ABSTRACT
I recently spent some time in a popular-music recording studio. Not quite Abbey Road but a professional recording studio nevertheless. At its center, like an altarpiece, lay the mixing desk, its aura reinforced by a ring of synthesizers the likes of which I’d only read about in music magazines-a Roland TB-303, an old Mellotron, a Juno 106, a Yamaha DX7, a Moog. Next to the mixing desk sat a computer screen, with blocks of colorful data hinting at a mixing and mastering session that was to be more about software than hardware. For all their kudos as hardware classics, the synthesizers and outboard gear had been replaced by simulated versions in the form of “soft synths,” all-in-one studios, and software programs like “Band in a Box,” which allows users to generate music by inputting chord names, genres, styles, and rhythms. It was the sound engineer’s job to negotiate, via a series of menus and mouse clicks, a virtual desktop replication of the very equipment that surrounded him. And here, propelled by my professional myopia, I encountered a group of sociologists
of culture. Howard Becker (1982) explained to me that the studio setting and its personnel satisfied a conception of art as collective activity. Even the student who made the coffee, he said, was a key link in an elaborate chain of cooperation that made the music world possible. In broad agreement, Paul Hirsch (1972) and John Ryan and Richard A. Peterson (1982) elaborated. The studio, they suggested, is part of a complex organizational system of popular music characterized by market structures, reward systems, and decision chains that work to reduce demand uncertainty. It’s likely, they explained, that the cultural work put into the demo CD would make the songs sound more polished and professional, but it was gatekeepers further down the production chain who would really determine whether they would get airplay. With varying degrees of detail, a group of sociologists of music refined my knowledge
of the process, their responses displaying great diversity. Some, of a more Marxist persuasion, pointed to the interpenetrations of genre formation and niche marketing in a music industry that was increasingly part of a globalized market of taste, talent, and rights (Frith 1978); others dismissed the studio outright as a cultural factory peddling repetitive
dross to a manipulated mass of consumers. Others still identified a trend towards the fragmentation of music networks and a patchwork of micro-industries, from small record labels and unlicensed nightclubs to urban music scenes and amateur radio broadcasts. These less visible networks, they said, blurred boundaries between producers and consumers, professionals and amateurs, in ways that suggested historical fluidity in the organization of cultural work (Kealy 1979). Finally, there was a group of scholars who wanted to talk specifically about the studio
technologies-the microphones, the cables, the acoustic insulation, even the door closers (Kealy 1979; Latour 1988). Some took a shine to particular synthesizers in the studio, such as the Moog, whose history as a technological artifact was shown to be bound up with the practices, discourses, and biographies of designers and engineers (Pinch and Trocco 2002). A few gravitated towards the computer and waxed passionately about the potential for new digital technologies of cultural production such as software studios and samplers to promote vernacular creativity amongst an untrained mass of new producers (Chadabe 1997). Others pointed to the rise of virtual studios and virtual music scenes made possible by globalized networks of communication, mobile digital devices, and the internet (Bennett and Peterson 2004). In years to come, they explained, the locality of this recording studio, its connections to place, will be softened, perhaps even threatened, by its insertion into a global space of flows (Théberge 2004). Sure enough, around the time the music-based social networking site MySpace took off, the studio was forced to close down due to lack of demand. Still, at least it played host to all these cultural sociologists whose own work had enriched my experience of being there.
