Bytes and Backbeats

Front matter

BYTES & BACKBEATS

REPURPOSING MUSIC IN THE DIGITAL AGE

STEVE SAVAGE

Preface

Several of the gracious readers of this book in its various drafts suggested that I should include some biographical information to help orient the reader to this work. I suppose all authors have a story about what brought them to their book, but perhaps in this case it is particularly relevant. My story begins with a career as a drummer during which time I played in numerous unsuccessful rock bands, learned some jazz without ever coming close to mastering it, studied and performed African music with a master drummer from Ghana, and spent a couple of years actually making a living as a musician playing in a dance band. I found playing four hours of cover songs five nights a week rather trying and abandoned that, and after a short but glorious stint in a punk band, I and my career transitioned into production and recording.

I discovered that the other side of the glass—the control room side rather than the recording room side—fit me better, and my career slowly built around recording. I had a 12-track studio in my garage (a short-lived Akai home-recording format) and recorded demos for rock bands for dirt cheap. One of those bands put its resources together to go into a professional studio to record a single and asked me to be the engineer/producer. I got my first taste of making commercial recordings and I was hooked. From there I recorded a variety of fledgling “new wave” artists’ singles and albums in the heady early 1980s and cut my teeth on 24-track analog recording. After a stint as house producer for a small indie label—where I built and learned to operate a lovely little state-of-the-art studio—I became a full-time independent record producer and engineer.

One tends to get work in areas where one has some successes, so it was through my work with the very talented songwriter Bonnie Hayes that I

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Preface have ended up working on many singer/songwriter music projects, and after three Grammy-nominated CDs with the master blues artist Robert Cray, I have had the pleasure of working on many blues records. I have also recorded jazz, R & B, rap, hip-hop, country, opera, music for musicals, and children’s records. I have been the engineer and/or producer on over 100 commercial releases and have served as the primary recording engineer and mixer on eight Grammy-nominated CDs including records for Robert Cray, John Hammond Jr., Elvin Bishop, and the Gospel Hummingbirds. I have also taught recording at the college level one night a week for the past twelve years.

There was a recent survey conducted by the Recording Academy (the Grammy folks—an organization that I have been very active in) and sent to all the members of the Producers and Engineers wing of the Academy. Among the questions asked were these:

In your opinion, do the tasks performed by the producer, recording engineer, sound editor, DAW [digital audio workstation] operator and mixer each involve specialized skill sets and sensitivities that are differentiable from one another?

Do you specialize mainly in one of these tasks, or are you aware of audio production professionals in your technical/creative community who specialize mainly in one these tasks?

On sound recordings you were recently involved with, was each one of the 3 tasks of producing, engineering and editing performed by separate individuals, or were all 3 tasks performed by a single person?

I never saw the results of this survey, but I know what the answers were for most of us that do this work professionally. While these functions are defined separately on paper, they are not clearly differentiated in practice. We may specialize (’'ve done more mixing than anything else in the past several years), but we are almost all capable of, and called upon to take on, all of these roles as a routine part of our work. And in most recordings the three tasks mentioned in the last question are performed by the same individual, but in partnership with a variety of other people, including the musicians. These are the reasons that I and others are transitioning to the term recordist for people who work as active participants in the making of recordings. Functions such as engineer, producer, DAW operator, mixer, editor, and so on blur into one job held by the person taking primary responsibility for the recording at any given moment (and who this person or persons are may be as fluid as the jobs themselves). An even grayer area

Preface concerns the term musician, as the roles and functions of music making have been so altered by the contemporary recording environment. It is often impossible to really differentiate between who is responsible for the music and who is responsible for the recording. An exploration of the intersection of the recordist and the music maker occupies the lion’s share of the work that follows.

