Introduction
This article seeks to investigate the technological mediation involved in recorded popular music in relation to the consumers as well as the producers. While many studies have investigated the sound of recorded music from the perspective of the producer,Footnote 1 less has been said about how the forms of consumption and the attitudes of consumers influence the creative process. I will examine two aspects of this, the function to which the recorded output will be put and the notion of perceived authenticity, to explore this question of technological mediation. The functionality question will be explored through the concept of staging (see Moylan 1992). While all forms of music may be associated with one function or another, the question here is whether and how that function influences the staging of a piece of recorded music. Alongside this is the issue of which forms of technological mediation are seen as being sufficiently transparent such that an ‘external’ agent can apply them without being perceived to have impinged on the creative territory of the artist. Before we progress any further with this, however, I want to discuss the notion of staging in recorded music in more detail.
For the obvious reason that it relates to the semantic origins of the word, I start with the analogy of staging a play. We can quite easily identify several discrete forms of mediation that add meaning to the actors' performances, such as the structure of the theatre, the stage design for this specific production, the costumes, the make-up and the lighting. Transferring these ideas to the staging of recorded music provides certain analogous forms of mediation: those relating to the size and nature of the space in which the performances are being situated; those relating to the positioning of the performers in that space; those that change the perceived form or character of the performance; and those that direct our attention towards, highlight or obscure a particular feature of a performance. Staging a play relates to an actual physical space and can therefore be seen as mimetic of reality but with media such as film, television and audio recording the staging can relate to ‘impossible’ or virtual spaces.
While William Moylan's (1992) use of the term staging and Allan Moore's (1993) sound-box were both concerned with spatial staging,Footnote 2 Serge Lacasse (Reference Lacasse2000) extended the term to include mediation that altered the character of a performance such as distortion, dynamic compression and phasing.Footnote 3 Lacasse also coined the term phonographic staging as a generic term for all these forms of mediation. I have identified two additional, what might be described as hybrid, forms of staging: functional staging (Zagorski-Thomas Reference Zagorski-Thomas2006) and media-based staging (Zagorski-Thomas Reference Zagorski-Thomas2008). I shall explain functional staging in more detail in the next section. Media-based staging deals with staging that is mimetic or suggestive of various forms of media: the telephone voice, the tannoy public address system or the crackle and limited dynamics and frequency range of old recordings, for example.
Functional staging
Different forms of music are associated with a particular function; their audiences generally engage with the music in a particular social context, enabling it to fulfil that particular social function. The idea of functional staging is that certain forms of technological mediation are applied because they allow some types of recorded music to better fulfil their particular social function. As I shall explain, these functional aspects of staging must be situated within the relevant musical community's collective representation of creative authenticity. I shall proceed by describing two forms of functional staging that reflect a fundamental split in modes of consumption of popular music that developed in the 1970s.
Functional staging related to dance music
The first of these utilised the playback of recorded music in large public spaces for the purpose of dancing. While the development of the disc jockey at parties and clubs (rather than on the radio) can be traced back to the 1940s, the 1970s disco phenomenon saw a dramatic change in the scale and volume of the venues:Footnote 4 the Studio 54 disco in New York, for example, had previously been a theatre and a television studio and measured approximately 100 × 80 m with a capacity of over 1,000 guests.Footnote 5 When music that has been recorded to include perceptible ambience is played back loudly in a large space such as this, not only is another form of reverberation added to the music, but it is added to the recorded ambience as well. Distributing the speakers evenly throughout the space can alleviate this to a certain extent, but increasing the general level of reverberation reduces the clarity of the attack transients of the music which are the key perceptual cues used for rhythmic entrainment and dance. Rossing, Moore and Wheeler explain that clarity deteriorates if ‘the reverberant sound does mask following sounds’ (Rossing et al. Reference Rossing, Moore and Wheeler2002, p. 534). Another key factor is that low-frequency sound tends to reverberate for longer than high-frequency sound: reverberation times for various types of building material show that bass frequencies around 125–250 Hz will decay twice or three times more slowly than treble frequencies between 2 and 4 kHz (Rossing et al. Reference Rossing, Moore and Wheeler2002, p. 531). This means that instruments in the lower range such as the bass and the bass drum will be more negatively affected by these masking problems through playback in a club than will instruments in the higher frequency ranges. This problem will be further exaggerated if there is recorded reverberation on the music being played back into the club.
