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
5 - From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
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
At 7.18 pm on 30 November 2006 three hundred people began to dance in a London railway station. Conga lines formed, some danced together while others were engrossed in their own dance steps on the concourse: not a single strain of music was heard by the bemused onlookers.
What took place was a flash mob, a happening organised via mobile phone text messages and email sent from person to person. In this case it was devoted to people dancing to different, individually chosen music that only they could hear on their personal MP3 players. In this brief moment many of the themes of this chapter are encapsulated: the centrality of listening to recordings in our modern relationship to music; how technological innovations have encouraged this; the increasing atomisation of the musical experience coupled, paradoxically, with a yearning for (musical) community; and, most of all, the idea that listening is far from being a passive, receive-only mode of interacting with music. In what follows we provide a sketch of how listening became institutionalised as the prevalent and normative mode of musical appreciation in industrialised locations; how the activity of listening has been variously configured over time and place (in interaction with technology); and how listening needs to be theorised as a form of social practice, even when it takes place in solitude. We set these themes in the context of what listening, as a social activity, has enabled listeners to do, and we examine the symbiosis between recorded music, related industries and the listener.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music , pp. 102 - 115Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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