Getting It on Record: Issues and Strategies for Ethnographic Practice in Recording Studios

The recording studio has been somewhat neglected as a site for ethnographic fieldwork in the field of ethno-musicology and, moreover, the majority of published studies tend to overlook the specific concerns faced by the researcher within these contexts. Music recording studios can be places of creativity, artistry, and collaboration, but they often also involve challenging, intimidating, and fractious relations. Given that recording studios are, first and foremost, concerned with documenting musicians’ performances, we discuss the concerns of getting studio interactions “on record” in terms of access, social relations, and methods of data collection. This article reflects on some of the issues we faced when conducting our fieldwork within British music recording facilities and makes suggestions based on strategies that we employed to address these issues

Learning to Listen When There is Too Much to Hear: Music Producing and Audio Engineering as ‘Engaged Hearing’

This article examines how music producers and audio engineers learn to listen in the context of a very particular form of musical work. Ethnographic interviews provide data on their acquisition of skills, strategies they devise to remain engaged with the physicality and aesthetics of sound, and the socio-cultural and psychogical dimensions of their work. It comments in particular on the multi-skilling brought about by the technological changes and economic imperatives informing the cultural production of popular music