The evolution of the book you are reading follows from the preceding career. Having become obsessed with music, I did not finish college coming out of high school. About a dozen years ago I decided to return to school, just because I always enjoyed the classroom. At the urging of a friend I stayed focused on getting a degree rather than simply taking classes, and after finishing my BA in Philosophy and Religion, and wanting more, my advisor recommended the Department of Humanities at San Francisco State University. There, through the good graces of Professor Cristina Ruotolo, I encountered a chapter from Michael Chanan’s book Repeated Takes and was surprised to discover a segment of academia that was considering the cultural implications of the work (recording) that I had been doing professionally for many years. This connected my return to school to my professional work in an unexpected way, and once again, I was hooked. Since then I have explored this field in some depth, having the good fortune of studying with the musicologist Nicholas Cook, whose work I admire (and who I reference fairly extensively in the following). Other colleagues that have provided welcomed and much-valued support and guidance include Philip Auslander, Serge Lacasse, Mark Katz, Mary Francis, Henry Stobart, Julie Brown, and Nikki Dibben, and it was especially satisfying to connect with Michael Chanan, whose earlier work had set me upon this journey.

Throughout this more recent academic work I have maintained my active career as a practitioner, and despite growing commitments as an educator I continue to work primarily as a recordist. Although I admire the writing of many musicologists and cultural commentators, it is my work as a recordist, as much as or more than my research, that guides my writing. I have been profoundly affected by the fluid nature of the creative process and the way that I must embrace and foster the unpredictable to be an effective recordist. The notion of fluidity, expressed especially in the forms of collaboration and community in the recording studio, has migrated from my work to my research.

I hope that my thousands of hours of studio work inform my analytical work in a way that fosters a deeper understanding and appreciation for

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Preface the process of making contemporary recordings. As the recordist you are there for the hundreds of hours required to make many popular music recordings. If you're not there the whole time, then when something extraordinary happens youre very likely to miss it. Those extraordinary moments—along with the hours of concentrated work, of sound under the microscope, of repetition and revision—bind the process together in the same ways that have always made music central to the human experience. Music remains central to my experience, and my work continues to feed my profound love of music whether in the studio, in the classroom, or as an author.

Acknowledgments

The involvement of those individuals that have had the most direct impact on this work is acknowledged as part of the narrative in the preceding preface. I am also grateful to the University of Michigan Press, and especially Chris Hebert and Albin Zak for their support in bringing this book into the Tracking Pop series. Beyond that I wish to simply express my gratitude to all of those who have participated with me in my musical life. I am blessed to have stimulating collaborators in the world of music production, wonderful colleagues in the academic world, and a family anchored by the love and support of my wife Tamara and our daughters, Sophia and Thalia. To all of you I offer my deepest gratitude for participating with me in all the ways that have nourished this book.

As is perhaps inevitable in a work such as this, I know that I will be continually encountering earlier sources that are relevant to the work here and new sources that both reinforce and expand various of the ideas that I present. To the extent that the work is deficient in acknowledging relevant sources I can only offer my regrets that they were not referenced as they might have been. At the same time I certainly welcome all additions to the literature. It is especially satisfying to continue meeting and developing relationships with the increasing number of colleagues who straddle the lines with me between researcher and practitioner in the field of popular music.

An earlier version of much of the material in chapter 5 originally appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Blackwell Press, volume 18, issue 3 (December 2006): 332—40.

four. Application Study: Jazz Piano Trio 81

five. Studio Study: Capturing the Unintentional Performance 99 six. Artist or Artisan? 107 part three: Repurposing Participation 127

Introduction to Part II 127

seven. Application Study: African Folklore and Music Communities 129 eight. Studio Study: From iPod to GarageBand 150

nine. Integration or (Dis)integration? 174

Conclusions: Reflections on the Future 193

Notes 197 References 219 Index 229

Audio Clips

Clip numbers referenced in the text are available for streaming at my website: www.stevesavage. net.

Clip 1 Clip 2 Clip 3 Clip 4 Clip 5 Clip 6

Clip 7

Clip 8 Clip 9

Clip 10 Clip 1

Clip 12

The Jenny Thing song “When You Hold Her’—mixed but not “fixed.” The Jenny Thing song “When You Hold Her”—mixed and “fixed.” Isolated example of a Freddie Hughes “lipsmack.”

