What Studios Do

Authors

Eliot Bates, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2012

Abstract

This essay is focused around a seemingly simple question – what do recording studios do? First, a clarification. I am not primarily asking “what are studios” or “what do people do in studios,” two comparatively straightforward questions that are tangentially addressed in academic and trade writing. Rather, I wish to consider some of the ways in which the studio itself shapes the kinds of social and musical performances and interactions that transpire within. I contend that studios must be understood simultaneously as acoustic environments, as meeting places, as container technologies, as a system of constraints on vision, sound and mobility, and as typologies that facilitate particular interactions between humans and nonhuman objects while structuring and maintaining power relations.

Comments

http://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/what-studios-do/ ---Journal on the Art of Record Production ---the attached pdf is the correct version of the essay; the web version currently online is missing accepted revisions submitted in 2012.