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The Bloomsbury
Handbook of
Music Production
ii
The Bloomsbury
Handbook of
Music Production
Edited by Andrew Bourbon and
Simon Zagorski-Thomas
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any
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regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have
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Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers
would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged.
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables x
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction
Andrew Bourbon and Simon Zagorski-Thomas 1
Part I Background
1 Recorded Music
Simon Zagorski-Thomas 7
Part II Technology
4 From Tubes to Transistors: Developments in
Recording Technology up to 1970
Albin Zak III 53
5 Transitions: The History of Recording Technology
from 1970 to the Present
Paul Théberge 69
6 How Does Vintage Equipment Fit into a Modern
Working Process?
Anthony Meynell 89
vi Contents
Index 405
Figures
Simon Barber is a research fellow in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural
Research at Birmingham City University. His work focuses primarily on songwriting
and the relationships between creative workers and industry. He is currently leading
the Songwriting Studies Research Network, a two-year project funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and has published on the subject in journals such
as Popular Music and Society and The European Journal of Cultural Studies. Simon is also
the producer and co-presenter of the popular Sodajerker podcast, which features interviews
with some of the most successful songwriters in the world.
Eliot Bates is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. He is an ethnomusicologist and technology studies scholar whose
research examines recording production and the social lives of musical instruments and
studio technologies. A graduate of UC Berkeley (2008) and ACLS New Faculty Fellow
(2010), he previously taught at the University of Birmingham (UK), Cornell University
xii Contributors
and the University of Maryland, College Park. His publications include Digital Tradition:
Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul’s Recording Studio Culture (2016), Music in Turkey:
Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (2011), and Critical Approaches to the Production
of Music and Sound co-edited with Samantha Bennett (2018). He is also a performer and
recording artist of the 11-stringed-oud.
Richard James Burgess is President and CEO for the American Association of Independent
Music (A2IM) and has produced, recorded and performed on many gold, platinum and
multi-platinum albums. He was previously Associate Director of Business Strategies at
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings where he produced Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.
He is known for his pioneering work with synthesizers, computers, sampling, EDM, New
Romantics and early house music, as the inventor of the SDSV drum synthesizer and for
coining the music genre terms EDM and New Romantic. His most recent publications
include The Art of Music Production: The Theory and Practice, 4th edition (2013) and The
History of Music Production (2014).
Lori A. Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa. Her articles have been
published in edited collections and leading journals, such as Popular Music, The Journal for
Music, Sound, and Moving Image, Studies in Music, and The Journal for Music Theory. Her
book Disruptive Divas: Critical and Analytical Essays on Feminism, Identity, and Popular
Music (2002) won the Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women
in Music (2005). She is co-editor of The Pop Palimpsest with Serge Lacasse (2018) and The
Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis with Stan Hawkins (2019) as well
as series co-editor of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.
Contributors xiii
Anne Danielsen is Professor of Musicology and Director of the RITMO Centre for
Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion at the University of Oslo. She
has published widely on rhythm, digital technology, and mediation in post-war popular
music and is the author of Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and
Parliament (2006), Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound
with Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen (2016) and the editor of Musical Rhythm in the Age of
Digital Reproduction (2010).
Michail Exarchos (aka Stereo Mike) is a hip-hop musicologist and award-winning rap
artist (MTV Best Greek Act 2008), including a nomination for an MTV Europe Music
Award. He is the course leader for Music Mixing and Mastering at London College of
Music (University of West London) where he is carrying out doctoral research on the
relationship between sample-based hip-hop and vintage record production techniques. His
publications include articles for Popular Music and the Journal of Popular Music Education.
His self-engineered and produced album Xli3h was included in the thirty best Greek hip-
hop albums of all time (SONIK magazine) and he is the first Greek artist ever to perform
at South by Southwest (2013).
