Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound

Samantha Bennett, Eliot Bates

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501332067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théorie et appréciation de la musique

Who produces sound and music? And in what spaces, localities and contexts? As the production of sound and music in the 21st Century converges with multimedia, these questions are critically addressed in this new edited collection by Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates. Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound features 16 brand new articles by leading thinkers from the fields of music, audio engineering, anthropology and media. Innovative and timely, this collection represents scholars from around the world, revisiting established themes such as record production and the construction of genre with new perspectives, as well as exploring issues in cultural and virtual production.

CHAPTER ONE

The Production of Music and Sound: A Multidisciplinary Critique

Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett

Since the 1970s, the production of music and sound has been analyzed in several distinct fields and with divergent theoretical frameworks and methodologies. Phonomusicology is an umbrella term that encompasses an assortment of approaches toward studying recorded music where the focus is on recordings rather than on other forms of media (or on live performance). While not all phonomusicological works analyze production, there has been an increasing attention on the techniques of the recording studio and therefore by extension on production as a practice. The production of culture perspective, since the 1970s, has been a mode of American organizational sociology for analyzing cultural industries. As one of the few broader sociological perspectives to originate in the study of music (and to be later applied to other industries), works in this field have emphasized the structural features that enabled new musical genres to emerge. The literature on the occupation of producer has resulted in a body of scholarship that regards the producer as an auteur, composer, or overseer of the production process. Finally, an outgrowth of phonomusicology is a new academic subfield called the art of record production, which has placed considerable attention on the techniques and technologies found at the heart of recorded music.

Phonomusicology

In recent years, discourses on sound and music production have broadened in scope as more scholars engage in the space(s) existing between performance and reception. Many of these new ideas have emerged via what Stephen Cottrell called phonomusicology (2010), which is the study of recorded music. This discourse posits the recording—as opposed to the score—as the text, and notes important facets of music and sound production to include recordist agency, the recording workplace and/or space, as well as non-notatable sonic aesthetics present in recordings. This has led to key edited collections analyzing recorded sound, including Greene and Porcello’s Wired for Sound (2005), Cook et al.’s Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009), Amanda Bayley’s Recorded Music (2010), Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas’s methodology-focused The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field (2012), and Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett’s Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound (2015). These works move the study of music away from the previous focus on composition and performance and toward the recorded document, whether artifact or digital file. They also suggest the fruitfulness of analyzing the labor of production, even though such considerations surface only within a few chapters.

Phonomusicology has certainly broadened the scope of analytical priorities within popular musicology to include the sonically discernible extramusical aspects of recordings in addition to traditional, commonly foregrounded aspects of melody, harmony, meter, structure, and form. In popular music analysis, the effects of sound recording and production technology on what we eventually hear have until very recently been a secondary concern, if acknowledged at all. This is surprising, since the intervention of sound recordists and the technologies used in music production are commonly foregrounded in recorded music. For example, how different would “Strawberry Fields Forever” have sounded without the use of analog tape techniques and manipulation or, indeed, the influence of George Martin? Many sound production tropes, including techniques such as side-chain compression, band pass filtering, and auto-tuning, are now well assimilated into the pantheon of electronic music production to the point where electronic music produced without such features is the exception rather than the rule. In his 1982 article “Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method, Practice,” Tagg’s hermeneutic semiological method included a “checklist of parameters of musical expression” (1982: 47) including “acoustical” and “electromusical and mechanical” as two of seven categories. This early recognition that production techniques were not extra-musical factors as they strongly impacted what is eventually heard was an important milestone in scholarly understandings of the music production process as well as popular music analysis generally.

Works including David Gibson’s Art of Mixing (1997) and William Moylan’s Understanding and Crafting the Mix (2007) detail the construction of mixes from a technical perspective and feature visual representations of several basic parameters of recorded sound. These texts are designed to assist those interested in improving their mixing technique, and to that end are aimed at practicing recordists as well as scholars. Ruth Dockwray and Allan Moore’s “Configuring the Sound Box 1965–72” (2010) prioritizes the spatial, frequency, and dynamic attributes of a recording and draws meanings from the relative positions of instruments within commercial popular music mixes at the turn of the 1970s. Doyle (2005) recognized the impact of echo and reverb on pre-1960s recordings, in particular the fabrication of space in recorded music. Doyle’s comprehensive and insightful book foregrounds the use of space, ambience, and environment as extramusical, yet essential facets of recorded music as he highlights applications of echo and reverb via multiple examples. Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen (2016) in contrast focus on “digital signatures,” or traces of digital signal processing tools and their use that remain or are foregrounded in popular recordings. Works by Samantha Bennett (2015a,b) analyze recordings using a “tech-processual” analytical method. This includes a focus on contextual issues, such as the intentions of the recordist, workplace circumstances, and access to technologies before detailing the sonically discernible impact of dynamic, spatial, frequency, effects processor, and mix characteristics on what the listener eventually hears. New studies in phonomusicology certainly benefit popular musicology, but their scope and impact are far broader than that.

