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The Establishment of the Virtual Performance Space in Rock

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2010

ALLAN F. MOORE  and
RUTH DOCKWRAY
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Abstract

Analysis of the spatial elements of popular music recordings can be made by way of the ‘sound-box’, a concept that acknowledges the way sound sources are perceived to exist in four dimensions: laterality, register, prominence, and temporal continuity. By late 1972 producers working across a range of styles and in different geographical locations had adopted a normative positioning of sound sources across these dimensions. In 1965 no such norm existed. This article contextualizes the notion of the sound-box within academic discourse on popular music and explores the methodology employed by a research project that addressed the gradual coming-into-existence of the norm, which the project defined as the diagonal mix. A taxonomy of types of mix is offered, and a chronology of the adoption of the diagonal mix in rock is presented.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , September 2008 , pp. 219 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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