Robert Fink is a past chair of the UCLA Musicology department, and currently Chair
of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Music Industry Program. His publications
include Repeating Ourselves (2005) and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone (2018). His work
on popular music, minimalist experimentalism and post-1965 music and politics has
appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Oxford Handbook of
Opera, the Cambridge Opera Journal and the recent collections Rethinking Reich (2019)
and Einstein on the Beach: Opera Beyond Drama (2019). Before coming to UCLA, Fink
taught at the Eastman School of Music (1992–97), and has been a visiting professor at Yale
University (2006) and a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (1998–99).
Phil Harding joined the music industry at the Marquee Studios in 1973, engineering for
the likes of The Clash, Killing Joke and Matt Bianco. In the 1980s, he mixed records for
Stock, Aitken & Waterman, Bananarama, Rick Astley, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Pet Shop
Boys and Kylie Minogue. In the 1990s, he set up his own facility at The Strongroom with
Ian Curnow and further hits followed. Harding has recently worked for Samantha Fox,
Belinda Carlisle and Curiosity with his new team PJS Musicproductions.com. He is Co-
Chairman of JAMES (Joint Audio Media Education Services) and completed his doctorate
in Music Production at Leeds Beckett University in 2017. His most recent publication is
Pop Music Production (2019).
Mike Howlett was born in Lautoka, Fiji. During the 1970s he played bass with space-funk
group Gong. Leaving Gong in 1976, Mike put together his own group, Strontium-90, who
went on to enormous success as The Police. Mike began producing records in the 1980s
and had a string of top ten hits around the world. Mike was a founding member and former
chair of the Record Producers Guild (now known as MPG, the Music Producers Guild).
xiv Contributors
Following his PhD, Mike was Discipline Leader of Music and Sound at Queensland
University of Technology. He is currently semi-retired, playing occasional gigs with his
space-funk improvisational group PsiGong and re-mixing live multi-track recordings for
an upcoming Gong box set.
Mark Katz is Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
Founding Director of the hip-hop cultural diplomacy program, Next Level. His publications
include Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (2004, rev. 2010), Groove
Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (2012), and Build: The Power of Hip Hop
Diplomacy in a Divided World (2019). He is co-editor of Music, Sound, and Technology
in America: A Documentary History (2012) and former editor of the Journal of the Society
for American Music. In 2015 he was recognized by the Hip-Hop Education Center in its
inaugural awards ceremony. In 2016 he received the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical
Association.
Laura McLaren is a PhD student in musicology at the University of Toronto. Her research
interests are in popular music, feminist theory, music video and digital media. She
completed her Master’s of Arts with Specialization in Women’s Studies at the University of
Ottawa and completed her thesis ‘The Lyric Video as Genre: Definition, History, and Katy
Perry’s Contribution’ under the direction of Dr Lori Burns. She has presented her research
at IASPM-CAN and contributed a chapter to the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of
Popular Music Video Analysis edited by Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins.
Kirk McNally is Assistant Professor of Music Technology in the School of Music at the
University of Victoria, Canada. He is the program administrator for the undergraduate
combined major program in music and computer science and the graduate program in
music technology. Kirk is a sound engineer who specializes in popular and classical music
recording, and new music performances using electronics. He has worked in studios in
Toronto and Vancouver, with artists including REM and Bryan Adams. His research and
creative work has been supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst
(DAAD), the Canada Council for the Arts, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and
the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Contributors xv
Mark Mynett is a record producer as well as live music front-of-house engineer, and
has worked as Senior Lecturer in Music Technology and Production at the University
of Huddersfield, UK, since 2006. Mark initially had an extensive career as a professional
musician with six worldwide commercial albums with several years of touring. This
was followed by a career as a self-employed record producer and front-of-house sound
engineer. In addition to teaching music technology and his own production work, Mark
frequently writes articles for publications such as Sound on Sound and Guitar World (US).
He is the author of Metal Music Manual: Producing, Engineering, Mixing and Mastering
Contemporary Heavy Music (2017).
