ABSTRACT
The language and terminology producers and engineers use to communicate with one another in a studio environment when describing sonic attributes and production values in music production is of great interest in understanding this domain. When speaking to musicians, audio engineers and producers, it is clear that there is only marginal agreement about what they understand by production terms such as ‘warmth’, ‘brightness’, ‘punchiness’ and ‘edginess’ for example. One area where this manifests is in the use of terms associated with distortion, saturation and colouration. Terminologies can range from explicit aggressive forms such as ‘clipped’, ‘bit-crushed’ or ‘fuzz’ to subtle harmonic saturation enhancement and colouration. What is clear from the discourse is that the descriptors of such sonic anomalies and non-linearities mean many different things to different groups of people. Because of this confusion, variability and disparity, mapping technical parameter spaces to aesthetic emotional ones can be problematic. During interviews conducted with professional producers and mix engineers, I present a subjective overview of studio language, terminology and semantics used in connection with this field. I try to understand if the descriptors used by professionals correlate with the technical parameter space for such processes. We also evaluate how deep the underlying emotional value contributes to the discussion and whether it is possible to map this to a specific parameter space. For the purposes of this study, we focus on what mix engineers and producers understand by this phenomenon. Using a combination of thematic analysis and techniques used in Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), we develop grounded theories and assumptions about the use of distortion and the language used to communicate its meaning. For the evaluation, we analyse a series of interviews with award-winning professionals where themes, comments and insights are extracted. We also look for hierarchical clusters of comments and see if there is some agreement about how this field might be navigated in a systematic approach to understanding the semantics associated with the domain.
