Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound 9781501332050, 9781501332074, 9781501332081

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Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound

Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound SAMANTHA BENNETT AND ELIOT BATES

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates, 2018 Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Wragg / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bennett, Samantha (Music professor) | Bates, Eliot. Title: Critical approaches to the production of music and sound / [edited by] Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates. Description: New York NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017024433 (print) | LCCN 2017038088 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501332067 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501332081 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501332050 (hardcover: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sound recordings–Production and direction. | Popular music–Production and direction. Classification: LCC ML3790 (ebook) | LCC ML3790 .C77 2017 (print) | DDC 781.49–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024433 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3205-0 PB: 978-1-5013-5578-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3208-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-3206-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of figures and tables vii List of contributors ix Acknowledgments xiii

1 The Production of Music and Sound: A Multidisciplinary Critique Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett

PART ONE Situating Production: Place, Space and Gender 35 2 Field Recording and the Production of Place Tom Western 23 3 The Poietics of Space: The Role and Co-performance of the Spatial Environment in Popular Music Production Damon Minchella 41 4 “An Indestructible Sound”: Locating Gender in Genres Using Different Music Production Approaches Paula Wolfe 62

PART TWO Beyond Representation

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5 Producing TV Series Music in Istanbul Eliot Bates 6 Reclamation and Celebration: Kodangu, a Torres Strait Islander Album of Ancestral and Contemporary Australian Indigenous Music Karl Neuenfeldt 98

PART THREE Electronic Music

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7 “All Sounds Are Created Equal”: Mediating Democracy in Acousmatic Education Patrick Valiquet

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CONTENTS

8 Technologies of Play in Hip-Hop and Electronic Dance Music Production and Performance Mike D’Errico 138

PART FOUR Technology and Technique

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9 Weapons of Mass Deception: The Invention and Reinvention of Recording Studio Mythology Alan Williams 157 10 Auto-Tune In Situ: Digital Vocal Correction and Conversational Repair Owen Marshall 175

PART FIVE Mediating Sound and Silence 207 11 Listening to or Through Technology: Opaque and Transparent Mediation Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen 195 12 Six Types of Silence Richard Osborne 211

PART SIX Virtuality and Online Production 243 13 Intermixtuality: Case Studies in Online Music (Re)production Samantha Bennett 231 14 Crowdfunding and Alternative Modes of Production Mark Thorley 253 Index 267

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure 2.1 IFMC Resolution Concerning the Preservation of Folk Music, 1955 30 Figure 3.1 Space as workplace 49 Figure 3.2 Embodied emotional space 50 Figure 3.3 Aural architecture and spatial interaction 51 Figure 3.4 Ideals and reality 54 Figure 3.5 Technology and limitations 55 Figure 3.6 Systems sketch of creative practice 58 Figure 3.7 Creative practice as situated practice 58 Figure 6.1 Cover of the Kodangu CD 100 Figure 6.2 From the insert to the Kodangu CD 102 Figure 6.3 Map of the Torres Strait region 104 Figure 8.1 Monome “grid” controller (2008) 143 Figure 8.2 (A) Playstation 4 controller (2013); (B) Xbox One controller (2013) 146 Figure 8.3 MLRv Max patch (2011) 149 Figure 10.1 Musical transcription of interaction between Carl and the author 187 Figure 10.2 Spectrographic representation of interaction between Carl and the author 187 Figure 10.3 Autocorrelation-based representations of interaction between Carl and the author 188 Table 5.1 Fırtına theme 88 Table 13.1 Mix stem organization in Deadmau5’s “SOFI Needs a Ladder” 235 Table 13.2 Contents of “REM AIF FILES” folder in REM’s “It Happened Today” 236

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CONTENTS

Table 13.3 Contents of “ADDITIONAL AUDIO” folder contained within “REM AIF FILES” in REM’s “It Happened Today” 239 Table 13.4 Mix stem organization in Bon Iver’s “Holocene” Table 13.5 Mix stem organization in Skrillex and Damien Marley’s “Make It Bun Dem” 243

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Samantha Bennett Samantha Bennett is a sound recordist, guitarist and Associate Professor in music at the Australian National University. She is the author of Modern Records, Maverick Methods (forthcoming) and Peepshow, a 33 1/3 series book on the album by Siouxsie and the Banshees. She has published numerous chapters and articles on popular music recording, production, technology and analysis, including in Global Glam and Popular Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, Popular Music, Popular Music and Society and The Journal of Popular Music Studies. In 2014 she gave the American Musicological Society lecture at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Library and Archives, where she also held a 2015 research fellowship. Eliot Bates Eliot Bates is a scholar specializing in the emergence and development of digital music technologies, and the transformations to instrumental performance practice that accompanied the adoption of computer-based recording techniques. An ethnomusicologist by training, he has conducted over three years of field research in Turkey, and is the author of Music in Turkey: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (2011) and Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul’s Recording Studio Culture (2016). Eliot teaches ethnomusicology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and previously taught at the University of Birmingham (UK), Cornell, and the University of Maryland. In addition to his scholarly interests, for 20 years Eliot has been a performer and recording artist on the oud. Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen is Associate Professor in Popular Music Studies in the Department of Musicology and Research Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion (RITMO), at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has published widely on music production, digital media, remix culture, mashups and sound studies, and is the

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co-author of the book Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound (2016). Mike D’Errico Mike D’Errico is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College and a lecturer in the UCLA Music Industry program. His research focuses on trends in software and hardware design, as well as the development of interfaces for digital music and multimedia production. As a DJ and electronic music producer, he has performed and published on a range of topics including hip-hop, sound design, electronic dance music and video games. Owen Marshall Owen Marshall is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Science & Technology Studies program at the University of California—Davis. He has a PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell University. His research is concerned with the history and anthropology of science and technology, specifically sound technologies and technologies of the voice. He has also worked extensively in sound design, music performance and radio production. Damon Minchella Damon Minchella has achieved substantial professional success in his musical career that has included cowriting and performing on 15 top 20 singles with his own band Ocean Colour Scene and working with artists such as The Who, Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse and Paul Weller. During this time Damon received two Brit Award nominations and performed at Live 8. Damon is course leader and senior lecturer at the University of South Wales and is currently performing and recording with the best-selling artist Richard Ashcroft. Karl Neuenfeldt Karl Neuenfeldt trained academically in anthropology (MA—Simon Fraser University, Canada) and cultural studies (PhD—Curtin University, Australia) and has been active as a music researcher, producer and performer. In 2009 he received the Sound Heritage Award from the Australian National Film and Sound Archives for his musical collaborations with Indigenous communities. He is part of a music production team along with producer and audio engineer Nigel Pegrum, former member of British folk-rock band Steeleye Span, and Torres Strait Islander producer, audio engineer and musician Will

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Kepa. Together they have produced and recorded numerous CDs and DVDs with Indigenous Australian communities, groups and soloists. Richard Osborne Richard Osborne is a senior lecturer in popular music at Middlesex University. Prior to becoming a lecturer he worked in record shops, held various posts at PRS for Music and comanaged a pub. His blog on popular music is available at: http://richardosbornevinyl.blogspot.co.uk. His book Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record was published in 2012. Mark Thorley Mark Thorley’s research focuses on the impact of emerging technology on the creative industries and draws upon his background as a classically trained musician, technologist and entrepreneur. He has developed and managed several academic programmes in the UK and is a pioneer in bringing together universities and industrial partners throughout the world to work on global music production projects. He is a senior fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and was previously director of the Music Producers’ Guild. Patrick Valiquet Patrick Valiquet is a Canadian musicologist studying the intersection of politics and technoscience in experimental musics. In 2014 he earned his doctoral degree from the University of Oxford, where he worked as a research associate on the European Research Council Seventh Framework project Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies. Since then he has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and the Institute of Musical Research, Royal Holloway, University of London. Since 2015 he is also Associate Editor of Contemporary Music Review. Tom Western Tom Western writes about music and sound in the production of nations and borders. He is currently finishing his first book, National Phonography: Field Recording, Sound Archiving, and Producing the Nation in Music, which listens to histories of ethnomusicological field recording in the years following the Second World War. He has also published in the journals Sound Studies and Twentieth-Century Music. Tom is now living and working in Athens, Greece, researching his next project on displacement and cosmopolitanism in European popular musics.

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Alan Williams Alan Williams is Professor of Music and serves as Music Department Chair at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. An ethnomusicologist, his research focuses on recording studio practice, and is particularly concerned with issues of power and agency. He has published in the Journal on the Art of Record Production, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association Journal and has chapters in The Art of Record Production and The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. He has several production and engineering credits, and is a songwriter and performer with the band Birdsong at Morning. Paula Wolfe Paula Wolfe was awarded her PhD at the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, in May 2014. Her thesis documented the responses of women artists, producers and industry professionals to the impact of digital recording and marketing technologies in the first 12 years of the digital era. It also offered a feminist reading of the debates that accompanied the subsequent industry shifts. Paula has published on music production, music technology and gender (2012) and music production, media representation and gender (2016). She regularly presents her research at national and international music conferences and her book, Women in the Studio: Creation, Control and Gender in Popular Music Sound Production, is due for publication in 2017. Practitioner as well as scholar, Paula is a critically acclaimed artist-producer (Mojo * * * * Uncut * * *) whose third album, White Dots, is due for release in 2017 (Sib Records).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank Ladi Dell’aira for her generous assistance with the manuscript. Her careful attention to detail greatly improved the book. At Bloomsbury, we also would like to thank Leah Babb-Rosenfeld, Susan Krogulski, and Giles Herman for their support and encouragement along the way.

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.

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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 nonnotatable 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.

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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 SchmidtHorning’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 records 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

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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

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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 raises questions surrounding authorship and creative direction when multiple audience members invest in a production process. Benjamin O’Brien focuses on the production process as a collaborative one in his chapter “Sample Sharing: Virtual Laptop Ensemble Communities.” Both these chapters consider the production of music as a collaborative process, but also one that bridges real and virtual economies, creative practices, and communities. These are just two examples of production-focused chapters in a wider publication that addresses new modes of music practice online.

Production of Culture The production of culture perspective emerged in 1974 as a “self-conscious perspective [that] challenged the then-dominant idea that culture and social structure mirror each other” (Peterson and Anand 2004: 311–12). Originally, it was one of several approaches within a movement in North

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American sociology that were concerned with bringing a flexible concept of culture to bear on the sociology of organizations and industries, while continuing to acknowledge the importance of symbolic/semiotic systems on the production of culture. As such, the perspective presented an alternative both to then-dominant Marxist and functionalist perspectives. It additionally has much in common with Howard Becker’s contemporaneous concept of art worlds (1976), but with more focus on organizational/institutional dynamics than on different types of professional individuals. Notably, the production of culture concept emerged out of a decade of research on jazz, rock, and popular musics and discoveries that the rise of rock and decline of swing jazz (as the dominant popular music form, at least) couldn’t be understood simply from aesthetic features, consumer demand, or the work of the “individual genius” alone. The perspective has had considerable subsequent adoption outside of music studies, becoming in the words of Paul DiMaggio “hegemonic in the sociology of the arts and media” (2000: 108) and framing studies of industries including fashion, visual art, restaurants and microbreweries, and photography. As Marco Santoro has noted, “the heuristic usefulness and epistemological importance of the production of culture approach rests in the fact that it is indeed attuned to the specificities of cultural objects as symbolic representations and meaning structures, while still being focused on matters to do with social institutions and modes of social organization” (2008: 8). By looking primarily at the production of informally produced symbols, and by treating music primarily symbolically, the focus remains largely on identity construction and formation. Toward this end, concepts like “authenticity” have been central in the production of culture perspective approaches toward recorded music, as authenticity can be discussed both as a quality of a symbolic object and as a social value within genre-specific music communities. Correspondingly, the focus on symbolic aspects of production has meant a lack of attention on other aspects of recorded music; in addition to having symbolic value, recordings are material artifacts that facilitate very real embodied experiences (i.e., those that transpire during the acts of production or listening) and as such are irreducible to a symbolic valence alone. While Peterson regularly revised and honed the production of culture perspective in response to his ongoing research into music industries (and especially the US country music industry), the standard model of the perspective hinged upon six concepts: (1) technology, (2) law and regulation, (3) industry structure, (4) organizational structure, (5) occupational careers, and (6) the market. This six-part structure is useful to analyze when thinking about what precisely defines production within this perspective—and it is useful to scrutinize all that is occluded by focusing on these six concepts. For example, absent are the very objects that production produces, their aesthetic qualities, or the reception of these products. The perspective does not contain any explicit conceptualization of time or temporal unfolding and, therefore, is not well suited for analyzing the workflows of production.

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Thinking through labor solely with the framework of careers or industry/ organizational structure misses most of what is interesting in the field of production, for example, distinctive differences in how engineering, arrangement, production, mixing, etc., are done for different forms of music ostensibly contained within “the industry.” Peterson’s book on country music (1997), for example, does not attend to recording studio practices in any meaningful way; recording practices and studio-sited performances are deemed inessential for understanding how country music, as an industry structure, fabricated a cult of authenticity. The conflation of “the market” with “the audience” (Dowd 2004: 240) correspondingly conflates consumer activity with audience reception. Thus, there is little critique of whether the commercial success of particular symbolic objects necessarily means that consumers subscribe to the symbolic meanings intended by the producers of those objects. Keith Negus’s long-term study of the cultures of major record labels situated in the UK provides a distinctive take on the “mundane mediations of the music industries” (1999: 174) that largely follows the production of culture perspective. The main aim of his research is to demonstrate how “all industries are cultural” (ibid.: 23) and to provide a sociological account of the creation and maintenance of musical genres. His first book, Producing Pop, included a brief discussion of studio-sited production (1992: 82–93), which is discussed from the perspective of artists and repertoire (A&R) representatives rather than the perspective of engineers, producers, musicians, or audiences. None of the discussion of studios and engineers appears to be based on ethnography conducted within studios, which contrasts with the first-hand accounts he provides from A&R reps and record label executives. In his follow-up book Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, Negus further clarifies his research aim as understanding “how staff within the music industry seek to understand the world of musical production and consumption by constructing knowledge about it . . . and then by deploying this knowledge as a ‘reality’ that guides the activities of corporate personnel” (1999: 19). Negus’s focus on the industry and organizational structure of record labels explicates “the conditions within which great individuals will be able to realize their talent” (ibid.: 18). While industry structure serves as one of the pillars of the production of culture perspective, rarely is the term “industry” defined or problematized. Instead, “the industry” is taken for granted as an empirical category, where it is typically synonymous with the major transnational record labels and radio conglomerates. But as recent ethnomusicological scholarship has shown, “the industry” is perhaps not best understood as an empirical category. Chris Washburne (2008) has shown how the New York–based salsa music industry is best understood as a scene. Benjamin Brinner’s study (2009) of Israeli-Palestinian ethnic music collaborations depicts an industry that transpires at the intersection of the social networks of dozens of individual musicians. Eliot Bates’s research (2016) into an emergent

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industry for Anatolian minority language musics in Turkey theorizes it both as an actor-network and as an inheritance of Ottoman-era craft guilds. Louise Meintjes’s ethnography (2003) of South African record studios situates the industry for mbaqanga music within sets of embodied practices and complex articulations of racial difference and power. In all cases, the industry does not exist so much as it is performed, contested, enacted, negotiated, and recontextualized. It makes little sense in the early twentyfirst century to talk of “the music industry,” even as corporate mergers have further consolidated the control of recorded, broadcast, and live music performances (Williamson and Cloonan 2007). The production of culture also lacks a coherent theory of technology; it alternates between social and technological determinist poles but lacks a consideration of the more nuanced relations between people and technological objects that, for example, comprise the labor of STS as a field. For example, Peterson (1990) suggests that the shift from 78 RPM shellac to vinyl records had a direct role in the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll. While this may have been the case for the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Osborne (2012) has shown the situation in the United Kingdom was different. The country was slower to adopt the new formats, and new genres became popular without any wholesale change in format. Works such as Wallis and Malm (1984) and Gronow and Saunio (1998) have shown just how asymmetrical the adoption of media formats have been in different countries. What is necessary, therefore, is a site-specific consideration of how certain technologies become part of social formations and cultural practices. Another problem that faces the study of production concerns the tendency to reduce the role of recordists, engineers, producers, arrangers and other people involved in the production of recorded sound to that of “intermediaries” and therefore equivalent to A&R reps, accountants and other record label/ music industry employees. The “intermediary” concept is quite problematic with regards to academic writings on popular music production for a number of reasons. First, while the work of music critics, publicists, A&R reps, accountants, record producers, engineers, arrangers, or session musicians all do contribute to the subsequent “reception” of music by audiences, the kinds of labor—and the effects of these different kinds of labor—do not necessarily contribute in similar or symmetrical ways. As David Hesmondhalgh has shown, some of the myriad uses of this term in Anglophone scholarship on popular music and cultural industries come from a pervasive misreading of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of intermediary, which most specifically was concerned with the role of critics in the field of cultural production (Hesmondhalgh 2006: 226) rather than the labor of what Hesmondhalgh terms “cultural managers.” Second, the intermediary concept is problematic as it assumes the presence of a specific relation between an artist/musician/creator and an audience in which the intermediary mediates. This inherits the legacy of early uses of the term “mediation” in reference

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to the mediation between an individual and God, or subsequent uses of the term to refer to diplomats and the mediation between sovereign states or between an individual and the state. But the relation between a broad field of creators and an even broader field of potential audiences is not clearly built upon a binary relationship, especially when considering the complexities of the circulation of physical media and networked distribution of digital content and cultural products. As Hesmondhalgh noted, “we need a better specification of the division of labour involved in mediating production and consumption in culture-making organizations than that offered by Bourdieu and by those who have adopted the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ from him in these many different ways” (2006: 227). A more productive, but simultaneously more expansive and diffuse, concept of mediation transpires in the work of Antoine Hennion, where the concern moves beyond simply navigating human social relations and considering the role of nonhuman actors, especially technological objects, on human interaction and creative practices. For Hennion, producers and other studio workers have a vital role in mediating between the public and the artist, but in doing so “the aim of the entire organisation of production is to introduce the public into the studio” (1983: 189). Thinking of mediation in this way is productive insofar as it permits the analysis of systems where built environments or technological objects come to have a considerable influence on creative and social labor, and provide much needed attention on the ways in which certain objects occupy highly charged and influential positions within cultural practices (e.g., the microphone, see Stokes 2009). In a later work, Hennion addresses the sociology of music as a field when he argues that “music enables us to go beyond the description of technical and economic intermediaries as mere transformers of the musical relationship into commodities, and to do a positive analysis of all the human and material intermediaries of the ‘performance’ and ‘consumption’ of art, from gestures and bodies to stages and media” (2003: 84).

Producers, “Production Personnel,” and Auteurism Concepts of sound recordist agency and the role of the sound recordist have, in recent years, become key foci in both sound and music studies. In his 1977 article “The Producer as Artist,” Charlie Gillet theorized the role of the record producer as similar to that of the film director. This prompted the emergence of another disciplinary focus, that of “the producer as auteur” which situated the producer as driver of a commercial musical project. By 1990, an entire issue of Popular Music and Society was dedicated to studies on the impact of technology—specifically sound recording and music production technology—on recorded, popular music. Yet such early

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studies recognized the complex intersection between musical composition, performance, musician and recordist agency, and technology in the production of recorded music. Muikku (1990), for example, categorized producers into four specialist groups: those working for one record company, freelancers, those working for their own company and artistproducers. Others theorized the role of the record “producer” as similar to that of a composer (Moorefield 2005) or film director, thus resulting in a sub-discourse of “the producer as auteur” (Warner 2003). This line of thought was perhaps most notably pursued by Evan Eisenberg in The Recording Angel (2005), as he described: But for the most part the small army of engineers, studio musicians and assistant producers that takes part in a typical recording is simply ignored. In charge of this small army is the producer, who is the counterpart of the film director. (2005: 94–95) The idea that a music production process is overseen by one individual is, however, controversial and has attracted critique. In an early work, Ed Kealy argues that, despite the shift from a craft union mode of organization to an entrepreneurial one, sound recordists still very much were part of a collaborative work environment (1979). In The Poetics of Rock, Albin Zak focused on the difference between the production roles of producers and engineers, as follows: “[Engineers] are the participants in the process who best understand the technological tools in terms of their potential for realizing musical aims” (2001: 165). Correspondingly, Most rock producers play some sort of aesthetic role as well, which may overlap with songwriting, arranging, performing, and engineering, either in participation or in lending critical judgement or advice. Most importantly, producers must nurture the overall process and preserve a larger creative vision as the process moves through myriad, mundane details. (2001: 172–73) However, Zak stopped short of fully endorsing auteurism, instead reinforcing the collaborative process involved in record production, as he stated: “But the idea that a producer should be such an auteur—imposing his or her own sound and vision on diverse projects—is controversial, as is the ‘artist/ record producer’ conflation (unless, of course, the producer is also the featured performer)” (2001: 179). In The Art of Music Production Richard James Burgess categorized the producer in four interesting ways: The All-SingingAll-Dancing-King-of-the-Heap, The Faithful Sidekick, The Collaborator, and Merlin the Magician (2002). While these distinctions reflect Burgess’s own professional practice and can therefore be taken as an accurate reflection of recording industry roles within a particular production milieu, the categories—particularly the final of the four—reinforce mythological

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understandings of the role of the recordist in music production processes and do little to theorize the impact on resulting recordings. There is, however, acknowledgment that producers operate in both auteurist and collaborative modes. In his book Any Sound You Can Imagine, Paul Théberge considered the impact of new digital recording technologies on the process and professions of music production. This book focused on the so-called “democratization of technology” (1997: 29–30) and the availability of recording tools to performers in the 1980s and early 1990s, showing how producers become consumers of technology. Links between the proliferation of cheap, accessible, and predominantly digital recording technologies and new recordist roles have been drawn by a number of scholars (Théberge 1997; Katz 2004). The production, dissemination, and consumption of digital music has undoubtedly resulted in a conflation of traditional recording and production roles as defined by Zak. As Virgil Moorefield suggested, “At the top of the current charts, one increasingly finds cases in which the producer is the artist is the composer is the producer; and technology is what has driven the change” (2005: 111). Mike Howlett’s “The Record Producer as Nexus” is less concerned with the relationship between production technology and personnel, more focused on the producer as an intermediary, and about “engagement with otherness” in terms of “the song and the performance, the engineering and the industry” (2009).

The Art of Record Production The art of record production, sometimes termed “the musicology of record production,” is a distinctive scholarly field that emerged largely out of practice-led research initiatives in British universities (and later in North America, Australia, and continental Europe). The annual conferences of the Association for the Art of Record Production, and since 2007 the Journal on the Art of Record Production, have been one of the main milieus for the scholarly analysis of recorded music. In their introduction to an edited collection, Simon Zagorski-Thomas and Simon Frith argue that “in the studio technical decisions are aesthetic, aesthetic decisions are technical, and all such decisions are musical” (2012: 3), which encapsulates one of the main concerns of this branch of musical research. Conspicuously absent, however, is any substantive consideration or theorization of the social. Because of that, this field would seem to be the antithesis of the production of culture perspective. For example, Zagorski-Thomas (2014) employs an eclectic framework drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), the social construction of technology (SCOT), and a systems approach to creativity (especially Csikszentmihalyi 1997) in order to propose a new approach to musicology that is more responsive to the analytical challenges of recorded music. He

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proposes a methodology that focuses around four questions: (1) who and what the participants are in the study (including the possibility of technologies as active participants), (2) types of knowledge and understanding, (3) types of activity (including both the specialized labor of recording production and the more general cognitive/physical activity), and (4) the ecology/environment in which this process occurs. This framework enabled Zagorski-Thomas to write with considerable detail about the techniques and technologies present in the field of production, perhaps the greatest achievement of this approach (especially in comparison to previous scholarship such as production of culture perspective works). Broadly speaking, the bulk of art of record production literature by other scholars, even though it has differed in theorization, has stuck to variants of this methodology, including the problematic dichotomy between the object of study (the first three questions) and its context (the fourth question). Specifically missing in such a framework is, for example, any necessary discussion of musical meanings, power, identity, politics—and sociocultural issues more generally. While the same could be said for most musicological scholarship before the 1990s, what Philip Bohlman has noted as musicology’s “remarkable capacity to imagine music into an object that [has] nothing to do with political and moral crises” (1993: 414–15), the field has changed substantially. It is not clear why it is necessary, in arguing for a musicology of record production, to roll back the considerable achievements that musicology has made in showing how music is constitutive of social realities (e.g., DeNora 2003; Turino 2008). Analytical work, such as that carried out by Tagg and Moore, is notably absent from the discourse too, as is work considering the production of music and sound outside the traditional realm of the commercial, popular music recording industry. That is not to say that the Art of Record Production forum is not valuable; it most certainly is and, to a large extent, it has made significant inroads into establishing and continuing a vital discourse once absent from popular music studies and the creative, artistic realm of audio engineering. Still, space remains in sound and music production discourse for further work. This book aims to address this notable gap, thus broadening the discourse beyond the recording workplace and into domains such as fieldwork, television, the Internet, and live music. Here, we present 13 innovative and original new ideas pertaining to the production of music and sound drawn from both traditional and contemporary research bases and methodologies. In order to widen the literature and contribute to this field beyond the loci of records and recordings, this book is organized into six key sections. The chapters in Situating Production: Place, Space and Gender (Section 1) begin with an exploration of the contexts of production, but move beyond questions of context to understand how recordings always carry with them traces of their spaces, places, and gendered modes of production. Tom Western, in Chapter 2, moves our analysis beyond

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the oft-assumed studio/field recording dichotomy to understand how both are equally “artificial constructs of sonic manipulation,” especially in relation to editing choices and microphone selection and placement. Moreover, field recordings are a technology used to produce place—and as such exist as forms of cultural production. Drawing on the early history of ethnomusciology and the formation of the International Folk Music Council (IFMC), Western shows how field recordings were instrumental in the very foundation of the field of ethnomusicology and used by the IFMC “to produce idealized versions of place.” Yet this process wasn’t (and isn’t) unproblematic, as field recordings can also evoke a spirit of displacement, leading listeners to project place onto field recordings. In Chapter 3, in an analysis of UK-based popular music practitioners, Damon Minchella considers how space becomes an intrinsic aspect of the creative process of making audio recordings, and grounds practitioners’ experiences of the world. The chapter uses a novel framework that draws on phenomenological enquiry, sound studies approaches to theorizing aural architecture, and a systems model of creativity and is supported by ethnographic data taken from long-form interviews. Minchella arrives at three conclusions: that the “atmosphere” of a space has more effect than other aspects of spaces, that technological and acoustical concerns are secondary to the feel of the aural architecture, and that spaces leave an imprint on the sound produced within. Chapter 4 turns the attention to the significance of gender within production environments, where Paula Wolfe explores three themes: “the role of production within the creative process, the influence of the lyric on the production process and the impact of gendered ‘cultural notions of age’ on the women’s representation.” This is done through a comparison of the Argentinian folk/electronica artist-producer Juana Molina with the allwomen rock band Savages. For Molina, there is no meaningful separation between composition and production processes—both are part of a broader creative act. For Savages, the work they did contributed to what they termed an “indestructible sound,” and they cultivated a close relationship with a male producer who facilitated their distinctive way of coming together as four soloists. While recordings often do significant work as representations of culture, and questions of representation have been frequently assessed in ethnomusicological literature, recordings go beyond representation to constitute sociocultural realities in themselves. Section 2, Beyond Representation, shows how an exploration of production labor enables us to understand the broader cultural work that recordings do. Eliot Bates, in Chapter 5, analyzes the production of music for a Turkish dramatic comic TV show Fırtına, which constituted a project of “rethinking, reframing and representing the Black Sea.” He specifically focuses on the labor done by arrangers, a distinctive occupation in Turkey that is responsible for orchestration decisions, project management, and the creation of the musical

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and sonic concept for the TV show’s soundtrack. Despite the newness of the TV series medium (private television broadcasts began in Turkey only in the 1990s), TV show music inherited many elements from album production, especially an infatuation with arrangements of so-called “traditional” folksongs specific to the region being represented. Ultimately, the productive labor of arrangement, like the show’s script, stages an encounter between a rurally marked Eastern Black Sea and an urbanly marked Istanbul. In Chapter 6, Karl Neuenfeldt discusses the production of an album of Torres Strait (Islander) music performed by The Custodians that draws on contemporary styles and Western popular music recorded aesthetics while preserving a sense of the traditional ancestral music. The album Kodangu strives to “reposition Mabuyag Islanders, and by extension other Islanders, in contemporary narratives, arguably functioning as an aural, textual and visual memory device.” In doing so, Neuenfeldt shows how the production process of making indigenous recordings “can be a means of reclamation and celebration.” Simultaneously, production and creative labor can serve as a form of research that goes beyond the audible to enhance the impact that albums have once they circulate. Section 3 moves the spotlight onto discourses of Electronic Music production, an area rich in both technological and production aesthetics. This section deals with electronic music from two unique perspectives: Patrick Valiquet considers the historical trajectory of acousmatic music and education in Quebec, Canada, before Mike D’Errico deals with aspects of controllerism in the production of hip-hop before. Both these chapters contribute considerable historical and contextual findings to studies of music production. Patrick Valiquet in Chapter 7 focuses on both the historical and the educational as opposed to practical aspects of electronic music production. Valiquet considers the historical context of acousmatic music before tracing the origin and trajectory of its educational place in Quebec, Canada. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work, Valiquet evaluates various observations on acousmatic music curricula to include the place of theory, perception, and technical skills. His findings exemplify the extent to which acousmatic music pedagogy and concomitant production results in democratization. Critically, Valiquet draws significant conclusions surrounding the masculine coding of electronic music’s tools and the exclusion of women from electronic music historiography. In Chapter 8, Mike D’Errico explores the blurred lines between music performance and production among DJ producers. In tracing the trajectory of controllerism via turntablism, D’Errico posits computer game controller design as integral to the playability of music software. His case study focuses on Daedelus, a US DJ who places interactive audio control at the center of his performance and production aesthetic. D’Errico’s findings concern the necessity of failure in gaming and how such aesthetics “bleed into the realm of digital music.” He also summarizes failure as evidence of

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liveness and recognizes the enduring embodiment of analog processes in new digital tools. Technology and Technique are two aspects inherent to the wider production of music and sound. In Section 4, Alan Williams and Owen Marshall consider the aesthetics of music and sound production technologies and techniques in two critical perspectives that focus on the historical and contemporary aspects of music production, respectively. This section recognizes that without tools and processes, the production of music and sound is limited, yet applications of technology and technique are loaded with historical and aesthetic meanings. Undoubtedly, commercial rock and pop record production has led to a mythologization of music production tools and processes; it is this intangible, yet critical aspect of historical music production that Alan Williams explores in Chapter 9. Here, matters including technostalgia and technological deception are critically examined with reference to mythologized recordings including The Beatles’s Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Williams critically examines the power of music production technologies to reinforce notions of performance deceit via a richly detailed set of examples drawn from popular culture. Finally, Williams discusses an evident manufacturing of record production mythology that perpetuates today. Owen Marshall considers a current discourse in contemporary music production in Chapter 10. He acknowledges the politics of auto-tune in music production before focusing on conversation analysis as a technical approach to vocal correction. In a meticulously detailed examination of a music production session, Marshall’s case study focuses on “Carl,” a US audio engineer who is observed applying pitch correction to a prerecorded vocal track. Aspects of repair, repetition, and intonation are critically examined in an innovative documentation of accountability in the pitch correction process. In his conclusion, Marshall evaluates the extent to which the tools of correction are concealed and, significantly, what is to be gained by revealing them. How is the production of music and sound mediated to listeners? Section 5, Mediating Sound and Silence, features two chapters exploring the notion of music production from original angles. Here, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen focuses on the opaque and transparent in the reception of music production aesthetics, while Richard Osborne studies the trajectory of the production of silence. In Chapter 11, Brøvig-Hanssen considers how technological mediation in the music production process is perceived by listeners. After drawing parallels between opaque/transparent productions and Smalley’s naturalist/ interventionist works, Brøvig-Hanssen goes on to frame her argument in the context of French philosopher Louis Marin’s understandings of opacity and transparency in the semiotics of paintings. Brøvig-Hanssen also considers the foregrounding of “phonograph effects” in music productions before focusing on Squarepusher in a case study of spatiotemporal fragmentation.

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Additionally, a listener’s experiential comprehension of technological intervention is considered with reference to applications of pitch correction software in music production. She concludes by evaluating the opacity of technological mediation as variable depending on listener and aesthetic potential. In an innovative study on approaches to the production of silence, Richard Osborne revisits John Cage’s 4’33” as one of many examples. In Chapter 12, Osborne first considers aspects of notated silence, before recognizing the presence of silence as more prevalent in record production than in notation. Osborne turns his attention to the politics of silence using diverse examples from anarcho-punk band Crass to EDM act Orbital. Here, Osborne also notes the presence of silence as a marker of peace in Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s A Riot Goin’ On” and in John Lennon’s “Nutopian International Anthem.” The chapter then moves on to discuss notions of memorial and technological silence. Finally, Osborne considers aspects of economic silence and draws links back to John Cage’s composition. In the final section of this book, Samantha Bennett and Mark Thorley move the discussion on music and sound production into the online sphere. Here, contemporary matters of virtual production are considered from two distinct angles; Bennett analyzes stem remixing practices in online remix communities, while Thorley considers the impact of crowdfunding as a new mode of music production and a viable alternative to the commercial mainstream. In Chapter 13, Samantha Bennett recognizes the online communities that form around remix competitions and events. Such communities have formed on dedicated platforms such as Indaba Music and Beatport, as well as through creative commons sites such as ccMixter and individual artists’ fora. Following a critical discussion on intertextuality in popular music, Bennett examines four case study examples: Deadmau5’s “SOFI Needs A Ladder,” REM’s “It Happened Today,” Bon Iver’s Bon Iver, and Skrillex and Damien Marley’s “Make It Bun Dem,” before positing “intermixtuality” as an online music production practice among community participants. This virtual production engagement is, however, evaluated as part of a continuum of (re)mix practice. In Chapter 14, Mark Thorley investigates crowdfunding. This chapter first considers established modes of music production before investigating the potential “alternative” in online crowdfunding models. Here, aspects of audience engagement and participation, economics and revenue streams are critically discussed. Thorley goes on to consider the “barriers to entry” in the established recorded music industry before he examines crowdfunding as an, albeit highly complex, alternative. Thorley notes that the establishment of a clear rationale, bypassing of the established model, and understanding of supporter motivations and engagement mechanisms are key to crowdfunding as a successful music production alternative. Additionally, Thorley recognizes the potential of crowdfunding as an alternative mode

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of production among communities of participants with whom there is proximity and shared “alternative” values.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodore W. 2002. Essays on Music. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bartmanski, Dominik, and Ian Woodward. 2015. Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bates, Eliot. 2016. Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul’s Recording Studio Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Bayley, Amanda, ed. 2010. Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, Howard S. 1976. “Art Worlds and Social Types.” American Behavioral Scientist 19 (6): 703–18. Bennett, Samantha. 2015a. “Never Mind The Bollocks… A Tech-Processual Analysis.” Popular Music and Society 38 (4): 466–86. Bennett, Samantha. 2015b. “Gus Dudgeon's Super Sonic Signature.” In Global Glam and Popular Music: Style and Spectacle from the 1970s to the 2000s, edited by Ian Chapman and Henry Johnson. New York: Routledge Studies in Popular Music. Bohlman, Philip V. 1993. “Musicology as a Political Act.” The Journal of Musicology 11 (4): 411–36. Bonomo, Joe. 2010. Highway to Hell. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Born, Georgina, ed. 2013. Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinner, Benjamin. 2009. Playing Across a Divide: Israeli-Palestinian Musical Encounters. New York: Oxford University Press. Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, and Anne Danielsen. 2016. Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Burgess, Richard James. 2002. The Art of Music Production. 2nd ed. London: Omnibus Press. Cook, Nicholas, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink, eds. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cottrell, Stephen. 2010. “The Rise and Rise of Phonomusicology.” In Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology, edited by Amanda Bayley, 15–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1997. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. DeNora, Tia. 2003. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DiMaggio, Paul. 2000. “The Production of Scientific Change: Richard Peterson and the Institutional Turn in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 28 (2): 107–36. Dockwray, Ruth, and Allan F. Moore. 2010. “Configuring the Sound-Box: 19651972.” Popular Music 29 (2): 181–97.

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Doğantan-Dack, Mine, ed. 2008. Recorded Music: Philosophical and Critical Reflections. London: Middlesex University Press. Dowd, Timothy. 2004. “Production Perspectives in the Sociology of Music.” Poetics 32: 235–46. Doyle, Peter. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording 1900-1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Eisenberg, Evan. 2005. The Recording Angel. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ferris, D. X. 2008. Reign in Blood. New York: Continuum. Frith, Simon, and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, eds. 2012. The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field. Farnham: Ashgate. Gibson, Chris. 1998. “‘We Sing Our Home, We Dance Our Land’: Indigenous Self-Determination and Contemporary Geopolitics in Australian Popular Music.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (2): 163–84. Gibson, David. 1997. The Art of Mixing: A Visual Guide to Recording, Engineering, and Production. Boston: ArtistPro Publishing. Gillett, Charlie. 1977. “The Producer as Artist.” In The Phonograph and Our Musical Life, edited by Hugh Hitchcock, 51–56. ISAM Monograph No. 14. New York: City University. Greene, Paul D., and Thomas Porcello, eds. 2005. Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Gronow, Pekka, and Ilpo Saunio. 1998. An International History of the Recording Industry. London and New York: Cassell. Hennion, Antoine. 1983. “The Production of Success: An Anti-Musicology of the Pop Song.” Popular Music 3 (1): 159–93. Hennion, Antoine. 2003. “Music and Mediation: Towards a New Sociology of Music.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 80–91. New York: Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2006. “Bourdieu, the Media and Cultural Production.” Media, Culture & Society 28 (2): 211–31. Howlett, Mike. 2009. “The Record Producer as Nexus: Creative Inspiration, Technology and the Recording Industry.” Ph.D. Thesis. University of Glamorgan. Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kealy, Edward R. 1979. “From Craft to Art: The Case of Sound Mixers and Popular Music.” Sociology of Work and Occupations 6 (1): 3–29. Kehew, Brian, and Kevin Ryan. 2006. Recording The Beatles. Houston, TX: Curvebender Publishing. Klein, Eve. 2015. “Performing Nostalgia On Record: How Virtual Orchestras And YouTube Ensembles Have Problematised Classical Music.” Journal on the Art of Record Production 9. http://arpjournal.com/performing-nostalgia-on-recordhow-virtual-orchestras-and-youtube-ensembles-have-problematised-classicalmusic/ Kral, Inge. 2010. Plugged in: Remote Australian Indigenous Youth and Digital Culture. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research [CAEPR] Working Paper No. 69. Canberra: The Australian National University.

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Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham: Duke University Press. Milner, Greg. 2009. Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music. London: Granta Publications. Moore, Allan. 2012. Song Means: Analyzing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Farnham: Ashgate. Moorefield, Virgil. 2005. The Producer as Composer: From the Illusion of Reality to the Reality of Illusion. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Morton, David. 2004. Sound Recording—The Life Story of a Technology. Westport: Greenwood Press. Moylan, William. 2007. Understanding and Crafting the Mix. Oxon: Focal Press. Muikku, Jari. 1990. “On The Role and Tasks of a Record Producer.” Popular Music and Society 14 (1): 25–33. Negus, Keith. 1992. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: E. Arnold. Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge. Negus, Keith. 2002. “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance between Production and Consumption.” Cultural Studies 16 (4): 501–15. O’Brien, Benjamin. 2016. “Sample Sharing: Virtual Laptop Ensemble Communities.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran, 377–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Osborne, Richard. 2012. Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record. Farnham: Ashgate. Peterson, Richard A. 1990. “Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music.” Popular Music 9 (1): 97–116. Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Peterson, Richard, and N. Anand. 2004. “The Production of Culture Perspective.” Annual Review of Sociology 30: 311–34. Santoro, Marco. 2008. “Culture As (And After) Production.” Cultural Sociology 2 (1): 7–31. Scales, Christopher. 2012. Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry. Durham: Duke University Press. Schmidt-Horning, Susan. 2013. Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press. Stokes, Martin. 2009. “‘Abd Al-Halim’s Microphone.” In Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, edited by Laudan Nooshin, 55–74. Farnham: Ashgate. Tagg, Philip. 1982. “Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice.” Popular Music 1 (2): 37–65. Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/ Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Théberge, Paul, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett, eds. 2015. Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Thorley, Mark. 2016. “Virtual Music, Virtual Money: The Impact of Crowdfunding Models on Creativity, Authorship and Identity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran, 557–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tompkins, Dave. 2010. How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from WWII to Hip Hop. Chicago: Stop Smiling Books. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. London: Constable. Warner, Timothy. 2003. Pop Music—Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate. Washburne, Christopher. 2008. Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Whiteley, Sheila, and Shara Rambarran, eds. 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, John, and Martin Cloonan. 2007. “Rethinking the Music Industry.” Popular Music 26 (2): 305–22. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. 2014. A Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zak, Albin. J. III. 2001. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zak, Albin. J. III. 2010. I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Filmography Dilworth, Dianna. 2008. Mellodrama. 75 minutes. Bazillion Points. Dunn, Alexander. 2015. 808. You Know Films. Fantinatto, Robert and Jason Amm. 2014. I Dream of Wires. Artoffact / First Run Features. Fjellestad, Hans. 2004. Moog. 72 minutes. Plexifilm. Grohl, Dave. 2013. Sound City. 107 minutes. Variance Films.

PA R T O N E

Situating Production: Place, Space and Gender

CHAPTER TWO

Field Recording and the Production of Place Tom Western

Introduction 1955. The advent of rock (Peterson 1990), but also a significant year in the histories of world music and of field recording. That same year, Columbia Records released The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music on its Masterworks imprint—a monumental anthology presenting to listeners “the first systematic mapping of the folk or oral music tradition of humanity” (Columbia Records 1955). Reviewing this World Library in the scholarly press a couple of years later, ethnomusicologists Alan Merriam and Charles Haywood (1958: 86) declared it “a major contribution to the study of folk music,” going on to explain: “This, in large measure, is due to the fact that all the material was recorded ‘in the field.’ There is no impression of the recording studio here, no contrivances with mikes, or setting up of proper balances. There is a pervading feeling of truth—this is how the folk sings, dances, or plays.” A clean, indexical relationship is given to the sound on record and sound as it exists in the world, and a binary is created between studio and field recordings. Studio recordings are understood as artificial constructs of sonic manipulation, while field recordings are heard as the transparent capturing of external reality. This thinking stretches back to the early history of sound recording, and persists into the present. In this chapter, I will attempt to challenge this binary by listening to field recording as a form of cultural and

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knowledge production, with particular focus on how field recordings have been used to produce place by linking sound to geography. Field recordings do not only produce place. They have also been employed by folklorists, ethnographers, ethnomusicologists and recordists of other stripes to produce race, gender, class, ethnicity and identity. Often field recordings produce all these things at once, forging associations in the ears of listeners and playing active roles in processes of racialization, nationalization, segregation, spatialization and more (Stoever-Ackerman 2010; Hagstrom Miller 2010). Sounds recorded in the field are always suffused with politics, which then feed into listening experiences. In this chapter, though, I keep my analytical ear trained on place: to probe how sonic conceptions of place intersect with and absorb understandings of ethnicity, identity and belonging; to critique the current reception of archival recordings, which credit them with granting access to how places sounded in the past; and to hear how places—particularly the nation—have been produced through territorial acts of silencing. My central case study here comes from the history of ethnomusicology: the conversations about field recording that took place within the International Folk Music Council (IFMC) in the mid-twentieth century. But I will consider this history alongside perspectives from other modes of field recording, arguing that while these genres have their differences, they also have much in common, and can productively be brought to bear on each other. The production of field recordings is highlighted throughout, showing how sounds and music and representations of people and places have been brought into being. I turn, first, to the many histories of field recording and some ways of conceiving of them, before listening to ethnomusicological conversations on recording at mid-century. I then focus on the concept of place, and how it is produced in sound, before addressing the silences involved in sonic productions of place.

Hearing the Fields Field recording has many histories. Recordings made on location—and of locations—traverse the trajectories of multiple genres of music and sound. In scholarship, field recordings have been employed in, and in some cases have been central to, various disciplines: folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural geography, anthropology, biology and more. In art music, they have been a source material for composition through most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, with microphones and tape machines becoming instruments in themselves, employed to create as well as record sounds. In popular music, field trips made by now-iconic producers—Ralph Peer, Fred Gaisberg, John Hammond—were hugely important in scouting artists, establishing markets and globalizing the recording industry. The histories

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of folk and world musics, similarly, have developed alongside recording technologies and their use in the field, often at the intersections of commerce and scholarship. Field recordings are also widely used in mass media. In film, a key part of a movie’s soundtrack consists of environmental recordings used to create ambience and produce a sense of location. In radio, location recordings were central to the development of the medium, especially in its documentary and drama forms; early radio theorists Rudolf Arnheim (1933: 30–32) and Lance Sieveking (1934: 15–26) write of building sound pictures and presenting the world to the ear. A related history is that of the recording of wildlife and natural history sounds. And related to that is the activist practice of acoustic ecology, which uses recorded sound to highlight the plight of various species in the face of habitat destruction. More anthropocentric is work in sonic ethnography, which uses field recordings to document and comment on social life in different cultures. Straddling all of these disciplines and creative concerns, and encompassing a lot more besides, is the ubiquitous and plastic concept of soundscape recording (Sterne 2013). The literature on field recording is equally diffuse, tending to inhabit pockets of space across disciplines rather than cohering as one in itself. There is not the space for a complete review here, so what follows in this section is a discussion of the work that speaks most directly to the themes of this chapter. For starters, the study of recorded music is rapidly expanding and growing in volume. A name—phonomusicology—has even been suggested (Cottrell 2010). Yet little in this recent run of texts has concerned field recording, either as process or as product. The art of record production, it seems, takes place in studios; field recordings remain largely outside of disciplinary earshot. But leaving field recordings out of conversations about record production perhaps inadvertently feeds into the notion that field recordings are not produced at all. This despite the prominent role field recording has played in various histories of music and sound. Maybe this is because recording studios are such fertile sites for analysis, so rich with interpretive opportunity and metaphor (particularly when they are written about with such verve as in the work of Evan Eisenberg (2005 [1987]: 130), for whom “the glass booths and baffles that isolate the musician from his [sic] fellow musicians; the abstracted audience; the sense of producing an object and of mass-producing a commodity; the deconstruction of time by takes and its reconstruction by splicing—these are strong metaphors of modern life”). Maybe it is because practices of field recording are so varied, sounding across the numerous aforementioned creative and scholarly enterprises. Or maybe it is because field recording lacks a generally accepted definition, usually being defined by its supposed opposite. If studio recordings are about modern techniques of control, creating ideal sounds and removing the contingencies of place and space, then “the field” is the reverse: uncontrolled sonic environments, real

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locations and capturing them in their full complexity (Akiyama 2014: 6–26; Gallagher 2015: 562). Either way, the study of field recording remains scattered and undertheorized. Yet while this is the case, there has been something of an explosion in the circulation of archival recordings in digital online sound archives, generating both public and scholarly interest. On the one hand, the reception of these recordings upon their return to the aural public sphere is fluid and mutable.1 Their meaning is open. But on the other hand, we are encouraged, in both public and scholarly realms, to hear old field recordings as though they grant us unmediated access to the past. To give a couple of examples: the discourse that encourages the listening public to engage with online sound archives posits them as “windows to the past,”2 while scholars have written that through field recordings, in contrast with written fieldnotes, “non-literate people can speak for themselves, events are captured without the bias of the writer and certain phenomena that almost completely escape the written word can be fully documented, such as dance and music” (Seeger and Chaudhuri 2004: 2–3). In both cases, the multiple mediations that are built into the production of field recordings disappear. But various voices from across music and sound studies explain why this is problematic, and I will now bring some of these voices together to illustrate this point. For Mark Katz (2010: 2), the “discourse of realism” in recording ignores a crucial point: “recorded sound is mediated sound.” While for James Barrett (2010: 100), “where the reception of musical performance is mediated through recording technology the listening experience has been humanly organised by the controllers of the recording and production process.” Sound recordist Chris Watson (2009: 284), although not writing about music as such, likens the process of recording nature sounds to conducting: “[I] found my recording position by walking round the site listening for a preferred natural balance of all the parts, similar perhaps to the conductor’s position in front of an orchestra.” And location recordist Ernst Karel (in Masters and Currin 2011) makes a similar point in a different way: recording is “not a matter of capturing a sound that was there—it’s a matter of making the microphones do something interesting.” In many ways, these authors are all adhering to an argument laid out in detail by Jonathan Sterne (2003), whose history of the origins of sound reproduction is of great help in explaining how recording has never been about capturing existing sounds, but always about getting people (or other sounding entities) to make sounds specifically for machines. And these ideas have been applied directly to the multiple histories of field recording by Mitchell Akiyama (2014). For Akiyama, the assumption that field recordings are faithful capturings of sound and place—things as they were—revolves around the notion of presence in the field, or “being there.” Across fields of ethnography, biology, acoustic ecology, and sound, ideas of transparency and authenticity permeate understandings of field recording. But Akiyama

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posits recording as a form of intervention that constructs its objects, rather than the mimetic reflection of an original phenomenon. And he traces the history that has created a binary between field and studio—a binary that is largely fictitious and contingent: a development of the Victorian era, glossing how the laboratory was present in the field and vice versa. Ultimately, field recording is a studio art. About controlling and ordering sound; about microphone configurations, polar patterns, parabolic reflectors, boom poles, preamps, connboxes, mounts and windshields;3 about sonic labour and cultural production; about constructing and operating ministudios, purpose built—sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively—in the field. This is not to say that studio and field recordings are the same, that there are not differences between them. But they both must be understood in terms of production, and fall within the rubric of phonography. I will close this section with a brief attempt to define this term so as to highlight the creativity and agency involved in all recording, field included. Although often associated with creative compositional practices that utilize field recordings in sound art, suggesting a degree of artistry as much as documentary, phonography, on a more general level, simply means “sound writing” or “writing with sound.” Eisenberg (2005 [1987]: 93, 196–97) posits phonography as an art form rather than merely a medium, defining it as music (and I would argue his definition extends to sound generally) “created in the process of recording.” Rothenbuhler and Peters (1997: 259), meanwhile, insist that we take the -graphy part of the term seriously, asserting that “phonography offers something like handwriting, with its tracing of the quirks of the author’s body.” This is to say that we must consider all acts of phonography as a form of cultural production, that recordists are always present in their recordings, and that they continue to speak through them as they circulate. Phonography describes the use of technology to organize and inscribe social practices and sonic phenomena, and with this in mind, I will now bring these ideas to bear on specific histories of field recording.

The Art of Field Production Sound recording is written indelibly into the history of ethnomusicology. Eric Ames (2003: 297) writes of comparative musicology—ethnomusicology’s disciplinary forebear—as “the first discipline based on sound recordings.” Many, perhaps most, ethnomusicological recordings have been field recordings, but there has been relatively little focus on how these recordings have been made, and what, consequently, they are. Indeed, the discourse of objectivity in recording outlined at the top of this chapter, and a lack of critical reflection on production practices in the field, are also written into the history of ethnomusicology. In this section I will listen to mid-twentiethcentury conversations on techniques for recording folk musics, taking the

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work of the IFMC as a case study and amplifying how sound was used to represent place—specifically the idea of the nation—in Europe during this time. Technologies and production techniques were much discussed, but were at once obscured behind narratives of folk authenticity, national music, the exigencies of salvage fieldwork. A couple of canonic quotes to start with. Béla Bartók wrote in 1937: “I can positively declare that the science of music folklore owes its present development to Thomas Edison” (1976 [1937]: 294). And Jaap Kunst, in 1955, wrote: “Ethno-musicology could never have grown into an independent science if the gramophone had not been invented. Only then was it possible to record the musical expressions of foreign races and peoples objectively” (1955: 19). Both these statements speak to the prevailing ideas—ideologies, even—around technology, scholarship, and world and folk musics around mid-century: ideas that centred on scientific research, which necessitated an understanding of recording as an objective gathering of data. But they do little to address the effects of technology on those being recorded, which plug into bigger issues of power and privilege. The invention and early use of sound recording technologies at once profoundly altered the relationships between the fieldworker and those being studied, while at the same time reinforcing anthropological assumptions and prejudices (Brady 1999). The phonograph was used as part of colonial staging, through which cultural difference was exaggerated, but colonized peoples also sought to appropriate this technology, with inevitably complex results (Taussig 1993). In the years that followed the Second World War, a new technology became available, and was quickly adopted by individuals and organizations producing field recordings. Magnetic tape was widely used as a recording medium from 1947, having been patented in 1898, developed in Nazi Germany, then appropriated—through confiscation of equipment and free licensing of Axis-owned patents—by Allied forces as the war ended (Brock-Nannestad 2009: 163–65). It was soon established as the industry standard, supplanting wire recording machines that had been prevalent before and during the war. The improved sound quality of tape recordings—their signal-to-noise ratio, ability to accommodate two or more channels, longer recording length and relative ease of editing—rendered earlier technologies deficient.4 This didn’t escape ethnomusicologists. Tape facilitated recording and archiving practices, and stimulated discourses of fidelity. For Jaap Kunst (1955: 21), “the new apparatuses not only enable us to obtain an infinitely better rendering—hardly, if at all, inferior to the original performance—they also allow of uninterrupted recording lasting, if desired, as long as 72 minutes.” And tape was one of the factors that contributed to a rush to the field in the decade following the war.5 This was certainly the case in Europe. Across the continent, folklore institutes sought collaborations with record companies and radio broadcasters, hoping to make field recordings of traditional musics for preservation and circulation. IFMC—now the International Council for

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Traditional Music—was founded to organize and unify these endeavours. Founded in 1947, the IFMC had a distinct European bias: just 3 of the 17 members of its Executive Board represented non-European nations (one of those three being Klaus Wachsmann, a German-British ethnomusicologist representing Uganda). At the heart of the IFMC’s aims was some highminded humanism, including in its constitution the objective “to promote understanding and friendship between nations through the common interest in folk music” (IFMC 1949: 4). Recordings were central to IFMC ambitions. It placed priority on the exchange of records between nations as an act of cultural diplomacy, publishing an International Catalogue of Folk Music Records through Oxford University Press. Council members heard field recording as a means of shoring up national identities in sound, capturing musical representations of places and peoples, and defending against the unwanted influence of mass culture. But all this was predicated on establishing an essential divide between kinds of—folk and popular—music and asserting selective connections between sounds and places. Which is to say that the IFMC’s focus on recording was to produce (idealized) versions of place—and I will now turn to publications produced by the Council in its early years, to understand why and how recordings were made. The IFMC’s position in its first decade was an ideological admixture, consisting of several equal parts: a continuation of the long-held Herderian belief that folk music was the preserve of a rural peasantry, and had to be collected from them; a stand against mass culture, advocating “traditional ways of recreation” as “an antidote to empty and passive forms of amusement” (IFMC 1953: 15); an anti-urbanity to counter processes that place people “in a desperate condition of loneliness” among “the masses of great cities” (ibid.: 15); an effort to curb the musical cosmopolitanisms that ensued from the movement of people from country to city and from nation to nation (ibid.: 12); and a rally against universal education and mass communication (ibid.). By 1955, the outlook for folk music—as understood by IFMC—was so bleak that a “Resolution Concerning the Preservation of Folk Music” was drawn up, and sent to UNESCO and “all the governments of the world” (IFMC 1956: 1–2). I would like to present it in full (Figure 2.1). Such a resolution reflected, and contributed to, normative models of mid-century European musical folklore and anthropology. 1955 was also the year Claude Lévi-Strauss, for instance, published Tristes Tropiques (translated into English as A World on the Wane), painting a sad picture of disintegrating difference in the face of commodity-driven monoculture.6 But my point here is that recordists and institutions affiliated with IFMC carried these perspectives into the field with them, choosing what to record and not to record on this basis. Of particular relevance is the positing of technology as both a positive and a negative force, claiming it can only be used for good purposes with sufficient expertise and authority, which are accordingly granted to the Council. And despite typical mid-century claims

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The Members of the International Folk Music Council, assembled at Oslo on the 30th day of June, 1955: Being gravely concerned at the rapid disappearance of traditional songs, dances and instrumental music which is taking place in most countries of the world as a consequence of the sudden break in the continuity of the lives of those who have hitherto been the bearers of the tradition: Considering that the rapid extension of education, the incursions of industrialism, and, above all, the spread of commercialised mechanical music are superimposing an alien culture on traditional modes of artistic expression; and that the present decline in the traditional practice of folk music arises not from unprejudiced choice but from the loss of confidence engendered by the unaccustomed ways of modern life: Being convinced that folk music has a unique value in the life of today as (a) being in itself a complete and satisfying form of artistic expression as well as a basis for further musical development, (b) playing an important part in the scientific and historical study in the art of music and in the sociological study of mankind, and (c) forming a bond of union between the peoples of all countries at all levels of culture: Believing that, while our modern civilisation is destroying folk music, it also has the power to revitalise it and to save for posterity by means of mechanical recording and filming, providing that the work be done forthwith in the spirit of the injunction, ‘Colligite quae superaverunt, ne pereant’: Have resolved to bring to the notice of governments, UNESCO and other authoritative bodies the urgency and importance of preserving the folk music of their own countries: to suggest (1) that they should take immediate steps to ensure the recording and filming, under expert guidance, of all extant authentic folk music, and (2) that they should treat the preservation and encouragement of folk culture as an indispensible adjunct to any campaign that may be undertaken against illiteracy.

FIGURE 2.1 IFMC Resolution Concerning the Preservation of Folk Music, 1955.

to science, recording is imbued with all kinds of politics. The IFMC model of preservation amounted to a form of purification. Traditions considered “alien” were purged from conceptions of national music, and types of music were artificially demarcated from one another. Soundings of place were territorial. The power to define culture disappears with claims to objectivity.7 These political aspects of recording were coupled with conversations about techniques and technologies. IFMC published a manual for fieldworkers on The Collecting of Folk Music and Other Ethnomusicological Material in 1951,

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aimed primarily at those doing research in Europe, with a geographically expanded second edition following in 1958. Under the editorship of Maud Karpeles, this latter edition is a 40-page document, containing much advice and information on making field recordings. It is aimed at non-experts, with an emphasis on how “much more precise technical means of recording” enabled those with no musical training to make recordings, which could then be analysed by others later (Firth 1958: 3).8 Here we find a point of divergence between the field and the studio. The increased availability and affordability of portable recording machines in the 1950s and 1960s led to something of a democratization of sound recording, some decades in advance of the rise of the home recording studio. Ian Rawes (2010) highlights the existence of hobbyist tape-recording clubs that were founded across Britain during this period. Yet folklorists were keen to maintain a distinction between professional and amateur fieldrecording endeavours. A few years earlier, Karpeles had deemed “inexpert observing and collecting” as dangerous, and that “amateur observers should not be encouraged to interfere with traditional customs.”9 The idea of the professional fieldworker was vital to folklore’s drive for academic legitimacy (Bendix 1997: 46), and access to recording technologies remained a form of technoprivilege. Stoever-Ackerman (2010: 62) writes of how a sonic colour-line separates those who made recordings and those who were recorded. And certainly the ability to archive and circulate recordings, and to define and represent peoples and places, remained a form of institutionalized power. Even so, the IFMC manual gives advice on technical matters: recording speeds, microphone choices, power sources, playback devices, microphone leads, reducing wind noise and machine hum. And on personal matters: finding informants, obtaining material, getting folk instead of popular songs, and making concealed recordings by working “inconspicuously behind a bush or in a hut” (Karpeles 1958: 17). Talk of concealed recordings brings into focus another key issue in the production of field recordings: ethics. This is a big topic, with perspectives varying from recording-as-expropriation (Fox 2013) to recording-as-humanism (Reigle 2008). Awareness of the problematic ethics of much twentieth-century field recording feeds into the current ethnomusicological focus on repatriation: returning recordings to their source communities in efforts to counter, even heal, what Aaron Fox (2013: 523) calls the discipline’s “racist and colonial legacy.” But focus is also given specifically to production. The limitations of recording, as a medium, are acknowledged—“A mechanical sound recording cannot by itself reproduce the actual quality of the living song or instrumental tune” (ibid.: 19)—and so the quality of recordings, as a technical practice, is emphasized: “It would be a mistake for the field worker to ignore either the technical quality of his [sic] recording or its aesthetic presentation” (ibid.: 22). Recordists are encouraged to think about using wall surfaces to generate reverb and about mic placement in relation to different instrument

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families. Detailed instruction is provided on recording ensembles, so as to generate a good mix in a live setting: In recording an ensemble, start with a general recording of the whole piece, or a representative section of it, and then, without stopping the machine, move the microphone near each performer, or group of performers, in turn. The object is to give prominence to each contributing element whilst still allowing the complete ensemble to be heard in the background. (Fox: 21) In other words, the recordist is encouraged to move in and among the musicians to get their microphone close to each component sound source. But the recordist becomes part of the performance as a result. These methods were promoted to assist subsequent analysis of the music, yet they also show how concern for the microphone and its positioning were central to ethnomusicological recording endeavours. Knowledge production came through analysis, which was reliant upon technology. This may seem completely obvious, but it is exactly this concern for technology and production that often goes missing in discourses of field recording, which emphasize fidelity, transparency and verisimilitude. Karpeles also approvingly cites Hugh Tracey’s “Recording African Music in the Field,” another 1955 work, which similarly stresses the links between sonic representation and creative use of microphones. For Tracey (in Karpeles 1958: 22), “the microphone must be ‘focused’ like a camera to select the salient features of the music and to present them in such a way as to suggest a complete representation of the occasion.” And like photography, this is a combination of documentary and artistry: “recording is an art form operating within the limitations of a frame which demands its own set of rules” (ibid.: 22). Two points emerge. First, the set of rules—to echo Tracey’s language—that inform the production of recordings obviously differs across recording settings. Studio recordings are clearly different from field recordings, just as the various genres of field recording differ from one another (though there are plenty of overlaps). Second, and at the same time, all recordings are produced, and this is always at once a creative and a technical act. Microphones are compositional tools. Karpeles’s and Tracey’s recording guidelines speak directly to questions of balance and perspective and record production as a form of performance—which is to say, everything that Merriam and Haywood state that field recordings are not. In 1986 Anthony Seeger urged ethnomusicologists who make recordings to think of themselves as record producers. In discussing the ontologies of sound archives, he wrote: “No archive preserves sounds. What it preserves are interpretations of sounds—interpretations made by the people who did the recordings, and their equipment” (1986: 270). This is remarkable for the fact that it needed saying at all, some thirty years after the field-recording moment under discussion here. Even the Columbia World Library—the

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project that drew Merriam and Haywood’s affirmations on truthfulness through its lack of sonic “contrivances”—had plenty of production. Alan Lomax, who compiled this recorded anthology, wrote to a colleague: “In all my albums I have helped the records a lot with the filter bank, the echo chamber, and I’ve also had a good producer, who knew about making master tapes for records, socking up all the gain that he could, but careful not to sock on too much. It’s a specialized job” (in Western 2014: 293).10 Moreover, and to close this section, the aesthetic presentation of field recordings is part of their production, and this feeds into the connections between sound and place that are forged in both the production and reception processes. In the case of the World Library, recordings were presented in fragments, so as to fit many sounds onto two sides of a long-playing record—each volume a bricolage to represent a nation. Such field-recording projects can thus be heard as tape music, not completely unlike new kinds of composition based on cutting, splicing and manipulating tape that were gaining ground in art music at the same time. There are some connections here. While plotting the World Library, Lomax wrote to a colleague with a plan to undertake another project: to record “sounds and music of the great cities of the world at night.”11 Lomax went to Italy to scope out sounds and existing recordings in September 1953, exactly the same time as Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna were composing their Ritratto di città (Portrait of a City)—a collage of city sounds in tape. There is nothing to say that these projects were actually connected, or that Lomax even knew of Berio and Maderna. But Lomax was a tape cutter, and his presentation of field recordings on the World Library makes for a dizzying listen. Each album can be heard as an aesthetic object as well as an ethnographic document. Despite the discourse of science and fidelity that at once permeates and masks the production of ethnomusicological field recordings, once we accept the creativity involved in producing these sounds, then we can understand this practice as sitting at the intersections of modernist art and ethnography, of ethnological and surrealist collaborations. Picasso at the Trocadéro, Lévi-Strauss in wartime New York—the category of “primitive art,” so essential to the history of ethnomusicology—emerged at the meeting point of modernist aesthetics and global culture collecting (Clifford 1988: 228, 236–44).12 With field recording, specifically, the result of this is very often a sonic representation of place. Field recordists use sound and editing and rhythm to produce it. And I will turn now to ideas on how exactly this is done.

