When a stereophonic track is heard through headphones or over loudspeakers, the image of a virtual performance is created in the mind. This virtual performance, which exists exclusively on the record, can be conceptualised in terms of the ‘sound-box’ (Moore 1993), a four-dimensional virtual space within which sounds can be located through: lateral placement within the stereo field; foreground and background placement due to volume and distortion; height according to sound vibration frequency; and time. From the mid-1960s, the increasing shift from mono to stereo meant that producers and engineers had to contend with the notion and potential of a song's sonic arrangement or mix, resulting in a disparity of sonic placement and a diverse range of sound-box configurations. By 1972, a normative positioning of sound sources within the sound-box was established, which we term the ‘diagonal mix’. This article focuses on the consolidation of this norm by means of a ‘taxonomy of mixes’ and the utilisation of visual representations which detail the sound-box configurations of a variety of pop/rock, easy listening and psychedelic tracks from 1966 to 1972.

The recorded format is the medium through which popular music is diffused. Since the advent of multi-track recording, the studio has become a compositional tool in which musical ideas are formed into sounding matter. Direct access to the manipulation of sound layers and the possibility of mixing different sources and moving them in the stereo window become not only technical options but musical and compositional properties. In fact, the organization of the recording space reflects more and more the structural organization of the music itself; the sound of the record is a sort of sonicprint (sounding fingerprint) of the music of an artist in a particular period. This paper develops the idea of sonic space, a multi-dimensional representation of the recording space in which spatial, morphological and spectral spaces interact in order to form the structure on which the sounding matter of the piece is developed. Through the analysis of the properties of each space and their relationships, it is possible to point out normative behaviours, well defined associations between more musical aspects like motives, harmony, melodies and their organization in the sounding structure.

In this article I emphasise the deliberate and reflexive way that Bob Dylan has approached studio recording, sketching the features of a phonographic aesthetic, to highlight a neglected aspect of Dylan's creative practice and to counter the view of Dylan as primarily a ‘performing artist’, one who approaches the studio in a casual manner as a place to cut relatively spontaneous drafts of songs that are later developed on stage. Drawing on Evan Eisenberg's discussion of the ‘art of phonography’ and the way recording radically separates a performance from its contexts of ‘origin’ (allowing recordings to be taken into a private space and subjected to intense, repeated listening), I argue that studio practice, a recording aesthetic and the art of phonography are integral to Dylan's songwriting. The process and practice of songwriting is realised through the act of recording and informed by listening to songs and performances from recordings, regardless of how much time is actually spent in the studio. Exploring how Dylan's phonographic imagination has been shaped by folk, blues and pop sonorities, along with film music, I argue that recording should be integrated into discussions of Dylan's art, alongside the attention devoted to lyrics, performance and biography.

This essay reviews alternate mixes and edited versions produced for numerous purposes over the past half-century for stock singles, promotional singles, albums and reissues of all sorts, all evidencing a form of literary intertextuality of uniquely central importance to the record industry that has not previously been covered systematically. These multiple texts resulting from different manipulations of a single tape source exhibit what is termed intratextuality, leading to variations in composition, arranging and engineering. In addition, much of the essay's discussion will document for scholars as well as for fans a number of recordings whose continuing availability has been jeopardized by never having been reissued in CD format.

This article will discuss how two major contributing factors, functional staging and perceived authenticity, have had and continue to have a powerful influence on the sound of record production across geographical boundaries and throughout history. Functional staging is a concept building on the idea of phonographic staging developed by William Moylan and Serge Lacasse and related to Allan Moore's ‘sound-box’. The staging of sounds in the record production process is considered to be functional if the reason for their particular placement or treatment is related to the practicalities of audience reception rather than to aesthetics. It is not a question of whether the music has a function or not but whether that function has influenced the staging of the recorded music. Thus the divergence of staging techniques used in dance music and rock music that began in the 1970s can be seen as resulting from the different functions the music was put to by the different audiences. Music that is played back through large speakers in a club for the purpose of dancing needs to maintain the clarity of the rhythmic elements and so the ‘drier’ techniques of drum and percussive instrument mixing that characterise dance music developed. Rock, however, was more frequently played back in the smaller, less ambient, home environment and so reverberation was added to simulate the atmosphere of the large-scale venue. At the same time, a variety of culturally constructed notions of authenticity have developed within different musical audiences. Why is it that Queen felt the need to inscribe ‘no synthesisers were used in the making of this album’ on their early records and yet Brian May felt entirely comfortable constructing multiple layered performance ‘patchworks’ of guitar tracks? Why might the use of one type of technological mediation be considered more or less authentic than another? Using examples taken from recordings from all around the world and from ‘art’ and ‘popular’ forms of music, this article will explore how audience-led cultural trends in recording and production practice have resulted in the particular ‘sounds’ of different recorded music genres.

The art of crafting successful pop singles can be a hit and miss affair, and this essay addresses the notion of hits and misses through a consideration of ‘(They Long to Be) Close to You’ by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. In September 1963, Bacharach produced the first version of the song with Richard Chamberlain, but the recording was, and still is, considered an artistic failure, as was the version Bacharach produced with Dionne Warwick a year later. It was not until Richard and Karen Carpenter recorded the song in 1970, without input from Bacharach, that the full potential of ‘Close to You’ was realised. But what made the two Bacharach versions miss the mark, while the Carpenters, to use Bacharach's words, ‘nailed it’? If one identifies the elements of a recording's sonic surface that contribute to its success, the deficiencies of Bacharach's misses become as readily apparent as the strategies The Carpenters employed to score a hit. Specifically, this essay considers how groove, instrumentation, melodic style, tempo, manner of performance (both vocal and instrumental), and the disposition of the song's sections (verses and bridge) generate an expressive flow that either enhances (The Carpenters) or diminishes (Bacharach) the emotional impact of the story told in the lyrics.

This paper examines two of the most common signal processing techniques, namely, equalisation and dynamics processing. As with all signal processing techniques, equalisation and dynamics processing modify audio signals in particular ways to suit the evolving requirements of a mix. Rock and electronica records currently feature the most extroverted uses for these techniques and, thus, the clearest examples for a field guide like this. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that I focus on records from these two genres. I begin this field guide by suggesting a definition for ‘signal processing’ which is sufficiently broad to account for every technique that recordists currently use. I then relate that definition to the concept of ‘frequency response’. In my opinion, this concept is crucial to any understanding of signal processing – a core component of the knowledge base for audio engineering, which is the discipline under which signal processing is typically subsumed; the concept of ‘frequency response’ guides many of the decisions about signal processing that recordists make, especially those concerning equalisation. Finally, I explain how equalisation and dynamics processing work, and I offer a field guide to their most common applications on hit rock and electronica records today.