Apple’s “The Song” holiday ad has managed to pretty universally tug heartstrings, in keeping with its usual practices for this time of year, but the product story contained therein is one of a creative workflow that involves most of Apple’s current product lineup. A new behind-the-scenes video the company has just published shows that Apple’s cutting edge tech was paired with some very early recording gadget antiquities to come up with the ad’s movie magic.
The “vintage” found recording discovered by the ad’s protagonist was actually laid down by a present-day recording artist, but the pops and audio features that make it sound like it’s from the 40s are authentic: a recording booth, which let tourists wandering boardwalks press their own records on the spot from minute-and-a-half recordings of their own voice was used to create the source track the young woman in the ad later remixes for her elderly relative.
Apple uses the making-of video to draw some parallels between the social impact of voice-o-graph recording booth studios, which let people hear their own voice recorded for likely the first time, and Garage Band, which lets many amateur recording artists prepare their own tracks for sharing with the world without any special technical expertise required. The recording booth at its inception was probably a little more difficult to wrap your head around, but it’s an effective comparison nonetheless.