Producing Place Place is a fundamental concept in pretty much every type of field recording. Alongside the ethnomusicological model described above, which was concerned with sonic representations of nations and traditional cultures,

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a bunch of examples can now reintroduce other histories of field recording to this chapter: Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend portrays a weekend in Berlin through a collage of words, music fragments and field recordings, creating an audio snapshot of the city; Tony Schwartz spent a lifetime recording the sounds of New York City, presenting them on the radio and on record under such evocative titles as Sound Picture of New York, Sounds of My City and New York 19; Annea Lockwood’s A Sound Map of the Hudson River charts the textures, changes and repetitions of this body of water as it moves through different places, and, probably most famously, the members of the World Soundscape Project—notably R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp and Barry Truax—have produced detailed sonic accounts of Vancouver among other places. An issue that relates back to the mid-century IFMC model of recording, but also connects with any work that represents place, is that of deciding what to record and what not to record, what to keep and what to discard, which sounds are appropriate and which are not. On one level, this might be a simple aesthetic decision. But there’s more to it than that. Samuels, Meintjes, Ochoa and Porcello (2010: 335) write that in producing recordings, “field recordists make decisions behind which lie histories of ideas about what needs to be made audible.” Sometimes this will mean a romantic environmentalism, wherein a dichotomy is set up between nature and industry, with the latter being heard as degrading and noisy, and the former as pristine, in need of protection and something to get back to.13 Often these histories will be concerned with identity, territory and belonging. George Revill (2000: 597–98) tells us how sound can inform “moral geographies of landscape, nation, and citizen,” while Martin Stokes (1994) shows how music can be employed to make connections between place and ethnicity, and the construction and maintenance of boundaries. At worst, soundings of place produced through field recording can perpetuate the idea of ethnos—Greek for nation, and referring to people of the same race. In an essay on the intensification of globalization after 1989, Arjun Appadurai argues that the idea of a national ethnos is fundamentally— often dangerously—contained within the idea of the modern nation-state. Appadurai’s analysis is particularly relevant here as he tackles head-on the idea so often found in the discourse strapped to field recordings of traditional musics, but that applies equally to assertions of nationness through soundscape recording: that certain musics and sounds bear some intrinsic relation to the land and that a nation can be expressed through them. He writes: “The idea of a singular national ethnos, far from being an outgrowth of this or that soil, has been produced and naturalized at great cost” (2006: 4). Which is another way of saying that the flipside of sound and representation is silence and exclusion. In other ways, however, sound and sound recording can foster deeper understandings of, and connections to, place. The person who has arguably done the most in this regard is Steven Feld, whose recording work in

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Papua New Guinea and elsewhere has aimed at shaping representations of different ways of listening in different parts of the world, rather than simply transporting our ears to these other places (Feld 2015: 12–21). Not dissimilarly, Nancy Guy, in her work on ecomusicology, draws upon Lawrence Buell to show how the concept of place points in at least three directions at once: toward environmental materiality, social perception or construction, and individual affect or bond (2009: 219). Field recording, when done well, can sound out each of these directions. On top of this, listening to places as produced through field recordings is always complicated by the act of listening taking place somewhere else. Even though, as Michael Gallagher (2015: 565–66) points out, we are encouraged to “listen through” technologies to hear the recorded place, these sounds are always merged with the sounds that exist around us in real time. As Brandon LaBelle (2006: 211) puts it, “place paradoxically comes to life by being somewhat alien . . . as a listener I hear just as much displacement as placement, just as much placelessness as place.” And Akiyama goes further, arguing that place does not inhere in recorded sound, but is projected onto a recording by the listener—a sense of place is actually a placemaking (2014: 37). Often the only reason we have any idea where we are listening to is due to supplementary information supplied external to the recording in question, through track names, photographs and paratexts of other sorts. One of the main ways that sounds are mapped to places is through the genre of the sound map. Sound and maps may be uneasy bedfellows— maps need grids and boundaries which don’t apply to sound; maps are two dimensional while sound is three dimensional; by strapping sounds to visual representations of place, sight is again placed above hearing in the hierarchy of the senses—but they have a history, and seemingly a future (Ouzounian 2014). They are a site of increasing collaboration between scholars, archivists and the general public. Whereas producing place through field recording was previously the domain of a small number of recordists, the situation today is different. Anna Schultz and Mark Nye have updated Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s (1991) model of technological eras in ethnographic recording (divided into phonograph, LP and cassette eras) to take account of our “unbound digital era” (2014: 298–316). At present, fieldworkers have been stripped of the technological privileges that came with the exclusive ownership and control of recording technologies. Now, almost anyone can record almost anything, and field recordings are ubiquitous. Interactive sound maps allow users to upload and share recordings online, collectively creating new representations of place through network technologies.14 And while these are obviously still mediated productions, at least people are now producing place for themselves. Highlighting production is not to argue that the places that are recorded do not exist; instead it aims to show how recording produces realities (Law and Urry 2004: 395). Ultimately, field recordings continue to bring places into being.

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Conclusions All of which is to say that—while I do not disagree that having sound archives full of field recordings is a good thing, and that recordings circulating beyond archives is an even better thing—we should be careful not to uncritically celebrate the work of earlier field recordists. Tropes of heroic salvage and noble ethnography serve to gloss over the power relations inherent in histories of field recording. And this power is not just that of wielding technologies; it is in defining culture—using sound to construct relations between people, places and identities, which then inform the reception of recordings and understandings of history. Listening to field recordings as works of cultural and knowledge production allows us to hear silences, decisions about what has been deemed worthy of recording and how places have been produced through this sonic labour. In this chapter I have sought to do two things to this end. First, to unsettle a binary between the studio and the field that exists both in scholarship and in the aural public sphere. Field recordings are productions, containing many of the same technologies and practices as their studio counterparts. Second, to highlight how these productions have served to bring places into being. Recording projects have usually had some ideological agenda, often to do with salvage and anti-modernity, or ethnicity and nation and territory. Far from being truthful transmissions of places and pasts, field recordings produce these entities in sound.

Notes 1 The idea of the “aural public sphere” comes from Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2006). On the mutability of meaning in recordings, Martin Stokes (2010: 8) puts it better than I can: “Recordings are not simply inert objects of social scientific or historical enquiry. They are energetic and conversational creatures, alive to us in time and space.” 2 For an example of the discourse of “windows to the past,” see a crowdfunding video for the website of archival field recordings made in Scotland, Tobar an Dualchais: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYNnjrwBb4E. 3 It is very possible to make field recordings without much of this equipment, or knowledge about it. Handheld all-in-one devices with built-in microphones, such as the popular Zoom H4n, allow recordists to easily produce sounds. Yet at the same time there are many websites on field-recording production, offering advice on equipment and good practice, and many of the large online forums on sound recording—such as www.soundonsound.com, taperssection.com and www.gearslutz.com—feature sections on field recording. In most threads, as is often the case in such forums, it is generally agreed that the production of “good” recordings requires a raft of specialist equipment, above and beyond entry-level handheld devices.

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4 Signal-to-noise ratio describes the strength of a (desired) signal relative to background noise or interference. 5 Philip Bohlman writes of the general trend whereby technological change accompanies developments in the production and understanding of world musics: “The history of recording technology unfolds in relatively strict counterpoint with the history of world music itself, anchoring it in the materiality of wax cylinders, long-playing records, magnetic tape, audio and video cassettes, and the digital media of CDs and MP3s” (2013: 5). 6 More recent positions have critiqued this stance. James Clifford (1988: 14–15) posits Lévi-Strauss’s narrative as “too neat”: assuming a “questionable Eurocentric position at the ‘end’ of a unified human history, gathering up, memorialising the world’s local historicities.” This kind of memorializing, for Clifford, assumes a process of ruin and cultural decay, and fails to account for the agency of individuals and groups to improvise local performances “from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols, and languages” (ibid.: 14–15). 7 Stuart Elden argues for an understanding of territory as a political technology, more to do with relations between power and space, terrain and technique, than with notions of land as an inert backdrop for states. Accordingly for Elden, territory is never static, but is “a process, made and remade, shaped and reshaped, active and reactive” (2013: 17). For excellent work on national— and nationalist—music, see Bohlman (2011). 8 This division of labour between recordist and analyst predates postwar technological change, and was an essential part of earlier comparative musicology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Lobley 2010: 39–43). For an excellent account of how this division of labour worked in practice, see Lars-Christian Koch (2013). 9 Joint Sub-Committee on Matters of Cultural Interest meeting minutes, 10 October 1947; Executive Committee meeting minutes, 23 October 1947. English Folk Dance and Song Society Minutes, Volume 19, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London. 10 Lomax’s concern with post-production techniques, and with sound quality in general, were part of his efforts to give traditional musics an equal hearing in the music industries alongside other forms of commercial recorded musics. He later termed this “cultural equity” (Western 2014: 282). 11 Alan Lomax’s letter to D. G. Bridson, 25 October 1950. BBC Written Archives Centre, R46/309/2—Rec. Gen. Alan Lomax File 2:1947-51. 12 André Schaeffner, who co-produced the French Africa volume of the World Library, and who developed a musical instrument classification system in the 1930s, had previously worked with Georges Bataille to produce the surrealist journal Documents in 1929–30. 13 These negative framings of noise have been subject to recent critique. R. Murray Schafer’s work on soundscapes, which constructs this binary between nature and industry, has been shown by Sterne (2003: 342–43) to conceal “a distinctly authoritarian preference for the voice of one over the noise of the many,” while Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (2010: 63–71) and David Novak (2014: 28) show how arguments about noise are always imbued with prejudices on class and race.

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14 Examples of interactive sound maps include the British Library’s UK Soundmap (sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmap), the Radio Aporee Maps project (www.aporee.org/maps/info/) and the Soinumapa project in Spain (www.soinumapa.net).

Bibliography Akiyama, Mitchell. 2014. “The Phonographic Memory: A History of Sound Recording in the Field.” Ph.D. Thesis, Montreal: McGill University. Ames, Eric. 2003. “The Sound of Evolution.” Modernism/Modernity 10 (2): 297–325. Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1933. Radio. London: Faber and Faber. Barrett, James. 2010. “Producing Performance.” In Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology, edited by Amanda Bayley, 89–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartók, Béla. 1976. Béla Bartók Essays. Edited by Benjamin Suchoff. London: Faber and Faber. Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bohlman, Philip. 2011. Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe. London: Routledge. Bohlman, Philip, ed. 2013. The Cambridge History of World Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brady, Erika. 1999. A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Brock-Nannestad, George. 2009. “The Development of Recording Technologies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink, 149–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Columbia Records (1955). The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. Columbia SL-204 – KL-5174. Cottrell, Stephen. 2010. “The Rise and Rise of Phonomusicology.” In Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology, edited by Amanda Bayley, 15–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenberg, Evan. 2005 [1987]. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Elden, Stuart. 2013. The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12–21. Durham: Duke University Press. Firth, Raymond. 1958. “Preface.” In The Collecting of Folk Music and Other Ethnomusicological Material, edited by Maud Karpeles. London: International Folk Music Council and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

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Fox, Aaron. 2013. “Repatriation as Reanimation through Reciprocity.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip Bohlman, 522–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, Michael. 2015. “Field Recording and the Sounding of Spaces.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33: 560–76. Guy, Nancy. 2009. “Flowing Down Taiwan’s Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination.” Ethnomusicology 53 (2): 218–48. Hagstrom Miller, Karl. 2010. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham: Duke University Press. Haywood, Charles, and Alan Merriam. 1958. “Folk and Primitive Music.” Journal of American Folklore 71 (279): 83–86. IFMC. 1949. “The International Folk Music Council: Its Formation and Progress.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 1: 1–2. IFMC. 1953. “General Report.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 5: 9–35. IFMC. 1956. “Editorial.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 8: 1–2. Karpeles. Maud, ed. 1958. The Collecting of Folk Music and Other Ethnomusicological Material. London: International Folk Music Council and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Koch, Lars-Christian. 2013. “Images of Sound: Erich M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogram Archive.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip Bohlman, 475–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, Mark. 2010. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kunst, Jaap. 1955. Ethno-Musicology: A Study of its Nature, its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities to Which is Added a Bibliography. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. LaBelle, Brandon. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Continuum. Law, John, and John Urry. 2004. “Enacting the Social.” Economy and Society 33 (3): 390–410. Lobley, Noel. 2010. “The Social Biography of Ethnomusicological Field Recordings: Eliciting Responses to Hugh Tracey’s The Sound of Africa Series.” D.Phil. thesis, Oxford: University of Oxford. Masters, Marc, and Grayson Currin. 2011. “Turning the World into Art.” Pitchfork, October 21. http://pitchfork.com/features/the-out-door/8692-fieldrecording/ (accessed October 26, 2016). Novak, David. 2014. “A Beautiful Noise Emerging from the Apparatus of a Machine: Trains and Sounds of the Japanese City.” In The Acoustic City, edited by Matthew Gandy and B.J. Nilsen, 27–32. Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2006. “Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 12 (6): 803–25. Ouzounian, Gascia. 2014. “Acoustic Mapping: Notes from the Interface.” In The Acoustic City, edited by Matthew Gandy and B. J. Nilsen, 164–73. Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Peterson, Richard. 1990. “Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music.” Popular Music 9 (1): 97–116.

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Rawes, Ian. 2010. “Sound and Sociability.” London Sound Survey, February 21. www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/survey/post/sound_and_sociability/ (accessed February 15, 2017). Reigle. Robert. 2008. “Humanistic Motivations in Ethnomusicological Recordings.” In Recorded Music: Philosophical and Critical Reflections, edited by Mine Doğantan-Dack, 189–210. London: Middlesex University Press. Revill, George. 2000. “Music and the Politics of Sound: Nationalism, Citizenship, and Auditory Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 597–613. Rothenbuhler, Eric, and John Durham Peters. 1997. “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory.” Musical Quarterly 81 (2): 242–64. Samuels, David, Louise Meintjes, Ana María Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello. 2010. “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 329–345. Schultz, Anna, and Mark Nye. 2014. “Music Ethnography and Recording Technology in the Unbound Digital Era.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, vol. 1, 298–316. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seeger, Anthony. 1986. “The Role of Sound Archives in Ethnomusicology Today.” Ethnomusicology 30 (2): 261–76. Seeger, Anthony, and Shubha Chaudhury, eds. 2004. Archives for the Future: Global Perspectives on Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 1991. “Recording Technology, the Record Industry, and Ethnomusicological Scholarship.” In Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, edited by Bruno Nettl and Philip Bohlman, 277–92. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sieveking, Lance. 1934. The Stuff of Radio. London: Cassell & Co. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2013. “Soundscape, Landscape, Escape.” In Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage, edited by Karin Bijsterveld, 181–93. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Stoever-Ackerman, Jennifer. 2010. “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York.” Social Text 28 (1): 59–85. Stokes, Martin, ed. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg. Stokes, Martin. 2010. The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Tobar an Dualchais. 2013. “Help Support Scotland’s Traditional Culture.” YouTube, October 15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYNnjrwBb4E (accessed February 12, 2017). Watson, Chris. 2009. “Something in the Air.” In The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink, 283–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Western, Tom. 2014. “‘The Age of the Golden Ear’: The Columbia World Library and Sounding Out Postwar Field Recording.” Twentieth-Century Music 11 (2): 275–300.

CHAPTER THREE

The Poietics of Space: The Role and Co-performance of the Spatial Environment in Popular Music Production Damon Minchella

Introduction and Preamble Trying to park in NW8 was always a nightmare. The reserved area at the front of the recording studio was too small to accommodate all of the vehicles used by the building’s clientele. So, after the best part of half an hour trying to find a place to park, to then be greeted in reception by a glum-faced concierge only added to the underwhelming nature of the start to the day’s work. “Who are you? Your name’s not on my list, wait here.” Another half-hour wait ensued, and eventually, after having been finally ushered through the hallowed portals of Studio Two, the day could now start: the real business of making a record with all its attendant pressures and excitement. Encountering the drummer tuning up his kit quickly dampened this fleeting feeling of enthusiasm; “The drums sound flat in here, what a pain. Maybe right for The Beatles, but we don’t sound like them.” Perhaps the engineer on the session, one who the band had recorded with many times before, would have a solution. Or not, as it turned out; “Drums always

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sound a bit lame in here, orchestras are a different matter, throw up a couple of good mics and bosh!” Sadly, we were not an orchestra but a four-piece rock group, with the usual drums, bass, two guitars and lead vocal line-up. A quick hop up the stairs, from the live room to the control room, revealed a visibly nervous lead singer, clearly weighed down by his love, bordering on obsession, for the studio’s most famous clients, and the guitarist, who was more concerned with taking photographs than picking up an instrument. Reviewing this day, years after the fact, has a rationale beyond being just a trip down memory lane. Space is so much more than the realm of surveyors and measurement; rather, it is central to our whole experience and is an intrinsic factor in the process of creativity itself. Drawing on extensive interviews with current professional music practitioners, this chapter presents an investigation into the phenomenological impact of the lived environment on the making of British-based popular music. With its roots in the Greek word “to make” or “to create,” poietics is a pertinent term for this research. Aligning with creation or production aspects, the phrase “poietics of space” incorporates the lived environment directly into the process of making music. Furthermore, it also allows for the inclusion of active constructions and individualized adaptations of the spatial environment; a theme directly highlighted by the research participants. Poietics denotes a focus on the act of creating music, as opposed to a concern with the reception of works or their formal or structural aspects. However, this narrower focus should not be taken as one that is too reductive in scope. As research participant Chris Potter states, “the creative space can provide the spark that takes you away and produces something worth listening to.” A “something” that helps to form the popular music that can then be heard anywhere in the world at the click of a button. Two other terms used throughout this chapter require some clarification. “Popular music” denotes music that is made based upon original artistled compositions, whether under the varying labels of “rock,” “indie,” “electronic” and so on. As the participant base is not solely limited to musicians but also incorporates producers, engineers, record industry executives and a studio designer, the more inclusive term “practitioner” is used. This also allows for the occasional plurality and blurring of specific roles in the making of British-based popular music. Building on existing and diverse literature that discusses the role of the spatial environment, this chapter highlights the lived nature of space as being a central factor in the poietics of popular music. Through phenomenological enquiry I argue that our conceptualizations of creativity should be updated to be properly attentive to spatial concerns and, as such, I present a representation of creative practice that is underscored by the lived environment in the conclusion.

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Phenomenology and the “Science” of Experience What is it to experience and what is it that we experience? These are the two central concerns of phenomenology, which Smith regards as the “first person science of consciousness” (2013: xi). With its origins in the work of Edmund Husserl, phenomenology aims towards an inquiry into the sense that is made when we engage with the phenomena of the world and the elements of our experience. Husserl (1970 [1936]) sought to show how the content within an act of consciousness becomes meaning for an individual through the idea of “intentionality.” With an intrinsic awareness of external objects and the ability to reflect on internalized mental states, our consciousness is always related to a “perception of something” (ibid.: §22). Simply stated, consciousness is intended towards something that we experience, being either objects or acts of reflection. For Husserl, acts of intention form meanings through our positioning in the “lifeworld.” The intentional relationships that turn the contents of consciousness into meanings are bound within and formed by the perspective or “horizon of possibilities” (ibid.) of our experiential surroundings. As no one lives in a vacuum, the lifeworld creates a spatial and temporal position from which we experience. Such a non-static conceptualization for the individualized content within an act of consciousness—which Husserl called “noema” from the Greek for “what is thought about”—led Merleau-Ponty to elevate the role of the body to a central position in phenomenology. With the grounding of experience occurring through embodied perception, MerleauPonty regarded consciousness as a “being-toward-the-world” (1945). In this way, “our existence is too tightly caught (up) in the world” (ibid.: Ixxvii) for the noematic sense or meanings we infer to be abstracted from the environment. Due to this embodied nature, Malpas (2007) regards space as directly informing our experience and the meanings that we derive. Stating that “our ‘inner’ lives are to be found in the exterior spaces in which we dwell, while these same spaces are themselves incorporated ‘within’ us” (ibid.: 6), Malpas views space as being the catalyst for our ability to have experiences in the first place. On face value, this may appear to overstate the phenomenological centrality of the spatial environment but consciousness is always conscious of and directed towards something (Smith 2003). As such, and in alignment with the views of Bachelard (2014 [1958]) and Nancy (2007), there is no sharp Cartesian-like division between the inner self and the outer world— spaces are not merely locations; rather, they act as a partial grounding of our experiences. Accordingly, our imaginative and creative acts are never wholly autonomous from our location: the external influences the internal. Indeed, for Bachelard, “we do not (just) change place, we change our nature” (2014 [1958]: 222). Such an emphasis on the importance of the lived environment makes the role of space central to Husserl’s original call to study “the things themselves” in phenomenology.

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Complexity and Creativity Geographer Ray Hudson attributes to the spatial environment a complex or manifold role in helping to form our “meanings, identities and practices” (2006: 627). Aligning this with a move away from the outmoded and de-contextualized Romantic view of creativity as one that revolves around a solitary lone genius—a person devoid of unwanted outside interference or influence—the concept of creativity as a systems model has largely become the accepted view on creative practice. Under such frameworks (e.g. Csikszentmihalyi 1988; Feldman 1999), the interdependence between creative agents and their social and cultural contexts has been highlighted. The systems view comprises two elements with which the creative agent interacts. Firstly, the “domain” is the cultural aspect comprising a background of conventions, techniques and knowledge—the “rules” of a specific area of creative practice—with which an agent needs to “immerse” themself. The “field” is the second or social aspect that partially constitutes and controls the domain. This element is comprised of organizations and groups who regulate and determine the shape of the field and can be seen as the providers of the validation (or not) that a new product or idea needs in order to be accepted. The wider framework provided by the systems view has allowed for a recognition to be made of the relationships and exchanges that occur across the creative process and any resultant creative outcome. Due to acknowledgment of these contexts, there have been many studies on the role of environmental factors in the creative process. Hudson aside, the majority of geographers pursuing this topic have focused on the impact milieus have on the diffusion and dissemination of creative ideas and products rather than on the agency that a space may exert, as Meusberger et al. (2009) confirm. Sociological and economic-based perspectives have centred their discourse mainly on organizational aspects (Sailer 2011). As a consequence, the specific relationship between the spatial environment and the effect this has on the unfolding of the creative process has been somewhat overlooked. A smaller body of research has argued for more relational understandings such as Drake’s (2003) focus on the complexities of space providing visual and mental creative stimuli in craft and design industries. On a more general level, popular music-related studies have somewhat skirted over the impact of the recording studio as a “lived” space, regarding it rather more as one link in a chain of mediations from an initial song sketch or demo through to the final marketed CD or download. Two works that do directly relate to such an experiential role are Chasing Sound by Schmidt-Horning (2013) and The Musicology of Record Production by Zagorski-Thomas (2014). Focusing on “the art of capturing a performance to the art of engineering an illusion” (2013: 4), Schmidt-Horning provides an account of the changing spaces and practices in recording studios from the late nineteenth century

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until the mid-1970s. Although not written as such, Chasing Sound can usefully be regarded as an in-depth historical background to the more theoretical approach of Zagorski-Thomas. Combining concepts relating to perception, cognition and creativity, a widescreen overview is provided regarding the way music—and in the main popular music—is recorded, and how differing recording practices may produce different meanings or “sonic metaphors.” Zagorski-Thomas also directly engages here with the systems view of creativity, which he regards as being able to cope only with “more general attributes” (2014: 16) as it has “issues triangulating the individual with the cultural domain and social field” (ibid.: 131). I consider this capability of the systems approach in the conclusion to this chapter, but, for current purposes, Zagorski-Thomas’s call for “an understanding of our environment” (ibid.: 211) aligns with the phenomenological centrality that Moran ascribes: “we don’t just take up space, we inhabit it, we relate to it” (2000: 424).

Musical Spaces Both Hansen (2006) and Théberge (2004) have suggested that, through technological advances, the reliance on single locations in recording music has been reduced. Clearly, advances in recording equipment and transmission technologies have opened up creative possibilities in the production of music, along with the ability to create virtual forms of acoustic spaces. However, Théberge suggests that other aspects of a studio, such as “aesthetics and organization” still create a “sense of place” (2004: 766). Furthermore, Blesser and Salter argue that spaces combine four “social, navigational, aesthetic, and musical” (2009: 64) aspects or attributes. So, while Williams (2012) saliently highlights the change in auditory experience that wearing a pair of headphones creates, leading to a removal of the external sonic landscape, this is only a temporary modification of the “musical” space. The headphonewearing musician is still seated in a particular and multi-attributed space. Whatever the technology that is enabling the production of music may be, it is still placed and operated within real and lived environments. The importance of the specific musical space is highlighted by Bates (2012), who states that “recording studios . . . call attention to themselves throughout the recording process”; by Gendreau, who regards the environment as a “de facto collaborator” (2011: 41); and by Moylan, who raises the point that the “interaction of sound source and the environment, in which it is produced, will create alterations to the sound” (2002: 10). To all intents, it can be argued that there is a degree of fusion of the acoustic environment with the sounds produced there: an interaction of the sounded with the sound-space. Regarding enclosed spaces as acting as “storage containers for sonic energy” (2009: 135), Blesser and Salter consider each

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spatial environment to have a unique “aural architecture” (ibid.: 2), wherein a space has its own particular reaction to sound frequencies, enhancing some while suppressing others. Reybrouck argues that a musician’s process of audition within these “sonic containers” occurs through a “closed loop” system (2006). There is a tripartite and recursive interaction between an individual, the music being produced, and the situated environment, rather than a stepwise flow through a stimulus-then-reaction channel. For example, a guitarist will modify their production of sound after sensory feedback—their perceptual input—on the sound being produced. A new output is then created which interacts with the environment and feeds back to the listener/musician as a new input. In this way, “dealing with music . . . entails a constructive process of sense-making that matches the perceptual input against a knowledge base and coordinates it with possible behavioural responses” (2006: 45). While this feedback process may operate at times on a subconscious level, the environment is intrinsic to its provision. At the heart of this “loop,” a music practitioner can be argued to “aim” for a state of equilibrium between their “cognitive structures and the environment” (ibid.: 49), an equilibrium clearly not immediately achieved, due to the aural architecture of Abbey Road’s Studio Two, by the drummer in the introductory preamble.

Methodology The participant interviews were conducted using an initial semi-structured format, focusing on how each individual perceived the process of musicmaking. This enabled a widescreen view to be obtained—one free from prompting or suggestions of specific frameworks or theories. These initial interviews were then followed up with more detailed discussions focusing on specific responses deemed relevant to the research title. In this way, clarifying questions and context-specific inquiry could be carried out, allowing for a “richer understanding of the perspective of the person being researched” (Norton 2009: 96). The resulting interview transcriptions were then coded and analysed, using the thematic networks analysis approach founded by AttrideStirling (2001). Under this system, data is coded using a framework consisting of the criteria being looked for (deductive codes) and recurrent issues in the texts (inductive codes). These texts are then dissected into segments using the coding framework and themes identified. Basic themes are placed into groups with larger common issues, called organizing themes, which are then summarized into overarching assertions, or global themes. This approach enables connections to be explored between the explicit statements and implicit meanings in participants’ discourse and emergent patterns to be analysed. As part of what Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates term my “autoethnographic” approach, my own reflections as a fellow music practitioner

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have been included, allowing for the addition of “well founded insights” (Mostyn 1985: 118) or emic “cultural categories” (McCracken 1988: 23). There is still, by necessity, an interpretation carried out on a text or interview transcription, which can lead to a provisional aspect in resultant findings. However, a parallel can be drawn here with the formation of new case law. Under jurisprudence, propositions and inferences are supported with corroborative testimony and conclusions made, which may include any necessary reservations. As such, findings are derived from predicates and not unassailable “facts.” In the case of this chapter, the opinions of the research participants to the research findings have been included and reviewed in the concluding section.

Findings The organizing themes have been grouped into five categories. While these groupings are a useful way to focus on different aspects and allow for more manageable analysis, there are some partial crossovers between these demarcations. The categories do not stand as unconnected and discrete entities, due to the very nature of the interconnection of the musical, aesthetic, social and navigational aspects of the spatial environment. This also mirrors the nonlinear nature of the situated creative act itself. Each of the sections contains a related tabular figure showing the grouping of basic themes into italicized organizing themes.

Space as Workplace From the outside, making popular music can appear to be a rather glamorous and romanticized activity. Situated reality is very different, as the seating of music creation is regarded by practitioners to be a place of work: a form of labour that has its privileges and occasional vacation-like locations, but works in a workplace nonetheless. The social aspect of the environment is highlighted under this category with the importance of community taking a role in the success or failure of the environment. Mark Wallis comments, “an awful lot of that good spatial environment comes, not only from the room, but also the people who work, run and maintain it.” Steve White confirms this aspect, along with the need for a suitable and comfortable workplace setup: I really loved Madness’ studio Liquidator. There were always members of the band there and it felt very industrious and productive. That's the feel that I really like. Same with the vibe when you walk into Studio 150 in Amsterdam, you feel that you are going to get good stuff done. (White)

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At odds with historicized views of creativity and industry marketing spin, the atmosphere of a space is given primacy over questions of reputation that a place may have—“I like a place that feels unpretentious . . . Abbey Road feels very corporate” (The Temperance Movement)—and this is often combined with a need for personalization over high-end acoustic specifications: It doesn’t really matter how much has been spent on creating a perfect acoustic space. They don’t exist. If the artist doesn’t feel comfortable in the studio it will show on tracks. I love it when you can create your space within the studio area and make it feel like your home where you want to hang out, bringing a focus to the space you’re working in. Lighting has a massive impact. If it’s stark you play stark. If the lighting reflects the mood you’re after for the song then it makes the song more possible to achieve. (Dugmore) These comments emphasize the experiential and lived nature of the workplace, where space is not just a “backdrop to action and experience, rather (it is) the very ground and frame for such” (Malpas 2007: 173). From attics and lounges, through technology-laden studios on industrial estates, to rural retreats in England and Norway, the participants also accentuate the aesthetic and navigational aspects of space as being directly intrinsic to the creative act. Adam Ficek remarks that industry-standard urban studios generally are “sterile and boring . . . they can seem a bit stifling and don’t feel seamlessly creative.” The desire for a more relational location is furthered by La Roux’s producer, Ian Sherwin, who discusses why they are currently using his lounge as a recording space. “It’s just relaxed here. It doesn’t feel like work and having the normal world coming in through the window makes you feel really connected.” Arguing for a more remote spatial location, Steve Sidelnyk raises the phenomenological role of space in the formation of the music itself: I always enjoyed residential studios. Music comes from silence and there is a spark that grows into something else. That’s the great thing about being together and away from everything else. You make a different type of music than if you were in a city like London. Places like Hook End (a countryside residential studio) gave you a different perspective about the way you played or programmed, just because of the environment. Music is indigenous. You go to a place and you make a certain record. The importance of location sits alongside the need for a workplace of focus and navigational simplicity. Tony English discusses how his approach to studio design has rather more prosaic roots than would be expected of such seemingly technology- and acoustic-dependent spaces: If I look back at my room in my parents’ house, it was perfect for me—I threw the bed out, built a modest studio in it, slept on the floor, it was my

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band’s rehearsal room, my studio. It was perfect, much of my writing and recording in that room was the best I've ever done. I'm trying to recreate the same thing all these years later. I had all my gear exactly where I wanted it, modest equipment that I got the best out of, an uninterrupted workflow. That’s the ethos I try to instil if the client allows. (English) While there is no “one size fits all” approach to a creative workplace, the phenomenology of the spatial environment is part of the complex nature of place and one that also impacts on the emotive aspects of music-making.

Atmosphere, location and community directly affect the success of a workplace Reputation and acoustic “perfection” are secondary concerns Writing and recording spaces can be regarded as workplaces. An environment’s feel and location directly affects the work done there. Acoustic perfection is secondary to an atmosphere that engenders creative work. Simplicity and lack of interruptions increase focus.

FIGURE 3.1 Space as workplace.

Embodied Emotional Space Drake regards spaces as “emotional phenomena” where an individual’s response “will affect how they may use the attributes of that place for aesthetic inspiration” (2003: 513). While Drake focuses on craft and design industries, this also applies to music creation. Chris Potter suggests that the workplace can have a direct impact on the mindset of musicians and, therefore, the music produced: “The room can have a big effect emotionally on the people who are making the music. The state of mind of the people making the music is a key thing. You can play the part as it is or put all of yourself into it and then that's a different thing.” Tristan Ivemy also recognized this sense of an embodied and emotional space: If you are doing music that has a full sound, that is more emotional, you need to be able the hear it, to be in that place. Listening and monitoring and how you react with it makes a massive difference. When you are connected and it just flows out of you, you can play way better than you ever have and a different listening experience will change that. (Ivemy) Simpson regards existence as a phenomenological “being-with,” a sense and experience of the world that is never fully completed but is always in the process of being-made, where “we are always moving toward, or are in

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approach to, sense” (2009: 2563). This ever-forming meaning-making ties in with the experiential impact of the location, and as such, space helps to form the sonorous present in which music is made. Discussing how one particular recording location had a dramatic effect on the music being made, Fyfe Dangerfield expounds: Where you record makes a difference, definitely. (In Norway) it was very different, overlooking a valley in the countryside. A massive barn for the live playing and a cabin, which is the studio . . . blissful! Making music there and going outside at 2am with the stars and listening to your own music that you have just made, I can’t imagine a more idyllic way to make music compared to recording on an industrial estate in Willesden (where the previous record was made). That commute compared to waking up and walking 20 seconds through Narnia. My God, that has a huge effect. (Dangerfield) Fyfe Dangerfield’s preference for the navigational ease and aesthetic pleasure of a Norwegian recording studio over and against the more negative aspects of an urban and industrial location highlights the organizing theme of music-making and emotions (being) connected to the environment. The second of the organizing themes, namely a space and its atmosphere can engender or inhibit the creative process, is one that reflects the opinions of the majority of the research participants, along with my own experiences of professional music-making. Drake’s previously stated suggestion that the “emotional response” (2003: 513) of an agent to their location may impact on how they “use the attributes of that place” (ibid.) is one that carries

Music-making and emotions are connected to the environment A space and its atmosphere can engender or inhibit the creative process There is a connection between place and emotion There is continual interaction with the environment during music-making Spatial location and atmosphere can relieve external pressures on the musicmaking process There is a sense of music being embodied in the environment where it is made

FIGURE 3.2 Embodied emotional space.

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weight with the realities of music creation as being a form of embodied work that is inherently connected to the space within which it is conducted.

Aural Architecture and Spatial Interaction So far, the musical or sonic aspect of the spatial environment has barely been touched on, with the aesthetic, social and navigational aspects taking precedence. However, this area is clearly of importance in the realm of music-making. Arford and Yau (2011) confirm Blesser and Salter’s (2009) contention that each space has its own unique aural architecture, which finds further support in the experiences of the research participants. As Andy MacDonald states: Finding the right environment is so important and could depend on a million different things. Lee Mavers (singer in The La’s) mainly used to write on the toilet . . . sitting on the loo with his feet against the door because of the way the guitar sounded and felt in there. In fact, this is why he was never happy with the records—they never sounded like that space to him. (MacDonald) This highlights the mediation of the spatial environment on the direct sound produced in Reybrouck’s “closed loop” system. Mike Smith, who works with The Gorillaz, conveys the difficulty of trying to reproduce a sound made in one environment in another location—a comment echoed by Richard Ashcroft–and, returning to Geoff Dugmore, the suitability of a specific sonic environment is called into question: I’ve been in situations where a very large room has been booked to record a very intimate song for example … in this circumstance it becomes very hard to create the right sound to record such a type of song. In London my preferred studios are British Grove and Kore. The sound of the two rooms serve completely different purposes. (Dugmore)

Sound is mediated by the acoustic environment Each space’s aural architecture may or may not suit an individual or a work of music A location’s aural architecture will impact on the work done there. Sound sources interact with and are impacted on by the spatial environment.

FIGURE 3.3 Aural architecture and spatial interaction.

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Max Heyes, the recording engineer from the introductory preamble who viewed the drum sound at Abbey Road to be “lame,” highlights the unsuitability of that particular space for his intended sonic outcome. The unwanted amplitude patterns that Studio Two may have impressed on the source sound of the drum kit, ones that the drummer was also unimpressed with, reinforces Moylan’s point regarding how each acoustic environment “functions as a sound quality, shaping the sound source” (2002: 266). Indeed, Heyes suggests that “as an engineer, you have to get over the issues with the place that has been chosen to record in. All you can do is your best to minimize the awfulness!” These comments about “awfulness” and “lameness” are partial descriptors for the sensory data within each individual’s perceptual system. The participants’ views can be seen to contain responses to two distinct areas of the auditory experience of music-making. Responses can be to the auditory aspects of in-the-moment recording—such as a drummer during a take of a song—or to the sound of an instrument-as-recorded, such as a recording engineer listening back to the drums. What is of note is that both aspects are influenced by the specific aural architecture within which music is being created. As Damon Wilson from The Temperance Movement states, “I’m still amazed by the concept of what your ears think they are hearing and what’s actually going on.” The use of such derogatory terms also reinforces Blesser and Salter’s contention that every spatial environment has its own “tonal preferences” (2009: 63). Simply put, those that “match the listeners’ aural expectations are pleasing to them; spaces that do not are not” (ibid.: 61). This question of suitability brings into focus the area of an ideal of recording verses the actuality of specific and individuated recording practice.

Ideals and Reality Former Universal Records artist Beth Rowley raises the potential issue of pressure in the recording process: a pressure partially dependent on the specific location being used. As a major label artist, Beth was placed in a high-end studio, resulting in an experience far removed from her ideal concept of such situated practice. Now working on her own budget in a more low-end space, she states: I record at a little studio called Fish Factory, which is great because unlike RAK it’s a bit of a mess but has a much better and more relaxed vibe to it. It’s much better for me to be in a place like that. There’s much less pressure and the songs come out better. (Rowley) RAK is a world-renowned studio with a roster of well-known clients. However, for Beth, this more professional, less “messy” and potentially more impersonal space impacted negatively on her recording activity, revealing

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the individuated reality that the environment provides. Paul Weller, an experienced user of high-end studios, also had a negative experience of RAK. This instance of individuated reality was not, unlike Beth Rowley, down to pressure. Rather, the sensory feedback that the live room provided for him was deemed unsuitable, bringing about a premature end to the session and a relocation to a more favourable studio, one that did not sound “shit.” As a musician on this session, I found the auditory experience of RAK’s live room to be a less negative one, which is echoed in the opinion of Jon Walsh, a former recording engineer and a current A&R executive: “RAK is my favourite studio because of its vibe and equipment.” These four differing opinions on the very same space highlight the individual-specific nature of the experience of the lived environment, one ranging from “pressure,” to “vibe” and to the creation of sensory and auditory information. Ellie Jackson, who records under the name La Roux, comments: I love it here (in her producer’s lounge), it’s better for us. When you are making tunes at home, you feel like you are just making tunes, you don’t feel like you are “making a record” (speaks in a serious business-like voice). All the pressure has gone. It’s always like, when you make a demo, people say “your voice sounded really nice on that,” when you just sang it in your bedroom or wherever. Then you go and stand in a studio and it’s a really dead space and it makes me really un-vibed out as a vocalist. (Jackson) Ellie, in a similar manner to Beth Rowley, prefers a more instinctual performance to one focusing on technically improved acoustic quality. Matt Deighton makes a similar point regarding the recording of a specific song in two different recording spaces, initially in a low-end facility in Wales and subsequently in a more high-end facility in Manchester: Newer Yesterday swung better in Oswestry. Then you move to Blueprint Studios and all of a sudden it’s a different thing, a different feeling and collection of emotions that are captured. It took ages to get it good again. If Oswestry had been a well-equipped studio, it would probably have been the master (take). (Deighton) High-end professional studios often come with impressive reputations and most have been designed to reduce acoustic “imperfections” in their inner spaces. It would therefore appear that these would be “ideal” environments within which to create popular music. The realities of practice, however, reveal that less “clinical” spaces are often preferred. Richard Parfitt states, “the reputation of a place quickly fades. You spend so much time in these bloody places that it’s never about how great or famous a studio is supposed to be, it’s about how it makes you feel.” In a similar way, for Andy MacDonald studios “are like houses. When you go to view a house it’s how

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Clinical environments are aesthetically and creatively undesirable and hinder creative output Achieving a required level of performance and instinctual creation can be more difficult in clinical spaces. Acoustic perfection is secondary to an atmosphere that engenders creative work.

FIGURE 3.4 Ideals and reality. it feels [his emphasis] that makes you want to be there, not how expensive it may be.” Analogous with the views already shown regarding RAK, he adds the caveat that “trying to get four or five people in a band to feel the same way is never easy!”

Technology and Limitations Technological changes have enabled a more flexible and adaptable approach to what may or may not constitute an appropriate recording space. This has not, however, resulted in the negation of the environment as a factor in the success of any recording. In fact, such changes in technology have, potentially, heightened the impact of the lived environment. Jamie Johnson states: The environment really makes a difference. Not so much from the equipment or technical point of view: most technical things you can get around. It’s never really for me about the equipment; in terms of the studio, it’s the space itself. I worked with a famous singer and we were between studios so we built this live room out of amplifiers, boxes and blankets in a big open space and the desk was at the end of the room, with a vocal booth made out of stacked up amplifiers and boxes. She did all the vocals there and then went to Switzerland to a fantastic expensive studio and did the vocals again properly and they were shit. Then onto another expensive studio in Spain and they were shit. So in the end, the original ones were used that were recorded behind boxes on a handheld Shure microphone. (Johnson) Jamie is emphasizing that space—as a lived environment—takes primacy due to the quality of relatively inexpensive recording equipment. The need for “clinical” and “sterile” but technologically superior spaces has been obviated: atmosphere and perceptual input take precedence. Dead Sea Skulls create their own workplace in a rather unexpected setting:

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We record in my mum’s hairdressing salon. It allows us to be more creative as we aren’t being creative by spending five grand in studios that we didn’t know and felt wrong. We have all the time in the world to record anytime. You make the best of what you’ve got and it becomes real and you can hear the passion in the music. Good musicians understand the limitations and create within them. The use of space as a creative workplace can be aligned with the concept of the environment as a technology itself. Arford and Yau’s (2011) views align with the opinion of Tony English, who regards spaces as akin to acoustic instruments, with each one having a unique timbre, tone and reverberation. Musical instruments are instances of technology and, equally, each recording space can be regarded as a technology. Ones that are essentially independent of the technologies used within them and ones that bring their own unique aural architecture. Returning to La Roux, who is more generally known for making less acoustic-dependent and more synthesized music, the impact of the spatial environment is still shown to have precedence: one that stands over and above the common technology of headphone-based recording: It’s ok if you have a really great headphone mix but when I can hear my own voice just coming back at me across the room out of those (points to the speakers), I am way more happy, I feel like I am singing in a room not like (adopts the serious voice again) “I am recording.” And otherwise it’s just singing inside your own head. (Jackson) Peter Gordeno, from Depeche Mode, echoes this point, stating the need to feel music as sounding in the space of a room, not just interiorized in a pair of headphones. A singer’s conception of their voice is made up out of a combination of “bone conduction coupled with room resonance” (Williams 2012: 115). In this way, a removal of the spatial environment can be seen as an upsetting of the “balance between direct conduction and reflected sonic energy” (ibid.). As previously stated, the headphone “position” is only temporary but the wider lived space is not and is a technology that directly impacts on the process of music-making. No space, outside of an acoustically “perfect” anechoic chamber, has a uniform response and all have some degree of “acoustic defect” (Blesser and Salter 2009: 228). The way

The atmosphere and sound of a space take primacy over technological specifications Technology lessens the need to use high-end recording studios. Atmosphere and perceptual input take precedence.

FIGURE 3.5 Technology and limitations.

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these then impact on the poietics of music directly informs the intentional relationships made in the lived environment.

Conclusions, Commentary, and Creative Practice The three global themes presented here reinforce the role of space and the importance of the specific locations used during the diverse and complex practice of music creation. The first global theme is the creation of music is embodied in space, with the location’s atmosphere taking primacy over other considerations. Lefebvre (1991) separates space into three distinct concepts: space as an ideal, as a “stand-alone” material entity and as an actualized phenomenon. The first two positions are purely abstract but the last concept aligns with the nature of embodiment highlighted by the participants. Steve White remarks, “there are some studios that I never got into, that never felt right or worked for me”; Chris Potter reveals, “there are three well known studios that I’d never use again”; and Tristan Ivemy suggests that the importance of atmosphere runs so deep that “even if you aren’t conscious of it, it’s what makes the difference. It’s about putting you in an environment where you feel the vibe.” The aural architecture and feel of the spatial environment takes precedence over high-end specifications. This second theme may appear to collapse partially into the previous one as they both cover “feel” and “atmosphere.” This merely demonstrates the elevation of the atmosphere— the “feel” of a space—in terms of the primary considerations for an effective and creative workplace. What is of note here is the relegation of technologically and acoustically advanced spaces—the “high-end specifications”—to a lower level of consideration. Steve Robson adopts this approach to his work, even going as far as “recording the vocals in the control room with spill and everything over them because you get the right feel and it sounds (his emphasis) so good in here.” Steve’s position therefore brings in the second noteworthy consideration: the importance of the aural architecture that is intrinsic to each and every space. This viewpoint is mirrored by the producer and engineer Phill Brown, who states in his memoires that “technology isn’t the problem—a good location is” (2010: 309). The third and final theme drawn is there is a unique impact on sound and the creative process by every space. Although somewhat reductive, this can be considered as the overarching theme drawn from all the research conducted. This aligns with my experience of a multitude of spaces used in music creation, where each and every one is different and all of them are a conglomeration of musical, social, aesthetic and navigational aspects: aspects which combine to foster or hinder the creative processes within

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music-making. Commenting on the global themes, the participants offered a general affirmation, with remarks such as: I’m sure that all music makers will have stories that support your findings. For me, the environment that I am in will always have an influence on the creation of music, being as it is an expression of human emotion. (Ian Sherwin) This has struck a chord with me. I’ve often had very similar conclusions, though I haven’t been able to articulate them until reading all of this, when I’ve been in a space that obviously isn’t giving you that creative and excited feeling. (Tristan Ivemy) I would wholeheartedly agree . . . all the findings correlate with both my own experience and beliefs. (Adam Ficek) There were, however, some more nuanced comments that bear discussion. Mirroring the comments of Chris Potter, Ali Staton remarked: I absolutely agree and with the quality of technology now available, the importance of space itself has become paramount. However, I have on occasion worked in an atmosphere that was far from great but I was able to deliver because I had confidence in the sound of the space. (Staton) While this may seem like a partial lessening of my stated importance of a location’s atmosphere as being a primary consideration, these comments reinforce the position that there is no one particular element that an effective creative space hinges on. Rather, the most important elements are constituted by aspects of sound and atmosphere over and above concerns for “high-end” specifications, and these more primary considerations will vary for each practitioner. What does not vary, however, is the all-encompassing phenomenological impact of the environment in the poietics of popular music. Figure 3.6 presents a sketch of a systems model of creativity, showing the domain and field meeting with the individual practitioner within an intersecting area labelled as creative practice. Zagorski-Thomas (2014) suggests that the systems view is more useful as a theoretical overview, lacking the necessary level of detail to reflect individual practice. However, by inquiry into the experiences of relevant practitioners, real-world agency can then be given to this sociocultural and contextual approach to creative practice. The intersecting area is the realm of situated practice, and therefore, the lived environment needs to be positioned centrally to this systems sketch. Accordingly, the building represents the spatial environment, combining the social, navigational, aesthetic and musical aspects. As this research argues, real-world creative practice is invested by the phenomenological impact

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Domain

Creative Practice

Field

Individual

FIGURE 3.6 Systems sketch of creative practice. of the lived environment, helping to form and inform the creative works produced. Drawing partially on anthropologist Alfred Gell’s (1998) work on the social relationships of art, a representation of such situated practice is shown in Figure 3.7:

The mobilization of aesthetic judgements through the course of mediated practice and social interaction [ < - - - The Lived Environment - - - > ]

FIGURE 3.7 Creative practice as situated practice. The lived environment underscores the activities and meaning-making processes—the intentional relationships—upon which creative practice depends. La Roux may not be overemphasizing when she states, “the space you are in provides a defining element in the music that you make.” From the prosaic to the idyllic, the phenomenology of space acts as a lived event in the poietics of popular music. Summarizing through a final trip down memory lane, four musicians, in a poorly heated two-room space with constant struggles to meet rent demands, composed and created 72 songs. The cherry-picked “best” of these went on to sell over 2 million copies. Fast-forward 36 months: now without financial worries and with access to state-of-the art facilities, the same musicians, in a similar time frame, succeeded in completing only 15 compositions, achieving significantly less sales. The initial period of success may have changed their motivations, and time constraints due to touring and promotion may have also had an adverse impact, but, as one of these

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musicians, it can positively be stated that only one thing had really changed and that change was a thing lost: the original lived space, the workplace of creativity.

Bibliography Arford, Scott, and Randy Yau. 2011. “Filling the Void: The Infrasound Series.” In Site of Sound #2: Of Architecture and the Ear, edited by Brandon LaBelle and Cláudia Martinho, 195–209. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press. Attride-Stirling, Jennifer. 2001. “Thematic Networks: An Analytic Tool for Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Research 1 (3): 385–405. Bachelard, Gaston. 2014 [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Translated by R. Kearney. New York: Random House. Bates, Eliot. 2012. “What Studios Do.” Journal on the Art of Record Production 7. Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. 2009. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Brown, Phill. 2010. Are We Still Rolling? New York: Hal Leonard Corporation. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1988. “Society, Culture and Person: A Systems View of Creativity.” In The Nature of Creativity, edited by Robert Sternberg, 325–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drake, Graham. 2003. “This Place Gives Me Space: Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries.” Geoforum 34 (4): 511–24. Feldman, David Henry. 1999. “The Developments of Creativity.” In Handbook of Creativity, edited by Robert Sternberg, 14th ed., 169–86. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gendreau, Michael. 2011. “Concerted Structures.” In Site of Sound #2: Of Architecture and the Ear, edited by Brandon LaBelle and Cláudia Martinho, 33–41. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press. Hansen, Jerome. 2006. “Mapping the Studio: The Artist’s Workspace in Sound and Visual Arts.” Sound As Art Conference. Brighton: University of Sussex. Hudson, Ray. 2006. “Regions and Place: Music, Identity and Place.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (5): 626–34. Husserl, Edmund. 1970 [1936]. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Blackwell. Malpas, Jeff E. 2007. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCracken, Grant. 1988. The Long Interview. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. London: Routledge. Meusburger, Peter, Joachim Funke, and Edgar Wunder. 2009. Milieus of Creativity. Netherlands: Springer.

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Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Mostyn, Barbara. 1985. “The Content Analysis of Qualitative Research Data: A Dynamic Approach.” In The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches, edited by Michael Brenner, Jennifer Brown, and David Canter, 15–145. London: Academic Press. Moylan, William. 2002. The Art of Recording: Understanding and Crafting the Mix. Boston: Focal Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Norton, Lin. 2009. Action Research in Teaching and Learning. Oxford: Routledge. Reybrouck, Mark M. 2006. “Musical Creativity Between Symbolic Modeling and Perceptual Constraints: The Role of Adaptive Behaviour and Epistemic Autonomy.” In Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, edited by Irène Deliège and Geraint Wiggins, 42–59. Hove: Psychology Press. Sailer, Kerstin. 2011. “Creativity as Social and Spatial Process.” Facilities 29 (1/2): 6–18. Schmidt-Horning, Susan. 2015. Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Simpson, Paul. 2009. “Falling on Deaf Ears: A Postphenomenology of Sonorous Presence.” Environment and Planning 41 (11): 2556–2757. Smith, Alex David. 2003. Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London: Routledge. Smith, David Woodruff. 2013. Husserl. Oxford: Routledge. Théberge, Paul. 2004. “The Network Studio: Historical and Technological Paths to a New Ideal in Music Making.” Social Studies of Science 34 (5): 759–81. Williams, Alan. 2012. “‘I’m Not Hearing What You’re Hearing’: The Conflict and Connection of Headphone Mixes and Multiple Audioscapes.” In The Art of Record Production, edited by Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, 113–27. Farnham: Ashgate. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. 2014. The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Interview participants Adam Ficek (Babyshambles) Andy MacDonald (Independiente) Beth Rowley (Universal Records) Dead Sea Skulls (Raw Power) Fyfe Dangerfield (The Guillemots) Peter Gordeno (Depeche Mode) Geoff Dugmore (Rod Stewart) Jamie Johnson (Paul Weller) Jon Walsh (Universal Records) Ellie Jackson (La Roux) Ian Sherwin (La Roux)

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Mark Wallis (U2) Mike Smith (Gorillaz) Matt Deighton (Oasis) Chris Potter (The Verve) Max Heyes (Primal Scream) Steve Robson (Paloma Faith) Steve Sidelnyk (Massive Attack) Steve White (Paul Weller) Tony English (Damon Albarn) Tristan Ivemy (Frank Turner) The Temperance Movement (Earache) Richard Ashcroft (The Verve) Richard Parfitt (Duffy) Ali Staton (Turin Breaks)

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CHAPTER FOUR

“An Indestructible Sound”: Locating Gender in Genres Using Different Music Production Approaches Paula Wolfe

Introduction My intention in this chapter is to progress my response to what has been a paucity of research in music production and gender. The attention paid to female recordists has often been limited to noting their underrepresentation (Frith and McRobbie 1978: 373–74; Théberge 1997: 185; Bayton 1998: 6; Cohen 2001: 232; Moorefield 2005: 110), and although these observations are welcomed, they have gone no further. To date I have examined the situation of women producing their own music in today’s music industry (Wolfe 2012, 2017), and in this chapter I build on this work to consider how choice of genre, alongside gender, might have some bearing on women’s practice. I first came across Argentinian artistproducer Juana Molina (Domino) from some footage of her performing at the Glastonbury Festival in 2014. Simultaneously steering beats and soundscapes from her keyboards, from her guitar and voice and from the contributions of a live drummer and bass player, what struck me was the innate complexity of the different elements she was navigating onstage to create a mesmerizing sound described as folktronica, ambient,

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experimental and chillout.1 I assumed that the control she exercised to create her live sound was replicated in the studio to create her recorded sound through self-production, an assumption later affirmed on her website. The previous autumn I had heard two members of the all-women rock band Savages being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour following the Mercury Prize nomination of their first album, Silence Yourself (Matador 2013). In the course of the interview Gemma Thompson (guitarist) and Jehnny Beth2 (lyricist and vocalist) discussed their music and their position as women in the music industry. They also described their desire “to create an indestructible sound” in their music (Thompson in Murray 2013) and the importance they placed on their sound also led me to assume that they had produced it themselves. In both cases, my assumptions were in fact a flipped reaction to what Emma Mayhew has described as “patriarchal assumptions” (in Whiteley 2004: 149) associated with music production and undoubtedly were also influenced by my own practice as an artist-producer. In the case of Savages, what had added to my interest was the notion of a whole band self-producing, a practice more associated with solo artists, as my previous research has confirmed (Wolfe 2017). However, on trying to secure an interview with the band a year and a half later, following the release of their second album Adore Life (Matador 2016), I was directed by their label not to the band but, much to my surprise, to their producer, Johnny Hostile.3 Presented with the situation of Hostile as a male producer working with an all-women four-piece band, I was unsure prior to the interview how the research was going to “fit.” What possible connections was I going to establish between Savages, a mainstream rock band working closely with their producer since their formation, and Juana Molina, a left-field artist-producer creating ambient electroacoustic trance music? What transpired, however, was that these extreme contrasts offered the very nuances I was seeking, not just in terms of the cultural meanings that accompany the situation of a woman artist-producer and a male producer, but of the production process itself. As I discuss below, the multifaceted nature of music production, as highlighted by Richard Burgess (2002), Albin Zak (2001) and William Moylan (2002), allowed the different needs of Molina as a solo artist and Savages as a band respectively to be met, irrespective of their gender. I argue, however, that when positioning the music production processes in the culturally gendered context that is the music industry, the significance of their gender takes centre stage. In this chapter, therefore, I revisit the core debates related to music production and gender by presenting these two case studies, in which I draw on two conversations that took place on Skype, with Molina in Buenos Aires and Conge in Paris. I focus in particular on three key themes that emerged: the role of production within the creative process, the influence of the lyric on the production process, and the impact of gendered “cultural notions of age” (Jennings and Gardener 2012: 3) on the women’s representation.

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DIY Beginnings Molina and Hostile share a similarity in that their production skills are selftaught but their use of those skills in the creative process differs. Molina’s work as an artist-producer is a weave of composition, production and mixing, whereas Hostile’s work positions him observing and then guiding the creativity of the band, “they do the job . . . I’m guiding them, that’s all I’m doing” (personal communication, 24 February 2016). Molina’s decision to self-produce followed her experience of recording a whole album in four days in a commercial studio with a producer in the late 1990s. She described the musicians as “really great” and that “everything sounded good” but that “it wasn’t representing me, I couldn’t play that record live being myself” (personal communication, 20 April 2016). The result was not what she had in mind even though she did not know at that time “what that mind was” (ibid.). In other words, although she had not found her own sound, she knew that the sound produced for her by someone else was wrong and so embarked on a creative journey to develop her sound for herself. At this time Pro Tools was available only as expensive hardware accessed through commercial studios, but the increased availability of other digital recording technologies was starting to be embraced by the independent artist (Théberge 1997; Ryan and Hughes 2006). Likewise Molina purchased her first computer in 1997 and some recommended software and “started to learn how to make it work” (personal communication, 20 April 2016). Two years followed of intensive recording of new songs and a reworking of existing recordings on cassettes and tape into the new digital formats. Molina viewed these recordings as demos, but when she then decided “to record this properly” (ibid.) she experienced the frustration of demo chasing (see Massey 2009), I realised that I had a record already done, with that quality, very lo-fi quality but a gorgeous soundscape and soundfields . . . in an eternity I wouldn’t have been able to record it again. (op. cit.) She tried to improve what she already had, but when she played it to an engineer, “it sounded like shit!” (ibid.). She discovered that she “had a made a whole record with volumes and pans, that was it. There was no EQ, no compression, nothing” (ibid.). She then spent a month working with the engineer in post-production learning about frequencies, equalizers and filtering and the result was Segundo, “the first record I made on my own with the help of this guy” (ibid.). It took her two and a half years to make the record but the result was that “I knew by then I was never, ever going to come back to a studio” (ibid.). Molina’s self-taught route is similar to that of other artists I have spoken to who accessed available technology in this period. For instance, she learnt from mistakes to acquire what Thomas Porcello has described as insider engineering knowledge. In addition

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she transcended what Tony Grajeda (2002) has referred to as the barrier between amateurism and professionalism. Furthermore the process was solitary, a characteristic noted by Eddie Ashworth (2009). The result was not just a product with which she could start her career, but the discovery of a way of working: The way I work is that I just go there and add something and then record several things and edit and move around. So that’s how I started working that way and developing little by little what you call skills . . . you just dive into that world of music and computers that become one thing. (op. cit.) One of the core skills and challenges for the artist-producer, irrespective of gender or genre, is the ability to combine clear artistic vision with objectivity in order to be able to perceive and capture a significant moment in a recorded performance that “could be the main thing” (ibid.). This is an aspect of the self-production process that Molina relished: “I enjoy very much when I have recorded something that is there but not quite so that I need to make that thing that is there to sound the way it has to be” (ibid.). She compared this process to the work of an artisan, in particular to that of an embroiderer, and the core essence of a song like a single thread that may require her “to unsew and to cut all those threads and do it again” (ibid.). Subsequently, she “can’t separate composition from production at all” (ibid.) and emphasized that even the mixing, rather than simply optimizing different aspects of the track (Burgess 2002: 159), formed part of a simultaneous interrelated act of creativity. Molina’s analogy is in line with Zak’s observations that artists’ use of “recurring analogies to visual media and perception,” in this case embroidery, is an indication that “like the visual artist, the recordist handles the actual material of which the piece is made” (2001: 22–23). Also representative of Moylan’s “new creative artist” (2002: 35), Molina distinguished between her former way of working, akin to that of a singersongwriter writing complete songs on a guitar that she would then embellish to “the way I work now” whereby everything comes together . . . So the production, the composition and the mixing, the three of them come at the same time. Like I said with the embroidery, you [make] a flower here, you can’t move it there because it’s already here and everything that comes later, comes later because that flower was there. (op. cit.) The development of her ear to recognize the potential of “that flower” leads the production and liberates her from what she perceives as the restraints of the blueprint of a song already established. Arguably, however, the only difference is that it is a melodic line rather than a whole song structure or lyric that inspires and then leads the production. So although it is suggested

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that electronic music (a broad genre in which her music might be placed) appeals to women artists due to its perception as a “tolerant, abstract environment” (Awbi 2014: 14), I would argue that it is not so much the genre that is appealing as the ability to create music as a self-contained unit aided by technology or the ability to access what Jay Hodgson has described as “a complete, self-sufficient musical language” (2010: viii). Conversely, a whole band can enact such a compositional process through improvisation but the simultaneous recording of the compositional/production process lends itself to solo expression. In comparison, the situation of Hostile and Savages establishes a clear distinction between composition and production, yet interestingly the development of Hostile’s skills as producer and those of Savages as musicians and songwriters took place simultaneously: I wasn’t involved creatively, that’s their world . . . I started to record them in my bedroom in London . . . we started to experiment all together recording-wise very early on . . . I was able to tell what they need[ed] by [making] mistakes with them and we all made mistakes in terms of recording. (personal communication, 24 February 2016) As with Molina, Hostile also made the transition from amateurism to professionalism through his home studio and by learning from mistakes, and yet their self-determined routes has resulted in contrasting interpretations of confidence, identity and purpose. Hostile has developed a core confidence in his own abilities as a producer: I come from a very lo-fi DIY world with no money whatsoever, so today I’ve got a bigger studio and I go in very big studios to produce stuff but I feel that confidence in me that tomorrow I can go back in the basement and work and [make] good music out of it. (ibid.) In stark contrast, Molina states her early inability to make her own records was exasperated by insecurity: “I’ve always been very insecure. I never had that confidence that people get more and more now. I can see that young people are born with better confidence” (personal communication, 20 April 2016). The situation of Molina’s creative confidence enacted in a private space, juxtaposed with her stated lack of confidence in the public arena, resonates with Paul Théberge’s suggestion that “the privacy of domestic space becomes the ideal site of musical expression and inspiration rather than the more public realms of night club and stage” (1997: 218) or the equally “public” and gendered “realm” of the commercial studio (Bayton 1998: 6; Cohen 2001: 233–41). Although Molina has established a career and has since returned to successfully record in a large commercial studio, the interview is peppered with statements of self-doubt. And yet there is no lack of confidence in her eloquent articulation of the production process from which emerges her sound. I have established elsewhere a connection

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between “a room of one’s own” (Woolf 1985 [1929]) and a studio of one’s own (Wolfe 2012) to argue that the need for private creativity is particularly significant for a woman artist when situating her work in the framework of what remains a patriarchal industry. I do not suggest that the insecurities Molina highlights are gendered, but the broader industry context in which her work is positioned resonates with Savages’s publically stated desire “to create an indestructible sound” in their debut album (Thompson in Murray, 30 October 2013), a phrase also repeated on the band’s website in reference to their second. When I asked Hostile what this “indestructible sound” was and why the band used the phrase to foreground their work, he offered two answers. The first was that the description had served as an effective way of Savages announcing their arrival as a new band, but secondly he said that the band’s use of phrase made him “think the opposite—there is some fragility that needs to be protected” (personal communication, 24 February 2016). In sonic terms “an indestructible sound” provides “protection” for an artist in three ways: it provides an aural framework within which the creativity of each band member or solo artist can take place; it forms the identifiable sound of a band or artist, crucial for marketing purposes (Théberge 1997: 193); and it provides a link to the visual image, again a necessary component when marketing the brand (Lieb 2013). The band’s perceived need for their sonic, and subsequently visual, identity to be “indestructible” might be read, therefore, as a response, conscious or otherwise, to the historic positioning of the rock genre within which they create as a masculine discourse (Coates 1997) and which has rendered the representation of women rock musicians problematic. Although Savages require at this stage a producer to help them achieve their sound, Hostile’s position challenges the “dictatorship of the public” represented by the music producer (Théberge 1997: 219). He has worked with Savages from their inception and his working relationship is reflected in the way he described how he was “amazed just at the very first rehearsal,” that he felt “deep love the first time I saw the band,” that “they weren’t aware of what they were doing—that kind of magic was in the room” and that he believed the band was “gonna be so important, not big but important and maybe big but to me important” (personal communication, 24 February 2016). Subsequently, he developed and released the first single, videos and live EP and released it on his own label, Pop Noir, and then licensed to Matador (he still owns the first single and the first EP). Arguably any artist or band sees their work as important, but the importance Hostile attaches to Savages seems to stem from three sources: their unwillingness to bend to industry pressures in terms of marketing, the importance that is attached to the lyrics in the songs, and the dedication each member has to their own instrument. This perhaps accounts for his description of them as “all solo artists” (ibid.). He acknowledged that this resulted in band tensions at times but more significantly it determined the pre-production and recording of the second album to allow each band member the space to develop their individual creative responses that then contributed to the whole band sound:

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For the pre-production I had them solo in the studio working on their instruments and their ideas without them talking to the others and then they felt confident about what they were doing . . . you have to consider people not as a group but as individuals and that’s how I found my way sonically. I could focus on Gemma’s guitar for example . . . or one pedal or just microphone and you can’t do that with other people in the room. (ibid.) He took the same approach with the bass player, Ayse Hassan, stating: When you experiment sonically you have to be able to push, to go out of your comfort zone and I figured out you can’t do that with other people looking at you all the time. (ibid.) What can be seen here is a need to avoid what Alan Williams (2007) has described as the “inequalities of power” when “engineers and producers freely communicate behind the control room window” while “recording musicians must be circumspect and cautious.” Théberge’s creative “privacy” was facilitated, therefore, through the use of Hostile’s own studio away from the “public realm” of the commercial studio even though that was re-entered once they were ready to record the album. Subsequently, Hostile did not discuss the production process as arriving at a moment of realization, in the way that Molina did as an artist-producer, but rather pointed to an exchange of trust and intimacy in the producer/artist relationship that resulted in the required performances. For instance, he describes Thompson and Milton as “very creative about their instruments” but who sometimes lose direction so he viewed his role as “just to know before them what they want” and “will push them in a direction that they will feel naturally comfortable with” (ibid.). So although the situation of Hostile as a male producer, enabling a rock band of four women to realize their sound, reinforces gendered perceptions about the male producer/female artist dynamic (Mayhew 2004: 149–52), it is clearly a relationship of mutual respect for the skills each of them contribute to the overall construction of their sound: They trust me in terms of ears. They have control in the live room, in their instruments, they have absolute freedom in that. In the control room I’ll be the one deciding what microphone to use, what plugins to use, all the production aspects they leave it to me and all the structure as well which is how to record in which conditions, in which studio and all that stuff. We decide all that together. I will never make a decision without them agreeing [to] it. (Personal communication, 24 February 2016) Hostile’s knowledge and respect for the band members and for their individual creative capabilities has clearly influenced his level of investment

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in them and in the sonic trust they place in him. But there is another factor to consider. At the time of the interview I was unaware that Hostile, as well as being the band’s producer, is also the long-term partner of Beth. The relationship, therefore, was not discussed but in hindsight its existence sheds some light on Hostile’s responses throughout the interview that seemed to position him as a fifth band member rather than as an entirely objective outsider. It also has some bearing on the level of trust that characterized the descriptions of his relationship with all the band members as their producer. It is not unheard of for female artists to have relationships with and/or marry their producers (Haithcoat 2016), and the gendered power dynamic this introduces is certainly of interest, not least in terms of how it colours the artist/producer relationship. This is not to suggest that this does not happen the other way round as some women producers I have interviewed either were at the time of interview in relationships with male artists or had been approached by male artists they were producing. It is an interesting topic that warrants further attention but is beyond the scope of a short chapter.

