Skilled Hearing
Embodied Skill among Sound Engineering Students
Roel van Bakkum s1807366
MSc Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology Supervised by Mark Westmoreland
Second Reader: Bart Barendregt Leiden University
Word count: 7789 Oktober 2018
Abstract:
Sound Engineering occupies a strange space in musicological thought. Though it plays an important role in our contemporary global music culture and industry, in musicological and anthropological research it is often
overshadowed by research on musicians. Technology plays a large role in many contemporary music cultures, but the experts that work with it often do not fall in the limelight. This essay and my accompanying film the Illusion
of Music explore the practice and thoughts of students in the schizophonic space between recording and
reproduction. Knowledge of sound, of music, and of technology merge together in this field. Yet how is this knowledge embodied by engineers? How does this influence the way they percieve and appreciate music? What does their preoccupation with this technical schizophonic space mean for our understanding of music?
"And for these, and such like marvellous Actes and Feates, Naturally, and Mechanically, wrought and contrived: ought any honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher, be counted, & called a
Conjurer? Shall the folly of Idiotes, and the Malice of the Scornfull, so much prevaille ... Shall that man, be (in hugger mugger) condemned, as a Companion of the hellhoundes, and a Caller, and
Conjurer of wicked and damned Spirites?"
Table of Contents
Introduction: the other side of the record 5
Methods 7 Theory 10 Observations 15 Reflection 21 Conclusion 23 Literature 24 Filmography 26
Introduction: The other side of the record
When talking about music, the discussion often revolves around musicians. Musicians are heralded as knowers of sound, possessing seemingly supernatural skills like the ability to hear precise
pitches, having better abstract thinking skills, have better memory (Cohen et al. 2011) or have lower blood pressure (Sunderman 1946, Burgraaf et al. 2013). But very few studies focus on those with even more elaborate technical musical skills, like audio engineers, who live and breathe sound waves, transients and subharmonics, overtones and microphones. What do they see and hear when they hear and see the sound waves fly by through their monitors and computer screens? How does this affect their affection for certain sounds and songs? Does the mix make its way in their
appreciation of music?
Though many sound engineers are or have been musicians themselves, the act of engaging with music through specialized machines on a professional level is a whole different kettle of crawdads. Their systematized way of engaging with produced sound alters not just the possibilities of sounds to produce, but also the possibilities of sounds to think. In a way, sound engineers seem to become one with their machines, learning machine-like ways of thinking while maintaining their own human appreciation for music, becoming mental cyborgs, man-machine hybrids.
To better understand what engineers do and how they do it, I travelled to the quaint town of Hasselt, in Belgium, where my friend Luuk Schelvis studies Muziek Techniek at PXL Music, a department of the hogeschool (the Dutch/Flemish equivalent of college) PXL dedicated to the study of music. Luuk's way of talking about music technology and his passion for those strange machines have always both intrigued and mystified me. I wanted to know what he was doing over there, down in the South, and who these colleagues-engineers-friends were of which he speaks quite often. Though I had been in a number of recording studios myself and even recorded tracks with Luuk and the (coincidentally named) Van Hasselt brothers, I wanted to demystify the music engineering practice for myself, and look at the people behind the buttons and the sliders from an
anthropological/musicological point of view. Furthermore, it's worthwhile to take a look at these practices, because sociotechnological phenomena like Bryan Pfaffenberger describes (Pfaffenberger 1992) have become not just commonplace but even integral to our Western society. Pfaffenberger borrowed the term sociotechnical systems from Trist and Bamfort (Trist & Bamfort 1951) as a framework to understand technology in a social context: what social forces make technologies possible and how do those technologies influence the social circles by which they are made and
used? Though I will not use Pfaffenberger's theory in my thesis, it did spur me to further delve into the subject of technology and the people that work with it.
Anthropological and musicological research on recording engineers and their practice is not a new thing, as many have gone before me (Porcello 1996, 1998, 2004)(Bates 2008). With my research, I wanted to shed some light on how student engineers learn to listen to sound, and how they navigate the sonic possibilities within a mix to find out what kind of aesthetic choices suit the music. How do sound engineers learn to listen? How do they acquire this embodied skill? And what does their practice mean for our understanding of contemporary music?
Methods
The setting, the people
The two and a half months I spend sleeping on my friend Luuk Schelvis' couch and subsequently destroying my back for months to come were to study him and the people he associates with: sound engineers. Knowing Luuk to be a very sociable individual, I relied on his network of friends to find more sound engineering students willing to talk about their thoughts and experience, in an informal snowball sampling fashion, contacting people I had heard about in interviews and informal talks through Facebook to interview them, using audiovisual methods to document my encounters. Initially I wanted to combine Geertz's well known 'Deep Hanging Out' approach (Geertz 1998) with audio visual recordings, but rather quickly discovered this did not work as well as intended. I found that actively 'hanging out' with people with the purpose of research not only cost me a lot of energy but also made me feel highly uneasy about everything I said and heard. I became hyper-conscious of myself, which negatively influenced my research. Though I did not stop going to friends I had made in the field, I did change my approach to something slightly more formal. Whenever I heard from a participant while talking about my project that I should meet so and so, I would look up these individuals on Facebook, contact them, and try to make arrangements for interviews or other activities to attend and film. There were times where this worked very well, and times where I travelled one and a half hours by train to a city I never in my life had been to on a freezing winter day, only to find out my participant was still in Hasselt, down with the flu, and had forgotten to send me a message.
