Table Of ContentIntroduction
1. Sculptures
2. Acoustic Iconography
3. Psychoacoustic Profiles
4. Psychoacoustic Encoding
5. Audio Transduction
6. The Cybernetic
7. Conceptual Infrastructure
8. Interpellation
9. Conjuring Tricks
10. Tracking I: Performance as Programming
11. Tracking II: Programming as Performance
12. Tracking III: Lateral Dynamics Processing
13. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
About the Authors
The present cultural revolution is technical, not ideological.
V. Flusser
Introduction
My fundamental premise in these notes is that performing musicians make and shape sound, while record-
ists represent sound. No genetic connection between live performance and recorded musical communica-
tion is here assumed. This is an important distinction, and one that should have far-reaching resonance for
recordists, musicians, and analysts alike.
My theory is based on observations made over two decades of composing, tracking, mixing, mastering,
commissioning, distributing, and releasing records of popular music, ranging from hard-core punk to Celtic
folk and minimal techno. I have enjoyed many successes along the way. My first tracking session was as a
guitarist on a record that was nominated for a Juno Award in 1993. Since then, as a songwriter, guitarist,
and singer, I have topped national college indie charts in the US with original rock and folk-rock songs,
mixed and mastered records nominated for Juno Awards, and which topped Beatport’s global techno and
minimal charts, the self-described “largest music store for DJs in the world,” and composed music for
documentaries produced by the United Nations and lauded by the likes of Rolling Stone magazine. I have
written songs professionally for Fields of Blonde, a music publishing company situated in Chicago, and I am
co-founder of Roofless Creations, an audio and video production boutique whose credits include work on
albums by some of Canada’s most popular music makers. I offer these credentials so readers may know a
bit about the person behind the following theory and to establish that it derives not just from intellectual
observation but from experience.
I have struggled throughout much of my adult life to articulate this theory, which takes as its primary
premise that the language we use to discuss acoustic phenomena is ontologically impoverished. We cannot,
at this moment, make a meaningful distinction between a sonic signifier (say, a mass-produced recording
of a classical guitar performance) and its referent (the performance itself). I believe that our concept of
sound requires ontological nuancing to account for fundamental differences between what we hear when
we listen to a live performance and when we listen to a record. Understanding these differences—even
acknowledging that they exist—will provide a tremendous boon for recordists as they conceptualize their
work, just as it will provide analysts with a more concrete and empirically accurate understanding of what
they professionally research. The day I realized recorded sound was actually a representation of sound, that
recorded sounds only sound like something other than speaker and headphone diaphragms flapping, was
the day my work as a recordist suddenly became easy. From that moment on, I have known what I actually
do when I sit down to make a record: I am representing sound, just as a painter represents some person or
object without reproducing that person or object.
Long ago I stopped thinking about performance in the studio as anything other than a sophisticated kind of
software programming. When tracking, musicians provide the alternating current—or, in the case of synthesis, the
control information—that recordists process, shape, and order into recorded musical communications. Indeed, per-
formances are the subject of recorded musical communications, whether they are tracked live, synthesized,
or sampled. Performances are, in short, the model’s pose, the thing recordists portray through their records.
In failing to hear records as representations of sound, listeners mistake the subject of communication for
communication itself.
What we hear when we listen to a record is a sophisticated kind of aural photography, a stop-motion kind
of aural animation. Recordists take a series of snapshots, called samples, and synthesists sequence a series
of those snapshots, at a rate determined by the recording or sequencing apparatus. Half a century ago, the
sample rate required to realistically animate sound was based on the speed at which tape had to pass the
playback head of tape machines. That speed was measured in inches per second; typical speeds then were
10 or 15 ips. Likewise, with flat discs and cylinders, the rate was determined by the number of revolutions
per minute needed to conjure the same animated illusion, usually 33 1/3 or 45 revolutions per minute.
With digital technology like compact discs, digital audiotape, and virtual formats like MP3, WAV, and AIFF,
the rate is at least double that at which sounds are sampled—anywhere from 44.1 kHz to 192 kHz.
