Sonic cartoons

Zagorski-Thomas, Simon

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139871846.005

Cited by 2 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…In another example, Brøvig Andersen (2006) has coined the term opaque mediation to describe Portishead's use of mediation that is deliberately audible on their album Dummy 1994. This is an instance of media-based staging: Portishead exploit the sound of the recording media and the processing technology (Zagorski-Thomas 2008). Geoff Barrow of Portishead has stated:We just record in loads of different ways.…”

Section: Mediation and Performance Authenticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Utilising a dilettante approach to media-based staging (see Zagorski-Thomas 2008) can make the producer and artist appear, on the face of it, superficial, amateurish and ill-informed about recording practice. Garage bands from the late 1950s onwards have produced rough and unpolished recordings and this has led to it being embraced as a production aesthetic in itself.…”

Section: High Fidelity and The Perception Of Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lacasse also coined the term phonographic staging as a generic term for all these forms of mediation. I have identified two additional, what might be described as hybrid, forms of staging: functional staging (Zagorski-Thomas 2006) and media-based staging (Zagorski-Thomas 2008). I shall explain functional staging in more detail in the next section.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The stadium in your bedroom: functional staging, authenticity and the audience-led aesthetic in record production

Zagorski-Thomas¹

2010

Pop. Mus.

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This article will discuss how two major contributing factors, functional staging and perceived authenticity, have had and continue to have a powerful influence on the sound of record production across geographical boundaries and throughout history. Functional staging is a concept building on the idea of phonographic staging developed by William Moylan and Serge Lacasse and related to Allan Moore's ‘sound-box’. The staging of sounds in the record production process is considered to be functional if the reason for their particular placement or treatment is related to the practicalities of audience reception rather than to aesthetics. It is not a question of whether the music has a function or not but whether that function has influenced the staging of the recorded music. Thus the divergence of staging techniques used in dance music and rock music that began in the 1970s can be seen as resulting from the different functions the music was put to by the different audiences. Music that is played back through large speakers in a club for the purpose of dancing needs to maintain the clarity of the rhythmic elements and so the ‘drier’ techniques of drum and percussive instrument mixing that characterise dance music developed. Rock, however, was more frequently played back in the smaller, less ambient, home environment and so reverberation was added to simulate the atmosphere of the large-scale venue. At the same time, a variety of culturally constructed notions of authenticity have developed within different musical audiences. Why is it that Queen felt the need to inscribe ‘no synthesisers were used in the making of this album’ on their early records and yet Brian May felt entirely comfortable constructing multiple layered performance ‘patchworks’ of guitar tracks? Why might the use of one type of technological mediation be considered more or less authentic than another? Using examples taken from recordings from all around the world and from ‘art’ and ‘popular’ forms of music, this article will explore how audience-led cultural trends in recording and production practice have resulted in the particular ‘sounds’ of different recorded music genres.

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Section: Mediation and Performance Authenticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: High Fidelity and The Perception Of Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The stadium in your bedroom: functional staging, authenticity and the audience-led aesthetic in record production

Zagorski-Thomas¹

2010

Pop. Mus.

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“…These developments in VR sound resonate with longer trajectories in pop music production and reception, with spatial sound design emerging as a key creative focus of digital pop production practice and aesthetics (Moore, 2010;Brøvig-Hanssen & Danielsen, 2013, 2016Zagorski-Thomas, 2014), and personal (headphone) listening becoming prevalent as a dominant mode of music engagement (Quiñones, 2013;Bull, 2012). Concurrently, recent years have seen an emerging theoretical focus on and analysis of recorded popular music as virtual space, which may imitate or play upon the sonic characteristics of actual acoustic environments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Virtual auditory reality

Findlay-Walsh

2021

SoundEffects

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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).

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Sonic cartoons

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The stadium in your bedroom: functional staging, authenticity and the audience-led aesthetic in record production

The stadium in your bedroom: functional staging, authenticity and the audience-led aesthetic in record production

Virtual auditory reality

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