Carlo Nardi received his PhD in Sciences of Music from the University of Trento in
2005. He is Research Associate at Rhodes University and Research Assistant at the Free
University of Bozen. He teaches methodology, arts marketing and music production at
Centro Didattico Musica Teatro Danza (CDM). He focuses on the use of technology from
a sensory perspective, authorship in relation to technological change, the organization of
labour in music-making and sound for moving images. Between 2011 and 2013 he was
General Secretary of IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music). In
addition to academic research and teaching, he is also a producer, composer and performer.
Toby Seay is Professor of Recording Arts and Music Production at Drexel University. As
an engineer, he has worked on multiple gold and platinum certified recordings including
eight Grammy winners. He is a voting member of the Recording Academy (Grammys);
President of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA)
2017–2020; and Chair of the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations
(CCAAA) 2020–2021. Selected publications include: ‘The Recording’ in The Bloomsbury
Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2019), ‘Sonic Signatures in Record Production’
xvi Contributors
in Sound as Popular Culture (2016) and ‘Capturing That Philadelphia Sound: A Technical
Exploration of Sigma Sound Studios’ in the Journal on the Art of Record Production, no. 6
(2012).
Rob Toulson is Founder and Director of RT60 Ltd, specializing in technology development
for the audio and music industries. He was previously Professor of Creative Industries and
Commercial Music at the University of Westminster and Director of the Cultures of the
Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. Rob is a music producer,
sound designer and studio engineer who has worked with many established music artists
including Talvin Singh, Mediaeval Baebes, Ethan Ash and Janet Devlin. Rob is a successful
software engineer; he developed and co-produced the groundbreaking Red Planet EP
and iPhone music app for Daisy and The Dark. Rob is also the inventor of the unique
iDrumTune iPhone app.
Alan Williams is Professor of Music, Chair of the Department of Music and Coordinator
of Music Business at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He has published chapters
in The Art of Record Production (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology
(2015) and Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound (2018). He also writes,
records and performs with his ensemble, Birdsong At Morning.
21st Century Music Practice. He is ex-chairman and co-founder of the Association for the
Study of the Art of Record Production. He is a composer, sound engineer and producer and
is, currently, writing a monograph on practical musicology. His books include Musicology
of Record Production (2014; winner of the 2015 IASPM Book Prize) and the Art of Record
Production: Creative Practice in the Studio co-edited with Katia Isakoff, Serge Lacasse and
Sophie Stévance (2019).
Albin Zak III is Professor of Music at the University at Albany (SUNY). He is a composer,
songwriter, record producer and musicologist. His articles and reviews have appeared in
the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music,
Current Musicology, Journal of American History and in several volumes of collected essays.
He is the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (2001) and I Don’t
Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America (2010). His recordings include the
albums An Average Day, Waywardness and Inspiration and Villa Maria Road.
xviii
Introduction
Andrew Bourbon and Simon Zagorski-Thomas
In the proposal document for this book we provided the following as a brief outline of
the book’s goals:
Leading and emerging academics in the field of music production have been brought
together in this handbook to discuss how their cutting edge research fits into the broader
context of other work in their specialism. Examining the technologies and places of music
production as well as the broad range of practices – organization, recording, desktop
production, post-production and distribution – this edited collection looks at production as
it has developed around the whole world and not just in Anglophone countries. In addition,
rather than isolating issues such as gender, race and sexuality in separate chapters, these
points are threaded through the entire text.
Obviously the second sentence outlines the sectional structure, but it might be useful
to outline the reasons for these choices. For example, we could have taken a more
chronological approach, breaking the book into a series of decades or quarter centuries.