Although there were no dramatic technological leaps in the 1960s and 1970s to rival the sudden changes in frequency and dynamic range that occurred in the 1920s (with developments such as the move from acoustic to electrical recording), or the late 1940s/early 1950s (with the move from shellac discs to the vinyl microgroove) there was, nevertheless, a gradual increase of bass on records during this period. The EMI engineer Norman Smith said of Motown in the late 1960s, ‘the amount of level and bass they got on their LPs was extraordinary’ and this was related to the thickness of the vinyl and the depth of the cut (Kehew and Ryan Reference Kehew and Ryan2006, p. 399). This competition to increase the levels and bass amplitude that could be pressed onto vinyl product was mirrored in the development of sound reinforcement systems for playback in large venues. The rapidly growing market for these systems led to a redeployment of technology already in use in recording studios, cinema and the hi-fi marketFootnote 6 to create public address systems capable of both increased overall volume and louder bass reproduction. Another development that increased the potential for bass in clubs and discos was the introduction of the 12” single, which allowed deeper grooves with wider spaces between them. Promotional copies started to appear in 1975 and the first commercial release was ‘Ten Percent’ by Double Exposure in 1976 (Souvignier Reference Souvignier2003, p. 40). All of these factors therefore allow for louder playback and increased bass content in clubs and discos throughout the 1970s.
There are two principle features of the changing sound of dance music record production that I would categorise as functional staging. The first is the use of ‘dry’,Footnote 7 prominent drum (or percussive instrumental) sounds where the onset of the sound is accentuated or highlighted and where these sounds provide the principal rhythmic impetus that allows for rhythmic entrainment and dancing. The second feature involves the addition of added ambience to sounds that are mimetic of activities that dancers or listeners in a club environment might participate in: vocal hooks, chorus singing, hand claps and shouts of enjoyment. This staging places them symbolically in the space of the club by simulating its acoustic properties and thereby marks them out for potential audience participation and/or creates the impression of existing audience participation.
To illustrate these changes I will describe some examples. The descriptions provided here are selections from a larger programme of guided listening that I engaged in to explore this hypothesis. In the mid-1960s, due to a combination of contemporary recording techniques and the limits on bass frequency reproduction set by disc-cutting technology, the bass drum sounds found in rock and rhythm and blues/soul are all relatively diffuse and low level. Even in James Brown's ‘Say It Loud I'm Black And I'm Proud’ (1968) and Sly & The Family Stone's ‘Everyday People’ (also 1968) which foreground the drums and bass in their mixes to an unusual extent for the time, it is the snare drum that cuts through clearly, rather than the bass drum. The dominant aesthetic in the treatment of drums still maintains the integrity of the drum kit as a single entity – often with a prominent tambourine or other forms of hand percussion. Just a year later, the kick drum sound on Sly & The Family Stone's ‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)’ (1969) is very clear and prominentFootnote 8 and demonstrates the beginning of microphone placement techniques that allow the increasing separation and separate staging of the component parts of the drum kit. By 1972 with, for example, The O'Jays ‘Love Train’ (1972) a much stronger separation between kick drum, snare drum and hi-hat is discernible. They are not simply defined more clearly through close microphone placement, but are also staged in different parts of the stereo field and with different amounts of ambience and equalisation. The Hues Corporation's ‘Rock The Boat’ (1974) sees the crystalisation of this form of staging (as well as many of the musical features of the approaching disco sound) with a very prominent and dry bass drum and hi-hat (plus a tom tom rather than a snare) and reverberant chorus vocals. Earth, Wind & Fire's ‘Shining Star’ (1975) provides a version of this form of staging that harks back to the guitar-driven funk mixes of late 1960s James Brown: the rhythm guitar, playing a percussive role similar to the hi-hat, is mixed dry and forward and the dry kick and reverberant snare, with a sound reminiscent of hand claps, are prominent as well. Not all dance music was mixed in this way. K.C. & The Sunshine Band's ‘Get Down Tonight’ (1975), for example, has a strong bass drum but is mixed to sound much more like a band playing in a single space. The BeeGees' tracks from Saturday Night Fever such as ‘Night Fever’ (1978) demonstrate quite an extreme example of another aspect of this form of staging, the shortening of drum sounds through damping and gatingFootnote 9 and the highlighting of the attack portions of these sounds through either mechanical or electronic means.Footnote 10 Added to this, the falsetto chorus vocals on BeeGee tracks generally utilise more or longer reverberation than the lead vocals. A more dramatic version of this ‘party’ staging over a very dry, prominent rhythm section can be found on Sister Sledge's ‘We Are Family’ (1979), where reverberant hand claps double the drier snare sound in the choruses, the chorus vocals have more reverb than the lead, and a track of party shouts and whoops are staged in a very ambient space. The development of computer-based dance music in the 1980s and beyond allowed for even more extreme and stylised versions of this form of functional staging to evolve tracks such as Irene Cara's ‘Fame’ (1980), Indeeps's ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’ (1983), Phuture's ‘Future Jacks’ (1987) and the Age of Love's ‘Age of Love’ (1990).