The same lipsmack in its musical context.

The same passage with the lipsmack removed.

A passage from Bob Dylan's “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands” with a “popped fp.”

A passage from Bob Dylan’s “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands” with the “popped ‘p’” removed.

A passage from Green Day’s “American Idiot” with slurred “esses.”

A passage from Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, Pm Yours” with pronounced breaths.

A passage from Tori Amos’s “Cruel” with heavy compression and pronounced breaths.

A jazz “improvisation” played by Dana Atherton, Dan Feiszli, and Jason Lewis. Recorded and constructed by Steve Savage.

My constructed version of the African folklore piece “Milee Yookoee.”

Clips 1 and 2, The Jenny Thing, “When You Hold Her” 1994, used by permission of KSS Records. All other tracks are short clips used under Fair Use or Fair Dealing, improvised segments of recordings or musical constructions based on works in the public domain.

Introduction Reproduction and New Paradigms

The Construction of Music Via Repurposed Audio

Music today is being created, performed, and listened to in ways that are profoundly different from music practices prior to the migration to digital audio. The traditional timeline from the composer through the performer to the consumer has been radically altered under new working paradigms, providing significant new opportunities for musical participation and community. Technology and personal agency interact to undermine the conventionally polarized view of musical functions and experience. The creation and exchange of contemporary music extends far beyond neat categories such as composer, songwriter, musician, performer, consumer, or audience. Much of popular music is constructed from a variety of sources using vastly expanded creative tools. The role of the recordist as collaborator and creative participant has been dramatically increased. The consumer of music has extraordinary new alternatives for acquiring, sharing, and responding to music. Contemporary music is new in part because it can be constructed in utterly new ways.

I frequently use the term construction in this book to distinguish contemporary methods of popular music creation from the compositional models of the past. The term composition itself suggests a kind of musical construction—music is inevitably a product of the designing and piecing together of multiple elements—but the long history of composition ties it to conventional musical procedures. Compositions are traditionally constructed from a series of motifs or melodies; realized through arrangements of voices and/or instruments in unison, harmony, or counterpoint; and learned via oral/aural tradition, played from notation, or improvised. Contemporary practice takes us much further along the road of constructed music, a road that is built from a broad new assortment of composition techniques made available by computing power and drawing musical building materials from a wide range of sources. This book tells the story of some of these techniques and places them in a broader cultural and musical context.

My motivation for adopting the term construction is to break out of thinking of music creation in terms of conventional composition/performance routines and to identify how it has been transformed by this new array of techniques. I do not intend this reference to constrain the understanding of music creation to a structural model, rather to expand it to include all the tools of the imagination, of design, and of technology. The techniques developed as a part of the digital control of contemporary audio production are paradigmatic because their technological scope has so deeply broadened the process of music creation and reception, and greatly expanded the network of people that may be intimately involved in the composition (read construction) of the final music recording.

As construction is one defining metaphor for these new archetypes, so the notion of repurposing! encompasses the ways that the age of digital record production has spawned these new techniques of music creation. I adopt the idea of repurposing as central to understanding how every aspect of musical activity has been transformed. This transformation is both tangible in its new approaches to music making and conceptual in compelling new ways of thinking about music. The evolution of audio recording technology has moved both the practice and the critical debate beyond questions concerned primarily with the status of reproduction. The focus turns now to issues surrounding the manipulation and transformation of audio reproductions—in a word the repurposing of musical performance as audio recording.

