Addi Sounds: The Community Recording Studio (2022-)
Addi Sounds is a research collaboration between Addison Road Community Organisation and the Australian National University, exploring how music production can be used as a tool for community expression, inclusion, and connection.
Over the past few decades, music production has become more affordable and accessible thanks to new technologies. Yet many communities still face barriers to accessing the tools needed to record and share their stories through music. This project responds to that challenge by embedding a fully functioning recording program—Addi Sounds—within the broader creative environment of Addi Road.
Addi Sounds is designed not just as a technical offering, but as a creative and social space: a place where local musicians, storytellers, and community members can come together to create, collaborate, and build skills. The project is grounded in the belief that music is not only a form of art, but a way of building connection, fostering wellbeing, and empowering voices that may not otherwise be heard.
Researchers from ANU led by Dr Pat O’Grady are working alongside the Addi Road team to better understand how community-based music production programs like Addi Sounds can serve and strengthen the communities they support. The project explores how such initiatives can contribute to positive social and cultural outcomes, align with the mission of a community organisation, and be shaped in ways that are inclusive, responsive, and led by community priorities.
Ultimately, this research will help build a model for how other community organisations might create their own recording spaces—designed by and for the communities they serve.
Latent Elements in Music Production (2016-)
The significant role that recording technologies play in pop music production has received extensive attention in recent years. Here, the use of signal processing units and audio editing shape the sound and style of many pop music songs. The role that these technologies play, however, has been predominantly assessed by examining final recordings. This project examines the Bee Gees’ production practices in order to analyze the latent role that these technologies also play in shaping sound and style. In this context, the instruments, signal processers, and multitrack recording technologies that are absent from the final recording can, nonetheless, play a crucial role in the production. It also examines the ways in which these latent elements – and their social contexts – might be useful for consideration in popular musicology.
Rethinking Music Production, Aesthetics and Parptication (2016-)
In this project, Pat O’Grady considers the socio-cultural dimensions of analogue recording technology within contemporary music production. He examines how attitudes towards analogue hardware signal processors and mixing consoles shapes cultural capital within the field. The project investigates how a fetishization towards exclusive and expensive analogue technology can obstruct the potential of emergent technologies. Against the backdrop of increasingly accessible music production technologies, a focus on analogue technologies can bring the legitimacy of emergent technologies into question. Over seven journal articles and one book chapter, the project to date has covered analogue technology across various areas, including fidelity in the everyday, democratization, creativity, lossy compression, home studios, mastering and digital emulation. This project aims to encourage greater participation within the music recording sector through a better understanding of the politics of aesthetics and how they shape value.
Outputs
O’Grady P (2022) ‘Everyday Fidelity’ : Analyzing Sound Quality in Ubiquitous Listening Practices. Popular Music and Society, https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2022.2129257
O’Grady P (2021) Sound City and music from the outskirts: the de-democratization of pop music production. Creative Industries Journal. 14(3) pp. 211-225. http://DOI: 10.1080/17510694.2020.1839281
O’Grady P (2021) ‘An essential tool for creativity’: technologies, spaces and discourse within pop music production. Media International Australia. http://DOI: 10.1177/1329878X211040127
O’Grady P (2021) Rethinking criticism about lossy compression: Sound fidelity, large-scale production and audio capital in pop music. Convergence. 27 (4), pp. 1075-1091.
O’Grady P (2020) Making mirrors, making albums and making documentaries: the music of Gotye and negotiating Bourdieu’s field of cultural production. Popular Music. 39 (3-4) pp. 669-684
O’Grady P (2019) The Master of Mystery: Technology, Legitimacy and Status in Audio Mastering. Journal of Popular Music Studies. 31(2). pp. 141-164.
O’Grady P (2019) The Analogue Divide: Interpreting Attitudes Towards Recording Media in Music Production. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. 446-459 DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2019.1626348
O’Grady P (2019) The Politics of Digitizing Analogue Recording Technologies. In: Hepworth-Sawyer R and Hodgson J (eds) Producing Music. London: Routledge.