ABSTRACT
As a textbook, this collection of essays was designed to be an introduction to the study of recording. As editors we assumed that many of the book’s readers would be thinking about the issues discussed here for the first time. We hope that readers now have a better knowledge of the history of recording, a better appreciation of the variety of methods with which recording can be studied, and a better understanding of the cultural, technological and aesthetic issues thereby raised. But there is one point that we should, finally, make explicitly. The essays in this book challenge the assumption that there is music and there is recording, something done to music. Our argument – the starting point for the Art of Record Production – is that recording is itself a way of music-making. It is not something done to music but a process in which sound becomes music. Recording is, indeed, the process through which the music that most of us listen to most of the time is created in the first place.
