The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, Second Edition

An extended meditation and dialogue on what the process of recording does to music. Why do people collect recordings? What makes some recordings special? The book draws on Glenn Gould's ideas about recording, pits Aristotle against Plato in terms of how music works on the emotions, and includes several anecdotes and portraits of music fans of Eisenberg's own acquaintance. It's occasionally uneven, but rarely dull. The second edition has new material about the arrival of CDs and online music.

The author describes how scientists studying the growth of complexity in nature are discovering order and pattern in chaos. He explains concepts such as nonlinearity, the Butterfly Effect, universal constants, fractals, and strange attractors, and examines the work of scientists such as Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, Edward Lorenz, and Benoit Mandelbrot.