From sound production to music engineering

Music Educators Journal, 2019

Recent advances in music technology include practical tools for sound recording and production in school music classrooms. Secondary school music production classes allow students to make meaningful connections between school music and the music in their own lives. We offer several projects for teaching music production and sound recording; provide examples of authentic, performance-based assessments; and identify opportunities for collaboration through digital means. These projects are particularly well aligned with the United States' Core Arts Standards related to creating music and may widen the door for students who are less interested-or less able to participate-in traditional bands, orchestras, and choirs or music appreciation electives.

College Music Society Symposium, 2024

In this article, the authors put forward a Conceptual Model of Independent Studio Production (ISP) in undergraduate music technology courses. Independent Studio Production reflects the increasingly multifaceted nature of the recording industry, where artists frequently occupy multiple roles in the creative process, including producer, audio engineer, promoter, and distributor. Studio recording happens in various places, including bedrooms, full-scale professional facilities, on tour, and entirely through the Internet. Therefore, designing assessments that carefully measure technical, theoretical, and creative skills that independent musicians encounter in myriad spaces may yield a more flexible approach to teaching music production. Though studio pedagogy has a rich tradition in music technology and audio engineering courses, many high-end recording studios have closed or been forced to change their business models in recent years. Additionally, while students frequently have access to high-end facilities during their studies, they often record at home and collaborate online. The ISP Conceptual Model encourages iterative curricular development through Authentic Assessment. After a brief synopsis of Authentic Assessment, we discuss AA implementation into three undergraduate music technology courses. The article concludes with suggestions on ways educators might integrate the ISP Conceptual Model through backward design.

Journal of Music, Technology and Education

Many music production programmes in higher education institutions are heavily invested in popular music genres and production values in contrast to the diversity of musics often included in other music programmes and encountered in everyday life. Commenting on his 2017 album, Ed Sheeran highlights the potential for incorporating Irish traditional music into popular music. Over the past number of years, creative practice research projects at Dundalk Institute of Technology have provided opportunities for music production students to engage in the recording and production of Irish traditional music, broadening their experience beyond popular music genres and facilitating time for them to work collaboratively with Irish traditional musicians. Thus, an authentic and action-oriented mode of engagement in higher education is utilized to enhance the learning experience continuously aware of changes and attitudes in the music industry. This article focuses on three Summer Undergraduate Rese...

During recording sessions, record producers and sound engineers play the role of cultural intermediaries between musicians and their future audience. Their role differs from that of artistic leaders, such as film directors, who express their own ideas through a collective creative process. Studio professionals aim to achieve the best possible representation of a given musical project, similarly to photographers, whose goal is to capture the most significant image of their models. Recently, the delocalisation of well-equipped studios to home studios, combined with the collapse of the traditional business model of record companies, has led musicians to produce their recordings without necessarily hiring studio professionals. And when hired by musicians, producers and engineers often take on both roles at once. This client relationship without the intermediary of record companies modifies the collaborative aspects of the production process. In such a do-it-yourself context, studio professionals need to reinvent their job while musicians need to learn the art of recording and define their expectations when collaborating with studio professionals. This chapter is based on my professional and teaching experience, as well as five research studies conducted with professional producers, engineers, and musicians. In three sections, it highlights the best practices in conducting recording sessions from the perspectives of musicians and studio professionals coming from different musical backgrounds, countries, and generations. The first section focuses on the preparation of studio sessions to produce successful musical recordings. The second discusses record producers' and sound engineers' skills, as well as the mission and specificities of each profession. The third addresses the myths of artistic direction by making explicit the impact of producers ' comments on musical performance.

The Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education', 2017

Music technologies can lead us to a transformation of perceptions and the reinvention and refinement of our processes— from the way we see, interact with, and understand the materials of sound and music to the way we learn new skills, communicate, and share with each other, the way we represent ourselves to the world as music creators and professionals, and especially, the way we teach. Technology has and is transforming our language around music content and consumption (“I streamed a podcast of glitchcore mashups, reblogged it and gave it a ‘like’ ”). It is creating musical and sonic possibilities that transcend the facilities of traditional music notation and analysis. It sometimes requires interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to bring projects, artworks, and products to fruition. (Music technology resides not in the field of music only but also in the fields of media; science, technology, and society [STS]; electronics and computer science.) Finally, it grants music creators agency and control of their works (Taylor, 2014). As a composer, I am completely enchanted and continually inspired by the way new music technology applications so readily challenge my own understanding of what music is and can be. The proliferation of digital applications, computerization, and online connectedness has given rise to a diverse and evolving collection of practices or “literacies” that are advantageous skills for creative musicians working in commercial and contemporary new music scenes to possess (Durant, 1990; Hugill, 2012). At the time of writing, these literacies can include skills associated with multitrack recording and production using digital audio workstations, MIDI sequencing, audio editing, sound design, synthesis, sampling, looping, triggering, live sequencing, coding, controlling music and sound with interfaces and apps, instrument and effect building, app development, hacking and circuit bending, mixing, remixing, and mashing up, score typesetting, publishing, broadcasting, and contributing knowledge and expertise to online communities of practice. To the composer in me, these technologies represent an opportunity to expand my creative vocabulary with pure magic: to capture any sound and turn it into music that is meaningful; to conjure up ghosts of the past; to bend space and time; to hold the air. Speaking from my perspective as a teacher, they represent a new promise of freedom: never before have the materials of music been so pliable, touchable, easy to understand and access.

