The Sound of Recorded Music

Section Headings:

5. The Postproduction of Performance

Approaches to Analysis

Allan Moore’s ‘Analyzing Popular Music’

Repeated Listening

Repeated listening and noticing more – timbre, micro-timing.

Music and Metaphor

Music and metaphor – drawing on theories about the metaphorical basis of language.
Mirror neurons and the ‘sound of gesture’ – Clark and the interaction of the metaphorical meaning of the instrument / performance and the metaphorical meaning of the sound / sonic narrative.

The Sound of Gesture

The impact on our perception and understanding of music of this quest for ‘perfection’ through edited performances and the mechanical repetition of sampled loops must obviously play a large part in any musicological approach that seeks to include an analysis of record production. There is neurological evidence that ‘a perceived beat is literally an imagined movement; it seems to involve the same neural facilities as motor activity, most notably motor-sequence planning. Hence, the act of listening to music involves the same mental processes that generate bodily motion.’ If, at a subconscious level, the perception of music involves hypothesizing what it would feel like to produce that sound, it would be useful for both music and musicology to study the grey area between edited performances that are perceived as possible and those that are perceived as impossible or unnatural. How much room for breath needs to be left in a spliced performance before we perceive it as an activity that is impossible to generate, and therefore artificial? How is it that we perceive the difference between a very accurately played repeated pattern and a sampled loop? There are, of course, many examples in recorded popular music in which room ambience or an unnatural truncation of a sound at a loop point will make the artificiality obvious, but there also seems to be another dimension to this that may be related to the impossibility of playing a perfect repeat. Theories of embodied cognition should be incorporated into the study of record production in the same way that they have contributed to other areas of musicology.

The Postproduction of Performance

Editing and quantization – post-production of performance and the perception of gestural consistency and structural intention (both at a large scale and phrase or even note level).

Timbre

Serge Lacasse – timbral shaping as staging. Extending this to discuss how features like compression, gating and strip silence can affect meaning at perceptual level and through cultural meaning – the presence of a ‘human’ experienced through breath, noise etc.
Another instance of technology and contemporary music developing in tandem is the way in which timbral innovation has become central to the composition process. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be characterized as a time in which timbral variation through extended and unorthodox playing techniques has become a central feature of both art music and popular music. In many instances this has been encouraged and extended by the ways in which technology has opened up further opportunities in the world of sound. It can be no coincidence that this trend has coincided with the development of what Eisenberg has called phonography, and the accompanying changes in listening practice. The ability to listen to the same performance many times allows the attention to focus on the minutiae of timbre, pitch, and phrasing that characterize these playing techniques. The study of performance practice is wholly reliant on recording technology to enable the measurement and analysis of these factors. I will not venture into the huge subject of electronic sound generation here, but the manipulation and processing techniques that have developed alongside the recording process, and the use of close microphone placement and multitrack recording, have all helped to focus attention on the grain of a sound.

the musicology of record production