We could have chosen to divide the book according to professional (or other) roles such
as engineer, producer, artist, session player, equipment maker, etc. However, there is an
agenda at the heart of this book that is reflected in Bloomsbury’s stated aims for the series:
Bloomsbury Handbooks is a series of single-volume reference works which map the
parameters of a discipline or sub-discipline and present the ‘state of the art’ in terms of
research. Each Handbook offers a systematic and structured range of specially commissioned
essays reflecting on the history, methodologies, research methods, current debates and
future of a particular field of research. (Bloomsbury n.d.)
The idea of mapping the parameters of the discipline and presenting the ‘state of the art’ in
terms of research is complicated by the fact that this is a practical and vocational discipline.
As Zagorski-Thomas discusses in Chapter 1, there is a dichotomy between research that is
concerned with explaining the ‘state of the art’ of practice – essentially, how to do the job
well – and the ‘state of the art’ when it comes to understanding how production works. This
is also reflected in the various approaches that the contributors have taken in this volume.
It might be best understood in terms of two models of education that exist throughout
the music sector. What we will call the ‘traditional’ model is based on the idea of a novice
learning from an expert. This can be contrasted with what we might call the ‘university’
model of using theoretical knowledge to understand how a process works and looking
at new ways of working based on that theory. Of course, neither of these models exists
in a pure form, especially not in the current ‘state of the art’. Universities employ a lot of
dual-professionals who bring extensive knowledge about cutting edge industry practice –
and about the tried and tested expertise from the ‘golden age’ of recording. There is also
more and more research going on about how communication, interaction and creativity
work in the studio (see for example McIntyre 2012; Lefford 2015; Bennett and Bates 2018;
Thompson 2018) and how we listen to and interpret recorded music (e.g. Moylan 2007;
Zagorski-Thomas 2010; Moore 2012; Dibben 2013; Zagorski-Thomas 2014a, b, 2018).
There is extensive literature that combines some scientific knowledge about the nature of
sound with forms of generic technical manuals, for example explaining both the ‘typical’
controls on a dynamic compressor and how they affect an audio signal (e.g. Owsinski
Introduction 3
1999; Case 2007; Izhaki 2008; Hodgson 2010; Savage 2011). And there are a broad range
of historical and ethnographic studies that outline past practice in varying amounts of
detail (e.g. Zak 2001; Meintjes 2003; Porcello and Greene 2004; Ryan and Kehew 2006;
Zak 2010; Williams 2012). What there is not much literature on is the connection between
practice and aesthetics. And again, this is an issue which spans the whole of the practical
music education section. Vocational education should not only be a matter of learning how
experts do their job (and how they did it in the past) but should also be about providing
novices with a theoretical map that lets them think about what the musical objectives of the
song are, decide how that might be embodied in a sonic metaphor or cartoon (Zagorski-
Thomas 2014b), and be able to identify the tools and techniques to achieve it.
So, to rewind for a second, the agenda we mentioned that is reflected in the Bloomsbury
Handbook’s stated aims is to find ways to bridge between the vocational and the academic,
the practical and the theoretical, and the ‘how’ and the ‘why’. Although more or less everyone
in this book can be described as a dual-practitioner of some sort – either simultaneously
or sequentially as both a creative practitioner and an analytical and reflective researcher –
they all also do it in different ways and to different extents. And, also in different ways, we
all negotiate between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘university’ modes of learning and knowledge
that were outlined earlier. The decision about structuring the book was, therefore, based
on finding a way to best achieve those aims of bridging between various differences and
dichotomies. These eight headings allowed us to mix up contributors from different
backgrounds and with different approaches in the same section. Hopefully, although
the contributions can all stand up on their own, this structure will suggest connections,
differences, contrasts and complementarity that will make the book greater than simply
the sum of all its parts. In order to reinforce this approach we have prefaced each of the
sections with a short discussion of the topic in broad terms and the ways that the various
chapters link together.
Bibliography
Bennett, S. and E. Bates (2018), Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound,
New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Bloomsbury (n.d.), ‘Bloomsbury Handbooks’. Available online: https://www.bloomsbury.com/
us/series/bloomsbury-handbooks (accessed 5 May 2019).