Audiovisual Methods: how and why?
I have always thought writing about music is in a way a bit silly. Whereas speech and action translate well to the written word (metaphor and imagination filling in the gaps of description) the physical world around us holds many indescribable sensations. Sound is one of most ephemeral sensations, crashing upon our ears like waves and only truly arriving in our mind after it is gone. A sight remains until you turn your head, a smell lingers around its source until the wind dissipates it, and the warmth of a touch is still felt after the hand has moved on. Yet sound is gone after it has been heard, unless it is recorded.
audiovisual technologies, but since we live in an era where media technologies have become cheap, widespread, and of increasingly better quality, there is something to be said for making the music you write about audible. I wanted to record the thoughts of engineers on their craft and how they conduct their practice, struggle with the sound and express their views on the sound. Much like how the Balafon maker in Masters of the Balafon: The Wood and The Calabash (Zemp 2003) shaves off wood at the end of a key to get the tone right, my film shows how engineers work with equal meticulous fervour on the sound of their mixes.
When I started editing the footage I shot in Hasselt, I aimed to make my film as observational as possible. But this was not entirely the way I shot everything. In many scenes, I was actually in dialogue with my participants, filming from my point of view, or maybe slightly to the side. Still, I was invisible and inaudible. In the first drafts of the film, I had cut out nearly every instance of my voice, thinking it to be unprofessional. Then I watched Polka (1986) by Amsterdam visual
anthropologists Maarten Rens and Robert Boonzajer Flaes. In this striking ethnography on
Mexican, Chicano, and Austrian polka music, interviewer Maarten Rens often sits directly in plain view next to his interviewees, which often forces him to talk directly to his interviewees and state the questions asked. I found this approach inspiring because it confronted me with the maker, and evoked the feeling of being an actual spectator instead of mimicking the view of the film maker. This prompted me to include my own voice more in the final edit of my film, because I wanted to juxtaposition the voices of my informants with my own voice, to sever the sensation of first person view.
This research was my first time conducting actual autonomous fieldwork, as well as making a film on my own, which caused me a lot of anxiety throughout the whole research. Whether I like it or not, this has influenced my methodology. I initially positioned myself as a researcher interested in sound engineering, but since I was a friend of Luuk and relied on him to start my research, I was often regarded just as a friend and band mate of Luuk that had come to Hasselt to make a film. I essentially got stuck in between this role of film maker and friend-of-a-friend, which helped with some boundaries like getting people to interview, but also hindered me, I think, in crossing more professional boundaries.
The camera I travelled with was a small 1080p HD JVC camcorder with a widely used but fairly inexpensive external Røde microphone, that could internally set to record at -10 or -20 decibel, something that turned out to be imperative when filming live performances. I also had borrowed a
clip-on wireless microphone and a tripod from the university for interviews. This bare-bones and thus lightweight set-up allowed me to travel quickly and save my couch-shaped back from more torment. I feel like the size of my camera made it and by extension me seem less threatening, which may have made me more relatable to the students I interviewed, yet less professional in a field rife with high tech recording technologies. At the same time I acknowledge that the use of a camera worked as a potential detaching force. Ethnographic camera use comes with expectations. It becomes a play between the filmer and the filmed, ever resolving around what needs to be filmed and what can be filmed. People do not just forget the presence of the camera, especially when you are walking around with it. In the same sense, the ethnographer becomes part of the camera, regardless of it being used. The 'threat' of being recorded is still there.
Ethical considerations
My primary ethical concern revolved mainly around copyright. Since I would be working around music and other creative work, upon which copyright laws are inherently applicable, I could be liable for recompensating the artist for their work. Private organisations like SABAM (the Belgian copyright organisation) and Buma/Stemra (the Dutch copyright organisation) exist to enforce the law on this front. Though Buma/Stemra has provisions to allow free usage of material in
educational assignments within the premise of an educational institute, SABAM does not have such a provision. However, the artists would deserve the money they are due in any case.
A second concern revolved around shooting footage that may negatively impact my participant's careers. During filming, I had one instance of somebody who objected to my recording because he did not feel comfortable 'attaching his face' to the music he was making. Being a guest there, I complied, of course. As always, I had asked consent prior to filming and subsequently did not receive it, though I could sit in during the mixing session. When anybody objected to me filming them, I would stop filming and not use what I filmed before.
Theory
In our contemporary Western urban society communities of practitioners (and communities of clients) arise everywhere. Sound engineers are but one brand of specialized technicians that serve a very specific number of audiences: people that want to record sounds. Though this extends to all sorts of peoples and professions, from game designers to video post-production, their most prolific clients are musicians. In exploring how engineers learn and conduct their practice, I rely on certain theoretical concepts. How should we think about the way they look at their craft? What are the theoretical implications of working the space between recording and reproduction? And how does that influence our conceptualization of sound recording in general?
