The once-ubiquitous, but tragically underappreciated fade-out in music appears to be near its end. And like a classic example of itself, the decline has been long, gradual, and barely noticed.
The fade-out—the technique of ending a song with a slow decrease in volume over its last few seconds—became common in the 1950s and ruled for three decades. Among the year-end top 10 songs for 1985, there’s not one cold ending. But it’s been on the downturn since the ’90s, and the past few years have been particularly unkind. The year-end top 10 lists for 2011, 2012, and 2013 yield a total of one fade-out, Robin Thicke’s purposely retro “Blurred Lines.” Not since the ’50s have we had such a paucity of fade-out songs.
Composer Gustav Holst understood the power of the fade-out and employed one of the first at a 1918 concert. For the “Neptune” section of The Planets, Holst had the women’s choir sing in a room offstage. Toward the end, he instructed, the door should be closed very slowly: “This bar is to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance.” Given the subject matter—Neptune was thought to be the most distant planet in the solar system—Holst’s attempt to conjure the remoteness of the planet and the mysteries of the cosmos makes sense. Early fade-outs on record similarly ascribed real-world scenarios, like the passing train of George Olsen’s 1930 song, “Beyond the Blue Horizon.”
Back when recording was strictly mechanical, in which the vibrations of sound waves directly created the grooves on discs or cylinders, it took heroic efforts to end a recording with a fade. Patrick Feaster, an ethnomusicologist at Indiana University Bloomington who specializes in the preservation of early sound media, says doing so usually meant slowly carrying the phonograph away from the sound’s source. He points to an 1894 Berliner Gramophone record, the “Spirit of ’76,” as an early example—on the recording, we hear a fife and drum band seemingly approach and then march away.
Advances in technology played a big part in the rise of the fade-out. Electrical recording emerged in the 1920s, allowing studio engineers to increase or decrease amplification. And achieving the effect became even easier when magnetic tape recording became widely available in the ’40s and ’50s. Many early fade-outs were added simply because engineers were short on time: To meet the demands of radio, or the limited runtime of one side of a vinyl single, they had to make the record fade out early.