The production of sound and music from historical perspectives is beginning to be documented, with key works including David L. Morton’s Sound Recording: A Life Story of Technology (2004) and Susan Schmidt- Horning’s Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP (2013) focusing on the historical trajectories of sound recording technologies and workplaces, respectively. The historical nature of recording technologies and workplaces as “concealed” facets of the recording process has led to an insatiable, general interest appetite for “behind the scenes” texts and documentary films that “reveal” such processes and the oft-overlooked contributions to well-known recordings made by recordists. The Classic Albums documentary series and books including Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever (2009) are good examples of largely interview-based works revealing the tools, techniques, and personnel behind canonized rock and pop recordings. This well-established and popular format has continued with films including Sound City (2013), which focuses on the Los Angeles recording studio of the same name, as well as the Neve 8078 console, which recorded many of the commercially successful record s made in the studio. Documentary films including Moog (2004), Mellodrama (2008), I Dream of Wires (2014), and 808 (2014) and books including Tompkins’s How To Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from WWI to Hip Hop (2010) center on specific electronic music technologies and their impact on niche genres of recorded popular music. Bloomsbury Academic’s own 33 1/3 series of books features plenty of titles that take such revelatory approaches. Two in particular are D.X. Ferris’s Reign in Blood (2008), which features detailed discussion surrounding the impact of Rick Rubin’s production and Andy Wallace’s mix techniques on the 1988 Slayer record. Joe Bonomo’s Highway to Hell (2010) takes a similar line, in that it foregrounds the contribution made to the AC/DC record by recordists Mutt Lange and Tony Platt.

Historical studies of music production do, however, tend to privilege Anglophone commercial, pop and rock musics; studies on the production of indigenous musics, as well as classical and jazz musics, feature far less in both general interest and scholarly phonomusicological studies. This is possibly due to the techniques involved in the recording of commercial musics as opposed to noncommercial and/or Western art musics. Technological and processual intervention has arguably been foregrounded in popular music recording since the 1950s, with recordists such as Sam Phillips and his pioneering “slap-echo” effect heard across most releases from his Sun Records label (Zak 2010). In the 1960s recordings of The Beatles, we hear prominent tape manipulation effects, as well as the consolidation of musician and recordist vision via the impact of George Martin as producer (Kehew and Ryan 2006). Using these historical examples does, however, reinforce a recordist canon of sorts that in recent years has grown from the concentration of both scholarly and general interest works focused on the so-called “golden age” of Anglophone commercial recording between the 1950s and 1970s. Mine Doğantan-Dack’s Recorded Music (2008) diverts from this well-trodden path by focusing on the aesthetics of phonography, and the recording of jazz and classical musics from both philosophical and critical angles. Recordings of classical and jazz musics have historically tended to be more “transparent” in that a “performance capture” approach is preferred. In saying that, recent studies by Klein (2015) suggest increasing technological intervention in the recording and production of classical music today. While there has begun to be some consideration of production-related issues in the milieu of indigenous music (e.g., Gibson 1998; Kral 2010; Scales 2012), to this date outside of Anglophone music in the Northern Hemisphere, there has been only limited work. Clearly, there is plenty of work to be done.

One fascinating area in sound and music production studies is that of the recorded music artifact/document and the impact of digitization on production, dissemination, and consumption of recorded sound. As one of the foremost scholars in sound studies, Jonathan Sterne has argued that simultaneous to the audio industry’s historical quest for high fidelity is a parallel history of audio compression. In MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012), Sterne posits a historical and philosophical perspective on perceptual encoding, data reduction, and the governance of format technologies. This is a key work among many in music, media, and sound studies in that it situates the MP3 as emerging from century-old techniques in audio compression and not simply a symbol of musical devaluation. Sterne’s work is particularly valuable to sound studies since the focus is on the format and technology itself and not the ramifications of MP3 on music industry business models, which make up the majority of studies on music file formats. In his 1969 essay “Opera and the Long Playing Record,” Theodore Adorno stated, “In the history of technology, it is not all that rare for technological inventions to gain significance long after their inception” (2002[1969]: 283). This is certainly the case for the vinyl record format, boosted not only by a recent, albeit unexpected, growth in global sales but also by scholarly attention. Richard Osborne’s Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (2012) considers the format’s historical trajectory and ongoing appeal in the digital age, with focus on technology, consumer demographic, and aesthetics. Bartmanski and Woodward’s Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (2015) posits a challenge to format obsolescence by arguing the place of the tangible object in today’s almost entirely digital music world. Bartmanski and Woodward recognize the importance of listener subjectivity, mediation, and other reception matters, suggesting the vinyl record is “an icon of recording that thanks to its remarkable affordances came to sit at the core of great cultural transformations of the twentieth century” (2015: 5). Both texts consider vinyl as transformative, not simply in terms of a music carrier, but also the centrality of the format to social and cultural practices throughout the twentieth century.

Consideration of these analog/digital, tangible/intangible binaries appears throughout existing studies on the production of music and sound. Another recent, emergent area concerns the production of sound and music in the virtual world. Whiteley and Rambarran’s Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2016) includes multiple chapters on the production of music online. The role of participatory, fan-funded platforms is considered in Mark Thorley’s chapter “Virtual Music, Virtual Money,” which ...