The process that I am proposing here is not deterministic in that there is no ‘goal’, nor is there a concerted attempt by a single community to develop such a goal. The communities of soul, disco and, later, house and techno record producers did not explicitly identify the problem of clarity and rhythmic entrainment in relation to ambience and seek methods to solve it. Nor did they work blindly with no understanding of what sonic characteristics made for an effective dance record. Where developments in the sound of dance music record production were effective, DJs and dancers in the clubs recognised this and these records, all else being equal, would receive preference. Obviously, however, all else wasn't equal and many other factors could contribute to the popularity of records. Followers of Dawkins (Reference Dawkins1976) might point to this as an example of a ‘meme’Footnote 11 but the idea of discrete ‘pieces’ of knowledge that this implies seems inadequate to explain what is happening here. There is no single process that produces a desirable sonic result; there are, rather, a range of tools that produce, for example, various bass drum timbres that have desirable characteristics. So, instead of there being discrete ideas that produce a distinct ‘evolutionary’ output, there is a gradual change in what Csikszentmihalyi (Reference Csikszentmihalyi and Sternberg1999) describes as the domain of knowledge in this area of creativity.Footnote 12 The various processes that individual engineers and producers absorb into their standard practice, while not necessarily being the same, become the types of practice that produce, for example, prominent ‘back beat’ drum soundsFootnote 13 with well defined attack transients. There is a trend in the direction of certain sonic characteristics, rather than the development of a definitive production method.
Functional staging related to rock music
The staging of some specific forms of rock music, on the other hand, took steps in almost precisely the opposite direction. Rock artists whose audience experienced them in concert in large venues developed production techniques that were mimetic of that form of large-scale space. The consumption of recorded music by those artists in the 1970s centred around the playback of albums in the living rooms and bedrooms of their audience: a result of the oft cited growth in ownership of record players in the 1960s and 1970s (see for example Straw Reference Straw, Frith, Straw and Street2001, p. 60). From Pet Sounds (1966) and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) onwards, the long-playing album format became the de facto formal structure for creativity in rock music and the primary form of consumption for most fans was playing that album in their bedroom or living room. At the same time, the ideal form of consumption was the live concert and this other form of functional staging emerged, recreating an idealised or stylised version of the large-scale rock concert sound for playback in the domestic environment. Moore and Dockwray (Reference Moore and Dockwray2009) have conducted a study on the stereo staging of rock music, the positioning of elements in the sound-box, between 1966 and 1972 that produces some evidence that the horizontal or lateral spatialisation in recorded rock music during this time doesn't necessarily reflect concert or television stage arrangements. They point out that, for example, the central positioning of the bass that became normative in the 1970s was, in all likelihood, related to the technical needs of stereo groove cutting rather than the positioning of musicians on a stage. The point that I am making about functional staging relates to the size of the perceived space and the perception of distance rather than lateral placement.
The added ambience that stems from music being played back in the typical family home is generally both short and familiar and is thus not very noticeable. The added ambience in the arena or stadium rock concert is, on the other hand, very noticeable and becomes an important part of the musical experience. On the positive side, the power of the large-scale communal experience is reinforced by the sonic imprint of a big noise in a big space. On the negative side, the masking problems that I mentioned above in relation to discos are magnified by even longer reverberation times, increased ‘rumble’ from the bass accentuation created by this type of acoustic and, often, discrete echoes returning from the back wall of the venue towards the stage. These are the problems that live sound engineers and system designers for large-scale rock concerts have been wrestling with (and gradually finding ways to reduce) since the late 1960s. The form of functional staging I am describing in this instance involves the various ways in which recorded rock music took on some aspects of the acoustic characteristics of the arena/stadium experience in order to create the sensation of scale without the negative musical impact: bringing the stadium to the listener's bedroom. In general, this involved adding long reverberation (mimetic of the large spaces involved) but in a variety of ways that reduced its masking effect, and by using echoes on isolated musical components. Echoes were often timed so that they reinforced the rhythm of the music rather than conflicting with it. Alongside this, various techniques were developed that ‘fattened up’ the bottom end of the frequency range without the use of reverberation. As we shall see from the following examples, a wide range of techniques can be identified as addressing this issue of scale, which range from partially realistic recreations of the spatial experience of the concert hall to highly stylised forms of staging which might be characterised as ‘acoustic cartoons’: representations which exaggerate or distort a single feature in order to conjure up a recognisable experience. Once again, I emphasise that I am hypothesising a broad cultural trend rather than any utilisation by engineers, producers and artists of this mental representation of their creative practice. However, the relationship between size and power is a fundamental human metaphor (see Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980; Feldman Reference Feldman2006) and it seems reasonable to assume that the idea of a ‘big’ sound in rock music is a fundamental driver in creative mediation practice. The connection between the ‘big’ sound and the concert hall need not, however, be made explicitly in the minds of practitioners.
