Bytes and Backbeats : Repurposing Music in the Digital Age

Steve Savage

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780472901180
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

From Attali's "cold social silence" to Baudrillard's hallucinatory reality, reproduced music has long been the target of critical attack. In Bytes and Backbeats, however, Steve Savage deploys an innovative combination of designed recording projects, ethnographic studies of contemporary music practice, and critical analysis to challenge many of these traditional attitudes about the creation and reception of music. Savage adopts the notion of "repurposing" as central to understanding how every aspect of musical activity, from creation to reception, has been transformed, arguing that the tension within production between a naturalizing "art" and a self-conscious "artifice" reflects and feeds into our evolving notions of creativity, authenticity, and community.

part one

Repurposing Presentation

Introduction to Part I

Part I examines the way that the presentation of recorded music has been altered by music production within the computerized environment of the DAW. I describe the implementation of a variety of these new capabilities in the postrecording process (work on the recording done after the actual recording is made). Through the description and analysis of an application study and a studio study I examine the meaning and impact of these technologies. Both studies examine the level of polish being employed in current popular music recordings. Use of these techniques has generated a reaction against excessive refining within a genre that has traditionally valued a certain rough and raw musical aesthetic. I explore the impact of the aesthetic judgments that have come into play since computer-based audio has opened the door to these levels of musical “fixing” and performance “cleansing,” noting some of the creative rewards along with the more frequently articulated shortcomings of these practices.

With the ability to correct both rhythm and pitch, current pop music recordings have acquired a new level of musical accuracy as defined in terms of metronomic timing and regulated intonation. The application study (chapter 1) describes the process of this musical “fixing” of one particular pop song. The elaborate procedure is detailed and sets up an examination of the way these manipulations have affected musical construction and collaboration. Notions of cultural value are weighed against this kind of manipulation of musical performance. This expanded process of mixing and manipulation of musical elements, these new paradigms of presentation, are considered within the context of more traditional musical activities such as composition and arranging.

I argue that despite the wholesale changes in production capabilities there is not a fundamental change in the relationship between technology and music making. Technological mediation has achieved new heights in regards to degree, but it is not changed in kind—technology has always mediated music creation and reception. Yet the new technologies that allow the relatively easy “fixing” of human performance and “humanizing” of electronically constructed performances challenge long-standing practices and prejudices. And it is in part because of revolutionary technologies that popular music enjoys a kind of creative renewal.

The studio study (chapter 2) explores other new elements of music construction generated by DAW-based technology. I examine the intersection of the technical part of the recording process with some of the sounds that singers make outside of the essential verbal elements that create the words they sing. I consider the significance of this interaction for the listener—what might be said about how the recording process affects the experience of these nonverbal sounds and in turn how this perception might affect the experience of the music. The analysis centers on an expanded understanding of Roland Barthes's notion of the “grain” of the voice; I extend Barthes's approach to music aesthetics to include the way aesthetics are now intertwined with technology. In doing so I also appeal to Barthes (in absentia, of course) to accept the “grain” of the voice that I find to be an inextricable part of the contemporary recording process.

Music recording has always and primarily been a particular presentation of original, live musical performances. As apparent from the application and studio studies here, it is the extent of access to and manipulation of all manner of source material that has been expanded in such dramatic fashion through the use of various tools in the digital audio domain. As a result, the process involved that generates the final musical recording is increasingly obscured. As some of these practices are examined in these studies, the new capabilities created by the technologies encounter traditional ideas about the writers and performers of music, and ultimately the way “their” music is presented. The blurring of roles, and in the process the breakdown of the dichotomy between art and artifice, is the inevitable outcome of this encounter.

In the final chapter of Part I, I look more generally into the theoretical sides of the correlation between music, recording, and the human experience. I begin by examining the debate regarding technological determinism—the extent to which technology drives culture versus culture driving technology. This introduces further explorations of art, artifice, authenticity, and reciprocity and how they all figure into a necessary reconsideration of the place of recording in the contemporary music experience. The results illustrate the limiting nature of hierarchical judgments about how music is presented. There is no better indication of this than the fact that lower fidelity mp3s are preferred by many to CDs, and the history of audio technologies is riddled with similar examples—cassettes versus LPs, and so on. Many consumers have long preferred recorded music to live performance. Factors governing the presentation of music, its meaning, and its reception reflect constantly shifting historical and cultural conditions.

one

Application Study

Rock Band

“In Tune and in Time”

