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Peer-reviewed articles: ‘Everyday Fidelity’: Analyzing Sound Quality in Ubiquitous Listening Practices (2022) | An essential tool for creativity (2021) | Making mirrors, making albums and making documentaries (2020) | Rethinking criticism about lossy compression (2021) | Sound City and music from the outskirts (2021) | The Master of Mystery (2019) | The Analogue Divide (2019) | Latent Elements in Music Production (2018) | Another Day to Swing on Clothes Lines (2017)
Peer-reviewed chapters: The Limits of Literary: Rethinking Allusions in Pop Music (2022). Under the Cover of Darkness (2021) | The Politics of Digitizing Analogue Recording Technologies (2019) | Off the Charts (2016)
Conference Proceedings & Reviews: Studio Hubs (2014) | Disrupted Flow in the Studio (2013) | Review (2013)
‘Everyday Fidelity’ : Analyzing Sound Quality in Ubiquitous Listening Practices
Popular Music and Society, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2022.2129257
Studies have suggested that consumers of recorded music favor portability over high fidelity. In recent years, wireless technologies – such as Bluetooth headphones and speakers – have become a popular way to listen to music. The technology can be contextualized within “ubiquitous listening,” which describes how music is, for many listeners, not a standalone activity. This article examines wireless headphones and speakers to consider how “ubiquitous listening” practices shape our desires for portability and fidelity. The article proposes the term “everyday fidelity” to describe how listeners might seek out distinct levels of fidelity based on their activities at one point in time.
The Limits of Literary: Rethinking Allusions in Pop Music.
In: Hibbett R (eds). Lit-Rock: Literary Capital in Popular Music. New York Bloomsbury, 2022
This chapter critically examines the socially driven relationships between pop music and the literary world. What I am not trying to argue here is that the Bee Gees’ invocation of Hemingway was an effort to demonstrate sophistication or depth, or even that they necessarily deserve to be celebrated as serious” artists; what I am asserting, however, is that “Islands in the Stream” suggests there are unconscious boundaries to what constitutes a meaningful relationship between literature and pop music. In making such boundaries more visible, I aim to expose the lingering dominance of rockism and canon-formation within the broader domain of popular music and its corresponding social divisions.
‘Under the Cover of Darkness’: Situating ‘Covers Gigs’ within Live Music Ecologies.
In: Anderton C & Psifil S (eds) Researching Live Music: Gigs, Tours, Concerts and Festivals. London: Focal Press 44-55, 2021
This chapter examines two live pop music ecologies within Sydney, Australia, in order to suggest how the performance of either “cover” or “original” songs shapes these spaces. Often, studies of live music have focused on original live music scenes without distinguishing between the originality of the music being performed. The chapter considers how the geography, space, purpose, labor conditions, and status of “covers gigs” can represent a distinct part of a live music ecology. By fleshing out these distinctions, it asks how they might influence ideas about the value of live music and the challenges it faces. The chapter examines the covers scene in Sydney between 2005 and 2015, by drawing from an autoethnography and interviews with four musicians and promoters.
An essential tool for creativity’: technologies, spaces and discourse within pop music production.
Media International Australia, online first 2021 DOI: 10.1177/1329878X211040127
Within the pop music industries, the term ‘creativity’ is a popular descriptor of the processes associated with the production of music. Historically, a romantic or rational approach has often featured in discussions on creativity. Some scholars have suggested that a culturally informed understanding of creativity is more useful, while some have advocated that we abandon the term altogether. The purpose of this article is to emphasise how the term ‘creativity’ works as a part of a discourse that risks rendering some practices as creative while ignoring others. In the face of changing technologies, the cultural value associated with creativity – and its use to label technologies, spaces and practices – helps shape ideas about legitimacy and prestige.
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, 2020.
Recent popular music and film studies have revealed the political functions of documentaries about musicians. These studies suggest that such documentaries make powerful interventions into the field of music production as they construct the value of their subjects and their work. Owing to the expense and complexity of broadcast equipment, production companies have tended to favour documentaries about artists and work considered to be popular and historically significant. Over the past 15 years, however, new technologies have allowed musicians to make documentaries themselves, which they can release at the same time as their song or album. Using the example of Gotye and his album Making Mirrors, this article argues that these developments have led to powerful and distinct interventions into debates and themes within home music production for independent musicians. It also argues that the use of this technology on social media platforms challenges the relationships between text and process.
