed everything from live to pre-recorded, mixed, and edited.

If you think about it, Thomas Edison's record player and motion picture devices were data storage solutions. Ampex was directly involved in almost every computer magnetic and optical disc recording system like hard drives and floppy discs. Ampex settled into Silicon Valley and became known as Ampex Data Systems. Most consider the Hewlett-Packard garage as the "birthplace of silcon valley"6 in 1940, where they made an audio recording oscillator which Walt Disney bought to make Fantasia, but Ampex was the earliest in developing the tape that made computers practical. The first Univac 1 was delivered to the US Census Bureau in 1951 and IBM shipped the first Model 701 in 1953.

Bing Crosby moved to Silicon Valley in 1963 because he didn't want to raise his children in Hollywood. The influence on recording and computers will now be my first association when I hear White Christmas.

References​

Footnotes​

  1. The Honest Broker - https://www.honest-broker.com ↩

  2. Ted Gioia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Gioia ↩

  3. Net Jockey - https://davidawindham.com/net-jockey/ ↩

  4. White Christmas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(song) ↩

  5. Ampex - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampex#Origin ↩

  6. "Birthplace of Silicon Valley" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Garage ↩