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

To Know Beyond Listening: Monitoring Digital Music

In music production, “monitoring” refers traditionally to audile strategies intended to reveal the “true” sound of mediated audio. Here, it is expanded to include new, digital technologies intended to better know and control the record-object beyond what listening and listening technologies allow. Surveying traditional, contemporary, and emerging tools of record production and distribution, this essay addresses three types of monitoring: audio, visual, and data. In sum, monitoring entails the supplementation and subversion of the ear through protocols promising to surmount the biases and distortions of audio media. Key technologies include reference speakers, room correction systems, digital audio workstations, open mixes, pre-sets, social networking sites, and automatic music information retrieval. Situating these within a “techoustemology” of monitoring, the central argument is that many innovations in digital audio are non-auditory and, therefore, displace sound and listening as the central means of producing relevant knowledge about music mediated in the digital age

Three Contributions to the “Sonic Turn”

Since roughly the mid-1990s, scholars in a number of humanities and social science disciplines have turned their attention to ontological, episte-mological, and phenomenological questions concerning sound. Historians Corbin (1998), Smith (1999), and Rath (2003), for example, have sought to "re-sound" historical spaces and eras; historians of science Bijsterveld (2001), Thompson (2002), and Blesser and Salter (2007) have examined architectural acoustics and the construction of a built sonic modernity; Gitelman (1999), Sterne (2003), and Weheliye (2005) have, albeit from quite different perspectives, explored the nexus of sound recording and reproduction technologies and cultural practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in a special issue of Social Studies of Science, Pinch and Bijsterveld (2004) called for the establishment of a field of "sound studies"; and, while having entered the discussion of the sonic somewhat earlier, film historians and theorists, especially Lastra (2000), Altman, ed. (1992), and Chion (1994), have provided crucial analytical and historical sonic frameworks to think both with and against

Hydrogeologic Evaluation of a Ground-Source Cooling System at the BSF/CSF on the Battelle Campus: Final Report

This report documents both the field characterization activities and the numerical modeling effort at the BSF/CSF site to determine the viability of an open-loop ground source heat pump (GSHP). The primary purpose of the integrated field and modeling study was to determine far-field impacts related to a non-consumptive use water right for the well field containing four extraction and four injection wells. In the field, boreholes were logged and used to develop the geologic conceptual model. Hydraulic testing was performed to identify hydraulic properties and determine sustainable pumping rates. Estimates of the Ringold hydraulic conductivity (60-150 m/d) at the BSF/CSF site were consistent with the local and regional hydrogeology as well as estimates previously published by other investigators. Sustainable pumping rates at the extraction wells were variable (100 – 700 gpm), and confirmed field observations of aquifer heterogeneity. Field data were used to develop a numerical model of the site. Simulations assessed the potential of the well field to impact nearby contaminant plumes, neighboring water rights, and the thermal regime of nearby surface water bodies. Using steady-state flow scenarios in conjunction with particle tracking, a radius of influence of 400–600 m was identified around the well field. This distance was considerably shorter than the distance to the closest contaminant plume (~1.2 km northwest to the DOE Horn Rapids Landfill) and the nearest water right holder (~1.2 km southeast to the City of Richland Well Field). Results demonstrated that current trajectories for nearby contaminant plumes will not be impacted by the operation of the GSHP well field. The objective of the energy transport analysis was to identify potential thermal impacts to the Columbia River under likely operational scenarios for the BSF/CSF well field. Estimated pumping rates and injection temperatures were used to simulate heat transport for a range of hydraulic conductivity estimates for the Ringold Formation. Two different operational scenarios were simulated using conservative assumptions, such as the absence of river water intrusion in the near shore groundwater. When seasonal injection of warm and cool water occurred, temperature impacts were insignificant at the Columbia River (< +0.2ºC), irrespective of the hydraulic conductivity estimate. The second operational scenario simulated continuous heat rejection, a condition anticipated once the BSF/CSF is fully loaded with laboratory and computer equipment. For the continuous heat rejection case, where hourly peak conditions were simulated as month-long peaks, the maximum change in temperature along the shoreline was ~1ºC. If this were to be interpreted as an absolute change in a static river temperature, it could be considered significant. However, the warmer-than-ambient groundwater flux that would potentially discharge to the Columbia River is very small relative to the flow in the river. For temperatures greater than 17.0ºC, the flow relative to a low-flow condition in the river is only 0.012%. Moreover, field data has shown that diurnal fluctuations in temperature are as high as 5ºC along the shoreline

Konflikti in zaupanje med zaposlenimi na ravni neprofitnih organizacij

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.‘Acoustemology’ conjoins the words ‘acoustic’ and ‘epistemology’ to refer to a sonic way of knowing and being in the world. The term was introduced by anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld following his fieldwork among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. He sought to describe the highly developed practices of listening, hearing and sounding that characterised Kaluli engagement with their rainforest environment. Feld also used ‘acoustemology’ to expand upon existing vocabulary for the anthropological discussion of human engagement with sound. The term has been taken up by other anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds whose work contributes to what has become known as Sound Studies, and ‘acoustemology’ has become a key word in the conceptual lexicon of contemporary research on auditory culture