Music Engineering
Sound engineering is a broad field of practice where the world of sound and the world of
technology merge. The history of mechanical reproduction goes back to 9th century Baghdad, from
which time the Banu Musa brother's Book of Ingenious Devices stems, a book full of indeed quite ingenious devices among which a water organ and a programmable mechanical flute player. Sound engineers today are still concerned with programming devices (whether physical or digital) to generate and/or alter often musical sound. The mechanical reproduction chain like we know today -to record and reproduce- originates from two Frenchmen; Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and Charles Cros, who respectively invented the phonautograph in 1885 and the paleophone in 1887. Though De Martinville's invention only transcribed physical sound onto paper (thus making it until recently impossible to reproduce) and none of Cros' machines ever was found, they can still be credited with taking the first step. Unfortunately for both of them, it was the (in)famous inventor Thomas Edison who made and patented the first working recording device: the phonograph. Edison's shrewd business instincts allowed him to market his device to a wider public and essentially jump-start the beginning of the record industry.
Parallel with these technologies to set sound in stone, or at least, vinyl, tape, and bytes, the microphone developed, growing from a comically large cone attached to a needle, to the only slightly smaller carbon and ribbon mikes of the 50's, to the wide variety of condenser, dynamic, and even optic microphones we have today. These early technologies subsequently developed into devices that could do the recording-reproduction job just a bit better; machines could increasingly record and reproduce longer, faster, cheaper, and in higher definition, and became more portable, more reliable, and with more functionality than ever before.
The practice of sound engineering runs equally parallel to the development of sound technology as it is both born from and bears new technologies. Though the usage and the development of new audio technologies have grown to be separate, they stem from the same ancestor. Of course, when professional electronics slowly became consumer electronics, the borders between engineer, producer, and musician began to blur. Sound engineers still manage the technological
infrastructures necessary to make records or to perform for stadiums full of people, but especially since the omnipresence of computers in the current era, their job has become both much easier yet much more complex. As David Novak aptly quotes: “'Sound fidelity,' Jonathan Sterne (2003: 219) reminds us, is 'more about faith in the social function and organization of machines than it is about the relation of a sound to its ‘source.’ '” (Novak 2011).
Skilled Visions
As the main theoretical driving force behind my research, Cristina Grasseni's notion of 'skilled visions' (Grasseni 2010) is the most important theoretical concept I employ. Though the concept seemingly implies a primarily 'ocularcentric' or sight-based focus on the acquisition and expression of skill, its titular plural form refers to a broader concept of 'vision', one that encompasses all senses, with 'vision' in the sense of eyesight as most evocative of the senses. Skilled visions are those ways of seeing that have been altered by training and experience, “embedded” knowledge (ibidem) and sensibilities in the way practitioners of a craft look at and value the objects of their craft. In a way, 'skilled vision' explains how people learn to see more than meets the eye.
The sensory world of music engineers, though not solely auditory, is however dominated by sound. While engineers work with many visual tools, be they physical machines with VU gauges that flick back and forth or the stunning graphical interfaces rendered on the computer screen, it all boils down to the sound of the music. But when skilled vision is applicable to more senses than the eye, how does that translate itself to the sonic expertise of music engineers, and how do they attribute value to sonic qualities?
Schizophonia and Mechanical Reproduction
Since the advent of the mechanical reproduction of music, the mutability of that sound's
reproduction has been an issue. Accidents can warp the sound of a record into something else, like wax phonograph cylinders melting in the tropic heat rendering the sound nearly intelligible. The recording has always been a mere approximation of the experienced performance, as even the highest definition monitors colour the sound you hear in one way or another. This detachment of
sound from its original source features in Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer's work, in which he calls it schizophonia (Schafer 1969). But schizophonia does not only imply the separation of source and sound; what is detached from its whole can be re-purposed for something new. Sound in its 'natural habitat' is inherently ephemeral, originating and dissipating with equal speed,
reflecting off surfaces or resonating through materials. Electromechanical and digital technologies allow not only for reproduction, but also the manipulation or modification of sounds, as actual physical waves are translated into any number of different formats and then back again.
Where Walter Benjamin lamented the loss of the aura in the reproduction of art (Benjamin 1936), Mark Katz seems to celebrate the possibility of mechanical reproduction and the possible
implications, at least in music (Katz 2004). Katz explores the consequences of recording on the sensations of both listener and musician. Whereas the viewing sensation of a reproduced piece of visual art was largely unchanged, the mechanical reproduction of music changed the very way in which we consume music. No longer are we bound to a musician to provide us the service of playing us a piece, with all possible spontaneity and virtuous variety that comes along. We can now listen to whatever music we want, when we want, where we want, and as often we want. Musical records do not even need to be one performance any more, as illustrated by Katz' example of The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever, in which the song's dreamy atmosphere is due to the fact it consists of two completely different takes quite literally taped together.