The primary way of using ambience to create the impression of a large space in rock music in the mid- to late 1960s is mimetic, in some way, of being in the front row of the concert experience: a loud direct version of the sound, and a quieter but long reverberation in the background. The issue of realism (or rather the lack of it) here is also related to concert-style amplification. Cream's ‘Spoonful’ from the album Fresh Cream (1966) was recorded in a single take apart from Jack Bruce's harmonica overdub.Footnote 14 The large-scale ambience on the track comes largely from the drums and guitar. The vocals, being recorded through a close microphone, would not have been very loud in the recording space and wouldn't have created much reverberation of their own. In a concert situation, on the other hand, the voice would have been amplified through a large public address system and would generate similar levels of reverberation to the other instruments. In the recorded version, the microphone placement has been used to accentuate the direct sound of the bass guitar to give a strong bass end, and the drums appear to have had the low frequencies filtered out to some extent (there is very little bass drum) – perhaps to remove the ‘muddiness’ of the bass reverberation that would be present from the drums and bass guitar that would be captured by the ambient microphones used on the guitar and drums. This example thus presents two early forms of techniques that become key tools in this form of staging: firstly, the use of microphone placement to create appropriate (and artificial) balances of direct and reverberant sound to maintain clarity while providing audible suggestions of a large space and, secondly, the use of equalisation and filtering to remove low-frequency reverberation and to counterbalance that with close microphone placement and dynamic compressionFootnote 15 of one or more components with strong bass frequency content.
Bruce Botnick's recording of the Doors' ‘Light My Fire’ (1967) at Hollywood's Sunset Sound Studio demonstrates several further ways in which these ideas can be implemented. Sunset Sound was quite unusual for a studio in 1966 (the sessions took place in September 1966 and the single was released the following year) in that it boasted both an echo chamber and isolation booths as well as the 4-track tape recorder (Cogan and Clark Reference Cogan and Clark2003, pp. 46–52). Thus, although the recording of ‘Light My Fire’ was created predominantly with a single performance, the increased separation came from the vocal booth and overdubbing a bass guitar. Bruce Botnick recalled:
Back then, no facility had a vocal booth. Tutti [Camarata, owner of Sunset Sound] was the one who came up with the concept. As a producer he'd never liked the fact that there was all that leakage into the singer's mic when he recorded alongside the orchestra. He didn't have the control that he wanted, and so when he and Allan Emig designed the studio they incorporated the vocal booth. I had never seen one before, and when I walked in and saw it I was blown away. It made perfect sense, and I subsequently recorded pretty much everybody in there, from jazz singers to hard rock.Footnote 16
Alice Cooper's ‘School's Out’ (1972) provides an example of how this model became stylised in the early 1970s. Reverberation on the voice is deliberately artificial: a slap back echo and a short bright reverb.Footnote 17 The guitars have a more natural and larger reverb sound but it is mixed further back in comparison to the direct sound. While the track gives an overall impression of large size, this is achieved through ‘cartoon’ versions of a large ambient space (compressed and exaggerated bass frequencies and exaggeratedly loud but short reverberation effects), when in fact the production of the drums and bass is very dry.
Bruce Springsteen's ‘Born To Run’ (1975) is equally artificial in its construction but creates a more natural-sounding approach to space. The production is reminiscent of Phil Spector's ‘wall of sound’ technique, but many of the elements are dry to maintain their clarity (e.g. the chimes, electric piano and the wah wah guitar in the middle section). The overall effect combines reverberation on various instruments at different levels to create the impression of an ‘epic’ space while maintaining clarity in a way that is missing from Spector's sound.
