ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emotional labour performed by producers and engineers in order to manage the emotions of the artists and musicians and elicit a performance from them that is full of “authentic” emotion. The chapter suggests that the recording studio can be considered an emotional space that is actively created by producers and engineers through their performance of emotional labour. The chapter describes how, in the absence of a “live” audience to feed energy to the often spontaneous and speculative musical performances that take place in the studio, emotional labour has a crucial role to play in enabling a producer or engineer to feed energy to musical performance.