Music has long since become regarded as an object instead of the synchronized motions of a group of individuals, and especially with the rise of the record industry, musical sound became tied to vinyl, tape, and MP3: physical objects as carriers of sound and signifiers of the music they carry. A vinyl carrying The Clash's London Calling is no longer a recording of them performing nineteen different songs, but a deliberately constructed object that is its own signifier. However, in turn with digital data storage, even the songs on such an object have been rent from their physical form. Theodor Adorno coined the term 'atomized listening' long before the invention of MP3, referring to the phenomenon that occurs when longer compositions are 'broken' into pieces due to the limited format of wax cylinders and vinyl records. The rise of the musical format of the three-minute pop song could fairly well be attributed to this phenomenon, as Katz speculates (Katz 2004). The limited time artists had in the beginning of the recording era forced many to change their musical ways into something more 'manageable', constraining their spontaneity to fit the musical mould of a baekelite disc. Likewise, the radio had a similarly profound influence on the length of recorded music.
Beyond mimicking
Schizophonic mimesis is the term coined by Steven Feld (Feld 1996) to describe sound detached from it source, then reproduced and subsequently re-purposed for other means. Feld explains the term by illustrating the global dissemination of 'pygmy sound' by the hand of ethnographers and ethnomusicologists. 'Ethnic' musics get recorded and resampled, thanklessly appropriated by Western musicians and audience.
But what does it mean when people consciously manipulate the sound of music? Can we truly speak any more of mimicry when the product only vaguely resembles the original (if there is even an original to begin with)? The alterations sound engineers apply to the musical product do not always happen by mere happenchance and they certainly do not stay by sheer luck; each alteration to the original sound is deliberate to add more meaning to the whole. Whether you believe in the
capability of music to inherently hold meaning or not, the form of a sound is its function. Altering the sound's form thus alters its meaning, changing the schizophonic mimesis into a schizophonic semiosis, so to speak.
Hence, recordings could be thought of as illusions. While they may seem a representation of an activity that has happened, each time a recording is reproduced, it becomes recontextualised into a setting where it was not originally produced. Though we may close our eyes and imagine ourselves to be in some imaginary space, an empty church, an intimate embrace with the singer, on the plains of inner Mongolia, this space is merely an illusion. The events of a recording, especially in popular music recordings, often end up being a collage of different events layered on top of each other. It is important to remember that these illusions are not mere figments of the imagination. They are deliberate (in varying degrees) manipulations created by skilled people.
In their workings upon the human listener (and our understanding of them), recordings are in line with J.R.R. Tolkien's concept of a Secondary World or Secondary Belief (Tolkien 1947), with which he described the way fairy tales still work despite their incredulousness. When we listen to a studio recording, it is obvious to us the music is a creation, an illusion, an “enchantment”, but we accept this within the confines of that secondary reality. We accept modulated, disembodied voices and harsh electronic noise as being part or the secondary musical reality, as part of the work of art, even if we do not understand what produces this sound or if we just don't like it, though we have to make that conscious effort to suspend our disbelief when we do. As with Tolkien's example of the “green
sun” we can only accept this Secondary World when the parts fit, if it is consistent with what it presents. Engineers make it so the sonic consistency is maintained, keeping the illusion of the music intact.
Illogical Form
Yet there is still something mind boggling about the nature of music. What is it exactly that engineers manipulate when mixing? What aspect of music do they work with when they do what they do? For this I rely on Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form (1953), the sequel to her Philosophy
in a New Key (1941). Langer puts forth a theory of music as symbol in both books. The way she
frames that “Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.” (Langer 1953:27) resonates with the way many of my participants spoke of their craft; they follow the feeling they or other artists want to convey and attempt to enhance the emotional impact of music, hence, they manipulate sonic emotive markers to amplify whatever feeling the music ought to convey.
I appropriate Langer's use of symbolic forms in music not only as signifiers of outside patterns (as things sounding alike being alike) but also as this very power of music and the strange things engineers do with sound. They do not necessarily make music, but do work to make music sound 'better', yet this 'better' is determined by intersubjective processes. Where musicians are primarily concerned with the 'logical form' of their art, which is to say, the structural elements of a piece, engineers are mainly focused on maximizing the 'qualitative form' of a piece, the way things seem and sound in relation to each other. This is of course a crude dichotomy. It is not to say that musicians are not concerned with the qualities of their art, or engineers never have a say in structural forms, but their concerns in the face of the art are different.
Observations
Technical Skill, Social Skill
A school like PXL Music trains professionals. That is the first thing we need to remember when talking or writing about sound engineers. While the sound engineering practice gives rise to many more implications on the nature of recorded music and the way training influences auditory skill, the dynamic between engineer and musician -between worker and client- is the core of their business. Studios and venues are expensive spaces filled with potentially more expensive
equipment, and though home recording has become more prevalent over the years, the practice is still mainly and professionally conducted in these spaces.
The engineering practice exists by the grace of audio technology. This materiality should be by no means disregarded. The auditory skill engineers acquire is only made possible through the
technologies that allow them to see and manipulate sound in the way they do. It is the knowledge of all the workings and flukes of different machines that account for a large portion of the capabilities of engineers. Knowledge becomes analogous to skill. The more one knows about the tools works with, the better one becomes at the job at hand.