Where function and audience aesthetic combine
It should be apparent from these examples that the issue of function is also closely associated with the audience aesthetic and with perceived creative and performance authenticity. In the rock examples, the ‘function’ refers to staging that will exhibit attributes of the ideal version of consumption (the rock concert) in the normative version of consumption (playback of the LP in the home).
The forms of spatial staging employed on recordings of singer/songwritersFootnote 18 is another example of the way that function and audience aesthetic combine to produce normative practice. The two key aspects of staging that are used extensively in this area involve the prioritising of the instrumental and vocal performance of the individual performer above any accompanists, and a very close spatial positioning of the performer in relation to the listener. On a functional level, the meaning of the lyrics in this musical genre are generally perceived as being more important to the listener than in other genres. This can be seen in the many descriptions of these artists as poets as well as musicians,Footnote 19 and in the way that reviewers discuss lyrical content in more detail than other musical styles.Footnote 20 The clarity in the 3–5 kHz frequency range (key to the intelligibility of speech) which is one of the consequences of close proximity recording, and the loudness of the main performer in relation to any other accompanists (if present), both facilitate this functional goal of listening to the lyrics. At the same time, this type of proximity to the performer suggests an intimacy that goes beyond the norms of a small-scale performance venue.Footnote 21 Dibben (Reference Dibben2006) has discussed this issue of intimacy through the combination of microphone placement and performance practice in the work of Bjork as a way of reinforcing the lyrical meaning of a track. Indeed, these forms of analysis draw on the notion of subject-position (Clarke Reference Clarke1999, Reference Clarke2005) in relation to the subject matter that is also implicit in the work of Lacasse (2001). As Clarke describes it:
The relationship between the particular characteristics of the sounds used and the subject-position specified can be traced in an explicit and principled manner, and that the relationships involved combine social conventions … and physical principles (for example … the specification of space/distance by reverberation). (Clarke Reference Clarke1999, p. 371)
The staging in this instance not only facilitates the function in terms of the form of consumption (listening with attention focused on lyrical meaning), but also involves a generalised or stylistic subject-position that combines the physical principles relating to proximity with social conventions that conflate proximity with direct and unmediated, perhaps even honest, communication. While Clarke (Reference Clarke1999, pp. 350–51) suggests that cultural meaning has become as ‘invariant as natural law’ in relation to the macroscopic meaning of features such as metre and tonality, one can discern – through a historical study of usage – the general nature (if not the precise detail) of changes in meaning associated with different harmonic progressions: for example, the changing perception of what constitutes dissonance. In the same way, the subtle inflections of meaning suggested by different forms of staging can be seen to have changed over the past 40 years. Bob Dylan's move from acoustic to electric mediation on Highway 61 Revisited (1965) was seen by many in the folk music community at the time to represent a move from the ‘authentic voice’ of acoustic performance to the commercial one of rock.Footnote 22 The discussion forum on NickDrake.com features an extended stream arguing the case whether Bryter Layter (1970) is ‘over-produced’Footnote 23 because the instrumental arrangements overpower the acoustic guitar. On the other hand, David Gray's White Ladder (2000) utilises synthesisers and drum loop samples as well as electric instruments while, in the view of one reviewer, still managing to sound ‘like a guy playing his acoustic guitar’.Footnote 24 In the same way that familiarity with harmonic dissonance can be seen to have gradually extended the ‘acceptable’ harmonic vocabulary throughout the 19th century, familiarity with the sound of record production may be seen as extending the ‘acceptable’ vocabulary of technological mediation in the last half of the 20th. Despite this shifting vocabulary, however, we can still use the ideas of functional staging and subject-position to explore the idea that a particular combination of mediation techniques are seen by particular audiences as more or less appropriate for particular styles of music.
Moving away from the sounds of western popular music, Enrique Morente's ‘Venta Zoraida’ (1992) is a flamenco track that uses electronic drum kit sounds as well as the traditional flamenco ingredients of acoustic guitar and the hand claps and light percussion of the palmas. These electronic drums are mixed and equalised differently from how they are in Anglophone popular music. The cultural importance of a full range of frequencies in the guitar sound in flamenco is, in some ways, similar to the foregrounding of the acoustic guitar in the singer-songwriter examples mentioned above: it involves both functional staging and subject-position. In order to maintain the rhythmic importance of the guitar (to facilitate the dance function), it is mixed much higher in volume and with a fuller frequency content than rhythm guitars in rock and pop music.Footnote 25 The palmas, the rhythmic clapping that provides the other main rhythmic impulse, is also loud in the mix, and the drums work subordinately to these two elements. The relative prominence of the various components in the staging also reflect the relevant social conventions, i.e. the importance of the guitarist as a key creative artist in the music and the participatory nature of the palmas.