Case, A. U. (2007), Sound FX: Unlocking the Creative Potential of Recording Studio Effects,
Burlington, MA: Focal Press.
Dibben, N. (2013), ‘The Intimate Singing Voice: Auditory Spatial Perception and Emotion
in Pop Recordings’, in D. Zakharine and N. Meise (eds), Electrified Voices: Medial, Socio-
Historical and Cultural Aspects of Voice Transfer, 107–122, Göttingen: V&R University
Press.
Hodgson, J. (2010), Understanding Records: A Field Guide to Recording Practice, New York:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Izhaki, R. (2008), Mixing Audio: Concepts, Practices and Tools, Burlington, MA: Focal Press.
4 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production
The three chapters here deal with the questions of what recorded music is, the ways in which
it may or may not be authentic, and the problems involved in the research and study of
music production. But the question of background and context goes way beyond the scope
of what could be fitted into a single volume, let alone into the chapters within this single
part. Almost by definition, this part was going to be less to do with the specifics of music
production and more to do with the nature of music, the non-technical and non-musical
factors that influence how it is made, and the types of knowledge we can have about the
subject. While these three chapters address those ideas quite clearly and coherently, they
certainly do not do so exhaustively. Indeed, the chapters in Part VIII, on Distribution, can
be seen to be as equally relevant as background or context. Several of the contributors in
the book, although they are writing about a specific topic here, have professional lives that
reflect some of the complexities of this ‘background’. Mike Alleyne was an expert witness
in the Robin Thicke/estate of Marvin Gaye court case over the single ‘Blurred Lines’. The
influence of the law on creativity is understudied – possibly because it would be so difficult
to establish cause and effect – but record companies’ legal departments are having and have
had a huge influence on which records get made, get released and who gets the money (and
therefore creates incentives for future work). Richard James Burgess, through his work
with the Recording Academy and A2M, has been an advocate for recognizing producers
as creative contributors to recordings who should receive royalties in the same way that
an artist does. There is also the issue of the way that flows of money in and around the
industry influence the types and quantities of recordings that are made and released. Mike
Howlett, separate to his contribution here, has written about this idea of the producer as a
nexus between the business interests of the record company and the creative and technical
interests of the artists and technicians.
A conceptual thread that goes through many of the chapters in this collection, as well
as the first two chapters in this part, is the idea of ownership and the way that the recorded
artefact does more than simply provide access to sounds. This relates not only to the ways
in which we interpret the ‘unnatural’ experience of sound without sight but also to the
ways in which it helps to shape our sense of identity. This thread also travels through
Alexa Woloshyn’s and Mark Katz’s chapters in relation to both identity and listening
practice. Indeed, this idea of the ways in which a recording industry affects and is affected
6 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production
by its national and cultural context formed the basis for a series of radio programmes
that Zagorski-Thomas recently made for the BBC World Service called ‘How the World
Changed Music’. It demonstrated the many ways in which the creation of recorded music
was an integral part of a process of cultural development – the spread of a single language
across China, the development of colonial and post-colonial statements of resistance and
identity in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Okinawa, the changing gender roles in
India and China, and the problems with attempts at state control of music in Poland and
Cuba.
Although, of the three, Carlo Nardi’s chapter is the most clearly focused on the types
of knowledge we can have about music production and the recorded artefact, all three are
permeated with this question. Of course, as one would expect with a part that provides
a general background or context to the whole volume, these questions infuse all of the
chapters. And, as discussed in the introduction, this question of what a survey of the ‘state
of the art’ of research in this discipline should look like is at the heart of the design of the
structure of this volume.
1
Recorded Music
Simon Zagorski-Thomas
What is music?
There are a great many theories about the development, purpose and nature of music and,
while this is not the place to go too deeply into that discussion, it is important to discuss
some parameters and definitions at the start of this book. We all think we know exactly
what music is and yet most definitions run into trouble if they try to be universal rather
than personal. Mine is more a series of stories than a single definition.