Music is a problem
For an engineer, music is a problem. It is not a problem in the way a wasp nest in your kitchen is a problem, but more like a mathematics problem. And like every problem, it is one that needs to be solved. Every step in the chain from musician to listener poses another difficulty to solve. The musician plays a guitar, but what is the sound the artist wants? How do you achieve this sound of the guitar and will this sound fit the rest of the song? Sometimes dedicated producers regulate these semi-artistic processes, and make the decisions, but even then the engineer is still producing in a way. What kind of microphones are there available, and what is the 'correct' way to use them? When I was filming a recording session in DAFT Studio in Malmedy on the invitation of Luuk Schelvis (who works there as an intern) as part of an assignment for first year engineering students of PXL Music, a number of students got reprimanded by the studio owner Stijn Verdonckt because they had put a ribbon microphone too close to the drum. Ribbon mics are fairly fragile devices and when put too close to a loud source, the ribbon within the mic might tear quickly, which is expensive to repair. These are factors that need to kept in mind. Every microphone and every amplifier has a different characteristic sound, and a different usage. Knowledge of proper usage (and the margins of improper but safe usage) is imperative.
Every step between source and ear is one that can potentially influence how a song will sound and thus received. Students of PXL and other engineering schools learn how to navigate this
schizophonic space, recognizing and negating problematic artefacts and using other artefacts to stylistic advantage. Reducing artefacts of technological alterations is part of the engineers job, but the line between what is an effect and an artefact is thin. As Luuk explained it, you should feel the effect is there, but you should not hear it work. He let me hear an example of a compressor, and explained that the effect is meant to give it some more punch, but that you can hear it modulate and ruin the sound when used too 'aggressively'. This is another problem arising from a well intended solution.
The Hunt for the Perfect Sound
There are a vast number of things that can ruin a sound. The factor of human error is an obvious one; a drummer playing a sloppy rhythm, a bass player missing a note, a guitar player accidentally hitting that goose note, or a recording engineer simply putting a microphone in a weird place. These are occurrences where the technical solutions engineers are trained for may but seldom supply an outcome. Instead, it becomes a matter of psychology. A drummer playing with a click track -a digital metronome over the headphone- might be playing worse as they are not used to playing like that and are focusing too much on following the track instead of drumming. Luuk illustrated this when he came back from Malmedy once with a story of a singer who messed up vocal take after vocal take as her producer was constantly bluntly criticizing her singing, causing her to feel insecure, and perform even worse.
Technological malfunctions are also a commonplace occurrence, ranging from atmospheric interference (especially commonplace with analogue equipment) to the dreaded phase difference, whereby two microphones recording the same thing but at different distances or different polarities causing the similar but out-of-phase sound waves to cancel each other out or at least part of each other. Solving technical difficulties is one of the core tasks of engineers, and sometimes, one of the most boring tasks. No matter how well organized a studio or a venue is, breakage and malfunction is a looming threat. Once again returning from Malmedy, Luuk again told me about how during the recording sessions with the rock band the Sore Losers and lead engineer Jim Vollentine two very specific microphone cables broke, which he as intern/assistant engineer had to fix. A small pin had broken off on both cables and fallen into one of the connector holes which he had to pry out with a pincer and solder back among twenty-so equally tiny pins on a surface the size of the tip of his
pinky finger, all in the early morning with just minutes before the recording session began. These are mundane and necessary tasks.
Sonic inconsistencies can arise from instruments clashing with each other's frequency ranges. In a good mix, all instruments ought to be audible within their own frequency range, and according to the wise words of Eric “Mixerman” Sarafin, “[e]verything else in the mix is there to support the melody.” (Mixerman 2014). All instruments occupy a specific range in which the sound they make fall. Before the invention of the microphone, instrumentation was also bound to the loudness of an instrument, but now tread of a cat can sound like as loud as thunder and a cannon as soft as a summers breeze. Yet if the frequencies of two complex wave forms meet each other, the one tends to drown in the other. This is undoubtedly the most complex job of an engineer, as this is where their technical, social, and perceptional skills come together. Drums should not swallow the bass whole, nor the piano the guitar, yet everything should also sound as the artist wants it to sound. This is where the engineer's embodied skill comes in.
It is the engineer's job to make an artist's music sound as good as possible. Yet at the same time, many of my participants have told me that utter perfection is boring. It seems, as with most art, that the human element must remain for it to valid art. With live mixing, like Cis told me in an
interview, it is important to think and work with the dynamic of the band. “A mix should never be perfect, live, for me,” he told me, “Never. A mix should just be representable...a representation for what a person is doing live, or what a band is doing live. So I'm not going to…make it... It shouldn't all be too proper [clean]. There has to be… There can be a synth a bit too loud. There may be something that gets your attention, or you may go crazy with reverbs or delays or with extreme dynamics. You may pull it real soft or very loud. Why not? But you have to follow the feeling of what a band is doing on stage.”
