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.

FROM FOLKLORE TO POP MUSIC. DAGESTAN SONG: STATE, PROBLEMS, ADAPTATION IN MODERN TIMES

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-80
Author(s):  
Elmira Bashirovna Abdullaeva
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
The State ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Positive Experience ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Musical Context

The article considers the forms of existence and adaptation of a folk song in the modern musical context of Dagestan. The author shows the positive experience of the development of pop songs in the works of Dagestan composers, critically assesses the state and problems of Dagestan popular music and its stage forms.

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.

The music industry, technology and utopia – an exchange between Marcus Breen and Eamonn Forde

Popular Music ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCUS BREEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
The State ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Multiple Characteristics

A new struggle has emerged within popular music. This struggle is about technology and access to music through computer-mediated technology. Somewhat typical of the state of cultural things being more complex in their multiple articulations, this struggle runs in tandem with the historical struggle by youth for ‘their music’ against that of previous generations. The multiple characteristics of the struggle over cultural production, ownership and circulation represents a change from earlier days when pop music was articulated to youth culture and social movements, offering relatively direct relationships from one to another. (For example, ‘The Sixties’ became the shorthand reference for these cultural formations.) That relationship still exists, albeit in a self-conscious historical sense that requires continuous examination as it changes with the new generations of youth and the available technologies.

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).

Remembering Rock and Roll with P. P. Arnold

2021 ◽  
pp. 225-254
Author(s):  
Alexandra M. Apolloni
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
New Work ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter asks how American singer P. P. Arnold’s vocal performances in the 1960s shaped British popular music production and how she renarrates rock history today. The story of Arnold’s music career reveals how the Black feminine vocality exemplified by Arnold’s style of singing shaped 1960s rock, and how Black women singers navigate experiences of marginalization and narratives of authenticity. Arnold’s recordings for Immediate Records and her work with the Small Faces on songs like “Tin Soldier” reveal how this dynamic manifests musically, while the story of her “lost” album The Turning Tide illustrates the effect that it had on her career. The chapter closes with a section on Arnold’s recent live performances, using Black feminist thought to understand the implications of Arnold’s engagement with 1960s stereotypes of rock authenticity and sexual expressivity in her new work.

Reading the charts – making sense with the hit parade

Popular Music ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Parker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Top 40

One of the formations which helps to shape the meaning of modern pop music is the charts. In theory, the charts define the most popular of popular musics, the goal, the pinnacle of success. Both professionals and audience dedicate large amounts of time and money to producing and consuming this series of comparative market histories produced at rapid and regular intervals. Technology is bent to the service of the research in order that the figures be produced more quickly and with the appearance of accuracy. But why should we be interested in the Top 40 itself rather than its music? Writers on pop have provided us with some detailed descriptions of the charts (Frith 1978; Harker 1980; Wallis and Malm 1984; Street 1986), but few have noted that this level of consumer obsession with sales figures is almost unique to the record industry. Consumers of other commodities do not usually consult a specialist book or magazine in order to discover the past sales history of their favourite brand, nor do they listen to particular radio stations in order to ascertain the best selling product of the week. Why then should the sales results of EMI, Polygram, WEA and others be of interest to their consumers when the same data about multi-national corporations in other market sectors are primarily of interest to market insiders and analysts? An important caveat needs to be added in that popular music is now not the only type of cultural production that foregrounds sales figures. More recently popular literature (the ‘Bestsellers List’), video and films have all begun to use this format but in none of these cases is the chart as central as it is with pop music.

The Dance Chorus in Recent Top-40 Music

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Barna
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Electronic Dance Music ◽  
Production Techniques ◽  
Top 40

Contemporary trends in popular music incorporate timbres, formal structures, and production techniques borrowed from Electronic Dance Music (EDM). The musical surface demonstrates this clearly to the listener; less obvious are the modifications made to formal prototypes used in rock and popular music. This article explains a new formal section common to collaborative Pop/EDM songs called the Dance Chorus. Following the verse and chorus, a Dance Chorus is an intensified version of the chorus that retains the same harmony and contains the hook of the song, which increases memorability for the audience. As the name implies, the Dance Chorus also incorporates and acknowledges the embodiment performed in this section.

Step It Up and Go

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Menconi
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The State ◽  
College Town ◽  
American Idol ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The Many ◽  
Nina Simone

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.

The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Electronic Sound ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Sound Technology ◽  
Sound Culture

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document