"The sonic qualities that emerge from aesthetic and technological decisions in the recording studio have a major impact on how music sounds, yet our ability to describe this impact on the listening experience is limited. Listeners often use very elaborate metaphors when describing sound quality, such as timbral and spatial characteristics. There is, however, a prevalent belief that metaphors are vague and highly subjective, and therefore unsuitable for academic and more exacting discussions of sound. Making Sense of ...
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"The sonic qualities that emerge from aesthetic and technological decisions in the recording studio have a major impact on how music sounds, yet our ability to describe this impact on the listening experience is limited. Listeners often use very elaborate metaphors when describing sound quality, such as timbral and spatial characteristics. There is, however, a prevalent belief that metaphors are vague and highly subjective, and therefore unsuitable for academic and more exacting discussions of sound. Making Sense of Recordings challenges this assumption by showing how these metaphors are closely connected to our sonic experience and that they make sense within a larger historical context of technological developments and changing discourses of recorded sound. Part 1 of the book starts by tracing written discourses of recorded sound, discussing how everyday listeners and audio professionals describe their experiences of sound in recorded music. The concept of the listener, as it is theorized here, relates both to the production and reception side of recorded music and assumes some sort of conscious evaluative process where people give meaning to their experiences. Listening is approached from a quality-oriented mode of listening concerned with embodied cognition and is conditioned by the specific listening situation and the specific purpose of listening. Building on cognitive sciences, ideas of embodied cognition, and recent studies in discourse analysis, the book then provides new theoretical and methodological approaches to sound perception and conceptualization with particular relevance to recorded music. The aim is not only to expand on existing histories of studio music technologies, from production to reproduction to reception, but also to provide analytical and practical tools to aid in the understanding and communication of sound discourse in the studio and beyond"--
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