Music Production and the Lyric The lyric plays a role in the production process, as noted by Moylan (2002: 71), and that role differs significantly for Savages and Molina. For Savages, the lyrics and melody provided by Beth form the starting point for the individual response of each of the women as “solo artists.” Beth, in fact, shares her lyric ideas with Hostile in their early stages, pointing to an access and trust that an “ordinary” producer would not have, clearly influenced in this case by the couple’s longstanding personal relationship, as noted above. The development of the songs, therefore, is not the result of an entirely ensemble approach associated with a band McIntyre (2008), but one in which individual interpretations are collated and at times restructured by Hostile as part of the production process. This approach, however, is not without its tensions. For example, the start of the single “Adore” was a song written by Beth and inspired by the life of the San Francisco poet and academic Minnie Bruce Pratt. However, in presenting the song to the band, Hostile explained that the band started to change things because it has to be a Savages song, which is the normal process, but the tension out of that was so enormous that “Adore” at some moments nearly didn’t exist. (personal communication, 24 February, 2016) Conversely for Molina, the lyrics arrive at the very end of the production process and are written for their sonic quality rather than for their semantic meaning. Molina explains, “I write a whole song, the record’s done and the lyrics are not even there and I need to write something in order to be

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able to sing” (personal communication, 20 April, 2016). She quoted the late Argentinian artist, poet and musicologist Leda Valladares, who told her, “I sing to tell and you tell to sing . . . meaning that she needs to sing in order to order to [say] what she wrote and I need to write to sing what I composed” (ibid.).4 In line with the view that “recording becomes an art when it is used to shape the substance of sound and music” (Moylan 2002: 36; see also Zak 2001: 46), for Molina meaning stems from the sound of her composition and that determines the “substance” of the lyrics she eventually writes. That process, however, presents an innate struggle between the abstract and the concrete because the meaning is the sound; therefore, if there are to be lyrics, she wants them “to sound exactly like the melody and if there’s an A in there you need to sing an A” (ibid.). Molina argued that lyric-determined songs facilitate collaborative work with a producer, whereas producing a piece of music that infers meaning is a more abstract process to share: “there are many artists where you can tell that the important part of the song is the lyrics . . . for artists like that maybe they can work easily with a producer and that won’t change too much what they do” (ibid.). This is evident in Hostile’s work with Savages, who goes as far as saying that “having such a strong lyricist . . . inspires me in the way it needs to be delivered.” I asked whether the space and dynamics in Adore Life that contrast to the first album, had been a direct response to the lyrics and whether the close working of Beth’s vocals and Thompson’s guitar had been intentional. He responded: I wanted to get bigger drums than I had on Silence Yourself, I wanted to get a bigger sound, something present in the lower end of things . . . Before that everyone is in the same space frequency wise, it’s really punked . . . whereas this time everyone has space to express themselves and it’s probably why you think that the vocals and guitars are prominent but in fact they’re just in their own space. (personal communication, 24 February 2016) In Molina’s case the process is enacted in reverse as the lyrics need to represent the sound already developed. Where the difficulty lies is in translating meaning into words when, for Molina, the music already communicates its own meaning and when “lyrics . . . wake[] me up from the enchantment of music” (personal communication, 20 April 2016). Furthermore, she stated that she would “be more comfortable” with what she did if people did not call her a songwriter, because the song is lyrics and music, that’s what songs are, and I am rather a musician . . . I like the lyrics I write afterwards, after months of despair . . . it’s such a complete different process and state. I mean music is pure concentration and joy . . . it’s a journey, a trip and I am not, I don’t

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exist, honestly I disappear . . . but when I write lyrics, everything becomes heavy and tough and real and earthy. (ibid.) When I asked her why she did not simply stop writing lyrics for her songs, she replied, “Because then, how do I sing?” (ibid.) I had meant that she might view her work as that of a composer only, but despite her claim that “if I weren’t in the songwriting pigeonhole then I would [be] freer” (ibid.), she felt the need to sing. Molina’s dilemma raises interesting questions, not least the problematic representation of the woman artist-producer’s voice that I address elsewhere (Wolfe 2016). How can a word sound like a note? She was not referring to a lexical choice that might reflect a mood or an evocation from a given melodic line nor to simplistic use of onomatopoeia; rather, it is a grasping for verbal articulation of meaning that has already been expressed sonically; allowing someone else to write lyrics for her, therefore, was not an option: I don’t think I could sing somebody else’s lyrics unless they are so myself I find [they] have said what I wished I had said and couldn’t. I don’t think that’s going to happen. (op. cit.) She agreed that the sound or mood of the music can evoke images, so rather than striving to make lyrics sound like the music, might she not describe those images? Paint with words the way she paints with music? Her response: “yes, but you need to be a very good poet to do that” (ibid.). She does eventually manage to write conventional lyrics that best represent the sound of the songs but the process sits uncomfortably, “everything I write, I feel that ruins the song, ruins that mood in the song” (ibid.). This struggle led Molina to publically announce that one day she would “sing songs with no lyrics” (ibid.) but admitted that so far she had not dared. What would she sing if she did dare? She replied: “the melodies that came with their own sound” (ibid.). To illustrate, she recounted a story in which a filmmaker asked her to write a song for a short film and wanted a copy of the lyrics but there were none. She had effectively sung what sounded like words to a non-Spanish speaker but were just utterances that she had felt approximated the sound of the music she had composed. In other words, she had “dared” to write songs with no lyrics and they communicated meaning. Did it feel natural to just sing utterances that expressed sonic rather than semantic meaning? Her reply is emphatic: “Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . and every song has its own sound” (ibid.). Furthermore, she was amused to discover that the “nonsense,” as she described it, contained plurals: Sometimes I sing like “norromestos” and that “s” at the end is a plural of that thing that has absolutely no meaning at all. So it totally could sound, I mean for someone who doesn’t speak the language, it sounds like lyrics

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but for the whole majority of Spanish speakers, they would easily tell that there are no lyrics at all. (ibid.) The importance Hostile attached to the lyric in the production process concurs with Pete Astor and Keith Negus’s argument “that lyrics matter to songwriters and lyricists” (2014: 196). They take as their starting point Simon Frith’s assertion that lyrics are “words in performance” (1996: 166) and that “the best songs, in short, are those that can be heard as a struggle between verbal and musical rhetoric” (ibid.: 182). To progress these ideas they position their discussion within three frameworks more commonly associated with poetry analysis and which have been described as the private, the public and the anti-world (MacLeish 1965: 202–05). In addition they utilize the framework offered by nonsense verse in which “developing a lyric from a half-formed set of utterances is an accepted way of creating both song words and poems” (ibid.: 204). I draw attention to this work because what can also be seen is that although Molina rejects the label songwriter, her approach to lyric writing in fact finds favour in Frith’s reading. It can also be positioned within the anti-world approach that “is often pushing at the limits of semantics and syntax” (ibid.: 203). Furthermore it lies within the remit of nonsense in which “the very choice of nonsense words gives the song its lyrical potency” (ibid.: 205).

Situating Gender When positioning the work of both Hostile and Molina in the framework of a gendered contemporary music industry culture, Hostile’s sonic control as “producer” adheres to “patriarchal assumptions” (Mayhew 2004) inasmuch as Molina’s control over her own sound challenges them. When I questioned Hostile about Savages’s choice to work with him as a producer rather than produce themselves (three of the band members, Milton, Thompson, and Hassan, have in fact started to develop production skills in their own solo projects, as I discuss below), he commented: I don’t think it’s due to the gender thing . . . As musicians they are already in a world where musicians should be which is being supergood at what they do and being absolutely passionate about their own instruments and that’s it really. (personal communication, 24 February 2016) However, “the gender thing” is an issue beyond the studio. Hostile stated, “we are very strongly against a lot of things in the music industry, me as a producer and them as a band” and that they often feel “anger” and “rage,” citing the marketing of the band as a particular source of conflict. He recalls

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being in rooms with some guys saying, “Well, they maybe have to focus a little bit more on sex and maybe a more sexy image” and all that shit. I’ve heard it, you know, I’ve heard it about Savages. So that’s how revolting this fucking industry is. (ibid.) It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the band’s oft-expressed desire “to create an indestructible sound” (Thompson in Murray 2013) is reflected in their visual as well as sonic identity. Their oppositional stance may have also contributed to the alignment of the band with punk in media reviews (see Empire 2016 and Petridis 2016). Arguably, their “anger” and “rage” mark a not unusual response to a patriarchal and capitalist value system that forms the backbone to the music industry, and clearly Savages is not the first band to challenge the notion of the “angry young man” as angry young women in the genre of rock (Coates 1997) and punk (Reddington 2012). Nor are they the first band to find themselves in a situation of high irony where their anger is commodified as part of their marketing (Nehring 1997).5 Molina made similar distinctions. For example, she states that although she has “never had the male/female problem” (personal communication, April 2016), she recognizes many prejudices of her own and referred to an album she had admired for many years and had assumed was written by a man. Her discovery that “it’s a girl not a guy”6 was not just a pleasant surprise but proof for her that “there is no difference between men and women” and that “music has no gender at all. . . . The only thing that tells us is the voice. Honestly. There is no other thing that could tell that you’re a man or a woman” (ibid.). In terms of the broader industry, she believed that although the “gender thing” was “deeply installed,” it will die out, “when all those dinosaurs are gone . . . within 60 years this problem won’t be a conversation” (ibid.). However, she argued that “there’s something stronger than the difference between being a woman or a man and that’s age.” In some ways Molina’s observations echo work that has drawn on “cultural notions of age” to re-examine the key issues of gender, sexuality and identity accompanying older women performers in popular music (Jennings and Gardner 2012: 3). However, she progresses these ideas in her assertion that a woman artist’s age per se is used to contain her work in a way that does not happen to male artists: If you’re 18 they would also [say] that you’re that you’re only 18 but they wouldn’t say it for a guy. A guy can be 18, 25, 30 or 80 and either he’s great or he’s not, that’s it. (personal communication, 20 April 2016) I concur with Jennings and Gardner that “from a feminist perspective, in particular, these new debates on ageing are crucial” in their demanding “new considerations of the ways that notions of youthful heterosexual attractiveness dominate not only their own reception, but also the ways that women in general within popular music are conceptualized” (op. cit.).

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However, I suggest that the situation of Molina and other women artistproducers who are in control of their sound adds a further dimension worth considering. It is a given that image forms part of an artist’s brand that is presented to the public, and although I have argued that women in control of their sound are more likely to have control over their image (Wolfe 2017), that control cannot determine the response of a music media steeped in discourses of sexism (Davies 2001). Consequently, “cultural notions of age” (Jennings and Gardner 2012: 3) or of race or of class are simply extensions of the range of rhetorical devices employed to contain the achievements of women artists in popular music in conjunction with the gendered constructions surrounding music production. Molina stated that she “struggle[s] with age because they make me struggle with age” (op. cit.) and described a number of reviews of her previous album that started with, “for a fifty year old woman blah blah blah blah” (ibid.). She also referenced the media representation of a tour she did, with two bands Vetiver and Adem and the artist Vashti Bunyan, whereby, “in every single article, the only ages appearing were Vashti’s and mine. So the problem with gender is age” (ibid.). When I asked her how she negotiated her representation, she replied: You can’t negotiate that, there’s nothing you can do . . . You need to just swallow it. If you dwell on it, they will [place] even more focus on that so when that happens you need to keep your mouth shut. (ibid.) Molina’s response appeared to be one of resignation and yet the album cover and video accompanying her last album saw her wearing a black mask with three small eyes, one serving as her mouth.7 Although this image serves as an appropriate metaphor for Molina’s interplay between music and language—a mouth is a silent observing eye that communicates meaning without a tongue, without words—I would argue that it can also be read as knowingly playing with and challenging the “aged gaze” (Gardener in Jennings and Gardener 2012: 111).

Conclusions To return to my stated intention in this chapter, what remerges is that the cultural context cannot be divorced from the practice in that questions continue to arise from the creative and political dynamics when the virtual compositional and production sketch-pad created in private is placed in the public arena. I would argue that the response of Molina and Savages to their reception is defiance, but it takes different forms and interestingly reflects their sound: powerful drumming and dominant electric guitar underscored by an insistent bass and an intense vocal performance in the case of Savages,

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and a hypnotic understated playfulness in the case of Molina. Although the means through which the music in each case is produced may be reflective of the creative processes of a solo artist as opposed to a band, there is clearly more to be said when gender is situated in the production paths that have been chosen. If those pathways are a response to the gaze that follows them then so too is the way they choose to visually represent themselves. Savage’s assertive sound is overtly aligned to their image, represented by the single raised fist on the album cover of Adore Life, the band’s monochrome uniforms and Beth’s direct glare at the camera in their publicity shots. Similarly, Molina’s image invites multiple interpretations in much the same way that she plays with notions of language, preferring the music to communicate its own meaning. Both visual approaches are as different as the production choices that accompanies the music yet I would argue that both are a response to a music industry culture that will contain their achievements, with slight variations on the methods used in accordance to the constructed gendered discourses they challenge: post-punk rock in the case of Savages, and music production in the case of Molina. Those methods will also be determined by their ages so that the demand for sexualization is imposed upon Savages by virtue of being women in their 20s whereas ageist discourse hounds Molina. As we age and mature, the more we are able to be in control of how we present ourselves, aurally and visually, to the world. Undoubtedly the members of Savages will go on to experience new levels of creativity that combine composition and production so that like Molina they will be able to say, “I love when the screen disappears and even though you’re looking at it, you’re only hearing and listening to music . . . only then I know that I may have something good” (personal communication, April 2016). However, like Molina, they will also knowingly work in a gendered music industry cultural context characterized by contradiction. Music technology offers women artists creative liberation through self-production allowing Théberge’s “impossible music” (1997: 215–16) to be made, yet that liberation remains at odds with methods of containing women’s achievements unchanged from those noted by feminist scholars of popular music over the last 30 years. The need, therefore, for women to create their own “indestructible sound” seems ever more apparent.

Notes 1 See http://www.juanamolina.com/ 2 Real name Camille Berthomier. 3 Real name Nico Conge. 4 The original Spanish reads as “cantas para decir y yo digo para cantar.”

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5 See http://www.vogue.com/13422096/savages-jehnny-beth-hair-makeup-shorthaircuts/ 6 The artist in question is Foehn (Fat Cat). 7 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl7h3KDMJFU

Bibliography Ashworth, Eddie. 2009. The Post-Millennial DIY Explosion and Its Effect of Record Production. Art of Record Production Conference 2009, Cardiff, UK. Astor, Pete, and Keith Negus. 2014. “More Than a Performance: Song Lyrics and the Practices of Songwriting.” In Popular Music Matters, edited by Dave Laing and Lee Marshall, 195–207. Aldershot: Ashgate. Awbi, Anita. 2014. “Women and Machines.” M-Magazine 52 (June 2014): 17. Bayton, Mavis. 1998. Frock Rock, Women Performing Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berthomier, Camille and Gemma Thompson in Kirsty Lang. 2016. Front Row [Radio Programme] BBC Radio 4, January 26, 19: 15. Burgess, Richard James. 2002. The Art of Music Production. 2nd ed. London: Omnibus Press. Coates, Norma. 1997. “(R)Evolution Now? Rock and the Political Potential of Gender.” In Sexing the Groove, Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley, 50–64. London: Routledge. Cohen, Sara. 2001. “Popular Music, Gender and Sexuality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, 226–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Helen. 2001. “All Rock ‘n’ Roll is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press. Popular Music 20 (3): 301–19. Empire, Kitty. 2016. “Real Kicks with Your Coffee.” The Observer 31 (January): 31. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Frith, Simon and Angela McRobbie. 1978. “Rock and Sexuality.” In On Record: Rock, Pop and The Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 371–89. New York: Pantheon Books. Grajeda, Tony. 2002. “The Feminization of Rock.” In Rock Over the Edge, edited by Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders, 233–54. Durham: Duke University Press. Haithcoat, Rebbeca. 2016. “The Music Industry Men Who Got Away With Exploiting Female Pop Stars.” Vice Media, April 1. https://broadly.vice.com/ en_us/article/the-music-industry-men-who-got-away-with-exploiting-femalepop-stars (accessed March 2017). Hodgson, Jay. 2010. Understanding Records: A Field Guide to Recording Practice. New York: Continuum. Jennings, Roz, and Andrea Gardner, eds. 2012. ‘Rock on’: Women, Ageing and Popular Music. Aldershot: Ashgate. Leonard, Marion, 1997. ‘“Rebel Girl You Are the Queen of My World”: Feminism, “Subculture” and Grrrl Power.” In Sexing The Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley, 230–56. London: Routledge.

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Lieb, Kristin. 2013. Gender, Branding and the Modern Music Industry. London: Routledge. Massey, Howard. 2009. Behind the Glass. Vol. 2. New York: Backbeat Books. Mayhew, Emma. 2004. “Positioning the Producer: Gender Divisions in Creative Labour and Value.” In Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity, edited by Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett, and Stan Hawkins, 149–62. Aldershot: Ashgate. McIntyre, Phillip. 2008. “Creativity and Cultural Production: A Study of Contemporary Western Popular Music Songwriting.” Creativity Research Journal 20 (1): 40–52. Moylan, William 2002. Understanding and Crafting the Mix: The Art of Recording. New York: Focal Press. Nehring, Neil. 1997. Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism: Anger is Energy. London: Sage. Petridis, Alexis. 2016. “Crown of Thaws.” The Guardian, January 15, 2016: 19. Porcello, Thomas. 2004. “Speaking of Sound: Language and the Professionalization of Sound-Recording Engineers.” Social Studies of Science 34 (5): 733–58. Reddington, Helen. 2012. The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era. Sheffield: Equinox. Ryan, John, and Michael Hughes. 2006. “The Fate of Creativity in the Age of Self-Production.” In Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture, edited by Michael Ayers, 239–54. New York: Peter Lang. Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/ Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Thompson, Gemma in Jenni Murray. 2013. Woman’s Hour [Radio Programme] BBC Radio 4, October 30, 10: 00. Whiteley, Sheila. 2000. Women and Popular Music, Sexual Identity and Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Williams Alan. 2007. “Divide and Conquer: Power, Role Formation, and Conflict in Recording Studio Architecture.” Journal on the Art of Record Production 1. http://arpjournal.com/divide-and-conquer-power-role-formation-and-conflict-inrecording-studio-architecture/ Wolfe, Paula. 2012. “A Studio of One’s Own: Music Production, Technology and Gender.” Journal on the Art of Record Production 7. http://arpjournal. com/2156/a-studio-of-one’s-own-music-production-technology-and-gender/ Wolfe, Paula. 2016. “‘I Write the Songs. He’s the Eye Candy’: The Female SingerSongwriter, the Woman Artist-Producer and the British Broadsheet Press.” In The Singer-Songwriter in Europe: Politics, Paradigms and Place, edited by Isabelle Marc and Stuart Green, 95–108. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wolfe, Paula. 2017. Women in the Studio: Creativity, Control and Gender in Popular Music Sound Production. London and New York: Routledge. Woolf, Virginia. 1985 [1929]. A Room of One’s Own. London: Panther Books. Zak, Albin. J. III. 2001. Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press.

PA R T T W O

Beyond Representation

CHAPTER FIVE

Producing TV Series Music in Istanbul Eliot Bates

When we conceive of music in relation to the concept of production, what specifically is being produced? The dialectic between the production of culture and the cultures of production (Du Gay 1997) depends upon the idea that production as a field is inseparable from culture and cultural issues. But it is music’s uncanny ability to refer (even if only in the abstract) to objects external to it that opens up a Pandora’s box of issues surrounding what is contained within the field of produced music or what specifically music is capable of producing. Indeed, music sometimes has a representational value, which suggests that what is being produced are representations—of culture, society, or something else (Barthes 1986; Nattiez 1990). Alternately, music is often highlighted for its role in construction of identity (Gracyk 2001; Beken 2004; Stokes 1994). Music also evokes emotional-affective registers, and thus music can be said to produce emotional-affective responses in audiences (Becker 2004; Berger 2009), even in cases of reduced listening or ubiquitous music (Kassabian 2013). Produced music, especially when foregrounding the presence of its technological apparatus, can also be seen as a means of introducing the public to the recording studio and to the team who produced the music (Hennion 1989), enabling us to hear the social mediations within the production milieu that made such music possible (Born 2011). And in the case of music for audiovisual media, musical sound is inextricably interwoven with the unfolding narrative structure of the visual media that it accompanies (Gorbman 1987). Thus, production studies, as

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a field of study, is not simply concerned with chronicling the techniques inherent in the labor of production, but rather entails a means of critically interrogating this range of things that music is capable of producing and that producers are capable of creating through music. This chapter will explore a transitional TV series (dizi), Fırtına,1 that aired in 2006–07 on Kanal D, one of the largest private television networks within Turkey. The show was a weekly, hour-long dramatic comedy that ran for 48 episodes spanning two seasons; the first 15 episodes (and the most acclaimed) were filmed in Eastern Black Sea villages and towns, primarily in the Aksu village in the Trabzon Province. With a large cast of well-known actors and actresses, and a considerable production budget (including what was at the time a large music budget), Fırtına was one of the major TV series in the year that it ran; it was also released with subtitles in Iran and the Arab world and thus gained international popularity. Fırtına is musically transitional in several regards. It was one of the earlier series to move beyond conceiving of music primarily in a background mood capacity and to involve character-specific leitmotifs, meaning melodic, rhythmic, or timbrally distinct figures that provide the show’s audience with more information about the characters. It prefigured the subsequent expansion of the role of music in enhancing the dramatic narrative, and it was one of the first TV series to adopt film music conventions that had first developed within the context of dönem films, an indigenous genre of historical fiction films that featured elaborate contemporary arrangements of repertoires that were both historically accurate and place specific (Bates 2016). Referring to the rapid introduction of private, satellite television in 1991– 92 to Turkey, Şahin and Aksoy note that “the new media were instrumental in bringing to the fore the defining tensions of the Turkish identity, such as ethnic origin, religion, language, and group aspirations” (1993: 35). By the time that Fırtına was in production, TV series had expanded past this to explore questions of regional belonging and different modes of Turkishness. Fırtına, whether considered via its script, its choice of actors and actresses, the choice of film clips, or its musical component, stages an urban (specifically, Istanbul) encounter with rural Anatolia. The tumultuous love affair between the main characters Zeynep and Ali, while mediated by the village experience and the many barriers concocted by their village families, is ultimately an Istanbul-style romantic relationship that has been transplanted to the comparatively foreign context of the Eastern Black Sea. The series articulates a more than century-old urban fascination with village culture and extends a common comic trope whereby village families fail to understand contemporary urban modes of heterosexual love, while clearly marked “modern” characters fail to understand the nuances of village traditions. It also draws on well-known urban stereotypes about people from the Eastern Black Sea Region, including a fervently religious character who fits the “Oflu Hoca” (old teacher from the town of Of) stereotype (Meeker 2002: 40–41).2

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As Vildan Mahmutoğlu (2007) has shown, the series not only explores human romantic relations but also grapples with the impact of changing economic conditions (especially privatization and globalization) and the economic inequalities between different village families; the Tabakçıs own a private tea factory while the Balcıs farm tea that they sell to the Tabakçis. Thus, the show indexes that the primary economic activity of the coastal Black Sea Region, tea cultivation, which began in the 1920s–30s as an experimental national horticultural project, by the 1940s resulted in the construction of the country’s first tea factory in Rize (a town that became synonymous with tea itself) and became a self-sufficient state monopoly by the 1960s (Ercisli 2012: 311). As the show progresses we witness the lead character Zeynep working in the Tabakçı factory, always in front of her computer, speaking with an Istanbul accent that resulted from her education in Istanbul, putting her in a different social class both from her family and from Ali, and articulating the labor divisions between farming and business. Ali runs river-rafting trips for foreign and domestic tourists, and pursued a tourism/hospitality degree at the regional Trabzon University; he is depicted as different from Zeynep’s brothers, who were neither university educated nor capable of developing a rapport with foreign tourists. This indexes a more recent industry in the region, adventure tourism, which has brought some much needed revenue at a time when little profit could be made from tea cultivation. Fırtına’s musical selections simultaneously evoke disparate cultural geographies, largely through the strategic use of instrumentation. The use of the Karadeniz kemençe fiddle, tulum bagpipes, and garmon accordion clearly establishes the links to musical traditions of the Eastern Black Sea, as these instruments are well known and (with the exception of the garmon) not found in other Turkish regions, which is amplified by their appearance on-screen in several episodes.3 Other instruments, for example, the kaval end-blown flute, tanbûr and divan-saz long-necked lutes, Persian kamanjā, and numerous Anatolian percussion instruments, suggest a more general “Eastern” sentiment as the parts written for them lack region-specific audible cues. However, the use of violin/viola, lavta, clarinet, classical and electric guitar, and synthesizer pads suggests an urban, cosmopolitan cultural identity too—music about and for the city (Krims 2007). In tandem, just from instrumental timbres alone the show asserts a polysemic multicultural ethos, which contributes much to the TV show’s project of rethinking, reframing, and representing the Black Sea.

Arrangement Key to understanding the genesis of both album and TV/film music production is an understanding of the specific labor that falls under the purview of

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arrangers (aranjör) and the process of arrangement (aranjman, düzenleme). Arrangement is something that is done to “traditional” (geleneksel) music, whether rural-folkloric repertoires or urban light art music. As a set of practices, arrangement most distinctively entails orchestration of existing repertoires, the composition of new sections (e.g., intros, breaks, outros) and of short melodic-instrumental answer (cevap) phrases, and the project management of the creative “team,” including studio musicians and engineers, who will contribute to the arrangement. Many arrangers also act, to a limited extent at least, as studio musicians and thus perform many of the parts within their own arrangements, while maintaining a network of preferred studio musicians who are able at short notice to perform parts on instruments with which the arrangers lack performance competence. The combination of the musical-creative roles and the managerial role ensures that arrangers are firmly situated at the center of production workflows, inhabiting a space that in other national contexts might fall under the remit of the producer and the soundtrack composer. Arrangement is an exercise in excesses, always entailing the tracking of more parts than will end up surfacing in the final version. There are two strategic reasons for this excess: it enables the creation of multiple versions of the same motif with a minimal increase in labor, and it enables the creation of musical variety in the show while still maintaining the ability for composed leitmotifs to do their work of representing places and characters. Pro Tools sessions of arrangements tend to include many muted-out regions that have been kept around for possible inclusion in theme variants, because of either a desire to increase the variety of the incidental music sections while still preserving the leitmotif function or a lingering worry that the show’s producer will object to a particular instrumental timbre and insist on a new lead melody part at short notice. As I observed during this project and during others, this tendency to excess and to edit has significant consequences on the ontology of the musical work, as it means that there is no longer a singular original from which versions derive; instead, the original resides within a Pro Tools session that contains the capability (frequently leveraged) to easily render multiple versions. As I will show later, arrangers often draw on other past and current projects, creatively reusing whole works of music or creating new works out of previously used backing tracks. Therefore, arrangement, through its strategic reuse of material and intermediality, moves us beyond any clear unitary concept of “the musical work” (Goehr 2008), whether conceived musically or socially. My inclination is to think in terms of the broader oeuvre of the arrangers in question as being a large, extended musical object, an interpretation that is inspired in part by Alfred Gell’s notion of art as a distributed object, for example, his provocative suggestion that “in that each of Duchamp’s separate works is a preparation for, or a development of, other works of his, and all may be traced, by direct or circuitous pathways, to all the others” (Gell 1998: 245; see also Born 2005: 20–23). In other words, arrangement style is not just an attribute

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within distinct musical works, but comes to blur the distinction between works themselves. The music for Fırtına was co-arranged by Aytekin Gazi Ataş and Soner Akalın, and I engineered and mixed the sessions for the first half of the TV series.4 Both arrangers got their professional start in music through the performing arts ensemble Kardeş Türküler (lit. “ballads of fraternity”), which since the early 1990s in various forms has been the primary ensemble in Turkey dedicated to researching and performing a diverse repertoire of music from myriad Anatolian ethnicities. The group began life on the campus of Boğaziçi University as an offshoot of the university’s folklore club, where students and faculty had long collaborated with conducting field research and with staging folkloric music and dance (Boğaziçi Gösteri Sanatları Topluluğu 2008). Whereas the folklore club, like many other university folklore clubs, had primarily researched regional Turkishlanguage traditions, Kardeş Türküler became interested in minority ethnic music communities, and their repertoire came to include elaborate multipart arrangements of Kurdish, Zaza, Laz, Armenian, Arab, Romani, Alevi, Assyrian, and Sefardic musical traditions originating from across Anatolia and the Balkans and into Mesopotamia. Ozan Aksoy (2014) has interpreted the broader mission of the group through the lens of cultural reconciliation. Both Aytekin and Soner were active with Kardeş Türküler in 1999–2000 when the group was enlisted to create the music for the film Vizontele (2001), a dönem (era) film set in 1974 on the eve of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and situated in the village of Gevaş in the eastern province of Van. Musically speaking, Vizontele was a landmark Turkish film, featuring the most complex and ornately arranged film score to date, and stood out for three arrangement innovations that became subsequently imitated in many film and TV music scores: first, a new approach to layering interlocking percussion parts together to create complex polyrhythmic driving rhythms (Soner was one of the percussionists most responsible for this innovation); second, experimenting with extended performance practice on plucked string instruments (e.g., saz, lavta, ‘ûd) and the creation of riff-based textures; and third, creating atmospheric textures with layered and heavily effected vocals and bodily sounds including stomping, dancing, and rhythmic breath exhalations (Aytekin was one of the vocalists who contributed to this). Thus, the Kardeş Türküler experience not only exposed Soner and Aytekin to a diverse range of musical traditions and extensive musical repertoire, but also provided them a milieu for experimenting with extending the technique and performance practice for local and foreign percussion, Anatolian plucked stringed instruments, and vocals. It also introduced them to a professional network, centered around the large independent record label Kalan Müzik Yapım, which provided them with instant connections to potential collaborators and professionals within the industry for what came to be termed Anatolian ethnic music (Anadolu etnik müzik). Fırtına was the first major long-running TV show they scored, and essential for exposing their creative work to an international audience,

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and it led to even larger budget work, including scoring what has become Turkey’s most famous and acclaimed TV show of all time, Mühteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century) (Bowen-Çolakoğlu 2016).

Music and Arranged Sound in Fırtına For designing the series, several somewhat distinct kinds of musical fragments were required. First, the show needed a theme—one that would do the interpretive work that opening credits music does (see Tagg 1979), but one that also could recur in varied forms to accompany important scenes in the series. Second, the show needed leitmotifs that accompanied particular characters. The most important of these is the leitmotif that represented the love affair between the show’s co-stars, Ali and Zeynep. Third, the show needed mood-appropriate music that evoked particular emotions; there are comic, tragic, melancholic, and tension/suspenseful moods regularly through the show. Fourth, much use is made of short synced instrumentally or vocally produced sound effects, known colloquially in Turkish as tuş (literally touch, click), which emphasize or interpret a single moment on the screen. And fifth, longer passages from fully arranged songs were regularly used in the closing credits; some of these were taken from commercially available CDs that had been arranged by the TV show arrangers. Compared to any of the other music, the theme song entailed the most effort prior to the launch of the show. The opening credits include two clips where people are whitewater rafting down the Fırtına River, shots of fishing boats going out to the Black Sea, tea harvesting, characters walking through areas with lush green foliage—in other words, stereotypical visual representations of the Eastern Black Sea that strongly anchor the show in the region. To accompany this, the show’s producers wanted an actionpacked theme, one that also situated the show in the Black Sea but was simultaneously modern. However, as we discovered, this mandate left a lot open to interpretation. Quite quickly Aytekin came up with a few motifs that seemed to fit the bill, including the opening “heyya heyya heyamo heyya” vocal part (“heyamola” is an expression shouted by fishermen in the region and is a well-known expression specific to it), the descending A minor flute melody that became the song’s core, and wrote and sang a third section in the atma türkü song form (a Black Sea style that features rapid vocal delivery and rhyming couplets). Soner came up with few percussion grooves featuring askı-davul (a double-headed drum played with different sized sticks), cajón box drum, and “effect” percussion (reverse cymbals, “ocean” drums), and double-tracked or quadruple-tracked these. They hired studio musician Eyüp Hamiş to perform the theme’s main melody on the kaval end-blown flute, which gave the theme a “soaring” quality. However, the producers were not happy with early mixes of the song, noting that to them

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it sounded “too much Black Sea.”5 They suggested, perhaps flippantly, that “if we added some Kurdish rhythms maybe it’d come out better.”6 After a back-and-forth process, the theme was altered to feature more prominently the electric guitar, which carries the melody the first time around, and the vocals of the final atma türkü section were removed and replaced with a breathy/percussive/overblown kaval flute playing a variant of the vocal part, and a descending countermelody on electric guitar. Soner created a couple of new percussion parts that provided a more driving, swung rhythm with dense articulated 16th note subdivisions (perhaps his response to the request for “Kurdish” rhythms, although this was not verbalized during the tracking sessions). To increase the build and impact, for the final section Soner and Aytekin overdubbed the sounds of them stomping on a large hollow wooden box, and sounds of exhaling “heh” syllables that punctuate the downbeats, drawing on a technique they had perfected a couple of months previously when creating the song “Gülçini” for an album by Yaşar Kabaosmanoğlu (Bates 2010). The stomping and exhaling was quadruple-tracked. The final version met the producer’s criteria and worked very successfully to sonically “brand” what came to be one of 2006’s most popular TV series. The leitmotif that symbolizes the romance between lead characters Ali and Zeynep was a simpler proposition to create. Since the kind of love that is being portrayed is a modern one, meaning outside of the traditions of arranged marriages common within the Black Sea Region depicted, and since both Ali and Zeynep are marked as characters with university education who speak standard Turkish rather than a regional dialect, this theme has even less connection to the region and its musical styles. The leitmotif begins with sparse arpeggios on two classical guitars played by Erdem Doğan, followed by the entrance of a minor melody on octave-doubled clarinet with answer phrases played on electric guitar and by Nejad Özgür on the garmon (an Azeri and Russian variety of small accordion with a distinctive key-clicking sound for each note articulation). On the repeat of the theme, the melody is shadowed by vocal humming. Throughout the motif in the background is a MIDI pad sound holding a steady drone. The mood of this leitmotif is melancholic, specifically the emotional-affective state and kind of melancholy known as hüzün (Stokes 2010: 125). Hüzün is an interesting phenomenon as it became especially important in Turkey in the 1980s in literature, movies, and music, and is not just any melancholy but rather a particularly modern form of it. In her study of Orhan Pamuk’s writing, Banu Helvacıoğlu explores “how melancholy in aesthetic production transverses with melancholy as a historical condition of modernity and with melancholy as a cultural condition” (2013: 164)—and much the same can be inferred for this forbidden romantic love affair as depicted in Fırtına. I would argue that the garmon accordion, in particular, in this leitmotif and in some others where it appears, becomes a principal instrument of hüzün; its deep rubato and distinctively strong ornamentation suggest a passionate emotionality, and its relative foreignness to Turkish recorded music history and lack of

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Table 5.1 Fırtına theme time

section

description

0:00–0:03

lead-in

wave sound (produced with an “ocean drum”)

0:03–0:07

A

“heyya heyya” vocals doubled with divan-saz with delayed electric guitar part (the wave sound continues)

0:00–0:16

A’

vocals continue, accompanied by 2 new clean guitar parts, 1 distorted guitar part, electric bass, cajón, and doubled askı-davul drums (the percussion emphasizes 8th note offbeats)

0:16–0:34

B

main A minor melody enters on doubled lightly overdriven electric guitar; percussion switches to 16th note subdivisions and a more complex/driving part (the accompanying parts continue)

0:34–0:42

A’

return of A’, but this time with the driving rhythmic feel of the B section

0:42–1:00

B’

the A minor melody is now performed by doubled kaval flue, “hey hey” syllable male vocals, and overdriven guitar (with the same accompanying parts)

1:00–1:08

A’’

return of A’, with less vocals, and percussion switches to a new driving part keeping 16th-note subdivisions

1:09–1:11

bridge

everything drops out, and a rhythmic/breathy kaval flute vamp only accompanied by askı-davul drums enters

1:11–1:20

C

atma türkü section, with breathy/percussive kaval flute melody, a delayed guitar part playing a single note, and very strong percussion created from 4x askıdavul drums, multitracked sounds of stomping on a large wooden box, and strongly exhaled vocal “heh” syllables on downbeats

1:20–1:30

C’

the atma türkü section continues, now with a descending electric guitar countermelody

1:30

end

the song ends with a guitar chord put through a 1/4 note regenerative delay

overinscribed regional associations mean it lacks some of the predetermined emotional-affective baggage that comes with strongly regional and local instruments. Especially following this TV series, Nejad Özgür, Turkey’s primary session musician on this instrument, has been much in demand for album and TV scoring work, even as his name is barely known to the public at large.7 The clarinet, played by session musician Serkan Çağrı (another musician connected to the Kardeş Türküler professional networks), also contributes to this hüzün affect with its deep vibrato and rubato playing.

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In contrast, in order to create the theme for the Oflu Hoca character, one who perhaps more than any other comes to represent the locality of the show through his locally inflected wildly comic speech, the arrangers employed the two instruments most immediately associated with the Eastern Black Sea: the tulum bagpipes and the kemençe fiddle. The kemençe (performed here by Tahsin Terzi) plays an ornamented two-note melody, while the tulum (performed by Mahmut Turan) plays a simple phrase that sounds similar to the first sounds that a bagpipe player plays when they pick up their instrument to check tuning and immediately before they begin an actual song. Neither constitutes a “normal” part that they would play for a work of music, but the instrumental timbres are immediately distinctive and are what solidify the placeness of this leitmotif. As the kemençe and tulum are not particularly “comic” instruments, and there is not much of a tradition of “comic” music in the region anyway, the arrangement depends upon other parts to impart a comic affect. In particular, staccato notes on electric guitar and the lavta (a guitar-like instrument with a rounded bowl and four sets of double-chorused strings), glissando slides and sporadic wah wah filter sweeps on a second electric guitar part, and a battery of quickly decaying percussion sounds performed on found objects (tea cups, water glasses, metal ashtrays) all help to bring the “comic” element to this leitmotif. The production of sound and music for TV series, while constituting a distinctive niche within Turkey’s field of cultural industries, can not wholly be separated from the production of music for albums or for feature films. The professional networks for these largely overlap, meaning that the same people are involved in the arrangement, engineering, and studio musician professions.8 In the case of Fırtına, the production of the music for the first series transpired simultaneously with the production of two albums, Yaşar Kabaosmanoğlu’s debut album Rakani (Metropol Müzik Üretim, 2006) and Gökhan Birben’s third album Bir Türkü Ömrüme (Metropol Müzik Üretim, 2006). Music from these two Black Sea-themed albums of arranged folkloric music was used in the TV series, and music originally designed for the TV series ended up being used on Gökhan’s album. Both the television series and the albums were (loosely) based upon a limited repertoire of folksongs that folklorists or singers had recorded in Eastern Black Sea villages. The effectiveness of the albums was first and foremost dependent upon the perceived faithfulness of the arrangements to tradition, meaning that innovations and newly composed material needed to not interfere excessively with the primary task of conveying the folksong in a regionally or locally appropriate style. In contrast, the effectiveness of the TV music was concerned with the emotional-affective associations conveyed specifically by and through the newly composed sections of arrangements. These sections often differed considerably from the sound of folk music in the region in terms of melodic structures, instrumentation, ornamentation,

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and other aspects. Correspondingly, usually the only sections of album song arrangements to be used in the TV soundtrack were those newly composed intro and instrumental break sections. In some instances, material was taken from the original multitrack DAW session files but new melodies were written or new parts recorded. Overall, we can conclude that the dependence upon the heavily arranged sections of album music rather than on the primary vocal sections (where accompaniment stuck closer to the traditions of the region) demonstrates that TV music as a whole features considerably less connection to the traditional music in question and much more connection to what I term the arranged tradition—the several decade history of arranging folkloric resources in order to make stage productions or recordings (Bates 2016). Aytekin and Soner were hired to do the music for this series in part due to their association with the extremely popular Vizontele films, as discussed earlier. While the representational demands are different (Vizontele and Vizontele Tuuba claim to make historically plausible representations of politically important time periods and serve as a commentary on the economic underdevelopment of Eastern Turkey), both Vizontele and Fırtına feature “tension/suspense” (gerilim) scenes that require energetic music to propel the action forward. The “tension” music in Fırtına is very similar to the tension music in Vizontele; both feature the Hicaz melodic mode (B – C – D# – E – F# – G) with an alternation between B major and C major chords (the primary source of the “tension”), both feature interlocking riffs played on plucked string instruments, both make striking use of high male vocals singing “hey ey” syllables and treated with a thick, long reverb, and both use complex, interlocking, and very dense percussion grooves elaborating on the Çiftetelli (4/4) rhythm.9 The specific percussion and stringed instruments that were chosen do differ, and the Fırtına tension theme adds drama with a tremolo violin part (performed by Neriman Güneş) that emphasizes the chord changes, but the more prominent similarities suggest how in just five years an innovation in film music had become a convention in TV music. For expediency I have written so far about these motifs as if they are singular entities. However, for each one of them we created multiple versions. For example, for the show’s theme there were versions without the vocals, without most or all of the electric guitars, and ones without percussion. There was even a version with only the solo guitar playing the main melody. We made stand-alone versions of each of the theme’s three sections. The theme variants surface regularly when depicting river scenes, but even in later episodes when rivers no longer were depicted on screen, theme variants were employed to accompany a variety of other kinds of scenes. For the Ali and Zeynep character leitmotif, alternate versions were made with electric guitar, the Persian kamanjā bowed string instrument, or the garmon taking the lead melody instead of the clarinet. This variety is essential to sustain interest over a long run of a TV series, but keeping the motifs still recognizable maintains the sonic brand of the show. It also suggests that the

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instruments that are called upon in TV music to carry a part’s emotionalaffective register are, at least to an extent, somewhat interchangeable. This differs considerably from these instruments’ traditional roles in village performance practices (Picken 1975). One distinctive trait in the soundtracks to some Turkish film and TV music is the use of instrumentally produced sound effects—what Aytekin referred to as tuş sounds. Tuş is a colloquialism that is sometimes used to refer to the act of clicking on a button on a screen, and in other contexts can mean “touch.” In the context of film music, it refers to brief, synchronized sounds that punctuate and emphasize a frame of the film. For Fırtına, several dozen tuş sounds were made during the course of the production. Often, they were taken from warm-ups when session musicians were in the studio and thus constitute parts that were not intended to be used at all; other times, the sounds came from the ends of melodies or percussive passages that were pulled out of context and made into stand-alone motifs. Partly to inscribe the “Black Sea”-ness of the show, many of the tuş sounds were taken from tulum bagpipes. Since the parts originated in the sessions, which ended up producing the series’ music, there is an audible cohesion that justifies their usage. As the dialog-intensive nature of Turkish TV dramas precludes the use of much vocal music within the show itself (with the exception of certain dramatic scenes without dialog), the one place where vocal music is most often located is in the closing credits. One such song in Fırtına, “Ha Bu Ander Sevdaluk,” was written by Aytekin and became the best known song in the series, developing a life outside of its role in the show. Part of the song appeared initially in a scene where several characters are leaving by boat on a long journey and their family and friends, tearful, wave from the shore, but the full work appeared in the closing credits to that episode and many subsequent ones. This work is interesting since it was composed by an ethnically Zaza-Alevi musician, but in the style of some of the slow sad türkü (folksongs) from the Trabzon area (closest perhaps to “Oy Benum Sevduceğum,” a song repopularized in the 2000s by folk music stars Erkan Oğur and İsmail Hakkı Demircioğlu). While the text of the song has been critiqued on social media sites for not wholly articulating the Trabzon dialect of Turkish that the song purports to represent, that has not stopped the song becoming part of the stage repertoire of numerous groups that perform Black Sea popular and folkloric music, and even being covered by singers in Albania and Bulgaria. I even heard it being performed by local musicians in the Rize Province (just to the east of where Fırtına was shot), showing that the song had made it back to the village. It is as if “Ha Bu Ander Sevdaluk” was a newly located türkü rather than a pop song created for a TV series. Surveying the broader labor of production for the series, the entire creative process, from the initial song conceptualizations to tracking all the parts, from editing selections to arrangement revisions, from the final mixes to finally compositing fragments into episode soundtracks, was done in the

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studio and without any written scores, and extremely quickly. The bulk of the labor transpired over a two-week period, during which time we created some 96 distinct mixed sound files (of durations ranging from five seconds to three minutes in length) that in various combinations comprised the soundtrack to the first several episodes of the TV series. Everyone involved in the sessions—arrangers, engineers, and studio musicians included—had an active role in the labor of production, although this work took different forms. All of the session musicians that we worked with have an innovative approach to performing in the studio that results in a performance that is extremely consistent in amplitude, reducing or eliminating the need for track-specific compression to be used, and otherwise attempting to minimize the likelihood that the arrangers or audio engineers might feel the need to manipulate the part excessively after tracking. As so many parts needed to be tracked—more complex song arrangements had upwards of 36 tracks, and sessions required alternate takes performed on a multiplicity of different instruments—there was very little time for a prolonged, dedicated mixing phase, so I tended to mix as I was tracking and editing, relying mostly on conventional instrument-specific EQ and compression settings and using the same reverbs and tempo-locked delays throughout the project. There was also no time for experimentation regarding microphone selection and positioning, so we developed a standard go-to configuration for each studio musician we worked with, ensuring that we could edit between takes done on different days without it being easily perceptible. The routine use of the same microphones (typically a Neumann U87ai for melody instruments or vocals, and whatever small diaphragm condenser was available for small percussion) positioned in the same spot of the room and at the same distance from the performer ensured a consistency of sound that contributed to our ability to quickly EQ the track using predetermined, instrument-specific settings rather than necessitating an extensive experimentation with frequency bands. Electric guitar and electric bass were always recorded direct rather than through amps, which minimized the time spent playing around with cabinet and mic placement and fiddling around with guitar tone controls on the amp. Two Waves Renaissance reverb plugins were used on every session: one was a generic simulated hall reverb with a 1.4–2.2 second decay time (depending upon the tempo of the track), which was used on all vocals and melodic instruments except for bass, and a simulated plate reverb with a 0.6–1.1 second decay time for the percussion submix. The aesthetic preference was for a fairly dry mix, meaning that only enough reverb was used to compensate for the artificiality imparted from the close-miking of instruments and the deadness of the tracking room. However, for certain leitmotifs, excessively long reverb and regenerative delay might be used on a part or two (especially vocals, flutes, and effect percussion) to produce a particular, pronounced spatial effect. All mixes of folkloric music, or mixes inspired by folkloric production conventions, tend to showcase one instrument that, as mentioned before,

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is felt to have a regional significance; this part is always mixed up as if it were a lead vocal, and the supporting parts are mixed so that all are audible but none sticks out excessively.10 Since the music for TV series is typically mixed 20 decibels below the dialog, and the music is in competition not just with the dialog but with location sound and foley, the challenge of TV series music is creating something that will convey anything at all at such a low level, a phenomenon compounded by the poor quality of the audio playback on most listeners’ TV sets. Subsequently, the most important part of the frequency spectrum is the 200–8000 Hz range. Within that range, the upper midrange band centered around 1.5–2.2 KHz was the most important for imparting the audible aesthetic known as parlak (“shine”) (Bates 2010), which in practice meant that often a 10 decibel boost would be used in that band for important instruments and another extreme boost used in the same range on the full mix.

Conclusions Due to governmental restrictions and tight central control of the media industries there has been only private TV in Turkey since the 1990s. The comparatively recent phenomenon of television music quickly became a new creative site and employment opportunity for those working in preexisting music-sound production networks, in particular album arrangers and film music creators (already two professions with significant overlap), rather than a wholly new field with different personnel. Correspondingly, TV series music inherited some of the cultural logics of film and album music, including a long-standing infatuation with “traditional” music and locally or regionally specific musical instruments. That some of these also have ethnic associations (e.g., the kemençe is often associated with the Laz and Pontic Greek ethnicities, while the tulum is most associated with the Hemşin) serves to underscore a vision of Turkey that is multicultural at its core but cosmopolitan in its outlook. TV shows such as Fırtına, despite being fictional, create powerful representations—in this case of the Eastern Black Sea Region and its economic and cultural relation to Istanbul. Music comes to nuance these representations, but in doing so moves beyond having a solely representational or emotional-affective valence to constitute something new and distinct. TV music is, however, in some ways the mirror image of album music. Albums develop a filmic, dramaturgical aesthetic that surrounds material that then must, to compensate, be overinscribed as traditional, accomplished through an excess of instruments with local significance, and an exaggeration of ornamentation and instrument-specific performance features. There is an inherent paradox, therefore, in an album arrangement, that all the newly composed stuff is in effect wholly inessential for the correct portrayal of

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traditional repertoire, yet most defines the artistry of the arrangers (and the whole production team). TV music, however, works by avoiding material that is excessively inscribed as traditional, tending to focus on all the newly composed filmic/dramaturgical material that was inessential for the correct performance of the traditional song in an album context. But as I have shown, arrangers routinely work in both milieus, and much of the material they create for TV or film music may have had its genesis in outtakes from album productions. As a profession, arrangement therefore strikes a delicate balance between these two dispositions. As I argued before, for production studies to do critical work necessitates a nuanced understanding of specifically what is being produced, above and beyond aesthetic art works. In the case of Turkish TV music, in addition to the representational and cultural geographical aspects we are able to hear the computer-based production workflow in action, and therefore able to hear, to an extent at least, the social negotiations, technical decisions, and collaborative performances that comprised part of the production process. Moreover, the work concept has only a limited utility for theorizing the music, as the dozens of incidental themes and multiple leitmotif variants point to the need to frame individual sounds instead within the broader oeuvre of the arranger—and by extension the entire production team.

Acknowledgments My research was facilitated by a State Department Fellowship generously provided by ARIT (American Research Institute in Turkey) (2006–07) and a Fulbright IIE grant (2005–06). I wish to thank Ladi Dell’aira, Benjamin Brinner, Heather Haveman, and Samantha Bennett for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I also wish to thank Soner Akalın, Aytekin Gazi Ataş, Ömer Avcı, Metin Kalaç, Yeliz Keskin, Ayşenur Kolivar, Ulaş Özdemir, Fatih Yaşar, and Yılmaz Yeşilyurt for their friendship inside and outside the studios, and for their patience with my never-ending questions.

Notes 1 Fırtına literally means “storm,” but has a double meaning in the case of this show, as it also refers to a well-known river that is popular for trout fishing and whitewater rafting (both depicted in the show). 2 Oflu Hoca characters are particularly known for the puzzling or even ridiculous sayings they make. Since the 1980s, amateur cassettes have circulated featuring “greatest hits,” consisting of field-recorded spoken sayings of various Black Sea men who listeners find to fit the stereotype.

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3 The kemençe appears in an indoor dance scene where people wildly dance the horon to live kemençe accompaniment. The tulum appears in a comic scene where a man, hoping to serenade a woman, stands outside her second story window and fakes playing the tulum while a friend of his, hidden in the bushes, actually plays the bagpipes. 4 I worked as the house audio engineer for ZB Stüdyo from December 2015 until the spring of 2017, during which time I worked extensively with Soner and Aytekin on their album, TV, and film music projects. 5 Fieldnotes, June 29, 2006. 6 It is hard to resolve on one interpretation of this particular studio moment. For starters, there is only a limited tradition of playing percussion in the Eastern Black Sea Region, so any percussive parts are inherently “foreign” to the music (which has not stopped their use on many albums). However, despite the widespread use of percussion in Kurdish regions, there is not one particular percussion style that is unequivocally “Kurdish” in nature. Culturally, the Eastern Black Sea is also the only part of the country where there is not a sizable Kurdish population, so the suggestion that adding Kurdish elements might be a productive strategy for lessening the Black Sea-ness of the theme suggests a peculiar take on multiculturalism. 7 On the invisibility of session musicians in Indian film music, see Booth 2008: 5. 8 Some arrangers partly give up doing album work after becoming established in the far more lucrative world of TV music, but will still arrange single songs for albums of artists with whom they are friends. 9 While many melodic modes in Turkey do have specific emotional-affective registers, there is nothing about the traditional associations with makam Hicaz that would imply its association here with suspense. This could be termed a postmodern recontextualization of the mode. 10 Interview with Metin Kalaç, April 10, 2007.

Bibliography Aksoy, Ozan. 2014. “Music and Reconciliation in Turkey.” In The Kurdish Question in Turkey: New Perspectives on Violence, Representation, and Reconciliation, edited by Cengiz Güneş and Welat Zeydanlioğlu, 225–44. London: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1986. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bates, Eliot. 2010. “Mixing for Parlak and Bowing for a Büyük Ses: The Aesthetics of Arranged Traditional Music in Turkey.” Ethnomusicology 54 (1): 81–105. Bates, Eliot. 2016. Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul’s Recording Studio Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Becker, Judith O. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Beken, Münir. 2004. “Ethnicity and Identity in Music—a Case Study: Professional Musicians in Istanbul.” In Manifold Identities: Studies on Music and Minorities, edited by Ursula Hemetek, Gerda Lechleitner, Inna Naroditskaya, and Anna Czekanowska, 181–90. Buckinghamshire: Cambridge Scholars Press. Berger, Harris M. 2009. Stance: Ideas About Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Boğaziçi Gösteri Sanatları Topluluğu. 2008. Kardeş Türküler: 15 Yılın Öyküsü. Istanbul: bgst yayınları. Booth, Gregory D. 2008. Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios. New York: Oxford University Press. Born, Georgina. 2005. “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity.” Twentieth-Century Music 2 (1): 7–36. Born, Georgina. 2011. “Music and the Materialization of Identities.” Journal of Material Culture 16 (4): 376–88. Bowen-Çolakoğlu, Kimberly. 2016. “Turkish Television’s Magnificent Music: A Case Study of Meaning, Production, and Audiencing in a Successful Dizi.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Istanbul: Istanbul Technical University. Du Gay, Paul, ed. 1997. Production of Culture/Cultures of Production. London: Sage. Ercisli, Sezai. 2012. “The Tea Industry and Improvements in Turkey.” In Global Tea Breeding: Achievements, Challenges and Perspectives, edited by Liang Chen, Zeno Apostolides, and Zong-Mao Chen, 309–22. Heidelberg: Springer. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency. London: Clarendon. Goehr, Lydia. 2008. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gorbman, Claudia. 1987. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gracyk, Theodore. 2001. I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Helvacıoğlu, Banu. 2013. “Melancholy and Hüzün in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46 (2): 163–78. Hennion, Antoine. 1989. “An Intermediary between Production and Consumption: The Producer of Popular Music.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 14 (4): 400–24. Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Krims, Adam. 2007. Music and Urban Geography. New York: Routledge. Mahmutoğlu, Vildan. 2007. “Yeni Yerel Kültürel Kimliklerin TV Dizileri Üzerinden Gösterimi: Fırtına.” Galatasaray Üniversitesi İletişim Dergisi 7: 173–92. Meeker, Michael. 2002. A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nattiez, Jean Jacques. 1990. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Picken, Laurence Ernest Rowland. 1975. Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey. London: Oxford University Press. Şahin, Haluk, and Asu Aksoy. 1993. “Global Media and Cultural Identity in Turkey.” Journal of Communication 43 (2): 31–41.

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Stokes, Martin. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg. Stokes, Martin. 2010. The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tagg, Philip. 1979. “Kojak—50 Seconds of Television Music: Toward the Analysis of Affect in Popular Music.” Göteborg: Musikvetenskapliga Institutionen.

CHAPTER SIX

Reclamation and Celebration: Kodangu, a Torres Strait Islander Album of Ancestral and Contemporary Australian Indigenous Music Karl Neuenfeldt

Music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives. (Frith 1996: 124) The stories told about the past speak powerfully to the self-image of the story teller. Collective stories define collective identities. Speaking about the past, we make for ourselves a present and project a future. (Pue 1995: 732)

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Introduction For Torres Strait Islanders (henceforth Islanders), music is a key component of their sociocultural life as one of Australia’s two Indigenous peoples.1 For Islanders, music is simultaneously memory (the past), innovation (the present), and imagination (the future). It is also culture and commerce and sometimes also inherently political, albeit not always overtly so. The last few decades have seen increased research, documentation and analysis of Islanders’ music and music practice following on from pioneering work such as that of Beckett (1981, 1972), Laade (1990) and Lawrie (1970). More recent research on a wide range of the styles, uses and cultural production of Islander music and music practices is found in the work of Beckett (2001), Barney and Solomon (2010), Costigan and Neuenfeldt (2002), Lawrence, H. (2004, 1998), Mullins and Neuenfeldt (2005, 2001), Nakata and Neuenfeldt (2005), Neuenfeldt and Costigan 2004 and Neuenfeldt (2001, 2007, 2011 and 2014a,b). However, relatively less has been published about the processes underlying the musical production of what can be termed quasi-commercialized recordings. They regularly combine the sometimes otherwise distinct genres of ancestral and contemporary music and can have more of a cultural than commercial agenda (Pegrum, Kepa, and Neuenfeldt 2008–15; Neuenfeldt and Kepa 2011). In those instances, it is arguably not about the potential monetary benefits but rather about the cultural cachet such recording projects can accrue and the impact they can make. This applies equally to recordings of secular and sacred Islander music. The focus here is one such example of a quasi-commercialized Islander music album of secular songs with a conspicuous cultural agenda: Kodangu. It features ancestral and contemporary songs and was recorded in 2015 by The Custodians, a cross-generational Islander family band (Figure 6.1). The intent here is to examine the processes that informed its musical production via description and analysis based substantially upon ethnographic interviews with two senior members of the band and extended family, the Late Dimple Bani Senior and Gabriel Bani, and the author's role in its production. This overall approach is consonant with that of Durán (2011), who has investigated how music production can be simultaneously a tool of research and also have a cultural impact. This chapter argues Kodangu strives to preserve ancestral music while also incorporating contemporary musical styles and Western music production aesthetics, thus melding past, present and future into what Frith refers to above as an “imaginative cultural narrative” (1996: 124). Kodangu uses the resulting syncretic music to address contemporary issues relevant to Islanders such as the roles of historical influences and cultural protocols as well as the challenges of language retention and implicitly the concept of communal copyright. Contributing to debates on those issues is perhaps its foremost potential

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FIGURE 6.1 Cover of the Kodangu CD.

impact culturally, socially and politically, along with featuring music that is written, composed, performed and recorded at a professional level—and is also educational. My personal and professional role as a co-producer of the Kodangu album, along with Nigel Pegrum and Will Kepa, involved more than just music per se. It also involved an academic background of research and involvement in numerous previous music recording projects with Islanders.2 In essence, combining my academic and musical interests in an album can be typified as a personal striving to do research that, in Durán’s words, “is in a format which is ‘useful and accessible’ to the people we are writing about” (2011: 246). The numerous previous albums and projects we have produced in collaboration with Australian Indigenous communities, bands and soloists have become an integral part of the soundscape of their communities. To hear them being used and enjoyed, as entertainment and education, is the ultimate reward for our role as producers in helping reclaim and also celebrate Islander music in its secular and sacred forms.

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A CD (compact disc) is of course purely a technology for carrying digitized information. Nonetheless, it is a recording technology that has globally been put to widespread and culturally significant use in the last decades in the service of the reclamation and celebration of Indigenous peoples’ music and traditions (Neuenfeldt 2007a; Scales 2012; Wilson 2014). It succeeded the earlier analogous use of cassettes (Manuel 1993) and preceded the now ubiquitous MP3 format (Sterne 2006) and the use of laptops, SD (secure digital) cards and phones (Crowdy 2015). CDs not only are a technology of convenience, reliability and replicability, but also provide excellent audio quality and relative durability. Briefly, several theoretical perspectives can provide insights into situating and understanding the diverse roles of music recording projects such as The Custodians’ Kodangu in shaping broader processes of cultural identity (Hall 1990) and collective memory (Halbwachs 1980), as well as how music itself has a particularly affective and effective role in identity formation and reinforcement (Frith 1996). These perspectives will be reprised in the analysis section at the end of this exploration.

The Kodangu Album's Contents—and Intents Kodangu was funded by the Torres Strait Regional Authority through its Culture, Art and Heritage Program. The Torres Strait Regional Authority was established in 1994 as the Australian federal government's representative organization for Indigenous peoples living in the Torres Strait region. The album was recorded at two locations. The rhythm tracks, mixing and mastering were done at Pegasus Studios in Cairns in northern Queensland. It is a project studio owned and operated by Nigel Pegrum, formerly the drummer with iconic 1970s British folk-rock band Steeleye Span and an experienced session musician, producer and arranger, including numerous world music and Indigenous Australian albums (Neuenfeldt 2005). Preproduction with Gabriel Bani and co-producer Karl Neuenfeldt was also done at Pegasus Studios, and Torres Strait Islander co-producer Will Kepa assisted with arrangements and played bass, guitars and keyboards on the rhythm tracks. Dimple Bani Junior played drums. The multi-tracked vocals by Dimple Senior, Gabriel, Danny and Jack Bani were mainly recorded on Thursday Island, the administrative centre of the Torres Strait region at the studio of Radio 4MW. Nadene Jones of Nova Graphics did the album and booklet design, with photographs and artworks supplied principally by the Bani family (Figure 6.2). All the songs’ lyrics are contained in the booklet of 24 pages along with translations and explanations. The album contains 11 songs and has 49 minutes of music. Members of the Bani extended family wrote the songs with Dimple Bani Senior being

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FIGURE 6.2 From the insert to the Kodangu CD. the primary composer and author with contributions from his father, the Late Ephraim Bani; his maternal uncle Erris Eseli; and his younger brother, Gabriel. A notable facet of the album’s production is that the sequencing of songs, usually done after recording, was already completed in keeping with the trajectory of the broader story Kodangu was designed and intended to tell. In essence, the album had a storyboard comprised of songs, which points out the Banisʼ detailed planning and cultural research preceding the actual recording sessions. In order to explore the story the album was designed to tell, it is useful to turn to the personal observations of Dimple Bani Senior and Gabriel Bani. They deal explicitly and implicitly with the notion of how recording Indigenous music can be a means of reclamation and celebration and can simultaneously be informed by extensive research by artists and producers that can serve to heighten an album’s impact. There are several songs that will

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be singled out because of their aptness and what the Bani’s comments reveal about the processes of culturally informed research and the complementary aesthetics of culturally appropriate music production.

Geographic and Cultural Contexts Mabuyag Island, traditional name Urpi Kigu Poeyadhras, is in the western cluster of islands in the Torres Strait region of far north Queensland (Figure 6.3). It currently has approximately 250 residents and is serviced by an airport, a school and health facilities. It is a small, tropical island set amid the region’s many scenic islands, reefs and cayes that separate Australia and Papua New Guinea (D. Lawrence and H. Lawrence 2004). Historically, beginning in the colonial era it was an active centre for maritime industries such as beche-de-mer and pearl shell gathering and consequently had a diverse and sizeable multinational and Indigenous workforce as elsewhere in the region (Mullins 1995). The traditional language of the western Torres Strait region is Kala Lagaw Ya (and its dialects) and the traditional language of the eastern Torres Strait region is Meriam Mir. Torres Strait Creole/Yumpla Tok and Australian English are now more widely spoken, hence the importance for sustainability to record the traditional languages used in culturally significant contexts such as music (Grant 2014). Mabuyag has a well-deserved reputation as a strong culture community, and music and dance are of particular importance. As in many communities of the region, emigration has reduced the home-island population on Mabuyag with many emigrants now living throughout mainland Australia (Shnukal 2001). They are part of the major post–Second World War Islander diaspora, with approximately two-thirds of Islanders now residing on the Australian mainland. For some Islanders, especially youth, there can be subsequent issues related to identity, being Islanders but not being in the Torres Strait region (Watkin Lui 2012).3 Many Mabuyag people are also living within the region because economic and educational opportunities are very limited in such a small, isolated island community. The Bani extended family is typical of this kind of Islander migration pattern and diaspora. Members are widely dispersed, some living on Mabuyag and Thursday Islands, others on Cape York Peninsula in the nearby Northern Peninsula Area (NPA) on the Australian mainland as well as others as distant as Western Australia. Notwithstanding this geographical dislocation the extended family retains extremely strong links to their homeisland and its cultural traditions. As Gabriel Bani (2015a) confirms: The family is originally from Mabuyag and we have three clan groups and a major tribe [there]. The clan groups are Panay, Maydh, Sipingur and Wagadagam is the major tribe—it’s when all the clan groups come

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FIGURE 6.3 Map of the Torres Strait region. together for ceremonies and also for their harvest festivals. The major totem of Wagadagam is the crocodile. You will find other sub totems because of intermarriage. And because of our relationships with Papua New Guinea and the Australian mainland, there are also sub totems. According to senior members of The Custodians, Dimple Bani Senior and Gabriel Bani, they can claim a demonstrable hereditary right to represent the Wagadagam tribe. It is partly based on genealogical records collected about Mabuyag during the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits in 1898 (Haddon 1904–35), one of the world’s first full-scale anthropological expeditions (Herle and Rouse 1998). It was headed by Alfred Cort Haddon and included specialists in diverse research foci such as

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ethnology, psychology, linguistics and music. Regarding the role of headman among the Wagadagam, Gabriel recounts it has been in the Bani family for generations, both in the family's and in the community’s repository of oral history and also documented by William Halse Rivers in the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition’s reports (1904: Table 4). Dimple Bani Senior and Gabriel Bani’s father, the Late Ephraim Bani Senior (1944–2004), was a cultural custodian, linguist, broadcaster, musician and visual artist. He was the seventh traditional headman of Mabuyag’s Wagadagam tribe as well as one of the few of his generation to have undergone a traditional initiation with his maternal uncles. As Gabriel states, “As a custodian of traditional knowledge . . . a lot of things were passed to him during that initiation time, which gave him that responsibility. At the time he saw the erosion of culture, erosion of language and all that stuff. Dad actually tried everything to do that work and that’s why he started his work with linguistics and culture.”4 Consequently, an abiding concern for culture was a part of their upbringing. As Gabriel reflects, “[We] grew up in an environment of reading, research, all that side [of culture] but also the side of the singing, the community, ceremonies, community celebrations and all of that. . . . I think that’s where everything sort of began for us to be where we are now up to, when Dad’s gone.” Dimple Bani Senior, Gabriel’s older brother, was called on to be next in line for being a headman for the Wagadagam tribe. Consequently, as Gabriel explains: “We did [Dimple Senior’s] initiation in 2005, a formal initiation with the government on Mabuyag. [Other government representatives] came to Mabuyag: the TSRA [Torres Strait Regional Authority], the Island Coordinating Council [ICC], the [Torres Strait Island] Regional Council [TSIRC]. And all the Islander elders from as far as Murray [Island/Mer], and Kaurareg elders and all the islands came. [That] set the stage for a lot of work that we started.” Thus, the extended family members, and Dimple Senior and Gabriel in particular in their generation, have direct links to the core of the culture and accept and acknowledge a responsibility to preserve and promulgate its worldview and lore. One artistic medium they have chosen to help realize that obligation and aspiration is music.