In a sense, recordings themselves represent a repurposing of live performance, but contemporary practices have made the term more distinctively appropriate for referencing the multitude of ways that audio may be used to construct recordings. Webster’s informs us that the prefix re- suggests the use of something again as well the use of something anew.” Repurposing audio may accomplish both by creating new music from elements that had been used previously (used again) and/or by transforming elements so as to adapt their use as desired (made anew). The notion of repurposing is suggestive of the rampant explosion in the manipulation of sounds to create musical performances. These sounds may originate from any source, including original recordings, samples, sound effects, historic recordings, and so on. Contemporary recording practice frequently puts audio to new or renewed purpose before it finds its ultimate place in the final recording. Recordists cut, copy, and paste; they fix, they enhance, they thicken, they borrow, and they downright reinvent original performances in order to create a final recording. It is often the case that the final recording sounds relatively “normal”—like a rock-and-roll band playing a song for example—but in most cases the process of creation has reached far beyond the simple recording of the musicians playing their part.

Repurposing welcomes the new paradigm of music construction without prejudice. Repurposing acknowledges the ways that reproduction has evolved as both copy and original simultaneously. Repurposing focuses the attention on musical construction as a new beginning with a new purpose, rather than on original sources or meanings. One of the seminal projects in the kind of new construction made possible by computer-based digital audio manipulations was the 1989 CD Plunderphonics from the producer John Oswald. Plunderphonics took audio from previously released material, some well known and some obscure, and recrafted it into wholly original recordings. At the same time the rap and hip-hop genres had begun using samples of previous recordings in such a widespread fashion as to be redefining the nature of music creation. In both cases the media responses often focused on the source material and issues surrounding copyright violations, rather than on the newly created music, independent of its sources.

There has been a delicate, and sometimes uneasy, balance between the sources used in construction of new music and the music itself. In the case of Plunderphonics Oswald purposely called attention to the connection to the historical recordings. In most of the more contemporary use of repurposed audio the source material is primarily a tool rather than a reference. The implications of the word plunderphonics, the negative connotations of the word plunder and the apparent pride in a kind of violation of historical recordings, are at odds with the evolution of repurposed audio’s overwhelming presence in popular music construction. While issues surrounding copyright remain significant (and are considered at some length in chapter 9), it is not appropriate for there to be any absolute value judgment associated with the broad practice of using repurposed audio in new music creation. New practices are redefining music creation in ways that profoundly affect our notions of authorship, improvisation, collaboration, and musical timeline. Identifying these developments in the context of repurposing helps us redefine the understanding of music recording at the same time that the practice of music recording is itself being redefined.

Presentation, Performance, and Participation

This study of contemporary music is organized around presentation in Part I, performance in Part II, and participation in Part III. The continuum from creator(s) to listener(s) encompasses composition, performance, improvisation, and audience with new musical practices transforming each element, while the traditional distinctions between elements are increasingly blurred. The notion of repurposing focuses the attention on the fundamental ways that these age-old musical activities have been made new.

In the following chapters presentation is framed as “art or artifice,” performance as “artist or artisan,” and participation as “integration or (dis)integration.” Each pairing is seen as a flawed dichotomy in judging contemporary music practice. For example, cultural and historical contingencies must be considered central to value systems that attempt to classify musical creation as either “art” or “artifice.” I argue that the tension within presentation between a naturalizing “art” and a self-conscious “artifice” reflects and feeds into our evolving notions of creativity, authenticity, and community. It is reductive to relegate technologically driven effects to artifice. Ultimately it is listeners who must decide whether they approve or reject the results of contemporary practices, and they will do so on their own terms and with their own set of evolved cultural contingencies outside any preconceived notions of art or artifice.‘

Similar conflicts arise in attempting to elevate performers to the status of artists or relegate them to the role of artisans. The historical forces that have reserved the label of artist for the composer in opposition to the interpretative artisanship of the performer lose meaning when the roles become blurred by contemporary production practices such as those detailed in this book. And the bias toward traditional music participation, whether it is the formal participation by role such as composer, arranger, performer, audience, or the models from other times or cultures, ignores the manner in which new music practice integrates itself into contemporary culture. From the transnational communities of interest on the Internet to the explosive capabilities of home recording, new integrative practices continue music’s power to bring people, communities, and cultures together. The new models of musical presentation, performance, and participation break down the strict hierarchical dichotomies, revealing much more complex relationships within musical practice.

