Recording Analysis

How the Record Shapes the Song

William Moylan

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317207153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Acoustical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Recording Analysis: How the Record Shapes the Song identifies and explains how the sounds imparted by recording processes enhance the artistry and expression of recorded songs.

Moylan investigates how the process of recording a song transforms it into a richer experience and articulates how the unique elements of recorded sound provide essential substance and expression to recorded music. This book explores a broad array of records, evaluating the music, lyrics, social context, literary content and meaning, and offers detailed analyses of recording elements as they appear in a wide variety of tracks.

Accompanied by a range of online resources, Recording Analysis is an essential read for students and academics, as well as practitioners, in the fields of record production, song-writing and popular music.

Part One

Chapter 1
Recording Analysis: Domains, Disciplines, Approaches

This chapter sets the context for the study of recording analysis, and introduces the process. A sizeable portion of this context has been explored in the field of popular music studies. Those writings have provided valuable information and models, especially pertaining to disciplines outside the domains of the record. Popular music studies and popular music (and rock music) analysis topics will appear often in this chapter, and interspersed throughout this writing. Recording analysis emerges from these fields as a broader and more inclusive examination of the recorded song; recording analysis owes much to these origins of the study of popular music.

The record reshaped the listening experience and influenced the music itself—profoundly. The record is a finely crafted performance; it reframes notions of performance, composition and arranging around a production process of added sonic dimensions and qualities. It shapes spans of time and captures spontaneous moments. The record’s influences are broad in scope, and worldwide in their impacts. A general accounting of them here helps to establish a meaningful point of reference.

Further establishing this context is an examination of the central issues surrounding analyzing each of the three domains of the record: music, lyrics and recording. The domains are examined separately to identify central concerns and issues to be engaged in their analysis. This provides background information and an overview to inform the upcoming chapters on each of these domains, as well as chapters pertaining to the analysis process and framework.

Disciplines outside the domains of the record have contributed significantly to popular music studies and analysis, some since before the field formally began. Others have recently been applied to the analysis and study of popular music. The most pertinent disciplines are identified and introduced here, with some indication of their scope, focus and potential application. These topics might serve to establish a context for recording analysis, depending on its goals.

Recording analysis and related concepts are introduced. A framework of four principles and several concepts, and a flexible, functional process, forms the approach to recording analysis that is presented throughout this writing. Important to the approach is its flexibility and transparency. The framework establishes a general scheme of inquiry from which the process may forge or explore many paths— paths that are unique and appropriate for the individual recorded song. From these paths, pertinent conclusions may emerge to illuminate the track.

RECORDS AND RECORDED MUSIC

Since its development over 100 years ago, the record has changed music (“music” being used in the broadest sense) in a great many ways. The record as a commodity emerged and has had significant, worldwide commercial influence and varied and broad social impacts. The record is a musical voice of the people, of all people—any person from the common and the elite, the sacred and the profane, and all between or beyond. It has changed how we relate to music and how we engage music, and it has changed the content of music. Much writing from many directions and disciplines has covered aspects of these topics and much more.¹ Our focus here is on the ways the record has shaped music and the experience of listening to the recorded song, of which the following section is but a glimpse, serving to set some context for our study of recording analysis.

The record shifted the ways we engage music. Before the record, music listening was a communal, group activity; it took place in concert halls, churches, pubs and other public places. Music was performed live and in front of the audience, it took place in real time and was created spontaneously, and once the performance was over all that remained of it were the memories of those in attendance. In the early days of recorded music—when listening to records (or perhaps cylinders) was largely a parlour or living room experience—the record (plus phonograph) had become the chamber music of the twentieth century; this soon evolved into something else. With the record one can have any music, any time, any place. Music has become personal (we own the records we choose from millions of options, and we can identify deeply with them) and portable (we take music with us wherever we wish and listen whenever we wish). Music listening has become largely solitary (Eisenberg 1987) as listening is often an activity individuals do when alone; increasingly, music listening is isolating, as we close ourselves off from the world with our earbuds.

Along with changing these processes of engaging music, the record changed the substance of music. It spawned types of music that could not have been possible without it—and continues to do so. Rock music, and much popular music, is created and disseminated as records; the medium and the music are fundamentally joined. This is music that is both created and heard, with musical qualities that are the result of the recording process, of the media that stores and delivers it, and of the reproduction methods that presents it to the listener.

Composition, performance and recording production are linked and entwined. Performers and performances generate musical ideas in “the same sort of considered deliberation and decision making as musical composition” (Zak 2001, xii). Recorded performances are intentionally crafted with great attention to details, and performer interpretations are filled with nuance and precision— all intentionally captured, then carefully combined into the sound of the record. There is a team of skilled individuals that contribute to the record—in addition to performers there are songwriters, arrangers, lyricists, engineers, producers, all of who might have overlapping roles. Those that shape the record are called “recordists” here, despite their varied roles of producer, engineer, mix engineer, mastering engineer, tracking engineer, and the host of other formal and informal positions and titles.

