ABSTRACT

More than any other form of musical practice, popular music is shaped in its development by sound recording (with its enormous possibilities for dissemination) and therefore by audio technology. For a good half-century, the involvement of this technology has meant that everything classified as ‘popular music’ has, for the most part, been produced music, not performed music and consequently music whose ultimate sonic form is achieved with the aid of technical equipment in a step-bystep studio process. Live music, then, imitates the sound produced previously in the studio by means of equipment-intensive reconstruction on stage. This state of affairs is something that tends to be considered only from the perspective of musical performance. The recording studio is normally understood as simply a new kind of place for music-making, a place where music-making has been extended by new possibilities, but has also been drawn into formerly unknown financial and technological dependencies.2