Mediation and performance authenticity
I shall now return to the issue of perceived authenticity and mediation that was mentioned in the introduction. In 1975, the album cover of Queen's A Night At The Opera proclaimed that ‘No synthesisers were used on this album’ and yet Brian May felt entirely comfortable constructing multiple-layered performance ‘patchworks’ of guitar tracks. As their producer Roy Thomas commented in Cunningham (Reference Cunningham1995):
There was no stipulation that we wouldn't have any synths, but the statement ‘No synths’ was printed on the album sleeves because of peoples' lack of intellect in the ears department. Many people couldn't hear the difference between a multitracked guitar and a synthesiser. We would spend four days multi-layering a guitar solo and then some imbecile from the record company would come in and say, ‘I like that synth!’.
This may, to some extent, be an attempt to rewrite history so that Queen's use of synthesisers on albums after 1980 did not appear to be a change of mind, but in any event it involves the privileging of one form of technology over another. Almost 20 years later, we find another example of guitar, bass and drums being promoted over newer technologies when Rage Against The Machine's eponymous album also announced in the sleeve notes, ‘No samples, keyboards or synthesizers used in the making of this recording’ (Rage Against The Machine 1992). In what appears to be a deliberate reference to these earlier ideological statements, the experimental electronic duo Matmos stated, ‘No microphones were used on this album’ on the CD cover for Supreme Balloon (2008). In another example, Brøvig Andersen (Reference Brøvig Andersen2006) has coined the term opaque mediation to describe Portishead's use of mediation that is deliberately audible on their album Dummy 1994. This is an instance of media-based staging: Portishead exploit the sound of the recording media and the processing technology (Zagorski-Thomas Reference Zagorski-Thomas2008). Geoff Barrow of Portishead has stated:
We just record in loads of different ways. We put stuff on tape. We put beats to vinyl, then we sample them. We stick things through little amps and re-record them again. Usually, the crappier the machine, the better it sounds. It's the way that we work. (Geoff Barrow interviewed by Goldberg (Reference Goldberg1997))
The professional and creative practice of the DJ and the producer are being foregrounded here by deliberately highlighting the crackle, hiss and distortion of various forms of mediation that are associated with that practice: the crackle of vinyl, the hiss of tape and the distortion added by the extreme treatments in the studio. In all these instances, the skills of the dominant creative agents inform the aesthetic decisions about what constitutes authentic technological mediation or performance practice. Steve Albini, a recordist whose background is in guitar-centred rock bands, says:
There is a lot of use of ProTools in professional studios, but this is mostly for the special effects it allows, not for sound quality. These special effects soon fall out of fashion, and I don't think this trend will define studios permanently. Do you remember when real drummers were told to sell their drum kits, because drum machines were going to ‘take over’? That same false prophesy is happening with regard to analog tape machines and ProTools now. It is a trend, and it will have some permanent impact, but it doesn't replace analog systems, which are more durable, sound better and are more flexible. (Steve Albini interviewed by Breivik (Reference Breivik2002))
Albini is making decisions about recording practice based on a single dimension of the technological mediation: the sound quality. This, in itself, is based on a subjective assessment of the desirability of the forms of distortion associated with analogue tape recording rather than those associated with digital systems such as ProTools.Footnote 26 Albini ignores other dimensions such as the creative opportunities that non-linear digital recording offers. His ideology of recording valorises performance practice over the techniques of production. While he is also a musician, he is better known for producing artists such as Nirvana and the Pixies and his deliberate subordination of his own creative practice to the performance practice of the bands he works with demonstrates the importance of the audience's aesthetic ideology in a musical style. The cultural domain and social field associated with Nirvana in 1993 took a very different stance on the issue of technological mediation than the cultural domain and social field associated with Portishead in 1994 and both were different again to that of Queen in 1975. Having said that, both Nirvana and Queen (at that time) were also influenced by the trends in functional staging relating to rock music mentioned above while Portishead, with their strong connections to DJ and club culture, reflect the influence of the functional staging of dance music.
