Towards liveness: collective memory and reproductions of studio reverberation

ABSTRACT

Through a consideration of their reverberant characteristics, this article places representations of recording studios as an active cultural process that plays out through the recorded sounds such spaces become associated with. Like other heritage sites, the work to define, maintain, and allocate certain structures as unique or significant relies on the cultural process of collective memory. By focusing on the concept of sonic recollection, the reconfiguration of unique tracking room environments for “in the box” digital audio workstation software, exemplified through reverberation, is shown to draw from a network of people, sounds, and technologies that cumulatively reflect various stages of a recording studio’s trajectory. By uncovering this network – encompassing well-known and unnamed engineers, famous to merely aspiring recording artists, established or defunct studios and software companies, and technologies such as convolution reverb, all of which articulate one another in digital audio workstation software – it suggests that the theoretical underpinnings of collective memory studies are a useful tool of analysis to more fully frame reconstructions or representations of physical spaces undertaken through recorded sound, and that reverberation is an ideal metaphor for the work of collective memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Reverb
• collective memory
• recording studio
• impulse response
• Abbey Road
• plugins

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Krin Gabbard and Jacob Gaboury for their mentorship and feedback throughout much of this research, to Brooke Belisle and Susan Schmidt Horning for their extended comments, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful critiques and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sterne and Mitchell (2012) use the term “human echolocation” to describe an approach to negotiating space acoustically, exemplified by Daniel Kish, a blind individual who utilises vocal clicks and listening to navigate throughout the world on foot or on bicycle. While most listeners are unable to discern the level of detail Kish picks up on through listening, the potential to recognise not only distance but also textural characteristics of objects or obstructions in one’s surroundings has been shown to be within the realm of possibility for the trained listener.

2. Importantly, Tkaczyk (2015) notes that the idea of remembering and distinguishing sounds of spaces from an auditory memory alone was debunked by the physicist Sigmund Exner who observed “that the listener was unable to compare the reverberations times of different auditoriums by ear alone, since to do so, the listener had to rely on his memories which faded or changed over time” (73).

3. Cogan and Clark (2003, 127–128) and Doyle (2005, 143) quote Bruce Swedien’s take on the impact of Bill Putnam’s (arguably first) artistic use of additional reverb in the recording of “Peg o’ My Heart” by Jerry Murad and the Harmonicats. Sterne (2015, 143) suggests that contrary to the concept of reverb as simply noise to be deadened in the modern soundscape, as outlined by Thompson (2002), the intentional and creative additions of separated reverberation in music and recorded sound, termed artificial reverb, instead “led to an increased mobility flexibility and layering of all acoustic space”.

4. While perhaps not used quite as much as Massey implies, Lewisohn (1988) details multiple instances of echo chambers being utilised in the recording or mixing process of Beatles material. For an example of the reverberation of Echo Chamber 2 at The ambient quality of the vocals and percussion on “And I Love Her” by the Beatles is an example of the reverberation imparted by Chamber Two at Abbey Road.

5. It is likely impossible for the human ear to pick out individual components of a mix since they are always going to be combined with other components and undergo audible changes in the process. Gear and rooms used to record music with are often only a starting point, from which the mixer will generally manipulate further. A recorded track can undergo multiple rounds of eq, compression, and ambient effects on an individual level before further processing gets applied to groups of tracks at once. One aspect of manipulation applied to the recorded sound, in other words, is often itself manipulated further.

6. The earliest film scene centred on a studio recording I’ve come across is the 1945 short, The House I Live In featuring a young Frank Sinatra (LeRoy 1945). For a broader scope of studios represented in film, Doyle (2013) situates recording studio interiors portrayed in film settings as moving through four historical phases, wherein the recording studio is shown to be a quasi-authoritarian technophilic ideal, a space with little power or consequence, a space that regains power and consequence, and eventually a space that frequently amounts to “a nostalgic refuge” in contemporary films.

7. Examples range from the Beatles (1967) “Our World” broadcast (Burrell-Davis, Freisewinkel, and Hespe 1967) of “All you Need is Love” filmed within EMI Recording Studios, later renamed Abbey Road Studios, to television series set around documenting specific studios or performances within them.

8. Such texts can range from industry specific magazines such as Tape Op or Mix to detailed texts related to specific studios such as Cogan and Clark (2003) focusing on American studios or Massey (2015) focusing on British studios, texts detailing equipment, gear, or specific sessions by artists, such as the focus on Beatles sessions by Ryan and Kehew (2008), texts detailing record companies such as the historical overview of Columbia Records by Wilentz (2012), or texts detailing record production practices such as Cunningham (1996) and Schmidt Horning (2013).

9. See also Durkheim (1976) and Tarde (2012) for early conceptions of collectivity and identity. For further discussion on their impact to memory studies, see Blom (2017).

10. Cunningham (1996) argues there is still room for creativity and artistic sensibility in the music making or mixing processes, though the possibility to draw specifically from sounds of the past is something that computing technology introduces on a wider scale.

11. For a representative example of spring tank reverb, listen to the bouncy ambient trails of Dick Dale’s guitar in “Miserlou” (Dale, 1962). For a representative example of a plate reverb, listen to the prominent reverb trails on the vocals and percussion in Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” (1973) or just about any other track from The Dark Side of the Moon, which the engineer Alan Parsons describes as steeped with reverb from the EMT 140 plate in an interview with Gallagher (2012).

12. Southall et al. (2011), Lawrence (2012), and Massey (2015) each get into the specific materials used in the construction of (and of the gear housed within) various studios.

13. Nora (1989), Lipsitz (1990), Halbwachs (1992), Taylor (2003), Landsberg (2004), Sturken (2008), Ippolito and Rinehart (2014), and Schwarz (2014) are representative examples from the field of memory studies that suggest collective memory is an active (and not necessarily accurate) process of remembering that is often possible by remembering through other objects.

14. It should be noted, however, that the impact may be more beneficial towards legitimising a software company than towards augmenting the history of a recognisable studio.

15. The effect of this delay and reverb is even more pronounced listening through the isolated vocal track from the leaked 4-track stems.

16. Massey (2015) details Olympic specifically and Cogan and Clark (2003) adds similar detail to other defunct recording studios.

17. Latour and Lowe (2011, 275–288) considers the lack of worth that copies of artworks are generally attributed in contemporary society. Levine (1988) similarly considers the shifting stance on copies of works of art during the 19^th century.

18. Similarly, Du Gay et al. (2013) suggest that an object’s meaning remains an ongoing cultural process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marley Rosner

Marley Rosner is a lecturer in the University Honors Program and Department of Liberal Studies at Cal State Fullerton. His work centers on the history and representation of sound recording technologies, digital media, and collective memory. Much of the research undertaken for this article was completed at Stony Brook University, where he recently earned his PhD.