Analysis of Select Songs Some of the songs on Kodangu are analytically of particular relevance and provide cultural insights into their writing and production. The first song on the album, “Kodangu (Chant),” sets the stage for the stories and music that follow. It also aurally flags the cultural agenda by being sung a cappella in Kala Lagaw Ya accompanied only by warup/buruburu drum percussion, as would have occurred in a ceremonial context.5 Adapted, and composed and authored by Dimple Bani Senior, Gabriel Bani and Erris Eseli, it is an ancestral chant:

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Mabuyag mura Mabuyag e. Garke kubiw laaga inu Mabuyag e. Kodangu in kodangu e. Goegayth mura apasin mura apasin e. Explanation: Mabuyag is a place of beginnings, a place for all people. This originates from the Kod, the sacred meeting place of governance and initiation. Tribes and all in the village revere what comes out of the Kod, with humbleness and respect. (“Kodangu (Chant)”) Dimple Bani Senior (2015), who also uses the honorific title ahdi, signifying someone with considerable cultural knowledge, emphasizes “that chant is the beginning . . . [It] was especially sung for my initiation when I was taken from the kod to be initiated. So that’s the start of that history. That’s why we began with that [song for the album].” As Gabriel adds, “That [song] draws a context around the principle that it comes from the kod that we do what we do. If it’s initiation that’s being done in this modern day, it’s still here. What existed before is still here, in the midst of all the changes and everything that’s happened.” The function of a kod or kwod is reported in Haddon: In every inhabited island there was a certain area set apart for the use of the men which was known as a kwod. Some islands appear to have had but a single kwod, others had several; for example, in Mabuiag. . . . Each of these so far as I could learn was the kwod of a particular clan, whereas the great kwod on the adjacent sacred islet of Pulu was what might be called the national kwod of the Gumulaig [peoples of Mabuyag]. The kwod corresponds to the club-houses . . . that are so widely spread over Melanesia. . . . Speaking in general terms, these places are tabooed to women and to the uninitiated, they are used as dwellings or meeting places of the men, and in them various ceremonies are held; they constitute the social, political and religious centres in the public life of the men. (1904: 3) The sociocultural, religious and political significance of a kod in the Mabuyag region has been archaeologically investigated (McNiven, David, Goemulgau Kod and Fitzpatrick 2009). The song and the album’s title are modern-day aural and visual extensions of the kod's role as both a physical and a cultural and sacred space. As Gabriel clarifies, That “ngu” at the end [of the word kodangu] means “from the kod.” And the songs on the CD [album] actually link us back to everything that begins there, which is our value system and even the laws surrounding our lives, our conduct, our everything, our vision, where we’re heading. So it all reflects the fact that everything comes from the tribal perspective. To get anywhere in this world, that’s where we need to set up our foundation from. Dad [the Late Ephraim Bani] said all the time that, “man must first

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find himself before he can conquer what’s outside.” You know, the most important part is to establish yourself, your identity, who you are. The chant is incorporated later on in the album into the song “Kodangu” with other additional new lyrics in English and more elaborate production using a guitar-bass-drums rhythm section, synthesized strings and complex vocal harmonies. All quite common elements of a Western production aesthetic but here augmented in both the chant and the song by a major aural signifier of Islander culture: multi-tracked warup/buruburu drums. The cultural agenda is reinforced in the English lyrics and also made more accessible for Islanders and non-Islanders who do not speak Kala Lagaw Ya. This mixing of languages and incorporating of ancestral musical elements is a common strategy for contemporary Islander composers and authors (Neuenfeldt and Costigan 2004). There is decidedly a cultural agenda, even if the resulting song accedes primarily to Western production aesthetics. The lyrics of “Kodangu” are as follows: Through the songs and dances our stories are told. With the guidance of the spirits we stand bold. Time will heal the scars through the seasons, foretold by the highest heavenly plan. These islands are homes of a unique race of people. Generations on we've survived on customs and values we embrace. So here we are, we can react in a nation with a status of warriors. We’ll be living forever in the islands of the Torres Strait. History has come alive on our island [Mabuyag] as we have seen this is how it used to be. To the sweet sound of music we are taking a walk through the corridors of time. [Chant] We’ll be living forever in the islands of the Torres Strait. (“Kodangu,” Kodangu 2015) Along with an assertion of cultural uniqueness, the lyrics refer to Dimple Bani Senior’s initiation as headman in 2005 and also make an implicit reference to the Christian affiliation of many Islanders: “Time will heal the scars through the seasons foretold by the highest heavenly plan.” The two linked songs, “Kodangu (Chant)” and “Kodangu,” are lynchpins on the album as they draw on the past in the service of the present—and by implication the future. An overt link to the future is in “Masters and Commanders,” composed and authored by Dimple Senior and Gabriel Bani and featuring Gabriel’s 14-year-old son, Jack Bani Junior. Its lyrics and also its performance by the youngest member of The Custodians are overtly focused on the next generation of culture bearers. The title comes not from the Peter Weir/ Russell Crowe film of a similar name, Master and Commander, but rather a quotation from the Late Ephraim Bani Senior: “For a healthy race of people to exist has but one answer: they had managed to master the environment and were in full command of their survival” (Bani 2015b). The lyrics read:

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It is another day in a place that is special, a life that is built on values from above, [and] our survival day by day. The birds are singing. The flowers are blooming. It is time again for work and play in a special place bound by respect and kindness, humility and moral ways. Our connection with the land and sea is quite unique in every way. These values chart the course of this voyage through the challenges of life we share. We are masters and commanders sailing on this journey, navigators [and] seafarers blessed and proud to be making history. We’re turning another page. The sun is setting; another day is ending, oh in this special place. Birds have stopped singing; the flowers are closing. It is evening in Zenadth Kes.6 To the sound of laughter there’s singing and dancing, ceremonies are taking place. Our hopes and dreams will become reality, yeah in the morning . . . Making history, Torres Strait Islanders. The Kodangu booklet's explanation of “Masters and Commanders” comments: “This song describes the beautiful setting of the Torres Strait islands, reefs and seas—a unique home for a special people. Through time we have mastered the seasons, the tides and the constellations. This song speaks of our journey through time.” While some of the songs on Kodangu are Mabuyag-centred, others address pan-Islander concerns such as the recognition of Indigenous peoples' claims to Native Title over portions of Australia's lands and seas. One that does so explicitly is “Mabo: An Aylan [Islander] Man,” whose title refers to Eddie Koiki Mabo, an Islander from Murray Island (Mer) (Mabo 2015). He was a main plaintiff (along with Celuia Mapo Salee, James Rice, Sam Passi and David Passi) in the landmark and protracted legal dispute over whether or not Indigenous Australians’ occupation and use of the Australian continent and the Torres Strait islands prior to the arrival of European colonizers conferred any residual rights (Beckett 2014). It was a complex, often acrimonious and socially divisive series of legal cases that culminated on 3 June 1992 when the High Court of Australia in the Mabo v. Queensland case recognized that some Native Title rights were recognizable at common law. It overturned the long-held and politically and economically convenient notion of terra nullius, that Australia was an “empty land” when the British arrived to settle in 1788 (Sharp 1996).7 However, the whole notion of any kind of residual rights was anathema to some segments of Australian society, who feared it challenged and undermined the identity of “white” Australians (Koerner 2015). Well-funded vested interests in mineral extraction and pastoral industries, right-wing media, conservative political parties and politicians, as well as entrenched and unapologetic racists were keen to demonize individuals, organizations or political parties involved in supporting the legal challenges and the concept of Native Title that underpinned the very complex decision (Cunliffe 2007). They also pointed out what was to them a key anomaly: that Islanders, most having a different heritage and history from Aborigines, were not the

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same as Aborigines. Therefore, because the case pivoted on Islander-specific instances regarding land use and inheritance, the decision should not be applied to all of Australia. Such a view would effectively disenfranchise Aborigines further. In reality, of course both Aborigines and Islanders are Australian citizens and thus supposedly equal before the law and holding the same rights, privileges and obligations. Such obvious logic, however, was conveniently ignored or dismissed as irrelevant, in congress with the deep and abiding Australian race-based discrimination that undergirds—and still underlays—the persistent and pervasive campaigns against Indigenous peoples nationally (Reynolds 2001) and in Queensland (Kidd 1997). As a main plaintiff, Eddie Koiki Mabo became the focus of the High Court ruling, which is commonly called the Mabo Decision, and the subject of widespread analysis in public forums such as newspapers and academic publications, and also in popular culture in films (Perkins 2012), documentaries (Graham 1997) and songs. Unfortunately, Mabo died just months before the final adjudication, a legal decision that fundamentally altered the existing race-based paradigm of destruction, dispossession and dislocation that had been in place since the colonial era. That paradigm was the basis for the wholesale destruction of many Indigenous communities and their attendant cultures, languages and music in states such as Queensland (Donovan 2002), although the application of race-based draconian government legislation varied from place to place and was applied somewhat differently in the Torres Strait region (Beckett 1978). This controversial but crucial pan-Australian story is encapsulated in “Mabo: An Aylan [Islander] Man,” composed and authored by Dimple Senior and Gabriel Bani. Its lyrics celebrate the High Court decision but also note that there were other aspects of Islander culture not entirely recognized, such as local oral traditions and community lore. I was thinking about the time when history was made through struggles and sacrifices. We had to prove ourselves: who we were, what we had and our own inheritance. Eddie Mabo, an aylan [Island] man, made history. Fought with his plaintiffs to be recognised for all the Meriam [Mer/Murray Island] families and also for all of us. It was a great victory. It doesn’t make sense why we still have to live a lie. Life of an aylan man only he knew how an Aylan man wanted to live. Mabo an aylan man boldly, they did so an aylan man will live. The decision was handed down, now [it’s] history. Wiping out terra nullius, every thing that we stood for was recognised. But also [it] should’ve recognised our L.O.R.E. I was telling my children about history, how their forefathers were and lived. They don’t have to prove themselves, they know who they are and what they have, it’s their own inheritance. Now it makes sense why we still have to live our lives. I know why oh why. The song’s explanation asserts the local, regional, national and international importance of the Mabo Decision:

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The two most important pieces of documentation in Australia, recognised by UNESCO today, are the Mabo Collections and the journal of the British explorer James Cook. The Mabo Collection is part of the records of the world. This significant Australian High Court decision took place in our generation and created a new platform for us Torres Strait Islanders to stand strong as a sovereign people. (Kodangu 2015)8 The previous three songs are examples of the Kodangu album as a cohesive entity, a cultural artefact constructed to tell a particular story in a particular way. In the album’s final song, “Zenadth Kes,” the lengthy explanation summarizes explicitly what Kodangu's (2015) content and intent were designed to achieve: Now that we have invited you to experience a small part of our story, this final song, Zenadth Kes, forms a bridge into the future. As our father the Late Ephraim Bani explained: “This region is the home of Maluwlagalgal, Kulkalgal, Maluyligal, Gudamaluiligal and Kaiwalagalgal [the various peoples of the Torres Strait region]. This is Zenadth, our Torres Strait, our home, our islands, our seas, our treasure from the past to the distant future and into the cosmos. This is a supreme gift from the Almighty to us, for our children, for our children’s children and for those who will follow on this infinite journey into the inconceivable unknown, hidden in the veils of the future. This is our beautiful tropical Torres Strait, Zenadth, embedded in, and situated on this green planet called earth, a paradise within a paradise.” This CD in itself is a fireplace, a campfire, for us to sit where stories are told. As the words of the song say: "Towards the evening the campfires continue to burn"; and as our father [Ephraim Bani Senior] said: “From the time of our ancestors to the present day, let us continue to breathe on the embers to keep the fire burning.” The explanation closes with a Kala Lagaw Ya valediction: “Adhapudhay Koeyma Eso—We are overwhelmed with gratitude, thank you” (“Zenadth Kes,” Kodangu 2015). It perhaps summarizes the Kodangu album as an opportunity seized by The Custodians to present their stories and cultural agenda through songs. They have created an aural and visual equivalent of a fireplace or campfire: a place for storytelling and a space for reclamation and celebration.

Theoretical Analysis We return now to the aforementioned theoretical perspectives (Hall, Halbwach and Frith) that help to understand the album as emblematic of Indigenous Australians striving to create their own narratives and collective

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memories via music recordings and also to understand the role of music production and its aesthetics as both research and impact. Hall (1990) posits that a cultural identity is not immutable but rather can be constructed and reconstructed via memory and narrative. In that sense, as has been demonstrated by Dimple Bani Senior’s and Gabriel Bani’s comments, Kodangu is demonstrably all about self-consciously constructing and reconstructing a particular and also general Islander identity. In this case the Banis can draw upon communal memories, some of which were fortuitously documented by academic researchers working in the Torres Strait region in the late nineteenth century. The songs on Kodangu, taken as an entity, create a narrative as musical stories about cultural continuity, cultural change and historic events, which are reflected in the use of language and instrumentation in the production process and the actual sequencing of the album’s songs. Kodangu is not inventing a narrative but rather using recorded music to reposition Mabuyag Islanders, and by extension other Islanders, in contemporary narratives, arguably functioning as an aural, textual and visual memory device. As per Hall, it is a cultural identity being made, or more precisely re-made: Cultural identity . . . is a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being.” It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending time, place, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. (Hall 1990: 225) The Kodangu album shows that what Mabuyag Islanders were historically is no longer inevitably what they are now, regardless of where they live. However, they can use information on what they were then in the past to reshape what they want to become in the future—and music recording projects can help serve that purpose. Halbwach’s (1980) notion of collective memory posits that a group of people possess a history as they remember it, albeit selectively. However, what happens when a history has been either erased or only partially preserved with only fragmentary recollections worldview or documentation of what had been a full way of life and comprehensive? One of the few options available is to reclaim what can be retrieved, and in that sense Kodangu and the Bani extended family could draw upon the cultural information preserved in, for example, the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition Reports. Notwithstanding that those reports have been criticized as examples of British, and Australian, colonial imperialism and anthropology's complicity in such undertakings (Nakata 2007), in the case of Mabuyag Islanders (and other communities also, for example, at Mer and Saibai Islands) that documentation has provided some retrievable information. For the Banis,

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having a direct link through inheritance to cultural credentials was crucial in validating the mandate inherent in the entire Kodangu recording project. Elsewhere in the Torres Strait region much of that cultural and social information is now out of living memory and no longer retrievable, and those collective memories are lost or fragmentary. The “accident” of academic research conducted over a century ago has provided an invaluable source for reclamation. However, for some Islanders it was only inadvertently a celebratory exercise. Due to the twin British imperial juggernauts of colonization and Christianization much more was certainly lost than preserved. Kodangu, however, does attest that collective memories can be at least partially retrieved to educate and enthuse current generations. It is not the wholesale “invention of a tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) but rather a repossession of what is retrievable via a digital technology such as a CD album that can facilitate widespread dissemination—and importantly replication—within extended family and community networks, and beyond. Frith (1996) postulates that music and identity are closely interrelated, as in one sense music is very personal because it is the individual who absorbs and reacts to it. In another sense, music is also often a collective experience, even if consumed in private as part of fandom, and its contents and intents can create cohesion for and identification with a group, be it for good or ill. A person’s identity is often forged or reinforced in those collective experiences of the personal. Kodangu can provide Islanders with the personal and the group experience of music. While it is Mabuyag-centric and has some songs only in Kala Lagaw Ya, some songs are partially or totally in English, meaning a wider audience can not only access its music but also hear its messages and absorb its stories. What listeners do with them, of course, is personal but Gabriel says that people have reacted positively when hearing the messages conveyed in the songs. However, there can also be a tinge of sadness when the songs also may unintentionally highlight how much cultural knowledge has been lost in some communities that did not have the serendipitous academic research of sources such as the Cambridge Expedition Reports to draw upon. To return finally to the theorization of Durán, who observes cogently: “My experience has shown that a CD, produced with sensitivity to a musical culture nurtured by long research, has the potential to have a far greater impact than a publication in a scholarly journal” (2011: 245). After all, like many people, Islanders listen to a lot of music but very few read academic publications, no matter how prestigious the journal or how emeritus the writer or editor. The aforementioned theoretical perspectives help appreciate how the forethought The Custodians put into the production of the album and the producers’ application of a culturally sensitive production aesthetic worked in tandem to create an album with personal and collective value and a forthright cultural and tangentially a quasi-commercialized agenda.

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Conclusions As stated in Chapter 1, for Torres Strait Islanders music is simultaneously memory (the past), innovation (the present) and imagination (the future). Kodangu definitely operates effectively at all three levels as narrative, collective memory and music. This chapter’s description and analysis has demonstrated that on the Kodangu album The Custodians band strives to and arguably succeeds in preserving ancestral music and communal memories while also incorporating contemporary musical styles and Western music production aesthetics. It uses the resulting syncretic music to address contemporary issues relevant to Islanders such as the roles of historical influences and cultural protocols as well as the challenges of language retention and communal copyright. Contributing to the debate on those issues is perhaps its foremost potential impact culturally, socially and politically, along with featuring music that is written and performed professionally and is also educational. For all involved, Dimple Bani Senior and Gabriel Bani, the extended family band members and the producers, the Kodangu album shows the intrinsic value of collaborative research and music production. To reiterate a point made earlier: Kodangu shows how recording Indigenous music can be a means of reclamation and celebration and can simultaneously be informed by extensive research by artists and producers that can serve to heighten an album’s impact.

Notes 1 Indigenous peoples are among Australia’s most disadvantaged groups (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2014). Aborigines and Islanders comprise 3 per cent of the population or approximately 670,000 people, with Islanders numbering approximately 52,000 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011). 2 See discography. 3 See Beckett (2004: 13), who poses pertinent questions regarding mainland Islanders’ identity: “But what kind of identity have the next generation made for themselves? Who are their models and how do they identify themselves to their own and to others? To be an Islander you must have an island, but for the mainland-born this ‘island’ has to be discovered all over again, and imagined.” 4 For examples of the Late Ephraim Bani’s linguistic and culture research, see Bani 1976, 1987, 2004a–e. For documentary films on him see Calvert 2012 and 1997. 5 Warup/buruburu are wooden cylindrical drums often featuring a snake or goanna skin tympanum and are mostly accessed via traditional trading and sociocultural networks from Papua New Guinea (Lawrence 1994; Neuenfeldt 2016).

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6 Kodangu's booklet (2015) states: “The term Zenadth Kes is mentioned in several songs. It is an acronym from a combination of words in the two traditional languages of the Torres Strait region. In Kala Lagaw Ya: ‘ZE’ stands for Zey (south wind); ‘NA’ stands for Naygay (north wind); ‘D’ stands for Dagam (Place/Side); ‘TH’ stands for Thawathaw (coastline). In Meriam Mir: ‘KES’ stands for a channel or waterway.” 7 See Koch’s (2013) discussion paper “We Have the Song, So We Have the Land: Song and Ceremony as Proof of Ownership in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land Claims” for a discussion of the use of Indigenous music in the substantiation and adjudication of some Australian Native Title decisions. 8 The Mabo Papers, held at the National Library of Australia, were placed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register in 2001.

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Martin, Denis-Constant. 1995. “Choices of Identity.” Social Identities 1 (1): 5–20. McNiven, Ian, Bruno David, Goemulgau Kod, and Judith Fitzpatrick. 2009. “The Great Kod of Pulu: Mutual Historical Emergence of Ceremonial Sites and Social Groups in Torres Strait, Northeast Australia.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19 (3): 291–317. Mullins, Steve. 1995. Torres Strait: A History of Colonial Occupation and Culture Contact 1864-1897. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press. Mullins, Steve, and Karl Neuenfeldt. 2001. “The ‘Saving Grace of Social Culture’: Early Popular Music and Performance Culture on Thursday Island, Torres Strait, Queensland.” Queensland Review 8 (2): 1–20. Mullins, Steve, and Karl Neuenfeldt. 2005. “Grand Concerts, Anzac Days and Evening Entertainments: Glimpses of Music Culture on Thursday Island, Queensland 1900-1945.” In Landscapes of Indigenous Performance: Music and Dance from Torres Strait and Arnhem Land, edited by Fiona Magowan and Karl Neuenfeldt, 96–117. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Nakata, Martin. 2007. Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Nakata, Martin, and Karl Neuenfeldt. 2005. “From Navajo to Taba Naba: Unraveling the Travels and Metamorphosis of a Popular Torres Strait Islander Song.” In Landscapes of Indigenous Performance: Music and Dance from Torres Strait and Arnhem Land, edited by Fiona Magowan and Karl Neuenfeldt, 12–28. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2001. “Cultural Politics and a Music Recording Project: Producing Strike Em!: Contemporary Voices from the Torres Strait.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 22 (2): 133–45. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2005. “Nigel Pegrum, ‘Didjeridu-Friendly Sections,’ and What Constitutes an ‘Indigenous’ CD: An Australian Case Study of Producing ‘World Music’ Recordings.” In Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures, edited by Paul Greene and Thomas Porcello, 84–102. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2007a. “Notes on the Engagement of Indigenous Peoples with Recording Technology.” The World of Music 49 (1): 7–21. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2007b. “Learning to Listen When There is Too Much to Hear: Music Producing and Audio Engineering as ‘Engaged Hearing.’” Media International Australia: Culture and Policy 123: 150–61. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2008. “‘Ailan Style’: An Overview of the Contemporary Music of Torres Strait Islanders.” In Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Australian Popular Music, edited by Tony Mitchell and Shane Homan, 167–80. Hobart: Australian Clearing House for Youth Studies. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2011. “Assembling a Sacred Soundscape: Choosing Repertoire for Torres Strait Islander Community CDs/DVDs in Australia.” In Austronesian Soundscapes: Performing Arts in Oceania and South East Asia, edited by Birgit Abels, 295–317. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2014a. “Collaboration, Provenance and Copyright/ ‘Ownership’: Navigating Challenges in the Production of Torres Strait Islander CD/DVD Projects in Australia.” In Collaborative Ethnomusicology: New Approaches to Music Research between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians, edited by Katelyn Barney, 25–42. Melbourne: Lyrebird Press.

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Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2014b. “‘Sweet Sounds of this Place’: An Overview of Contemporary Recordings and Socio-Cultural Uses of Mabuyag Music.” In Mabuyag Island, edited by Ian McNiven and Gareth Hitchcock, vol. 1, 307–24. South Brisbane: Queensland Museum Memoirs Series. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2016. “‘Listen To My Drum’: The Musical, Social and Cultural Importance of Torres Strait Islander Warup/Buruburu Drums in Australia.” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2: 61–80. Neuenfeldt, Karl, and Lyn Costigan. 2004. “Negotiating and Enacting Musical Innovation and Continuity: How Some Torres Strait Islander Song Writers are Incorporating Traditional Dance Chants within Contemporary Songs.” The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology 5 (2): 113–28. Neuenfeldt, Karl, and Will Kepa. 2011. “A Case Study of Indigenising the Documentation of Musical Cultural Practices.” In Australian Folklore in the 21st Century, edited by Graham Seal and Jennifer Gall, 73–91. Perth, Australia: Black Swan Press. Neuenfeldt, Karl, and Kathleen Oien. 2000. “‘Our Home, Our Land... Something to Sing About’: Indigenous Popular Music as Identity Narrative.” Aboriginal History 24: 27–38. Pue, Wesley. 1995. “In Pursuit of Better Myth: Lawyers’ Histories and Histories of Lawyers.” Alberta Law Review 33: 730–67. Reynolds, Henry. 2001. An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia's History. Melbourne: Penguin. Rivers, William Halse. 1904. “‘Genealogical Tables’ and ‘Kinship.’” In Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits: Sociology, Magic and Religion of the Western Islanders: Volume 5, edited by Alfred Cort Haddon, 121–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scales, Christopher. 2012. Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharp, Nonie. 1996. No Ordinary Judgement. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Shnukal, Anna. 2001. “Torres Strait Islanders.” In Multicultural Queensland 2001: 100 Years, 100 Communities, A Century of Contributions, edited by Maximilian Brandle, 21–35. Brisbane: The State of Queensland Department of Premier and Cabinet. Shnukal, Anna. 2004. “Language Diversity, Pan-Islander Identity and ‘National’ Identity in Torres Strait.” In Woven Histories, Dancing Lives: Torres Strait Islander Identity, Culture and History, edited by Richard Davis, 107–23. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2006. “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact.” New Media & Society 8 (5): 825–42. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel. 2011. “Research Ethics, Positive and Negative Impact, and Working in an Indigenous Australian Context.” Ethnomusicology Forum 20 (2): 255–62. Watkin Lui, Felecia. 2012. “My Island Home: Re-presenting Identities for Torres Strait Islanders Living Outside the Torres Strait.” Journal of Australian Studies 2: 141–53. Wilson, Oli. 2014. “Selling Lokal Music: A Comparison of the Content and Promotion of Two Locally Recorded and Released Albums in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.” Journal of World Popular Music 1 (1): 51–71.

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Discography (Select) Badu Island Community. Badu Nawul: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from Badu Island, Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2008, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Boigu Island Community. Boeygulgaw Sagulal A Mura Nangu Wakayil: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from Boigu Island Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2011, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Central Queensland University. Sailing the Southeast Wind: Maritime Music from Torres Strait. 2003, compact disc. Central Queensland University. Saltwater Songs: Indigenous Maritime Music from Tropical Australia. 2005, compact disc. Church of Torres Strait. Augadhau Nawal: Songs of Our Lord Church of Torres Strait. 2002, compact disc. Custodians, The. Kodangu. Independent Release c/o Gabriel Bani, Box 42 Thursday Island, Australia. 2015, compact disc. Erub (Darnley Island) Community. Erub Ere Kodo Mer: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from Erub (Darnley Island). Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2010, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Iama (Yam Island) Community. Iama Wakai Tusi/Voices of Iama: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from Iama (Yam Island), Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2008, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Mabuiag Community. Mabuiag Awgahhaw Nawul: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from Mabuiag Island, Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2011, 1 compact disc 1 DVD. Masig (Yorke Island) Community. Masigiw Nauoel: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from Masig (Yorke Island), Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2017, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Murray Islands Community. Keriba Ged: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from the Murray Islands, Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2015, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Poruma (Coconut Island) Community. Poruma Ngaulai: Music and Dance from Poruma (Coconut Island), Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2011, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Repu, Cygnet. Islander. Steady Steady Music. 2009, compact disc. Saibai Island Community. Saibailagaw: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from Saibai Island Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2 compact discs 1 DVD. St. Paul’s Community. Bub Iba Kodo Mir: Family songs from St. Paul’s Community, Moa Island, Torres Strait. Independent Release. 2015, compact disc. St. Paul’s Community. Lagau Kompass: Music and Dance from St. Paul’s Community (Moa Island) Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2013, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Torres Strait Islander. Paipa/Windward. Canberra, National Museum of Australia. 2003, compact disc. Torres Strait Islander Media Association. Strike Em!: Contemporary Voices from Torres Strait. 2000, compact disc.

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Traditional Songs of the Western Torres Strait, South Pacific, produced by Wolfgang Laade. Folkways Records FE4025. 1977, LP. Waiben, Ngurupai, Kiriri and Muralug Communities. Kaiwalagal Wakai: Music & Dance from the Inner Western Islands of Torres. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2011, 2 compact discs 1 DVD. Warraber (Sue Island) Community. Warraber Au Bunyg Wakai: Traditional and Contemporary Music and Dance from Warraber (Sue Island) Torres Strait. Torres Strait Regional Authority, Thursday Island. 2008, 2 compact discs 1 DVD.

Filmography Cracks in the Mask. 1997. Directed by Frances Calvert. Australia: Ronin Films. Mabo. 2012. Directed by Rachel Perkins. Australia: Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Blackfella Films. Mabo – Life of an Island Man. 1997. Directed by Trevor Graham. Australia: Film Australia and Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Tombstone Opening. 2012. Directed by Frances Calvert. Australia: Ronin Films.

PA R T T H R E E

Electronic Music

CHAPTER SEVEN

“All Sounds Are Created Equal”: Mediating Democracy in Acousmatic Education Patrick Valiquet

Acousmatic music is a genre of experimental studio-based composition founded in the 1970s by disciples of French composer and radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer.1 Although it is sometimes defined in contrast with other electroacoustic genres as a music made primarily from samples of “natural” or “everyday” sound, strict acousmatic practice is articulated not in terms of sound material but in terms of listening style. Although the aesthetics and cultural politics of acousmatic music frequently involve questions of mediation, the ideal is not to achieve a more perfect reproduction of sounds in nature, but rather to discover the organic musical structures afforded by the nature of inner sonic experience. Schaeffer held a deep conviction that knowledge about music should be based not upon formal and pedagogical rules inherited from tradition, but rather upon the universal “structures of perception” underlying music’s articulation in particular cultures, periods, or places (Schaeffer 1966). What he imagined was not a new genre per se, but an experimental, interdisciplinary research into the ways that modern recording and broadcast technologies could be used to directly manipulate the relations between sound and experience at an immediate level preceding the concepts, affections and motivations normally associated with systems of musical convention (Palombini 1993). The few compositions Schaeffer produced were mostly formalist “studies,” concerned

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with manipulating the structure and sequence of a set of “sound objects” so as to frustrate or erase any reference to their instrumental, technological or natural sources. He adopted the term “acousmatic” to describe this “veiling” of the merely “acoustic” facts of sound production and transmission, focusing compositional and analytical attention on the perceptual experience of the individual listener (Kane 2014). In principle acousmatic theories were not to be deduced from rules or instrumental affordances, but induced from the basic features of auditory experience itself. For Schaeffer, this meant that the acousmatic approach could be applied to the production of any music at all. The implication was that acousmatic listening afforded better support for musical diversity than existing systems based on melody, harmony and rhythm. Like his structuralist contemporary Claude Lévi-Strauss, Schaeffer saw cultural diversity as threatened by the advance of Western imperialism (Johnson 2013). He noticed that comparing musics in terms of their adherence to Western formal standards made it seem as if some were more correct, even more modern, than others. By focusing on sound and listening, he thought, musicologists could develop a synchronic perspective in which all musical expression might be treated as equally correct and equally modern (Schaeffer 1966: 603–05). Following Schaeffer’s retirement from the French public service in 1976, control of his legacy shifted to ambitious disciples like François Bayle and Michel Chion, and acousmatic research began to diverge from Schaeffer’s pluralist politics. An acousmatic concert practice coalesced around the use of elaborate, spatialized arrays of loudspeakers modelled on Bayle’s acousmonium, and a performance technique known as “diffusion,” in which composers routed their recorded compositions live to the array from a multichannel mixing desk (Emmerson 2007: 96). Refashioning the acousmatic style as a “cinema for the ears” (Dhomont 1996: 24), second-generation theorists placed a strong emphasis on the dramatic possibilities afforded by juxtaposing familiar and unfamiliar sonic textures. Distinguished from forms of electronic music privileging technical or formal registers of invention, acousmatic music was thus reimagined as an art extending the perceptual field with new “auditory and mental” images (Bayle 1993: 54). The ideal of transparent, unmediated listening remained, however, and by extension the genre retained some aspects of Schaeffer’s founding pluralism. In Britain, for example, much acousmatic research in universities still focuses on highlighting the music’s perceptual immediacy, either by training composers to better anticipate listeners’ expectations (Weale 2006) or by designing production tools that highlight the accessibility of acousmatic techniques (Landy 2012). Acousmatic aesthetics have been unfairly marginalized, these studies argue: if educators and the media simply offered the genre more exposure, it would naturally manifest a wider appeal (Weale 2006: 190). It is therefore important to distinguish acousmatic pluralism from both the “relational” pluralism currently ascendant in music studies (Born 2010) and the kinds of “multi-dimensional” pluralism now being applied in

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epistemology and political ontology (Connolly 2005). All musics are equal for the acousmatic listener not because their differences are all valid on their own terms, but because their differences are secondary to human perceptual structures, which according to acousmatic theory must all be the same. This understanding was shaped both by a conjunction of post-socialist political and scientific ideals in postwar France (Drott 2009) and by specific public investments in the instruments market and in concert life (Veitl 1997). When it took root elsewhere, such as in Quebec or the UK, it retained these strong ties to the construction of cultural modernity. Notwithstanding later reinterpretations such as those of Denis Smalley (1996), acousmatic listening was not originally intended to be one “mode” of listening among many. For its inventors, it was the only form of auditory discipline that would allow all musics to manifest their true diversity. The tension inherent in this ideology—the emphasis on universality almost in spite of diversity—has made acousmatic music a fertile ground for contestation, especially in the form of calls for aesthetic democratization over the past few decades (Ostertag 1996; Waters 2000; Emmerson 2001; Haworth 2016). The vast majority of acousmatic production takes place in higher education, where its associations with experimentation, technological innovation and interdisciplinarity have given it an important role to play in postmodern and neoliberal manifestations of these debates. These new modes of democracy seek to make acousmatic production more accessible to novice musicians. They also put pressure upon acousmatic educators to tolerate a more and more diverse range of musics. But does the friction persist between this tolerance and the acousmatician’s critical stance on the universality of perceptual structure? This chapter looks at how the politics of listening are mediated in the context of formal academic production training. Its focus is the prominent acousmatic scene in the Canadian province of Quebec, which has been singled out for its “eclectic” sound (Dhomont 1996). I am interested in how acousmatic composers learn, in phenomenological terms, to “bracket” their particular technological and cultural conditions, and thereby to understand the acousmatic aesthetic as a natural consequence of their individual perceptual propensities (Kane 2014: 23–30, Schaeffer 1966: 270–72). I am also interested in whether this bracketing endows acousmatic composers with a sense of personal agency in the shaping of their political identities.

Acousmatic Training and the Transformation of Cultural Citizenship in Quebec The arrival of acousmatic education in Quebec coincided with a highly mythologized transition in the history of Quebecois cultural politics. Until the 1960s, the primary and secondary education system had been dominated

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by strict Catholic clerical authorities, and the professions by an anglophone business elite based in the province’s cosmopolitan centre, Montreal. The francophone population was predominantly rural and working class. Women received a lower level of education than men, were largely restricted to care and service professions if they worked outside of the home at all, and until 1964 were even denied the legal right to hold property (Dumont et al. 1983: 76; Lefebvre 1991: 76; Dickinson and Young 2008: 334). The period, usually associated with the rule of conservative nationalist premier Maurice Duplessis between 1936 and 1959, is often referred to in local accounts as the Grande Noirceur or Great Darkness. The death of Duplessis in 1959 helped loosen restrictions on labour organization and ushered in a period of rapid urbanization and liberalization. Through a combination of major industrial projects and Keynesian economic policies, Quebec’s politicians placed power back in the hands of the francophone majority, and thus helped give rise to a more progressive left-wing nationalist movement committed to raising the status of Quebecois language and culture (Létourneau 2006: 75–93). Inspired by contact with liberation movements in francophone Africa, Southeast Asia and Central America, young leftists reimagined the Quebecois resurgence as an anti-colonial struggle against anglophone oppression (Mills 2010). Only as an independent nation, they speculated, could Quebec truly realize its aspirations to modernity and democracy. To counteract this rise of separatist sentiment, the Canadian federal government launched a series of policy and funding initiatives meant to effect greater integration of the Quebecois in a transformed “postnational” confederation (Létourneau 2006: 89). By the end of this period, the provincial government had enacted sweeping educational and social reforms, secularizing all levels of instruction, guaranteeing equality of access and drawing students from all over the province to larger institutions in the urban centres. The federal government, meanwhile, enshrined an unprecedented level of accommodation for francophones at the national level in a series of legal and constitutional reforms. This period, from the death of Duplessis to the first Quebec sovereignty referendum of 1980, is referred to as the Révolution Tranquille, or Quiet Revolution. Before secularization, francophone student composers lucky enough to attend the province’s universities were largely taught in a conservative neoclassical style favoured by local composers who had studied abroad with prominent French teachers like Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud, and were graded with a system of examinations modelled on the Prix de Rome. Among the first Quebecois composers to take a serious interest in Pierre Schaeffer’s research was Pierre Mercure, who in 1957 gave up on the neoclassical orthodoxy and produced a series of tape compositions using recorded material prepared during his second study visit to Paris (Richer 1992). Mercure became one of Quebec's busiest supporters of the avantgarde, his activities peaking in 1961 when he organized a major festival of new music that hosted the first concert of Schaeffer’s work in Canada

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(Beaucage 2008; Stévance 2012: 159). Although he later died prematurely as a result of a 1966 traffic accident, Mercure’s work also contributed to the formation of the province’s first new music concert society, the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) (Beaucage 2011). By 1967, the post-serialist composer and SMCQ artistic director Serge Garant had taken up a post teaching composition at Université de Montréal, bringing the ideas of the province’s avant-garde into higher education for the first time (Boivin 1996). A popular avant-garde exploded as well, generating a genre known after Mercure's 1961 festival as musique actuelle (“current music”) that mixed free improvisation, psychedelic rock, traditional folklore and satirical performance art skewering the religious and economic elites. This strongly Quebecois-identified aesthetics of new music gave young composers a means of deconstructing previously denigrated local traditions and exploring new forms of improvisation, stylistic hybridity and dialogism (Stévance 2012: 51). Schaeffer’s ideas about listening mapped easily onto Quiet Revolution principles of authenticity, democracy and globally oriented modernity. Collage-based tape musics had already seen increasing use in the accompaniment of Quebecois film and dance, and by the end of the 1960s Schaeffer’s particular approach began to attract a new wave of student composers to Paris (Beaucage 2008). In October 1969, students Ginette Bellavance-Sauvé and Hélène Prévost proposed a course at Université de Montréal modelled on Schaeffer’s solfège to run in parallel with existing training in composition and acoustics (Bellavance-Sauvé and Prévost 1969). Schaeffer himself visited the university in November for a weeklong engagement arranged by SMCQ co-founder Maryvonne Kendergi (Beaucage 2008). His system seemed to fill a gap in the understanding of the auditory “aptitudes” necessary for the successful musical maturation of Quebecois society (Hirbour-Coron 1971: 42). It took particularly strong root in connection with early childhood education, a domain with close metaphorical associations to the nationalist project of separation. The first full university course in acousmatic listening was initiated in 1973 at Université Laval in Quebec City by Marcelle Deschênes, who had just returned from almost three years studying with Schaeffer in Paris (Lefebvre 2009). Policy makers were keenly aware of the behavioural and cultural benefits that could be derived from inductive theories of aesthetic perception, and thus workshops for children played a key role in Deschênes’s project (Direction générale de l’enseignement élémentaire et secondaire 1973). She and her undergraduate students designed experimental games and dramatic scenarios that imparted a holistic, multimodal framework for developing children’s sonic awareness, at the same time introducing them to a wide variety of audio media and musical traditions. In 1980 this framework became the basis of the first official electroacoustic composition curriculum at Université de Montréal, where Deschênes remained until 1997 as the programme’s principal architect and advocate.

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Her course designs mediated between acousmatic theory and government efforts to promote an open, secular alternative to traditional schooling. The policy climate of the time amplified the pluralism at the heart of her teacher’s work. The commission placed in charge of devising Quebec’s educational reforms in the mid-1960s frequently struck a note of unity in plurality informed by the same conservative humanisms that had inspired Schaeffer in France. “To achieve a modern humanism,” its authors asserted, “[the educator] needs, without neglecting to tap into tradition, to find in the growing diversity of knowledge a new unity of culture” (Corbo 2002: 66). A sub-report on music education circulated to schools and universities in 1968 characterized this growing diversity as a “crisis of language,” identifying popular culture and media literacy as key fronts in the battle to renew the legitimacy of the province’s musical expression (Deslauriers 1968). Joined with a body of musical research increasingly informed by structuralist ideas about the formation of sociocultural subjectivity (Donin 2010), these policy initiatives encouraged educators to take an increasingly experimental approach in the classroom. In a document setting out new guidelines for primary music education in 1973, the same year Deschênes began her work with children at Université Laval, policymakers explicitly link this approach to the correct inculcation of the province’s musicians as democratic citizens. “Arts education is an essential foundation of the formation of the child, provided that it is done in the spirit of active pedagogy, and consequently that the focus is placed on practical experience through free expression. The child actively participates in sensory externalization, and his learning comes from the fact that he experiments with musical facts as they are presented to him” (Direction générale de l’enseignement élémentaire et secondaire 1973: 1). As reforms crystallized over the ensuing decade, the Quebec government began to consider the consequences of its egalitarian policy measures. The most famous of the assessments it commissioned is Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), first published as a report for the provincial council of universities in 1980. The gap left by the evacuation of religious authority was being widened by increased access to higher education, on the one hand, and advances in information media, on the other. Where earlier policy makers had sought a solution to the crisis of epistemological legitimacy in a renewal of shared unities, however, Lyotard proposed an emphasis on pragmatic, local social bonds. Thus, the ideal of knowledge as a progressive force of self-reproduction in the sense of German Bildung should, for Lyotard, be replaced with an understanding of knowledge as a special type of “language game,” a procedure adapted to a particular purpose through the performative utterances of the individuals involved in its immediate construction. The technologically mediated breakdown of disciplines should not be held back, he argued, but rather encouraged. Progress would then be achieved not through increasing authority over language games but through “paralogy,” a kind of knowledge

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moving against the existing logic of affairs, the importance of which may not be recognized until later (Lyotard 1984: 61). Acousmatic music rose rapidly to prominence under this new, “postmodern” regime, with its flattened, relational understanding of knowledge and heavy investment in widening access through new media technologies. Instead of following Lyotard on the course of paralogy, however, acousmatic composers and educators remained closely committed to the humanist “grand narratives” that inspired both the initial reforms of the Quiet Revolution and the theoretical challenges of Schaeffer. From this older perspective, cultural diversity still had a unified generative basis in human perceptual experience. There might be a plurality of sounds, but there could be only one way to listen.

Acousmatic Pluralism in the Classroom In the studio and the classroom, acousmatic pluralism has coalesced into a robust repertoire of material and interpersonal conventions. To illustrate this I draw upon material gathered from interviews, oral histories and archival sources in Montreal between 2011 and 2015. This research mapped social and technological differences between the universities, where academic electroacoustic genres dominate, and the city’s vibrant underground experimental music scenes, where generic hybrids and more conceptual approaches tend to flourish. Having defined the Montreal sound of the 1980s and 1990s, acousmatic thinking was still a powerful point of reference for both academic and freelance musicians when I did fieldwork there in the early 2010s, if only in the sense that it provided a foil for emerging practices they saw as more complex and idiosyncratic (e.g. Adkins et al. 2016). The acousmatic bracketing of culture and convention persisted in both the felt quality and the prescriptive structure of the undergraduate lessons and evaluations I observed. The emphasis in acousmatic theory on sound as experienced was originally shaped by an eclectic mix of influences from phenomenology, spiritualism, and structuralist anthropology (Kaltenecker and Le Bail 2012). At its core is a system of four “listening functions”—écouter (indexical listening), ouïr (passive reception), entendre (qualitative hearing), and comprendre (symbolic understanding)—which Schaeffer conceived to account for the way meaningful acoustic experiences could be afforded by the basic processes of auditory attention (Schaeffer 1966: 116). He understood these functions not as distinct intentional attitudes, but as interrelated nodes in a deep cognitive structure that synthesized the dialectical oppositions between internal auditory intentions and external sonic phenomena into elementary musical intuitions. The private experience of music was thus more primary than both the materiality of musical instruments or sounds (which Schaeffer

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collected under the category of the “concrete”) and the cultural conventions defining systems of musical qualities or references (which for Schaeffer constituted the “abstract”). Differences in style or skill could thus be seen as relative and external factors in musical perception. What was essential for Schaeffer was the individual experience that afforded such differences. Instead of explaining the value of particular musical works, his system focused on fostering awareness of the organizing capacity of human perception and cognition, which he understood as the “common trunk” of all musics (Schaeffer 1966: 627–29). Classroom strategies aimed at fostering this focus on sensibility date back to the earliest academic electroacoustic studios in Quebec. Many of the academics I interviewed highlighted the importance of the curriculum established by Marcelle Deschênes at Université de Montréal. These early courses were among the first efforts to derive formal educational strategies from acousmatic theory. They coincide roughly with the establishment of similar programmes at the Universities of Birmingham and East Anglia in the UK. At the same time, however, they are profoundly personal, coloured especially by Deschênes’s ongoing interests in visual media and drama and, as I have already mentioned, intimately connected to the policy climate of the Quiet Revolution. The course Deschênes taught at Université Laval between 1973 and 1977 took the name morpho-typology after the taxonomical approach to sound analysis described in Book V of Schaeffer’s 1966 treatise. In her syllabus Deschênes identified a need to move from finding sources of legitimacy in conventional musical authority structures (systèmes musicaux) to individual engagements with concrete “musical facts” (faits musicaux) in their cultural and material diversity. “Sonic morphology-typology favours the personal constitution of a new vocabulary,” she explained, “furnishing a solid basis for improvisation, composition, and the comprehension of musical facts which no longer correspond to the reference system of Western classical music” (Deschênes 1977). The notion of the “musical fact” appears around the same time in the work of French ethnomusicologist Jean Molino, who argued for replacing normative theories of music with an empirical study of the ways in which music is constituted in human social life (Molino 1990: 115). Deschênes stayed true to Schaeffer, however, in focusing her attention not on the sociological factors that make musics so diverse, but on the “universal data of listening and gesture, which precede all cultural diversification.” To listen morpho-typologically was to participate in “the search for a common denominator in all the particular uses of the totality of possible sound sources” (Deschênes 1977). Deschênes’s approach to technical skills shifted somewhat between her early teaching at Université Laval and her later work at Université de Montréal. In the first courses, strictly centred on the system of morphotypology, Deschênes develops an inductive approach. The idea was to discover new technical and notational skills appropriate to the sonic

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phenomena in question. Students were guided through three stages of experimentation using only the studio’s microphones, tape decks and record library for sound manipulation. The first stage consisted of collective improvisations inspired by existing avant-garde compositions or ethnographic recordings. In the second stage students collected fragments of sound from their recorded improvisations or from compositions on record, and then classified them according to Schaeffer’s perceptual categories. In the third and final stage they produced graphic listening scores to illustrate the relationships between the perceptual “objects” they had identified in the recorded stream of acoustic material. Between 1974 and 1977 Deschênes expanded the course to encompass a series of listening games for elementary school children. Students from the morpho-typology course would essentially conduct the same sequence of inductive experiments with the children, and then take the children’s work as an object for further analysis. By the time Deschênes had left Laval in 1977, she had assembled a database of thousands of sound examples for further research, each accompanied by an index card correlating it with a set of musical examples, and with one or more improvisatory games that would dramatize its structure in multimodal form. In 1980 this collection became the basis for a course in “auditory perception” for students in the new electroacoustic degree programme at Université de Montréal. Here, however, with a newly equipped studio at her disposal, and a mandate to focus on training students in composition, Deschênes began to treat studio technique as a separate topic from listening. She called the course techniques d'écriture, or “writing techniques,” suggesting that studio production had an inscriptional rather than a directly creative role (Deschênes 1980). From an acousmatic perspective, of course, studio equipment and instruments are not the source of the music, but rather a means of registering the composer’s listening to share with others. Again Deschênes took a taxonomical approach, dividing the apparatus into “sources,” “transformers,” and “formers” based on its function in the compositional process. Techniques were presented first as auditory effects and then illustrated with examples from the growing electroacoustic repertoire. The lesson on the use of microphones, for example, focused not on the acoustic characteristics of specific microphone types, but on the placement of the microphone in space in relation to the sound source, and the possible mechanical preparations the recordist can make to alter the sound captured during the recording process. The illustration given was from Robert Ashley’s 1964 piece The Wolfman, in which a performer shapes feedback by changing the shape of his or her mouth in close proximity to a microphone that is linked to a speaker system playing back a tape collage. The focus of Deschênes’s microphone technique was thus not reproduction so much as variation. The point is not to use the microphone to transfer a given set of predetermined units like notes or words onto tape, but to discover the particular ways that the microphone transforms the audible as such.

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Acousmatic concepts could thus be detached from culturally and historically specific aesthetic decisions. I encountered this implication repeatedly in my classroom observations. “I keep telling the class,” one instructor at Concordia University (which had recently named a studio and an undergraduate scholarship in honour of Deschênes) told me, “music is not an object. Music is about relationships. You understand a relationship and you can transport it to any part of the spectrum, anything.” Instead of being taught as the conventions of a particular genre, acousmatic principles were being taught as the scientific fact behind all musical experience. Staff readily admitted to me, however, that few of their students would go on to identify with the acousmatic aesthetic. Since acousmatic production is generally restricted to universities, doing so would almost certainly require them to commit to the unforgiving pursuit of an academic career. Instead students were encouraged to discover their aesthetic allegiances outside the classroom. With acousmatically attuned ears, their instructors insisted, they would be better at everything from noise to hip-hop to folk. Another instructor explained: It requires the sort of perceptual skill of knowing what’s going to work for listeners . . . and just to be the cut above seems to be the goal that most of these students have. So when presented with the acousmatic aesthetic that tends to be the kind of core that the department has always been about, well I mean, I think students are very practical in seeing what their goal is, in being this cut above everybody else in terms of understanding of sound, and they go for it because . . . anybody who can produce that quality, and that type of balance, and that type of richness of spectral invention, and all the rest of it, that’s got to be good, and that’s got to be useful in some manner to them. Instructors brought a similar attitude to the teaching of technical skills. “What’s going to come out someone’s laptop is going to depend on what’s in there, and also if they’ve got outboard gear at home, and if they are really coming from a much more traditional studio perspective or a virtual studio perspective,” I was told. “All of these things have influence on the work, but in principle certainly my understanding is that creative work is creative work. Compositional work is about the process.” So for the instructors I spoke with, gear was interchangeable insofar as it could be understood to operate transparently. Technical procedures were imparted as transformations of auditory experience rather than as instructions for operating specific machines. And indeed, for all of its association with images of technological innovation in university marketing, acousmatic production has evolved relatively few of its own tools or techniques. Once students had a functioning Digital Audio Workstation software and a set of reasonably priced monitor speakers, the rest was up to them. Left without

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guidance, they turned to online sources to find tips about what equipment to buy. Since acousmatic theory taught them only that they should discern what equipment was best with their ears, students learned to trust peer recommendations most of all. Usually this corresponded with either “industry standards” or whatever instruments would be most emblematic of the genre they hoped to emulate in their extracurricular practice—a modular synthesizer for drone, a hardware sampler for hip-hop, etc. In the classroom, however, they still had no choice but to “transcend the technology.” The productive possibilities of different technologies were eliminated in advance by the notion that they were all fundamentally equal. Thus, students generally separated the pleasurable, embodied side of their practice, in which they identified intimately with pieces of equipment as commodities, from the rational, detached nature of their studies, which they saw as revolving around learning to listen well. Under these conditions, acousmatic music as such took on the function of a kind of laboratory tool. An acousmatic composition could be an exercise for demonstrating the different auditory transformations possible with a given sound fragment, but it would rarely be considered valuable as music. As a consequence, students often struggled to reconcile their training in the genre with their own practices. As one put it, “Somehow it feels like, in order to justify its own existence, the institution needs to create its own separate forms. It feels like it would be more relevant, at least to me, to sort of set that aside and just study what's out there.”

Conclusions Later commentators have frequently remarked that Quebec’s acousmatic style is uncharacteristically diverse for a genre so steeped in dogma. In a widely cited 1996 article, for example, Deschênes’s colleague Francis Dhomont speculates that Quebec’s composers must be essentially North American in outlook. They are therefore more focused on the “here and now,” and inclusive of sounds from a wider variety of genres and media than their European forebears (Dhomont 1996: 27). He also goes on to identify the “Quebec sound” as a specifically urban construction, linking it to Montreal’s vibrant multiculturalism. The acousmatic composer in Montreal, claims Dhomont, grows up with an innate conviction that “all sounds are created equal” (ibid.: 25). Dhomont’s account is ripe for critique. Claims to emancipation in acousmatic production have failed to account for the reasons why, for one thing, the privilege of “equality” is so rarely afforded to sounds made by women. This is ironic on a number of levels, not least because acousmatic music is so often set up as the “feminine” alternative to more scientifically minded forms of electronic music production, such as those informed

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by serialism. Andra McCartney (2006), for example, has suggested that acousmatic practice provides a fertile environment for the development of “soft” or “empathetic” epistemologies, which make it more amenable to participation by women. Discourses associating the acousmatic with equality and democracy seem to corroborate such a conclusion, but the association of figures like Marcelle Deschênes with teaching rather than composing or engineering reveals a clear division of labour behind such assumptions. The tools of electronic music production, many of them originally conceived for military research, are still heavily coded as masculine (Meintjes 2003: 104; Rodgers 2010: 6–7; Born and Devine 2015), while responsibility for childhood development and the fostering of sensibility is widely regarded as essentially feminine (Harrington Meyer 2000; Zimmerman et al. 2006). While it is important to celebrate the participation of women in organizing electroacoustic training in Quebec, then, it is crucial to recognize that this specialization has also contributed to their being pushed out of the histories of more stereotypically masculine, and consequently more highly valued roles. Deschênes, who is little known in spite of her pioneering work, is herself an obvious victim of this kind of exclusion. There is clearly a difference between all sounds being created equal and all sound makers being created equal. Embracing a plurality of sounds, as Schaeffer himself sought to do, does not necessarily entail a questioning of the social hierarchies that determine who is allowed to produce them. In fact, by shifting authority from historically sedimented convention to immediate individual perception, acousmatic theory may actually exacerbate such inequalities. It hails the composer as a maverick, transforming the private experience of resistance to institutionalized aesthetic norms into a shared “structure of feeling” that works against the recognition of wider social inequalities (Williams 1977: 132). Efforts to further democratize acousmatic production thus face an important ideological challenge. As long as acousmatic composers claim a critical position based on theoretical assertions about universal structures of audition, they complicate their own efforts to tolerate other musics. In Jacques Rancière’s formulation, democracy is not a kind of unification through collective intelligence; it is a form of dissensus, ensuring constant opposition to absolute power (Rancière 2006: 96). Hannah Arendt (1968) comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that politics must have an external relationship with truth as it is conceived in science and philosophy. From this point of view, the democratization of acousmatic music eventually forces a choice between theoretical universality and musical plurality. And in this sense the democracy acousmatic theorists and composers aspire to mirrors the Quebecois cultural transformation from clerical orthodoxy to modern secularism. Their challenge going forward is to decouple the grand narrative of unmediated subjective agency from the valorization of new auditory knowledges.

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Acknowledgments The research presented in this article was supported by a postdoctoral bursary from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture and by the European Research Council Advanced Grants scheme under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme, grant agreement number 249598.

Notes 1 Although it shares several features with the older genre of musique concrète (concrete music), the two are historically distinct. Schaeffer’s major theoretical work the Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects) (1966) presents musique concrète as mired in theoretical contradictions and in need of correction. His student François Bayle (1993) introduced the new term musique acousmatique (acousmatic music) as a means of consolidating the gains he saw in Schaeffer’s mature thinking. It did not become commonplace until the 1980s.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Technologies of Play in Hip-Hop and Electronic Dance Music Production and Performance Mike D’Errico

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, electronic dance music and video games emerged as dominant forms of popular cultural expression (Matos 2015; Bogost 2011). The rise of electronic dance music as a global industry parallels the proliferation of massive multiplayer online video games, both manifesting the power of social media in mobilizing previously isolated communities of gamers and musicians. More recently, the visceral experiences of music and gameplay have converged in various ways, specifically shaping the embodied practices of music and game creators themselves. The success of music video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band has influenced both amateur and professional musicians to think through the practical connections between musical production, performance, and gameplay. Dubstep pioneers Skream and Benga have discussed the ways in which their use of the Sony Playstation video game console to make beats has shaped the sound of contemporary dance music (GetDarker 2014; Red Bull Music Academy 2011). In 2014, Red Bull Music Academy even launched a documentary series titled “Diggin’ in the Carts,” tracing the global influence of Japanese video game music from the 1980s and 1990s on contemporary genres of electronic music (Red Bull Music Academy 2014). Through interviews with game music composers and hip-hop DJs alike, the series reveals unexplored relationships between the

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now ubiquitous experience of gameplay in everyday life and the technical practices of electronic musicians. Integrating theories of play from various branches of media studies with analyses of the technical design of both music and video game controllers, this chapter discusses the embodied practices of electronic music production in relation to the haptic control inherent to gameplay. Together, the coterminous rise of video games and electronic dance music charts an alternative historical narrative in the evolution of digital media. Rather than reifying the centrality of “analog” technologies such as the turntable in the birth of popular music genres, the ongoing convergence of games and music establishes forms of experimental play with emerging media as crucial to the development of cultural production in the twenty-first century. By engaging a transitional moment in the historical evolution of hip-hop, electronic dance music, and interactive media, I provide insights into the physical and cognitive structures of sonic embodiment in gameplay and human-computer interaction (HCI) more broadly (Collins 2013).

From Turntablism to Controllerism While digital music software has become commonplace in the studio and on the live stage, the history of hip-hop has always been rooted in the “analog” materiality and physical manipulation afforded by tools such as the vinyl record or the Akai MPC sampler and drum machine. Musicologist Mark Katz claims the physical immediacy of the record as the most important reason for its success, as he describes the hand resting “comfortably on the grooved, slightly tacky surface. . . . Pushing a record underneath a turntable needle, transforming the music held within its grooves, one has a sense of touching sound” (Katz 2012: 64). The “inimitable feel” of vinyl comes through not only in the performance practice of the DJ, but also in the hands of record collectors who value the dusty, aged quality of vinyl just as a book collector values the original printing of a text. In physically manipulating the deep wax grooves on the surface of a record, the DJ may sense he or she is “touching sound” and being allowed immediate access to the musical source and social context embedded within the object. It is no coincidence, then, that an archaeological rhetoric pervades discourse surrounding record collecting within hip-hop. The process of seeking out new records for both creative inspiration and musical source material, known as “digging the crates,” has become a rite of passage for aspiring DJs and record collectors more generally (Eisenberg 1988). According to ethnomusicologist Joseph Schloss, “one of the highest compliments that can be given to a hip-hop producer is the phrase ‘You can tell he digs’” (Schloss 2004: 80). The excavation of vinyl facilitates the construction and preservation of hip-hop’s musical genealogy. Katz describes the materiality

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of the vinyl as “a precious substance in hip-hop” that is “authentic,” “elemental,” and “fundamental.” Present at and largely responsible for the birth of hip-hop, Katz claims of vinyl: “There is more than just music inscribed in those black discs; vinyl carries with it the whole history, the DNA, of hip-hop” (Katz 2012: 218). In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, vinyl culture would confront a major practical and philosophical dilemma with the emergence of digital tools for music production. For a culture so intimately dedicated to the physicality of both the record and the performer, what happens to the structure of hip-hop’s musical DNA in the context of the perceived immateriality of software? How are techniques of production and performance coping with the gradual collapse of vinyl as the fundamental “substance” of hip-hop culture? In 2010, Technics discontinued the production of the SL-1200 turntable. The iconic model was lauded for its minimalist interface and direct drive system, which afforded the DJ a particularly robust instrument with a heightened sense of tactile feedback. The countless obituaries surrounding the device’s death marked this moment as the end of an era, questioning what would become of hip-hop in the post-SL-1200 age (Patel 2016; Barrett 2010). In the same year, Apple introduced the iPad, a touchscreen portable tablet that became particularly popular among digital musicians seeking new ways of controlling the increasingly complex music production software developed for laptops. These coterminous developments turned out to have a major impact on the forms and techniques of hip-hop production and performance, marking the convergence of multiple discursive spaces within electronic dance music culture—studio artists became stage DJs, laptops converged with mobile devices, and the lines between production and performance became increasingly blurred. While turntablism thrives on the physical dexterity of the DJ and the visibility of the vinyl record, laptop musicians often struggle with constructing convincing stage performances. Since the computer serves as the primary focal point for the stage setup, laptop DJs are often accused of playing video games or simply checking e-mail without offering the audience an entertaining performance. DJ John Devecchis disputes the notion of laptop performance as a form of DJing altogether, as he asks, “How do you know the DJ is even playing? How do you know he’s not playing a prerecorded set? How do you know he’s not playing Pac-Man while he’s supposed to be DJing? I want to see the DJ doing something” (Montano 2010: 410). For Devecchis, as well as many other DJs and fans of electronic dance music, it is the lack of visibility in performance techniques that delegitimizes the skill of the performer, while disrespecting the expectations of certain audience members. Debates concerning the proper techniques of electronic music performance proliferated on the heels of such technological changes, eventually coming to a head in 2013 as a result of a controversial statement by Joel Zimmerman, also known as Deadmau5, one of the most globally renowned DJs at the

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time. In a blog post titled, “We all hit play,” Zimmerman claimed to speak for all of the “button-pushers” who were too afraid to admit that most DJs “live” performances consist of simply getting on stage and pressing play: “its no secret. when it comes to ‘live’ performance of EDM . . . that’s about the most it seems you can do anyway. It’s not about performance art, its not about talent either (really its not)” (Deadmau5 2013). In direct response to DJs such as John Devicchis, who prioritizes individual skill and “paying your dues” as a turntable DJ, Zimmerman celebrates the lack of skill and technical accessibility of DJing in the digital age, claiming that “given about 1 hour of instruction, anyone with minimal knowledge of ableton and music tech in general could DO what im doing at a deadmau5 concert.” The post immediately went viral among the online community of DJs and electronic music producers, inspiring heated exchanges and countless defenses of the lineage of “live” performance in DJ culture, including Twitter rebuttals from Zimmerman’s friend and fellow DJ Sonny Moore, also known as Skrillex. The “button pusher” debate exemplifies many of the ongoing anxieties musical cultures experience with the rise of new technologies. For some audience members, the presence of a laptop on stage seems to negate the “live” aspect of the event and thus their own physical presence at the club, leading them to think, why not just listen to the music in the isolation of my home? For some DJs, particularly those who have dedicated years of their lives to learning the standard techniques of turntablism, the laptop delegitimizes the creative labors of a musical tradition nearly half of a century old. Rather than perceiving the technologies as threats to performance standards and conventions, music theorist Mark Butler describes the increasing prevalence of hardware “controllers” in the laptop performer’s arsenal as tools for externalizing the perceptibly opaque creative processes happening behind the laptop screen. According to Butler, “Rarely if ever is a ‘laptop set’ only a laptop set. Instead, the internal, digital elements of the laptop environment are externalized—made physical in the form of MIDI controllers and other hardware devices” (Butler 2014: 96). In the wake of Zimmerman’s commentary on the state of performance in electronic dance music culture, both stage DJs and studio producers have increasingly turned to hardware controllers as a means of heightening the physicality of their “live” presence (Butler 2014; Hugill 2008; Gilbert and Pearson 1999). In doing so, the lines between performance and production have become increasingly blurred for digital musicians.

Controllerism and the Materiality of Software “Controllerism” emerged in the late 2000s within the electronic music community against the heated backdrop of the button pusher debate. While the term could be used to describe a vast number of performance techniques

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within electronic music, musician and hardware hacker Moldover broadly defines it as being “about making music with new technology. Right now controllers are where it's at, and so that's the name for the movement. Button-pushers, finger drummers, digital DJs, live loopers, augmented instrumentalists; we're all controllerists” (Moldover 2013). For Moldover, controllerism represents a unique stage in the development of music technology, one that materialized at a historical moment in which the vinyl record ceased being the sole interface for performing prerecorded musical material. Indeed, it is the vast proliferation of digital music controllers that has defined electronic dance music production amid the perceived twilight of vinyl, helping DJs and producers to navigate emerging tools and techniques through new forms of musical practice. The use of MIDI devices to control digital software is the most common form of controllerism. In contemporary popular music since the early 2000s, MIDI devices are commonly used as “live” instruments that are manipulated in real time. Grid-based interfaces with rubber pads have become commonplace in the studio and on the stage, allowing the percussive triggering and automated sequencing of digital samples. Indeed, controllerism represents just one of the ways in which the lines between production and performance have become blurred in contemporary digital music—a fact that is evidenced by the emergence of FACT’s “Against the Clock” or XLR8R’s “In the Studio” series, both of which reveal the significance of MIDI controllers in the creative process of digital music producers. Designed by Ableton in collaboration with Akai Professional, the company responsible for the infamous MPC series drum samplers, the Push controller, for example, is marketed as a digital controller that blurs the line between production and performance, presenting a staggering degree of fine-tuned control while composing using Ableton Live software. Ableton’s APC, Livid’s OHM, the Monome, and Novation’s Launchpad, among many others, are specifically catered to the “live” triggering and micro-manipulation of both musical patterns and sonic parameters such as volume, effects, and mixer settings. Other grid controllers are fashioned as entire studio workstations in themselves. Native Instruments describes its Maschine Studio as an “ultimate studio centerpiece for modern music production,” specifically emphasizing the “unprecedented physical control and visual feedback” of the interface (Native Instruments 2016). While grid-based controllers dominate the digital instrument industry through a carefully marketed alignment with proprietary music software, other controllerists feel limited by the creative constraints resulting from this integration. Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain started building open source, minimalist controllers in 2006, seeking to construct “less complex, more versatile tools” than the cluttered interfaces being marketed to electronic musicians at the time. The company prides itself with operating “on a human scale,” using only local suppliers and manufacturers, and embodying values

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of environmental and economic sustainability in their design process. This minimalist sensibility is embedded within products such as their Monome “grid” controller, in which the only control mechanism on the instrument exists in the form of small rubber buttons capable of sending simple on-andoff messages to open source software such as Max/MSP (Figure 8.1). Rather than perform with the seemingly prescribed options of proprietary software, Monome users build and freely share custom software patches that can be applied across a variety of artistic genres and creative needs. As these examples demonstrate, controllerism surfaced as an attempt by electronic musicians and designers to employ hardware as physical extensions of existing instruments, simultaneously enhancing the sense of tactile immediacy imbued by turntablism and distinguishing themselves from the “we all hit play” paradigm detailed by Deadmau5. Indeed, Moldover defines the primary motivation for controllerism using the same critical language as vinyl purists, claiming “performers who use computer technologies as musical instruments needed a way to differentiate themselves from people who ‘check their e-mail’” (Golden 2007). At the same time, performing with vinyl without employing extensive sonic manipulation is also not enough for many controllerists, who emphasize “live” improvisation and the physical display of HCI on stage. In this way, controllerism positions itself as a progressive expansion of both laptop DJs and vinyl DJs who simply “hit play.” If vinyl record performance foregrounds the agency and presence of the musician, controllerist performance foregrounds the negotiation between the musician and the “rules” of the software. This dialectical relationship between hardware (human bodies, material technologies) and software (processes, logics, and mechanics of code) finds a direct analogy in the structures of video game play.