The issue of authenticity is not, however, as simple as a straightforward dichotomy between performance practice and technological mediation. While recognising that technological mediation has influenced the shifting ontology of creativity in music away from the simplistic, traditional notion of the work that Goehr (Reference Goehr1992) describes, Georgina Born ascribes contradictory tendencies that Théberge (Reference Théberge1989) had also identified, for technological changes to both promote collaborative creative practice and to disrupt communal performance (Born Reference Born2005, pp. 25–26).Footnote 27 While I think this held true in 1989 more than it did in 2005, I also think that this relies on a single, performance-based model of creativity that is ideological and not representative of the complex reality of popular music. The idea of ‘alienated’ labour suggests a model involving powerless musicians and a powerful producer which doesn't chime with accounts of the production process.Footnote 28 The ‘co-present aesthetic response and mutuality’ (Born Reference Born2005, p. 26) can occur in what might be called semi-real time: a negotiated communal composition onto recording media instead of onto paper or a head arrangement. This model allows for the mix of performance and mediation techniques that characterises the creative practice of many popular music artists. I've already mentioned the Beatles' collaborative work with George Martin; other examples of producer/artists such as Joe Meek and Phil Spector and artist/producers such as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder established the idea in the audience's mind that production techniques could be part of an artist's creative practice. One of the ways in which extensive technological mediation can gain acceptance with an audience, therefore, is for that mediation to be perceived as part of the artists' communal or individual creative practice. On the other hand, an audience's perception of what constitutes normative creative practice is also heavily influenced by the current cultural domain and the historical precedent which partially informs it.
High fidelity and the perception of quality
This brings us to a key factor in normative listening practice and its influence on record production: the notion of quality. Rossing, Moore and Wheeler describe five conditions that should be satisfied to achieve realism in reproduced sound:
1) The frequency range of the reproduced sound should be sufficient to retain all the audible components in the source sound, and the sound spectrum of the reproduced sound should be identical to that of the source;
2) The reproduced sound should be free of distortion and noise;
3) The reproduced sound should have loudness and dynamic range comparable to the original sound;
4) The spatial sound pattern of the original sound should be reproduced;
5) The reverberation characteristics (in space and time) of the original sound should be preserved in the reproduced sound. (Rossing et al. Reference Rossing, Moore and Wheeler2002, pp. 573–74)
They also, however, note that conditions 4 and 5 ‘often tend to be overlooked by high-fidelity sound enthusiasts’ and that ‘attempts to reproduce the full dynamic range of a concert hall in a small listening room would not create a very pleasing effect’ (Rossing et al. Reference Rossing, Moore and Wheeler2002, p. 574). This equation of realism in musical experience with the concert hall is cited by Keightley (Reference Keightley1996, p. 153) as one of the key attributes in the developing notion of high fidelity sound in journalism about the subject in the late 1940s and 1950s. As Keightley also states ‘Like the LP, hi-fi also connoted a sense of elevated class, cultural capital and prestige’ (1996, p. 150), partly through its association with classical music. He also notes, however, that from a very early point in its development hi-fi enthusiasts were concerned with extremes: the extreme bass and treble ends of the audible frequency range and extreme volume both in terms of loud reproduction and low background noise (Keightley Reference Keightley1996, 174). These aspects of early hi-fi enthusiasm have added features to the culturally constructed notion of a high-quality recording that go beyond the technical specifications of dynamic and frequency range to include: exaggerated bass and treble frequencies to enhance the experience of a full range of frequencies by making the extreme ends of the audible spectrum more noticeable; the removal of extraneous background noise even if, as in the case of performers breathing, shifting in their seats, etc., it is noise that would normally be present in the concert hall; a combination of loud direct sound with a quiet but long reverberation that provides a sonic impression of the experience of being in the best (and most expensive) seats of a concert hall.
As the trade and consumer press continued to stress the importance of the latest and most expensive technology in both the production and the reproduction of music in the 1960s and 1970s, descriptions of production in reviews of rock and pop albums start to utilise terminology relating to expense: ‘glittering’, ‘classy’ and ‘polished’.Footnote 29 This has in turn led to the marketing idea of ‘coffee table’ albumsFootnote 30 where the production values are seen as part of the packaging and need to reflect these notions of expensive sounding record production as well as using compression extensively to reduce the dynamic range so that the recording works as background listening. That audiences have engaged with the kind of cultural meaning suggested by this terminology can be attested to further in the emergence of ‘lo-fi’.
