Making Sense of Recordings

Building on ideas from cognitive metaphor theory, Making Sense of Recordings offers a new perspective on record production, music perception, and the aesthetics of recorded sound. It shows how the language about sound is intimately connected to sense-making - both as a reflection of our internal cognitive capacities and as a component of our extended cognitive system. In doing so, the book provides the foundation for a broader understanding of the history of listening, discourses of sound quality, and artistic practices in the age of recorded music.

The book will be of interest to anyone who asks how recorded music sounds and why it sounds as it does, and it will be a valuable resource for musicology students and researchers interested in the analysis of sound and the history of listening and record production. Additionally, sound engineers and laptop musicians will benefit from the book's exploration of the connection between embodied experiences and our cognitively processed experiences of recorded sound. The tools provided will be useful to these and other musicians who wish to intuitively interact with recorded or synthesized sound in a manner that more closely resembles the way they think and that makes sense of what they do.

"The sonic qualities that emerge from aesthetic and technological decisions in the recording studio have a major impact on how music sounds, yet our ability to describe this impact on the listening experience is limited. Listeners often use very elaborate metaphors when describing sound quality, such as timbral and spatial characteristics. There is, however, a prevalent belief that metaphors are vague and highly subjective, and therefore unsuitable for academic and more exacting discussions of sound. Making Sense of Recordings challenges this assumption by showing how these metaphors are closely connected to our sonic experience and that they make sense within a larger historical context of technological developments and changing discourses of recorded sound. Part 1 of the book starts by tracing written discourses of recorded sound, discussing how everyday listeners and audio professionals describe their experiences of sound in recorded music. The concept of the listener, as it is theorized here, relates both to the production and reception side of recorded music and assumes some sort of conscious evaluative process where people give meaning to their experiences. Listening is approached from a quality-oriented mode of listening concerned with embodied cognition and is conditioned by the specific listening situation and the specific purpose of listening. Building on cognitive sciences, ideas of embodied cognition, and recent studies in discourse analysis, the book then provides new theoretical and methodological approaches to sound perception and conceptualization with particular relevance to recorded music. The aim is not only to expand on existing histories of studio music technologies, from production to reproduction to reception, but also to provide analytical and practical tools to aid in the understanding and communication of sound discourse in the studio and beyond"--

"Walther-Hansen persuasively argues that metaphors, as linked to embodied cognitive processes, are reflective of the actual auditory experience; they thus function as effective tools with which to conceptualize and communicate the nature of sound itself. Thanks to its thorough and insightful examination and systematization of the rich vocabulary of metaphors used to describe recorded sound, Making Sense of Recordings is a go-to book for anyone grappling with articulating the abstruse qualities of sound." -- Ragnhild Br�vig-Hanssen, Associate Professor of Music, University of Oslo

"What do we mean when we talk about the character of recorded sound--its hue, its weight, its feel? In Making Sense of Recordings, Mads Walther-Hansen unpacks the language of recording with insight and clarity. A deft blend of scholarly theory and practical know-how, this book is a boon to both researchers and recordists seeking a deeper understanding of the listener's art." -- Albin Zak, Professor of Music, University at Albany