FIGURE 8.1 Monome “grid” controller (2008).

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Controller Design for Gaming The status of being a “button pusher” is not simply a denigrating term for artists working with hardware controllers, but a metaphor for the convergence of a gaming logic with digital music production. Speaking of his own influences from video gaming, Flying Lotus talks about growing up as an only child who “didn’t have too many friends, but I had Nintendo.” Like many electronic musicians growing up in the 1980s, the dawn of the gaming age, FlyLo cites that period as formative in his creative development, proudly stating, “Those sounds are part of my youth, part of my history” (Pattison 2010). Glasgow’s bass music pioneer Rustie talks about how his production styles emulate the way gamers play, describing his experience with the electric guitar and video games as “different means to the same end, really . . . there’s not much difference between plucking a string and pressing a button, I think” (Millard 2012). The 2000s witnessed the emergence of a new generation of electronic musicians, one that grew up on Nintendos, Game Boys, and Ataris, rather than their parents’ vinyl record collections, and the production practice of pressing buttons and swiping screens reflects this. Recently, musicologist Roger Moseley introduced “ludomusicology” as a theoretical model with which to analyze the shared experiences of play, performance, and digital embodiment in both gaming and music production. Most significantly, ludomusicology is concerned with “the extent to which music might be understood as a game”—as a system of rule-based logics that “constitute a set of cognitive, technological, and social affordances for behaving in certain ways, for playing in and with the world through the medium of sound and its representations” (Moseley 2013: 286). If, as Moseley suggests, musical scores, software code, and hardware interfaces constitute “the ludic rules according to which music is to be played,” what might the technical practices of digital music producers say about the shifting nature of musical performance and instrumentality as play? In order to recognize the explicit connection between gaming and music production, it is necessary to understand how the experience of play is capable of facilitating creative experiences in general. The notion of constraints as an engine for creativity and experimentation within closed, interactive systems has become an overarching framework for explaining the allure of play as a cultural force (Salen and Zimmerman 2004). In a succinct definition that could be applied equally to music and gameplay, Bernard Suits describes gaming as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (Suits 2005). Whereas musical play is often conceived as allowing an unfettered creative experience—the idea that technologies allows for the creation of “any sound you can imagine”—embodied interaction with games and electronic music may be more aptly characterized by the ways in which the media resists or constrains the actions of the user (Théberge 1997).

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Whether embedded within the instrumentality of music or gameplay, constraints are most often perceived in the physical comportment of the player as he or she interacts with a technological apparatus, the interface shaping his or her embodied knowledge and practices. Dance scholar Harmony Bench has examined the gestural choreographies through which users comport themselves while engaging with touch-based digital media devices, for example. Noticing the ways in which “their bodies curved into supportive architectures with which they cradled touch-screens,” Bench argues that these “digital media choreographies” encourage the development of bodily techniques across media and technologies, simultaneously ushering in new understandings of physical and bodily comportment and serving as the mechanisms for that education (Bench 2014: 238). Bench specifically aligns musicianship with the sort of “computational literacy” of gaming, detailing the significance of rote repetition in the development of embodied knowledge within each practice, as well as the ways in which each “demand[s] a corporeal training that impacts operators’ experiences of their physicality” (ibid.: 243). Think of the ways in which musicians, gamers, and computer operators alike must constantly update their skills based on the rapid, and often radical, changes made to common operating systems, game controllers, and digital musical interface design (ibid.: 245). While scholars have previously examined the “medium-specific” modes of embodiment that reshape technological users’ bodily structures, Bench’s analysis is not limited to a single platform, allowing her to highlight gaming and music production as shared avenues for the embodiment of systematic design constraints that ultimately function in shaping the bodily comportment of the player. Game controllers are particularly important conduits for the transmission and negotiation of design constraints, aiding in the embodied cognition of social values, haptic metaphors for technological interaction, and expected patterns of use. In other words, controllers externalize the “rules” embedded within digital systems. According to game theorist David Myers, all video game controllers share at least two formal properties that directly shape players’ embodied practices: “they employ arbitrary and simplified abstractions of the physical actions they reference, and they require some level of habituation of response” (Myers 2009: 50). For example, Xbox One and Playstation 4 controller schemes (the most popular handheld controllers at the time of writing) are similar in their dual-joystick layout, abstracting a complex set of buttons and triggers to letters and shapes. Abstraction in the hardware interface is thus used as a method for managing the complexity of the software, allowing the player to physically internalize the constraints of the controller that are required to succeed in a variety of gaming genres. How might these design constraints apply to digital music-making—a practice that asks the musician to navigate emerging complexities in HCI?

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FIGURE 8.2 (A) Playstation 4 controller (2013); (B) Xbox One controller (2013).

Controller Design for Music-Making As with the development of motor memory in video games, training on a musical instrument involves the internalization of the affordances and constraints of a given instrument through the rote repetition of bodily techniques and habituated responses. Musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin discusses the ways in which cellists physically comport themselves in relation to the cello during performance, molding themselves into a single “cellistbody” through movement and action (Le Guin 1999). Just as gamers embody the internal constraints embedded within the game itself, instrumentalists develop an embodied understanding of the constraints embedded within a given piece of music. Le Guin defines this skill as “anticipatory kinesthesia,” in which the performer assesses the physical demands of a given piece on their body, asking such questions as “What do I need to do in order to play this? Where will I put my hands, and how will I move them?” Most instrumentalists would not be able to articulate clear answers to these questions, in the same way that most gamers would have trouble putting to words such a deeply embodied practice. Rote repetition is thus capable of facilitating the acquisition of tacit, embodied knowledge (Polanyi 1966). As is the case with embodied knowledge in game controllers, the mappings of musical software onto hardware ask the player to internalize a constantly changing set of embodied musical techniques. This process of interface abstraction may be most clearly exemplified in the minimalist design of the Monome “grid” controller, which comprises a small rectangular box fitted with a symmetrical grid of small rubber buttons and a USB port. Often, the Monome is used as a controller for the Max/MSP visual programming environment, which is itself a modular, open software that can be used for a variety of creative practices from electronic music synthesis to the realtime generation of 3D visuals. In this context, the button grid interface can take the form of a pitch controller alternative to the keyboard interface, an externalization of a step sequencer, a multitrack mixer or effects modulator,

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a visual spatialization map, and any number of other tools. Approaching the blank interface of an instrument such as the Monome, the musician must focus more on the internalization of specific software affordances, rather than the external affordances of the minimalist hardware (Upton 2015). This internalization of software through hardware has two seemingly opposing effects on electronic music production. First, as the processing power for a given musical task is increasingly delegated to the software, the physical and gestural manipulation of the hardware becomes increasingly unnecessary. This fact is highlighted by trends in game controller and interface design more broadly, which value the least amount of effort to achieve the maximum output. In the context of games, a single, slight flick of a Playstation 4 controller’s right trigger may just as likely fire a gun, swing a sword, open a door, or detonate a series of explosives. In the context of musical production and performance, the single tap of a rubber pad may just as likely trigger a single snare drum sample, a four-bar drum loop, or an entire musical album. In valuing the non-isomorphic design of musical gestures, digital music controllers have encouraged both musicians and audience members to develop new forms of embodied listening and production. It is this transitional moment that sparked the vehement and ongoing debates about human agency in performance detailed in the opening of this chapter. Increased complexity in software design seems to facilitate a decreased complexity in hardware design, leading to what Bart Simon terms a “gestural minimalism” in gaming that could equally apply to musical production and performance (Simon 2009). However, as the player develops an embodied knowledge of the software’s “rules,” he or she is able to dedicate more attention to the physical control of the hardware itself. This leads to the common experience of what Simon alternatively calls “gestural excess” in gaming, when physical movements are made in excess of what the hardware is actually capable of performing. For example, even though the joystick of a controller may be the only mechanism capable of steering a car in a racing game, the player often exceeds this limitation by gesturing with the controller itself as a steering wheel, dynamically contorting their entire body to the left and right as if controlling an actual car. This becomes a subconscious attempt to overcome the arbitrariness of the digital “mapping” by foregrounding the embodied metaphor on which the software is designed. Just as these gestures function to translate the “rules” of the game to the player, embodied metaphors can likewise translate a sense of musicality and performativity to an audience. Or, in the case of studio producers, these embodied metaphors provide the musician with an imagined audience that can help guide their production practices (again, FACT’s “Against the Clock” and XLR8R’s “In the Studio” series provide interesting case studies of this phenomenon in action). For electronic musicians, gestural excess represents a clear strategy for conveying a sense of “liveness” to their audience, while developing

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performance strategies for the embodied control of musical techniques embedded in software (Auslander 1999). Describing a performance from German electronic musician Stefan Betke (also known as Pole), Butler writes about what he calls the “passion of the knob,” in which the producer “seems to put his whole body into the extended turning of a knob,” directing an “exceptionally intense expressivity toward a small, technical component associated with sound engineering” (Butler 2014: 101). These gestural excesses are highly choreographed, as the performer “telegraphs ‘expressivity’” to the prerecorded musical material, locating himself or herself as the primary agent of the sounds being heard by the audience (ibid.: 3). In a way, this mode of performance is meant to foreground the “human” presence while effacing the technological apparatus. At the same time, highlighting the physical practice of interfacial mediation likewise foregrounds the mechanics and “rules” embedded within the apparatus, thus indoctrinating the audience into new modes of listening to the interface. In other words, gestural excess gives the audience a practical method for listening to the electronic music controller as a process-based musical instrument, rather than a tool simply to be used for the composition of sound content. Daedelus, a Los Angeles-based producer and DJ, has become infamous for his use of controllers to externalize the mechanics of music software in production and performance. The relationship between gameplay and music is further highlighted by the type of creative work to which he dedicates himself, including interactive audio installations, sound design for video games, and controllerism in live performance. In a particularly fitting video shoot produced by the news and media website Into the Woods, he performs an entire “DJ” set in the middle of Portland, Oregon’s Ground Kontrol arcade (Intothewoods.tv 2012). The video begins with Daedelus challenging a fellow beatmaker to a game of Street Fighter 2, followed by a montage of clicking and clacking button presses that trigger short bursts and choppy audio samples from the machine. Surrounded by the flashing lights, bleeps, and blips of vintage game consoles, the gestural excess of these two buttonpushers transitions seamlessly into Daedelus’s musical performance. As the camera shifts focus from the game consoles to the musician standing in the middle of the arcade, the visual frame immediately foregrounds a technical setup comprising a laptop and two Monome controllers. The “brain” of the operation consists of a Max/MSP software patch called MLRv, which allows Daedelus to control simultaneously the playback and fine-tuned editing of musical parameters in multiple audio samples. The GUI consists of eight horizontal rows, each containing a sample, with options to adjust volume, playback speed, and pitch just below each row. Using the Monomes as controllers for the MLRv software, Daedelus then physically manipulates the rows of audio in various ways. The 256-button Monome serves as the primary control mechanism, mirroring the layout of MLRv by dividing the 256-button grid into 16 rows. The rows then spatially fragment

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the corresponding audio sample into 16 parts, allowing the musician to play back specific moments in the sample by pushing the buttons within the horizontal row. The audio waveform in the software literally becomes externalized in the hardware, and the “rules” of MLRv become playable. Daedelus’s performance mannerisms further highlight the gestural excess witnessed during the gameplay depicted at the beginning of the video. The Monome is angled upward, away from the performer and toward the audience, and the laptop screen is out of sight, highlighting the physical interaction between the musician and the hardware device. Every button press by the performer is accented by a rapid withdrawal of his hand from the interface, spatially exaggerating the spectral morphologies of the sounds being controlled. While the 256-button Monome remains stationary, Daedelus twists and contorts the smaller 64-button Monome, controlling audio effects that are mapped to the device’s accelerometer (the same sensor used in mobile phone technology). Rather than simply “pressing play” and letting the computer do all the work, these moments of gestural excess— combined with the abstract and minimal design of the hardware device— allow the viewer to focus visually and aurally on the musical patterns as they are chopped, stuttered, and looped by Daedelus in real time. Ultimately, both video game and digital music controllers make tangible the design affordances and constraints of the software being controlled. For

FIGURE 8.3 MLRv Max patch (2011).

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gamers, the process of abstracting video game mechanics into the letters and shapes of controllers allows players to embody the rules of games, and therefore develop the skills required to succeed in gameplay. For musicians, the process of externalizing the mechanics of music software programs allows performers to convey “liveness” to their audiences, and therefore engage with both listeners and technology on a more dynamic level. By bringing together case studies in music and gaming, I have suggested a play-oriented model of HCI that recognizes the interconnections between hardware objects and software processes; design and use; play, production, and performance (Moseley 2016).

Failure as Evidence of Liveness Controllerism represents a single solution to a perennial question in digital art: how to physically interact with and manipulate creative affordances embedded in screens. The development of hardware for engaging with music software has rightly been criticized as an unsustainable model that runs on the desire for commercial profit—a model of planned obsolescence that is paralleled in the games industry (Fitzpatrick 2011). However, the fact that users continue to experiment with controllers, constantly challenging themselves to learn new forms of embodied interaction with their tools, highlights another important value in the experience of contemporary music and games: failure. The necessity of failure is obvious in the case of gaming, a medium that teaches players to face death virtually over and over again. It is through the process of death and resurrection that the player learns from their mistakes in order to develop the skills necessary to “beat the game.” Recently, the proliferation of “controllers” in media production and performance has allowed the built-in possibility of failure and imperfection to bleed into the realm of digital music. Composer Kim Cascone describes failure as “a prominent aesthetic in many of the arts . . . reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion, and revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them” (Cascone 2000: 13). Rather than praising the agency and virtuosity of the human over technology, “liveness” is evidenced instead in the potential for failure inherent to the process of navigating new relationships with technology. Failure contradicts prevailing ideologies of innovation and progress inherent to design and technology industries. Each year, Apple releases swaths of computing devices, promising to make the lives of consumers better through “user-friendly” designs that are easy to navigate and seemingly fail proof. In exposing the potential for failure at the root of all forms of mediation, controllerism represents a single instance of a twentyfirst-century digital culture in the process of resisting the perennial narrative

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of technological process. Similar to parallel movements in interactive media—net.art, indie video games, glitch aesthetics—controllerism embraces vulnerability as a prevailing ethic of HCI. In each case, the imperfections of both the individual operator and the software become evidence of “liveness.” Technological change, in this context, is not simply about developing new, shiny “digital” objects, but also playfully experimenting with the embodied, “analog” processes ever present in music and media production. In an era of increased technological control, dominated by proprietary software, global surveillance systems, and the ubiquity of “smart” media, these technologies of play remind us that music, like many of the games we play, consists of rules that are designed to be broken.

Bibliography Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge. Barr, Pippin, James Noble, and Robert Biddle. 2007. “Video Game Values: HumanComputer Interaction and Games.” Interacting With Computers 19: 180–95. Barrett, Brian. 2010. “End of an Era: Panasonic Kills Off Technics Turntables.” Gizmodo, October 28. http://gizmodo.com/5675818/end-of-an-era-panasonickills-off-technics-turntables (accessed April 18, 2016). Bench, Harmony. 2014. “Gestural Choreographies: Embodied Disciplines and Digital Media.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, vol. 2, 238–56. New York: Oxford University Press. Bogost, Ian. 2011. How to Do Things With Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Mark. 2014. Playing With Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance. New York: Oxford University Press. Cascone, Kim. 2000. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24 (4): 12–18. Collins, Karen. 2013. Playing With Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Deadmau5. 2013. “we all hit play.” United We Fail. http://deadmau5.tumblr.com/ post/25690507284/we-all-hit-play (accessed November 9, 2015). DJ A-Trak. 2012. “Don’t Push My Buttons.” Huffington Post, July 23. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/atrak/dont-push-my-buttons_b_1694719.html (accessed April 18, 2016). Eisenberg, Evan. 1988. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. London: Pan Books. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2011. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: The New York University Press. GetDarker. 2014. “Benga makes a Grime beat on Playstation music 2000—BBC 2003.” YouTube, December 5. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AZHnaSIZP0Y (accessed March 31, 2016).

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Gilbert, Jeremy, and Ewan Pearson. 1999. Discographies: Dance, Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Golden, Ean. 2007. “Music Maneuvers: Discover the Digital Turntablism Concept, ‘Controllerism,’ Compliments of Moldover.” Remix, October. http://www. moldover.com/press/Moldover_Remix_Oct-2007_w.jpg (accessed April 17, 2016). Heatherly, Ben, and Logan Howard. 2014. “Video Game Controllers.” http:// andrewd.ces.clemson.edu/courses/cpsc414/spring14/papers/group2.pdf (accessed June 8, 2015). Hugill, Andrew. 2008. The Digital Musician. London: Routledge. Intothewoods.tv. 2012. “Far From Home #9—Daedelus Live Arcade Set.” Vimeo, April 18. https://vimeo.com/40608297 (accessed March 30, 2016). Katz, Mark. 2012. Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. New York: Oxford University Press. Le Guin, Elisabeth. 1999. “‘Cello-and-Bow Thinking’: Boccherini’s Cello Sonata in Eb Major, ‘fuori catalog’.” Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 1 (1). http://www. echo.ucla.edu/Volume1-Issue1/leguin/leguin-article.html (accessed March 30, 2016). Matos, Michaelangelo. 2015. The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America. New York: Dey Street Books. Millard, Drew. 2012. “Interview: Rustie Used To Produce Like How Gamers Game.” Pitchfork, May 31. http://archive.is/dzPoJ (accessed November 10, 2012). Moldover. 2013. “Moldover: Performance and Controllerism.” Ableton, November 28. https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/moldover-performance-and-controllerism/ (accessed November 12, 2015). Monome. 2015.“grid.” Last modified October 25. http://market.monome.org/ collections/primary/products/grid (accessed January 5, 2016). Montano, Ed. 2010. “‘How Do You Know He’s Not Playing Pac-Man While He’s Supposed To Be DJing?’: Technology, Formats and the Digital Future of DJ Culture.” Popular Music 29 (3): 397–416. Moseley, Roger. 2013. “Playing Games With Music (and Vice Versa): Ludomusicological Perspectives on Guitar Hero and Rock Band.” In Taking it to the Bridge: Music as Performance, edited by Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill, 279–318. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Moseley, Roger. 2016. Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Myers, David. 2009. “The Video Game Aesthetic: Play as Form.” In Video Game Theory Reader 2, edited by Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf, 45–63. New York: Routledge. Native Instruments. 2016.“Maschine Studio.” Last modified February 1. http:// www.native-instruments.com/en/products/maschine/production-systems/ maschine-studio/ (accessed March 30, 2016). Patel, Nilay. 2016. “The Technics SL-1200 Turntable Returns In Two New Audiophile Models.” The Verge, January 5. http://www.theverge. com/2016/1/5/10718234/technics-sl1200-sl1200g-sl1200gae-turntable-newmodels-announced-release-date-ces-2016 (accessed April 18, 2016).

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Pattison, Louis. 2010. “Video Game Loops & Aliens: Flying Lotus Interviewed.” The Quietus, May 18. http://thequietus.com/articles/04269-flying-lotusinterview-cosmogramma (accessed November 13, 2015). Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Red Bull Music Academy. 2011. “Lecture: Skream (Melbourne 2006).” Vimeo, September 24. https://vimeo.com/29535666 (accessed March 31, 2016). Red Bull Music Academy. 2014. “Diggin In The Carts—Series Trailer—Red Bull Music Academy Presents.” YouTube, August 28. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fwN_o_fi7xE (accessed March 30, 2016). Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. 2004. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Schloss, Joseph G. 2004. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Simon, Bart. 2009. “Wii are Out of Control: Bodies, Game Screens and the Production of Gestural Excess.” Available at SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.1354043. Suits, Bernard. 2005. The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. Ontario: Broadview Press. Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/ Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Upton, Brian. 2015. The Aesthetic of Play. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

PA R T FO U R

Technology and Technique

CHAPTER NINE

Weapons of Mass Deception: The Invention and Reinvention of Recording Studio Mythology Alan Williams

Introduction “Mythology” is a loaded term; similar to legend, it implies an oft-told story meant to illustrate something of a culture’s inherited value system. Joseph Campbell (1972) used the term to identify narrative schema found across cultures and time periods, distilling thousands of heroic characters and stories to a handful of recurrent archetypes and tropes. Roland Barthes (1972b: 109–59) utilized the same term to describe a system of semiotics, wherein objects can be read as text. For Barthes, the myriad associations an individual derives from encounters with cultural artifacts form a set of mythologies, where objects represent a history of ideas and actions, and meaning is derived by decoding these representational symbols. Recording musicians inherit a complex web of associated mythologies, whether in their bedrooms hunkered over a software program with a graphic representation of a piece of recording equipment they have encountered only as a mythological icon, or comfortably ensconced in a world-famous facility, absorbing the atmosphere of the location where canonical recordings were created (Bennett 2012; 2016). In his essay Musica Practica, Barthes (1972a: 149–54) makes a distinction between the music one plays and the music one listens to. In the first instance,

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the playing of music is located in the body, the physical act, something one does. In the second, music becomes something one processes, deconstructs, analyzes, reconstructs, and assigns meaning to. Barthes posits that music mediated via technology falls so far toward the analytic that it creates a desire to reimagine the experience of making, of doing. This desire is what motivates recorded music fans to search for insights into recording practices and histories. Representations of recording practice are found in a broad spectrum of pop culture artifacts, from books and documentary films to cartoons and internet memes. The reach of this collection of narratives and images extends far beyond the relatively small number of professional and amateur musicians, producers, and engineers, shaping even a casual listenerʼs understanding of recorded music processes and establishing a set of mythologies through which their experience of recorded music is filtered. In this way, mythologies shape the way musicians, producers, and engineers approach their work and, just as importantly, they have established the criteria by which success and failure are measured. There is another connotation of the term “myth”—something that is untrue, false, a lie. A breezy description in a lavishly illustrated coffee table book or a tightly edited documentary provides only a simulacrum of knowledge; over time, the anecdotal takes on the weight of timehonored fact. Such hazy hagiographies contribute to the formation of broad cultural (mis)understandings of music creation for general audiences while simultaneously serving as an inspiration for budding professionals, composers, and performers. In North America and much of Western Europe, a growing market for the merchandizing of recording mythology has emerged to feed this desire to understand and to reimagine, though I have not seen such a preoccupation with pop music production history and processes in other parts of the globe. Acknowledging the limited scope of US/UK-based examples, this chapter identifies several recurring tropes that have emerged from the marketing of recording studio mythologies, and examines how these mythologies influence the reception of recorded music and shape the production process itself as new generations of creative musicians reconcile their imagined recording studio experience with the realities of actual practice.

Manufacturing the Myth Though Rock discourse has often included material on recording techniques and technology, information on studio practice was much more limited during the first half century of sound recording. Yet even in its infancy, there were attempts by the record industry to inform the public about the intersection of technology and musical performance intrinsic to recorded sound. Susan Schmidt-Horning (2013) has examined a large amount of

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promotional material issued by the Edison laboratory, and especially the monthly newsletter of Victor Records, which often featured descriptions of recording sessions designed to promote both performing artists and updated models of playback devices. Educating the public about process was an essential component of marketing these new-fangled technologies, and weaving descriptions of technological process into recollections of musical performance helped to demystify how recordings were made and to cement the notion of recording as musical document rather than technological alchemy. However, once recordings had become more widely adopted in the marketplace, stories involving musicians and recording technology were downplayed in favor of promoting rising stars who happened to be captured by microphones and encoded on to discs. If Benjamin’s “aura” (Benjamin 2008 [1935]) disappeared with mass manufacturing, the obscuring of recording practice served to impart a different, mystical aura to these commodities—the “magic” of recorded performance. Advances in technology—electromagnetic microphones and amplification including multisource audio mixing, early uses of disc-to-disc bouncing, and later magnetic tape editing and multitrack overdubbing—all happened behind the scenes without great public fanfare. Yet these changes in technology necessitated new techniques that each recording performer had to adapt to, and learn to harness in new and creative ways. This is how the stage was set for creative recordists to weave narratives of studio wizardry into their own marketed mythologies, from Les Paul through The Beatles, and into the work of current EDM artists whose public performances mask the actual methodologies utilized in their musical creations. The Beatles in particular became the subject of an emergent mini-industry in mythologizing the manufacture of aura. During the mid-1970s, several books were published that framed their recorded output as artifact, whether as casual critical overview highlighting album packaging or cataloging releases with dates and chart positions (Carr and Tyler 1975; Castleman and Podrazik 1976). These editions sat on shelves alongside often wildly inaccurate biographies and memoirs of former employees, and even fans. But a new strand of mythology emerged with the publication of Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles Recording Sessions (1988), which emphasized process over product. With detailed descriptions of sessions, including dates and hourly session info, take numbers including edits and overdubs, and packed with previously unseen photos of the group at work in various recording studios, the book provided a far more detailed understanding of The Beatles’s recording practices. The revelations contained in the book served two sometimes overlapping audiences—Beatles fans who sought to understand their heroes’ creative process and recording professionals and enthusiasts who wanted to know how the iconic recordings were crafted. For Beatles fans, evidence of “genius” abounded—the speed with which songs were composed, performed,

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recorded, and distributed is impressive to even a casual observer. For studio professionals, the book became the source for a new set of mythological anecdotes—the against-all-logic success of the “Strawberry Fields Forever” edit, the invention of automated double tracking, the use of a speaker as microphone transducer, and so on. These mythological narratives were further cemented with video documentaries that allowed viewers to hear tracks in isolation, to see old model mixing consoles and tape machines in action. The interest generated by Lewisohn’s look into The Beatles’s process resulted in a television documentary, The Making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1992). As part of the feature, producer George Martin illustrated how the album’s concluding track, “A Day in the Life,” was constructed by isolating John Lennon’s vocal and guitar from the other sounds already deeply embedded in the memories of millions of fans. The moment was significant; in presenting the familiar in a totally new context, Martin presented a radically different conception of the song (and implying infinite alternative possibilities), while simultaneously illuminating The Beatles’s recording practices for amateur audio sleuths. This subset of the group’s audience was made up of both seasoned professionals who recognized studio techniques they themselves had employed and a growing segment of the band’s fans who were intrigued by the processes used to create the sounds of their heroes’ recordings. The emergence of this type of fan is a direct result of the growth of a market devoted to recording mythologies. The transmission of recording mythologies via books and films most often places artists (heroes) or recorded works (artifacts) at the center of the narrative, but recording practices and processes form the actual narratives behind these mythologies. In this regard, what is important is not what an audience might learn about recording practices, but rather what they think they have learned about them. Soon thereafter, the production team behind the Sgt. Pepper documentary was commissioned by the BBC to create a number of documentaries focusing on the composition and technological creative process behind canonical pop music recordings—the Classic Albums series. The initial offerings often included segments similar to the Martin/Beatles playback scene, with behindthe-scenes personnel such as producers and engineers isolating tracks so that viewers could audition the pieces that comprised the “classic” whole. Such scenes were commonly accompanied by choice anecdotes outlining the processes used to achieve the result, often placing the heretofore unheralded studio professional in the role of hero who utilized technological skill to overcome problems both technical and musical. But as the series continued over the years, these figures and their contributions were downplayed in favor of the star musicians whose work was the subject of the films. Thus, multiple and occasionally conflicting mythological narratives were crafted from loose threads of historical memory and existing technological artifact (Williams 2010: 166–79).

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This void was partially filled by a steady stream of books offering photos, histories, anecdotes, and technical details of various studios and the projects that took place within them. Again, The Beatles served as central figures in this developing arena. Lewisohn’s book established a market that was whetted by books like The Beatles Gear (Babiuk 2001), a photobook survey of various instruments played by the group during their live and recording careers, a fetishistic celebration of a form of technology that helped erstwhile musicians gain a measure of associative glory by obtaining copies of similar instruments such as McCartney’s signature Hofner bass, or the cornerstone of psychedelic progressive rock, the Mellotron. Playing these instruments extended the mythological narratives to include musicians who either imitated The Beatles directly or referenced “Beatleness” within their own musical output (World Party, XTC, the production work of Jon Brion to name just a few). Just as The Beatles established a global market for British musicians, books, and documentaries on a number of other bands and albums soon appeared on bookshelves and television screens around the world. Some documented the creative studio processes of major figures and canonical works (a small sampling includes Elliot 1990; Buskin 1999; Granata 1999, 2003; Kahn 2000, 2002; Nisenson 2001; Fyfe 2003; Gill and Odegard 2004; Streissguth 2004; Pond 2005). Others featured the spaces in which recordings took place—Abbey Road, Sun Studios, Motown, Columbia, Olympic, and so on (Southall, Vince, and Rouse 1997; Cogan and Clark 2003; Lawrence 2012; Massey 2015). Seasoned professionals, previously only names in a liner note but now identifiable figures in their own right, have published their memoirs—George Martin (1979, 1995), Geoff Emerick (2007), Phil Ramone (2007), Ken Scott (2012), Glyn Johns (2014), to name a few. Pulling all these streams together in an expensive and weighty tome, Recording The Beatles (Kehew and Ryan 2006) features a song-by-song description of the steps undertaken in the creation of each song, usually supported by statements from various technicians associated with the recordings, archaeological suppositions based upon existing photographs from sessions coupled with track sheet notes that purport to illustrate who played what part, in what area of the studio, and behind which gobo they sat or stood. Hundreds of lavishly illustrated pages identify each piece of recording technology used at Abbey Road during The Beatles’s career, with incredibly esoteric details to satisfy the most knowledgeable/hungry enthusiast. The fetishization of recording practice as marker of hipster authenticity that these deluxe editions represent parallels that of the “resurgence” of vinyl; the embrace of Mad Men era fashion and design. These forms of “received nostalgia”—a longing for a time period that predates one’s birth—signal a deep discomfort with the present/future. Artifacts and chronicles of rock’s golden age signify a past dissociated from historical context, even for people with only a tangential interest in popular music. A book like Recording The Beatles certainly has appeal to multigenerational

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“Beatlemaniacs” and recording studio professionals, but with its lovingly photographed representations of 1950s era technology, it also serves as a totem for a new generation of nostalgists.

Mythologies Shaping Practice The music magazines of the 1970s featuring electronic music and recording technology central to Paul Théberge’s (1997) study of an emerging consumer recording market also serve as indication of a nascent industry in recording practice mythology. Periodicals aimed at amateur musicians occasionally offered brief glimpses of pop stars at work in the recording studio, but were often vague and misleading regarding the specifics of studio practice. Trade publications featured glossy photos of technology and facilities, but were limited to those individuals who were already members of the professional recording realm (Bennett 2012). The marketed mythologies of recording practice that followed in the wake of Lewisohn’s tome reached far larger audiences, and their own commodity value as product in turn warranted higher production values. Behind-the-scenes photos captured the acoustically treated surfaces, control rooms and isolation booths, microphones on towering boom stands, and a plethora of musical instruments and cases, amplifiers and cables scattered about the expansive rooms, all of which defined the environments where musical heroes crafted their art. The texts and filmed anecdotes referred to processes only partially explained— tracking, overdubbing, editing, mixing—but from which even casual fans began to form an understanding of studio practice. Many musicians entering the studio for the first time during the 1980s and 1990s had absorbed a wealth of recording mythologies, and often set about reenacting these mythologies in the course of their own recording projects. As a result, these studio neophytes felt a deep cognitive dissonance when trying to reconcile their notions of studio practice as shaped by anecdotal books and articles with their own actual experience. In my ethnographic research on social dynamics and power relations in the studio, subjects frequently expressed a sense of demoralizing frustration regarding their first studio sessions. Perfection was difficult to obtain under the microscope, and the fascinating stories of studio experimentation they had read about were at odds with the practicalities of recording studio economics; engineers and producers were often resistant to any form of experimentation at all—“It won’t work, and it would take too much time even if it did.” If rock was born from a rejection of one set of musical/cultural values, then punk represented a rejection of the values that emerged over 20 years of rock as art and industry (Hebdige 1979; Savage 1991). Similarly, a counter-mythology regarding recording studio practice emerged, one that grew more powerful in the new millennium—a mythology of rebellion.

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Alternative mythologies emerge wherein method is constructed as an antidote to previously established, poisonous practice, where “how to do it,” is determined by “how not to do it.” In part exemplified by the increasing power of the artist over the recording process, rebellion was manifest in a conscious rejection of more established recording practices and was (and continues to be) especially evident in the trend to record in nontraditional environments. Figures who challenged conventional practice in the creation of their recorded work also began to harness the promotional power of the record industry to spread the word, introducing counter-mythologies into popular music discourse. One of the earliest examples of an artist using his or her power to break with tradition and explore new approaches to recording is found in the career of Neil Young. After struggling through conventional studio practices early in his career, Young began experimenting with various recording environments and methodologies. Young's third album, After the Gold Rush (1970), was recorded in the basement of his house, with a small ensemble tracking live, without overdubs. He continued to employ the live tracking methodology on his commercial breakthrough, Harvest (1971), in sessions conducted in Nashville and in the studio he built in a barn on his northern California ranch, Broken Arrow (Inglis 2003; McDonough 2003). Far from a low-fidelity aesthetic espoused by later generations of home recording enthusiasts, Young sought to achieve sonic clarity while rejecting the practices of isolation and overdubbing that had become associated with multitrack technology. He has continued to record in nontraditional spaces for most of his career, providing a template for musicians of a similar bent. Perhaps no individual has contributed more to the mythology of nontraditional recording environments than producer Daniel Lanois. His aversion to traditional recording studios, and his pursuit of recording practices that breech the control room/recording room divide, amount to a personal philosophy that insists on a holistic approach to recording practices and physical space (Greenberg and Mather 2004). A musician himself, Lanois established a recording studio in Hamilton, Ontario, called Grant Avenue. A three-story Victorian house, Grant Avenue was a facility without an isolated control room, where every room in the house was wired for recording and an atmosphere of sonic experimentation permeated the work that was made there. Brian Eno became a fan of Lanois’s work, collaborating on a series of ambient recordings and bringing Lanois into the sessions for U2’s The Unforgettable Fire in 1984 to serve as co-producer. As documented in promotional videos for the album, Eno and Lanois insisted on bringing the undivided space philosophy of Grant Avenue to the project, recording in one large room in Slane Castle. The commercial success of Lanois’s production work with U2 and Peter Gabriel enabled him to purchase a house in New Orleans, where he installed recording equipment and replicated the approach of his earlier set up at Grant Avenue. Kingsway, as the new studio was named, played host to a

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number of recordings that defined his sound, including Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy (1989), The Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon (1989), and Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball (1995). With the engineer no longer controlling access to communication networks via talkback mics and headphone mixes, unmediated exchange between all participants is possible. The absence of a physical divide also erodes the divisions between “musician” and “technician.” A guitar player might be placed in service as a tape operator while an engineer picked up a mandolin or percussion instrument (Clark 1996). The Lanois approach to recording was given great visibility in the video for U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love),” and featured frequently in promotional materials for Peter Gabriel’s So (1986) and U2’s The Joshua Tree (1987). Though far from the first producer to work in converted domestic space, Lanois’s highly publicized articulation of his approach as a philosophy has entered the realm of myth; his name frequently invoked as an icon of creative recording practices, his methodology emulated by thousands of musicians, producers, and engineers—replacing a rejected mythology with another mythology about rejecting mythology.

Fearing the Ever-Present Future There is a scene in The Delicate Delinquent (1957) where Jerry Lewis stumbles upon a theremin. As his nearby movements trigger the instrument to produce a sound, Lewis slowly learns how to manipulate his body in order to produce an ever more refined sonic result. Lewis is first frightened, then baffled, then intrigued, and finally humored as he gains control over this instrument that produces sound from thin air. It is highly unlikely that the viewing audience had ever seen the instrument, and certainly less likely still that they understood its operation. Lewis’s “performance” serves as a primer, a first lesson in how to play the theremin. But the scene also underscores the tensioned threat that futuristic technology poses for social norms. Given previous uses of the unseen instrument to produce disconcerting/spooky background scores for films such as The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the associative sound of the theremin signified danger. The potency of this technological threat is underscored further when moments after Lewis performs a phrase from Stephen Foster’s 1851 composition, “Old Folks at Home,” he is inspired to lose all inhibition and jump into a frenzied parody of Elvis Presley. Released just as rock n’ roll was upending America’s sociocultural equilibrium, the film scene sets up the analogy—futurist technology will lead to Armageddon, whether as nuclear implosion or as youth-led revolution. Artists that took advantage of new music technologies were called upon to defend the implementation of new creative practices associated with a vaguely threatening futurism. A good example of this can be found in

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the long segment of the television show Omnibus broadcast in 1953, in which Les Paul and Mary Ford give host Alistair Cooke a tutorial on Paul’s newly invented multitrack tape overdubbing process. With Cooke framing the demonstration as a retort to a brewing controversy over recording “tricks,” Paul proceeds to turn a series of knobs and dials mounted on a gigantic wall-like machine, the “Les Paulverizer.” He plays a brief guitar figure, then punches another button with a comedic extra pound of the fist, and outpours a fully arranged version of the music, much to the audience’s delight. Though played for laughs, it is not entirely clear that the audience is fully in on the joke—indeed, it’s possible that this machine actually produces the sounds that we hear. So, to clarify, Cooke then launches into a spirited defense of Paul and Ford, and the overdubbing process, the acknowledged “trick” used to create their recordings. The camera then pans to allow for Paul and Ford to demonstrate how they actually create their layered recordings with two magnetic tape recorders plainly in view. Once again, Paul performs a brief guitar figure, and Cooke requests that he play back the recording he has just made. At this point in the broadcast, a curious breach in the veracity of the demonstration occurs. Though meant to illuminate the actual process of recording, the legitimacy of the explanation is dramatically undercut when the tape playback is clearly not what Paul performed only seconds before. This unintended error humors Paul, and perhaps Cooke, but is quickly glossed over—an unnecessary lie presented as questionable truth, with Les Paul masterfully playing the role of con man. Both the “Les Paulverizer” and the “actual” demonstration obscure more than they reveal about the recording process; we see people do it, but we have no technical understanding of how it is done. In this way, multitrack recording is presented as a trick, just as the audience sees a magician saw his assistant in half, yet has no inkling of how such a trick is accomplished. And this mystery both comforts, “see, she can still move, no harm done,” and confounds, “just how did he do that?” For a portion of the audience, the trick is a challenge; they want to speculate, to figure it out, to imagine being the magician exercising ingenuity and dexterity, not just conjuring “magic.” But the majority of the audience would prefer to preserve the mystery—they might ask how the trick is done, but they may not really want to know. One significant mythology created by such magic acts posits that recorded music is a falsification designed to fool audiences into accepting fake musicians as the real thing. As popular music grew more technologically complex, listeners began to suspect that perhaps the artists whose faces adorned their album covers were not actually responsible for the sounds coming off of the groove. While The Beatles were at their most sonically experimental, they lost their chart dominance in the United States to a fictional made-for-television approximation of the fab four—The Monkees. If The Beatles had turned the tables on traditional pop music industry practices by writing and performing their own songs on record, their “authenticity”

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was countered by corporate machinery behind The Monkees/Manques. But the fact that their big hits were written by professional songwriters was less of an issue than the widespread rumor that they did not play their own instruments. The visual image of the group playing instruments in every episode was an intentional misrepresentation of the process used to create the sounds emanating from the television speaker. The practice of replacing band members with more accomplished studio musicians for recordings was commonplace—simultaneous with The Monkees’s ascendency, records by the Beach Boys, The Byrds, the Who, and many others featured the performances of musicians-for-hire (Thompson 2008; Hartman 2012). And while pop musicians who did play on their records frequently lip-synced to these recordings when making television appearances, The Monkees seemed to epitomize the mechanics of deception at the very heart of syncing visual to audio. The problem was that The Monkees’s records were good—state-of-the-art pop songs, performed with energy and confidence— and they sold in very large quantities, outpacing The Beatles during the era of Sgt. Pepper. The mythologies that surround The Beatles incorporate recording technology as creative tool, artists manipulating machines. But The Monkees mythology posits an alternative: fakes using machines to manipulate audiences. It is recording technology that makes such tricks possible, and once the seeds of doubt are planted, every record becomes suspect. Though high-profile examples of studio-based trickery were more of an anomaly than the norm, periodically inadvertent revelations of technological fraud served to reinforce the mythology of technological deceit. When Milli Vanilli was videotaped performing a concert where the musical backing began to skip, it was clear the duo was simply lip-syncing to prerecorded tracks. The practice of singing to recorded instrumental tracks was firmly established in pop and dance music circles. Likely, many of these acts also lip-synced as well. But the video clip of the group’s embarrassed attempt to lip-sync to the skip gained attention across mainstream news media outlets. Investigation into the process behind the recording of the album revealed that the two models whose faces graced the album cover, and whose bodies danced through their videos, had not sung a single note on the album, a record for which the group had been awarded a Grammy for Best New Artist. The award was subsequently revoked, and the scandal led to a consumer rebate for those who had purchased the album (Behind the Music: Milli Vanilli 1997). A decade later, Ashlee Simpson would experience a similar playback issue during an appearance on Saturday Night Live, and the technological deception mythology was resurrected anew in pop culture discourse (Out of Sync 2004). By this time, audiences had come to expect elements of sound playback, including vocals, in live performance. But studio-based recording practices became more scrutinized by music fans, especially following the inclusion of GarageBand in the Mac operating system. With this free software widely distributed to consumers, knowledge of digital recording practice left the

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exclusive domain of the recording professional and served to enlighten audiences about the possibilities for dramatically altering recorded sound using a home computer. The animated television series South Park featured an episode wherein Randy, the hapless father to Kyle, claims to be Australian electro-pop artist, Lorde (South Park: The Cissy 2014). In the course of the show, Randy attempts to prove his claim to her identity by demonstrating to Kyle how he creates recordings as Lorde. With South Park’s trademark crudely drawn animation, Randy is shown working a DAW program on his laptop. Randy informs Kyle that he gets his best ideas while sitting on the toilet at work. He records his awkwardly phrased, badly sung musings and then imports them into the software when he gets home. With quick keystrokes, he edits his phrases into more acceptable pop lyrics and creates a minimalist Lorde-style beat; then by running his voice through various audio processors, suddenly a quite passable imitation of Lorde is output to the speakers. Kyle’s face turns to an expression of abject horror before he passes out on the floor. This scene became widely disseminated as an internet meme, a prime example of how mythologies of deception conform to some audience expectations that most of the music they have heard has been created by talentless frauds and manipulated with powerful technological tools that result in more “acceptable” performance. A second meme of a clip produced by Canadian comedy television show lol:-) made the internet rounds at around the same time as the South Park clip. Entitled “Sound Engineer’s Hard Work,” the scene opens in the control room, with the engineer frantically moving around the mixing console, while a producer stands over him, enthusiastically mouthing the words to a song being recorded by a female singing in the recording room on the other side of the glass (2014). The engineer is moving with ever greater speed, sweating profusely, a look of intense anxiety on his face. The triumphant pop anthem sounds impressive as the camera pans past the control room and into the recording room itself, wherein the audio changes to the sound of a woman screeching wildly off key. The scene cuts back and forth between the two environments, so that it becomes clear that the engineer is working technological miracles (in real time!), turning an abysmal performance into something commercially viable. Both clips illustrate how technology is cast as a weapon of mass deception, and the millions of views they have received on the internet indicate how widespread this mythology is in popular discourse. These tropes are often cited as proof that contemporary music has no value and that current technological practices result in vapid, hollow exercises in style over substance. Older generations of music fans proudly admit that they continue to listen to the same music they discovered in their 20s. This puts current musicians in a difficult position; one solution is to emulate older musical styles, and the most effective way to do this is to reclaim recording technologies and practices from bygone eras, essentially a move toward “technostalgia” (Taylor 2001).

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Nostalgia and Revisionism The naturalized processes that give way to myth do so over a period of time, the ossification imperceptible until their rationale for existence appears selfevident. The collision of historical eras results in a period of flux where old practices continue to be enacted, even when new circumstances render them no longer operative. For most of the twentieth century, technological development was viewed as a boon for performers and audiences alike— musicians could take advantage of new tools to expand their artistic range, and consumers could bring themselves closer to experiencing musical sound as if their idols were present in their living rooms, or increasingly, as if fans had been granted access to the studios where the art was fashioned. But by the end of the century, many musicians began to feel constricted by the practices that had emerged and codified around multitrack recording processes, and looked to the past for inspiration. Both jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the alt-pop group They Might Be Giants made recording pilgrimages to the Edison laboratory, now a National Historic Site, in Orange, New Jersey (Fabris 1998). They Might Be Giants embarked on a project that was less about capturing the aura of a bygone era than in playing with the sonic signatures of the wax cylinder recording device. Eschewing the electric guitars, synthesizers, and drum machines that defined their sound in the 1980s, the group performed on acoustic guitar, accordion, tuba, and minimal drum kit. The lyrics to “I Can Hear You” (Factory Showroom, 1996), the song they recorded at the Edison site, were explicitly about the limits of sound reproduction and reinforcement, connecting the sound of the voice coming off of the cylinder to that of a phone call from an airplane, or the speaker at a drive-thru window. As such, the recording was a metastatement on audio quality rather than an attempt to reenact a mythic past. By contrast, the purpose of the Marsalis session (released on Mr. Jelly Lord—Standard Time Vol. 6, 1999) was explicitly to perform period jazz music under conditions that resembled what the musicians who invented the music might have experienced during the same period that the recording technology itself was being developed. As artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis functions as curator of the genre, possessing depths of knowledge and demonstrating considerable talent as a performer. Recording jazz as his forefathers might have done makes that sense of lineage and ownership explicit. When Marsalis stands before the acoustic horn of the cylinder recorder, he projects his own sense of himself within the history and mythologies of the musical form, and the automatic playback of the recording provides the proof—he sounds just like the recordings he wants to emulate. The Canadian band Cowboy Junkies embarked upon a different path toward the nostalgic past, one that focused not on the technology itself, but rather upon the practices associated with the technology (Timmins 1996). For their album The Trinity Sessions (1988), the group looked to the “temple

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of sound” model of Columbia’s 30th St. studio for its sonic template, while emulating practice from the era of acoustic recording. Recorded in one day with a single stereo microphone in an empty church, balances were achieved by carefully positioning each musician in proximity to the microphone so that the various amplitudes produced by the instruments and vocals could be appropriately balanced, just as with the acoustic horn and gramophone. The examples of nostalgic practice epitomized by the Edison Lab sessions of Wynton Marsalis and They Might Be Giants illustrate attempts to emulate the sonic character of iconic technologies. Comparisons between the audio reproduction capability of wax cylinder used for these sessions and that of a digital audio tape recorder employed by Cowboy Junkies demonstrate that similar recording practice will yield dramatically different results depending on the technology making the recording. The extremely limited frequency bandwidth and amplitude threshold, along with the considerable surface noise of stylus grinding against wax, nearly obliterates any audible imprint of the Edison laboratory acoustics, while the Cowboy Junkies album nearly drowns in the wash of the reverberant church ambience that is the record's most identifiable and influential characteristic. All three projects exhibit a nostalgic re-enactment of recording practices in their infancy. But it was the Cowboy Junkies’s combination of live ensemble performance, state-of-theart technology, and the sonic character of physical space that would prove particularly influential on a number of musicians, producers, and engineers to follow, from Daniel Lanois’s atmospheric location recordings to the single center stage microphone strategy employed during a concert at the Ryman Auditorium to promote the soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), which in turn was filmed for the documentary Down from the Mountain (2000). Nostalgia is selective—there are “right” and “wrong” pasts. During his time fronting The White Stripes, Jack White preached the gospel of analog tape, proudly noting that their albums were recorded cheaply and quickly utilizing limited track counts, with no digital editing or processing. Though White would subsequently champion even older technologies to make recordings such as his collaboration with Neil Young, A Letter Home (2014) recorded in a Voice-o-Graph consumer novelty recording booth, his stance on analog tape mirrored his musical inspirations—pre-rock era American blues and country (Hogan 2014). For White and many others (Bennett 2012), the artifacts of the musical past are inextricable from the technologies used to create them. If the music of the 1940s and 1950s was better than that of the twenty-first century, so too was the technology and its associative practices. The opening scene from It Might Get Loud (2008) features White fashioning an instrument from a chunk of wood scrap, a piece of wire, some nails, and a magnetic guitar pick-up. The Luddite reactionary stance is countered by the inclusion of electric amplification. White draws a line, but while he eschews the technologies developed in his lifetime, he is comfortable including those established only a generation or

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two earlier. His Third Man Records complex in Nashville includes a vinyl pressing plant, the aforementioned Voice-o-Graph machine, and a studio designed to resemble those that have been constructed in the back rooms of radio stations, and furniture and musical instrument stores during the first half of the twentieth century (Eells 2012). White is not anti-studio, but rather anti-rock-era-studio. It is instructive to contrast White’s stance with that of Dave Grohl, the former drummer of Nirvana, and leader of neoclassic rock band, Foo Fighters. For Grohl, the technologies, practices, and sonic temples of the classic rock era serve as his inspiration. Like many musicians of his generation, Grohl emulates the sound and recording practices of the 1970s when crafting his own music. But he has gone beyond enacting mythology to proselytizing the gospel of analog consoles, 2” tape, and the importance of the facilities where his musical inspirations were crafted. In 2013, Grohl directed Sound City, an ode to the studio where Nevermind was recorded, and from which he purchased the Neve mixing console that now sits in his home studio. Sound City accomplishes on film much of what Recording The Beatles does on paper; it lionizes the figures, both musical and technological, who worked at the facility, imparts an aura to the physical space itself, fetishizes the oneof-a-kind console possessing magical properties, and purports to tell the history of not only a studio, but also the music industry that fed it during the studio’s glory days from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Grohl followed up the film with Sonic Highways, an eight-part series that featured various cities and the musical styles and histories that emerged from them. Each episode showed glimpses of Grohl writing a song that factored details of the locale, and culminated with the song being recorded in a local facility. The closing shots served to imply that the historical narrative was present and ongoing, with dark overtones simultaneously hinting that these facilities’ days were numbered. It is here that the conflicting mythological narratives come to a head. Grohl overtly celebrates a mythological past that his documentaries are meant to enhance and extend. But they are presented as evidence of a past whose value far exceeds that of the present/future. In this way, recording studios come to symbolize everything that Grohl and his fans/viewers value most, a musical language based upon a body of work that is inextricable from the technological processes used to create it—classic albums/classic practices/classic rock. This argument is posited as a cautionary tale that serves to justify to an aging demographic that the music of their youth was in fact better than anything being created in the present day (unless it is crafted using the mythological places/gear/practices at the center of the documentaries). With magnetic tape at the center of this universe, “rockist” musical tastes correlate to “analogist” studio narratives. The false dichotomies of real/unreal, natural/artificial, true/false, however imagined they may be, continue to exert a powerful influence over recording practices and the reception of the resulting artifacts. Over time, practices

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of the past that were labeled “unnatural” at the time become romanticized as “honest” when compared to contemporary recordings. The passionate rejection of digital technology is one of the principles of nostalgic recording mythology established by figures such as Neil Young, Jack White, and Dave Grohl. Yet a project like The Cowboy Junkies’s Trinity Sessions utilizes digital technology while rejecting elements of studio practice that had been formed following decades of analog multitrack tape use. The Wynton Marsalis experiments with wax cylinders could be viewed as a rejection of both digital and analog tape technologies, but the one-off nature of that session signals not a sense that acoustic recording technologies are better than those that followed, but rather that something has been lost as a result of the dramatic alterations to conceptions of musical performance rendered by subsequent recording technologies. The recent documentary series Soundbreaking (2016) takes a broader view, weaving several mythologies together that incorporate and welcome a wide variety of music genres and recording aesthetics. In its egalitarian approach, all methodologies are considered valid, even when contributors voice negative assessments of particular practices. But the overall stance of the project still serves to reinforce the archetypes, narrative tropes, and iconic heroes of previously marketed mythology while appearing to function as a corrective to more “rockist” slants to documenting recording history.

Conclusions Apocryphal stories of studio heroism are far more appealing than a complete documentation of four hours spent obtaining an acceptable snare drum sound. Mythologies impose an imagined conception of doing, based upon elements from stories told about the history of what has been done. The stories are inherently flawed as factual truth, prone to elaboration, conjecture, and outright fabrication. Yet they serve as a means of placing a passive receptor into the active role of imagined doer. In a similar fashion, stories place the past (and importantly, multiple pasts) in the present. The imagined doer also imagines being. I am John; I am Paul; I am George; I am Ringo. I am George Martin and Geoff Emerick. I am Mal Evans bringing the boys a cup of tea (or “tea,” if I am also a Rutles fan). I am down on the floor of Abbey Road Studio 2. I am up in the control room. It is 1966. It is 1969. It is 1996 and I am Andy Partridge in the same physical space, aware of the history I am living within as I pay for an expensive string overdub (Partridge and Bernhardt 2016: 320–33). And I am me, reading Partridge’s anecdote, and placing myself within his mythology, which in turn contains all of the above-mentioned mythologies. The successful marketing of recording studio technostalgia has begun to seep into contemporary practice, reflected and refracted in the creation of new music by composers, performers, producers,

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and engineers, as well as the reception of recorded music by its audiences, who have learned to interpret what they hear through a prism of historical archetypes and narrative tropes.

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Granata, Charles L. 1999. Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording. Chicago: A Cappella Books. Granata, Charles L. 2003. Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds. Chicago: A Cappella Books. Greenberg, Jonathan, and Olivia Mather. 2004. “Producing Depth of Field: An Interview with Daniel Lanois.” Echo 6 (1). Hartman, Kent. 2012. The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Hogan, Marc. 2014. “See Neil Young Make Instant Vinyl in Jack White’s Booth on ‘Fallon’.” Spin, May 13, 2014. http://www.spin.com/2014/05/neil-young-jackwhite-instant-vinyl-crazy-fallon-video/ (accessed February 10, 2017). Inglis, Sam. 2003. Harvest. New York: Continuum. Johns, Glyn. 2014. Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Eric Clapton, the Faces... . London: New Rider Press. Kahn, Ashley. 2000. Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. New York: Da Capo Press. Kahn, Ashley. 2002. A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album. New York: Granta. Kehew, Brian, and Kevin Ryan. 2006. Recording The Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums. London: Curvebender Publishing. Lawrence, Alistair. 2012. Abbey Road: The Best Studio in the World. New York: Bloomsbury USA. Lewisohn, Mark. 1988. The Beatles Recording Sessions. New York: Harmony Books. Lewisohn, Mark. 1992. The Complete Beatles Chronicle. New York: Harmony Books. Martin, George, with Jeremy Hornsby. 1979. All You Need Is Ears. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Martin, George, and William Pearson. 1995. Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper. London: Pan Books. Massey, Howard. 2015. The Great British Recording Studios. New York: Hal Leonard Publishing. McDonough, Jimmy. 2003. Shakey: Neil Young's Biography. New York: Anchor Books. Nisenson, Eric. 2001. The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Partridge, Andy, and Todd Bernhardt. 2016. Complicated Game: Inside the Songs of XTC. London: Jawbone Press. Pond, Steven F. 2005. Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz's First Platinum Album. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ramone, Phil, and Charles L. Granata. 2007. Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music. New York: Hachette Books. Savage, Jon. 1991. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber.

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Schmidt-Horning, Susan. 2013. Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scott, Ken, and Bobby Owsinski. 2012. Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust: Off the Record with The Beatles, Bowie, Elton & So Much More. New York: Alfred Music. Southall, Brian, Peter Vince, and Allan Rouse. 1997. Abbey Road: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studios. London: Omnibus Press. Streissguth, Michael. 2004. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece. New York: Da Capo Press. Taylor, Timothy D. 2001. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture. New York: Routledge. Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/ Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Thompson, Gordon. 2008. Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Timmins, Michael. 1996. Cowboy Junkies—Studio: Selected Studio Recordings 1986–1995. RCA CD67412-2. Williams, Alan. 2010. “‘Pay Some Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain’— Unsung Heroes and the Canonization of Process in the Classic Albums Documentary Series.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22 (2): 166–79.

Film and Videography A Sound Engineer’s Hard Work. 2013. Television Broadcast. lol-:), May 29. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmT6MDOD3uc (accessed February 10, 2017). Behind the Music: Milli Vanilli. 1997. Television Broadcast. VH1, August 17. Doob, Nick, and Chris Hegedus. 2000. Down From The Mountain. 98 Minutes. Pennebaker Hegedus Films. Dupree, Jeff, and Maro Chermayeff. 2016. Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music. 425 minutes. Higher Ground. Grohl, Dave. 2013. Sound City. 107 minutes. Variance Films. Grohl, Dave. 2014. Sonic Highways. 1900 minutes. RCA/HBO Films. Guggenheim, Davis. 2008. It Might Get Loud. 98 minutes. Sony Pictures Classics. McGuire, Don. 1957. The Delicate Delinquent. 101 minutes. Paramount Pictures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzFkDAlAKR8 (accessed February 10, 2017). Omnibus: Les Paul and Mary Ford. 1953. Television Broadcast. CBS Television, October 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rITJyZVTfy4 (accessed February 10, 2017). Out of Sync. 2004. Television Broadcast. Fox News, October 10, 15.22. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCeUwu9gOzk&t=3s (accessed February 10, 2017). The South Bank Show: The Making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 1992. Television Broadcast. ITV, June 14. South Park: The Cissy. 2014. Television Broadcast. Comedy Central, October 8.

CHAPTER TEN

Auto-Tune In Situ: Digital Vocal Correction and Conversational Repair Owen Marshall

Introduction In recent decades, digital corrective tuning1 has become a standard practice in many domains of sound recording, particularly that of major label pop music production. Recording engineers regularly use software such as Antares’s Auto-Tune or Celemony’s Melodyne in order to correct pitch and timing problems, especially in vocal performances. While the technique has gained popular attention through its overt use as an artificial-sounding vocoding effect, its more common “corrective” use continues as something of an open secret. This is due in part to a broader controversy concerning the artistic implications of corrective tuning. While proponents argue that pitch correction increases the efficiency of studio time and allows greater emotional expression by reducing the burden of technical skill among musicians, critics claim that the practice erodes artistic expression, depreciates talent, and homogenizes music. Popular characterizations of auto-tune oscillate between the transhuman technological sublime and an inhuman automaticism. Scholars have examined auto-tuning’s resonances with broader discourses ranging from the deep play of gender and identity in “camp” (Dickinson 2001) to the recreational-therapeutic ambiguities of “doping” (Ragona 2013) and the boundary-troubling potentials of cyborg hybridity

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(Prior 2009). This work is complemented by more localized investigations into the use of auto-tune, for example, by North African Berber musicians (Clayton 2016) and Egyptian Coptic Christian singers (Ramzy 2016). Alongside these wide-ranging and richly thematized readings of auto-tune, my approach here may be taken as critical in that it is deliberately small scale and mundane. Rather than add to a well-developed conversation concerning pitch correction’s broader cultural meanings, this chapter aims to account for it as a specifically situated and contingent socio-technical practice. By examining an instance of vocal tuning in situ, I aim to show how a tuned voice is collectively accomplished as an instance of “invisible” infrastructural labor within a studio’s arc of work (Star and Strauss 1999). Such an approach helps to answer the question of how certain engineers (in this case, those working in the Los Angeles–area pop music production machine) may come to experience a vocal performance as “incorrect” and ultimately perform an appropriate instance of “correction.” Building on work in the sociology of repair (Henke 1999), specifically ethnomethodological approaches to repair and correction within domains of technoscientific work (Suchman 1985; Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977; Maynard 2013), I present a thick description of auto-tune as a mode of everyday socially accountable action within the recording studio. Within a repairoriented framing, we can analyze digital tuning as an assemblage of activities occasioning a field of practice, or what Michael Lynch has termed a “topical contexture” (Lynch 1991). To that end, the tools of conversation analysis (CA) (Sacks 1992) provide a useful way of highlighting the polyvocality and temporal emergence of digital tuning in practice. Whereas auto-tuning is often framed as a unidirectional and deterministic application of a readymade procedure (a pitch detection and correction algorithm) to a docile object (a vocal signal), CA makes specifically legible vocal tuning’s turnbased, temporally emergent, and fundamentally interactional structure. Representing it as a conversation between the engineer and the vocal performance being tuned helps to emphasize the practice’s dialogical dimensions. The vocal tuning work discussed here took place in late 2013 at a midsized recording studio in downtown Los Angeles. The recording in question is that of a California-based rock band with a male lead singer. “Carl” is a Grammy-nominated audio engineer with many years of experience recording top-selling popular musicians. The session is depicted here as a three-way conversation between myself (a participant observer who had begun working at the studio several weeks prior), Carl, and a prerecorded track of a singer’s vocal performance, to which the corrective tuning is being applied. Setting the scene in this way has two main effects. The first is that I appear as a sort of Greek chorus—a correspondent of the unfolding action within the scene and a proxy for a broader audience. Over the course of the scene I echo, amplify, specify, laugh, and “hmmm” along with the tuner and the tuned. By periodically asking after and helping to track the rationales

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that go into the task of tuning, I work to collaboratively bring out and make collectively accountable the reasonings and heuristics of tuning that would normally be used but not noted aloud.2 The second effect of the CA approach is to cast the tuner and the tuned in something resembling a ventriloquistic relationship. The vocal track takes the character of the tuner’s occasionally stubborn interlocutor, even as the reader understands that the prerecorded but mid-tuning vocal track is in a process of becoming, by way of the application of the tuning software, a partial and secondary voice of the tuning engineer. Passing back and forth between subjective and objective domains, the tuned voice works as what Michel Serres called a “quasi object” (Serres and Latour 1995: 161). The tuner-tuned interaction appears as an entanglement of two previously separate vocalic agencies so as to produce the effect of a corrected voice, which reflects the combined labor of the engineer and singer while also “covering the tracks” of that labor. This is not a case, it should be emphasized, of an agential subject imposing its will on a passive object. Rather, I would suggest that the prerecorded voice presents a hybrid or second-order agency by virtue of its entanglement with an actual client to whom the tuner’s intervention may ultimately be held accountable. At the same time, the prerecorded voice offers certain material resistances by virtue of its partial connection to an actual vocal performance and the material basis of that performance’s digital reproduction. At times the tuner struggles with the vocal track and the tuning software, which asserts and remakes itself in emergent and unpredictable ways. In these moments tuning becomes a “dance of agency” (Pickering 1995) or a play of resistances and accommodations between multiple material-semiotic voices. In this particular session, Carl is working partly with vocal takes he recorded with the band the evening before and partly with rough vocal tracks recorded by another engineer at a studio across town. The analysis unfolds along three praxiological themes: inscription, repetition, and intonation.

Inscription As with much engineering work, tuning is largely a practice of eliciting and assembling inscriptions (Latour 1987). As a noun, the term “inscription” refers to a way in which an artifact embodies a mode of use. As a verb, it denotes the production of enduring traces indexically or symbolically related to some temporally emergent activity. A key topic of inscription in vocal tuning is that of the pitch of the recorded voice over time. Most tuning plugins share a common visual paradigm wherein time is typically represented as running left to right along the X-axis while pitch and amplitude are represented vertically, with higher notes corresponding to a larger value on the Y-axis and larger objects representing greater energy.

