Carlo Nardi

Gateway of Sound: Reassessing the Role of Audio Mastering in the Art of Record Production

Audio mastering, notwithstanding an apparent lack of scholarly attention, is a crucial gateway between production and consumption and, as such, is worth further scrutiny, especially in music genres like house or techno, which place great emphasis on sound production qualities. In this article, drawing on personal interviews with mastering engineers and field research in mastering studios in Italy and Germany, I investigate the practice of mastering engineering, paying close attention to the negotiation of techniques and sound aesthetics in relation to changes in the industry formats and, in particular, to the growing shift among DJs from vinyl to compressed digital formats. I then discuss the specificity of audio mastering in relation to EDM, insofar as DJs and controllerists conceive of the master, rather than as a finished product destined to listening, as raw material that can be reworked in performance.

Challenges facing musical engagement and taste in digitality

The ways in which technology mediates the relationship between people and music has increasingly evolved since the advent of playback devices. With the arrival of digital music, and its inherent culture of digitality, new issues have emerged regarding musical engagement at the level of fan and/or consumer. This paper will explore what and where people are engaging with music, as mediated by technology. These two issues will be categorized by: (1) the immense quantity of popular music available digitally is promoting a culture of eclecticism, whereby people are not tied to specific genres when defining their tastes. Personal genre alliance has fallen out of favour, and replaced by fluid definitions of genres and artists, that are user-driven and highly personalised and subjective: for example, folksonomies. (2) One of the primary ways in which people consume music is through portable media devices, such as the iPods. My data shows that people are predominantly utilising these devices in three sites of engagement: mobile, immobile and quasimobile activities. These issues are explored through the results of a large-scale, international study, utilising both quantitative and qualitative approaches, in the form of interviews and surveys, both conducted online and in person. Throughout this paper, I make distinctions between how digital youth, or digital natives, those under the age of thirty who have grown up entirely immersed in digitality, and those over thirty, or digital immigrants, have developed diverse systems of musical engagement. I argue that digital youth, whose relationship with music is increasingly mediated by digital technologies, such as the iPod, are no less emotionally engaged with music than their older counterparts, but their tastes are less genrefocused. IASPM 2011 proceedings 16

(Dis)placing musical memory: Trailing the acid in electronic dance music

The acid, a museme, is the unstable element in acid house. It is arguably both the spiritual and hedonistic apex of psychedelic music, enabling a shift in perception. In electronic dance music, the journey of the acid museme seems to have developed from Phuture’s “Acid tracks” during the mid-1980s in Chicago club the Muzic Box. The new sound of acid house, as well as acid’s implicit reference to the psychedelic drug LSD, inspired a moral panic in the UK during the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, acid house further influenced the development of trance music in Germany and elsewhere. Yet, a similar musical figure can be recognised in earlier electronic acid rock experiments of Tangerine Dream. The discussion first maps out the development of this museme by placing key-moments geographically. However, this paper concludes that musical memory seems to operate rhizomically, in a deterritorialised2 (displaced) manner. keywordS: memory; rhizome; acid; trance; electronic dance music.

Music, the word and the world; or the banality of (South African) classification

Systems of classification pervade all aspects of our lives, prescribing our moral and aesthetic worlds, constructing our values, shaping our identities, creating the perspectives in which we view ourselves and others. Yet despite the fact that these systems impact so powerfully on people’s lives, they remain largely invisible. This is a problem everywhere, but especially in societies whose conflicts are fuelled by issues arising from categories such as “race”, gender, class or nationality. Is music – and the study of music – exempt from these concerns? If not, then how is it implicated, and with what consequences? What is its role? This paper examines the banality of classification in general and its entanglement with music in particular. Though the issues are of the broadest relevance, the paper focuses specifically on post-apartheid South Africa.

