The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production

Simon Zagorski-Thomas, Andrew Bourbon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501334030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production provides a detailed overview of current research on the production of mono and stereo recorded music. The handbook consists of 33 chapters, each written by leaders in the field of music production. Examining the technologies and places of music production as well 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 world. In addition, rather than isolating issues such as gender, race and sexuality in separate chapters, these points are threaded throughout the entire text.

Part I

Background

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 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:

1. The direct embodied responses of empathy and engagement (e.g. moving to a beat).

2. The learned and physiological subconscious metaphorical connections we make (e.g. hearing the sound of lethargic activity as sad or listless).

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).

The ‘production’ activities of musicking (Small 1998) – composition, performance, arranging and staging – that have developed throughout the span of human history and in the myriad strands of geography and culture, have been designed and nurtured to encourage these three forms of engagement in various combinations in the ‘consumption’ activities – listening, dancing, worshipping and other forms of participation. It is only through limited technologies such as the music box and, more recently, through recorded music that the ‘production’ activities could be embodied in an artefact that allowed them to be separated in time and space from the ‘consumption’ activities.

What is recorded music?

When Edison developed the recording process, he considered its use to be for recording speech – as a way of replacing writing. It was to be a representational system that not only represented the words but also the character and tone of the voice of the individual person. It is interesting that its primary function soon became the representation of music, a representational system in itself.

Obviously the term ‘record’ implies that there is a phenomenon or an occurrence and that there is an artefact that constitutes a record of that phenomenon or occurrence. But records are not about replication, they are about selecting particular features to measure or represent. When I talk about a record, I am not talking about reliving a moment exactly as it was. My medical record is not an exact copy of the history of my body’s health, it is a record of pieces of information that various health professionals think might be important to any future health professionals who have to assess my health or treat my illnesses. Audio recording uses a mechanical process to translate the vibration of air molecules at a particular place (usually at the diaphragm of a microphone/transducer) into a representational system that allows other transducers (usually a speaker cabinet or headphones) to recreate similar vibrations of air molecules in a different place and time. The ‘realism’ of this representational system has been based on making the transducer and the storage system for the representation at least as sensitive as the human ear is to frequency and dynamics. While we may have come quite close to this in terms of these two features, there are other features of the live and active process of hearing that are not being represented. There are very few moments in life when we are confused about whether we are listening to ‘real’ or ‘recorded’ sound and, when we are, we can soon find out if we want to. The ‘realism’ of recorded music is very limited. Indeed, many forms of musical recording are about creating something that is clearer and more impactful than the original moment – or they are about creating something that is an idealized version of a musical idea.

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.

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).

Curated versus constructed

In the same way that we have become accustomed to visual representations that might be drawings, paintings or computer animations as well as those that are mechanical ‘reflections’, we have also developed aural forms of representation, as I mentioned before, that are constructed entirely within the representational system rather than being ‘captured’ versions of a reality. Thus, I can record the sound of a snare drum being hit but I can also create one electronically using white noise, envelope shaping and filtering. I can also record the timing and dynamics of a performance or I can place sounds on a computer generated timeline and trigger them at different amplitudes to construct an artificial performance. And I can mix and match these types of production activities – placing recordings of a real snare drum on a timeline, triggering electronic sounds from the timing and dynamics of a recorded performance or realigning the timing of a performance using audio quantization to a timeline grid.

Whether recorded music involves a quasi-realistic representation of a single performance that occurred in a specific space, a ‘performance’ that has been constructed by overdubbing and editing together multiple individual performances into a collage, or an entirely constructed electronic piece that bears little resemblance to actual human activity, we still construct our interpretations based on our experience of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Background
• Part II Technology
• Part III Places
• Part IV Organizing the Production Process
• Part V Creating Recorded Music
• Part VI Creating Desktop Music
• Part VII Post-Production
• Part VIII Distribution
• Index
• Imprint