At the music academy, she was trained as a vocalist. In her live concerts, she wants to do more than sing, however, and begins to experiment with recording and processing her voice in real time. The result astounds her, as well as the audience.
A member of the audience [had] looked forward to the concert for a long time, searching the internet for all the music the artist had made. As the live performance reaches a peak, he picks up his smartphone to record and save the moment for later.
These examples point to the range of opportunities that are available to artists, audiences, and their intermediaries in the digital millennium. The use of those opportunities, however, raises certain questions. Why does the singer intervene in the live flow of her voice, and what is achieved by trying to capture it in new ways? What becomes of “live performance” when it is saturated with new media? A striking feature of the examples above, which are all picked from the chapters to come, and a broad trend in popular music in general, is the blurring of established boundaries between live and recorded music. This development seems to allow for new ways of creating, experiencing and mediating music, the motives and outcomes of which will be studied in this book.The concert organizer teamed up with a record distributor, both aiming to offer their audience something extra. Together they install a mobile studio backstage, where the artist is asked to make a special recording, which they then release online.
Let’s begin at the beginning. For most of our history, music has been live. But people did not think of it as such when there was no alternative. For a long time, the sound of music was created exclusively at the same time and place in which it was experienced. This applied to solitary humming as well as music shared in pubs or between parent and child at bedtime. Music was always performed by (and for) someone present, there and then. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the invention of the phonograph and sound recording presented alternatives, enabling music to be created and experienced beyond the there and then. Music could reach people’s ears without bringing performers, instruments, and notation along because the listener could simply press “play.” This, in turn, triggered the development of two distinct domains of music: the growing sphere of recorded music and the existing sphere of live music.
A key affordance of recording technology is its mobility , broadly defined as movement ascribed with meaning. On the one hand, sound recording enabled mobility of music between people, with recordings traveling between homes, cities, and continents. On the other hand, it enabled new forms of mobility within the music itself via the moving and manipulating of sound elements. Obvious examples of the latter include the splicing and overdubbing of different takes, but sound recording was also the start of an evolution toward more advanced techniques of processing and designing sounds to take a desired shape, an art form spearheaded by The Beatles in popular music. The music that was called “live” was, conversely, characterized by its lack of mobility and manipulability, with performer and listener located at the same place and with the music only existing during the time they shared together.
Throughout the twentieth century, the mobility of recorded music, and the growing systems of production, distribution, and consumption of popular music, added to its contrasts with live music. Alongside these developments, concerts and festivals came to represent a sector of their own. Soon enough, the mobility of recorded music began to blur borders, as in the case of radio channels broadcasting live concerts to listeners elsewhere. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the mobility of music has dramatically increased, in tandem with its rapid diffusion via the internet and mobile devices, from laptops to smartphones. These media are also swiftly moving into the domain of live music, expanding the overlap between the live and the recorded. But what happens when music becomes somehow both?
Artists, audiences, and their intermediaries are in various ways embracing these new opportunities to reconfigure the live and the recorded. With the aid of laptops, tablets, and other mobile devices, artists enjoy an unprecedented opportunity to bring technologies inherent to studio work with them onto the live stage, recording, editing, and processing sound as part of a concert performance, whether of electronic dance music or avant-garde jazz. Equally relevant is the trend toward audiences bringing smartphones to concert venues, whether to record the music or share (it) with people not present. Music intermediaries, including concert organizers and record sellers, are finding new ways to enable this interaction and offer new musical experiences as well, thus managing some growth within a sector that was hit hard by the digital upheaval.
This book examines the emerging overlaps between live and recorded music, looking at both the opportunities and the challenges presented to those who create and experience this music in this way.
Music offers vast opportunities for inward reflection and outward interaction, as is obvious in daily life as well as in the academic literature. The exploitation of these opportunities requires human resources, such as musicality, motivation, and training, but it also depends on external technological resources, such as musical instruments, amplifiers, and headphones. In the 2000s, the availability of digital music technology spread its possibilities to an unprecedented range of people and places. We should therefore stop and ask what the implications of this growth are for how people relate to music. In particular, does the use of new technology trigger new and somehow stronger experiences with music, or does it actually hinder them?