Utilising a dilettante approach to media-based staging (see Zagorski-Thomas Reference Zagorski-Thomas2008) can make the producer and artist appear, on the face of it, superficial, amateurish and ill-informed about recording practice. Garage bands from the late 1950s onwards have produced rough and unpolished recordings and this has led to it being embraced as a production aesthetic in itself. If the dilettante approach is deliberate, however, then it takes on additional meaning: a professional quality recording may become a signifier for the ‘establishment’ and the rejection of it through choosing a lo-fi approach becomes a political statement of difference.
This notion of equating quality with modernity and expense through technology has also manifested itself in an interesting way in the world music market. Artists who are marketed in the world music category frequently find that record companies have different ideas about what constitutes appropriate forms of production. The artists want their recorded product to sound ‘modern’ (which often means electronic) as they feel the term is defined by western commercial music norms. This in turn is counterbalanced by western markets wanting their world music to sound traditional (which generally means acoustic) or exotic.Footnote 31 The concept of audio quality is still, as I mentioned above, defined in ways that entail the use of certain contemporary recording and production practices that are separate from the capture of wide frequency and dynamic responses. This requires a careful balancing of the technical mediation process with the performance so that the recording sounds traditional and modern at the same time. The sleeve notes on Ngcobo (2004) provide an interesting example of this. Certain aspects of the multi-track nature of the recording are described, but the producer is at pains to make some specific points about technology:
No, we didn't use any preprogrammed grooves (apart from Shiyani's own elastic precision), but we still want some boom and clack on the track. You'll hear the traditional Zulu isigubhu drum, brought in from the ingoma dance tradition. A drum machine? That tap-tap that pops through on some of the tracks – that's Shiyani's foot. Dave, let's get a mike on Shiyani's foot. (Ben Mandelson (producer) on Ngcobo (2004))
The sleeve notes go on to make it clear that overdubbing and non-linear recording techniques are being used, but also emphasise a certain African free-wheeling nature to the process: recording in the garden, getting used to using headphones, ‘looking for the performance, not just the layering’ (Ben Mandelson on Ngcobo (2004)). In other words, the listener can expect to hear the ‘right’ balance of high fidelity sound recording and authentic performance practice.
Conclusions
The idea that the consumers of recorded music have an influence on the techniques of production has been explored from a variety of angles in this article. Firstly, I have used the term functional staging to explain the way that the function to which recorded music is put can affect the approach taken in production to highlight or create particular characteristics in the sound. Secondly, I have explored a variety of ways in which the audience's perception of creative agency has created notions of authenticity associated with the relationship between composition, performance and technological mediation. Thirdly, I have discussed the issue of audio quality and the way in which this seemingly empirical feature has been added to and distorted by socio-economic forces. These three aspects have been discussed using Csikszentmihalyi's (1999) ideas of the cultural domain and the social field as a way of representing this ‘external’ knowledge and ideology as part of the creative process. Clarke's (1999, 2005) use of subject-position in relation to the nature of the perceived sound has also been used to help differentiate physical principles from social conventions. These two theoretical models, while working at different levels of analysis, help to clarify the analysis by providing both a socio-cultural framework and a perceptual/psychological one.
The perception of creative control and integrity that an audience gains from an artist's recorded work stems more from ideology than from aesthetics, and this is one of the guiding factors in the perception of what constitutes acceptable or authentic forms of technological mediation in a musical community. It is partly about the sound properties (often perceived in terms of quality) of the production, and partly about maintaining the audience's romantic idea of the artist or performer as being in control of their creative output. This is also informed by historical conceptions about the boundaries of relevant creative practice. In the classical, folk and, to a lesser extent, world music styles the fact that these musical forms pre-date recording mean that there is greater resistance to mediation through the recording process. In various forms of popular music artists have absorbed some aspects of mediation into the acceptable boundaries of creative practice. Functional staging is also fused with and involved in the maintenance of the audience perception of creative authenticity and of the music maintaining the appropriate sonic qualities of what is perceived to be an appropriate listening/engaging environment. The social constructions that create a function for music in culture can be seen (following Clarke Reference Clarke1999, Reference Clarke2005) to relate to both physical principles (such as those that facilitate the perception of rhythmic components or the intelligibility of sung lyrics) and social conventions (such as features that contribute to participation or maintain the cultural importance of a particular feature). At the same time all these audience or consumer influences can be seen as contributing to the implicit forms of knowledge, rules and ideology that comprise the cultural domain in the Csikszentmihalyi (Reference Csikszentmihalyi and Sternberg1999)/McIntyre (Reference McIntyre2007) model, that the audience is obviously an important component part of the social field that judges creative output with a view to acceptance into and possible consequent alteration of the cultural domain.