Rethinking criticism about lossy compression: Sound fidelity, large-scale production and audio capital in pop music.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 27(4): pp. 1075-1091, 2021.
Although digital music streaming and downloading practices highlight a preference for portability over fidelity among pop music consumers, for some ‘high fidelity’ continues to be a crucial component of their pop music engagement. This article examines the political dimensions of audio preferences. It considers comments by Neil Young and those within The Distortion of Sound who claim that the lossy compression encoding process – used in digital downloading and streaming – significantly degrades the quality of recorded sound and compromises valuable pop music characteristics. In 2015, these claims were followed by the development of the ‘hi-res’ music player device and digital download store ‘Pono’. This article argues that some criticism of lossy compression can be understood as ‘audio capital’. Rather than merely exchanging aesthetic preferences, or a reliable metric of the audibility of high fidelity, audio capital describes the reconversion of celebrity status and economic capital into a class divide structured by an appreciation for large-scale music production.
Sound City and music from the outskirts: the dedemocratisation of pop music production.
Creative Industries Journal. 14(3): pp. 211-225, 2021
The term ‘democratisation’ often appears in debates about pop music production. It tends to describe the effect of reductions in price and required skills-sets of new digital recording technologies. Some scholars have questioned whether democratisation has actually occurred, given the ongoing gender, class and geographic divisions within music production. In spite of these factors, the number of large studios appears to be in decline and in favour of smaller, digital-based environments. This study engages with these debates to ask whether a political reading of large studio discourse might not only show democratisation as a simplistic understanding of recording practice, but also reveal ‘de-democratising’ variables within recording. It looks at how users of larger recording studios have responded to digital recording technologies. The 2013 documentary Sound City about Sound City Studios offers an example of such responses. It comprises numerous famous musicians and producers who praise the analogue recording console. This article suggests that analogue aesthetics shape ideas about legitimacy among recordists.
The Master of Mystery: Technology, Legitimacy and Status in Audio Mastering.
Journal of Popular Music Studies. 31(2). pp. 14-164, 2019
Over the past twenty years, the field of popular music studies has significantly enhanced our understanding of pop music production. Studies have drawn from a range of industry discussions to explore, for example, the ways in which emergent technologies have led to distinctive production techniques and the important role that recording technologies play in shaping the sound of pop music. Whereas many industry discussions have provided productive sites of analysis, they can also obstruct research in some respects. This article focuses on an area of music production where such industrial discussions tend to hinder, rather than enhance, an understanding of its practices. It examines the ways in which industry discussions position the process of mastering as “mysterious.” This article argues representations of mastering as “mysterious” work to reinforce the importance of this practice and also safeguard it from new technologies that might challenge its dominance. These representations can function to reproduce and secure social hierarchies within the field.
The Analogue Divide: Interpreting Attitudes Towards Recording Media in Music Production.
Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. 33(4): pp. 446-459, 2019
Since the 1980s, the uptake of digital hard disk recording has replaced analogue tape as the primary medium on which popular music is recorded. This change sparked a fierce and ongoing debate between producers about aesthetics and musicianship within pop music production. It is possible to understand this debate as part of an extended history of sceptical attitudes towards new technologies. In this article, I examine the ways in which the capacity to express and articulate sceptical attitudes towards new technologies also function as cultural capital. In order to develop this argument, I analyse Brian Eno’s published critical attitudes toward digital recording technologies, and draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital as a conceptual tool for understanding the cultural dimensions of the perceived divide between digital and analogue. Against the backdrop of emergent cheaper and user-friendly digital technologies, this article argues that aesthetic attitudes towards analogue media can consecrate an agent’s position – and in the case of artists, their oeuvre – within the social order of pop music.
The Politics of Digitizing Analogue Recording Technologies.
In: Hepworth-Sawyer R and Hodgson J (eds) Producing Music. London: Routledge.
