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Series:   Elements in Twenty-First Century Music Practice

Repetition and Performance in the Recording Studio

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2024

Rod Davies
Rod Davies
Affiliation:
Monash University, Victoria

Summary

The recording studio is a performance setting in which popular music performers often produce multiple takes, using particular strategies to vary outcomes in search of the 'perfect take'. However, repetition offers the opportunity to discover the unexplored liminality between what we expect to hear and what is performed. Observing multiple takes of one's own recorded performance within the temporal limits of a vocal recording session yields qualitative data to create an ethnography of both the process and the Work itself. Presenting artefacts from a recording session in conjunction with an autoethnographic text provides a demonstration of how evolving external cues, and internal cognitive scripts interact with technology and social conventions in the recording studio to impact a popular music musician's performance and, in effect, the creation of a new Work.
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Keywords

popular musicrecording studio productionperformancerepetitionautoethnography
Type
Element
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Series: Elements in Twenty-First Century Music Practice
Online ISBN: 9781009253789
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 14 March 2024

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Repetition and Performance in the Recording Studio
  • Rod Davies, Monash University, Victoria
  • Online ISBN: 9781009253789
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Repetition and Performance in the Recording Studio
  • Rod Davies, Monash University, Victoria
  • Online ISBN: 9781009253789
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Repetition and Performance in the Recording Studio
  • Rod Davies, Monash University, Victoria
  • Online ISBN: 9781009253789
Available formats
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