Balkan High, Balkan Low: Pop-Music Production Between Hybridity and Class Struggle

2019 ◽  
pp. 155-170
Author(s):  
Slobodan Karamanić ◽  
Manuela Unverdorben
Keyword(s):  
Class Struggle ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Music Production

The Business of Pop Music Production

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-57
Author(s):  
Phil Harding ◽  
Mike Collins
Keyword(s):  
Pop Music ◽  
Music Production

Rethinking criticism about lossy compression: Sound fidelity, large-scale production and audio capital in pop music

2020 ◽  
pp. 135485652097645
Author(s):  
Pat O’Grady
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Lossy Compression ◽  
High Fidelity ◽  
Scale Production ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Large Scale Production ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Music Player

Although digital music streaming and downloading practices highlight a preference for portability over fidelity among pop music consumers, for some ‘high fidelity’ continues to be a crucial component of their pop music engagement. This article examines the political dimensions of audio preferences. It considers comments by Neil Young and those within The Distortion of Sound who claim that the lossy compression encoding process – used in digital downloading and streaming – significantly degrades the quality of recorded sound and compromises valuable pop music characteristics. In 2015, these claims were followed by the development of the ‘hi-res’ music player device and digital download store ‘Pono’. This article argues that some criticism of lossy compression can be understood as ‘audio capital’. Rather than merely exchanging aesthetic preferences, or a reliable metric of the audibility of high fidelity, audio capital describes the reconversion of celebrity status and economic capital into a class divide structured by an appreciation for large-scale music production.

The Master of Mystery

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-164
Author(s):  
Pat O’Grady
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Production Studies ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Emergent Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Production Techniques

Over the past twenty years, the field of popular music studies has significantly enhanced our understanding of pop music production. Studies have drawn from a range of industry discussions to explore, for example, the ways in which emergent technologies have led to distinctive production techniques and the important role that recording technologies play in shaping the sound of pop music. Whereas many industry discussions have provided productive sites of analysis, they can also obstruct research in some respects. This article focuses on an area of music production where such industrial discussions tend to hinder, rather than enhance, an understanding of its practices. It examines the ways in which industry discussions position the process of mastering as “mysterious.” This article argues representations of mastering as “mysterious” work to reinforce the importance of this practice and also safeguard it from new technologies that might challenge its dominance. These representations can function to reproduce and secure social hierarchies within the field.

scholarly journals Virtual auditory reality

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Iain Findlay-Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
User Experience ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Music Listening ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Auditory Experience

This article examines popular music listening in light of recent research in auditory perception and spatial experience, record production, and virtual reality, while considering parallel developments in digital pop music production practice. The discussion begins by considering theories of listening and embodiment by Brandon LaBelle, Eric Clarke, Salomè Voegelin and Linda Salter, examining relations between listening subjects and aural environments, conceptualising listening as a process of environmental ‘inhabiting’, and considering auditory experience as the real-time construction of ‘reality’. These ideas are discussed in relation to recent research on popular music production and perception, with a focus on matters of spatial sound design, the virtual ‘staging’ of music performances and performing bodies, digital editing methods and effects, and on shifting relations between musical spatiality, singer-persona, audio technologies, and listener. Writings on music and virtual space by Martin Knakkergaard, Allan Moore, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen & Anne Danielsen, Denis Smalley, Dale Chapman, Kodwo Eshun and Holger Schulze are discussed, before being related to conceptions of VR sound and user experience by Jaron Lanier, Rolf Nordahl & Niels Nilsson, Mel Slater, Tom Garner and Frances Dyson. This critical framework informs three short aural analyses of digital pop tracks released during the last 10 years - Titanium (Guetta & Sia 2010), Ultralight Beam (West 2016) and 2099 (Charli XCX 2019) - presented in the form of autoethnographic ‘listening notes’. Through this discussion on personal popular music listening and virtual spatiality, a theory of pop listening as embodied inhabiting of simulated narrative space, or virtual story-world, with reference to ‘aural-dominant realities’ (Salter), ‘sonic possible worlds’ (Voegelin), and ‘sonic fictions’ (Eshun), is developed. By examining personal music listening in relation to VR user experience, this study proposes listening to pop music in the 21st century as a mode of immersive, embodied ‘storyliving’, or ‘storydoing’ (Allen & Tucker).

Latent Elements in Pop Music Production

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 506-521
Author(s):  
Pat O’Grady
Keyword(s):  
Pop Music ◽  
Music Production

The Death Rattle of a Laughing Hyena

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albin J. Zak
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
The State ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Death Rattle ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Top 40 ◽  
Radio Stars

In 1958, record producer Mitch Miller vehemently criticized the state of Top 40 radio. He argued that DJs were pandering excessively to the tastes of teenagers and playing low-quality popular music. This criticism was aimed largely at rock and roll records produced by the low-budget, independent recording firms with whom he now found himself in competition. This chapter traces the development of the major-labels’ novel pop music production practices in the 1950s, specifically the use of overdubbing, unconventional arrangements, added reverb, and Foley effects. These techniques are compared with indie-label recording, which captured more populist genres with less expensive postproduction capabilities. Finally, the chapter traces the aesthetics of DIY (do-it-yourself) records made by amateur musicians-turned-radio-stars, and concludes with a discussion of the lasting effects of these 1950s pop music crosscurrents.

Synthesized space in pop music production

2000 ◽  
Vol 108 (5) ◽  
pp. 2537-2537
Author(s):  
Alexander U. Case
Keyword(s):  
Pop Music ◽  
Music Production

Pop Music Production Creativity

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-64
Author(s):  
Phil Harding ◽  
Mike Collins
Keyword(s):  
Pop Music ◽  
Music Production
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