One of the first responsibilities that a producer of popular music takes on is the requirement that the final product delivered to the record company be “in tune and in time.” That is to say, the musical performances are to realize a certain standard of technical proficiency in pitch and rhythm. The legacy of this central role for a producer may be found in the many rough performances that were a part of the early history of rock and roll. Along with a heavy reliance on attitude came some rather oblique relationships to musicianship on the part of some of the musicians. Thus, especially in the “band era” of the 1960s and 1970s, came the need for some QC (quality control) and the centrality of the producer's role as the arbiter of traditional musical standards. The long-dreamed-of tools for relatively easy pitch and rhythm “fixing” have now arrived along with the DAW. In regards to the direction of technological influence (“top-down” versus “bottom-up”), the realization of this desire suggests that the pitch and rhythm tools of computer-based audio may be seen as a striking example of agency driving technology (we needed to fix stuff, and now we can). However, as we shall see through this volume, there are always elements working in both directions. Perhaps some of what is generally considered to be excessive “fixing” of rhythm and pitch may be considered to be examples of technology driving agency (we can fix stuff, so we do). In any case, the ease and degree of control over pitch and rhythm have dramatically changed, so the new paradigm of music construction is in full bloom when it comes to realizing the producer's dictum that performances must be “in tune and in time.”

Prior to the current computer technology the producer had relatively few options in the control of intonation and rhythmic accuracy in musical performances. The primary tool was, after a studio take that wasn't up to the desired standard, to get on the “talk-back”¹ to the performing musician and say something like: “That was great, but can you do it one more time for me: It was a little pitchy” (meaning either too sharp or flat for use) or “It felt a little awkward” (meaning not good enough rhythmically for use). Here the final recorded performances were created through selective repetition. Bits of performances would be captured to allow a complete, musically acceptable performance to be pieced together. If the musician was very capable, then little or no such repetition would be necessary, but in the case of the relatively inexperienced rock-and-roll band member, this could be a long and tedious process. Over time certain techniques and technologies developed that could be applied after the performance, and these aided this process in small ways—tape editing, “flying in,”² and later judicious use of a harmonizer³ could correct problems in certain instances—but these options were time-consuming and only successful in a very limited number of circumstances. For the most part getting the required performance out of the musician, sometimes one arduous bit at a time, was the only viable option.

To explore the changes in the application of control over tuning and timing I undertook a project involving a song that I had recorded in 1994 for the band “The Jenny Thing.” I had made the original recording using the dominant professional recording technology at the time, which was a 24-track analog tape recorder. This meant I had twenty-four individual tracks for recording on which to build the music for each song. The original sessions were carried out in the typical studio production style of the time. We recorded the initial “basic” tracks of drums, bass, guitar, and vocal together, but all of the performances other than the drum track were considered “scratch” tracks—that is, they were played as guide tracks to be later “scratched” or discarded in favor of new takes of these performances. All of the instruments, as well as each element of the drum set, were recorded on their own individual tracks. All of the instruments and the lead vocal were isolated from each other so that there wasn't “bleed” from one sound into the recording of the other, facilitating the replacement of parts later. Additional parts such as lead guitar tracks, harmony vocals, and percussion tracks were added later. By recording each part at different times I was able to focus the attention and the process of revision on the execution of each individual performance until it was considered acceptable. This was a relatively low-budget record, so the standard for “acceptable” had to take into consideration the capabilities of the musician along with the overall time that the budget allowed for the entire recording and mixing process. This remains the dominant procedure in pop music today, though the weight of performance control has shifted from being almost completely a part of the original recording to a balance between recording and the kind of postrecording manipulation that I was now going to apply to this production. My goal in this study is to apply to this older recording the process of rhythm and pitch “fixing” currently used in pop production, allowing me to compare the original master as it was released on record to what would probably comprise the master recording if this song were produced using contemporary technology.

My first task was to transfer from the analog tape to digital audio in the DAW. For the software needed to control the digital audio stored on the computer's hard drive I used today's dominant professional recording software, Avid's Pro Tools.⁴ While making the transfer and listening to the original audio I noted a slight tempo fluctuation during the song's introduction. I remembered being continually aggravated by this when I produced the original track. This was a case where I had deemed the inconsistency to be slight enough to be acceptable, though it was significant enough to have bothered me throughout the process. I smiled to myself knowing that now I would be able to “fix” this slight problem, and then thought of the countless number of examples of such occurrences in other recordings made before the current capabilities were available. How many slight problems in recorded performances have haunted musicians and producers before there was a means of correcting them as a part of the production process? But before I explore the meaning of such musical “fixing,” I provide a narrative of the process I undertook in applying contemporary production practices to this particular piece of music.

First, a caveat: I use the terms fix, correct, consistent, and the like as technical terms, while recognizing that these also carry significant implications about the value of the alterations being made. The reality is much more complex, for value in musical performance is most often ascribed to deviations from the standard to which we are “fixing.” The implied values of such words as fixing are not necessarily a reflection of how one might value the actual effect of this process. In fact they may be completely at odds with such implications (supposedly “fixed” performances may be considered inferior to the original). I will be addressing questions of value in this more general sense later in this chapter, but for the moment I ask the reader to temporarily indulge the use of the language for the sake of the narrative.