This study of the opportunities and challenges involved in the overlap of live and recorded music will also capitalize on the potential of the analytical perspective known as “mentalization ”: “the capacity to perceive and interpret behaviour in terms of intentional mental states, to imagine what others are thinking and feeling” (Busch 2008: xv). Mentalization, a notion developed within psychology, has gained currency as a perspective for understanding the development of personal identity and social interaction. In fact, one of its prime theorists, Peter Fonagy (2008: 5), argues that it represents an “evolutionary pinnacle of human intellectual achievement” in its provision of “consciousness of mental states in self and others.” It also captures the very basic and everyday aspect of simply relating to others, from family and friends to rivals and strangers (with varying degrees of success)—a fact that complicates the identification of mentalization’s requirements, as well as its rewards. Music presents extensive opportunities for mentalization. Just consider how powerfully the song “I Will Survive ” conveys what it feels like to be left by a loved one. To perceive and interpret thoughts and feelings via music is not only an experience in itself but also the basis for communication via music. Mentalization therefore relates not only to how audiences listen to music but also to how artists express themselves via music—for example, when an artist tries to interpret some form of the human condition, then tries to make that interpretation perceivable to others.
The concept will be useful for mapping the differences between live and recorded music, as well as for understanding the opportunities inherent in that overlap. This study proposes not only a fresh approach to the relationship between the live and the recorded but also a perspective on music and media that is directly informed by mentalization. The starting point for applying this concept is my conviction that music is an art form with a vast and varied potential for mentalization. The perception and interpretation of thoughts and feelings represent crucial elements of human interaction and self-understanding, both of which are undertaken via music every day. If the use of new media somehow supports (or obstructs) the mentalization of artists and audiences, we would do well to understand why.
In what follows, I shall introduce the analytical approach of this book and account for its specific context in time and place (Norway in the 2000s), then supply an overview of its chapters.
Approach
My interest in mentalization hints at the theoretical and methodological premises of this study. I tend to privilege human experiences with music and media and am thus more concerned with musical subjects than musical objects . My research has a social and ethnographic orientation that is certainly present elsewhere in both music and media scholarship, but I strive also to account for aspects of the musical content (for more, see Chap. 2). A strict isolation of subject from object (musician from music, audience from audio) would be at once strained and counterproductive for my purposes. As I seek to understand how artists express themselves via new media, for example, I must also be sensitive to what they are expressing.
This study focuses on how artists and audiences use new technology , and, relatedly, how this technology thus affords new forms of musical agency (i.e., the ability to do things with music). It relates to existing trends in technology and music research by addressing technological influences on human perception/psychology, as well as the role of new technology in sociocultural formations (e.g., Sterne 2012). I aim to contribute to these areas of interest—one looking inward, into the mind, and one looking outward, into the social world. These twin ambitions pointedly parallel two of the affordances associated with live and recorded music, given that studio recordings offer opportunities for individual sonic excavation, and concerts offer opportunities for collective action.
From a bird’s-eye perspective, this study sets out to explore what happens when new technology is introduced into established places and practices, such as, in this case, live music events. It is therefore anchored in media research’s interest in the use of new digital technologies (e.g., Jenkins 2006). To fully grasp the significance of new media, however, the project also engages with musical activities and experiences (e.g., Born 2013). It is therefore anchored in music research as well. And, indeed, I have found that media research and music research stand strong together, in that attentiveness to the musical experience can promote an understanding of the media, and attentiveness to the mediating technology can promote an understanding of the music. I shall return to the theoretical positioning of this study and its relation to existing research on live and recorded music in Chap. 2.
The starting point for this study is that the mobility of digital media brings with it new conditions for the creation and experience of music. Claiming novelty here is, however, complicated because most new technologies and practices have predecessors. As Bertolt Brecht said, “Nothing arises from nothing; the new springs from the old, but that is just what makes it new” (1978: 110). Although many industry players and commentators speak of a digital revolution, evolution is closer to the truth—a point supported by research showing that media innovations are usually incremental and accumulative (Storsul and Krumsvik 2013: 18). This is also the case for the use of recording technology, which Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Anne Danielsen (2016: 6) address in their search for the distinctively digital in contemporary music:
For instance, while the cut-and-paste technique is not unique to digital technology, the scale with which this technique is applied within the digital era is almost unthinkable via analogue technology, and it is thus often associated with the digital. The resulting quantitative change in its use is so dramatic that it has, in a sense, become a...