Music Production: Recording Technology and Acousmatic Listening

Abstract

Recorded sound is acousmatic, meaning that it does not display any visual sound sources. When people listen to recorded/acousmatic sound, they generally apply their previous experiences with the acoustical conditions of sounds to the new experience. Divergence from these expectations often results in an experience of the music as unnatural, uncanny, hyperreal or surreal—that is, as an expansion of the world as one knows it. There is, however, also another force that affects auditory perception: the tuning of people’s ears, or the mind’s ability to adjust to new sonic environments with dispatch. Accordingly, new musical expressions, made possible by recording technology, eventually become naturalized, transforming one’s reference and starting point for new listening experiences. This chapter discusses and reviews literature concerned with these two perceptual mechanisms pertaining to acousmatic sound as well as the more general relationship between musical live performances and recorded music. © 2017 Routledge