Within the new paradigms of music presentation questions arise about how much performances should be altered. What are we to make of the effect and impact of such alterations? What are the deeper implications when we supposedly “fix” a musical performance? New models have surfaced whereby composition is a result of the process of recording and editing rather than a precursor to it. In many instances the creation of contemporary recordings partially or completely replaces the model of the original, preexisting composition—and the process is now often collaborative rather than isolated to the individual composer. These creative opportunities are heightened by the technologies that support quick and intuitive responses to music manipulation. The capabilities of computercontrolled digital audio are an integral part of musical presentation. Composition and performance are constantly in play,’ along with the sonic qualities that embodied traditional recording concerns, long past any project’s initial recording sessions.

The widespread manipulations that create the new paradigms of musical presentation fuel debates surrounding the question of musical authenticity. I argue that there can be no notion of authenticity that is not historically and culturally contingent. The hidden messages behind deterministic claims to authenticity are primarily driven by nostalgia. This is clearly seen in considering prerecording technologies such as the acoustic piano. A combination of nostalgia and the profound historical and cultural connections to the instrument seem to grant it a separate ontological status from a synthesizer, but this cannot be the case in any absolute sense. Ultimately time may well grant the synthesizer the same nostalgic and cultural status as a piano. This process has already started in regards to some legacy synthesizers such as the Moog. Similarly, I argue that Barthes’s famous “grain of the voice” must be extended beyond live performance to include elements that reside in the presentation of vocal recordings, despite his protestations to the contrary. Embracing the breadth of the collaborative model in popular music also serves to undermine nostalgic concepts of musical significance. All of these observations break down traditional ideas about authenticity, genius, and the hierarchy of aesthetics characterized by a division between art and artifice.

Attempts to characterize the composer as artist and the performer as artisan also quickly collapse under the new musical paradigms. I argue that intervention through technology joins improvisation in blurring traditional categorizations such as composer and performer. Digital technologies emerge as partners in the large-scale shifts in the way compositions and performances are created in popular music. Some of the recording experiences that I describe here provide evidence of how both recording and studio manipulation may embody spontaneous musical creation, despite their roles in the mediation of performance. The fluidity of the working environment further obscures any imagined line between the work of an artist and the applied craft of an artisan. I also challenge the view that portrays the fleeting musical performance as being in conflict with the permanence of audio recordings. Rather, creative modes of record production have come to expand upon and support live performance—an intertwining rather than an opposition.

While collaborative opportunities have expanded, contemporary recording technologies have undermined the traditional reliance on collaboration among live musicians in music performance. The potential for isolating performers in both time and space has yielded wholly new capabilities for recordists to alter performances. Collaboration now occurs on many levels, often starting in the interaction between musicians, but typically progressing on to broader interaction in the editing process. Final performance decision-making may occur in collaboration between musicians and recordists or even unilaterally by the recordist. Producers have traditionally made decisions about which recorded performance to use, or about which elements to use in the case of editing together of multiple performances, but today’s decisions about performance may include the radical reordering of musical phrases as well as the creation of entirely new musical ideas through manipulation of the rhythm, duration, and pitch of notes played. This requires a combination of musical and technical skills that may be embodied in many different collaborative groupings, blurring the lines between performance and composition.

Such practices have not only challenged the hegemony of the solo composer, they have altered the very nature of musical composition. The flexibility of computer-based music construction yields not only an array of new choices for the composer/constructionist but elongates the process such that the ability to make compositional revisions is available from the beginning of the recording all the way up to the final mix. One striking development from this flexibility has been the evolution of a much more random quality to the progression of musical ideas in popular music, undermining traditional song forms and musical phrasings. This is fostered by the combining of compositional, unintentional, and improvisational elements made possible by current editing techniques. Even more radical are the “mash-ups” created by combining elements from various and oftenunlikely sources. Musical composition of this sort had never been even remotely possible prior to computer-based digital audio editing.