In the field of pop music production, audio technology companies such as Waves and Universal Audio claim to reproduce the sound of “vintage” analogue signal processing recording technologies. They use software to emulate the form and sound of technologies that, in their hardware form, became highly valued parts of recording studios from the 1960s and 1970s. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which ideas about vintage analogue sound are reproduced in digital music production contexts. In addition to the sound such software plug-ins produce, I argue that these strategies also play a crucial role in the reproduction of these technologies.
Latent Elements in Music Production
Popular Music and Society. 41(5) 2018
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 article examines the Bee Gees’ production practices during the 1990s in order to analyze the latent role that these technologies also play in shaping sound and style. In this context, the article argues that digital instruments, signal processors, 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.
Another Day to Swing on Clothes Lines: The Bee Gees and Australia.
Perfect Beat. 18(1) pp. 27-47, 2017
A large proportion of overseas-born artists comprise the pop music industries in Australia. Keith Urban, Rick Springfield, members of Cold Chisel, The Angels and Masters Apprentices, for example, not only represent themselves as ‘Australian’; they are frequently associated with the nation by critics and audiences. The Bee Gees also exemplify this trend. In this article, I wish to bring into focus the Bee Gees’ curious connection with Australia. In order to do this task, I ask a series of questions: first, what is the Bee Gees’ connection to Australia? Second, how has this connection been constructed and continually reinforced? Third, what forms of discursive resistance against their ‘Australianness’ exist in regard to these constructions? And finally, how might we critically understand the tensions that have emerged regarding their legitimacy as an ‘Australian band’? I argue that their connection to Australia is continually renegotiated due in large part to their incompatibility with dominant performances of masculinity by Australian white male musicians.
Off the Charts: The implications of incorporating streaming data into the charts (co-authored with Steve Collins)
In: Nowak R & Whelan A (eds) Networked Music Cultures: Contemporary Approaches, Emerging Issues. London: Palgrave, pp. 151-170, 2016
Collins and O’Grady explore the impacts of digitisation on music charts. Focusing on streaming platforms such as Spotify, the chapter questions the continued relevance of calculating charts based on sales when consumer data offers far more nuanced information that measures the popularity of music based on use. The authors firmly situate the current opportunities for reconfiguring charts within a history of the music industries that is characterised by transformations and continuities.
Studio Hubs: Changing Recording Environments
In: O’Regan J and Wren Toby (eds) Communities, Places, Ecologies: International Association for the Study of Popular Music 2013 Australia and New Zealand Chapter Conference Proceedings, 2014
From the 1960s through to the end of the 20th century, recording studios were mainly owned by large record labels, who would generally employ in-house engineers, and bring outside producers to work on specific projects. Abbey Road, where the Beatles recorded much of their creative work, was at this time owned by record label EMI, who employed a host of in-house engineers such as Ken Scott. However, over the past 15 years, there has been a decline in large corporate owned studios and a rise in smaller independently owned, producer-based studios. Many of these studios are located in private homes, owned by a mixture of hobbyists and professionals. Here, producers own and operate their own studio, often functioning as both a sound engineer and musician. This paper will consider the recording studio Love Hz Studios as a case study of the technological and cultural differences between these emerging environments with home and large studios. It situates Love Hz in-between home and large studios and argues that their emergence is in response to industrial shifts, facilitated by the advent of new recording technologies, and the democratisation of some existing technologies. The paper also considers the potential implications of hub-like environments on collegiality and collaborative practices.
Disrupted Flow in the Studio
In: Wilson O and Attfield S (eds) Shifting Sounds: Musical Flow: A Collection of Papers from the 2012 IASPM Australia/New Zealand Conference, 2013.
For many popular music records, the creative process of production has traditionally involved the collective input of songwriters, musicians, and producers. This paper considers how the confluence of recording and songwriting practices, known as studiobased songwriting, has disrupted some of the established flows associated with the role of songwriters, musicians, and producers in the production of popular music recordings. It examines historical examples of studio-based songwriting practices, specifically the Bee Gees and Michael Jackson. These examples provide a historical context in which studio roles are self-contained and coherent, but, as this paper argues, newly-affordable recording technologies have disrupted these notions. The analytical scope of this research concerns solo artists, duos, and small vocal groups where most of the non-vocal instruments are played by session musicians who generally do not contribute to the songwriting and production decisions
Review: The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field.
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