Knowledge as skill
Knowing sound is a key element in the mixing practice. Knowing what things should or should not sound like is part of the engineering practice, and in fact, largely that which is considered 'skilful' among the engineers I spoke to. Though this knowledge can be learned by book and study - at least on a basic level - the secret behind becoming a great mixer is simply practice. From virtually very person I have interviewed I have heard this.
asked him whether he thought more technically than before he studied music technology. He said though he had learned a lot at PXL, the interest had always been there in him. He had always wondered how the guitars in a track were panned, or how a drum was recorded, so he had later set out to study as a musician, but found the engineering profession more interesting (and seemingly more secure regarding jobs). Pieterjan Seynaeve, who works at MotorMusic as an in-house engineer/producer and teaches master classes in the MotorMusic studios through his project
Mandinka, told me also that the personal drive to record and mix as often as possible is not only the
best way to become a good engineer, but that it is also the only way to become a great engineer and make it further in the business. I met Pieterjan by accident at MotorMusic in Mechelen when I went there to interview another student of PXL, who turned out to be down with the fever and forgot to text me about it. He was just setting up the control booth of the main recording hall for a class on mixing. It was a small room filled neatly but to the brim with patching bays and control panels like a space ship, its large window not showing the starry vacuum of space, but two stories of the former hospital made into a large room, a grand piano tucked away on a stage in the corner. I was initially looking for somebody else, but we got talking, and he told me about phon curves or the 'equal-loudness contour' and what it requires to be a great engineer. In his expertise, the problem that arises for engineers not being familiar with concepts is that they do not keep in account how the perceived frequency range of the track will change with the sound pressure level, often because they prioritize attention to the 'ear' of the computer. Thus, an engineer who always mixes very loudly would have their mix sound rather off.
Demand of the musician, agency of the music
In my interview with Frank Duchène and my many talks with Luuk Schelvis, the theme of
interpersonal skills returned over and over again. Musicians are known to often be fickle creatures with large ego's, and negotiating that fickleness often seemed crucial to being a good engineer. As the engineer's job is to translate the artist's vision into technical solutions and applications, and thus sonic changes, a large part of their work is being in dialogue with artists and producers. Most engineers I spoke to about this part of the practice use this 'translation' metaphor to describe this interaction between the artistic view of the client and the technical know-how of the engineer. Often this is achieved by vocalization or metaphorization, as thoroughly described by Thomas Porcello (Porcello 2004), and sometimes by concrete direction. At the same time, a lot of artists, especially beginning artists, do not know what sound they want exactly, either because they are unfamiliar with the possibilities or because they haven't thought about it yet.
While in general the client's word is law, since they're paying for the session after all, the music is often said to have almost a will of its own. Often, I heard engineers describing a certain form of agency to music. Whether somebody is mixing a record or a live performance, the music demands certain things. The music wants changes, that push it in a certain stylistic direction. I understand this as a metaphor for the (inter)subjective aesthetics of the people involved in the project. Whether it is something iconic for the genre, like a slap back delay for a country song, or something
experimental, like a slap back delay for an orchestral piece, when an alteration to the sound fits the rest of the song, it is the correct approach. What 'fits' a song, however, is another proper question and another matter of intersubjective preference.
Artefacts as markers of illusion
The enhancement of the music's emotional message that the engineer applies, has significant impact (be it positive or detrimental) on the reception of a song and the message.
When I was talking with Luuk on his kot where I slept on his couch for so long, he once casually dropped how you aren't supposed to hear the workings of a compressor. It struck me as a bit
strange; when you apply an effect on a sound, you do it because you want to change the sound. Why shouldn't you want to hear that? He explained that while a change to a sound is supposed to be audible, applying too much of an effect warps the sound into something ugly, you can hear the artefacts of that effect in the sound. In effect, the artefacts of a (in this case) digital effect are those alterations that break the illusion. At the same time, there are plenty of examples where artefacts have been adopted as desirable aesthetic choices, most notorious of which is the well-known pitch correction or Autotune. Whereas this effect was initially meant to clear up pitch inconsistencies in vocal takes, overdriven applications of the effect have found their way into becoming an aesthetic choice among various musical scenes: from hip hop artists to Berber folk musicians (Krukowski 2017 #4).
Yet this is what the illusion of recorded music hinges upon. A mix is supposed to sound as “natural” as possible, but that is also what makes it problematic. As a product of sonic manipulation, a track is inherently artificial. Artefacts form the places where the seams of this illusory veil come loose. Whether this is accidental, thus undesirable, or intentional, thus desirable, is up to the artist's taste and the engineer's discretion. The distinct warble of a starting tape machine can be a sound that may be a desirable addition to a certain track, whereas interference from a photocopier may have
engineers roaming the streets with a guitar pickup on a fishing pole just to find the source of the noise (Krukowski #6 (2017)). “In a recording studio, microphones open up a rich field of sound,
just as doctor Quesnel [Krukowski's audiologist] describes for our ears.” Krukowski describes in his six part radio show. “But instead of our brain, it's then up to an audio engineer to decide what in that is signal, and what is noise, maximizing one and minimizing the other. That decision might not have anything to do with what we typically call 'noisy'.” What is or isn't noise remains a decision
between artist and engineer.