New models of participation also feed these new creative models of music production and reception. Expanded networks are an essential part of the creative process of recording, and reciprocity is central to understanding the network of forces at work in popular music. The flow of music from writer to player to recording to listener has become a process of networking and reciprocal relationships. Although the new paradigms of participation may produce cultural aesthetics that are considered casualties of contemporary practices (too many cooks, lowest common denominator, etc.), I emphasize the ways that the new capabilities of music creation lend themselves to positive new forms of music, musical process, and community. Music has always been intertwined with social participation, but the models are changing in dramatic ways. One such example is the implicit communities that have developed in the age of easy transnational communication via the Internet. I argue for the continuing centrality of musical community despite the ways that these communities may defy conventional social structures.

Cultural models for music participation differ around the world and over each cultural history. Each music culture provides unique social models, but they may also help us to uncover the ways in which musical participation is a universal human experience. Some lament the way that computer manipulations allow for creation of music through “knowing” rather than “doing”—that is, if we know what music we want to create, the computer gives us the capability to construct that music, even though we aren't able to perform it in the traditional sense on a musical instrument. I contend that the basic relationship between tools and creativity remains the same, whether it is an African playing a djembe or an American making music on his computer (or vice versa). And there is a certain democratizing effect to the ability to create through knowing—it makes musical activities including composing, arranging, and performing available to a much wider range of people by radically changing the necessary skill set. This does not alter the demands that music making requires in the form of skills, only the nature of those skills. It does not make creating music any easier—trudimental skill still creates rudimental music, and extraordinary music still demands extraordinary skill levels.

The ability to create so many different kinds of music through knowing has also had a tremendous influence on the current hybridization of different musical cultures and genres. Sample-based musical construction has allowed the integration of musical styles in broader and more accessible forms than ever before. While this is still widely debated in regards to merit, I argue that it should be viewed as a form of social exchange that acts as a constructivist force—it feeds musical participation and provides valuable social and cultural meaning. Thus, I argue for a reexamination of so-called musical appropriation. The issues surrounding hybridization are complex, and later in the book I examine both positive and negative effects, but I embrace hybridization and I argue against the use of the word appropriation, which is highly charged with negative, reductive connotations. I propose the term repurpose as an appropriate reference to the historical and cultural status of musical expressions that may feed or inspire new musical creations. Repurposing embraces the new creation as primary, without ignoring the references to origination. The idea that we might “appropriate” music from other cultures is both inaccurate in implication and inappropriate as a term for describing musical hybridization.

The dynamic between creating and consuming music is also being transformed. New forms of musical participation and new communities of music makers are evolving from new technologies. The mp3 format that spawned music downloading; the iPod and other new playback technologies; social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace that are heavily oriented toward musical tastes; Pandora, Amazon, and other sites that provide personal and collaborative filtering of music preferences; and easily accessed programs like GarageBand and Audacity that provide full-scale recording and composition capabilities are all driving new relationships to music that extend beyond the traditionally passive role of the music consumer. It may be too early to know how far the new creative capabilities will reach into the general population—the extent to which music software in the computer and the interactive models of Web 2.0 are descendants of the piano in the nineteenth-century parlor—but there are indications of movement in this direction and beyond. In any event, the expanded capabilities that run from access to huge libraries of music on the Internet, to the flexibility of playlists on the iPod, to the recording and composition tools that arrive free with the program GarageBand on every Macintosh computer suggest the breadth of possibilities for the future of music.

While it is the intention of this book to represent a balanced analysis of contemporary music creation, it unabashedly embraces technology as an integral and increasingly powerful partner in music making. When taken in conjunction with the kind of audio manipulation I chronicle here in the various studio and application studies, music making in the digital environment represents not just a change in degree, but a fundamental change in “kind”—a change that strikes at the very heart of music creation. It is a change that requires many new and different skills and sensibilities, where the only fundamental link to traditional music creation lies in the essential need for music makers to use their ears to create musically appealing pieces if they are to attract an audience.