Singing emerged as part of the bundle of activities that humans developed to encourage
and cement social cohesion and to use metaphors for emotion to synchronize the mood
between participants. It became part of the ritualization of life where we developed
special versions of everyday activities to imbue certain instances of them with additional
importance. Thus singing, chanting and poetry became special versions of speech that
allowed us to mark certain stories as more important than others. They allow us to
exaggerate certain features of speech – the types of energy that inflect the words with
additional meaning – and thus fall into the category of sonic cartoons (Zagorski-Thomas
2014). Instrumental music allows us to isolate the meaningful emotional energy from the
semantic meaning of language and to create a ritualized and schematic representation of
experience.
Being a representational system, it involves two layers of perception, interpretation
and appreciation – of the phenomenon that is being represented and of the way it is
represented. I can perceive, interpret and appreciate the semantic meaning of a poem
and the aesthetic way it is expressed. I can do the same with other forms of literature,
with visual art and with music. I can perceive, interpret and appreciate what I consider
to be the physical or emotional narrative that is being represented as well as the skill
and beauty with which it is represented. And there are three concurrent and interacting
modes of engagement (Middleton 1993) that we use in this process of interpretation and
appreciation:
3 The conscious metaphorical connections that emerge from learning and problem
solving (e.g. hearing structure such as verse/chorus or sonata form in a piece of
music).
In addition, even before the moment that electrical speaker systems were used to play
back these types of recording, they were also being used to create new forms of artificial
sound – sounds that were the result of the electrical circuitry in instruments like the
Theremin and the Ondes Martinot. Just as the representational system of music notation
allowed composers to create musical forms that were too complicated to hold in their heads
without the tool of notation, so too did the representational system of sound-as-voltage
allow creative musicians and technicians to produce sounds that were more precise and
ordered than those produced by the mechanical vibration of objects in the natural world.
Later in the twentieth century both art music and popular music developed approaches
and techniques that combined and manipulated these two sources of sonic representation –
recorded sound and electronically generated sound. The last forty years have witnessed a
steady process of integrating these two forms of sound generation into the technologies
of music production. Even in musical traditions that have an ideological averseness to
electronic musical instruments, the recording process now, more often than not, involves
electronically generated artificial reverberation. And, of course, multiple representations
of waveforms – collected from different angles and distances from the various sound
sources – are filtered, reshaped and merged together to create a new and highly artificial
representation of a sonic ‘event’. In traditions such as electroacoustic art music, hip-hop
and EDM, these twin strands of recording and construction and the ubiquitous processes
of waveform manipulation and reshaping come together to produce music that travels far
beyond the limits of what is possible in the acoustic realm of humans and objects making
air vibrate in a given environment.
The story of recorded music is often told as a progression from low fidelity to
high fidelity and, although we have moved beyond that narrative in some senses, the
development of 3-D sound and immersive audio is beset with those images of ‘realism’.
But do we want to be in control of our relationship with music? Do we want the
sound to alter as we move either our head position or our position in a room? Or do
we want to be subjected to a musical experience that has been created for us by the
artists? Of course, the answers to these types of rhetorical question tend to be ‘maybe’,
‘sometimes’ and ‘it depends’. The development of all forms of art and entertainment are
a constant negotiation between some collaborative group of makers, who are designing
and producing something for us to engage with, and the choices and decisions of the
audience member or consumer. They can choose whether, when and how they engage.
They can choose what aspect of the experience to focus their attention on at any given
moment, and their interpretation of what is happening and what it means will be a
unique product of their past experience and the decisions they make while engaging
with it. However, as Eric Clarke (2005) and others have pointed out, our interpretation
is not random. It is the result of our perception of affordances – what is possible and/
or more or less likely – in a given set of circumstances, whilst a representational system
manipulates our subject-position; rather than, it selects or distorts our visual or aural
perspective, it affords the perception of some features and not others, and it creates a
chronological narrative.