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This visual organization affords a uniform basis of comparison in the form of a given musical scale, constructed from some set of possible notes. Even within this paradigm, there are numerous interpretive contingencies built into these structures of visual representation and comparison, which manifest in the various technological styles (Hughes 1983) of tuning tools available. In addition to functioning as “inscription devices” (Latour and Woolgar 1986), each tuning program offers its own particular pre-scription (Akrich 1992), or way of construing the task to which it is being applied, while also participating in broader shared contexts of meaning (standards of notation and signal representation, names of component functions, etc.). These include locally applied naming conventions that make Pro Tools sessions legible: Carl, for example, has appended “2N” to the label of one of the vocal tracks, which he explains indicates that it is a tuned track. 1 2 3

2 N. Which means it’s tuned. ((clack))3 (Instead [of) Owen: [mmh:mm

Carl:

Following the invitation of the keystroke, the prerecorded vocal track makes its appearance. This particular take is an overdub, or double of the lead vocal line, but at the end of the second line it veers slightly from the main melody. The exact way it veers is, as yet, difficult to articulate. To my ears it is unclear whether the problem is the pitch of the notes or something closer to the way the singer changes the shape of his mouth over the course of the “youuuuuu” refrain. Before the actual repair process can begin, this portion of the vocal track needs to be made accountably repairable. Troubles become repairable only in relation to their situation. For example, Carl explains that while the line is not necessarily out of tune with respect to the scale of the song, its position as a double of the main vocal necessitates correction because it is currently “rubbing” against the main vocal: 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

S:4 C:

S: C: O:

S:

Everything around youu↓uuu Everything around↓youuuuuu↓uu [uuuuu↑ [If they doubled it exactly like this we could probably ↑leave ↓it and it’d be fine. It’s just that (.) with all the other vocals there’s no way [Everything around ↑yooooouuuuuuuuuu↓uuuu [ºIt just sounds like it’s rubbingº(.) really badly ↑rubbing? (.)↓yeah (8.6) ((clack)) Everything around ↓youuuuuuuuu↓uu (3.5) ((>clack clack< clack))

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The tactile metaphor of “rubbing” constitutes the trouble as a frictional play of textures within the compositional scene. At first, however, the precise way in which the line rubs is indeterminate. Is it a literal rubbing sound that one might associate with experiences of, say, pencil erasers? As I listen I work to imagine the sound in order to hear it properly, but neither of these strategies of seem to track. Carl pulls the offending vocal line up in the editing window of Melodyne. Whereas Auto-Tune tracks and corrects pitch in real time, this version of Melodyne needs to first be “fed” the voice that needs fixing. As the track plays into Melodyne’s grid, it forms a series of reddish “blobs” of varying height (pitch), size (amplitude), and shape (timbre). As the note-blobs are inscribed across the window, the rubbing metaphor becomes more visually literal. The line hitches visibly downward, forming a new blob apart from the other backing vocals. The rubbing now appears as the kind you might experience if you tried to push your way through a crowd of people moving in the opposite direction. Perceiving the take as falling out of formation and jostling with its neighbors, initially a task of imagination now becomes one of shared observation. Carl is further able to see that it should not be a difficult job to tune this line: 18 19 20 21

S: C: S:

Everything around ↓youuuu↓uu↑uuuu↓uu This one seems ((clears throat)) ºahumº (.)↓pretty easy ↓youuuuuu↑uu↓uu (5.1)

Having dealt with the inter-blob domain, the intra-blob now comes into focus. He proceeds by first “centering” the pitch of the blob, pulling in the drift of the inner line and making it adhere more tightly to the blob’s main frequency. He then shifts it down to match the main vocal melody: 22 23 24

C: S:

Pitch center it (.2) then change the pitch youuuuuuuu

Each Melodyne blob consists of a reddish membrane, which traces the amplitude—or total energy—of the note at any given moment. The red skin lightens toward the center of the note, which is positioned vertically according to the blob’s average frequency. A red line snakes through the blob, following the pitch drift of the note. If the singer hits the note dead-on and holds it without any vibrato (fluctuations in pitch too small to qualify as new notes) the line will be steady and sit within the blob’s membrane. Notes performed in a vibrato-heavy or otherwise warbly manner will zigzag and may escape the membrane entirely. They breach the blob, like springs sticking out of an old mattress. As with the broader pitch-grid, the note-blob as an inscriptional setting invites alignment, tucking-in, and pulling together.

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Repetition Whereas inscription is about making something temporal endure in space, or turning practices into artifacts, repetition is about making something spatial endure in time, or turning an artifact into a practice. Techniques of inscription and repetition are ways of producing, assembling, and redistributing relations of similarity and difference. In the context of tuning, these modes of practice take on a particular relationship of exchange. They serve as key methods for the interactive production of identifiable troubles and accountable interventions, what Lynch calls “turning up signs” (Lynch 1984). Attending to repetition brings into focus the elements of the tuning practice that are often easiest to take for granted. My presence in the work thus far, for example, has largely proceeded by way of nonverbal affirmation (mmh:mm) or echoing ([↑rubbing? (.)↓yeah). Though I am not adding much in the way of new information to the actual content of the interaction, my presence is a key part of how the situation is framed. My affirming and questioning throughout occasions either a carrying on or a moment of explanation. This repetitive work of attending is oriented toward the production and circulation of accountability. Peter Weeks, in a study of temporal coordination among members of an amateur string ensemble, uses the phrase “double accountability” to refer to how ensemble members are able to identify and repair troubles without the audience noticing (Weeks 1996: 216). In order to identify, contain, and repair troubles in the vocal track, it is necessary to produce, coordinate, and maintain multiple levels of accountability. In the case of vocal tuning, we could replace Weeks’s “double” with “multiple” (or “more than one and less than many”) accountability (Mol 2002). As material-semiotic things, voices come into being already marbled with veins of error and intention. They occupy local “repair worlds” (Jackson, Pompe, and Krieshok 2012) that practically configure their modes of use while conditioning their possibilities for reuse and refuse. The processes of recording and signal processing entailed in computer-based music production allow these meanings and repairables to proliferate. To a person not accustomed to hearing their own voice on record, the voice can even appear as, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s phrase, “less than one and double” (Bhabha 1994: 97). A recording of oneself, as a blurring of the boundary between voicing and writing, has the troubling quality of a putative interiority coming from the outside-in. Learning to hear a voice as one’s own has the character of a social accomplishment. Turning up and tuning out a sign of vocal trouble, similarly, takes work of social coordination. Accordingly, just as he used inscriptions to make his work visible to himself and others that might encounter this session in the future, Carl is announcing his actions verbally in order to make them available to me. Carl, the singer’s prerecorded voice, the clack of the keyboard, and my gestures of attendance form a rhythm of work over the course of the session.

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This rhythm is partially organized through a process of turn taking, as the participants try to make way for, and respond to, one another. When members of a musical ensemble encounter moments of temporal disagreement, one key method of repair is what Weeks calls a “holding pattern.” (Weeks 1996: 212) Holding patterns occur when someone does something unexpected—plays a wrong note or plays the right note too early or late, for example—at which point other members of the ensemble proceed to alter their parts, perhaps by holding a note longer or shorter than usual or repeating a phrase. Holding patterns invite corrections and make it possible to repair troubles retroactively without making them accountable to the audience. Like pilots taking second approaches in order to compensate for a crowded runway, players employ repetition to collaboratively and improvisationally enact situations as repairable. Whereas the ensemble performances that Weeks describes feature an “allat-once” temporality, digital tuning work is distributed over more disjunctive timescales. Instead of the holding pattern, we find the repeated take and the use of looped playback as the primary modes of repetitive repair methods in vocal tuning. These two modes of repair have a sort of nonlocal entanglement in that they occur in well-differentiated spatiotemporal scenes, but anticipate and refer to one another in order to produce the effect of a coherent voice unfolding in a single moment. Through the use of a hand-written “comp” sheet, vocal takes are catalogued, not like specimens from which an ideal single representative can be chosen, but like salvaged parts that, with the right tools, can be made to work well together. The practice of getting vocal takes, in this instance, appears as a mode of repetition specifically preconditioned by the possibility of repair after the fact. Post-hoc tuning work, meanwhile, is largely treated as a practice of procedurally recovering a feeling and spontaneity that is supposed to have been disassembled throughout the process of exploding the voice into so many individual takes. Decisions as to whether something in the vocal track is “supposed to be there” imply the back-formation of a coherent vocal supposition on the part of the vocalist, whether it was ever really there or not. Tuning is usually directed only peripherally toward producing agreement between the movements of a vocal trace and the quantized possibilities predetermined by the pitch-time grid. This is because any agreement’s adequacy as a criterion for “in-tuneness” is usually conditioned by an understanding of what the singer was “going for.” Where clarity regarding the in-the-moment intentions of the vocalist has been exhausted by the sheer proliferation of moments and intentions over the course of the vocal take process, the engineer resorts to continuously scrutinizing and fine-tuning a single take. The looping function works like a rock polisher. It is an ordeal through which the listener’s ears perform a due diligence, wherein rough edges are removed, and a certain grain5 and sheen of the voice are made to come through:

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78 79 80

S:

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

C: S:

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 O: 102 103 S: 104 105 C:

↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu ((click click)) ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uuu↑uu↓uu↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu ((click)) ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↓↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu ((click click)) ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↓↓uuuuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑↑uuuuuuu ((click click)) [continues in this way for ~5 minutes] ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uuuuu↑↑uuuuuuuuuu↓uuuuuu↓↓uuuuuu ((CLACK)) Sh(oo):↑t (3.0) º↓I’m not sure (it’s) supposed to be (↑there)º ((clack)) ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uuu↑uu↓uu↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uuuuu↑↑uuuuuuuuuu↓uuuuuu↓↓uuuuuu ((clack)) ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uuu↑uu↓uu↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu ↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uu↑uuuuu↑↑uuuuuuuuuu↓uuuuuu↓↓uuuuuu ((clack)) [continues in this way for ~2 minutes] ss:were you not sure what he was ↑going [for? (.)↓err [↑uu↓uu↑uu↓uuu↑uu↓uu↓uuuuuuuuuuu (.) ↓uuuuu↑uuuuuuu (1.6) Yeah

In everyday conversation, repetition is frequently deployed for general repair purposes, and correction in particular (Heritage and Atkinson 1984: 41).6 The same could be said of everyday repair of technical objects (e.g., rebooting a computer or cranking an engine). Corrective tuning work, by addressing a voice as both an object requiring technical intervention and a source of subjective expression belonging to another person, straddles the worlds of conversational and technical repair. The invitation to repeat is simultaneously a way of turning up a trouble sign and a way of creating a space in which that trouble can be dealt with. The repetitive techniques of vocal correction are ways of testing a vocal track. Trevor Pinch has

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used the example of the microphone check to illustrate the basic gesture of “projection” involved in technological testing: a stagehand repeatedly checks the mic in order to project that mic’s reliability once it is in the singer’s hands (1993: 29). Repetition in tuning has a similarly projective function: the engineer repeatedly tests the vocal performance for problems and subjects them to repair. Tuning-as-testing provides a way of ensuring that the voice will “work” across multiple contexts of audition.

Intonation Within this process of contingent repetition and rhythmic coordination Carl and I are improvising a sort of prosodic shorthand wherein our conversational inflections come to move with, make room for, and respond to the musical inflections of the singer. Again, the infrastructural invisibility of tuning work in practice is apparent in the way it provisionally straddles domains of meaning. Though conversational prosody and sung musical pitch typically form distinct economies of sense, the specific context of showing someone how to tune a voice produces a sort of “trading zone” between otherwise disjunct structures of meaning (Galison 1997: 781). In this space of ambiguous prosodic coding, the affirmations, questionings, tentativenesses, pressings-on, and focusings-in of everyday speech become partially commensurate with the meanderings of the singer’s voice as it moves along the terrain of musical key and melodic motif. They assemble provisional structures of feeling that allow the shared tasks of tuning, teaching, and learning to proceed. Even when no one is looking over his shoulder, Carl can occasionally be heard talking with or otherwise audibly responding to the Pro Tools session. His interactions with the computer and the voices it summons forth are usually nonverbal or interjectional. He laughs at, curses out, makes frustrated noises with, and otherwise invites action from the sometimesfickle digital audio workstation (DAW) interface. Most of the prosodic work taking place between Carl and me has a basis in our habitual everyday interactions. These should not be mistaken for generalized rules for how prosody might convey meaning in human speech, but are instead polyvocal ways of producing shared sense, inseparable from Carl and my personal histories of interaction. Learning to work with others in the studio means learning how they speak and how to speak with them. With Carl, for example, I quickly learn that when something needs to be done, or when something has not been done correctly, he habitually raises the topic with an upwardly inflected “oh yeah!” which will generally be followed by an instruction. (e.g., “Oh yeah! . . . get receipts next time”). This paralinguistic habit affords Carl the ability to perform a nagging concern as though it has come out of nowhere and caught him by surprise. Without this interactional history, the same inflection could enact entirely different meanings.

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Some prosodic habits are more on the generic side, however: an upward inflection, connoting a question or inviting a response, is often resolved by a downward inflection ([↑rubbing? (.)↓yeah) as a way of indicating that I am following along, that my understanding may have been snagged upon a newly deployed term (e.g. “rubbing”), but as the singer continues and I begin to hear what Carl means, I resolve my invitation to explanation with a downward inflection ((↓yeah)). The barrier between our conversational and musical ways of listening and speaking is a permeable one. As the refrain’s familiar melody rises, it seems to require once again the resolution of a falling tone. In response to Carl’s “centering” of the note, I respond by offering a possible synonym, that is, correcting the “drift” of the note from its center. My flat inflection mirrors that of Carl’s matter-of-fact procedural accounting (as in line 22’s “then change the pitch”) as does the newly tamed, pitch-centered, and drift-corrected note: 25 26

O: S:

The

[drift=okay [Everything around ↓youuuuuuuuuuooo

Having fixed that particular note to his satisfaction, Carl plays back the full phrase. He frames the playback by suggesting how he might have used Auto-Tune instead of Melodyne, possibly with a “weird”-sounding result. I imagine what the weirder possibility would have sounded like as I listen: 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

C: S:

C: S:

See with Auto-Tune on

[that might sound weird ((coughs)) [Everything around ↓youuuuuuuuuu Everything around ↑youuuuuuuuuu↓uuuuu (clack) Everything around ↓youuuuuuuu Everything around ↓youuuuuuuu Everything around ↑youuuuuuuu

We move on to the next line, which should be more or less identical to the previous one, but presents new difficulties: 34 35 36

S: C:

Everything around ↓youuuuuuuu Everything around ↓youuuuuuuuu [uuuu [º↑oooo↓oooº

Carl sings along, softly enough that I imagine it cannot be for my benefit. I realize that he is providing himself with a reference to how the line is supposed to go. He lets the line run and, again, compares his own sung version with that of the track: 37 38 39

S: C: S:

Everything around ↓youuuuuuuuuuuuuu [uuuu [º↑oooo↓oooº Everything around ↑youuuuuuuuuuuuu↓uuuuu

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Instead of my usual “hmm,” I respond to the new difficulty with a “huhh,” which is quickly answered by a severely off-pitch beginning to the next line: 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

O: S: C: S:

C: S: C: S: C: S:

huhh EverythOops(.) .hh ha [[being sharply retuned]] ↑u↓uu↑↑uu (1.2) -thing around ↑youuuuuuuuu↓uuuu↓uuuuu((clack)) º↑uuu↓uuu↓uuu º ((clack)) -thing around ↑youuuuuuu↓u↓uuuuu↓uuuuuº↑uuu↓uuu↓uuu º ((clack)) -thing around ↑youuuuuuuuuuuuu↓uuuuuº↑uuu↓uuuu↓uuu º ↓uu↑uuuu ↓u↓uuu↑uu

Carl hunts for the right note, but it seems to be stuck between two quantized options. As he searches for a note that works, I keep up the rhythm, acknowledging the trouble with a laugh. Carl’s intonation matches the uncertain searching of a vocal track in mid-tuning, rising and falling. I echo his inflection: 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

S: O: C: O: C: S:

uu↑uu (.5) ↓↓uu↑uu haha. ºwelpº ↑any↓wa:ys (that’s wha-) haa. ↑some↓where betwe:en uhn:ha↑ ↑u↓uuu- ((clack)) -thing around ↑youuuuuuu↓uuuuuu↓↓ uuu everything around ↓youuuuuuu↓↓uuuuuu↑↑uuu↓uu

Though Carl still seems dissatisfied with the exact note he had to settle on, he decides to play it back in the context of the lead vocal it is accompanying. Carl’s voice becomes quiet with anticipation, and I clear my throat, as we wait for the main vocal to respond. 61 C: ºlet’s=see if that passesº 62 O: ((clears throat)) 63 C: ((clack)) ºt’s uhh, this oneº ((clack)) [Singer comes in doubletracked with backing vocals:] 64 S: everything around ↓youuuuuuu↓↓uuuuuu↑↑uuu↓uu 65 everything around ↑youuuuuuu↓uuuuo↓ooo 66 everything around ↑youuuuuuu↓uuuuo↓ooo↑oo↓uu

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Apparently convinced that the tracks work well enough together that we can move on, Carl articulates his satisfaction, again in terms of the need to use Auto-Tune instead of Melodyne. The tools at his disposal provide a key context for decisions about the adequacy of the intervention. I try to clarify what Auto-Tune has to do with it, if it is not being used on the track: 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

C: O:

C: O: C: O: S:

↑Oka:↓y=↑I’m ↓okay with=that (.) No Auto-Tune this time. ºbus (.) toº (1.5) Does >Auto-Tune not let you do thing? (.) Or. [>’zit justa nother way of doing (.) things< [Yeah. It might fight you (.) sometimes. If it’s a long note it might go (.) up and [down [uhuhh ºOr um (sometimes maybe (.) sound too robot)º mmhmm everything around ↓youuuuuuu↓↓uuuuuu↑↑uuu↓uu everything around ↑youuuuuuu↓uuuuo↓ooo everything around ↑youuuuuuu↓uuuuo↓ooo↑oo↓uu

Later on, while working on the same song, we come to a falsetto backing vocal for which Carl opts for Auto-Tune instead of Melodyne. He explains that, given the quality of the vocal and the type of tuning needed, AutoTune and its previously invoked potential for weirdness may be justified. He does this playfully, with an exaggerated command that we agree to say the weirdness is intentional: 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

C: O: C:

O: C: O: S:

((clack)) Alright, well, Auto-Tune might help with that. Mmhmm And they’re high vocals so they can be a little weird sounding. (0.5) Mmhmm (2.3) [[with raised pitch and rough timbre]] >jus=say it’s on ↑purpose!< (laughs quietly through nose:) hfff hfff hff uuuuuu↓uuuuuu↑↑uuuuuuu↓uuuuu

If I transcribe part of the above passage as a musical score (Figure 10.1), certain aspects of the interaction become apparent. It becomes possible, for instance, to see that each of the first two exchanges find Carl inflecting downward and resting on the same note (approximately an F#) to which I respond with an “Mmhmm” on the same, or nearly the same note. Carl’s third turn (measure 9) begins on his low resting note and quickly jumps up

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FIGURE 10.1 Musical transcription of interaction between Carl and the author. by a perfect fifth, deviating from the gradual and downward sweeps of his first two turns. Spectrographic (Figure 10.2) and pitch tracking (Figure 10.3) analyses make visible certain aspects of this passage not included in the above transcription. They also, crucially, obscure elements of the passage, specifically the line-by-line interactional rhythm with which each passage sits within the broader exchange. Here are the spectrographic and periodic pitch representations of the above exchange over time:7 Just as the raised falsetto pitch of the singer is departing from the typical tonal range of the rest of the song, indexing a certain shift in character and justifying a tuning technique that may be “weird sounding,” Carl is raising his own prosodic pitch and applying a gravelly texture in order to enact the playfulness of his justification for using a weird sound—“just say it’s on purpose!” From our everyday interactions I know this is the tone Carl uses when he’s half-joking. It is the same tone he uses on talkback when faux-commanding the vocalist to do another take with a terse “again!” With the vocalist absent, and his audience consisting primarily of myself, himself, and the imagined future auditors of this vocal track, the implication

FIGURE 10.2 Spectrographic representation of interaction between Carl and the author.

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FIGURE 10.3 Autocorrelation-based representations of interaction between Carl and the author. is that the use of Auto-Tune in this case could be taken either as an instance of inexpertly attempted “invisible” tuning technique or, alternatively, as a deliberate creative choice. In the context of his previous experience of uncertainty as to where and how the vocal needs to be tuned, the half-joke serves as an acknowledgment of that frustration and the possibility that the bit of “weird” tuning needs to be declared and agreed-upon as intentional in order to be clearly accountable as a deliberate decision. The injunction to “just say it’s on purpose!” serves a dual role, drawing attention to an ambiguity in the tuning job while also distancing us from some imagined strict criteria or audit of the tuning job later on. At this point, we might take Carl’s previous statement that high vocals are allowed to be a little weird sounding as playfully implying a strict set of rules. My response of “mmhmm” does not indicate a recognition of the play in this gesture, but my laugh two lines later serves to correct for this lack of recognition.

Conclusions: On Producing an Accountably Unaccountable Transcription This chapter is not a transparent representation but a situated and discretionary interpretation of my own experience learning the craft of one aspect of recording engineering. As such, it is connected to the “actual practices” of recording engineers less in terms of accuracy of reference than in accountability to various audiences. My accountability includes my

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readers and the system of scholarly production within which I am working. The latter includes the terms of data collection, disclosure, and presentation outlined in my Institutional Research Board approval. I have permission, for example, to use the material collected from my interactions with engineers; I can reproduce their words and details of their practices with the provision that I anonymize them. I do not have this kind of permission from their clients, whose performances, particularly their voices, are both raw material and final product of an engineer’s everyday labor. Securing this sort of permission would be unlikely, and even the act of requesting this permission could jeopardize the reputation of my subjects. As a pretext for institutionally accountable human subjects research, this distribution of ownership of voice, and conditions for the collection and textual representation of voice, should not (at least in theory) be a problem since I am interested in the work of the engineers rather than that of the musicians, whose performances they capture and manipulate. However, the conceit comes into immediate tension with the fact that the two parties, by virtue of the interactions that serve as the key data for this project, are deeply involved in the production of one another as socially accountable actors. The distinction between technical and creative action is at its blurriest in the recording studio, precisely because this is the place where the work of generating that distinction gets carried out behind the scenes. It is not that emotional-creative and objective-technical roles are dispensed with in-studio; in fact, the studio is precisely where these roles are negotiated. The exchange entailed by this negotiation gets projected back to an imagined preexisting role as musician or producer, even as these roles are being actively produced. The practical question becomes how to go about removing these identifying marks, thus eliminating the risk that their performance will be identifiable in its potentially embarrassing moments of becoming, without losing those aspects of the tuning practice that I am interested in elucidating. Working through this practical problem of representational ethics is also a way of working through the problem of what makes the vocal performance accountably that of the singer versus that of the tuner (meant here to refer to both the tuning engineer and the tools they are using). Producing an account that reveals the hidden work of the engineer and obscures the identity of the performer is similar to describing a mold-making and casting process without revealing the final statue. It is the production of something that is, for my purposes, “accountably unaccountable” (or at least “plausibly deniable”). This tells us something about what matters to the members of the studio ensemble, because it reveals what I need to take into account as someone taking part in and making myself accountable to this ensemble. Displaying the tools of obfuscation, as with concealing the tools of correction, can help decide whether and how they ought to be used. The very availability of digital tuning, whether or not it is applied, has the potential to reshape the conversation.

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Acknowledgments This chapter was supported in part by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (award #1455647). It also benefited from the valuable feedback of Samantha Bennett, Eliot Bates, Michael Lynch, Rachel Prentice, Trevor Pinch, Steve Jackson, Mario Biagioli, Joe Dumit, Jim Griesemer, Tim Lenoir, Colin Milburn, and Tim Choy.

Notes 1 For the sake of brevity, the terms “pitch correction,” “intonation correction,” “pitch shifting,” “auto-tune,” and “auto-tuning” (the lowercase “a” indicating the term’s common synechdochic use), while each having distinct meanings and connotations, will be treated as roughly interchangeable unless otherwise specified. 2 Collins (2010) would categorize this normally unexplicated, though practically explicable skill, as “relational” tacit knowledge. 3 Transcriptions employ Jeffersonian Conversation Analysis notation (Heritage and Atkinson 1984). Parentheticals denote pauses, (.) denotes a just-noticeable pause, and arrows indicate upward or downward inflection. Horizontally aligned brackets and indentation indicate simultaneity of statements on adjacent lines. Quiet portions appear as in: ºexampleº. Onomatopoeia is used occasionally, as with “((Clack)),” for an audible stroke of the computer keyboard. 4 S denotes playback of the Singer’s prerecorded voice. 5 Roland Barthes’s phrase “grain of the voice” is often deployed in Sound Studies literature as a way of describing particularly “rough” or “distinctive” vocal qualities. This reading, while not incorrect, is incomplete in that it fails to capture the term’s use for critiquing (or at least socially and historically situating) a “transmission” model of the voice, wherein coded emotion is conveyed as a message. As Barthes writes, “The ‘grain’ of the voice is not—or is not merely—its timbre; the significance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message)” (Barthes 1977: 185). I use “grain” here precisely in this frictional sense, as something that is produced where music meets language (which I construe broadly to include the grammar of the tuning software in use). 6 Echoing a problematic word or phrase, for example, is one common device for initiating repair: A:

my cousin’s seven inches tall

B:

inches?

It can also be used for self-correction: A:

my cousin’s seven inches tall. inches. feet!

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Or as an acknowledgment of acceptance of other-correction: A:

my cousin’s seven inches tall

B:

seven feet?

A:

seven feet

7 These visualizations were produced with the phonetic analysis program Praat, available at: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/ (Boersma and Weenink 2013).

Bibliography Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. “The De-Scription of Technical Objects.” In Shaping Technology / Building Society, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law, 205–24. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2013. “Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer Program].” Version 6.0.14. Retrieved February 10, 2016. Clayton, Jayce. 2016. Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Collins, Harry M. 2010. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dickinson, Kay. 2001. “‘Believe’? Vocoders, Digitalised Female Identity and Camp.” Popular Music 20 (3): 333–47. Galison, Peter. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics/ Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henke, Christopher R. 1999. “The Mechanics of Workplace Order: Toward a Sociology of Repair.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 44: 55–81. Heritage, John, and J. Maxwell Atkinson, eds. 1984. Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Thomas P. 1983. Networks of Power. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jackson, Steven J., Alex Pompe, and Gabriel Krieshok. 2012. “Repair Worlds.” In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work—CSCW ’12, 107. New York: ACM Press. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lynch, Michael. 1984. “‘Turning up Signs’ in Neurobehavioral Diagnosis.” Symbolic Interaction 7 (1): 67–86. Lynch, Michael. 1991. “Laboratory Space and the Technological Complex: An Investigation of Topical Contextures.” Science in Context 4 (1): 51–78. Maynard, Douglas W. 2013. “Social Actions, Gestalt Coherence, and Designations of Disability: Lessons from and about Autism.” Social Problems 52 (4): 499– 524.

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Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pinch, Trevor. 1993. “‘Testing—One, Two, Three . . . Testing!’: Toward a Sociology of Testing.” Science, Technology & Human Values 18 (1): 25–41. Prior, Nick. 2009. “Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers.” New Formations 66: 81–99. Ragona, Melissa. 2013. “Doping the Voice.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson, 154–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramzy, Carolyn. 2016. “Autotuned Belonging: Coptic Popular Song and the Politics of Neo-Pentecostal Pedagogies.” Ethnomusicology 60 (3): 434. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation Volumes I & II, edited by Gail Jefferson and Emanuel A. Schegloff. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sacks. 1977. “The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation.” Language 53 (2): 361–82. Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Star, Susan Leigh, and Anselm Strauss. 1999. “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8 (1995): 9–30. Suchman, Lucy A. 1985. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of HumanMachine Communication. Palo Alto: Xerox. Weeks, Peter. 1996. “Synchrony Lost, Synchrony Regained: The Achievement of Musical Co-Ordination.” Human Studies 19 (2): 199–228.

PA R T F I V E

Mediating Sound and Silence

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Listening to or Through Technology: Opaque and Transparent Mediation Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

Despite an emerging interest in analysing the technological aspects of popular music production (Bayley 2010; Cook et al. 2009; Frith and Zagorski-Thomas 2016), scholars continue to lack a conceptual framework for addressing previously ignored aspects of the sound itself. In this chapter, I propose to add to the analytical vocabulary the concepts of “opaque and transparent mediation.” Through theoretical discussions and brief analyses of various music productions, I demonstrate the ways in which these concepts may help to describe various listening experiences and musical paradigms. Mediating technology is imperative to all forms of popular music-editing operations such as splicing, and processing tools such as reverb affect the sound whether we notice them or not. When we do not, it is because we perceive the technological mediation as transparent, not because there is none. Similarly, when we do notice those operations, it is not necessarily because there are more of them than usual but because they are used in a way that attracts our attention. If, for example, a track is spliced in a silent spot, it will be much less noticeable than if the splice interrupts a sound. The notions of opaque and transparent mediation help to clarify that what is usually at stake is not whether the music is unmediated or mediated, or how much mediation is involved, but rather how the mediation involved in the music is perceived. Transparent mediation implies that the

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listener’s focus is directed towards what is mediated and not towards the technological mediation itself, whereas opaque mediation implies that the listener is attracted to the act of mediation itself, in tandem with that which is mediated.1 Opacity and transparency are obviously not inherent qualities of music; listeners will perceive sound differently according to their personal musical experience, context and history. For example, a music engineer may notice a subtle use of compression on a voice, while a listener who has no experience with music production may perceive the same voice as “natural.” Does this mean, however, that one’s comprehension of mediation as either opaque or transparent is arbitrary? Drawing on theories from ecological perception and philosophy, I suggest that we are more likely to recognize technological mediation at three specific moments. The first is when it disrupts the spatiotemporal coherence of the music. The second is when it disturbs our familiar way of hearing a sound. The third is when it operates at the border between what we understand as being the music’s interior and exterior.

Opaque and Transparent Mediation Music-editing tools and processing effects, such as the cut-and-paste tool or the compressor and equalizer, can be used subtly to embellish and improve musical performances but also aggressively to create unique aesthetic effects via distinctive inscriptions of their own on the sound. These various ways of using and perceiving mediating technology have been identified by several scholars and assigned different names. In Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Mark Katz introduces the notion of “phonograph effects” to illuminate “the manifestations of sound recording’s influence” on music and listeners (2004: 3). In some of his case studies, such as his analysis of “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim, the term “phonograph effect” could in fact be replaced by “opaque mediation.” Yet there is an important distinction: “phonograph effect” describes any influence that technology has had on music and the listener, such as how the three-minute limit of a 10-inch 78 RPM phonograph record dictated (and, following Katz, still impacts) the length of the popular song (ibid.: 32). Opaque mediation, on the other hand, only describes the mediation involved in the musical production that is experienced as exposed. Simply put, all instances of opaque mediation are phonograph effects, but all phonograph effects are not instances of opaque mediation. “Opaque” and “transparent” mediation might further evoke Denis Smalley’s distinction between the “naturalist work” and the “interventionist work” (2007: 54). Although Smalley uses his term “naturalist work” in a way similar to how I use transparent mediation, and “interventionist work” in a way similar to how I use opaque mediation, I find his terms to be

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problematic. First of all, the means of achieving transparent mediation might involve just as much “intervention” as those achieving opaque mediation. As Andy Hamilton argues in his critique of Boulez’s criticism of progressive technology, “The purist recording is not, as Boulez thinks, the one without intervention, but the one where intervention is directed towards creating a realistic auditory image” (2003: 351). Furthermore, in relation to the connotations of the “naturalist work,” we must recognize that opaque mediation is experienced as both unnatural and natural, depending upon various factors that I will return to later. Therefore, as a qualifier, “natural” has little to recommend it. The terms “opaque” and “transparent” mediation might also evoke the French philosopher Louis Marinʼs application of the same concepts to painting and semiotics. Marin proposes that “to represent” means, in short, to present oneself as representing something else (1991: 60). He labels the representation’s condition of representing something else a “transitive dimension,” while he labels the representation’s self-presentation a “reflexive dimension.” Similarly, recorded music is always the sum of (1) its mediated sounds and (2) the sonic imprints of the technological mediation’s self-presentation. Consequently, it has both a transitive and a reflexive dimension. If mediation did not have a transitive dimension, it would not in fact be mediation, since the term itself necessarily implies that something is being conveyed. Likewise, to deny its reflexive dimension is to deny that technological mediation transforms or adds new qualities to sounds. While Marin uses the descriptors “reflexive” and “transitive” to explain representation at an ontological level, he uses the concepts of “opacity” and “transparency” to explain the experiential aspect of the reflexive dimension, “the various ways in which . . . representation presents itself while representing something else, the various modes of its self-presentation” (ibid.: 66). While this description may sound like my notions of “opaque” and “transparent,” there are certain differences that can be traced to the fact that while Marin discusses representations, which are based on substitutive signs, I discuss technological mediation that is not based on signs in this sense. Marin observes that representational signs, such as letters or paint brushes, must necessarily be experienced as opaque—they must be seen—in order to be experienced in turn as transparent to what they represent—that is, in order to be able to communicate meaning. Marin calls this the “paradox” of the functioning sign: the sign or representation is at the same time present and absent, opaque and transparent (ibid.: 55–56).2 The content of a book is accessible only through its words and letters, and the content of a picture is accessible only through its paint and brush strokes, but the content of music, on a perceptual level, is different in this regard. Though we do not have access to sounds except through mediation, we do not need to hear the mediation as mediation (i.e. to acknowledge it) in order to hear the sounds; often the listener does not notice the mediation as distinct from the sound but associates it with the sounds themselves. When it comes to the

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technological mediation involved in the production of music, opacity is, in other words, not a means of fulfilling the transparency function. Marin illustrates the various conditions of mediation with a metaphor: “To be at the same time present and absent is a good visual and conceptual definition of a transparent thing, a glass pane through which I look at the landscape beyond. If there are scratches on it, or stains or blotches, I suddenly see the window pane instead of the garden, its lawn and its trees” (ibid.: 57). This might seem to be a good analogy for transparent and opaque mediation: transparent mediation implies a self-presentation (of mediation) that the listener can completely ignore, whereas opaque mediation implies a self-presentation that is exposed and thus must be reckoned with. There are, however, at least two problems with this analogy. First, it assumes that the foregrounded technology is a flaw, or something undesired, which is often not the case. Second, it suggests that the mediation is an intermediary between the listener and the “real world.” While a recording can represent a preexisting performance, it can never copy it; the recording medium is, to borrow Theodore Gracyk’s characterization, the primary text in and of itself (1996: 21). As Jonathan Sterne explains, recording has always been a studio art: “Even in so-called live situations, the machine required a certain amount of attention, care, and technique” (2003: 235). In line with this, Evan Eisenberg questions whether “recording” is an appropriate term for this format (2005: 89). Based on this acknowledgment, Sterne argues against what he calls “a philosophy of mediation”: “The medium does not mediate the relation between singer and listener, original and copy. It is the nature of their connection. Without the medium, there would be no connection, no copy, but also no original, or at least no original in the same form” (2003: 226). This argument is like Hamilton’s critique of what he characterizes as the “transparency thesis”: “However one presents the transparency thesis, it faces the obvious challenge that recordings are artefacts. The recorded image, like the photographic image, is always crafted. It is not unmediated; the medium is significant” (2003: 351). While I totally agree with their reasoning, I still insist that a discussion of technological mediation and transparency can be fruitful if we are aware of the different definitions of the term “mediation” and if we distinguish between mediating/reproducing events/performances and mediating/reproducing sounds. The Latin mediates—the etymological source of the verb “to mediate”— means “to be placed in the middle,” which tells us that mediation forms a link between two different things, people or phenomena. In line with this, the term “mediation” is usually meant to signify either (1) the process of intervening or negotiating in a dispute in order to bring about an agreement or a reconciliation or (2) an intermediary process realized through a medium or instrument of transmission. The latter meaning of “mediation” indicates two further subcategories relating to either the process of interacting or the act of conveying. Mediation as interaction indicates a two-way process of communication or affection, while mediation as conveyance indicates the

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transmission of something from a source to a receiver, or from one place to another. The latter form of mediation might involve communicating something through representations, such as semantic meanings mediated by alphabetic letters or images mediated by paintings, or it might involve physical transmission of something through a material medium, such as the physical transportation of contaminants through water or the processes of sound transmission. “Mediation,” thus, has a variety of applications, but, in my use of “opaque and transparent mediation,” I will reserve it for the process of technological transmission of sound from a source, through a material medium, to a (potential) receiver. Music, in fact, is utterly dependent upon various processes of transmission through a material medium in order to be heard or even to come into being at all. For instance, a given acoustic guitar sound might have undergone the following stages of mediation: after being brought to life through the vibration of the guitar strings, it is first mediated (and affected) by the acoustic guitar’s body, then by the environmental space in which it occurs. It might then be electronically mediated by a microphone, and possibly by a compressor. If it is destined for a recording, it will be further mediated by a mixing console, a computer interface (which involves the mediation of a preamplifier and an analogue-to-digital converter), then by a computer, and then by processing effects and editing tools. Ultimately, it will be mediated by a certain recorded format (such as LP, CD, cassette, MP3 file and so on). Before the consumer can actually hear it again, it must be further mediated by a playback device, and by speakers, and by the environmental space in which the speakers are placed, not to mention the eardrum. In all these instances, a sound is travelling through (or is being processed by) technological mediation, and all these different processes of transmission contribute to the sonic result—it is the sum of all these processes that constitutes a sound’s identity. Therefore, sound and mediation cannot be separated at an ontological level. Yet, not all instances of technological mediation are experienced as a sound’s identity. For example, if a listener characterizes a sound as “cut up,” the listener conceptually distinguishes between a sound and a production tool affecting the sound’s identity. The mediation involved in this process (the cut-up tool) is thus experienced as part of the music (or part of the music’s interior) but separate from the sound’s “pure” identity. While some will regard what happens when the output signal of an electric guitar enters directly into a distortion pedal before output as mediation that contributes to the electric guitar sound’s identity, others will regard it as mediation that is applied to the electric guitar sound. In both instances, the mediation merges with the guitar sound, but the extent to which we experience it as integral to the sound or as applied to the sound will vary according to who the listener is and what the circumstances are, among other things. Instead of being inherent qualities of sounds, then, opacity and transparency comprise what Max Weber calls “ideal types,” analytical poles between which “real life” presents many intermediate positions, meaning

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that they describe rather than define reality (1922 [1904]: 146–214). In fact, the notion of opaque and transparent mediation has derived from my interest in the many ways we listen, and specifically in the fact that some of us focus on some forms of technological mediation involved in a musical production rather than others, and that others of us might ignore those same forms, and that all of this can change over periods of time that range from minutes to decades or more. Moreover, sometimes we may experience the same sound as both opaque and transparent, depending on what context it occurs in and/or what context we compare it to. This does not, however, mean that our experience of opacity and transparency of technological mediation is completely arbitrary. While it would have been very interesting to test this empirically, I here present a hypothesis based instead on ecological theory: while people’s experience of transparency and opacity seems to vary according to time, place, genre, listener’s background and so forth, there seem to be typical moments when mediation is usually experienced as opaque. These include those moments when the technological mediation disrupts the spatiotemporal coherence of the music, when it disturbs our mental imagination of the sound source’s “pure” identity and when it straddles the border between “intramusical mediation” and “extramusical mediation.” This hypothesis is also the reason why I believe that these concepts can be used not only as perceptual concepts but also as signals of alternative musical paradigms. In what follows, I will explain some of the reasons why technological mediation is typically experienced as opaque at these moments and exemplify some of the ways in which musicians have explored these moments.3

Opaque Mediation as Musical Paradigm According to James J. Gibson’s theory of ecological perception (1986), people (and animals) understand new environments according to their previous experiences with similar environments. The importance of previous experience is emphasized by other scholars as well, such as Marc Leman and Albert S. Bregman. Leman is principally concerned with people’s attribution of meaning to sound through habits or conventions—what he calls their “cultural constraints” (2008: 56), and Bregman is interested in the ways in which experiential regularities form mental “schemas” that affect the perceptual organization of sound (2001: 43). In his investigations into the listener’s perception of the spatial image of electroacoustic music, Smalley similarly points out that people have a “natural tendency to relate sounds to supposed sources and causes, and to relate sounds to each other because they appear to have shared or associated origins” (1997: 110). Sounds are, in other words, generally source bonded, because, as Eric Clarke points out, a fundamental mechanism of auditory perception is the identification of a sound’s origin (2005: 3).

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When listening to music, then, we are likely to make sense of the sound by comparing it with our previous engagements with sound—that is, an experience with one sound environment becomes an instant resource for the structuring and comprehension of a similar environment. For example, because people in general have a great deal of experience with interpreting sound as signifying space, their experiences with different acoustical reflection patterns unconsciously allow them to imagine specific actual spaces when listening to music.4 What is interesting is that in everyday life, we engage with very different forms of sonic environments. For example, we regularly encounter spatiotemporally coherent and source-specific sounds that follow strict acoustical laws (such as an everyday conversation), but we are also surrounded by soundscapes where anything and everything goes (such as musical recordings and soundtracks). People’s awareness of alternative contexts, and of what rules apply within them, remains very strong. For example, though a technologically filtered voice may now be naturalized in a musical context, thanks to the mind’s ability to adjust to new sonic environments with dispatch, it would be uncanny indeed if the person next to us suddenly started speaking in that sort of voice. Likewise, if the vocals of a contemporary pop music track had not been compressed, equalized or processed, that track would likely not become a hit, even though this is the vocal sound that we are most used to in an unmusical setting. Relevant here as well is Gibson’s notion of affordance, and particularly his observation that the same environment might afford different things in different contexts (1986: 128). Interestingly, however, it seems as though listeners often draw upon several sources of reference simultaneously, such as comparing the filtered voice both to how voices are heard in everyday settings and to how they often appear in musical settings. Consequently, the filtered voice is at once experienced as completely normal and as manipulated. To take another example, it is only against the backdrop of our continued understanding of a spatiotemporally fragmented soundscape as consisting of spatiotemporally coherent sounds that have been disrupted that the concept of a musical montage or collage makes sense. While music that evokes a sense of surreality generally becomes naturalized over the course of time, the human mind persists in meeting music not only on its own terms—as a musical environment in which anything goes—but also in the context of everyday life. As Smalley points out, “the idea of source-bonded space is never entirely absent” (2007: 38). And, we might add, neither is the idea of a sound’s acoustic qualities, such as its spatial and temporal coherence. This friction between the ecological constraints of listening and the liberating processes of naturalization generates a perceptual friction in which the technological mediation involved in the music production evokes the listener’s familiarity with a sound even as it subverts it. And it is at these moments when sounds are defamiliarized that they are likely to be experienced as opaque. Musicians and sound artists have always used recording technologies artistically to subvert listeners’ expectations, including those linked to

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previous experiences with sounds and with the acoustic qualities of sound (its spatial and temporal coherence). In my summary of the ways in which technological mediation has been deliberately exposed, I also identify a third creative means of subverting listeners’ expectations—namely, the introduction of what is usually conceptualized as the music’s exterior into the music’s interior. That is, listeners seem to distinguish between what they conceptualize as technological mediation that is part of the music (such as the use of processing effects and editing tools) and mediation that is not part of the music, although it still influences the sounds (a category typically encompassing file formats and recorded formats, playback devices and so on—that is, mediation applied after the music is “mastered”). Sounds commonly understood as exterior to the music that are used in a musical way often draw attention to themselves and are thus experienced as opaque. Below, I give examples of all three ways of exposing technological mediation to listeners while arguing that opaque mediation can, in addition to functioning as a set of perceptual concept, also signal a musical paradigm.

Spatiotemporal Fragmentation One of the ways in which technological mediation has been deliberately exposed is through highlighting the music’s fragmented construction. While the invention of the phonograph separated sounds from their sources and allowed for overdubbing (see, for example, Day 2000 and Théberge 1997), the invention of the magnetic tape recorder made it possible to literally cut tracks apart and paste them together again through the process of splicing. The spatiotemporal disjuncture of sound was further ushered along by the magnetic multitrack tape recorder. Not only could parts be recorded at different times and in different locations but also, because sounds could now be recorded through several channels without being automatically bounced onto a single track afterwards, parts could be treated separately even after they had been recorded. Consequently, recorded music came to encompass (and, in turn, imply) a patchwork of sounds recorded at different times and in different spaces. Digital technology did not “split” these sounds any further from their sources than the magnetic tape recorder did. However, thanks to its malleable digital nature (its conversion of sounds into binary numbers) and non-destructive editable environments, digital technology has facilitated and accommodated already established editing operations, making them even more frequent and profound. Recording musicians have always experimented with the editing opportunities associated with treating space and time as musical parameters, including creative ways of exploring spatiality in music. Both delay and reverb effects may be used to produce a virtual spatial environment that sonically recreates any “worldly” space, but they may also be used to produce a

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spatial design that clearly differs from any familiar actual space. Peter Doyle points to music recordings as far back as the late 1940s and early 1950s in which the virtual spaces reveal a “strong sense of ‘manufacturedness,’” as he puts it (2005: 143). For example, Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant’s “West of Samoa” (1954) alternates between “dry” and “wet” verses, which, according to Doyle, “serve[s] to cast the listener in and out of a mysteriously exotic, more than a little threatening soundscape” (ibid.: 156). When the magnetic tape recorder became the standard recording medium, musicians and engineers started experimenting with the tape path of the recording machine to create an artificial echo or delay (Zak 2001 and 2012). An example of experimentation with sonic spatiality in the digital domain is Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House” from her 1982 album The Dreaming (EMI). In “Get Out of My House,” the digital reverb and delay present an otherworldly musical spatiality that clearly differs from any actual physical environment. One reason for this is the distinctive nature of the reflection patterns that Bush applies, such as the gated drum sound: the reverb first suggests a large and empty hall but is then cut off after only a few milliseconds, rendering the “big” sound suddenly dry. The effect is almost surreal, as Zak points out in his description of gated reverb as well: “We are immediately taken from the acoustic world as we know it into a strange soundscape of unknown dimensions where sounds behave in unfamiliar ways and the air itself is controlled by machines” (2001: 80).5 The other reason is the track’s combination of several different virtual spaces at the same time. For example, at 0:46, the sound of the recording suggests three different sound spaces simultaneously: a small, dry space for a male voice, a slightly larger space for the female voice, and a much larger space for the percussive sounds. While each of these juxtaposed spaces could be heard to simulate an actual space, the sonic collage they comprise could never be experienced in reality. Smalley describes this as a spatial simultaneity—that is, an occasion when “you are aware of simultaneous spaces” in the music (1997: 124). The listener is here likely to hear the mediation in question as opaque—the technological mediation comes to the fore by giving away the game of the music’s fragmented construction. Another way to make mediation appear opaque is by exploiting the cut-and-paste tool through an artful disruption of the acoustic qualities of sounds, in this way highlighting the music’s fragmented construction. While the cut-and-paste tool is often used in a discreet or entirely hidden fashion to eliminate unwanted sounds or move a sequence from one take to another, it is also quite common to take a more experimental approach to cutting and pasting by highlighting these operations. In the analogue era, this type of editing involved razor blades to physically cut and splice actual audiotape; composers who experimented with it included William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others. For example, Stockhausen inserted leader tape—that is, blank, nonmagnetic

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tape normally used at the beginning and ending of a track—between sounds to create percussive, stuttering effects (2002: 135). Such artful disruption of the acoustic qualities of sounds has a longer trajectory as well. For example, Schaeffer produced a similar cut-up effect by using a disc cutter to lock grooves in the phonographic disc to repeat the sounds therein (ibid.: 92). In the digital era, the cut-and-paste operation involves the cursor and mouseclick of the computer-based sequencer program, or some experimentation with samplers or software, which is significantly less time consuming and thus more common. As Caleb Kelly points out, stuttering and skipping sounds “are now simply another part of the sound palette of the digital producer” (2009: 10). For example, “50 Cycles” (Ultravisitor, Warp, 2004) by Squarepusher (Tom Jenkinson) is characterized by clear traces of cutups in its stuttering freeze-and-flow style. Jenkinson explains that he used the Vegas DAW software by Sonic Foundry/Sony (now owned by Magix Software GmbH) “to assemble literally thousands of edited pieces of audio” when producing this track (Tingen 2011). The vocals are all chopped up, and the sound pieces are often separated by short signal dropouts, so that each sound starts and stops abruptly. Other times the vocal sounds are chopped up, copied and pasted consecutively, producing a staccato stutter. The vocal sounds are occasionally also repeated numerous times at such short intervals that the listener hears a percussive “drumroll” effect rather than a straightforward stutter. The song’s incomplete sounds, abrupt transitions between sound sequences, signal dropouts, stuttering rhythms and other percussive cut-up effects all demonstrate its spatiotemporally fragmental nature and, as such, draw attention to the technological mediation involved in the production of the song. A third means of exposing a musical track’s spatiotemporal disjuncture of sound, making the mediation appear opaque, is through the use of samples that are recognizable to a broad group of listeners, or at least recognizable as samples. With music that highlights the samples’ “quotation marks,” the mediation is likely to be experienced as opaque because the samples reveal themselves as what they are: extracts from a preexisting recording that have been inserted into a new context via some technological means. While sampling has a long trajectory, I will use contemporary mashup music as a case study here. Mashups are generally characterized by their use of nothing but samples from popular recordings. Usually, the manipulation of these tracks is concealed, to achieve an audience response along the lines of “These tracks shouldn’t go together but they do!” The meaning-making in mashups takes place within the listener’s constant negotiation between the sources as presented in the mashup and the sources as presented in their original contexts (see, for example, Brøvig-Hanssen 2016; McGranahan 2010 and Sinnreich 2010). The mashup, then, openly announces its own fragmented construction in order to generate new meaning.

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Mediation Comprehended as Applied to Sounds While musical spatiality, cut-ups and the use of recognizable samples may expose the technological mediation by highlighting the music’s spatiotemporal fragmentation, the technological mediation involved in the musical production process also often comes to the fore when it disturbs our notions of a sound source’s “real” or pure identity—that is, when we experience the sounds as sonically transformed by technological mediation. However, as already mentioned, the elasticity as to what is regarded as “natural” or “pure” sound is vast and will differ from listener to listener and context to context. I will therefore exemplify this form of opaque mediation with the technologically manipulated voice, since it is in a category all its own—as Canadian composer and writer Barry Truax points out: “The first sounds to which the ear is exposed as it develops in the foetus are human sounds, and from that point onward, the voice and human soundmaking are the sounds to which we are most sensitive as listeners” (2001: 33). Our sensitivity to the voice is evident when we listen to singing that is clearly impacted by pitchshifting devices such as Antares’s Auto-Tune software, which can transform slightly off-key sounds into exact pitch levels. While this effect, often referred to as “auto-tuning,” is usually used subtly and discreetly in the service of improving pitch in a given performance, it can also be used to eliminate both the natural vibration of the human voice’s sustained tones and the natural sliding transitions between different tones, which in turn makes the vocal performance sound mechanical and robotic. This opaque use of auto-tuning was made famous by artists such as Cher, with her 1998 hit “Believe” (one of the best-selling singles of all time), and contemporary rap and R&B singer T-Pain, who has made it a trademark of his sound. But over the last decade, in particular, the exaggerated use of pitch-shifting tools has appeared in a wide variety of popular music genres and supplied a wide range of aesthetic effects.6 For example, in 2009 the American indie folk band Bon Iver released their EP Blood Bank (Jagjaguwar) with their characteristic track “Woods,” which is an a cappella choir performance consisting of overdubs of Justin Vernon’s voice, in which each overdub is clearly auto-tuned. The folk- or hymn-like melody, the polyphonic a cappella vocals and Justin Vernon’s tender and passionate delivery of the lyrics create an introspective, almost spiritual, atmosphere that supports the track’s message about seeking peace and slowing the passage of time. The substantial and opaque use of pitchshifting on the vocals, in the manner of Cher and T-Pain, disturbs the vocal’s characteristically “human” qualities, and yet, interestingly, this particular hybrid of human and technology somehow manages to create a unique emotional and sensual atmosphere that neither the human vocal nor the technology could have managed on its own. Even though the vocal and the pitch-shifting tool are completely merged in this song, the listener is likely to experience the performance as a hybrid between the sound source and the

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mediation applied to the sound source, because the technological mediation upends our notion of a pure vocal sound.

Straddling the Border Between “Intramusical” and “Extramusical” Mediation A third way in which the mediation’s self-presentation is likely to be recognized as opaque and as a means of creating an aesthetic effect is through its challenge to our dichotomy between interior and exterior sounds—between the sounds that “belong” to the music and the sounds that reside beyond it. Above, I noted that stuttering, cut-up sounds draw attention to the technology involved because they reveal that the music is a fragmented constellation. Another reason why cut-up sounds are likely to be experienced as opaque mediation is that they are often entangled in associations of malfunctioning technology, such as a CD player that has problems reading the information on a scratched disc or a computer program that halts or freezes during playback of an audio file.7 While some music productions are based purely on technological glitches, others stage the glitchy sounds of skips, stutters, hangs and signal dropouts as passing effects, between which we are meant to sense a coherent musical performance. This is the case for Squarepusher’s “50 Cycles” (2004), mentioned above. Even if we understand these glitchy sounds to be part of the composition, they are not so easily released from their associations with technological failure. That is, skips and stutters designed for aesthetic purposes are not what we traditionally think of as music, yet they are somehow more artful and musical than glitches occurring naturally. This produces a further ambiguity, or perhaps a sense of double meaning: the skips and signal dropouts are at once unmusical elements (that are played with in a musical way) and musical elements in their own right. When these traditionally undesirable and certainly unmusical sounds are used to musical ends, they seem to straddle the border between the music’s interior and exterior. It is arguably the music’s contradictory double meanings—it both is and is not a traditional performance; the glitches both are and are not part of the music—that supply its compelling tension. The cut-up sounds thus make the listener aware of the recording/production medium’s double function, to mediate and to be that which is mediated—it presents itself while it mediates or represents something else. Another instance of sounds that seem to straddle the music’s interior and exterior is when the sonic imprints that the recording or playback medium leaves with the sounds are used to aesthetic ends. Before the introduction of digital technology, recorded sounds had always been enmeshed in the noises inherent to the mediating process. Digital recording and playback media, on the other hand, seemed to eliminate most of those sounds. In the age of their potential

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absence, then, the noises from previous recording and playback media that had been eliminated enjoyed a rebirth of sorts, as artists and listeners revitalized and revalued what had formerly been regarded as simply the limitations or by-products of the equipment. For example, as part of a countercultural reaction during the 1990s to the promotion of digital technology’s “victory” over low fidelity, several musicians made recordings during this time that featured the sound of pre-digital recording and playback media, and pre-digital instruments and other music equipment. Amplified vinyl noise, for example, can be heard on Portishead’s “Strangers” (Dummy, Go! Discs/London, 1994), Alanis Morissette’s “Can’t Not” (Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, Maverick/Reprise, 1998), Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” (Mezzanine, Virgin, 1998) and Moby’s “Rushing” (Play, V2 Records, 1999). Vinyl noise and other sounds associated with pre-digital technologies’ “limitations” are today very commonly used as aesthetic effects in popular music productions. Yet even though we understand these sounds to be conscious aesthetic choices rather than a casualty of the available technology, part of their aesthetic value lies exactly in their double meaning: they function as musical sounds at the same time as they are thought of as intrinsically related to (outmoded) playback media—that is, as the result of extramusical mediation.8

Conclusions In this chapter, I have used the terms “opaque” and “transparent” mediation to describe two analytical and perceptual poles between which there exist many intermediate positions. In both instances, the mediation merges with the sounds. Instead of describing how much mediation is involved, then, these concepts describe the extent to which we experience the mediation as integral to the sound or as applied to the sound. This experience will vary according to who the listener is and/or what the circumstances are, among other things. Transparent mediation implies that the listener’s focus is directed towards what is mediated (the mediation is experienced as merging with the sound), whereas opaque mediation implies that the listener is attracted to the act of mediation itself, in tandem with that which is mediated. While the extent to which the technological mediation involved in a production is perceived as opaque or transparent will vary from listener to listener, I argued that our experience is not completely arbitrary. Mediation is usually experienced as opaque at those moments when it disrupts the spatiotemporal coherence of the music, when it disturbs our mental imagination of the sound source’s “pure” identity and when it challenges our notion of what is “extramusical mediation” and what is “intramusical mediation”—it is during these moments that it gains the most attention. This hypothesis, which I based on theories on ecological perception, further implies that these concepts can be used not only as perceptual concepts but

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also as signals of alternative musical paradigms. In musical examples such as those analysed in this chapter, the aesthetic potential of the mediation’s self-presentation is scrutinized and its opaqueness celebrated. And what is sometimes described as a lesser degree of mediation should instead be recognized as transparent mediation and, correspondingly, as a rhetorical attribute or aesthetic strategy that is every bit as purposeful as the alternative. When music is criticized for being inauthentic because it is too reliant upon technological manipulation, it is usually not the involvement of mediating technology that is under attack. What is criticized, or alternatively saluted, is instead the musical aesthetic that privileges its opacity over its transparency—an aesthetic that seeks the overt and expressive use of editing tools and processing effects, and that endorses the moments when these mediating technologies are allowed to generate unique sounds and carry meanings of their own.

Notes 1 My notions of “transparent mediation” and “opaque mediation” were first introduced in Brøvig-Hanssen 2010. 2 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin apply the concepts of transparency and opacity in a fashion reminiscent of Marin in their descriptions of different forms of “remediation” (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 45). 3 For extended analyses of some of the songs discussed in this chapter (Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House,” 1982; Bon Iver’s “Woods,” 2009; and Portishead’s “Strangers”), see Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen (2016). 4 For further discussion of the natural and surreal soundscape and ecological perception, see Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen (2012). 5 For a discussion of how the British producers Hugh Padgham pioneered this “gated reverb” effect using analogue technology, see Zak (2001: 79–81). 6 For discussions of the artistic use of pitch-shifting tools, see, for example, Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen (2016), James (2008), Prior (2009) and Marshall (this book). 7 Audio files require a large amount of processing power from the computer, and in the 1990s, when processing power was still quite expensive, the computer’s playback of audio files often ended in hiccups or crashes due to buffer underruns. 8 For discussions of glitch music, see, for example, Bates (2004), Cascone (2000) and Young (2002).

Bibliography Bates, Eliot. 2004. “Glitches, Bugs, and Hisses: The Degeneration of Musical Recordings and the Contemporary Musical Work.” In Bad Music: The Music

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We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher. J. Washburne and Maiken Derno, 275–93. New York: Routledge. Bayley, Amanda, ed. 2010. Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Bregman, Albert S. 2001. Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild. 2010. “Opaque Mediation: The Cut-and-Paste Groove in DJ Food’s ‘Break’.” In Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, edited by Anne Danielsen, 159–75. Farnham: Ashgate. Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild. 2016. “Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot: Consumption as Mode of Production.” In Music and Virtuality, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran, 427–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, and Anne Danielsen. 2016. Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Cascone, Kim. 2000. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24 (4): 12–18. Clarke, Eric F. 2005. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. Cook, Nicholas, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Day, Timothy. 2000. A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Doyle, Peter. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Eisenberg, Evan. 2005. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frith, Simon. 1986. “Art Versus Technology: The Strange Case of Popular Music.” Media, Culture and Society 8 (3): 263–79. Frith, Simon, and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, eds. 2016. The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field. London: Routledge. Gibson, James J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gracyk, Theodore. 1996. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Durham: Duke University Press. Hamilton, Andy. 2003. “The Art of Recordings and the Aesthetics of Perfection.” British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (4): 345–62. Holmes, Thom. 2002. Electronic and Experimental Music: Foundations of New Music and New Listening. New York: Routledge. James, Robin. 2008. “‘Robo-diva R&B’: Aesthetics, Politics, and Black Female Robots in Contemporary Popular Music.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 20 (4): 402–23. Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kelly, Caleb. 2009. Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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Leman, Marc. 2008. Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Marin, Louis. 1991. “Opacity and Transparence in Pictorial Representation.” In EST II: Grunnlagsproblemer i estetisk forskning [EST II: Basic Challenges in Aesthetic Research], edited by Karin Gundersen and Ståle Wikshåland, 55–66. Oslo: Norges allmennvitenskapelige forskningsråd. McGranahan, Liam. 2010. “Mashnography: Creativity, Consumption, and Copyright in the Mashup Community.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Providence: Brown University. Prior, Nick. 2009. “Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern.” New Formations 66 (1): 81–99. Sinnreich, Aram. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Smalley, Denis. 1997. “Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes.” Organised Sound 2 (2): 107–26. Smalley, Denis. 2007. “Space-Form and the Acousmatic Image.” Organised Sound 12 (1): 35–58. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Tingen, Paul. 2011. “Squarepusher.” Sound on Sound, May, 2011. http://www. soundonsound.com/people/squarepusher (accessed April 05, 2017). Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/ Consuming Technology. Hanover: University Press of New England. Truax, Barry. 2001. Acoustic Communication. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing. Weber, Max. 1922 [1904]. “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntis.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 146–214. Tübingen: Mohr. Young, Rob. 2002. “Worship the Glitch: Digital Music, Electronic Disturbance.” In Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, edited by Rob Young, 45–55. New York: Continuum. Zak, Albin J. 2001. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zak, Albin J. 2012. “No-Fi: Crafting a Language of Recorded Music in 1950s Pop.” In The Art of Record Production, edited by Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, 43–55. Farnham: Ashgate.

Discography Bon Iver. “Woods,” Blood Bank. Jagjagwar. 2009. Kate Bush. “Get Out Of My House,” The Dreaming. EMI America. 1982. Squarepusher. “50 Cycles,” Ultravisitor. Warp Records. 2004.

C H A P T E R T W E LV E

Six Types of Silence Richard Osborne

In 2012 the Hayward Gallery in London hosted an exhibition devoted to “Invisible Art.” White canvases and empty plinths were put on display. The exhibition was revelatory, not least in outlining the extent and variety of intangible works. The show’s curator, Ralph Rugoff, compared the situation in fine art to the situation in music, claiming that “in music you only have one person do a piece of silent music but somehow in art, artists kept coming back to the subject” (Brown 2012). The music he had in mind is John Cage’s 4’33”, the “silent” composition that is most commonly known. Cage’s work caused outrage at its premier in Woodstock in 1952. The pianist, David Tudor, sat at his instrument but did not play it. Instead he opened and closed the lid three times, marking out the movements that comprise the 4’33” duration of the work. This caused “a hell of a lot of uproar . . . it infuriated most of the audience” (Revill 1992: 166). Reactions have changed, however. 4’33” has become a cultural touchstone. It is one of the most recognized and popular pieces of avantgarde music, a composition that is both widely “understood” and widely “misunderstood” (Gann 2010: 11). Rugoff is nevertheless mistaken when suggesting that Cage is the only person to do a silent piece. In the first instance, 4’33” has predecessors. Second, it is not silent. Third, there have been further explorations of “silence.” It matters where you listen. When it comes to the notated compositions of art music, 4’33” has cornered the market in muteness. It has proven difficult, conceptually, to move beyond Cage’s blank score. However, if we concentrate instead on record production we find many new silences. These recordings, moreover, introduce new theoretical ideas. In the following I will

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outline six types of silence, sounding out hushed music that has too often been ignored. I will commence with 4’33” and its art music precursors and descendants. Second, I will look at recorded silences that consciously homage Cage. Cage was not an advocate of recording process. As such, when 4’33” enters the realm of production his work is immediately transformed. Third, I will examine the use of silence to politicize record production. This usage reflects the fact that to be silenced, or to choose silence, can be a radical act; silence here constitutes a form of protest song. Fourth, I will examine memorial silence. These recorded silences are consciously marked off from the noise that surrounds them; they are a response to the amplification of the modern age. Fifth, I will address the ability of silence to reveal the characteristics of recording technologies. Silence has demonstrated both the ambiance of analog records and the “alien clarity” of digital carriers (Loder 1991: 94). Finally, I will attend to ways in which silence has become entangled with the economics of music royalties and copyright. Some people have questioned the right to author silence, while others have used silence to quietly generate funds. Silent records tell a secret history of sound recording. This history does, however, begin with the notated work of Cage.

Notated Silence The precursors to 4’33” are few in number. Moreover, each of these works is of a different character to Cage’s composition. They differ in their conceptual intentions and they differ in their relationship with sound. The earliest silent work documented is Alphonse Allais’s Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man from 1897. This punning composition consists of nine blank musical measures. In 1906, Charles Ives wrote Central Park in the Dark and its companion piece The Unanswered Question. In the first work “the strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness”; in the second they stand for “The Silences of the Druids—who Know, See and Hear Nothing” (Brooks 2007: 102). In both they are scored silently. These compositions are not mute, however. As the strings recede, other compositional elements take their place. Erwin Schulhoff’s Fünf Pittoresken (1919) is quieter. Its “In futurum” movement is made up solely of rests. Lastly, Yves Klein, whose invisible paintings were in the Hayward Exhibition, was also an invisible composer. His 40-minute Monotone-Silence Symphony from 1949 includes 20 silent minutes. 4’33” marks a revolution in the use of muteness. These predecessor works aim for silence; 4’33” does not. It was inspired by Cage’s visit to an anechoic chamber, a room that is insulated from external sound and which can absorb all reflective sound occurring within. The chamber revealed to Cage that “try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. . . . There is always something to see, something to hear” (Cage 1978: 8). He became fascinated

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by the ubiquity of sound and sought to dissolve the boundaries between intentional music and outside interference. Cage maintained, “If the music can accept ambient sounds and not be interrupted thereby, it’s a modern piece of music” (Davies 1997: 449). His composition is also influenced by Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings. It excited him that these works “caught whatever fell on them” (Cage 1978: 108) and he admired them as “mirrors of the air” (Cage 1990: 26). After seeing these paintings, Cage felt he must press on with the composition of 4’33”. He declared, “I must; otherwise I’m lagging, otherwise music is lagging” (Gann 2010: 160). 4’33” maximized the possibility of ambient intrusion: its 1952 premier was consciously located outdoors. Kyle Gann has noted, “In setting 4’33” for the first time in the sylvan deciduous forest of the Catskill mountains, Cage asked his audience to listen to the murmur of American nature as music” (ibid.: 28). Cage delineated what they heard: “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out” (ibid.: 3). He maintained, “The piece is not actually silent . . . it is full of sound, but sounds which I did not think of beforehand, which I hear for the first time the same time others hear” (ibid.: 191). Although Cage downplayed his agency in this respect, 4’33” was presented as his own composition: it was framed and it was performed. It was also copyrighted in his name. Within art music it has been hard to author new “silences”; Cage has claimed the idea of the blank composition. And so, while there have been successor works to 4’33”, these have not escaped its spell. György Ligeti, for example, created silences in homage. His Three Bagatelles for David Tudor (1961) name-checks the first performer of Cage’s piece. Two of these bagatelles are made up of a single bar that denotes a whole-note rest; the third includes a single piano note. Cage too found the influence of his most “important” work inescapable (Gann 2010: 15). He composed the musicfree 0’00” in 1961, a work that “does not depend on time” (Solomon 2002). It is also known as 4’33” No 2.