What distinguishes a mistake from noise and noise from a (happy) accident is a related question. One late night get together with Cis van Robaeys and Luuk we talked about this subject. Though the focus in the engineering profession is different for the both men - Cis is a predominantly live engineer, whereas Luuk has studied the studio more – they both agreed that mixing music is much like painting. We watched a Bob Ross video. In that moment, Bob Ross became a symbol for mixing. Ross' embrace of “happy” accidents over the idea of mistakes resonated with Cis and Luuk's idea of the engineering practice. The importance of “happy” accidents in music is
corroborated by Charles Kronengold (Kronengold 2005): accidents can become unique additions to a record. In his analyses of various track – among which Al Green's 'Simply Beautiful' – he makes a case for the acceptance of accidents as an integral part of music theory. Accidents differ from outright mistake in that they are an occurrence of chance. Accidents that “don't sound accidental” can unwittingly improve a song, which my informants relate much to Bob Ross' painting style.
Reflection
Like I mentioned previously, this was the first ethnographic research I had ever conducted. The strangeness of ethnographic thinking is one that has bother me a lot. It required a sort of alienation of the self. Coming from a musical and musicological background, it required negotiation with myself to bring out the ethnographic spirit: I already come into the field with my own conceptions of music, and my own understanding (albeit more limited than my participants, of course) of sound engineering. At the same time, the ethnographic mindset requires a sort of objectification of the 'other', even when the 'other' is quite like yourself. While you need to be less yourself -less a person and more a researcher- you likewise have to treat your participants as less of a person and more like an object of interest and a source of information.
Ethnography is a way of thinking that essentially has to be hypersensitive to meaning, whatever that meaning may be. Each time somebody says anything, the impulsive response is “okay, but what does this mean to this person?”. This clashed with the way I normally engage with people. Especially since my “informants” are people that are my age, also have my interests, and are generally also friends of my friend Luuk, the ethnographic mindset felt unnatural, akin to a sort of academic paranoid schizophrenia. I had to shift my thinking from one of “they're talking about machines again” to one that goes “okay, what is it they are actually saying?” or “what do they actually mean?”.
The whole experience reminded me often of the anecdote of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich I read and heard a number of times while studying Musicology at the University of Amsterdam. Supposedly, during breakfast he said: “What's a musicologist? I'll tell you. Our cook, Pasha, prepared the scrambled eggs for us and we are eating them. Now imagine a person who did not cook the eggs and does not eat them, but talks about them – that is a musicologist." (Fanning 1995). I felt like I was neither cooking, nor eating, nor talking about the eggs, but talking about the cook making the eggs, or perhaps even the chef overseeing the cook making the eggs. Yet the more I learned about these metaphorical eggs and cooks, the less I felt I understood it. It seemed like all my informants had to say boiled down to “you just need to do it a lot to become good at it”. A fair, but fairly unsatisfactory answer in my eyes.
This feeling of awkwardness and strangeness is not unique to me. Seeing my fellow students also struggle with new mode of engaging with people, it seems inherent to “becoming an
mindset.
My own vuurdoop or trial of fire was with my first impromptu interview with Arthur Moelants. The second day I was in Hasselt, Luuk took me to the PXL Music building because he had to mix a track in the Yellow Studio. Arthur was at school, mixing in the Red Studio, opposite from the Yellow, but separated by the Hall, the insulated recording room where musicians sit to be recorded. Hanging with Luuk, he prompted that I could go to Arthur for an interview. Insecure, and having only a loose collection of unstructured and unrefined questions, I took my camera and the microphones and walked those 20-or-so meters to the Red.
This is also where I became aware of the cultural differences between Dutch and Belgian people. Compared to most Dutch people I know, who can be rather boisterous from time to time, Arthur is this timid and very composed young Belgian man. For me, this reservation instantly felt like a sign Arthur did not like me or maybe even was suspicious of my motives. Of course this wasn't true, but since it caused me to take a step back, Arthur noticed, which did cause a bit of dissonance in our communication. He nevertheless showed and told me what I wanted to see: what he was doing, how he got into the whole engineering thing, and how different things work. At the end of the interview I asked him how I could improve my questions, to which he answered that he did not fully
understand the purpose of the questions, and that he expected me to have explained to him better what I wanted to see or hear; in essence, to come to the point better. I took his advice to heart, and the following interviews, including the next impromptu interview with Arthur, went far better, with clearer question and thoughts.
Conclusion
Engineers learn to listen by conducting their practice; recording and mixing a lot. They become sensitive - and appreciative - of the skill of other engineers' craft in records. Music engineers' technologically infused field forces them to continually focus on the sound. Though the basic principles are relatively quickly learned, engineering skill lies in the knowledge acquired through practice. As much as they express embodied knowledge in the way they talk about and engage with the sonic qualities of music, their skilled hearing is also mediated by their technological knowledge and social capabilities.
The skilled hearing sound engineers develop by study and repeated exposure to their technological realm grants them a heightened sense of sonic interpretation and appreciation. Between the plethora of 'wrong' sounds, ranging from technological malfunctions to human error to sonic inconsistencies, and the hunt for the perfect sound, they hone their senses to signal and noise, to desirable sound, and come up with way to achieve that. Building on Langer's “tonal analogue to emotive life”, music's meaning is symbolic to the feeling an artist wants to convey. Musicians employ music's emotive power by playing with the art's logical and qualitative forms, whereas engineers attempt to maximize the effectiveness of this music's qualitative form by placing the sounds in the right relation to each other. The sound engineer's craft revolves around schizophonic semiosis,
manipulating sonic meaning through the schizophonic space between recording and reproduction. The parallel between painting and mixing has frequently returned in conversations with Luuk and Cis. This metaphor does not entirely hold up to closer inspection. An audio engineer is not a painter, but closer to a colourist; he does not draw the lines, nor says what colours should be used, but he does choose to apply the shade of blue or red he deems best for the drawing at hand. Yet not even the best engineer can fix an ugly drawing.