Fixing in Pro Tools

As with most popular music, this song was recorded to a click track generated by a metronome. That is to say, the drummer listened to a click when laying his initial track while the other musicians played to the (click-informed) drummer's performance. Using contemporary production techniques where we would be recording directly into the computer, with the click generated by the computer, the bar and beat information would already be an integral part of the recording and established before any music was played. With this historical recording I had an individual audio track with the click from the metronome recorded separately, but this was not integrated into the computer clocking function—Pro Tools wasn't able to give a readout of the metronomic bar and beat information. In fact, because it was recorded using analog gear, the original metronomic timing was not perfect. Slight variations in the creation of the click by any analog clocking device (metronome), combined with minute variations in speed from an analog tape recorder, mean that it is not possible to simply assign the correct bpm (beats per minute) reading to the audio now in Pro Tools and have the music line up correctly with the bar and beat information. Fortunately there are tools to assist us in adjusting for these inconsistencies so that we can work within the traditional music organization of bars and beats along with the clocking precision of a computer.

In the Pro Tools program there is a plug-in⁵ tool called Beat Detective. As the name suggests, this tool investigates rhythmic qualities of audio data. It distinguishes beat information by identifying transients (high-frequency leading sound elements) that are likely candidates for marking the beginning of each beat. In this case, because I had the click track recorded on a separate audio track, it was an easy matter for Beat Detective to create a tempo map from the position of each click and thus organize the file into bars and beats. To do this Beat Detective assigns an exact tempo for each beat, to within three decimal points of bpms, thus yielding a bar and beat map that remains consistent with the original click. Beat Detective does not alter the placement of the beats, but it identifies and organizes them in a way that makes them conform to a bar and beat structure. By doing this I had a tempo map that represented the “ideal time” when the performances were made. This was the “correct” beat structure that the drummer was conforming to when laying the initial drum track.

I then used another feature of Beat Detective to slice all of the various drum tracks into separate regions,⁶ setting a variety of parameters to help it make “intelligent” decisions about how to read the transients and divide the performance into various beat-related elements. As is typical in contemporary drum set recording, there were individual tracks for bass drum, snare drum, tom-toms, and hi-hat cymbals, as well as separate stereo recordings of overhead microphones to capture the cymbals, and room mics to capture the overall sound of the drums in the room. Beat Detective processed each track separately. Using Beat Detective on overhead and room tracks is difficult because of the complexity of the information. As sophisticated as Beat Detective is, it has trouble determining beat divisions when the audio consists of all of the drum instruments mixed together.

Once Beat Detective had created individual regions from each track of the drum performance, I used the “quantize” function to correct the timing of the drum performance. Quantizing takes the beginning of each separated region of audio and moves it along the musical timeline to the beginning of the nearest user-defined beat subdivision (in this case the smallest subdivision was eighth-note triplets, as this song used a “shuffle” or triplet subdivision of the beat). Quantizing each track individually yielded the most accurate results, but it also meant that where there were inconsistencies in the quantizing process between individual tracks I would have to make manual changes for the parts to conform to each other. While this process created a much more accurate version of the original drum performance in terms of note placement relative to the “ideal” of metronomic time, there was still considerable variation in the volume and timbre of each individual sound, as well as internal variations within the larger segments that were quantized into position. Thus the resulting performance was not the same as a performance coming from a drum machine, where every note may be metronomically placed and there is generally little or no variation in dynamics or timbre.⁷ Quantizing these tracks took about two hours, but this is remarkably efficient considering the literally thousands of edits, adjustments of beat placements and extension of regions to close gaps, creation of crossfades in order to smooth transitions, and about twenty manual adjustments at places where the automated process produced slightly anomalous results.

In working with the drum track I made several other typical alterations to the files in order to create cleaner and more consistent performances. There were a few weak or bad-sounding bass drum or snare drum hits that had come from inconsistent striking of the drum, and I replaced those with better-sounding hits using a basic cut-and-paste function. There is also a tool in Pro Tools called Strip Silence that allows one to create silence below a user-definable amplitude threshold. In this way it is possible to quickly eliminate leakage sound from adjacent instruments, and for drums this can create a much cleaner overall sound. For example, the tom-tom tracks had substantial off-axis⁸ leakage from the snare drum, bass drum, and hi-hat. By stripping away all parts of the audio file other than the actual tom-tom hits I could remove the clouding effect of this leaked audio. Strip Silence provides a very effi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Audio Clips
• Introduction: Reproduction and New Paradigms
• Part One: Repurposing Presentation
• Part Two: Repurposing Performance
• Part Three: Repurposing Participation
• Notes
• References
• Index