Phonographic Cageian Silence It is both ironic and fitting that the legacy of Cageian silence is stronger in record production than within notated composition. Cage had an aversion to sound recording. He was insistent that 4’33” should be performed only in person: “What really pleases me in that silent piece is that it can be played any time, but only comes alive when you play it. And each time you do, it is an experience of being very, very much alive” (Cage 1981: 153). Cage’s advocacy of the liveness of performance over the lifelessness of records falls into a tradition that is as old as sound recording itself. In

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1906, John Philip Sousa railed against “canned music,” maintaining that the playing of records would replace the playing of instruments: Under such conditions the tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. Singers will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink? (Sousa 1906: 281) Cage echoed these sentiments in a 1950 lecture: Would you like to join a society called Capitalists Inc.? . . . To join you must show you’ve destroyed at least one hundred records. . . . A lady from Texas said: I live in Texas. We have no music in Texas. The reason they’ve no music in Texas is because they have recordings. Remove the records from Texas and someone will learn to sing. (Cage 1978: 125–26) Cage was also a supporter of the anti-recording crusades of musicians’ unions. He endorsed the ban on recording sessions that was initiated in 1948 by James Petrillo, the head of the American Federation of Musicians. Petrillo’s principal objective was to safeguard the livelihoods of performing musicians, whose jobs were threatened by the increased use of recorded music in venues and by broadcasters. There was also a phenomenological aspect to union activity. The British musicians’ union, for example, campaigned under the slogan “keep music live,” implying in the process that sound recordings were dead. Cage saw a deadening hand in all recorded media, which is why the unions’ campaigns piqued his interest. Speaking in 1948, he revealed that “Since Petrillo’s recent ban on recordings took effect on the New Year, I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy of how normalizing the effect might have been had he had the power, and exerted it, to ban not only recordings, but radio, television, the newspapers, and Hollywood” (Kahn 1997: 568). And yet, despite these views, it is appropriate that record production has been the locus for Cage-inspired works. Sound recording was the object as well as the target of his practice. 4’33” has an unrealized predecessor. Speaking in 1948, at least three years ahead of the visit to the anechoic chamber, Cage detailed his plans for a completely silent piece (Gann 2010: 160). He wished “to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co” in the hope that they would record it onto discs (Kahn 1997: 571; Gann 2010: 128). Cage stated, “It will be 3 or 4-1/2 minutes long— those being the standard lengths of ‘canned’ music—and its title will be Silent Prayer” (ibid.). Descendant recorded silences are more closely aligned with this work than they are with 4’33”. The Muzak Corporation launched their format of programmed music in 1934. They consciously aimed to rob music of human character, electing to use unobtrusive instrumental recordings, which they “piped”

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into workplaces, transportation, and shopping centers with the aim of stimulating trade and retail. Jonathan Sterne has noted that “In order for there to be programmed music, music must already have become a thing—it must be lived through its commodity status” (1997: 45). Muzak thrived upon the tendency of sound recording to reify and commercialize music. By mid-century, the format was becoming increasingly pervasive (Gann 2010: 130–32). Cage sought to silence the Corporation’s output, at least for short periods, by offering them the use of Silent Prayer. The proposed lengths of his compositions corresponded with the contemporary duration of 10” and 12” shellac records, which the company was then using to broadcast its works. In the United States, the menace of mechanical music was becoming more widespread generally. It was in the mid-twentieth century that the jukebox rose to prominence. Following the repeal of Prohibition, the number in use grew rapidly, from about 25,000 in 1934 to quarter of a million by 1939 (Chanan 1995: 83). As well as transforming the market for recorded music, the jukebox altered its repertoire. Music became louder, more percussive, and electrified; rhythmic sounds were required for noisy meeting places (Osborne 2012b: 119). This prompted further campaigns against recordings. Cage itemized a news report from the New York Post, January 16, 1952: “Darling,” said a fresh to a coed, “they’re playing our song.” For the first time since a juke box has been installed in the Student Union of the University of Detroit, she heard him. The place was swinging way out to one of those new sides called “Three minutes of Silence.” That’s it—silence. The student puts his dime in and he takes his choice, either the 104 jump records on the big flashy juke box or on one of the three that play absolutely nothing, nothing but silence. (Gann 2010: 133–34) The idea of the silent jukebox lived on at Detroit University. In 1959 a group of students set up “Hush Records,” manufacturing their own silent discs as a means of combating the thud of rock ‘n’ roll. They also organized a “silent music recital,” for which they issued a blank souvenir program (Silent Music Recital 1960: 23). Despite these high art concepts, the students gave no credit to the inspiration of Rauschenberg or Cage. The popularity and newsworthiness of their schemes do nevertheless suggest the climate in which 4’33” began to receive greater accord. As the power of noisy rock ‘n’ roll records increased, so did the power of silence. It gained advocates and it gained resonance. The response from within popular music has been twofold. There have been artists who have defended the music’s uproar, witness Slade’s “Cum on Feel the Noise” (1973), the Damned’s “Noise, Noise, Noise” (1979), or AC/DC’s “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” (1980). Conversely, there have been recording artists who have aligned themselves with Cage and his dislike of sound recordings. This apparently contradictory behavior should

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not come as a surprise. One of the effects of the pervasiveness of recorded music is that, as per Silent Prayer, recordings have been the location for critiques of the form. Popular music is mass culture that reflects upon mass culture. Moreover, as Dave Laing has noted, many of the most pointed dismissals of popular music have been found “within popular music rather than between it and some more admirable artistic product” (1985: 15). Cage has been useful in this respect. He has been an idol for performers who wish to distinguish themselves from the mainstream. This is not to say that recording artists who have assumed his mantle have a deep commitment to or knowledge of his work. For example, there are bands that have nodded toward the composer by issuing silent recordings that last for 4’33”. This includes the Magnetic Fields, who in 1995 released a CD compilation of their first two albums, The Wayward Bus and Distant Magic Trees, bridging the gap between the two releases with dead air lasting this duration. In 2000, Covenant released a silent track of the same length on their album United States of Mind. However, the very act of creating a sound recording represents a misreading of 4’33”. This work is instead more closely aligned with Silent Prayer than with Cage’s performative ambient piece. The Covenant recording does nevertheless have a “keep music live” inspiration. It is titled “You Can Make Your Own Music.” Other recording artists who have paid homage to 4’33” have misrepresented Cage’s earnestness. Some have considered the work to be a prank, whereas Cage had been “afraid that my making a piece that had no sounds in it would appear as if I were making a joke”; he stressed, “I probably worked longer on my ‘silent’ piece than I worked on any other” (Gann 2010: 16). An example of a humorous reinterpretation of 4’33” is “(Silence)” by Ciccone Youth (an alias used by the alt-rock group Sonic Youth). This track was included on The Whitey Album (1989), distributed in the UK by the aptly named Mute records. The group joked that they had produced a “radio edit” of Cage’s work, indicated by the fact their recording lasts for 1’03” (The Whitey Album 1989). In doing so, they too drew their work closer to Silent Prayer than to 4’33”. Cage’s Muzak recording was planned for differing durations dependent on differing sizes of records. While these artists allude to 4’33”, they do not recompense Cage. They fail to credit him as the composer of their recorded silences. Covenant and the Magnetic Fields betray a lack of faith that such work can be authored: their silences bear no composer credits. “(Silence)” by Ciccone Youth is credited to the members of the band rather than to Cage. In fact, Frank Zappa is virtually alone in having produced a recorded version of 4’33” that is silent and credits Cage as its author. His interpretation appears on the Cage tribute album A Chance Operation (1993). This was one of Zappa’s final recordings, a poignant conclusion for an artist who spent much of his career pushing the boundaries of recording processes. In addition, there are versions of 4’33” that credit Cage, but which take liberties with his work. In 2002, Korm Plastics issued the CD compilation

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45’18”, which features four versions of 4’33” and a further five recordings that reference the piece. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth has another attempt at the work here, but uses the concept of an empty score to liberate his musicians to make “instantaneous and improvised music” (Gann 2010: 190). Other versions on the album, such as those by Keith Rowe and Pauline Oliveros, are quiet but not entirely silent. There are also versions that, contrary to Cage’s “live” music and Arcadian ideals, are focused on recording processes. The one by Alignment, for example, features the amplification of digital recording equipment that a listener would not normally hear. And yet this maneuver is also supportive of Cage’s work. He intended 4’33” as a framework in which to bring everyday sounds to life, believing these sounds would gain renewed focus if they were staged. Cage stated, “What we hear is determined by our own emptiness, our own receptivity; we receive to the extent we are empty to do so” (ibid.: 191). And so, just as 4’33” brings the ambient sounds of nature to the fore by situating them in a performance context, Alignment’s interpretation brings the “natural” sounds of the recording process to the fore by making them the focus of a recording. These sounds are usually more forcibly silenced than the sounds of nature, however. As Andy Hamilton has argued, a paradoxical aspect of the urge toward “realism” within sound recording is a belief that “the medium is insignificant, and should not intrude itself” (Hamilton 2003: 350). This is particularly the case within classical recording, which is dominated by a documentary ethos that suggests music should be heard as “originally performed” (ibid.: 351). And so, even if the noises of recording machinery are present during a performance, they will either be left unrecorded or be removed. This is not the only recording aesthetic, however. Popular music recording, as Hamilton notes, is less concerned with documenting a preexisting performance; it instead produces “an entirely new sound object” (ibid.: 353). Nevertheless, here too the “non-musical” noise of machines—whether the hum of recording equipment, the buzz of amplifiers and microphones, or the metallic squeaks that drum kits can produce—is usually absent from the final recording. Some artists do attempt a “natural” process by including the ambience of machinery as part of their sound mix. Nevertheless, so dominant is the aesthetic of noise reduction that any attempt to reverse it can only be self-conscious, an example of popular music’s “inauthentic authenticity” (Grossberg 1997: 225). Recording processes are in evidence in the most commercially successful version of 4’33”. Cage Against the Machine recorded the piece in 2010 with the aim of securing the Christmas number one in the UK singles chart. This project, contrary to Cage, finds humor in the work. The group’s name is a punning allusion to Rage Against the Machine, the band who had unwittingly gained the previous year’s Christmas number one via a similar campaign. Their comedic record captures the hum of equipment in a recording studio, along with the shuffling feet and bodily sounds of the performers (these background sounds also form the basis of a series of

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remixes of the recording). This media conscious version of 4’33” is indicative of another reason why such sounds have been included on recordings: they signify the anticipation of a performance, the literal “buzz” of machinery before the music starts. In this instance the performance never comes. The sounds illustrate its absence. As with the Rage Against the Machine campaign, the aim of this project was to thwart the “Capitalist Inc.” music of the talent show X Factor, which between 2004 and 2008 secured five successive Christmas number ones. Rage Against the Machine’s noisy “Killing in the Name” halted the sequence. The aim of the Cage Against the Machine song was to silence through “silence.” It performed less well, however, reaching number 21, while that year’s X Factor winner topped the charts. Cage had nevertheless secured his first hit, a significant marker of the public appetite for 4’33”.

Political Silence In the Cageian tradition, silence is viewed as a liberating force. In contrast, there are recording artists who use silence as a means of highlighting oppression. Throughout the twentieth century it was the physicality of records that rendered them susceptible to categorization and censorship. Records could be segregated via labeling practices, regulatory bodies could ban them, they could be smashed or burned by outraged citizens, and they could be withheld from distribution by protesting workers. At the same time, the physicality of recording formats provided a means for redress. Mute recordings were particularly useful in this respect. As with the performative instructions for 4’33”, a recording format provides a frame for a silent track. The silence is given a home, sequenced between other pieces of music and/or detailed on the label. It can make a statement. When it comes to political silence, the focus is not usually on sound production techniques, however. The listener is not directed toward the capture of silence or to ambient sounds. Instead, the focus is on what is absent: the missing music or words that are triggered in the mind. Mute protests have taken a number of forms. On some occasions the target has been a particular song. In 1979, the anarcho-punk band Crass opened the re-pressing of their album The Feeding of the 5000 with silence. Workers at an Irish pressing plant had refused to handle the original version due to the content of the track “Reality Asylum,” which accuses Jesus of being a rapist, a gravedigger, and a life-fucker. When their distribution company requested an edited recording, Crass gave them two minutes of nothing, titling the piece “The Sound of Free Speech” (Berger 2006: 116–17). On other occasions, the target has been an entire genre of music. The EDM act Orbital responded to the implementation of the UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in 1994. This legislation included “Powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave” (s. 63). It was deliberately focused

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upon dance music, attacking music “wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” (s. 63(1)(b)). Orbital’s first release following the Act was the single “Are We Here?” which includes a silent “Criminal Justice Bill?” remix. This trick was reprised in 2002, when the band Slum Village spoke silently about the censorship of all popular music, their target being the Parents Music Resource Center campaign to demarcate records with stickers that warn of “explicit” content. The band self-censored their own album Trinity due to its track “Silent (Dirty),” which features “the dirtiest fifteen seconds of utter silence . . . ever not heard” (Osborne 2012a). Silence has also been used to campaign for peace. The title track of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On is timed at 0’00” (providing an echo of Cage’s 4’33” No 2). Sly Stone included this soundless and duration-free track because he “felt there should be no riots” (Dakss 1999). His sentiments are endorsed in John Lennon’s “Nutopian National Anthem,” a three-second silent track on Mind Games (1973). It is intended as the theme song for the Lennons’ conceptual country, Nutopia; a place with no borders, no leaders, and no laws (“other than cosmic”), which has a white flag as its emblem (Lennon and Ono 1973). Taking a different vein, there is a series of silent records that passes comment on political leaders. John Denver’s “The Ballad of Richard Nixon” from Rhymes and Reasons (1969) is six seconds of silence. It provides a deliberate recall of Denver’s cover version of Tom Paxton’s “The Ballad of Spiro Agnew,” which occurs earlier on the same album. The two politicians had recently been elected as president and vice president of the United States. The Agnew composition has one line: “I’ll sing you a song of Spiro Agnew, and all the things he has done.” The recording then trails off, implying that the politician has done nothing. The silent Nixon recording suggests that the president has done even less. Silence would later be used humorously as a means of critiquing neoliberalism and right-wing politics. In 1981, Stiff Records issued The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan, an album that consists of two sides of blank vinyl. This record influenced Cherry Red’s The Compassion and Humanity of Margaret Thatcher (2008), a box set featuring a blank tape and a blank videocassette. Providing further evidence that this joke can be expanded across different media, David King recently self-published the book Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration (2016). This work about the 45th US president features nothing but blank pages.

Memorial Silence Political silence often indicates a lack of respect. Memorial silence, in contrast, is reverential. The practice of marking two minutes of silence is a relatively modern phenomenon and it is indebted to noise.

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The increased mechanistic volume of everyday life prompted the Italian futurist artist Luigo Russolo to publish Art of Noises in 1913 (1986 [1913]). The following year witnessed the outbreak of the First World War. Russolo had thrilled at the musicality of combat, quoting the poet Filippo Marinetti in his text: “ZANG-TOUMB-TOUMB war noises orchestra blown beneath a note of silence hanging in full sky captive golden balloon controlling the fire” (ibid.: 26). The Great War amplified these noises and, for the first time, recording technology was able to preserve them. The Gramophone Company recorded a bombardment in 1918 and issued it for sale to the public. It was advertised as a “marvellous record” offering an “actual reproduction of the screaming and whistling of gas shells” (An Historic Gramophone Record 1918). It was because life and death had become so noisy that silence offered the best means of contemplation and withdrawal. The first two-minute silence occurred in Cape Town, South Africa, toward the end of the war. This practice was adopted in London for the first anniversary of the Armistice in 1919; George V wrote to The Times expressing “desire and hope that at the hour when the Armistice came into force . . . there may be, for the brief space of two minutes, a complete suspension of all our normal activities” (Crook 2008). At the 1920 Armistice, Columbia Graphophone recorded the burial of the Unknown Soldier, the first electric recording to be commercially released. Recordings of the two-minute silence were also made, but for broadcast purposes only. It was only when Jonty Semper issued Kenotaphion in 2001 that they were gathered on record. His compilation features 81 two-minute silences, recorded either on Armistice Day or on Remembrance Sunday. The first dates from 1929; the last from the millennium. The interest of these documentary “silences” lies in the fact that they are not silent. We can hear the sounds of nature and the sounds of recording processes. David Toop notes: In 1986, two pigeons flapped their wings. In 1988 a baby was crying, a child coughed, voices were raised and tape deterioration overlaid a patina of decay that suggests 19th rather than late 20th century. In 2000, seagulls flew overhead and a strange absence of lower frequencies emphasised the vibrato in Big Ben’s tolling strokes. (2004: 42) As the Semper release exemplifies, memorial silences are best captured on albums. His compilation illustrates the variety of silences. Elsewhere, the album format allows these commemorations to assume their proper form. They mark out a space among a general flow of noise. There have been a number of memorials. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s 1968 album Volume 3: A Child’s Guide to Good & Evil concludes with “Anniversary of World War III,” which pays silent tribute for two minutes. In the following year, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released the first of their silent recordings, “Two Minutes of Silence,” on Unfinished Music No. 2. This track bears the artists’ usual mix of solipsism and global politics. It marks the miscarriage of their child as well as being a memoriam

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for “all violence and death” (Osborne 2012a). It comes halfway through side two, sandwiched between a recording of the deceased baby’s heartbeat and a recording of the Lennons listening to the radio. In 1988, Soundgarden issued their own “One Minute of Silence” on Ultramega OK, claiming they wanted to do a “heavy metal version” of the “Lennon arrangement” (True 1989: 10). Crass’s “They’ve Got a Bomb” from The Feeding of the 5000, meanwhile, contains a prolonged period of silence within the song, included so listeners can “consider the reality of nuclear war” (Berger 2006: 118). The bombing of the Twin Towers in New York brought forth its own silences, among them Soulfly’s “9.11.01,” released in 2002 on their album 3. In each of these instances the recording artists are recognizing the links between noise and human suffering. Although their work does not explicitly reference Cage, he too drew upon this correspondence. As Douglas Kahn has argued, Silent Prayer is surely inspired by Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, which features a chapter called “Silence” followed by one called “Prayer.” Huxley’s work is a compendium of world beliefs, but in the Silence chapter he breaks from quotations to offer his own state of the nation’s address: The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire—we hold the history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated in doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. (2009 [1945]: 218–19). As Kahn notes, if Cage required the “spiritual impetus or moral justification to silence any aspect of the mass media,” he would surely find it here (1997: 575).

Technical Silence Memorial silence offers a critique of technological noise. There is, however, a separate tradition of preservative silence that highlights the essence of recording technologies. Some of these “silences” are unintentionally revelatory, while others are the conscious creation of recording artists. What is common about them is that they examine the relationship between

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recordings and time. The promise of sound recording was that it would immortalize sound. Recordings have nevertheless proven difficult to preserve. Death has haunted phonographic reveries. The first article about sound recording declared, “certainly nothing can be conceived more likely to create the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead” (A Wonderful Invention 1877: 304). Thomas Edison promised an epitaph that would last through the ages: “This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words: and, centuries after you have crumbled into dust, may repeat every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word” (The Phonograph and the Microphone 1878: 114). Toop has suggested that a record’s groove is like the writing on a gravestone, a supposedly permanent memorial. He has stated, “this black object is a fantastic metaphor for death. . . . It has an inscription, just like a tomb” (2005). The phonograph’s inscriptions have nevertheless been eroded with time. Edison’s original tinfoil recordings lasted only a few plays. Shellac and vinyl offered improvements upon this format, but they too have proven susceptible to aging processes. As they grow older, the noise of the recording format rises against the sounds of the music. The situation is more pronounced when there is no music. Silent analogue recordings do not remain silent. For some silent record makers this has posed a problem. The Detroit students behind Hush Records discovered that the records they put in their Student Union jukebox “were played so often they became noisy,” thus negating their silent objective (Silent Music Recital 1960: 23). Others have found pleasure in the patina. Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover (1985) is deliberately issued sleeveless so the disc can accumulate damage and dust. The recording has passages where Marclay DJs with old and worn records, as well as passages with no music at all. As the record ages it becomes difficult to tell which are its own scratches and which come from other discs. Marclay, like Cage, wants to create a modern form of music; he is in search of ambient sound. He has not sought his ambiance within a rural idyll, however, but has turned instead to the organic sounds of technology. For Marclay, When a record skips or pops or we hear the surface noise, we try very hard to make an abstraction of it so it doesn’t disrupt the musical flow. I try to make people aware of these imperfections, and accept them as music; the recording is a sort of illusion while the scratch on the record is more real. (Ferguson 2003: 41) Jio Shimizu reinforces this argument with his version of 4’33” on the 45’18” compilation. It focuses on the analog noise of a “silent” record. His work differs from Marclay’s, however, in that he uses the pristine reproduction of the CD format to highlight the “natural” sounds of an analog record.

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Digital recording and reproduction have brought forth new explorations of silence. Although the claim to offer “perfect sound forever” has proven untenable, the CD has provided a longer-lasting type of quietude (Milner 2009). It has been more faithful than analog silence in that it is less susceptible to degradation, but also more artificial as it produces a hush that has no equivalent in everyday life. This phenomenon has not passed unnoticed. Released in 1994, just as the CD was becoming the leading sales format, the Melvins’s album Prick includes the track “Pure Digital Silence.” It is introduced by a member of the band: “and now, for your listening pleasure, a few moments of pure . . . digital . . . silence!” More generally, the CD era brought forth a boom in silent recordings. As well as offering a monolithic form of silence, the CD gave artists more time in which to shut up. The 30-track self-titled album by Fantômas (1998), for example, includes four seconds of silence, rather than recording any music for the “unlucky” track 13. Echoing this device, Leila Bela’s sixty-five-track CD, Angra Manyu (2002) also includes a four-second silence, which is titled “Pregnant Pause . . . Intermission.” Curiously, a number of CD silences owe their existence to the earlier vinyl format. Faced with the seventy-minute running time of the CD, many performers struggled to fill it. They preferred instead to issue recordings that lasted the shorter duration of an analog LP. Some artists toyed with the new format, however, burying recordings within the empty expanses of the digital carrier. These hidden tracks, such as Sigur Rós’s “Rukrym” (1997) or Nirvana’s “Endless Nameless” (1992), are preceded by vast passages of silence, which are sometimes calibrated into a multitude of empty tracks. Elsewhere, artists have chosen to replicate the gap in listening that comes between side one and side two of an LP. Robert Wyatt’s CD Cuckooland (2003) includes 30 seconds of silence at its halfway point. Conversely, the silence of the vinyl track “Magic Window,” issued by Boards of Canada on Geogaddi (2002), owes its existence to the CD. It is listed as occupying the sixth side of the vinyl package, but rather than being represented with an analog groove, this disc contains a drawing of a nuclear family. Without its CD equivalent, which plays soundlessly for 1’46”, it is difficult to know if the unplayable vinyl version could be classified as silent.

Economic Silence The CD prompted a rush of silent recordings; other digital formats have raised questions about the public’s appetite for quiet. The uproar is different to that first encountered by 4’33”, however. Cage’s work caused outrage on aesthetic grounds. The concern more recently has been with silent income. Consumers have long paid for silent records, but these recordings have always been accompanied by something extra. The silent track will be just

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one of a number of recordings on a single, LP or CD. It will have a label and a sleeve. It will therefore have a context, akin to the performative framework that Cage stipulated for 4’33”. Digital downloading works differently. Most tracks are paid for on an individual basis and the accompanying materials are scant. The meaning of many silent tracks is therefore lost just as the question of economics is raised. Consumers have asked why they should pay for silent recordings; they have also wondered who gets paid. This issue was highlighted by bloggers who purchased downloads of “(Silence)” by Ciconne Youth: We’re amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 cents for a song full o’ nothing, we’re even more amused by the fact that said track contains the usual digital rights management code to prevent you from playing it on any unauthorized systems. And the most amusing thing of all, of course, is that the song has a [free] thirty-second preview. (Silber 2004) Following up on this post, Brian Flemming created a mashup from all the silent tracks he could purchase on iTunes. In making it available he satirized intellectual property laws: “This remix is governed by a strict copyright. I would have put that Palladium DRM shit all up on it if I knew how to do that. In fact, the full title of the song is ‘Silence (remix) 2004 BRIAN FLEMMING. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED’” (Flemming 2004). The turn to streaming platforms has lessened these concerns, as the silent tracks on this format are not paid for individually. Streaming has, nevertheless, added its own dimension to the economics of silence: copyright income is the inspiration for creating silent works. The pioneers in this respect were Vulfpeck, who released their album Sleepify in 2014. They realized that when a track is listened to for more than 30 seconds on Spotify a royalty is generated. Taking advantage of this, their album features ten silent tracks, each of which lasts for just over half a minute. Vulfpeck encouraged their fans to stream these songs on repeat “while they sleep” with the aim of generating enough royalties to fund a tour (Jonze 2014). This ruse managed to generate $20,000. It was swiftly copied by Michelle Shocked, whose Inaudible Woman (2014) also had the aim of generating tour funds. Shocked added two twists. One was that this “silent” recording contains a high-pitched whistle audible only to dogs (as with The Beatles’s inclusion of a dog whistle on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band this action is questionable: these whistles are beyond the frequency range of all commercially available recording formats). In addition, many of the tracks are titled after male music industry executives, thus commenting on the silencing of women within the profession. Three earlier recordings address issues of censorship, ownership, and silence head on. In 1987, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAMs) issued the original version of their album, 1987: What the Fuck is Going On? This record takes full advantage of digital sampling technology, which

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225

was then coming into vogue. It “illegally” appropriates a number of other records, including “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. Following its release, the group received a cease-and-desist letter from the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, leading to the withdrawal of the album. They responded by re-issuing the record with the copyright-infringing samples removed. This updated version, 1987: The JAMs 45 Edits, features 25 minutes of music accompanied by long passages of silence. Its sleevenotes explain how to restore the missing samples: “you will need three wind-up record decks, a pile of selected discs, one t.v. set and a video machine loaded with a cassette of edited highlights of last week’s Top of the Pops.” They also contain a warning: We must inform you that to attempt any of the above in the presence of two or more paying or non-paying people could be construed as a public performance. If the premises that you are in do not have a music license you will be infringing the copyright laws of the United Kingdom and legal action may be taken against you. Under no circumstances must your performance be recorded in any form. (JAMs 1987) The JAMs were later known as the Kopyright Liberation Front, providing some indication that the politics of ownership were their target from the start. Working in a similar manner, Paul Chivers (AKA Ramjac) released “Everything The Beatles Never Did” in 2011. This silent download lasts for 8’22”, the length of the longest Beatles recording, “Revolution 9.” It retails at US$226, working out at $1 for every track The Beatles released (the streaming version costs nothing), and comes with a transparent sleeve that erases The Beatles’s 13 album covers. This recording is the companion piece to Ramjac’s “All Together Now—Everything The Beatles Ever Did,” an audible mashup of the entire Beatles catalog, which also lasts for 8’22”. This record was removed from circulation due to copyright infringement. These recordings concern the right to appropriate music. The final case addresses the right to own silence. In 2001, Mike Batt’s group the Planets released Classical Graffiti. This recording includes variations on several classical themes, each of which is legally credited to Batt via his arrangements of these public domain works. It also features “A One Minute Silence,” which Batt registered as being composed by Mike Batt/John Cage. This punning credit led to a dispute with Cage’s publishers, Peters Edition, who claimed sole ownership of the work. A settlement was made amid much fanfare. Batt later claimed this was a hoax, stating that Peters Edition “had no real claim but he and the publisher decided to use opportunity to publicise the issue of copyright” (Wombles Composer Mike Batt’s Legal Row ‘A Scam’ 2010). The enactment of a musicological comparison, in which the two works were performed in sequence, would also suggest the promotional nature of this escapade. Nevertheless, it would seem as though the publishers had the

226 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

last laugh. A look at a copyright database will reveal that “A One Minute’s Silence” is now credited to Cage alone. This is unusual. I have detailed many recorded “silences” in this chapter, but Cage is rarely credited as being their author. This is perhaps fitting, as a recorded silence is inherently different to a performed silence. As such, even the silences that pointedly homage 4’33” are doing something new with Cage’s idea, if only through a misreading of his intentions. Many of the works in the other traditions do not even use Cage as a reference point. In their quiet manner all of these “silent” records have much to say. They provide a counterpoint to and a commentary on their more voluble recorded counterparts. Any history of sound recording is incomplete if it fails to address the issues of non-sound recording and of the recorded commentary upon “silence.” Why, then, are these recordings not more widely known? Perhaps it is because few people have heard them.

Bibliography “An Historic Gramophone Record.” 1918. Talking Machine News and Side Lines. November, 1918: 298. “A Wonderful Invention—Speech Capable of Indefinite Repetition from Automatic Records.” 1877. Scientific American, November 17, 1877. Berger, George. 2006. The Story of Crass. London: Omnibus Press. Brooks, William. 2007. “Pragmatics of Silence.” In Silence, Music, Silent Music, edited by Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor, 97–126. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brown, Mark. 2012. “Haywards Gallery’s Invisible Show: ‘The Best Exhibition You’ll Never See.’” Guardian, May 18, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2012/may/18/hayward-gallery-invisible-show (accessed May 18, 2012). Cage, John. 1978. Silence: Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars. Cage, John. 1981. For the Birds. London: Marion Boyars. Cage, John. 1990. I-VI. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chanan, Michael. 1995. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music. London and New York: Verso. Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. 1994. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1994/33/contents Crook, Lionel. 2008. “The Two Minutes Silence.” South African Legion, November 23. http://www.salegion.co.za/two-minutes-silence.html (accessed September 29, 2016). Dakss, Jonathan. 1999. “My Weekend with Sly Stone.” www.slyfamstone.com/ weekend.html (accessed May 30, 1999). Davies, Stephen. 1997. “John Cage’s 4’33”: Is it Music?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (4): 448–62. Ferguson, Russell. 2003. “The Variety of Din.” In Christian Marclay, edited by J. Hyun, 19–51. Los Angeles: UCLA Hammer Museum. Flemming, Brian. 2004. “Silence (Remix).” Slumdance.com. http://www. slumdance.com/blogs/brian_flemming/archives/000619.html (accessed September 30, 2012).

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Gann, Kyle. 2010. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1997. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Hamilton, Andy. 2003. “The Art of Recording and the Aesthetics of Perfection.” British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (4): 345–62. Huxley, Aldous. 2009 [1945]. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins. Jonze, Tim. 2014. “How to Make Money from Spotify by Streaming Silence.” Guardian, March 19, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/ musicblog/2014/mar/19/spotify-streaming-silence-vulpeck-make-money (accessed September 29, 2016). JAMs. 1987. 1987: The JAMs 45 Edits [sleevenotes]. KLF Communications. JAMS 25T. Kahn, Douglas. 1997. “John Cage: Silence and Silencing.” The Musical Quarterly 81 (4): 556–98. King, David. 2016. Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration. CreateSpace Independent Publishing. Laing, David. 1985. One Chord Wonders. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lennon, John, and Yoko Ono. 1973. “Declaration of Nutopia.” Mind Games [sleevenotes]. Apple Records. PCS 7165. Loder, Kurt. 1991. “Songs Lasting Three Minutes—and Forever.” Rolling Stone, November 28, 1991. Milner, Greg. 2009. Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music. London: Granta. Osborne, Richard. 2012a. “The Sounds of Silence.” New Statesman, August 21, 2012. http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2012/08/soundssilence (accessed August 21, 2012). Osborne, Richard. 2012b. Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record. Aldershot: Ashgate. “The Phonograph and the Microphone.” 1878. Illustrated London News, August 3, 1878. Revill, David. 1992. The Roaring Silence: John Cage; A Life. New York: Arcade. Russolo, Luigi. 1986 [1913]. The Art of Noises, translated by Barclay Brown. New York: Pendragon Press. Silber, Arthur. 2004. “The Sounds of Silence—And the Meaning of Nothing.” History News Network, February 9, 2004. http://time.hnn.us/blog/3427 (accessed September 29, 2016). “Silent Music Recital.” 1960. Sydney Morning Herald, January 10, 1960. Solomon, Larry J. 2002. “The Sounds of Silence: John Cage and 4’33”.” http:// solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm (accessed September 28, 2016). Sousa, John Philip. 1906. “The Menace of Mechanical Music.” Appleton’s Magazine 8: 278–84. Sterne, Jonathan. 1997. “Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectronics of Commercial Space.” Ethnomusicology 41 (1): 22–50. Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Toop, David. 2004. Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory. London: Serpent’s Tail. Toop, David. 2005. “Deep in the Groove.” Talk given at the Barbican, London, March 9.

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True, Everett. 1989. “Soundgarden: The Mutate Gallery.” Melody Maker, June 10, 1989. “The Whitey Album.” 1989. Sonicyouth.com. http://www.sonicyouth.com/ mustang/lp/lp7.html (accessed January 23, 2017). “Wombles Composer Mike Batt’s Legal Row ‘A Scam’.” 2010. BBC News, December 9, 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englandhampshire-11964995 (accessed September 29, 2016).

PA R T S I X

Virtuality and Online Production

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Intermixtuality: Case Studies in Online Music (Re)production Samantha Bennett

Introduction This chapter explores remix practice within online music communities, specifically the ways in which participants engage with remix contests and mix stems. In “The Listener as Remixer,” I defined mix stems as, “unlike a full mono or stereo master recording, a mix stem is a sub-group, compiled of individual instrumental or vocal recordings derived from the original multi track recordings” (Bennett 2016). Online music (re)production and reception is facilitated via competitions and other contexts whereby mix stems are made available by artists for the purposes of participatory remixing. In order to exemplify what I have previously defined as a virtual production practice (ibid.), I critically examine four case studies: Deadmau5’ “SOFI Needs a Ladder” (2010), REM’s “It Happened Today” (2011), Bon Iver’s “Holocene” (2012), and Skrillex and Damian Marley’s “Make It Bun Dem” (2012). As Johnson noted, most studies in online communities of practice take a case study form (2001: 52), which is also a robust and preferred methodology in emergent studies of online music communities (Jarvenpaa and Lang 2011; Pinch and Athanasiades 2012; Michielse 2013). The ways in which online music communities form, and their various modes of practice, have been explored from a range of scholarly angles and originate from research into “real world” communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). This chapter builds on research focused on online communities of practice, specifically studies in online music

232 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

communities, music production and reception, music and virtuality (Whiteley and Rambarran 2016), as well as intertextuality in recorded popular music (Lacasse 2000). Broadly speaking, this chapter contributes to the field recently referred to as phonomusicology (Cottrell 2010) in that it offers new ways of thinking about online music production in the context of recorded music. In an early study, Preece et al. suggested that purpose, software environment, governance structure, member demographic and size, all “shape the character” (2003: 1023) of online communities. Plant offered a taxonomy of online communities, recognizing differences in participation depending on whether the community was regulated, for- or non-profit, open or closed (2004: 55–61). In online music communities, such structures are apparent, although many are “shell-like” in nature and allow considerable flexibility for members. One such example is that of ACIDplanet, a Sony-owned website and software application for online music collaboration activities. ACIDplanet’s community is diverse, attracting casual users, amateur and professional remixers, as well as enthusiasts. In an extensive online case study of ACIDplanet, for example, Pinch and Athanasiades (2012) explored user identity, collaboration, community, and reviewing of music in 35 participants. They found that online music may “radically [reconfigure] the ways musicians can form identities” and allocate “status” (2012: 499). Furthermore, they found considerable activity within the user-driven environment of ACIDplanet while also presenting evidence that strictly governed online music remix sites fail to gain traction (ibid.: 496). In other words, the more flexible and open the online remix community, the more attractive it appears to be with users. The study of online music fan communities is still in its infancy, with online ethnographies of social media engagement dominating the literature (Jones 2000 and 2002; Baym 2007; Bennett 2012). Rob Cover offered a typology for analyzing remix texts, focusing on YouTube videos. Building on Lawrence Lessig’s work (2008), Cover (2013) studied the intertextual roots and narratives of what he called “interactive intertexts.” This study is, however, more useful for the analysis of video “mashups” as opposed to music. Directly relevant to this chapter, Jarvenpaa and Lang focused on structural aspects of online music communities in their examination of both ccMixter and remix.nin.com. While recognizing the importance of boundaries and boundary management in the production of content of both sites, they also acknowledge the “unprecedented creativity” (2011: 440) facilitated by such fora. Michielse (2013) studied participants in the Indaba Music community. In focusing on discussion threads and conducting participant interviews, Michielse considered the “fluency,” “flexibility,” and “adaptability” to different sets of musical circumstances as central to online remix practice. Indeed, three distinct sites of online music production practice have emerged whereby the remix is the point of focus: creative commons sites, such as ccMixter and Freesound, which allow users access to copyright-free music, usually free of charge; dedicated remix competition and contest host sites, such as Indaba Music and Beatport, which allow users to download stems and submit finished remixes; and direct

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artist-to-fan contexts whereby the artist releases stems from their website and creates a portal for the submission of completed remixes. As established in earlier work, there are multiple similarities between professional and amateur, “real world” and virtual remixing practices (Bennett 2016). Studies as to the role of the remixer are, however, focused almost entirely on the professional domain. Zak (2001), Théberge (2001), and Cunningham (1998) all recognize the critical role of the mixer in commercial record production. Hugill (2008) goes further to suggest “the mixer is central” to the entire recorded music production process. Later, Izhaki (2007) considered the presence of stem mixing in professional record production. However, little is known about the demographics engaged with online remixing or, indeed, the “profile” of the online remixer. Such practice is part of a wider form of virtual artistic engagement, or as Duckworth termed the “interactive artistic experience” (2003: 254), that may constitute fandom, music technology engagement, and/or general music community participation. What is clear about online remix practice is the vast quantity of remixes produced as well as the presence of remix culture in a multitude of online fora. Ultimately, remixes are intertexts, and this is an area worth exploring further. Intertextuality and intertextual practice has a long history, particularly in literature (Genette 1982; Clayton and Rothstein 1991; Stewart 1989). In popular music, studies of intertextuality—to include those focusing on remixes and remix culture—are broad. From sampling and allusion through quotation, satire, and pastiche, intertextuality constitutes a multitude of subcategories, as has been extensively explored by Lacasse (2000). Lacasse considers hypotexts as models for later texts and hypertexts as texts based on earlier texts. He refers to remixes using these terminologies whereby a hypotext is the original recording, and where the hypertext is the remix or adaptation of the hypotext (2000: 48). Accounts of intertextual practices often focus on sampling (Goodwin 1990; Beadle 1993) or, more recently, on sample-based genres such as mashup (Grobelny 2008; Navas 2010; Sinnreich 2010). However, intertextual practice exclusively in the virtual realm has only recently been acknowledged as a site of scholarly enquiry (Cover 2013). Earlier in this emergent discourse, both Lacasse (2000) and Taylor (2001) identified the implications of interactive remixing from authorship and reception perspectives: Lacasse recognized the potential of interactive remixing at the turn of the millennium, citing Peter Gabriel’s “Digging in the Dirt” on CD-ROM as a key example (2000: 50), while Taylor recognized the emergence of fan engagement with remixing (2001: 20). Online remix (re)production practice is so distinctive from prior understandings of what a remixer does—and, indeed, what a remix is—that I believe it deserves its own term. I call this practice intermixtuality, since while there is a clear presence of what Lacasse (2000) called the original hypotext (that being, the cohesive, whole single from which the stems derived), the mixes created by online remixers are not born from this hypotext (single), but from already separated fragments, or hypertexts derived from the multitrack mix.

234 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

This chapter explores four key questions: ●

What elements of a cohesive multitrack recording or hypotext are concealed, but later revealed when presented as mix stems or hypertexts?

●

How do online remixers engage and interact with mix stems and remix contests?

●

How, and to what extent, do artists engage fans via the music production process?

●

What are the implications in terms of online music (re)production and intermixtuality?

Each case study example will now be dealt with in turn, to include focus on the circumstances surrounding each remix competition or context and an aural examination of the stem components. These study sections will address the first of the four aforementioned questions before the remaining questions are addressed via a critical discussion on online production and reception.

Deadmau5—“SOFI Needs a Ladder” (2010) This case study focuses on the stem release of “SOFI Needs a Ladder” by US EDM producer Deadmau5. In 2010, Deadmau5 held a remix competition in conjunction with creative commons sites Acapellas4All and Beatport. Four stems were packaged together for a price of $3.99, available to download for a limited two-week time period. The competition was billed as “The Ultimate Remix Challenge” with a big prize—an opening slot DJ’ing at a Deadmau5 concert, an official release on Deadmau5’ Mau5trap label, headphones, Beatport credit, and a “bag of swag” with undisclosed contents. A four-stage competition process was held, with a two-week download period between September 21 and October 12, a two-week upload phase between September 28 and October 11, a two-week voting phase between October 12 and October 26, and then a semi-final phase between November 9 and November 18 whereby 10 remixes were performed live in front of judges including Deadmau5 himself. The “grand prize winner” was chosen and announced by Deadmau5 on November 23, meaning the entire remix competition process spanned more than two months. While four individual stems were released, each stem is a composite of multiple components of the original recording and processing. In other words, the stems do not feature single tracks of single instruments but rather groups of compiled instruments and production, inclusive of dynamics and time-based signal processing. Additionally, each individual stem was released at the same length (6:41) as the original single. Since not all musical phrases begin at 0:00,

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235

Table 13.1 Mix stem organisation in Deadmau5’ “SOFI Needs a Ladder” Stem No.

Stem Name

1

SNALAcapella

2

SNALBass

3

SNALSynth

4

SNALDrums

this suggests an artistʼs intention for the stems to be aligned to the beginning of a digital audio workstation (DAW) session in the first instance. This is significant, since the idea of a remix is not to simply recreate the identical length of the original recording, but to transform it in some way. SNALAcapella, for example, is presented as a completely “produced” composite vocal stem with multiple vocal recordings, as well as audible compression, reverb, and delay. Furthermore, SNALAcapella does not sound until 1:33; the multiple silences throughout the stem are commensurate with the vocal positioning in the original recording. SNALBass features not only the synthesized, programmed bass-like element, but also a range of synthesized percussive trills and stabs consistent with glitch, or what Cascone called “post digital aesthetics,” specifically “the aesthetics of failure” (2000: 12). SNALSynth also features a synthesis line with all its production intact. Beginning at 0:05, the repetitive note is initially presented awash with reverb featuring an infinite decay; then as the reverb is manually wound out of the track, it is slowly “revealed” to be a single note. Almost as soon as the note is exposed, the reverb is slowly wound back in again, the entire rotation lasting until 1:05 and recurring twice later in the stem. SNALDrums is also compiled from multiple instrument tracks including an apparently natural snare drum, programmed drum elements, as well as an extended breathy vocal phrase. Once again, all these elements retain their dynamics processing. Presenting the stems in this way ensures the remixer cannot separate many of the processed or original production aspects away from the original recordings or programmed elements.

REM—“It Happened Today” (2011) On February 7, 2011, US rock group REM released stems from their single “It Happened Today” via their official website, REM HQ. This remix event was not a competition context; REM’s producer Jacknife Lee simply stated: “Right from the early stages of recording this song in New Orleans Michael [Stipe] wanted to share the files with people to hear their different ideas and versions. So here they are” (R.E.M.HQ 2011).

236 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

A link to a folder entitled “REM AIF FILES” containing no less than 126 AIFF files—as well as another folder entitled “ADDITIONAL AUDIO” containing a further 69 AIFFs—followed Jacknife Lee’s announcement; the entire stem release totaled 195 audio files.

Table 13.2 Contents of “REM AIF FILES” folder in REM’s “It Happened Today” Stem No.

Stem Name

Stem No.

Stem Name

1

ACOSUTIC GTR BRIDGE 2.aiff

64

JOEL BV BRIDGE 3.aiff

2

ACOSUTIC GTR BRIDGE 3.aiff

65

JOEL BV BRIDGE 4.aiff

3

ACOSUTIC GTR BRIDGE 4.aiff

66

KIK SNR BRIDGE 1.aiff

4

ACOSUTIC GTR BRIDGE 5.aiff

67

KIK SNR BRIDGE 2.aiff

5

ACOSUTIC GTR BRIDGE 6.aiff

68

KIK SNR BRIDGE 3.aiff

6

ACOSUTIC GTR BRIDGE.aiff

69

KIK SNR BRIDGE 4.aiff

7

ACOSUTIC GTR CHORUS 2.aiff

70

KIK SNR OUTRO.aiff

8

ACOSUTIC GTR CHORUS..aiff

71

LEADVOX BRIDGE 1.aiff

9

ACOSUTIC GTR OUTRO.aiff

72

LEADVOX BRIDGE 2.aiff

10

ACOSUTIC GTR VERSE 1.aiff

73

LEADVOX BRIDGE 3.aiff

11

ACOSUTIC GTR VERSE 2.aiff

74

LEADVOX BRIDGE 4.aiff

12

BACKGRND VOX 3.aiff

75

LEADVOX CHORUS 2.aiff

13

BACKGRND VOX BRIDGE 2.aiff

76

LEADVOX CHORUS..aiff

14

BACKGRND VOX BRIDGE 3.aiff

77

LEADVOX VERSE 2.aiff

15

BACKGRND VOX BRIDGE 4.aiff

78

LEADVOX VERSE..aiff

16

BACKGRND VOX BRIDGE 5.aiff

79

MALLETS BRIDGE 2.aiff

17

BACKGRND VOX BRIDGE 6.aiff

80

MALLETS BRIDGE 3.aiff

18

BACKGRND VOX BRIDGE.aiff

81

MALLETS BRIDGE 4.aiff

19

BACKGRND VOX CHORUS 2.aiff

82

MALLETS BRIDGE 5.aiff

20

BACKGRND VOX CHORUS..aiff

83

MALLETS BRIDGE 6.aiff

21

BASS BRIDGE.aiff

84

MALLETS BRIDGE.aiff

22

BASS BRIDGE 2.aiff

85

MALLETS CHORUS.aiff

23

BASS BRIDGE 3.aiff

86

MALLETS OUTRO.aiff

24

BASS BRIDGE 4.aiff

87

MANDOLIN BRIDGE 2.aiff

25

BASS BRIDGE 5.aiff

88

MANDOLIN BRIDGE 3.aiff

237

INTERMIXTUALITY

Table 13.2 (Continued) Stem No.

Stem Name

Stem No.

Stem Name

26

BASS DRUM BRIDGE 2.aiff

89

MANDOLIN BRIDGE 4.aiff

27

BASS DRUM BRIDGE 3.aiff

90

MANDOLIN BRIDGE 5.aiff

28

BASS DRUM BRIDGE 4.aiff

91

MANDOLIN BRIDGE 6.aiff

29

BASS DRUM BRIDGE 5.aiff

92

MANDOLIN BRIDGE.aiff

30

BASS DRUM BRIDGE 6.aiff

93

MANDOLIN CHORUS 2.aiff

31

BASS DRUM BRIDGE.aiff

94

MANDOLIN CHORUS..aiff

32

BASS DRUM CHORUS 2.aiff

95

MANDOLIN OUTRO.aiff

33

BASS DRUM CHORUS..aiff

96

MANDOLIN VERSE 2.aiff

34

BASS DRUM OUTRO.aiff

97

PERC BRIDGE 2.aiff

35

BASS DRUM VERSE 1.aiff

98

PERC BRIDGE 3.aiff

36

BASS DRUM VERSE 2.aiff

99

PERC BRIDGE 4.aiff

37

BASS OUTRO.aiff

100

PERC BRIDGE 5.aiff

38

BASS SYNTH BRIDGE 2.aiff

101

PERC BRIDGE 6..aiff

39

BASS SYNTH BRIDGE 3.aiff

102

PERC BRIDGE.aiff

40

BASS SYNTH BRIDGE 4.aiff

103

PERC CHORUS 2.aiff

41

BASS SYNTH BRIDGE.aiff

104

PERC CHORUS.aiff

42

BASS SYNTH CHORUS 2.aiff

105

PERC OUTRO.aiff

43

BASS SYNTH CHORUS..aiff

106

PERC VERSE 1.1.aiff

44

BASS SYNTH OUTRO.aiff

107

PERC VERSE 2.aiff

45

BASS SYNTH VERSE 1.aiff

108

PETER GTR BRIDGE 2.aiff

46

BASS SYNTH VERSE 2.aiff

109

PETER GTR BRIDGE 3.aiff

47

BRASS BRIDGE 2.aiff

110

PETER GTR BRIDGE 4.aiff

48

BRASS BRIDGE 3.aiff

111

PETER GTR BRIDGE 5.aiff

49

BRASS BRIDGE.aiff

112

PETER GTR BRIDGE 6.aiff

50

BRASS OUTRO.aiff

113

PETER GTR BRIDGE.aiff

51

EDDIE BV BRIDGE 2.aiff

114

PETER GTR CHORUS 2.aiff

52

EDDIE BV BRIDGE 3.aiff

115

PETER GTR INTRO.1.aiff

53

EDDIE BV BRIDGE.aiff

116

PETER GTR OUTRO.aiff (Continued)

238 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

Table 13.2 (Continued) Stem No.

Stem Name

Stem No.

Stem Name

54

EDDIE BV OUTRO.aiff

117

PIANO BRIDGE 2.aiff

55

GTR BRIDGE 3.aiff

118

PIANO BRIDGE 3.aiff

56

GTR BRIDGE 4.aiff

119

PIANO BRIDGE 4.aiff

57

GTR BRIDGE.aiff

120

PIANO BRIDGE 5.aiff

58

GTR CHORUS 2.aiff

121

PIANO BRIDGE 6.aiff

59

GTR CHORUS..aiff

122

PIANO BRIDGE..aiff

60

GTR OUTRO.aiff

123

PIANO CHORUS 2.aiff

61

GTR VERSE 2.aiff

124

PIANO CHORUS..aiff

62

JOEL BV BRIDGE 1.aiff

125

PIANO OUTRO.aiff

63

JOEL BV BRIDGE 2.aiff

126

PIANO VERSE 2..aiff

On first look it appeared that each of REM’s stem files was an individual component of the multitrack recording, but this was not the case. Each stem had been broken into sections by song arrangement, so the file collection featured lead vocal and instrument stems for the intro, each verse, bridge, and chorus plus outro. Additionally, some files clearly contained more than one instrument, such as the vibraphone and celeste stems. On closer listen, these stems feature considerable differentiation in terms of presentation. For example, the “ACOSUTIC GUITAR” stems feature two acoustic guitars panned center left and center right in the stereo field (incidentally, multiple spelling errors are present in the stem names as well as some apparent disorganization in terms of continuity of numbering and additional periods, for example, in MANDOLIN 7..aiff). The “BACKGRND VOX” stems are also presented quite differently. Aside from audible noise gates, “BACKGRND VOX 3” appears relatively dry with minimal processing. After 0.06 seconds, the stem truncates midway through a vocal phrase, which demonstrates a lack of precision in the preparation of the stems. Yet stems such as “BACKGRND VOX CHORUS” feature significant dynamics and time-based signal processing. “LEADVOX BRIDGE” also features its dynamics and time-based signal processing intact, as well as some background instrumentation noise, commensurate with a vocal performance delivered by a vocalist with one headphone slightly removed from the ear. The “ADDITIONAL AUDIO” folder features some of the more interesting aspects of the stem collection. The “SNARE HANSA

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Table 13.3 Contents of “ADDITIONAL AUDIO” folder contained within “REM AIF FILES” in REM’s “It Happened Today” Stem No.

Stem Name

Stem No.

Stem Name

1

BASS SYNTH .aiff

36

DRONE GUITAR 9.aiff

2

BASS SYNTH 2 .aiff

37

DRONE GUITAR 10.aiff

3

BASS SYNTH 3.aiff

38

DRONE GUITAR 11.aiff

4

BASS SYNTH 4.aiff

39

DRONE GUITAR 12.aiff

5

BASS SYNTH 5.aiff

40

DRONE GUITAR OUTRO.aiff

6

BASS SYNTH 6.aiff

41

MANDOLIN 2.aiff

7

BASS SYNTH 7.aiff

42

MANDOLIN 3.aiff

8

BASS SYNTH 8.aiff

43

MANDOLIN 4.aiff

9

BASS SYNTH outro.aiff

44

MANDOLIN 5.aiff

10

BASS SYNTH sust 1.aiff

45

MANDOLIN 6.aiff

11

BASS SYNTH sust 2.aiff

46

MANDOLIN 7..aiff

12

BASS SYNTH sust 3.aiff

47

MANDOLIN 8.aiff

13

BASS SYNTH sust 4.aiff

48

MANDOLIN 9.aiff

14

BASS SYNTH sust 5.aiff

49

MANDOLIN 10.aiff

15

BASS SYNTH sust 6.aiff

50

MANDOLIN 11.aiff

16

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE 2.aiff

51

MANDOLIN 12.aiff

17

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE 3.aiff

52

MANDOLIN 13.aiff

18

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE 4.aiff

53

MANDOLIN OUTRO.aiff

19

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE 5.aiff

54

MANDOLIN.aiff

20

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE 6.aiff

55

SNARE HANSA STAIRWELL 2.aiff

21

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE 7.aiff

56

SNARE HANSA STAIRWELL OUTRO.aiff

22

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE 8.aiff

57

SNARE HANSA STAIRWELL SNARE ROLL.aiff (Continued)

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Table 13.3 (Continued) Stem No.

Stem Name

Stem No.

Stem Name

23

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE 9.aiff

58

SNARE HANSA STAIRWELL.aiff

24

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE build.aiff

59

UPRIGHT PIANO 1.aiff

25

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE copy.aiff

60

UPRIGHT PIANO 2.aiff

26

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE outro.aiff

61

UPRIGHT PIANO 4.aiff

27

CELESTE AND VIBRAPHONE.aiff

62

UPRIGHT PIANO 5.aiff

28

DRONE GUITAR 1.aiff

63

UPRIGHT PIANO 6.aiff

29

DRONE GUITAR 2.aiff

64

UPRIGHT PIANO 7.aiff

30

DRONE GUITAR 3.aiff

65

UPRIGHT PIANO 8.aiff

31

DRONE GUITAR 4.aiff

66

UPRIGHT PIANO 9.aiff

32

DRONE GUITAR 5.aiff

67

UPRIGHT PIANO 10.aiff

33

DRONE GUITAR 6.aiff

68

UPRIGHT PIANO OUTRO.aiff

34

DRONE GUITAR 7.aiff

69

UPRIGHT PIANO- 3.aiff

35

DRONE GUITAR 8.aiff

STAIRWELL” clearly features ambience consistent with a recording that has taken place in a stairwell at Hansa Studios (Berlin), with long, reverberant decay times and a particularly “live” feel. In the context of the original mix, this unique sound has been mixed with close-miked recordings, as is evident in the “KIK SNR” and “BASS DRUM” stem sets. The “UPRIGHT PIANO” stems feature plenty of pedal noise and shuffling, consistent with a relaxed performance and microphone technique. Here, the middle octaves of the piano are significantly louder than the lower register, which suggests a single overhead microphone placement and not a stereo pair, as is usual in piano recording. This extensive set of stems exposes plenty of aesthetic production decisions pertaining to processing and recordist gestures, many of which are concealed when heard as a composite whole. To that end, REM’s “It Happened Today” stems are one of the most revealing sets to date.

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Bon Iver—Bon Iver (2012) The next example features an entire 10-track album, with each song released in the stem format via the remix competition host site Indaba Music and Spotify. On August 2, 2012, US alternative folk act Bon Iver announced a “call to arms” remix contest via his website. The competition was hosted across a two-phase period: a remix submission period between August 3 and August 31, and a voting period between August 31 and September 14. During the latter stage, visitors to the site were able to vote for their favorite remix in each song category, with a $1000 prize available to the highest voted remix of each song, announced on October 3. Additionally, the winning remix in each song category was compiled into an album entitled Bon Iver, Bon Iver: Stems Project and released via Spotify. Remixes were also ranked in a variety of ways within Indaba Music’s host page including “most listened submissions” and even “top listeners,” acknowledging both those who submitted a remix and those who spent time listening. The most popular remix was “Holocene,” which is the remix of focus for this case study. Eleven stems were made available, each named after the immediate locality of the recording space: a converted veterinary clinic in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. The stem names tell a listener little about what instrumentation may be contained within them. Upon listening, however, it is clear that each stem contains multiple instrument tracks. For example, the “chippewa_falls”

Table 13.4 Mix stem organisation in Bon Iver’s “Holocene” Stem No

Stem Name

1

bangorkook.wav

2

chippewa_falls.wav

3

eleva.wav

4

gilman.wav

5

grand_rapids.wav

6

heigh_on.wav

7

lake_hallie.wav

8

le_grange_wi.wav

9

long_plain.wav

10

mandolin_wa.wav

11

virginia.wav

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stem features a granular synthesis line as well as vibraphone. “long_plain” is a composite of saxophone and a ride cymbal. “lake_hallie” features a kick drum, book brushes, and thigh strikes. “eleva” is an ambient-miked full drum kit, “grand_rapids” is a drum overdub in the form of snare rolls, and “gilman” features two closed-miked acoustic guitars panned center left and center right, as well as an electric bass guitar centered. The lead vocals are contained within “heigh_on”; this stem is a composite of two lead vocal performances. These are two separate performance recordings as opposed to the same performance “doubled.” It is possible to ascertain this due to the differences in note lengths, breaths, and shuffling in each vocal performance, as one is positioned to the center right and the other to the center left. “bangorkook” features backing vocals; two male backing vocals are panned to the right and center left with a reverberant female vocal centered. The most cryptic of the stems is “mandolin_wa,” since it does not feature a mandolin at all, but two contrasting synthesizer lines: one brassy, midrange melody; and another low-frequency heavy, underpinning bass line. Finally, “Virginia” features a combination of acoustic guitar and synthesis. Each stem also features plenty of ambient noise, shuffling, and movement consistent with both “live” and low-fidelity, or “lo-fi,” recording. These stems reveal an altogether different recording aesthetics to the other featured case studies. Both performances and recording techniques are relaxed and plenty of natural room ambience has been captured, particularly on “lake_hallie,” “eleva,” and “grand_rapids.” The stems also reveal combined instrument performances separated out from what was clearly a live recording of multiple instruments. It is possible to ascertain this from the presence of overspill in the recordings. For example, there are vocal performances present on “lake_ hallie,” even though it is clear from the stem presentation that the foregrounded instruments are kick drum, book brushes, and thigh strikes. The vocals are too loud and present to be overspill from headphones, yet too quiet in relation to the other instruments to be a fully integrated part of the stem. These stems are, therefore, drawn from both closed and ambient-miked instrument recordings whereby all musicians have performed the song in its entirety.

Skrillex and Damien Marley— “Make It Bun Dem” (2012) In 2012, the UK electronic dance music producer and dubstep artist Skrillex and the Jamaican reggae artist Damian Marley announced a remix contest via Beatport PLAY in conjunction with Sonny “Skrillex” Moore’s own label OWSLA. The contest focused on their single “Make It Bun Dem” (2012), a hit reggaestep song released in February 2012. This remix contest featured three key sub-competitions: a “Grand Prize Winner” selected by OWSLA, a “Community Pick” winner for the remix with the most public votes, and a

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Table 13.5. Mix stem organisation in Skrillex and Damien Marley’s “Make it Bun Dem” Stem No.

Stem Name

1

Skrillex-Bun_Dem-GUITAR.wav

2

Skrillex-Bun_Dem-SYNTH_BASS.wav

3

Skrillex-Bun_Dem-VOCAL.wav

“Skrillex Honorary pick” winner, chosen by Skrillex. The competitions ran over a three-stage process including an upload phase between September 9 and September 18, a voting phase between September 19 and October 3, and a judging phase between October 4 and November 12. The “Grand Prize” included an official release of the remix on Big Beat Records and Skrillex’s OWSLA label, as well as a Pioneer DJ system and software. The winner was announced via Beatport PLAY on November 13, 2012. A total of three downloadable stems were released via Beatport PLAY, Big Beat Records/OWSLA for the contest. Each of the three mix stems features multiple instruments. “SkrillexBun_Dem-GUITAR” includes a guitar track as well as a synthesized version of the same guitar melody. Both the guitar and the synthesizer retain their time-based signal processing: the introductory guitar features a band pass filter effect as well as a panned echo effect consistent with dub production aesthetics (Veal 2007; Kim-Cohen 2013). This stem also features a synthesized percussive instrument performing a reggae rhythm along with the guitar and synthesizer. Significantly, this stem features a wide dynamic range, with the introductory guitar instrument (0:00–0:13) much quieter than the synthesizer and percussive rhythm further into the stem (1:36–1:51). “Skrillex-Bun_Dem-SYNTH_BASS” features a synthesized bass element consistent with EDM, dub and reggae production. With significantly boosted sub-frequencies, the bass stem is clearly designed to fill out the lower part of the spectrum, commensurate with a production style intended for clubs. However, this stem also features a melodic synthesizer line with an octave effect (from 0:41) as well as a second high-pitched synthesizer motif toward the end of the stem (2:30). Furthermore, the stem features an ambient introductory synthesis line as well as filtered voice effect appearing sporadically throughout. In total, this stem contains five identifiable instruments, of which only one is the bass. “Skrillex-Bun_DemVOCAL” also features multiple vocal elements as part of the same stem. All the component vocal parts feature significant production, which has been kept intact. Between 0:00 and 0:12, for example, Damian Marley’s introductory vocal lines feature a lengthy pre-delay, lengthy hall reverb, as well as a delay. Marley’s powerfully delivered verse vocals (0:13–0:40) again feature a lengthy pre-delay, this time with a short, room reverb and a

244 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

single echo only on the final words of alternate sentences, specifically “fun” and “run.” These verse vocals are also double-tracked. Heavily gated vocal interjections of “rude boy,” which sound simultaneously to a prominent kick drum, are also present throughout. The coda’s “pack up and run” pay-off line commences at 2:58, with automated reverb wound in to the vocal from 3:12, increasing in density before abruptly cutting out at 3:23 to reveal the comparatively “clean” vocal track. “Skrillex-Bun_Dem-VOCAL” ends with a similar “rude boy” vocal interjection, swiftly “wound down” in terms of pitch and tempo by 3:25. These stems reveal significant production elements, many of which are concealed in the context of the whole single.

Intermixtuality—Online Re(mix) production and Reception Within dance music culture, Gilbert and Pearson recognized a “community of production” featuring “digital auteurs” (1999: 118)—computer musicians who compose, perform, program, produce, and then disseminate their own music. In the twenty-first century, not only have these communities of music production proliferated in the virtual world, but also their practice(s) extend far beyond dance music genres, as is evident in the REM and Bon Iver case studies. Additionally, an extension of Hugill’s “digital musician” (2008) is evident: remix contest participants are less creators or performers of original music and more digital adaptors of existing texts. The engagement with online music communities and the remixing practice(s) that bind them is reminiscent of Théberge’s work on music technology and consumers in the late 1980s. Théberge recognized links between music and technology magazines and the discourses present within them and the consumption of music technology among musicians (1997: 130). While this observation is from a different era in music technology, there are parallels to be drawn between the cycle of consumption and production of then-new, cheap digital technologies of the late 1980s and online consumption and production of digital remix materials: both sets of practices exist largely outside the commercial mainstream music industry and both are examples of what Axel Bruns called “produsage” (2008: 2–3), the simultaneous production and usage of technologies. It is also pertinent to note that producers and users of such technologies are also listeners. The case studies featured here constitute just a tiny fraction of online remix contests and, indeed, contexts. The practice has proliferated to such an extent that it is now ubiquitous in dance music, particularly EDM; both the Deadmau5 and the Skrillex and Damian Marley case studies exemplify both the quantity of participatory engagement and the blurring between amateur and professional remix practice that was clearly distinct in earlier studies (Bennett 2016). It is this specific online production practice, whereby

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a participant engages with stems, or hypertexts, fragmented from an original, cohesive recorded single, or hypotext (Lacasse 2000), that I term intermixtuality. The collective practice of online remixing is, however, evident in modes of reception as opposed to modes of production: rarely are remixes posted with more than one author, and while remixers engage with the work of others, they tend to mix alone. This is consistent with earlier findings, as well as the majority of remixes attributed to a single author across all case study examples. Additionally, remixers tend to fall into two distinct types: those “inward looking,” who stay within the realm of the fan community, remix host site, or forum, and those “outward looking,” a kind of remixer diaspora, who may begin the remix process within a host site or forum, but then disseminate their work across wider social media including YouTube, and online music platforms such as Soundcloud. In all case study examples, the participatory nature of the online remix process is emphasized in the accompanying sets of guidelines. That said, the remixers have no input in terms of how the stems are presented and the artist grants no access to original multitrack recordings. In all instances, the artists retain copyrights to original musical works and recordings. The most significant commonality of all these case studies is that all stems are presented with multiple processing and production components intact. The stems do not feature instruments recorded in their “raw” form, and even where the stems feature synthesized and/or programmed elements, these too retain all dynamics and time-based signal processing. To that end, the artist has controlled precisely which elements of the multitrack they wish the remixer to hear, while simultaneously revealing aspects of production that are concealed when the song is heard as its composite whole. These matters suggest the process is not as participatory as it may appear. Even in the REM example where the formation of nearly 200 stems is relatively rough, each individual stem still retains its original production processing chain. Also significant is that the stems are presented as uncompressed or lossless AIFF or WAV files in all case study examples: these stems are digitally complete, high quality (relative to lossy files, such as MP3) and as such are presented in large file sizes. Online remix contests prior to 2010 also tended to privilege the participatory nature of the remix process, yet offered little reward. In the cases of Kanye West, Nine Inch Nails, William Orbit, and Radiohead, the remixes created as part of the contests and events were not officially released, neither were remixers—or, indeed, their remixes—exposed in any associated real-world event. In the case studies featured here, the prizes and rewards extend much further; a continuum of intermixtuality is evident that, while originating online, now infiltrates the “real world.” Deadmau5, Bon Iver, and Skrillex all offered official releases as part of the contest prize packages, suggesting artists are now more willing to offer tangible rewards to remixers, as well as engage with remixers beyond the virtual realm.