Gems the on Line Journal of Grime, 2014

Based on new research from In and Out of the Studio, this online work considers the importance of early life experiences and formations in the construction of gendered identities and relationships with sound technologies. Constructed out of a practice of dialogic ethnography, Andra McCartney and Ana Friz act alternately as ethnographer and research subject, interacting in a conversation composed around open-ended

2004

Music technology' has been progressively gaining strength as an umbrella term for a number of professional and academic practices carried out within a context in which new media for the production, storage and distribution of music, as well as the relative decrease in the cost of electronic musical equipment -possibly amongst a plethora of other aspects -have enabled an unprecedented dissemination of both music as a product and music--making as an activity. Examining the potential of 'music technology' to be construed as a subject area in its own right, this paper examines two areas of crucial import to 'music technology' education: (a) the tension between academic concerns with curriculum content in respect to academic legitimacy and credibility, on the one hand, and practical considerations of placement within the job market, on the other hand; (b) the tension between different conceptions of 'music', both as embodied in specific curricula and as expected by the student construed (often self-construed) as 'client'. Adopting a post--structuralist stance, the paper argues that these areas of concern are characterised by dilemmas associated with the polarisation theory--practice that characterises predominant discourses on music. It is proposed that this polarisation has traditionally infused musical scholarship (by opposing scholarly to performance practices, for example) and music--making (by opposing 'professional' to 'amateur' practices, for example) alike. In deconstructing this dichotomy, this paper suggests a possible conception of 'music technology' neither as opposed to a '"hard" technology of music' nor as a collection of techniques and tools taught alongside more traditional subjects within music programmes, but as an 'in--between' site for the emergence of new musics, new technologies, and new discourses.

International Association for the Study of Popular Music , 2015

Record production is a major aspect of many tertiary-based popular music education programs. It is a practice that involves the capturing of an artist’s vision and is realised when that vision draws an emotional response from the listener. In professional practice there are many techniques the producer learns via experience to accomplish this, but as technology develops, processes of past eras risk being brushed aside by technological advancement. The capturing of a live performance was the practical framework used by popular music pioneers and the creative results of this process have particular characteristics that are difficult to achieve by contrasting methods. This article outlines the importance of an education in live recording frameworks to tertiary popular music students; it presents learning and teaching practices that accomplish this and concludes with a case study of a live recording workshop that nurtures the students’ developing creative practice. KEYWORDS: record production, popular music pedagogy, live recording

In 2013, at an industry panel at the Music Production show, the question was posed to the panel “with tuition fees being so high and rising, is it more worthwhile to spend that money on studio time and learning directly from industry practitioners?” As a lecturer this question was an interesting point, I see myself as an industry practitioner and a lecturer. I have recorded and produced numerous recordings and worked in a number of studio settings, however I have also received a number of grade one observations for my teaching. Does this mean that the knowledge base must be higher than the ability to teach? Universities appear to focus on subject specialism in the form of research requirements, yet from my personal experience further education focuses more on delivery techniques. There is an obvious difference from a lecturer’s perspective but which one is more beneficial to the learner/ student? Intrigued, I embarked on a research journey looking at higher education and further education and the links between academia, scholarly activity and institutionalised identity. This paper has been written to the standards of the British Journal for Music Education.

Identified as both a temple (Cogan and Clark, 2003) and laboratory (Hennion, 1989), the recording studio was historically the place where the very best musicians, producers, and engineers came to produce music recordings. The apprenticeship model of learning and training allowed student engineers to learn from the masters of their craft and often created famous lineages of music producers and engineers; the family tree of George Martin, Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott at EMI’s Abbey Road is perhaps the most well known. However, recent studies have shown that the recording studio sector has suffered a significant decline within the broader musical economies (Leyshon, 2009), which has resulted in the fragmentation of the knowledge capitol that was traditionally found in larger recording facilities. So, what remains when the masters are gone? The legacy of their work is the music that they have helped to create and these exist in the form of vinyl records, CDs or digital downloads, but they only tell part of the story. The true primary sources that help to reveal some of the creative and technical approaches to music making are the multitrack recordings from the recording sessions. These primary sources, the multitrack audiotapes and the archives that hold them are an emergent resource for both scholars and students in the field of popular music. This paper introduces the way in which three institutions, Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada and Leeds Beckett University in Leeds, UK are using multitrack materials in the classroom as part of their music production programmes. Importantly it illustrates ways in which popular music education can tap into this well of historical knowledge and, how moving the master into the classroom, makes access to their knowledge and ways of working more accessible.