The composition of the music might continue or might even occur during the tracking of various performances, where the sound qualities, performance techniques and expression of the performers become wed to their performances and interpretations of the musical ideas to make something larger, more substantial. The traditional approach to the musical setting or arrangement shifts to the more immediate and subtle to incorporate the qualities of the performance, and also to embrace the techniques and sounds of recording. These performances and the arrangement next receive their final shaping, are combined and mixed into the final form of the track itself. In this process all stages influence one another, and they function inseparably. The composition is the record and the performance. The record is the composition that emerges from the captured, created and crafted performance that is guided and realized through recording technologies.

This brings us to recognize that the record is not only a performance and a composition, but something else as well. It is also a set of sound qualities and sound relationships that to a great extent do not exist in nature and that are the result of the recording process. These qualities and relationships create a platform for the recorded song, and contribute to its artistry and voice.

The sound qualities of the recording, then, contribute fundamentally to the artistry and sonic content of the record. The recording’s sound adds qualities not found in nature, and reconfigures those qualities the listener already knows. The result is a reshaped sonic landscape, where the relationships of instruments defy physics, where unnatural qualities, proportions, locations and expression become accepted as part of the recorded song, of its performance, of its invented space. Sonic reality is redefined within the impossible worlds of records—and accepted without hesitation by listeners. Records can establish a “reality of illusion” (Moorefield 2005, xiii); a crafted world for the record that is uninhibited by the reality of natural sound relationships, where illusion is reality, where everything that can be created technologically is accepted as reality for the individual recorded song.

Given the high degree of control and scrutiny available in the production process, we should believe that what is sonically present on a record is what was intended, even if seemingly arbitrary or flawed. What is present is part of the record’s artistic voice, and it is integral to the primary text of the track, “constituted by the sounds themselves” (Moore & Martin 2019, 1). Should seemingly unintended sounds be present, those ‘flaws’ were either not heard during the making of the record, or a choice was made that allowed them to remain. What is on the record are those sounds and performances that were selected and combined from all that were recorded or that were generated by, created within or captured through the recording process. The process of making a record is exacting, and the sounds of the final record are carefully crafted; what is there was put there, or was allowed to remain. The record can be crafted such that a flawless performance results—a performance perhaps perfect in its flaws, as ‘flawless’ is in relation to conventions and artist intentions, and therefor open to the subjectivity of context. Related, the record may be perceived as flawless, though by some accepted norms it might be considered technically flawed or the performance may have qualities that might be perceived by some as imprecise (an example might be the often criticized vocals of Bob Dylan).

The record then comes to represent the definitive version of the song and the performance of the song (in as much as the two can be separated). The record represents the correct version of the song, and any covers of the song by others or future performances of the artist are gauged in reference to the original. Of course exceptions to this occur, but when the original is well known, the record becomes widely accepted and recognizable in this singular form. Here the record becomes a permanent performance, a performance frozen in time along with all its nuance of expression in dynamics, timbre and time captured—and along with everything else the individual listeners or society associates with it.

Differing from live performance, this recorded performance (that is permanent) allows repeated listenings and reflection, deeper examination and more personal interpretations by the listener, and discoveries of the subtleties of the music, the lyrics and the recording. Just as the listener finds something new in music with repeated hearings, and lyrics can reveal something new to the listener upon reflection or new listening, well-crafted recordings can reveal “new facets and nuances on playing after playing” (Gracyk 1996, viii). Albin Zak (2001, 156) shares: “one of the great delights of listening to a well-mixed record lies in exploring aurally its textural recesses, its middle ground and background, and discovering that it offers levels of sonic experience far beyond its obvious surface moves.” The sonic dimensions of the recording will reward the listener’s attention with further enrichment of the recorded song; the experience of the record is enhanced and supplemented by the recording, and the listener’s interpretation is further shaped by it.

ANALYZING THE RECORD'S DOMAINS

Analysis can demystify the record. It can provide clarity to its materials and their relationships, illustrate its structure and shape, and make its movement and energy more coherent to the listener/analyst; it may even allow one to peer into the content of its meaning. Analysis can provide some objectivity and depth of substance to listener interpretation, or to cultural analysis. In studying popular music, writings from numerous fields have examined various factors within and external to the song’s music and lyrics, and a few approaches also incorporate aspects of the record (see below). Analysis has the potential to illuminate how the recorded song works, and what it communicates. This study can allow the analyst to develop an intimate knowledge of the song and the track, the artist and the genre; it can make the record intelligible.

Music analysis may bring benefits to understanding music, and thus to understanding the recorded song. So can an evaluation of the lyrics. Music and lyrics might be most easily analyzed individually, isolated from one another’s influence. Within the song’s artistic statement, however, they are not so readily divided, with their interactions and interrelationships playing key roles in the experience of the song. The interactions and interrelationships include the sounds of the recording; these greatly shape the experience of the record—potentially as much as the music and the lyrics. Thus, an analysis of the recording adds another layer of materials, contributing fundamentally to the multidimensionality of the record. Recording analysis embraces these three domains equally.

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