The Digital Evolution of Live Music

Angela Jones, Rebecca Jane Bennett

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780081000700
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The concept of 'live' has changed as a consequence of mediated culture. Interaction may occur in real time, but not necessarily in shared physical spaces with others. The Digital Evolution of Live Music considers notions of live music in time and space as influenced by digital technology. This book presents the argument that live music is a special case in digital experience due to its liminal status between mind and body, words and feelings, sight and sound, virtual and real. Digital live music occupies a multimodal role in a cultural contextual landscape shaped by technological innovation. The book consists of three sections. The first section looks at fan perspectives, digital technology and the jouissance of live music and music festival fans. The second section discusses music in popular culture, exploring YouTube and live music video culture and gaming soundtracks, followed by the concluding section which investigates the future of live music and digital culture.

• Gives perspectives on the function of live music in digital culture and the role of digital in live music
• Focuses on the interaction between live and digital music
• Takes the discussion of live music beyond economics and marketing, to the cultural and philosophical implications of digital culture for the art
• Includes interviews with producers and players in the digital world of music production
• Furthers debate by looking at access to digital music via social media, websites, and applications that recognise the impact of digital culture on the live music experience

Section Two

Digital live

4

Live sound and the disappearing digital

J. Mulder

Abstract

This chapter discusses the impact of digital technology on the use of electronic amplification for concerts of popular music (live sound). In general, digital technology has taken over the processes that were done by analog technology in the not-so-distant past, with the exception of very specific tricks such as real-time pitch correction and the Cher effect. Moving through a macro-perspective, the Internet has had a profound influence on live music as a revenue stream, and employing a close perspective on the technology in use, the argument is presented that the changes to musical practice have been less profound.

Keywords

Live music

Sound engineering

Digital technology

Popular music studies

Media theory

Performance studies.

4.1 Introduction

In this chapter I offer a detailed production-level perspective on the advent of the digital era, specifically at the use of electronic amplification at popular music concerts. This micro-perspective can be contrasted by developments on the scale of global music industry macroeconomics. The impact of the master of all digital technologies—the Internet—on traditional monetizing options has supported a growth in live music revenue in comparison to recorded music (Holt, 2010; Mortimer, Nosko, & Sorensen, 2012; Rogers, 2013).¹ That growth has accelerated the globalization of booking agencies, ticketing companies, and venue management into a few monopolists such as Live Nation after its merger with Ticketmaster (Rogers, 2013, p. 119). These developments in turn have increased the demands on the many live sound technology providers and triggered a new level of professionalization.

Focusing on the use of digital technology at a live sound production level, I argue that although digital tools are now ubiquitous, the impact of those tools on pop music performance is not as dramatic. However, two developments do stand out: firstly with the stabilization of digital tools in live sound production, the notion that a pop concert is a replication of a studio recording has become even more apparent. Most digital processes in use replicate the tools that were available in the analog era and standard equipment in the recording studio. Interestingly, the digital versus analog debate that still rages in the professional studio, home recording, and consumer markets have lost ground in this context, in favor of the digital technology. The add-ons or plug-ins available for Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) are minutely reverse engineered software copies of popular analog devices. The graphic interfaces of such plug-ins are made to look exactly like the older, often vintage, hardware equivalents.

Secondly, increasing computational power has allowed for pitch processing to be real-time, either to create artistic effects, for example, the “Cher” or “gerbil effect” (Frere-Jones, 2008), or to correct vocal pitch to a technical optimum. Such processing was impossible to achieve with predigital technologies, but now a singer’s voice can be corrected when it is out of tune with great ease and in real-time. This adds an intriguing level of complexity debates around what constitutes a “live” performance, including terms of fairness, or accusations of cheating. Such terms are comparable to a long history of lip-syncing “incidents,” as reported for instance by Steve Wurtzler (1992) and Philip Auslander (2008). Pretend-performance issues appear to be endemic to Superbowl shows, but there are other examples. Renowned classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed a work by contemporary American composer John Adams at Barack Obama’s inauguration, accompanied by a few fellow classical stars (Wakin, 2009). For a number of reasons (including the freezing outdoor temperatures) the performers pretended to play along to a recording of a rehearsal some days earlier.

In 2007, Billy Joel was incorrectly accused of lip-syncing when playing and singing the anthem at the Superbowl. In clips of the television broadcast the brief effect of a pitch corrector becoming activated can be heard, causing some accusations of cheating on social and traditional media. According to his own account his foldback monitors were not working so he did not receive adequate feedback of his singing and the accuracy of his pitch in relation to the piano he was playing.² The first few notes he sang were slightly out of tune, causing an eager TV broadcast engineer to activate (or “insert”) the digital pitch correction. It is likely that the corrected voice would have been audible to the broadcast audience only, as the stadium audience would have heard a different mix controlled by a live sound engineer.

This chapter concentrates on popular music performance practices as opposed to academic and avant-garde live electronic music (see for instance Emmerson, 2007). The latter embraced the digital conceptually as a site for exploration and experimentation rather than as a tool for replicating the analog. This constitutes a distinctly different practice tradition, which we can consider as being external to popular music and the discussions in this chapter. To be more specific, this chapter tends to music practices that require predominantly traditional pop and rock instruments using microphones or other transduction processes (e.g. electric guitars) in contrast to performances of DJs or other digital electronic music sources using mainly pre-produced material.

