Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
3 - Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
Summary
You, as the engineer, have to share in the painting with the artist.
phil ramoneIn transforming musical thought and action into sound recordings, sounds are converted into electric current and sent along a signal path to a storage medium from which they can be reconstituted at the push of a button. This bit of technological magic has introduced a new figure into the music-making process – not a musician, nor a composer, arranger or songwriter, but one who nonetheless exerts a measure of influence over a listener's musical experience: the recording engineer. The tasks performed by engineers, while practical, have an aesthetic dimension as well, which amounts to an expressive voice in the sound-recording project, an example of what Hans-Joachim Braun calls the ‘technologization of musical aesthetics’. The voices of recording engineers, always present though historically ‘silent’, have long influenced the ways in which we perceive musical sound. Indeed, their accumulated work has shaped essential contours of our recorded musical landscape. Sound recordings are renderings of sound events and, like any rendering, they embody the attitudes, skills, habits and aesthetic stances of those who make them. Some renderings aspire to acoustic realism, others to fantasy, but whatever the case, the sound of a recording has much to do with the technical abilities and aesthetic choices of those whose hands control the signal path.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music , pp. 63 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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