246 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

In the Deadmau5 contest, thousands of comments and posts appeared across multiple music and technology fora, including the Beatport PLAY comments thread, but also Ableton Live fora, Logic Pro discussion threads, and YouTube and Facebook comments. Additionally, many sub-communities were formed on Soundcloud. Here, remixers “broke off” into smaller groups to discuss niche aesthetic directions and more nuanced techniques. The number of competition entrants remains unknown since the final number of entrants was not posted in Beatport; however, thousands of remixes appeared across multiple online music fora, including Soundcloud, InternetDJ, and YouTube. The reception of the “SOFI Needs a Ladder” remix contest was, however, overwhelmingly negative. Comments threads across all fora focused on DJ “beefs,” the initial cost of stems, the “ripping off” of fans, as well as many competition conspiracy theories. The most significant aspect of this competition was the speed at which smaller online communities formed around the remix on alternative fora, yet did not seem focused on or engaged with the competition itself. Here, the “outward looking” remix diaspora is evident. REM’s “It Happened Today” remix event generated a total of 211 remixes on an official Soundcloud “remix project group.” Other REM remixes appeared sporadically across YouTube and Facebook, but with no apparent formation of sub-communities. The official Soundcloud “remix project group” was moderated by R.E.M.HQ, with regular moderator engagement. Furthermore, with no “time limit” or prize attached to the event, the take-up was slower, and thus, the fan/remixer discourse was generally less “urgent” in nature. In contrast to the reception of Deadmau5 remixes, fan and remixer feedback was overwhelmingly positive across broad topics. Comments included thanks extended to the producer and the band for the opportunity, enjoyment and excitement at the chance to be “creative,” technical support enquiries and help requests from those new to music production and/or DAW software, and further requests for more remix opportunities. The main engagement with Bon Iver’s “call to arms” remix project took place via Indaba’s discussion forum. Also interesting to note is that, of all the mix stem case studies, Bon Iver’s remix contest generated prominent journalism and critical commentary in online fanzines, journals, magazines, and blogs. Overall, more than 1,000 remixes were uploaded to Indaba Music across the album tracks with “Holocene” generating the most remixes: 240 in total. Between eight plays and four thousand plays were generated from each remix, with further remixes posted on YouTube, Facebook, and Soundcloud. Fan engagement was overwhelmingly positive, with the main discussion focusing on enjoyment, praise for others’ work, vote requests, praise and acknowledgment to beginner remixers, and winner congratulations. Parallels can be drawn between the REM and Bon Iver contests in that both received positive feedback and engagement, and both featured “inward looking” communities of remixers who largely stayed within the realm of the remix’s host forum.

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Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three mixes were submitted to the Skrillex and Damian Marley contest, with many entries gaining hundreds of comments. This remix contest generated significant engagement, not just within the Beatport PLAY community but also across wider social media and music fora. Twelve remixes gained over 10,000 plays, with three remixes gaining over 1,000 votes. Comments varied between positive feedback on remixes and prizes to negative views on the competition structure, the remixes eventually chosen as winners, and participation by professional and/or “signed” remix artists. This level of professional engagement highlights a key difference between this contest and the other case study examples. Multiple entries from professional remix artists were submitted. For example, Norwegian remix duo Pegboard Nerds submitted a remix that, while it did not receive a prize, was the highest played remix and also featured the second highest number of comments, the majority of which were positive. This remix did, however, receive substantially more engagement via Soundcloud, where it has been played more than 1.4 million times. What this demonstrates is a blurring between fan or “listener” engagement and professional remix artists that was not evident prior to 2010. The sheer quantity, and concomitant variation in stylistic design and content, of remixes submitted to these contests is such that they transcend categorization. For example, online remix practice spans Navas’s four categories of “extended,” “selective,” “reflexive,” and “regenerative” (2010). Online remixes are often longer than the original hypotext, feature added or subtracted elements of the original mix stems, and, in some cases, feature only a fraction of the original stem collection—many allegorize the original hypotext and, since creative commons sites often feature open-ended remix timeframes, remixes can be considered regenerative. What is evident through studying intermixtuality is the potential of an online remix contest to act as a nexus between the artist, fan, and music production process. In most instances, the level of participant engagement is still superficial, but the hosting of a remix contest is clearly more than a simple marketing tool: it presents an ideal opportunity for an artist to engage their fan base, as well as online communities, in production practice. Since the artist takes for granted that participants possess both remix technologies (typically computers and appropriate software) and skillsets (digital audio editing and sample-manipulation techniques), this can, however, result in misjudged expectations. For example, in the REM case study, many participants expressed enthusiasm toward the stem availability and remix event. However, multiple help requests from remixers to the Soundcloud moderator were evident, suggesting a lack of understanding among participants as to how to engage with and/or remix the stems. In these cases, assistance was quickly given; however, there was a clear overestimation on the part of the artist as to the experiential level of remix ability among the participants. Conversely, much discussion among the Skrillex and Damian Marley contest participants surrounded the provision of only three stems, each of which

248 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

featured multiple instruments. Participants expressed frustration as to their lack of control over which instruments were consolidated into stems in the first place. Here, perhaps the artist underestimated participant ability and, therefore, unwittingly limited them from the outset. Prior to 2010, the practice of fan remixing might be considered as playing in a kind of music production sandpit. A fan can adapt a remix with plenty of room for trial and error and within the confines of the online music community. In saying that, the participant is not obliged to upload a remix just because they have downloaded the stems. As pointed out by Williams (2010), music recording and production is inherently private, with the operational processes occurring behind closed doors. There are certainly parallels to be drawn between the private nature of professional recording and production and intermixtuality since the actual process of remixing rarely takes place collaboratively; remixes produced by more than one individual are in the minority. Neither do such practice(s) take place in the public sphere since the software in which remixes are constructed is not viewable by others; this part of the production process is usually conducted offline. By “public sphere,” I am not referring to Habermas’s historical-sociological public sphere (1991: 1), but rather the kind of open, online community fora in which participants might discuss their work in view of others. In the online music community, however, only some participatory practice(s) take place publicly. As Nonnecke et al. noted, in every online community, there are public and nonpublic participants; the latter are referred to as “lurkers.” This study on intermixtuality does not account for such participants; however, the percentage of lurkers to public participants is much higher in technical-oriented fora than in other fields such as medicine (Nonnecke et al 2006: 8). Additionally, hierarchical structures are also present in online music communities, as has been acknowledged in both digital music studies (Baym 2012) and broader work on communities of practice (Wenger 1998; Preece et al. 2003). These sorts of structures are present both in the remixes that attract high numbers of votes and also in a kind of “super voter” who posts regularly across multiple remixes. The site of intermixtuality, while bearing all the hallmarks of an online community of practice, is temporary and transient in nature. Ultimately, the nature of the online community surrounds the reception of remixes, to include the remix production process, as opposed to their production.

Summary Intermixtuality is a potentially useful term to apply to online remix practice for a number of reasons. It is important to note that this process of online music (re)production begins with stem files, which have already gone through multiple stages of production: a first stage via the original multitrack recording, then a further stage as the instrument tracks, then

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again as fragments of the multitrack recording are consolidated and processed into the stem form for the purposes of remixing. This virtual mode of music production adds another layer to studies in music intertextuality. If we consider the recording as the original text or hypotext, then the stems or hypertexts generated from fragments of the original are created, only to then be further adapted and/or reappropriated. The malleable nature of stems as digital files—as opposed to the CD-ROM example discussed by Lacasse (2000)—is such that intermixtuality has the potential to produce multitudes of hypertexts; the nature of the subsequent online dissemination makes accurate documentation and, therefore, analysis challenging. Key findings from this set of case studies include recognition of a continuum of online (re)production practice and the “real world” acknowledgment of online production practice. This is evident in the recent prize structures of remix contests, which feature official releases, live performance support slots, and production equipment. Stems relating to dance music genres feature higher levels of engagement and participation. This is linked to historical forms of remix practice present in earlier pop and dance musics of the 1980s and, later, their concomitant computer-based professional production methods. Such musics foreground sample, loop, and sequenced phrases, and as such, audiences are more likely to possess at least an awareness of, if not experience in, associated production techniques. Regardless of genre, the potential of intermixtuality to engage participants in the production process is still somewhat limited. Remixers have no access to the original hypotext production process; an altogether different form of virtual production engagement is, therefore, created around the stems or hypertexts. Intermixtuality elicits numerous potential lines of future scholarly enquiry from a broad range of possible perspectives. Quantitative analysis as to numbers of participants engaged with remix contests, as well as further online ethnography, would generate a greater understanding of both engaged demographics and responses: Who remixes? And why? What about issues of gender and socioeconomic background in online remixer demographics? These social lines of enquiry could tell us more about the types of participants involved in online remixing and, where gaps are evident, how others may be engaged. Certainly more work could be done on the sonic construction of mix stems in the studio environment: What decisions are made surrounding the composition of stems? And what effect—if any—does the rise of stem remixing have on recordists and mastering engineers? It may be possible that this type of remixing practice is redefining the role of professional remixers and further work could certainly address that. Another line of research pertains to the music industry and the benefits of stem remix competitions and contexts as marketing and/or fan engagement tools. How are mix stem projects used to draw fans into a wider fan community? And what is the relationship between participation in remix competitions and the purchase of recorded music or live concert

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tickets? Existing work recognizes the prevalence of stem remixing in EDM and dance music genres, so there is plenty more opportunity to investigate the presence of mix stem practices across a wider genre spectrum. A significant research problem, however, lies in the transient nature of remix contests, the temporary hosting of competitions and contests, and the often sudden removal of the discussion threads that contains significant evidence of engagement and participation. Unlike broader phonomusicology, which can address recorded music long after release, more urgency is required in the field of online music practices.

Bibliography Baym, Nancy K. 2007.“The New Shape of Online Community: The Example of Swedish Independent Music Fandom.” First Monday 12 (8). http://journals.uic. edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1978/1853 Beadle, Jeremy. 1993. Will Pop Eat Itself?—Pop Music in the Soundbite Era. London: Faber & Faber. Beatport PLAY. 2010. “The Ultimate Remix Challenge.” https://www.beatport.com (accessed October 2016). Beatport PLAY. 2012. “Skrillex & Damian Marley—Make It Bun Dem Remix Contest.” http://play.beatport.com/contests/skrillex-damian-marley-make-it-bundem/?entry_id=5058d0b2753a0d0612229c27 (accessed October 2016). Bennett, Samantha. 2012. “Revisiting the ‘Double Production Industry’: Advertising, Consumption and ‘Technoporn’ Surrounding the Music Technology Press.” In Music, Law and Business Anthology, 117–45. Helsinki: International Institute of Popular Culture. Bennett, Samantha. 2016. “The Listener as Remixer: Mix Stems in Online Fan Community and Competition Contexts.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran, 355–76. New York: Oxford University Press. Bon Iver. 2012. Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Jagjaguwer / 4AD. Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Digital Formations 45. New York: Peter Lang. Cascone, Kim. 2000. “The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24 (4): 12–18. Clayton, Jay, and Eric Rothstein. 1991. Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cottrell, Stephen. 2010. “The Rise and Rise of Phonomusicology.” In Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology, edited by Amanda Bayley, 15–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cover, Robert. 2013. “Reading the Remix: Methods for Researching and Analyzing the Interactive Textuality of a Remix.” M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 16 (4). http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/ article/viewArticle/686 Cunningham, Mark. 1998. Good Vibrations. London: Sanctuary Music Library. Deadmau5. 2012. “SOFI Needs A Ladder” 4x4=12. Mau5trap Recordings/ Virgin.

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Duckworth, William. 2003. “Perceptual and Structural Implications of “Virtual” Music on the Web.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 999 (1): 254–62. Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes: La Littérature au Second Degré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Gilbert, Jeremy, and Ewan Pearson. 1999. Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. London: Routledge. Goodwin, Andrew. 1990. “Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction.” In On Record: Rock, Pop & the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 258–73. London and New York: Routledge. Grobelny, Joseph. 2008. “Mashups, Sampling and Authorship: A Mashupsampliography.” Music Reference Services Quarterly 11 (4): 229–39. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Hugill, Andrew. 2008. The Digital Musician. London: Routledge. Indaba Music. 2012. “Bon Iver: Stems Project.” https://www.indabamusic.com/ opportunities/bon-iver-bon-iver-stems-project (accessed October 2016). Izhaki, Rohey. 2007. Mixing Audio: Concepts, Practices & Tools. London: Focal Press. Jarvenpaa, Sirkka L., and Karl R. Lang. 2011. “Boundary Management in Online Communities: Case Studies of the Nine Inch Nails and ccMixter Remix Sites.” Long Range Planning 44: 440–57. Johnson, Christopher M. 2001. “A Survey of Current Research on Online Communities of Practice.” Internet and Higher Education 4: 45–60. Jones, Steve. 2000. “Music and the Internet.” Popular Music 19 (2): 217–30. Jones, Steve. 2002. “Music that Moves: Popular Music, Distribution and Network Technologies.” Cultural Studies 16 (2): 213–32. Kim-Cohen, Seth. 2013. Against Ambience. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Lacasse, Serge. 2000. “Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music.” In The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? edited by Michael Talbot, 35–58. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Michielse, Maarten. 2013 “Musical Chameleons: Fluency and Flexibility in Online Remix Contests.” M/C Journal—A Journal of Media and Culture 16 (4). http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/676 Navas, Eduardo. 2010. “Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture.” In Mashup Cultures, edited by Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, 157–77. New York: SpringerWein. Nonnecke, Blair, Dorrine Andrews, and Jenny Preece. 2006. “Non-public and Public Online Community Participation: Needs, Attitudes and Behaviour.” Electronic Commerce Research 6 (1): 7–20. Pinch, Trevor, and Katherine Athanasiades. 2012. “Online Music Sites as Sonic Sociotechnical Communities: Identity, Reputation and Technology at ACIDplanet.com.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 480–502. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Plant, Robert. 2004. “Online Communities.” Technology in Society 26 (1): 51–65. Preece, Jenny, Diane Maloney-Krichmar, and Chadia Abras. 2003. “History of Online Communities.” In Encyclopedia of Community: From Village to Virtual World, edited by Karen Christiensen and David Levinson, 1023–27. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. REM. 2011. “It Happened Today.” Collapse Into Now. Warner Bros. R.E.M.HQ. 2011. “News—Remix It Today!” http://www.remhq.com/news/remixit-today-5/ (accessed October 2016). Sinnreich, Aram. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Skrillex and Damian Marley. 2012. “Make It Bun Dem.” Big Beat/ OWSLA. Stewart, Susan. 1989. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor, Timothy. 2001. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture. New York: Routledge. Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/ Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Théberge, Paul. 2001. “‘Plugged In’—Technology and Popular Music.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street, 3–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veal, Michael E. 2007. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whiteley, Sheila, and Shara Rambarran. 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Alan. 2010. “Pay Some Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain— Unsung Heroes and the Canonization of Process in the Classic Albums Documentary Series.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22 (2): 166–75. Zak, Albin J. III. 2001. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press.

C H A P T E R FO U R T E E N

Crowdfunding and Alternative Modes of Production Mark Thorley

Crowdfunding has rapidly gained exposure as a new way for musicians, composers, record producers and all manner of music creatives to find new ways of realizing their work. Among the general excitement, there is often considerable media interest in musicians or producers who succeed in crowdfunding a project that has been neglected by the mainstream. Such interest plays into the recorded music industry’s long history of celebrating recording artists and performers who find “success,” despite being largely ignored by the mainstream. The narrative of the struggling musician who carries on despite continued rejection lends significant credibility to how they are viewed by fans and consumers. So when a music creative uses crowdfunding successfully, it serves to first continue this narrative—that is, the aspirant musician finds a way, through hard work and ingenuity to be supported by enlightened and empowered followers. Secondly, however, it throws just as much light on crowdfunding as a credible and effective way for new music to be brought into a form wherein it can find an audience. In this way, there is often as much excitement about crowdfunding and the particular platform used as there is about the project itself. There is, therefore, obvious resonance between crowdfunding as an alternative funding mechanism and an “alternative” approach to music production in its widest sense. Just as an alternative approach to music production eschews the mainstream and obvious, so crowdfunding avoids the usual functions of angel investors, shareholders and blatant commercial

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exploitation. In this way, crowdfunding and an “alternative” approach to production seem like comfortable and well suited co-habitees. However, among the maelstrom focused on successful crowdfunded projects, the unloved pitches remain just as that. The work does not come to fruition; the producers, despite their potential, do not realize their concepts; and no one is really the wiser. This chapter looks at the relationship between crowdfunding and what I term “alternative modes of production.” I first examine the established model of music production before outlining what is meant by an alternative mode of production. From there, I critique the immediate attraction of crowdfunding before discussing four elements which need to be considered as crucial to an effective relationship between crowdfunding and an alternative mode of production. These elements are: considered rationale, ignoring the record company model, anticipating potential supporter motivations and actively engaging with participants.

The Established Model and Alternative Modes of Production Before the advent of sound recording, musician and audience shared the same space and time—they would be in the same room with the audience hearing the performance as it was played. Sound recording, starting with the acoustic era and through the electrical, magnetic and digital eras, brought a new disjuncture—the performance could be heard many years after it was played and in a different environment. Schafer (1977 [1969]: 43–47) terms this separation of sound from its source as “schizophonia,” noting that it is electroacoustic production that has brought about the change. Alongside this emergence of the recorded music product, however, a whole new field of activity based around the discovery, management and economic exploitation of music has emerged, namely the recorded music industry. As the complexity of territories, markets and genres has increased, the recorded music industry has taken an increasing role in filling the gap between the music creator and the listener. A highly complex function beyond the scope of this chapter and covered in depth elsewhere (Hull 2004; Passman 2009), there are two key aspects of this increasing role. First, the “industry” takes a significant portion of the funds spent on recorded music, and secondly, it plays an increasing role in deciding what music is recorded, promoted or, in other ways, supported. Off the back of the “technical” emergence of the recorded music product, therefore, a massive machine (apart from the actual recording process) has emerged. Turning to the first aspect, to the layperson unfamiliar with the inner workings of the recorded music industry, the proportion of funds given to a recording artist may seem low. For example, while a recording artist typically receives between 8 percent and 20 percent

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of wholesale purchase price, there are usually many deductions for producer fees, studio time, packaging costs, breakages and territory variations, such that the actual figure is much lower. In defence of such contracts, though, organizations such as the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) are usually quick to point out that the additional costs of promoting and supporting recording artists—in a major market such as the United Kingdom or United States—could range from $0.5 to $2 million (IFPI 2016). This reflects the considerable cost of supporting and promoting recording artists to make them economically viable. Secondly, to maximize the economic return on such an investment, the music industry does much to mould and alter music before it is released. For example, it wields complete choice over who is contracted to start with, how much they are paid, what and where they record, whether the recording is released and how it is promoted. Furthermore, control goes beyond this to encompass exclusivity, the right of the record company (but not the artist) to terminate and the retention of copyright in recordings even after dissolution of the contract has taken place. A whole new set of intermediaries are involved in controlling this process, their ultimate aim being to ensure that the music produced finds a set of consumers who are willing to pay for it. This existing way of working has received extensive criticism from recording artists and producers. For example, in his unsuccessful court case (Panayiotou v Sony Music Entertainment (UK) Ltd. [1994]), George Michael referred to his recording contract as “professional slavery.” Similarly, Prince wrote the word “slave” on his cheek in reference to his contractual relationship with Warner Brothers. Both cases seem to pour scorn on the apparent imbalance of control. The existing way of working has also been critiqued widely in academic circles. Around the time that the “magnetic era” of sound recording was beginning, Adorno and Horkheimer first introduced the concept of the “culture industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1944]). Here, they proposed that popular culture (as opposed to the “higher arts”) is merely a factory production line producing standardized cultural goods to keep mass society in their place. In this somewhat pessimistic view, they state that “culture today is infecting everything with sameness” (ibid.: 94). Schiller continues this theme, outlining the manner in which corporatism is seen to negatively affect the production of culture. Commenting on the commercialization of culture, Schiller states, “What distinguishes their situation in the industrial-capitalist era, and especially in its most recent development, are the relentless and successful efforts to separate these elemental expressions of human creativity from their group and community origins for the purpose of selling them to those who can pay for them” (1989: 31). Schiller also draws heavily on UNESCO’s Cultural Industries: A Challenge for the Future of Culture report. The issues addressed by UNESCO are, by nature of the organization’s remit, global, and the challenge addressed is summed up as “the gradual eclipse or marginalization of cultural messages that did not take the form of goods, primarily of value

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as marketable commodities” (UNESCO 1982: 10). However, since this time many popular music academics have taken a slightly more pragmatic view. However, the overwhelming fact that the pursuit of profit is intertwined with the whole process is acknowledged, such as where Frith outlines that the industrialization of music is “not something which ‘happens’ to music but a process which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical and musical arguments” (1987: 54). Given that much of the growth of the cultural industries and, more particularly, the recorded music industry has been driven by technological innovation, the question of whether crowdfunding as a technological approach can offer an alternative is highly pertinent. Although writers on the music industries have used the term “modes of production” quite extensively, it was originally coined by Karl Marx in Das Kapital (2009 [1867]). Marx’s reference to the combination of “productive forces” and the “relations of production” has significant relevance to the music industries and, in particular, the manner in which it has altered during the past two decades. For example, the “productive forces” (tools, machinery, labour) have altered significantly in the production environment with the rise of project, home and laptop-based studios fundamentally driven by improved computing power and storage. The “relations of production” (power, legal frameworks, industry structure) have subsequently altered under the influence of digital networks. Arguably, some elements here have changed more substantially than others. For example, the rise of social media and other emerging technologies has altered the relationship between music producers and consumers (O’Hara and Brown 2006). However, legal frameworks have often lagged behind technological change and struggled to cope with changes in practice. The term “modes of production” is therefore useful and has thus been used in a variety of contexts already. An example of this is where Park, with relevance to Marx’s “productive forces,” outlines “established modes of production resulting from ownership patterns” (2007: 118). Here, Park is outlining the control of production as being rooted in the ownership of facilities, expertise and intellectual property. Using the term more flexibly with reference to Tin Pan Alley, Wise explains the mode of production prevalent there as “music provided on demand, tailored to particular needs in a thoroughly professional, business-like manner” (2012: 502). Somewhat differently, referring to music rooted in a specific locale (that of North Queensland and Torres Strait), Salisbury notes that whereas in the past music performers were at the mercy of industry gatekeepers, “in the current climate the ‘new modes’ of production have allowed Aboriginal and Torres Strait artists to take control over their own careers and to promote themselves directly to the consumer” (2013: 39). The term “new modes” here seems to suggest a co-existence with established models wherein being able to promote directly to consumers can overcome the issues to which UNESCO (1982) makes reference, for example. This chapter deliberately uses the term “alternative modes of production” to imply that it goes beyond the “new” modes of production referred to by

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Salisbury (2013). It does this with a focus on United States and Western Europe though. It must be noted that issues such as poverty and rife cassette piracy make territories (such as Africa) a totally different picture to explore (Shepherd 2003: 639). So while “new” modes encompass the use of emergent technology to promote and distribute directly to the consumer, crowdfunding has the potential for a much deeper impact that challenges the very assumptions and practice rooted in the sound recording era. While much academic focus is still on the production of a recorded artefact which the music consumer pays for, the producer of music or sound can now deliver a whole series of auditory experiences to a listener, who in return can provide a whole series of valued activities not necessarily limited to the allocation of funds. The term also plays deliberately into the challenges for production in an age of globalization. On this subject, and with reference to the effect of increased company mergers and concentration in production generally (not particularly music or media), Scholte notes that “alternative modes of production have arguably never been as weak in the world economy” (2005: 183). Notably though, much has changed with technology since then, including the rise of crowdfunding. However, in a more recent reference to how corporatism has pseudo-humanized popular media in order to control copyright, Cvetkovski notes, “There is little room for alternative modes of production in popular media” (2013: 67).

The Immediate Attractions of Crowdfunding The pivotal attraction of crowdfunding is that the producer can connect directly with their audience (and potential backer), as the cultural intermediary (Bourdieu 1984) is taken out of the equation. This means that, first and foremost, the producer need not go through the time-consuming (and often unsuccessful) process of trying to secure a commercial arrangement with, say, a record company. Just in terms of time and effort, this can seem attractive. However, it may also be attractive from a philosophical standpoint, particularly if the producer, with an “alternative” take on their own creative output, dislikes the commercial orientation of major record companies. Continued consolidation of ownership of record companies (and indeed media generally) has done little to help the music industry’s poor reputation for developing creativity. Although crowdfunding is often thought of as an aspirant’s route to market, in fact, many music practitioners who have had prior commercial contracts use it after previous (sometimes disappointing) contractual arrangements. An established producer or practitioner may also be attracted by the opportunity to leverage their fan base or network through social media (though such a fan base may have been supported by prior commercial partners). Secondly, and related to this, is the low-quality threshold which exists with crowdfunding. With the established model, there

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are commonly accepted approaches to pitching a potential product to, say, a record company that are set by professionals in that field (Ursell 2006), and this involves cost and time. In fact, as the recorded music industry has been more challenged by the shifting sands of technology, its attitude to taking risks has worsened. As Negus (1992: 40) notes, decision makers want to see product that is already proven in the market—and the cost of this “proving” falls with the producer. With crowdfunding there is no such threshold of quality, so while crowdfunding platforms do vet projects for suitability, this is a fairly broad approach checking for issues of legality and possible ethics. Given that crowdfunding platforms are themselves dependent upon driving traffic to their sites, even risky or edgy projects with no hope of being funded can be attractive—this is often part of the marketing message to potential project initiators. The quality threshold and associated cost is therefore low. Thirdly, and related to the first point, is the ability to retain greater control with the creative work. In a commercial relationship with a record company, the producer has to surrender legal and creative control of their work to the record company in return for the financial support to produce work. The more creative and independently minded a producer is, the more likely that this will be a problem particularly given the issues of homogenization highlighted earlier. Lastly, a crowdfunded project means that the producer retains more of the revenue. In contrast to the typical figures discussed earlier, crowdfunding platforms generally take between 5 percent and 10 percent of the funds if the project is successfully funded. The crowdfunding producer therefore gets more of the revenue and also has control over how it is spent. Against this backdrop, the potential of crowdfunding to significantly shift practice for producers into an “alternative mode” cannot be underestimated. However, much of the thinking behind its appropriation is understandably grounded in the era of recorded music. The following sections, therefore, outline four elements of consideration necessary to maximize the opportunity for crowdfunding to support an alternative mode of production.

A Considered Rationale The barriers to entry to the economically rewarding part of the recorded music industry are high. Furthermore, even once a practitioner gains some sort of commercial contract, success is far from guaranteed. In reality, according to Frith, 90 percent of records make a loss (2001: 33), while according to Kretschmer, 10 percent of records released account for 90 percent of turnover for labels (ibid.: 425). Indeed, it is no accident that crowdfunded music projects have grown in a time when signings to record labels have declined. One such example of an established practitioner’s success in the form of Amanda Palmer is discussed by Potts (2012). The fact that Amanda

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Palmer had been in prior commercial relationships with Roadrunner Records (of which Warner Music Group have held a majority stake since 2008) is often ignored. The pivotal point for Palmer came when Roadrunner Records asked that a video be re-edited to change her appearance. The ensuing backlash involved Palmer and her fans rallying against Roadrunner Records, from whose contract she was eventually released. The manner in which Palmer and her fans worked together against the record company is referred to by Potts (2012) as resistance to, or outright rejection of, “cultural norms”—collectively, they reacted to the record company’s control of the creative product. In Palmer’s case, the end result was her being released from her contract with Roadrunner Records, and secondarily the opportunity to launch an independent career funded in part by crowdfunding. The problem with this motivation, and why it may not always end so well, is that it is largely “reactionary,” stemming from frustration with established ways of working particularly in Artist and Repertoire (A&R) functions. In managing music output, A&R has two main functions—deciding what artists to contract and deciding how resources (financial and personnel) are used in the development of their music and image (Negus 1992: 48). Deciding to use crowdfunding from a reactionary stance is, therefore, a decision that the A&R function can be better exercised for the benefit of the producer by the producer themselves. However, this shows an under-appreciation of both the depth and the breadth of A&R. For example, in terms of depth, the A&R function takes many decisions such as where to record, what to record, what personnel to involve, contractual terms and so forth. All of these choices involve time and expertise in a bid to maximize economic and critical results. While an established artist or producer may have some of these skills, an aspirant music creator at an early stage of their career (when they are most in need of this expertise) is likely to be deficient in this aspect. Furthermore, the breadth of A&R is just as easily underestimated and underappreciated whereas in actual fact, as Negus (2002: 506) notes, even functions such as accounting and business affairs contribute to A&R. So, the manner in which the recording process needs to be supported with financial management, marketing, promotion and project management is important but often overlooked. The issue is that where there is frustration with other methods, crowdfunding offers an alternative where the barriers to entry are low. However, the typical work traditionally undertaken by A&R still needs to be addressed, and indeed the success of any project is highly dependent upon such work. As evidence of this, while there seems to be no quality threshold for setting up a crowdfunding project, in fact, as Mollick (2014) notes, the greater the preparedness (as a reflection of quality) of a project, the more likely it is to be funded. In choosing to use crowdfunding as an alternative mode of production then, the producer needs to have a clear rationale for doing so based upon the fact that they have the expertise to undertake the necessary work.

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Ignore the Record Company Model Given the prior discussions, it would be easy to think of crowdfunding as an alternative where the crowdfunding producer becomes the record company. The reality is, however, far more complex. In fact, D’Amato (2009) argues that it is the crowdfunding platforms which are in many ways like labels in disguise. The key difference is that the crowdfunding platforms are not risking their own money but, rather that of the funders. The fact that the platforms put little effort into unsuccessful projects but take revenue from those projects that are successful is remarkably familiar. Additionally, when platforms host unsuccessful projects which drive traffic to their site, and build awareness of their brand, they are in fact offloading research, development and promotional work to others. This is again very similar to the way in which record companies traditionally allowed others to take on risk from which they subsequently benefit. Given that crowdfunding producers often use the medium because they can retain ownership and control of the works, it is perhaps understandable that they think of themselves rather than the platform as most like a record company. So, although the emergence of disruptive technology (digital networks, participatory platforms) would seem to have totally undermined this model (in the same way that technology created it in the first place), crowdfunding producers lack either the will or the foresight to think differently. Decades of recorded music practice may well have led to entrenched ways of thinking about intellectual property, its management and exploitation. The problem is that while the producer may now have more control, it is actually over a more limited set of options. For example, while a record company maintains established commercial relationships with, say, labels in other territories who can release and promote recordings under licence and film/television companies to whom they can give synchronization licences, the crowdfunding producer has no such access to this infrastructure. Nor do they have the expertise to do the complex work usually routinely undertaken by a record company to exploit and manage intellectual property. In reality, then, though the producer retains much of the choice that a record company held due to ownership of works, they need to think and act quite differently. Whereas the “new mode” of production outlined by Salisbury (2013) suggests some movement, an “alternative mode of production” can, and needs to, change more.

Anticipate Supporter Motivations Understanding customer motivations is obviously fundamental to the approach of any business. Music taste is clearly very difficult to predict, though, as the music industry’s low proportion of recording artists who

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make a return on the investment attest to. Despite best efforts, commercial success still seems a game largely of chance. If being able to predict what music consumers will buy based upon decades of experience is a tricky proposition, crowdfunding is fraught with even more unknowns, with its geographically and culturally diverse set of possible funders. The fundamental issue with crowdfunding, though, is that the potential funder of a project is not a music consumer. They are not buying a music product; instead, they are committing funds to a project yet to happen for which they will get an experiential return. On this point, the work of Gerber and Hui (2013: 8) is pertinent. In their work, the four main motivations for funders are: collecting rewards, helping others, being part of a community and supporting a cause. “Collecting rewards” means receiving some kind of experience, acknowledgment or artefact, while “helping others” reflects a more philanthropic approach to supporting those with whom supporters have a particular connection. Being “part of a community” reflects the motivation to be involved in the work of a select group, while “supporting a cause” reflects backing a project that resonates with supporters’ values and ties in with issues of personal identity (or identity to which they aspire). This starts to show how the “alternative mode of production” could work for a producer of music or sound, though thinking how the “offering” can address these complex motivations is clearly a challenge. Importantly, though, the crowdfunding producer does now have the tools and the flexibility (through ownership and control) to propose a project which addresses funders’ rather than music consumers’ motivations. Given the general lack of research into the motivations of project supporters, particularly for music, uses and gratifications theory has considerable theoretical potential. The theory is an approach to examining and understanding how people use media actively to satisfy defined personal needs. It is relevant to crowdfunding because in making the decision to make a contribution in exchange for reward, the crowdfunding project supporter engages deeply with social media. The theory has already been applied to social media engagement (Leung 2013), internet use (LaRose et al. 2001; Ruggeiro 2000) and, furthermore, music listening (Lonsdale and North 2010). The majority of research into uses and gratifications theory is based upon McQuail, Blumer and Brown’s (1972) original work, which states that media use falls into four categories: (1) surveillance (keeping up with what’s going on in the world), (2) personal identity (who the user is), (3) personal relationships (interaction with others) and (4) diversion (the need for escapism or entertainment). A participant may use crowdfunding to stay engaged with developments in new music online (surveillance), as a means to express their sense of self and purpose (identity), as a way to be part of a community (personal relationships), as a means of escape from their usual life (diversion), or any combination of these. Much of this reflects the findings of Gerber and Hui (2013) outlined earlier. Similarly, in relation to music listening, Lonsdale and North’s research notes primary motivations

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being related to distraction, with interpersonal relationships, personal identity and surveillance being of secondary importance (2010: 131). Engaging with crowdfunding would alter this balance, potentially bringing interpersonal relationships, personal identity and surveillance more to the fore. In fact, it could be argued that crowdfunding is actually an extension of uses and gratifications theory because it allows users to decide on other peoples’ media experience. These admittedly limited areas of research underline how the producer interested in an alternative mode of production needs to anticipate supporter motivations as being very different to those of a music consumer. While building an offering that ties in with these motivations may not be immediately obvious, the freedom and control that the producer has can enable them to do so in a manner not previously possible.

Active Engagement with Participants Crowdfunding involves a new proximity of relationship between the music producer and the audience more akin to the situation prior to the era of sound recording. The mechanism of the recorded music industry and cultural intermediaries seem, on the surface at least, to have disappeared. This newly proximate relationship presents an opportunity to engage more actively than before, bearing in mind the complex motivations of potential participants. Given the fact that much of the appeal of crowdfunding centres on creative control, the benefits of engaging with participants actively, and potentially relinquishing some of that control, may not be immediately obvious. In examining the concept of control, two examples from the world of film are relevant. The first is that of the Pottermore Platform and specifically how a fan, Heather Lawver, developed a web-based fictional school newspaper called The Daily Prophet. Rather than valuing and engaging with this fan participation, Warner Brothers took legal action, viewing it as copyright infringement. By responding in this way, as Gallio and Martina note, “this case doesn’t bring any innovation: it is, in fact, a missed opportunity to re-think the idea of the ownership of the contents, since the immersive experience controlled by the powers-that-be is separated from the space that the fan is given within the same world” (2012: 2). Gallio and Martina compare this with the example of Star Wars Uncut, where fans created a complete new film by submitting and editing a series of 15-second clips. The copyright owners, LucasFilm, clearly had a case for legal action; however, in this case they took a more relaxed view, which resulted in what Gallio and Martina call “a clear example of a successful dialogue between media corporation and fan bases” (ibid.: 3). As a result, the film went on to be nominated for an Emmy Award in the Interactive Media category.

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These two contrasting examples show how producers can choose to use the creative efforts of fans constructively or not. Involving customers as participants in the process of product development is not totally new. The literature in service marketing has for some time highlighted the customer’s role in service provision (Zeithaml 1981; Murray 1991; Blazevic and Lievens 2008). Crowdfunding furthers this concept of getting the supporter to help form the offering, based on the notion that their expertise and input will produce a better result. This also ties into research around “lead-user” theory such as that of von Hippel (1986) and von Hippel and Katz (2002). These works note that “lead-users” can successfully anticipate needs and new innovations months and years before the marketplace. It follows, therefore, that involving such active and useful backers more closely should be constructive. As noted earlier, the lower cost tools now available to many have changed the “productive forces,” and new digital network connections have changed the “relations of production.” Participants can therefore be involved in projects in novel and interactive ways that can bring additional value to the project, and provide them with a novel experience. This ties in with Benkler’s argument that commons-based peer production is a viable alternative to capitalist production where inputs and outputs are freely shared (2006: 62, 146). While crowdfunding does not strictly adhere to the ideals of commonsbased peer production (particularly as many crowdfunding producers wish to retain and exploit copyright), it does draw on the “wealth of networks” concept to produce a range of outputs such as experience and community that are over and beyond surplus capital. Similarly, facilitating the active and creative engagement of participants also draws on concepts explored by Lessig (2008: 89–94). Where Lessig defines the “established model” referred to here as an example of a “read-only” culture, involving participants reciprocally means a “read/write” culture. Lessig notes that the commercial economy and the sharing economy can co-exist in, for example, the hybrids of “community spaces,” “collaboration spaces” and “communities.” As Lessig notes, “A hybrid that respects the rights of the creator—both the original creator and the remixer—is more likely to survive than the one that doesn’t” (ibid.: 246). The producer engaging in an alternative mode of production therefore needs to facilitate active engagement rooted in the new proximity with the funder. By embracing lower production costs, the participant can be involved in new ways that deliver value both to the project and to the participants themselves.

Summary This chapter has examined the relationship between crowdfunding as an “alternative” funding stream and “alternative modes of production.” It has

264 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PRODUCTION OF MUSIC AND SOUND

shown that beyond the “new” modes of production, an “alternative mode of production” now exists based upon the fundamental shift of emerging technology. Not only can the producer adopt new ways to promote and distribute recordings to listeners, those listeners can fund their work, give them ideas and even co-create with them. The “alternative mode” is therefore more reciprocal, more proximate and more innovative. This is a significant shift for the producer of music and sound. Whereas the role of music producer is established, it is still rooted in the practice and approach of 100 years of recorded music. Instead, it would now perhaps be better to use the term “Sound Producer”—that is, someone who ultimately coordinates an auditory experience for a listener. The capture of that event in a recorded form need not be the case though—it could be a live event, mediated online; it could be interactive or any number of variations. Herein lies the potential of a true “alternative mode of production” involving crowdfunding. Rather than the funding, ideas and control coming from the recorded music industry, these elements come from the community of participants with whom there is proximity and shared “alternative” values. As this chapter has shown, however, this can work only through careful consideration of the four elements discussed. First, a project needs to have a considered rationale taking into account the need to address work traditionally undertaken by A&R. So although the interface between producer and audience has changed, many activities such as deciding what material to develop and how resources are used remain necessary. Secondly, the existing record company model needs to be ignored and replaced with a fresh approach. While the crowdfunding producer does not have the capability to act as a record company, they do have the newfound control and flexibility to act in innovative ways that a record company could not. Thirdly, supporter motivations need to be anticipated bearing in mind that they are not music consumers. Instead, the complex motivations explored here suggest that the producer has considerable potential to entice likely supporters in new ways. Lastly, active engagement with participants needs to take place in order to build novel sound experiences that bring value to supporter and producer.

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Cvetkovski, Trajce. 2013. Copyright and Popular Media: Liberal Villains and Technological Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. D’Amato, Francesco. 2009. “Money For What? An Exploration in Music Crowdfunding or P2P Finance.” IASPM 15th Biennial International Conference Proceedings. Liverpool: IASPM. Frith, Simon. 1987. “The Industrialization of Popular Music.” In Popular Music and Communication, edited by James Lull, 53–77. Newbury Park: Sage. Frith, Simon. 2001. “The Popular Music Industry.” In The Cambridge Companion to Popular Music, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, 11–23. Cambridge: Polity. Gallio, Nicolò, and Marta Martina. 2012. “The Crowd Strikes Back. Crowdfunding and the Changes of Intellectual Property.” Paper presented at the 20th International Film Studies Conference. March 12–21, Udine, Italy. Gerber, Elizabeth, and Julie Hui. 2013. “Crowdfunding: Motivations and Deterrents for Participation.” ACM Transaction on Computer-Human Interaction 20 (6): 1–37. Hull, Geoffrey. 2004. The Recording Industry. London: Taylor and Francis. International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. 2016. Investing in Music. London: IFPI. Kretschmer, Martin, George Klimis, and Roger Wallis. 2001. “Music in Electronic Markets: An Empirical Study.” New Media and Society 3 (4): 417–41. LaRose, Robert, Dana Mastro, and Matthew S. Eastin. 2001. “Understanding Internet Usage: A Social-Cognitive Approach to Uses and Gratifications.” Social Science Computer Review 19 (4): 395–413. Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. London: Bloomsbury. Leung, Louis. 2013. “Generational Differences in Content Generation in Social Media: The Roles of the Gratifications Sought and of Narcissism.” Computers in Human Behavior 29 (3): 997–1006. Lonsdale, Adam J., and Adrian C North. 2010. “Why Do We Listen To Music? A Uses and Gratifications Analysis.” British Journal of Psychology 102 (1): 108–34. Marx, Karl. 2009 [1867]. Das Kapital. Washington: Regnery Publishing. Massolution. 2012. Crowdfunding Industry Report. Los Angeles: Massolution. McQuail, Denis, Jay Blumler, and Joseph Brown. 1972. “The Television Audience: A Revised Perspective.” In Sociology of Mass Communication, edited by Denis McQuail, 135–65. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mollick, Ethan. 2014. “The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: An Exploratory Study.” Journal of Business Venturing 29 (1): 1-16. Murray, Keith B. 1991. “A Test Of Services Marketing Theory: Consumer Information Acquisition Activities.” Journal of Marketing 55 (1): 10–26. Negus, Keith. 1992. Producing Pop. New York: Routledge. Negus, Keith. 2002. “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance between Production and Consumption.” Cultural Studies 16 (4): 501–15. O’Hara, Kenton, and Barry Brown. 2006. Consuming Music Together: Social and Collaborative Aspects of Music Consumption Technologies. Dordrecht: Springer. Park, David J. 2007. Conglomerate Rock: The Music Industry's Quest to Divide Music and Conquer Wallets. New York: Lexington.

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Passman, Donald S. 2009. All You Need To Know About The Music Business. London: Penguin. Potts, Lisa. 2012. “Amanda Palmer and the #LOFNOTC: How Online Fan Participation Is Rewriting Music Labels.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 9 (2): 360–82. Ruggeiro, Thomas E. 2000. “Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century.” Mass Communication and Society 3 (1): 3–37. Salisbury, David. 2013. “New Music Production Modes and Indigenous Music in North Queensland and the Torres Strait.” In Music Business and the Experience Economy: The Australian Case, edited by Peter Tschmuck, Peter Pearce, and Steven Campbell, 27–40. Heidelberg: Springer. Schiller, Herbert. 1989. Culture Inc: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford University Press. Scholte, Jan Aart. 2005. Globalisation: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schafer, Raymond Murray. 1977 [1969]. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books. Shepherd, John. 2003. “Recording.” In Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 1: Media Industry and Society, edited by John Shepherd, David Horn, Dave Laing, Paul Oliver, and Peter Wicke, 612–83. London: Continuum. UNESCO. 1982. Culture Industries: A Challenge For The Future Of Culture. Paris: UNESCO. Ursell, Gillian. 2006. “Working in the Media.” In Media Production, edited by David Hesmondhalgh, 133–72. Maidenhead: Open University Press. von Hippel, Eric. 1986. “Lead Users: A Source of Novel Product Concepts.” Management Science 32 (7): 791–805. von Hippel, Eric, and Ralph Katz. 2002. “Shifting Innovation to Users Via Toolkits.” Management Science 48 (7): 821–33. Wise, Timothy. 2012. “Tin Pan Alley.” In Continuum Encyclopaedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 8: North American Genres, edited by John Shepherd and David Horn, 498–503. London: Continuum. Zeithaml, Valerie. 1981. “How Consumer Evaluation Processes Differ Between Goods and Services.” In Marketing of Services, edited by J. H. Donnelly and W. R. George, 186–90. Chicago: American Marketing Association.

INDEX

4’33” (composition)

211–19, 222–4

Abbey Road Studios 46, 48, 52, 161, 171 Ableton Live 141–2, 246 Aborigines 108–9, 113 n.1, 256. See also indigeneity; Torres Strait Islanders academic training. See education, university acousmatic music 14, 123–34, 135 n.1 education 127–8 production techniques 125, 132–4 theory of 124, 125, 129–30, 133–4 acoustic ecology 25–6 acoustics 2, 127, 169. See also space, acoustic deadness 53, 92 actor-network theory (ANT) 8, 11 Adorno, Theodor 5, 255 aesthetics 11, 15, 33, 58, 124, 132, 208, 217, 235. See also glitch; lo-fi audible 2 production 4, 14, 92–3, 171, 240, 242–3 Western 14, 99, 107, 113 age, cultural notions of 73–4 agency 2, 9–10, 44, 125, 134, 143, 147, 149, 177 dance of 177 Akalın, Soner 85–7, 90, 95 American Federation of Musicians 214 analog tape. See tape, magnetic anechoic chamber 55, 212, 214 ANT. See actor-network theory (ANT) anthropology 24, 29, 111, 129 architecture, aural 13, 46, 51–2, 55–6

archives, sound. See sound archives arranged tradition 90 arrangement 165, 225, 238 of traditional music 13–14, 82–7, 89–94 artists and repertoire (A&R) 7, 8, 53, 259, 264 art of record production 1–2, 11–12 Ataş, Aytekin Gazi 85–7, 90–1 audio engineering. See engineering, audio auditory perception 45, 52–3, 124, 127, 129, 131, 200 Australia 98–114 occupation of indigenous territories 108 auteurism 1, 9–11, 244 authenticity 6–7, 26, 127, 161, 165, 217 folk 28 auto-tune 15, 175–9, 183–8, 190 n.1 Auto-Tune (Antares) 175, 179, 184, 188 Bani, Ephraim 102, 105–7, 110, 113 Bani, Gabriel 99, 101–13 Bani Senior, Dimple 99, 101–2, 104–7, 110–11, 113 Beatles, The 4, 15, 41, 159–61, 165–6, 170, 224–5 Beatport 16, 232, 234, 242–3, 246–7 Black Sea Region 14, 82–3, 87, 91 representation of 83, 86–7, 89, 93 Bohlman, Philip 12, 37 n.5, 37 n.7 Bon Iver 16, 205, 208 n.3, 231, 241–2, 244–6 Born, Georgina 81, 84, 124, 134 Bourdieu, Pierre 8–9, 257 Bush, Kate 203

268

INDEX

Cage, John 16, 203, 211–26 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition 104–5, 111–12 classical music 4, 126, 130, 217 colonialism 28, 31, 103, 109, 111, 126 comic affect 82, 86, 89, 95 n.3 compact discs (CDs) 101, 106, 110, 112, 206, 222–3 composers 16, 70–1, 84, 89–91, 93–4, 123–7, 129–34, 138, 203, 211–16, 225 and field recordings 24, 27, 32–3 relation to producers 10–11, 13, 65–6, 75 compression, dynamic range 2, 4, 64, 92, 196, 199, 201, 235 computers 145, 199, 204, 208 n.7, 244. See also digital audio workstations (DAWs) laptops and performance 140, 143 as musical instruments 149 and music production 64–5, 94, 167, 180, 183, 247, 249 controllerism 141–3, 148, 150–1 conversational analysis (CA) 176–88, 188 n.3 copyright 212–13, 224–6, 232, 245, 255, 257, 262–3 communal 99, 113 creative commons 232, 234, 247, 263 Crass (band) 16, 218, 221 creativity 47–8, 84, 132, 232, 246, 257, 263 and field recording 25, 27, 32–3 in industrialist-capitalist era 255 private 67–8 processes of 9, 13, 44, 56–8, 63–6, 75, 91, 141–2, 161 of producers 257 spaces of 42–3, 49–50, 54–7, 59 systems model 11, 13, 44–5, 57–8 vs. technical action 189 and technological affordances 146, 150 technological processes 159–60, 164, 166, 188 crowdfunding 16, 253–64 cultural geography 83, 94

culture

5–7, 9, 13, 27–30, 33, 36–7, 81, 87, 93, 99, 102–3, 105–7, 109, 111–13, 124–30, 134, 140–1, 157, 162 mass 29, 158, 166, 216, 255 multiculturalism 83, 93, 95, 133 recorded music industry 72, 75 village 82, 83, 85, 89, 91 culture industry 1, 7, 89, 255–6 Custodians, The (band) 14, 99, 101, 104–5, 107, 110, 112–13 Deadmau5 (artist) 16, 140–1, 143, 234–5, 244–6 delay 88, 92, 202, 203, 235, 243. See also echo; reverberation democracy 125–8, 134 democratization 14, 125, 134 of sound recording technology 11, 31 Deschênes, Marcelle 127–8, 130–4 digital audio workstations (DAWs) 90, 132, 167, 183, 204, 235, 246. See also computers digital signatures 3 digitization 4, 101 DIY (do-it-yourself) 66 drum machines 139, 142, 147, 168 drums 41, 52, 70, 74, 86, 88, 105, 107, 113 n.5, 171, 203, 217, 235, 242, 244. See also percussion dub reggae 243 dubstep 138 echo

3–4, 33, 176, 180, 185, 190 n.6, 243–4. See also delay; reverberation ecology, acoustic. See acoustic ecology ecomusicology 35 editing 13, 84, 91–2, 195–6, 208 digital 167, 169, 179, 199, 202, 204, 247 tape 28, 33, 159–60, 203–4 EDM. See electronic dance music (EDM) education, university 14, 83, 87, 125–34 effects processing 3–4, 146, 149, 175, 196, 199, 202, 204, 206, 208, 243. See also compression; delay; EQ; reverberation Eisenberg, Evan 10, 25, 27, 139, 198

INDEX

electroacoustic music 123, 127, 129–31, 134, 200, 254. See also acousmatic music electronic dance music (EDM) 138–44, 242, 244, 249–50 electronic music 2–3, 14, 66, 124, 133–4, 146–8, 162. See also acousmatic music; electroacoustic music; electronic dance music (EDM) embodiment 6, 8, 15, 43, 49–51, 56, 133, 138–9, 144–51 emotional-affective registers 81, 86–9, 91, 93, 95 n.9 emotions 49–50, 175, 189, 190 n.5, 205, 221–2 engineering, audio 12, 44, 148, 203 engineers 7–8, 10, 52, 64, 68, 84, 89, 92, 158, 162, 164, 167, 175–7, 183, 188–9 environmentalism 25, 34–5, 143 environments 163, 167, 200 sonic 3, 201 spatial 42–58, 199, 202–3 epistemology 6, 125, 128, 134 EQ (equalization) 64, 92–3, 196, 201 ethics 31, 189, 258 ethnicity 7, 24, 34, 36, 82, 85, 93 ethnomusicology 7, 13, 23–4, 27–33, 130 experimental music 63, 123, 129, 203 fidelity 4, 28, 32–3. See also lo-fi field recording 13, 23–37, 85, 94 n.2 fieldwork 12, 28, 30–1, 35, 129 films, dönem 82, 85 Fırtına (TV show) 13, 82–3, 85–94 foley 93 folklore 24, 28–31, 85, 89, 127 Frith, Simon 2, 11, 72, 98–9, 110, 112, 256, 258 garmon 83, 87, 90 gender 12–13, 24, 62–3, 66–9, 72–5, 175, 224, 249 masculinity 14, 67, 134 geography 24, 34, 44, 103. See also cultural geography gesture 9, 130, 145, 147–9, 180, 183, 188, 240 Gibson, James J. 200–1

269

glitch 151, 206, 208 n.8, 235 guitars 46, 51, 68, 70, 87–90, 92, 107, 144, 165, 168, 199, 238, 242–3 HCI. See human-computer interaction (HCI) headphones 45, 55, 164, 238, 242 Hennion, Antoine 9, 81 hip hop 14, 132–3, 138–40 Hostile, Johnny (Nico Conge) 63–4, 66–70, 72 human-computer interaction (HCI) 139, 143, 145, 150–1 Husserl, Edmund 43 Huxley, Aldous 221 hypertext 233–4, 245, 249 hypotext 233–4, 245, 247, 249 identity

6, 12, 24, 34, 67, 73, 81, 98, 107, 112, 175, 232, 261–2 cultural 82–3, 101, 108, 111 Islander 103, 111, 113 n.3 of sounds 199–200, 205, 207 IFMC (International Folk Music Council) 13, 24, 28–31, 34 indigeneity 99–101, 103, 108–10, 113 n.1. See also Aborigines; Torres Strait Islanders indigenous music 4, 14, 101–2, 113, 114 n.7 inscription 179–80, 196 devices 177–8 phonograph 222 and studio production 131 International Folk Music Council. See IFMC instrumentality 144–5 instruments 3, 37 n.12, 55, 83–4, 86–93, 125, 129, 131, 133, 142–3, 146–8, 161–2, 164, 166, 169, 214, 234, 238, 241–3. See also controllerism; drum machines; drums; garmon; guitars; kemençe; objects, technological; percussion; synthesis; tulum (bagpipes); turntables; voice plucked-string 85, 90 recording 52, 68, 245 tape machines as 24

270

INDEX

intermediary 9, 11, 198, 255, 257, 262 intermixtuality 16, 233–4, 244–5, 247–9 International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) 255 intertextuality 16, 232–3, 249 intonation 15, 183–8, 190 n.1 jazz 4, 6, 168 Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAMs) 224–5 Kardeş Türküler 85, 88 Katz, Mark 11, 26, 139–40, 196 kemençe 83, 89, 93, 95 n.3 kod 106 Kodangu (album) 14, 99–102, 105–13, 104 n.6 labor 7, 9, 83, 177 infrastructural 176 production 2, 12–14, 82, 91–3, 189 language 8, 37 n.6, 71, 74–5, 82, 85, 111, 190 francophone 126, 128 mixing 107 musical 66, 170 traditional 99, 103, 105, 109, 113, 114 n.6 Lanois, Daniel 163–4, 169 Latour, Bruno 177, 178 lead-user theory 263 leitmotif 82, 84, 86–7, 89–90, 92, 94 listening 6, 35, 148, 181, 201, 205, 241, 261, 264. See also auditory perception embodied 147 experiences 15–16, 24, 26, 49–50, 52, 75 politics of 125 and production aesthetics 3, 200 reduced 81, 93 as a research technique 179 to silence 213, 218, 221, 223–4 styles of 123–5, 127, 129–33, 184, 200 subjectivity 5 and technological mediation 195–9, 202–7 unmediated 124

lived environment 42–5, 53–9 liveness 15, 147, 150–1, 213 lo-fi 64, 66, 163, 207, 242. See also fidelity Lomax, Alan 33, 37 loudspeakers 55, 124, 131–2, 160, 166–8, 199 ludomusicology 144 lyrics 13, 63, 65, 67, 69–72, 101 nonsense 71–2 Mabo, Eddie Koiki 108–10, 114 n.8 Mabo Decision 108–9 magnetic tape. See tape, magnetic Marclay, Christian 222 Marin, Louis 15, 197–8 Marley, Damian 16, 231, 242–4, 247 Martin, George 2, 4, 160–1 Marx, Karl 256 mashups 204, 224–5, 232–3 materiality 35, 37 n.5, 129, 139–43 media. See recorded media mediation 5, 7–9, 15, 26, 44, 123, 125, 128. See also listening, unmediated of the built environment 51 opaque and transparent 195–208 social 81 technological 15–16, 18, 148, 150, 158, 195–200, 202–6, 208 Meintjes, Louise 8, 34, 134 melancholy 86–7 Melodyne (Celemony) 175, 179, 184, 186 memory 14, 99, 111–12, 160 collective 101, 113 motor 146 microphones 9, 13, 23–4, 26–7, 31–2, 36 n.3, 54, 68, 92, 131, 159–60, 162, 164, 169, 183, 217, 240, 242 mixing 3, 7, 64–5, 92, 159, 162. See also mix stems; remixing mixing consoles 124, 160, 167, 170, 199 mix stems 16, 231–50 modernity 25, 30, 33–4, 82, 86–7, 123–8, 134, 212–13, 222 anti-modernity 36 Molina, Juana 13, 62–75 Monkees, The 165–6 Monome 142–3, 146–9 Moylan, William 3, 45, 52, 65, 69–70

INDEX

MP3 4–5, 37 n.5, 101, 199, 245 musical instruments. See instruments musicians 7, 46, 49, 72, 144, 157–9, 161–70, 214, 253 digital/electronic 138–43, 147–50, 244 female 67 (See also women, in music) session/studio 8, 10, 25, 84, 86, 88–9, 91–2, 95 n.7 technical skill 175 as technological users 201–3, 207 musician unions 10, 214 music industry. See also culture industries audio technology 4, 142, 244 definitions of 7–8 economics of 253–6, 258, 260, 262 patriarchy 67, 73, 224 recorded 5, 7–8, 12, 16, 24, 48, 62–3, 72–3, 75, 85, 158, 163, 165, 170, 249, 257, 264 Muzak 214–16 mythology 10–11, 15, 125, 157–72 narrative 28, 81–2, 110–11, 113, 139, 157–61, 170–2, 232, 253 cultural 98–9 grand 129, 134 nation 24, 28–9, 33–4, 36, 37 n.7, 109, 126–7, 214 Negus, Keith 7, 72, 258–9 neoliberalism 125, 219 noise 169, 206–7, 212, 217, 219–22, 240, 242. See also records, vinyl noise reduction 31, 217, 238 signal-to-noise ratio 28, 37 n.4 nostalgia 161–2, 168–71 technonostalgia 15, 167 objects 43, 81, 157 digital 151 quasi 177 recordings as 10, 25, 27, 33, 132 sound 124, 131, 217 symbolic 6–7 technological 8–9, 182 online communities 141, 231, 244, 248, 250. See also virtuality fora 36, 233, 246 lurkers 248

271

of music production 5, 16, 232–5, 247, 249 ontology 32 of musical works 84 political 125 of sound and mediation 197, 199 overdubbing 87, 159, 162–3, 165, 178, 202, 205, 242 Palmer, Amanda 258–9 Perception 43, 45–6, 52, 54–5, 129 auditory 123–5, 130–2, 134, 196 ecological 196, 200, 207 gendered 68 percussion 83, 85–92, 95 n.6, 105. See also drums performance 14, 124, 140–4, 146–50, 158–9, 167, 171, 198, 217–18, 242, 254 live 8, 166, 169, 213 and reception 2, 26 and recordists 32 in the studio 7, 68, 92–4 vocal 74, 175–7, 183, 189, 205, 238 performance practice 85, 91, 139 Peterson, Richard 5–8, 23 phenomenology 13, 42–3, 45, 48–9, 58, 125, 129, 214 Phillips, Sam 4 phonograph effects 15, 196 phonography 4, 27 phonomusicology 1–3, 25, 232, 250 Pinch, Trevor 182–3, 231–2 place 12–13, 24–6, 35, 43, 106, 108, 125. See also workplaces production of 33–4, 36, 82 representation of 28–9, 31, 33–4, 84, 89 sense of 45 play 139–40, 144, 146–7, 150–1 game 138–9, 143, 145, 148–9 of gender 175 Playstation (Sony) 138, 145–7 plugins, effect 68, 92, 177. See also effects processing pluralism 124, 128–9, 134 poietics 42, 56–8 Pole (Stefan Betke) 148

272

politics

INDEX

12, 24, 30, 37 n.7, 74, 99, 106, 108, 123–5, 134, 218–21, 225 popular music 2–4, 6, 12, 24, 29, 31, 42, 47, 57–8, 73–4, 142, 163, 165, 176, 196, 205, 207, 215–17, 219 academic writings on 8–9, 44, 195, 232–3, 256 Porcello, Thomas 2, 34, 64 postmodernity 95 n.9, 125, 129 producers (record) 1, 4, 7–11, 13, 24, 32, 48, 66–70, 72, 82, 84, 141–2, 144, 147–8, 162, 164, 244, 253, 255, 257–64 artist-producers 64–5, 68, 71, 74 production 1–16, 45, 64, 66, 68–9, 72, 75, 81–2, 89, 94, 99, 111, 140, 144, 147, 211–12, 218, 243, 257. See also aesthetics, production; art of record production; labor, production; place, production of; production of culture acousmatic 124–5, 132–3 alternative modes 253–4, 256–64 cultural 27, 103, 139, 255 field recordings 24–8, 31–3, 37 and gender 62–3, 74, 134 modes of 256 online 231, 234, 244–9 production studies 195, 232–3 self-production 63, 65, 75 signal processing 234–5 sound 124, 264 workflows 83–4, 175–6 production of culture 5–9, 11–12, 81 produsage 244 Pro Tools (Avid/Digidesign) 64, 84, 178, 183 public sphere 248 aural 26, 36 punk rock 16, 73, 75, 162, 218 Quebec 125–8, 130, 134 sound 133 Quiet Revolution 126–7, 129–30 reclamation 14, 101–2, 110, 112–13 recorded media 1, 8–9, 37 n.5, 207.

See also MP3; compact discs; records, vinyl 78 RPM discs 8, 196 and deadness 213–14 recording studios 7–8, 44, 53, 142, 147, 161–3, 170, 189. See also performance in the studio atmosphere 48, 50, 52, 54, 56 commercial 64 design of 45 electroacoustic 130–2 and field recordings 23, 25, 27, 31, 36 home 66, 68, 163–4, 256 mythologies 158, 162 nontraditional 163 project 101 and the public 9, 81 recording technologies. See technology records, vinyl 5, 8, 161, 170, 223. See also recorded media; turntable and DJs 139–40, 142–3 lock grooves 204 noise 139, 207, 222 REM 231, 235–40, 244–7 remix artists, professional 244, 247 remixing 16, 218–19, 224, 231–5, 241–50 repair 15, 178, 180–3, 190 n.6 repetition 146, 180–3 representation 32, 81, 86, 90, 93–4, 158, 189, 197. See also place, representation of of performance 198 of recording practice 158, 162, 166 and self-presentation 197–8 symbolic 6, 157 visual 3, 35, 75, 178, 187–8 of women 63, 67, 71, 74 reverberation 3, 31, 90, 92, 195, 202, 203, 208 n.5, 235, 240, 242–4 and acoustic spaces 55, 169 rock 6, 8, 10, 15, 23, 63, 67, 158, 162, 170, 216. See also punk rock canonization of 3, 171 romanticism 34, 44 samplers 133, 139, 142 sampling 142, 147–9, 204–5, 224–5, 233, 247, 249

INDEX

Savages 13, 63, 66–7, 69–70, 72–5 Schaeffer, Pierre 123–31, 134, 135 n.1, 203–4 Schizophonia 254 Schmidt-Horning, Susan 3, 44, 158 semiotics 2, 6, 15, 157, 177, 180, 197 signal processing, effects. See effects processing silence 15–16, 24, 34, 36, 211–26, 235 and copyright 224–6 Skrillex (Sonny Moore) 16, 141, 231, 242–5, 247 Smalley, Denis 15, 125, 196, 200–1, 203 social media 91, 138, 232, 245, 247, 256, 261 sociology of music 7, 9 sociology of organizations 1, 6, 44 sociology of repair 176, 180–1. See also repair songwriting 10, 49, 65–6, 70–2, 165–6, 170 Sonic Youth 216–17 sound 200–8. See also archives, sound; identity of sounds; objects, sound; ontology of sound and music; perception, auditory; voice, sound of acousmatic 123–4, 129, 131, 133–4 ambient and natural 213, 217–18, 220, 222 body 85, 87 and field recording 23–36, 93 indestructible 13, 63, 67, 73, 75 instrumental 51–2, 171, 199, 203 production 1–4, 12, 15–16, 64, 68, 70, 74, 89, 164, 264 relation to silence (See silence) sound archives 26, 28, 31–2, 36 Soundcloud 245–7 sound effects 86, 91–2 sound maps 35, 38 n.14 sound studies 4–5, 13, 26, 190 n.5 space 12–13, 42–5, 48–59, 163, 202. See also creativity, spaces of; environments, spatial acoustic 45–6, 48, 53, 199 domestic 66, 164 fabrication of 3, 203 and microphone placement 131

273

speakers. See loudspeakers Spotify 224, 241 Squarepusher (Tom Jenkinson) 15, 204, 206 stems, mix. See mix stems Sterne, Jonathan 4–5, 25–6, 37 n.13, 101, 198, 215 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 203 Stokes, Martin 9, 34, 36 n.1, 81, 87 studio musicians. See musicians, session/ studio studios, recording. See recording studios Sun Records 4 Sun Studios 161 synthesis 55, 83, 107, 133, 146, 235, 242–3, 245 tape, magnetic 31, 33, 37 n.5, 64, 131, 164–5, 169, 202–3. See also editing, tape analog 2, 28, 170–1, 220 compositions 126–7 machines as instruments 24 manipulation 4, 33 Taylor, Timothy 167, 233 tea, cultivation 83, 86 technology 2–6, 8, 10–16, 25–32, 35–7, 45, 54–5, 64, 101, 123, 142–5, 150–1, 159–60, 162, 166, 168–9, 171, 207, 221, 224–5, 244, 256–7, 264. See also democratization of sound recording technology; objects, technological; mediation, technological disruptive 141, 164, 260 and education 125, 128–9, 132–3 failure 206 fetishism 161, 170 and gender 75 testing 183 technostalgia. See nostalgia, technostalgia television music 14, 82–94, 165–7 documentaries 161 Théberge, Paul 2, 11, 45, 66–8, 75, 144, 162, 233, 244 Torres Strait 103–4, 107, 109–12, 114 n.6, 256 Torres Strait Islanders 14, 99, 108, 110,

274

INDEX

113. See also indigeneity, Torres Strait Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA) 101, 105 Tradition. See arranged tradition; culture, village; language, traditional educational 128 familial and village 82, 87, 105 invention of 112 oral 23, 109 recorded music 163, 213 traditional music 14, 28–30, 34, 37 n.10, 83–5, 89, 90, 91, 93–5, 101, 127 TSRA. See Torres Strait Regional Authority Tudor, David 211, 213 tulum (bagpipes) 83, 89, 91, 93, 95 n.3 tuning, digital corrective. See auto-tune; intonation Turkey 8, 13–14, 82–95 turntables 139–41. See also records, vinyl

vocals. See voice voice. See auto-tune; performance, vocal and gender 73 grain of 181, 190 n.5 material-semiotic 177, 180 recording of 53–6, 85–8, 90–2, 107, 168, 180, 189, 203, 235, 238, 242 sound of 70–1, 205 technologically manipulated 15, 85, 167, 175–83, 185–6, 188, 196, 201, 204–6, 243–4 Wagadagam (tribe) 103–5 Watson, Chris 26 women 126 in music 13, 14, 63, 66–9, 73–5, 133–4, 224 producers 62–3, 69, 71, 74 workplaces 2–3, 12, 47–50, 52–6, 59, 215. See also place Xbox One (Microsoft)

UNESCO 29–30, 110, 114 n.8, 255–6 uses and gratification theory 261–2 video games 138–40, 143–6, 148–51. See also controllerism vinyl records. See records, vinyl virtuality 5, 16, 202–3, 231–3, 244, 249. See also online communities

145–6

YouTube 232, 245–6 Zagorski-Thomas, Simon 2, 11–12, 44–5, 57 Zak, Albin 10–11, 63, 65, 203, 233