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The playback of recordings is the primary means of experiencing music in contemporary society, and in recent years 'classical' musicologists and popular music theorists have begun to examine the ways in which the production of recordings affects not just the sound of the final product but also musical aesthetics more generally. Record production can, indeed, be treated as part of the creative process of composition. At the same time, training in the use of these forms of technology has moved from an apprentice-based system into university education. Musical education and music research are thus intersecting to produce a new academic field: the history and analysis of the production of record...
How sonically distinctive digital “signatures”—including reverb, glitches, and autotuning—affect the aesthetics of popular music, analyzed in works by Prince, Lady Gaga, and others. Is digital production killing the soul of music? Is Auto-Tune the nadir of creative expression? Digital technology has changed not only how music is produced, distributed, and consumed but also—equally important but not often considered—how music sounds. In this book, Ragnhild Brøvig and Anne Danielsen examine the impact of digitization on the aesthetics of popular music. They investigate sonically distinctive “digital signatures”—musical moments when the use of digital technology is revealed t...
Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks is a collection of essays dedicated to the study of recorded popular music, with the aim of exploring "how the record shapes the song" (Moylan, Recording Analysis, 2020) from a variety of perspectives. Introduced with a Foreword by Paul Théberge, the distinguished editorial team has brought together a group of reputable international contributors to write about a rich collection of recordings. Examining a diverse set of songs from a range of genres and points in history (spanning the years 1936–2020), the authors herein illuminate unique attributes of the selected tracks and reveal how the recording develops the expressive content of song performance. Analyzing Recorded Music will interest all those who study popular music, cultural studies, and the musicology of record production, as well as popular music listeners.
This is a book about sound studios, focusing on their architectural and geographical aspects. It explores how music is materialized under specific spatial and technological conditions and the myths associated with this process. Through ten in-depth studies, it examines the design, evolution and current function of sound studios amidst economic and technological shifts in the music industry. Traditional studios are in flux between the past and future. The industry, while steeped in romanticism and nostalgia, also embraces forward-driven pragmatism and an extensive reuse culture, encompassing heritage audio, building materials and existing buildings. A surprisingly diverse architectural herita...
The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces—cultural, aesthetic, and technical—the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience. One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song brings together 16 writers to weigh in on 16 iconic tracks from the history of modern popular music. Arranged chronologically in order of release of the tracks, and spanning nearly five decades, these essays zigzag across the cultural landscape to present one possible history of pop music. There are detours through psychedelic rock, Afro-pop, Latin pop, glam rock,...
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Some fifty years after its birth in the Bronx, hip hop has become one of the most influential cultural phenomena of the internet era. With the internet now enmeshed in our daily routines, hip hop thrives in the digital realm, constituting a third of all music streams. From Drake memes to viral TikTok dances and AI-generated rappers, hip hop is constantly created, shared, and discussed online. This shift challenges hip hop's conventional connections to place, authent...
Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature conducts an expansive exploration of different modes of timing. Its seven chapters pursue the question of time as it is embodied in key figures that shape both aesthetic and pragmatic life. Working closely with literary, visual, and musical artworks, the book aims to provoke new ways of engaging with the question of time. It treats artworks as experiments that launch temporal figures, and that test out the possibilities and connections these different figures enable. Thus, the book seizes upon works by artists like Anne Carson, King Tubby, and Raymond Queneau as opportunities for thinking through the valence of both e...
In this book, veteran music producer Richard James Burgess gives readers the tools they need to understand the complex field of music production. He defines the many roles that fall to the music producer by focusing first on the underlying theory of music production, before offering a second section of practical aspects of the job.
The recording studio is a performance setting in which popular music performers often produce multiple takes, using particular strategies to vary outcomes in search of the 'perfect take'. However, repetition offers the opportunity to discover the unexplored liminality between what we expect to hear and what is performed. Observing multiple takes of one's own recorded performance within the temporal limits of a vocal recording session yields qualitative data to create an ethnography of both the process and the Work itself. Presenting artefacts from a recording session in conjunction with an autoethnographic text provides a demonstration of how evolving external cues, and internal cognitive scripts interact with technology and social conventions in the recording studio to impact a popular music musician's performance and, in effect, the creation of a new Work.
Live Looping in Musical Performance offers a diverse range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the application of live looping technology by lusophone performers and composers. This book explores various aspects, including the aesthetic component, instrumentation, and setup, highlighting the versatility of this technology in music-making. Written by musicians and researchers from Portuguese-speaking countries, this book comprises eleven chapters that delve into various musical contexts, genres, and practices. The novelty of including collaborative texts written alongside non-professional researchers offers the possibility of drawing from real experience to consider how live looping has been...