sonic markers: sound as a compositional€¦ · music videos record covers journalistic writings...

Sonic Markers: Sound as a compositional

tool in pop productionMUS4605

03.09.2014

Foreleser: Eirik Askerøi epost: eirik.askeroi@imv.uio.no

En liten endring i timeplanen:

Simon Reynolds Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (2011)

Garage-punk resurgence: The Hives, The White Stripes, The Vines

Simon Reynolds Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (2011)

Vintage soul-style: Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Adele

Simon Reynolds Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (2011)

Eighties synth pop: La Roux, Little Boots, Lady Gaga

Simon Reynolds Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (2011)

Production aesthetics become a question of class?

«...where retro truly reigns as the dominant sensibility and creative paradigm is in hipsterland, pop’s equivalent to highbrow» (Reynolds 2011: xix)

«At the start of that period [1977 and onwards], and right in the heart of mainstream with artists such as Kate Bush, The Police, Bowie and Peter Gabriel, musicians were spurred by the desire to create something never heard before. But from the mid-eighties onwards, gradually but with increasing momentum, that changed into an impulse to create something very much heard before, and moreover to do it immaculately, accurately in every last detail»

What do these tunes have in common?

POP PRODUCTION

music videosrecord covers

journalistic writings

interviewsreviewsstar narratives

sonic product

biographies

formal properties

harmonic idioms

recording and production techniquestextures and timbres

rhythmic syntax

POP PRODUCTION: CLOSE READING

• “a move between the structures of the music alone and the broader context within which the music is located” Hawkins (2002: 2).

• In other words: the effect of the music (text) in a given context

• But how?

POP PRODUCTION AND GENDER IN A TRANSCULTURAL CONTEXT

Textual analysis

the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination

- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1977)

• Text: any form of media that conveys meaning (TV-shows, recordings, movies, books, videos ect.)

• By textual analysis we identify aspects of the sonic product: textures and timbres, formal properties, harmonic idioms, recording and production techniques, rhythmic syntax,

• Allan F. Moore says: “This also implies a degree of involvement with the experiencing of a musical text, which also, may not be part of the explicit experience of many listeners, but is normally part of the implicit experience - the way in which listeners construct their identity, in part, on the basis of the music they use, attests to that. The interpretation does not need to be conscious, nor does it need to be involved, but is something that we are inevitably engaged in” (Moore 2007: xi).

• Intertextuality: The idea that the text - or details within this text - communicates meaning in relation to other texts (Stan Hawkins, Julia Kristeva, Serge Lacasse, Allan F. Moore a.o.)

Textual analysis

Textual analysis• Stan Hawkins - ’Musicological Quagmires in Popular Music’:

• Explores the potential quagmires (hengemyrer) in connection with reading musical details for meaning:

• As a "cultural insider," the analyst needs to carefully seek sets of characteristics and details that make the logic of statements possible. Yet, despite the arguable expertise of such acquired competence, the rendering of results through music analysis can never guarantee the ‘fit'.

• To read a pop text is to conjecture about the discursive moments that are produced by conglomerations of sound-patterns. Here there is a speculative lineage that is granted by music's effect and its constitutive role within a dizzy network of rhetorical and creative correspondences that provide the potential for dialogue” (Hawkins 2001)

Discursive analysis - some basic premises:

• Poststructuralism (as a counter weight to and critique of structuralism)

• The most important influence on cultural studies: anti-essentialism

• Essentialism: Based around the notion that words and expressions have universal and stable referents, and that social categories somehow reflect an essential, underlying identity - that there are stable, constant truths connected to gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, age etc.

“Damer er bedre på interiør og farger enn menn. Menn skal ikke bry seg med det. (…) Menn er i utgangspunktet ikke interessert i farger, gardiner og sånne ting (…) Det er forskjell mellom kjønnene. Mannen er sterkere, og moren er bedre egnet til å ta seg av barna, i alle fall når de er små. Sorry Mac, sånn er det bare!”

!

Women are better at interior and colors than men are. Men are not supposed to care about that (…). Essentially, men are not interested in colors, curtains and things like that (…). There is a difference between the sexes. The male is stronger, and the mother is more capable of taking care of the children. At least when they are small. Sorry Mac, that’s just the way it is.

!

Otto Robsahm aka “Sinnasnekker’n”:

Discursive analysis - some basic premises:

• Poststructuralism - as a counterweight to and critique of structuralism - as represented by french thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida a.o.