10 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production
Sonic cartoons
The term sonic cartoons (rather than being about humour!) relates to the fact that
recordings are not realistic and that they are representations. And, along with the camera
obscura, photography, film, video, etc., they can all involve the creation of a representation
through a mechanical process that encodes a limited set of the physical properties of a
phenomenon – some of the ways it reflects light or causes air molecules to move. The
mechanical accuracy of these types of representation encourages us to place them in a
different category to other forms of representation such as drawing, painting or sculpture,
but we are technologically still a long way from any recording system that can mimic the
real world. We cannot mimic the way that the reflections of multiple sound sources in space
change along with our body’s position in the space, our head’s orientation (and continual
movement) on top of our body, and even, it now seems (Gruters et al. 2018), the muscular
changes in our ears that follow our eye movement.
What, though, is being represented by a recording? Written language is a representation
of the spoken word, but if you read a Hamlet soliloquy you will not experience the
actor’s facial expression or the tone of their voice. With a recording, for example, you can
experience an approximation of the sound of a group of musicians performing in a room
but you cannot see them and you cannot walk up to one of them so that you can hear them
more clearly. And if you move around in a space while listening to recorded sound played
back on speakers, it will change in very different ways than if you were in a room with
the players. Of course, most recordings, even ones of a single performance without any
additional overdubs, have been recorded with microphones in a different configuration
than the two ears on either side of our head. And many are deliberately unrealistic or
even surrealistic representations but we still understand them and make sense of them
in relation to the norms of human activity. Recorded music creates a representation of
the sound of some body (or bodies) and/or some thing(s) happening in some place for
some reason and that representation places you in some perceived physical and, therefore,
social and psychological relationship with that phenomenon. And just as I mentioned in
regard to music itself as a phenomenon, we can perceive, interpret and appreciate both the
musical activity that is being represented (i.e. the composition and the performance) and
the skill and artistry that are used in the process of representation (i.e. the techniques of
recording, production and mixing).
Wagon, 416
Wailaki, 207
Walloon, 111
Washington, 281
Waterloo, 5
Wealth, 295, 388
Wealth-display dances, 306-316
Week, 226, 241, 252-262, 326
Wei valley, 465
Welsh, 104, 117
West African area, 196, 205, 225, 234, 501, 502
West Indies, 211, 339
Wheat, 344, 414, 415, 426, 441, 446, 450, 460, 463
Wheel, 123, 362, 416, 424, 430, 441, 448, 462
Whipping, 363, 365
Whistle, 165
White Huns, 475
Willendorf, 173
Windbreak, 495, 501
Wissler, 337
Woden, 256, 257
Wolf, 348
Woodward, 22
Wool, 361, 463, 468, 479
World-renewing rites, 312-315
Writing, 223, 224, 228, 263-292, 333, 418, 426, 431, 433, 435,
441, 442, 445, 446, 449, 454, 463, 469, 471, 478-480, 482,
486, 488, 498, 500.
See also Alphabet, Pictographs, Phonetic
Würm, 18, 23, 150, 405, 445
Würtemberg, 412
Xanthochroid, 53, 55
Xylophone, 502
Yamato, 470
Yangtse river, 465
Yellow river, 461
Yenisei, 462
Yeniseian, 475
Y-grec, 279
Yokuts, 125, 188, 307, 310
Yoldia arctica, 427;
Sea, 427, 428
Yucatan, 205, 231, 246
Yuki, 307
Yukaghir, 475
Yuma, 311
Yünnan, 486
Yurok, 313, 320
Zapotec, 338
Zayin, 278
Zero, 230, 482, 485
Zeta, 278
Zeus, 256
Zinc, 417
Zodiac, 204, 254, 448
Zoroastrianism, 252
Zulu, 116
Zuñi, 181, 187, 252
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