4.2 Sound is analog

Before beginning this exploratory section, it is important to underline a crucial aspect of the physics of sound. No matter the ubiquity of the digital, in name or in actual technology, sound is analog. Where mediatized sound is being produced or reproduced, a transduction process is required, through a microphone on the input side or through a loudspeaker at the output. A loudspeaker transduces electronic waveforms into audible sound waves. Sound data that is kept or processed in the digital domain needs to be converted from the digital to the electronic before it can be transduced to audible sound. On the other end of the chain, whether for recording, broadcast, telephony, or amplification, where a sound source (voice, musical instrument, a barking dog, etc.) is being picked up, the reverse process is required. In the case of electronic sound amplification or reinforcement (further to be referred to as “live sound”), some digital processing may take place in between the transduction and conversion stages, but input (microphones, electric guitars etcetera) and output are ultimately analog.

With every generation of sound engineering technology, the analog to digital conversion process moves a little closer to the actual transduction stage of audible sound to electronic waveforms. For instance, although not commonplace, analog to digital converters can now reside inside a microphone (Becker-Foss et al., 2010). But the converter still requires an electronic waveform to digitize and the transduction process cannot be bypassed. Small improvements in technical sound quality are achieved in this way. But, microphones do still come in a range of sensitivities (to softer or louder sound) and polar diagrams (directional sensitivity), which relate to their analog working principles. Consequently, microphone selection choices have a more profound effect on the sonic outcome than any small improvements made by the advancement of digital technologies. For loudspeakers a similar development can be observed, with all-digital connections to the actual speaker cabinets, which have built-in amplifiers, potentially improving the quality of signal transfer. Even so, the basics of speaker typology, configuration, and setup continue to have a far greater impact on what an audience hears.

When comparing technical specifications, the transducers and converters are getting better over time but, as can be observed in the discussions, surrounding the digital versus analog (and the persistence of vinyl records as a consumer medium), better tools do not automatically imply better sound or a better auditory experience. Some consider the digitization process as detrimental; the fragmentation of continuous analog sound waves into separate chunks of data (samples) allegedly reduces the accuracy or even the wholeness of sound. The argumentation in these debates is fragmented and anecdotal, often focusing on, for instance, the use of (low bitrate) MP3 codecs or the inability of computers to emulate analog synthesizers convincingly.³ Ultimately there is very little research, let alone research that uses scientifically rigorous double-blind ABX comparisons, to support claims that one or the other is the better sounding technology or practice.⁴

4.3 Digital processes in live sound

On the production level, when looking at (sound and music) the technology in use, the digital genesis spread out over four decades. Specific live sound audio signal processing has been taking place in the digital domain since the 1980s. Until the first decade of the twenty-first century, such processing took place in dedicated digital boxes (e.g. effects and system processors installed externally to a mixing desk). One of the earliest relevant tools to become digitized was the “delay line,” which can be used to time-align loudspeakers (to compensate for timing differences resulting from a difference between audience and sound source and the distance between audience and loudspeaker, or between different loudspeaker systems). One of, or perhaps the first of, these digital delay tools was produced by a firm called Lexicon and designed by (among others) Barry Blesser (Blesser & Lee, 1971).⁵ The need for a device that could delay sound by a few milliseconds had already been identified in 1925 (McCutchen, 1927). Before it became digitally feasible, many different tricks were tried (using hoses, tubes, and magnetic tape), but all these suffered from audible degradation in sound quality and the digital delay line proved to be a long-awaited improvement.

Digital mixing desks became available on a large scale in the 1990s but it would take up until the first decade of the 2000s for them to become mainstream; at present they are commonplace—an interesting difference with the closely related, but disparate, stage lighting discipline, which embraced digital control surfaces instantaneously when they became available in the 1980s.⁶ Live sound engineers preferred to keep working on large, heavy, and expensive mixing desk that afforded immediate and hands-on access to large sets of different parameters. The large crafts often needed manual hauling into narrow positions in fixed seating theaters doing simultaneous damage to both theater furniture and technicians’ backs. Producers of early digital consoles tried to reduce the footprint by offering smaller desks with fewer directly accessible parameters, with others hidden under menus and visible only on different on-screen pages.⁷ That lack of immediacy and tactility is considered as one of the main reasons why it took the live sound profession such a long time to take up the digital mixing desk as their central tool. And many common digital live sound desks are still relatively large and have many dials and buttons that offer direct access to the most important parameters. In addition to a reduced footprint and weight, the ability to store some or all of the parameters and create “automation scenes” (configurations which can be instantly recalled) offered a great advantage. Currently some concert mixing is done remotely from networked tablet PCs or even smartphones, offering very few directly accessible parameters and no tactility of faders’ dials and buttons at all.

4.4 Global sound design

The shift of the music industry revenue stream from the recorded to the live sped up the synchronization of amplification practices that had previously been developed and maintained locally. Major arena ...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section One: Live that survives
• Section Two: Digital live
• Section Three: Live after death
• Coda
• Index