Sound Effects

Sound effects is the utility category for recordings whose content is sound itself rather than music: libraries of mechanical, environmental and everyday noises made for radio, film, theatre and home listening. Its classic form is the LP era library, from *Tony Schwartz*'s New York field tapes to *Jac Holzman*'s thirteen-volume "Authentic Sound Effects" series for #Elektra#, which catalogued car crashes, telephones, trains and thunderstorms with documentary precision. The category extends to soundscape and demonstration records — hi-fi test discs, haunted-house novelties, nature recordings — in which fidelity and recognisability, not composition, are the point.