• One of the most important influence on cultural studies: anti-essentialism

• Essentialism: Based around the notion that words and expressions have universal and stable referents, and that social categories somehow reflect an essential, underlying identity - that there are stable, constant truths connected to gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, age etc.

• Anti-essentialism - temporary stabilisation of categories. Subjectivity: a subject is never a universal and stabil unity, but rather an effect of language and actions that constitutes an “I”.

Discursive formations• According to Michel Foucault, discursive formations take place according to three rules:

• Surfaces of emergence: social and cultural areas through which discourse appears, e.g. the family, work group or religious community

• Authorities of delimitation: institutions with knowledge and authority, like the law or the medical profession

• Grids of specification: a system by which different forms of a phenomenon, for example madness, can be related to each other in psychiatric discourse !

• In other words:

• How we communicate about (speak, write, sing about, paint etc.) a phenomenon will to a great extent form our understanding of that phenomenon - contribute to the formation of the discourse of commercial pop music for example.

• Style/rhetoric - representation

• Temporary stabilisation of meaning through different forms of representation

How, then, does the concept of ‘sound’ come

into the picture?

• Sound and time - when a specific sound is ascribed to a decade (1960-, 70-, 80s-sound etc.)

• Sound and place/space - when a specific sound is ascribed to places (Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Seattle) or spaces/studios (Motown, Stax etc.)

• Sound and agency - when a specific sound is ascribed to a producer (Rick Rubin, Phil Spector, Timbaland, George Martin, Martin Hannett etc.)

Some starting points for how we can understand sound:

• “It [sound] is not just a sound image, but also a particular concept of sound, that results from the creative handling of recording technology” (Wicke 2009: 149)

Sonic markers as analytical concept

Sonic markers are musical codes that have been historically grounded through a specific context, and that, through their appropriation, serve

a range of narrative purposes in recorded music

• Sonic potential: Close readings of the musical text in the interest of identifying musical codes of potential significance!

• Contextual influence: The identification of those historical and biographical aspects that form the sonic marker’s contextual framework!

• Discursive formation: A description of the ways in which the sonic marker constructs, and is constructed, to serve a narrative purpose in recorded popular music

Sonic markers as analytical concept

• “In the end, the adaptability of cultural forms depends on an ‘irregular chain of historical transactions’ involving countless negotiations, exchanges, and competing representations, which come into prominence or recede based on fluctuating power relations” (Brackett 2000: 9).

• Stylistic and technical codes (Hawkins 2002: 10)

• Interaction: “It is through their arrangements within the recorded audio space . . . that stylistic and technological codes are blended into the compositional design” (ibid.).

• “Without the concept of the ‘code’, there can be no connotation, meaning, or ‘communication’, which throws the emphasis from meaning back to structure” (Brackett 2000: 11).

• “the reductionist processing of musical codes is only the first stage in discoursing on how codes function” (Hawkins 2002: 10).

Sonic potential: Musical codes

• The role of recording history

• Using the effect of culturally coded musical sound in pop composition

• Retro wave: constructing authenticity and forming a popular music canon by representing socio-cultural values of the past

• Use of sonic markers in new contexts: re-contextualisation and appropriation

• Re-coded - sonic markers with a narrative purpose

Contextual influence

• Historical grounding - evocation of historical or geographical origin when set in a new musical context

• Intentionality

• Ascribing socio-cultural values to musical sound

• Textual analysis - involving the listener

• Sounds become almost uncritically laden with value

• Categorisation and relative ‘distance’ to the music

• ‘Sound’ as a result of the collaborative act of music production

Narrative purpose: discursive formation

Some historical background

• Ca 1920-50: Ventriloquism (buktalerkunst) through recording (invention of the electrical microphone) - describes the gradually increasing distance between sound source and the experienced performance

• Crooning forbidden by the BBC in 1936 (a style of singing made possible by the electrical microphone)

• Ex: Bing Crosby: «Pennies From Heaven» (1936)

Some historical background (Toynbee 2000, chapter 3)

• Ca 1920-50: Ventriloquism

• Ca 1940/50: Tape technology - Recording onto magnetic tape leads to new possibilities for constructing virtual spaces (i.e. tape echo), but also multi track recording and better sound quality.

• Elvis Presley sounding ‘larger than life’ (Middleton 1990: 89) due to Sam Philips’ experimentation with slapback echo on Elvis’ voice.