Southern currents: Some thoughts on Latin American popular music studies

Latin American scholars of the 1980s generation have been strongly criticised for their supposed uncritical adoption of models from European and North American musicology. Thirty years after the start of IASPM, and after a little more than ten years of Latin-American IASPM, it might be fruitful to examine this assumption and offer a reassessment. This is even more appropriate considering the fact that the “founding fathers” of Latin American IASPM received their doctorates in the late 1980s and early 1990s in North America and Europe, which means that they were aware of the establishment of popular music studies, and of the classic texts of the field, especially those in ethnomusicology, musicology, history and anthropology, with some touches of literary criticism and sociology. However, after receiving their degrees, Latin American music scholars rolled up their sleeves in order to plan and initiate graduate courses and, more importantly, establish research groups in order to construct a field for popular music studies within the academy. The results of this endeavour form the essential focus of this paper.

Una teoria del formato audio per la musica dance elettronica

Format theory is aimed at investigating the relationships between technological formations and infrastructures, codes, protocols, regulations, industrial standards, companies on the one hand, and musical practices, transactions, discourses, representations and ideologies on the other. Hence, format is intended as industry, set of practices, aesthetic field and expression of one or more media (STERNE 2012). A critical analysis of EDM performers and practitioners shows that the format has implications that are not only technical, but also aesthetic, cultural and economic. In fact, the aesthetics of the format and the conducts that it validates respond to external conditions, which in turn relate to broader phenomena, such as the development of the technological market, access to knowledge and the organisation of labour, and which can constrain the field of experience of DJs and the other social actors involved. In this regard, I will show how the format shapes the activity of mastering engineers in EDM production.

Intercultural reception as manifested in popular music

This paper views popular music as a very important and inseparable part of intercultural reception. Based on empirical material gathered for a project on the subject of the mechanisms of intercultural reception of Slavic cultures in Austria, the text offers a systematisation of the dynamics of the reception of “otherness”. Popular music constitutes and verifies those complex intercultural processes as a substantial part of them, rather than as a separate working mechanism.

Sound in Lost and the disavowal of reality

This paper looks at the use of synchronised sound in the American television series Lost (2004-2010). Here the score bypasses the conventional distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic sound, thus affecting the viewer’s capacity to make sense of the narrative. I will show how this reflects a current tendency in the media towards the spectacularisation of reality and the fictionalisation of information. The inclusion in the plot of issues such as torture, terrorism or racism, which at the time of the screening were at the centre of the public debate, makes this use of the medium especially problematic. The effect of the score in Lost is not just one of disorientation, as it also contributes to the conviction that there is no available perspective that would grant an understanding of the countless mysteries that characterise the series; accordingly, the possibility itself of a rational explanation of the fictional events is often avoided through illogical turns in the plot. Background sounds play a role in generating this divergence between (fictional) reality and perception: if the fictional world is mystified, any means to know, understand and control it through our senses is frustrated, so that the spectator has to relinquish to the inexplicability of events. I will read this loss of perspective in the light of the theory of alienation, explaining how music is used in order to obtain a derangement of perception

Let them go and listen for themselves: The rise and rise of the citizen critic

This paper looks at issues of authority in the music blogosphere with particular focus on the main differences between the authority of traditional music critics and the authority of citizen critics. The relationship between music blogs and the music industry is also analysed with a consideration of how such a relationship might have an impact on a blog’s authority. The paper will argue that, despite the general belief that music blogs operate under parameters of independence from the music industry, in fact, over the last few years, they have developed a solid reliance on the music industry to the point of compromising their authority. The paper is based on thirty-one semi-structured interviews conducted with Australian music bloggers between May 2009 and April 2010.

Dubstep: Dub plate culture in the age of digital DJ-ing

This paper inquires into the role of the dub plate within the creative practice of the dubstep DJ. Dub plates are important to dubstep for a range of historical and aesthetic reasons. As a concept, the dub plate connects dubstep genealogically and rhizomically to the cultural memory of 1970s Jamaican reggae sound system practices. As a one-off cut, a dub plate provides an aura of authenticity to the DJproducer. In the dubstep music scene, however, dub plates seem to appear in a variety of media formats, from analogue lacquered aluminium (“acetate”) and vinyl to digital CDR. Finally, when inquiring into the current practices of digital dubstep DJs in the UK, the dub plate functions as a residual concept of a unique, authentic, event.