In fact, Recording Practice depends on sample rates completely. Get the sample rate wrong and the illusion
of sound fails to materialize. If the sample rate for playback is higher than that used to record, for instance,
sound is shunted off to one speaker. Other times, tracks sound slowed down or sped up, so sleepy operatic
tenors or caffeinated chipmunks emerge. Sometimes a jarring mechanical sputtering spews forth, berating
the listener’s lamentable ignorance. This is all to say that sound is animated, represented, on record, accord-
ing to a precise sample rate, while musicians generate and shape sounds per se through their performances.
Given that a primary analytic theme of these notes is that our current conceptual and terminological
infrastructure for discussing sound is inaccurate and impoverished, the basic premises undergirding what
follows defy pithy explanation. In fact, I suggest new definitions for the most fundamental and cherished
concepts held by musicians, recordists, and analysts—concepts such as “music,” “sound,” “performance,”
and so on. I offer these redefinitions, as it were, not to contradict or negate anyone else’s definitions but to
clarify the base technical ontology, the machine essence, of every recorded musical communication. These
redefinitions are like the Buddha’s proverbial ferry boats, offered only to take the traveller from one con-
ceptual shore to another, to be discarded the second the opposite shore is reached. They are meant, that is,
to transport readers from the comfort and familiarity of our current listening habitus to the ontologically
complex audioscape proposed below.
It is my hope that these notes function as a creative spur for readers. Recordists and analysts alike are
encouraged to consider each page of these notes on its own and also as part of a broader argument about
the nature of recorded musical communication. I have chosen the format of an essai-concrète, illustrated
carefully in collaboration with an artist whose work I have admired for years, Steve MacLeod, to help
facilitate this sort of reading. Given the lack of an adequate conceptual and terminological infrastructure
for discussing the ontological complexities of acoustic modernity, the mode of argumentation I deploy to
propose, articulate, and elucidate the theory of Recording Practice that follows, remains aphoristic and
metaphoric in tone rather than scientific. This strikes me as entirely appropriate and reasonable. After all,
I do not hope to prove anything by these notes. Rather, I want to convince readers of something—that the
acoustic world we recordists create is more complicated than it appears and that its ontological vagaries
are worth investigating.
It is my hope that by the end of these notes readers are convinced of the fundamental ontological distinc-
tion I make between sounds per se and the representation of those sounds recordists animate. How this
understanding influences a reader’s creativity is up to each reader. I have found this a profoundly liberating
philosophy, and I would note that most of my successes in music occurred only after I was able to fully
articulate it. Creativity is not a scientific method, however. Creative processes are as varied as the people
who engage in them. I thus refuse to make practical proscriptions in these notes based upon my theory.
Manuals and trade journals abound, and readers looking for tips on how to tweak the EQ on a kick track,
for instance, or how to dock vocals in a more natural-sounding way, should consult those publications. But
anyone interested in garnering broader insight into the craft of record making, beyond its mere mechanics,
is likely to find these notes useful. These notes are, after all, offered as a call to creativity, not a parochial
laundry list of modern record-making techniques. It is my final hope that recordists who consult these
notes find themselves inspired to think and work even just a little differently.
Jay Hodgson
London, Ontario
5 February 2013
1. Sculptures
For these notes, I adopt a materialistic perspective on live performance and define it as the physical activ-
ity of vibrating air molecules. However it is done, performing music is always vibrating (compressing and
rarefying) air molecules into dynamic, undulating shapes.
Sculpting air molecules, then, remains the substantive
basis of every live musical communication—the very
thing musicians do no matter how, where, when, or with
whom.
To sculpt air molecules into musical shapes, to make music, musi-
cians use their bodies (as do rappers and beatboxers) and other
tools they consider appropriate for the task. These tools are usually
called musical instruments, though the recent onset of turntablism,
sampling, and sequencing has prompted many analysts to recon-
sider what they think a musical instrument is, let alone music.
However they define these things, though, people must situate themselves
within earshot of vibrating air molecules, shoved this way and that by musi-
cians, to hear a performance.
As a genre of human communication, live performance
thus remains a product of two related and seemingly simple acts:
(1) sculpting air molecules and
(2) physically confronting those sculptures.