• Ex: Elvis Presley: «Baby, Let’s Play House» (1954)

• «In the case of Phillips’ slap echo the effect was indeed so effective that it started to be used by other producers and engineers, and became so widely present that some musicologists have ‘elevated’ the effect to the status of an ‘official’ stylistic feature of early rock’n’roll music» (Lacasse 2000: 124).

Some historical background (Toynbee 2000, chapter 3)

• The term ‘live’ appears for the first time in the 1950s as an opposite to ‘recorded’ music

• Gradual normalisation of the record during the 1950s

• Musicians experience increasing challenges in their attempts to emulate recorded musical expressions live.

• The Beatles, for example, quit playing live around 1966:

Tape technology - a new technological discourse

Example: Beatles: «Tomorrow Never Knows», Revolver (1966)

We did a live mix of all the loops. All over the studios we had people spooling them onto machines with pencils while Geoff [Emerick] did the balancing. There were many other hands controlling the panning. !

It is the one track, of all the songs The Beatles did, that could never be reproduced: it would be impossible to go back now and mix exactly the same thing: the 'happening' of the tape loops, inserted as we all swung off the levers on the faders willy-nilly, was a random event. (Lewisohn 1988: 72)

• How does ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as text contribute to the formation of the discourse on The Beatles?

• Sonic potential: Close readings of the musical text in the interest of identifying musical codes of potential significance!

• Contextual influence: The identification of those historical and biographical aspects that form the sonic marker’s contextual framework!

• Discursive formation: A description of the ways in which the sonic marker constructs, and is constructed, to serve a narrative purpose in recorded popular music

• Ca 1920-50: Ventriloquism (buktalerkunst) through recording (invention of the electrical microphone) - describes the gradually increasing distance between sound source and the experienced performance

• Ca 1940/50: Tape technology - Recording onto magnetic tape leads to new possibilities for constructing virtual spaces (tape echo), but also multi track recording and better sound quality.

• Ca 1980: The digital age: The possibilities for new forms of manipulation of time and space are strengthened by new digital technologies (MIDI, Lexicon reverbs, digital sampling, digital synthesizers etc)

Some historical background (Toynbee 2000, chapter 3)

The Chemical Brothers: ‘Let Forever Be’ (1999)

Beck: “The New Pollution” (1996)

Three examples:

Rockettothesky: ‘A Cute Lovesong, Please’ (2006)

• How, then, does these songs connect with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as text and with the discourse on The Beatles?

• Sonic potential: appropriation of certain characteristic codes in the ‘original’ tune - looped drum beat, repeated bass hook, mixolydian tonality in the melody, vocal staging through various effects, !

• Contextual influence: Who are these artists, and to what extent is it relevant for them

• Discursive formation: What kind of narrative purpose does the sonic markers hold in these examples? How do they contribute to the meaning of the different tunes?

• In all the examples so far, we are presented with sonic characteristics that are specific to recorded music and that have become different parts of what we now regard to be traditions.

• Sound forutsetter et dialogisk forhold mellom mennesker og teknologi (man/machine interaction)

• Methods in the recording studio, whose output become recognized as signatures/codes associated with studios, producers, epochs and so on

• Sonic markers are intended to described the re-contextualisation/appropriation of such signatures - meaning use of sound as a compositional tool

• Theoretically, we are now in the situation that we can choose sound for our recordings,

Concluding points:

• Dominating understandings of popular music are constructed through selective interpretations of history. Such understandings are in turn governed by certain interests and groups (gate keepers - music journalists, cultural institutions, record labels etc.)

• It is not up to the researcher to simply sum up and underpin governing trends or notions, but to critically scrutinize how such ‘truths become fabricated and produced

• Remember! The researcher’s task is not to have opinions about how people use music, or to judge what kind of music that is more or less valuable, but rather to interpret patterns and relations concerning how the music is used, and how meaning becomes ascribed to the music

Concluding points:

Concluding points:• The navigation between textual and discursive analysis forms the

methodological fundament in popular musicology.

• Text: any form of communication that can be read for meaning.

• Discourse (= language): Production of knowledge and categorical negotiations through (musical) texts

• As Stan Hawkins puts it: “[W]hether one moves outward from the musical atoms or inward towards the whole it is always a question of considering the balance between the autonomy of the detail and the discourse that describes the whole. Discourse, metalanguage, narratology, music theory, dialogics, and so on, all testify to the complicity of the aesthetic and the historical” (Hawkins 2001: 4)