Sound engineers occupy a significant role in the space created by schizophonic technologies. They manipulate the possibilities in this schizophonic space with the express goal to make the music sound 'better' than it previously was, yet what this 'better' is, is a matter of intersubjectivity caught between the engineers' technical expertise and the musicians' artistic demands. At PXL, students learn both technical skill and interpersonal skills to further help them in their craft, so that they can succeed in their careers and help musicians make the best music possible.
Literature
Bibliography
Bates, Eliot. 2008. Social interactions, musical arrangement, and the production of digital audio in Istanbul recording studios. PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley
Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin Books.
Burggraaf, J. L. I. et al. 2013. Neurocardiological Differences between Musicians and Control Subjects. Netherlands Heart Journal 21(4): 183–188. PMC. Web. 26 Sept. 2018.
Cohen, Michael A., Evans, Karla K., Horowitz, Todd S., Wolfe, Jeremy M. 2011. Auditory and visual memory in musicians and nonmusicians. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18:586-591 Fanning, David. 1995. Introduction. Talking about Eggs: Musicology and Shostakovich. In
Shostakovich Studies, ed. David Fanning, 1–16. Cambridge Composer Studies. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Feld, Steven. 1996. Pygmy POP. A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis. Yearbook for Traditional
Music 28: 1-35
Feld, Steven. 2015. Acoustemology. In Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak & Matt Sakakeeny. Duke University Press.
Feld, Steven. 2017. On Post-Ethnomusicology Alternatives: Acoustemology. In Ethnomusicology
or Transcultural Musicology?, ed. Francesco Giannattasio and Giovanni Guiriati. 82-98
Geertz, Clifford. 1998. Deep Hanging Out. New York Review of Books, October 22.
Greene, Paul D. and Thomas Porcello, ed. 2010. Wired for Sound. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Katz M. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press.
Kronengold, Charles. 2005. Accidents, Hooks and Theory. Popular Music 24(3): 381-397.
Langer, Susanne K. 1942. Philosophy In A New Key. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Langer, Susanne K. 1953. Feeling And Form: a Theory of Art. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Novak, David. 2011. The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media. Public Culture 23(3):603-634 Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1992. Social Anthropology of Technology. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:491-516
Porcello, Thomas. December 1996. “Sonic Artistry: Music, Discourse, and Technology in the Sound Recording Studio” PhD diss., University of Texas, 1996, UMI 9719458
Porcello, Thomas. 2004. Speaking of Sound: Language and the Professionalization of Sound-Recording Engineers. Social Studies of Science 34 (5):733-758
Sarafin, Eric "Mixerman". 2014. Zen and the art of mixing. 2nd ed. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard. Schafer, Raymond Murray. 1969. The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher. Scarborough, Ontario: Berandol Music Limited.
Sunderman, Lloyd Fredercik. 1946. A Study of the Physiological Differences between Musicians and Non-Musicians: I. Blood-Pressure. Journal of Social Psychology 23 (2): 205.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 1947. On Fairy-Stories. In Essays Presented to Charles Williams. London: Oxford University Press. Via: http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf (consulted on 01-06-2018)
Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An Examination of the Psychological Situation and Defences of a Work Group in Relation to the Social Structure and Technological Content of the Work System.
Human Relations 4(3):3-38
Sources consulted but not cited:
Bräuchler, Birgit and John Postill. 2010. Theorizing Media and Practice. Berghahn Books.
Brenneis, Donald and Steven Feld. 2004. Doing Anthropology in Sound. American Ethnologist 31 (4):461-474
Diduck, Ryan A. 2018. Mad skills. London: Repeater.
Dissanayake, Ellen. 2006 Ritual and Ritualization: Musical Means of Conveying and Shaping Emotion in Humans and Other Animals. In Music and manipulation: on the social uses and social
control of music, ed. Steven Brown and Ulrich Voglsten. New York: Berghahn Books.
Downey, Greg. 2002. Listening to Capoeira: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and the Materiality of Music. Ethnomusicology 46 (3): 487-509
Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1988. Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature: Towards an Anthropology of Technology. Man, New Series 23(2):236-252
Filmography
Rens, Maarten, Robert Boonzajer Flaes. 1986. Polka. Ethnographic Video Online (2). London: Royal Anthropological Institute. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/20536844
Sarafin, Eric "Mixerman". 2015. Recording Drums Part 1 and Part 2 from the Multimedia Edition of Zen and the Art of Recording. Youtube: https://youtu.be/FtFav3I8NTs.
Zemp, Hugo. 2003. Masters of the Balafon: Part 3, The Wood and the Calabash. Sélénium Films. Krukowski, Damon. 2017. Ways of Hearing. Radiotopia:
