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This chapter examines the dawn of Cajun recording. The Cajun community’s relationship to recording technology, the evolving nature of America’s recording industry, and Cajun music’s relationship to the ethnic, race, and hillbilly markets, are examined to illustrate the cultural intersections between the Bayou Country and America writ large. The pioneering recording careers of Joe Falcon, Cleoma Breaux Falcon, and Leo Soileau are also offered as further examples of the recording industry’s impact on local traditions and perceptions of Cajun music.

Bayou Country’s musical terrain and the cultural and historical undercurrents that expanded the genre’s repertoire, stylistic range, and instrumental conventions are outlined in this chapter. Three factors encouraged heterogeneity in the Louisiana’s musical traditions: a musical network that stimulated exchange between musicians, thereby diversifying Louisiana’s soundscape; the historical idiosyncrasies and ethnic variation shaping cultural production in rural enclaves; and the tension between traditional and innovative tendencies within the genre. Residual colonial song structures performed by guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, Dennis McGee’s enigmatic fiddling that crossed stylistic and racial boundaries, the friction between conservative and progressive inclinations in regional Cajun popular culture, as performed by Leo Soileau and Moïse Robin, and Cajun readings of American popular culture as interpreted by accordionists Lawrence Walker and Nathan Abshire are used as points of departure in this discussion of heterogeneous musical expression on 78 rpm record.

This chapter explores another area of the musical economy which has been radically transformed through software and code: the recording studio sector. It reveals how it encouraged a vertical disintegration of production in musical agglomerations from the late 1970s on and, in so doing, helped leading recording centres to strengthen their hold on the market for recording budgets. However, the impact of software since the mid-1990s has been less benign for such centres. The rise of more affordable digital recording rigs and easier programming protocols represents a democratization of technology, making available a process that was once only accessible through a recording studio. Software and code have made possible a regime of distributed musical creativity, and the recording studio sector is undergoing a severe crisis which has produced a spate of studio closures, redundancies and underemployment within musical agglomerations.

The framings discussed in the previous chapters foreground the importance of attending to the details of a specific musical event via its nesting in successive frames—a scene, a blues aesthetic, ritual, space, time, tune, and form. They emphasize, as well, relating that single event to others and noting how each event is constituted by references and responses to others displaced in time and space. Building on those ideas, this chapter focuses on the ways that the work of different actors and institutions shapes musical events in recording studios or clubs. It analyzes three studio recordings and three live performances to illustrate the efficacy of seeing jazz through the lenses of a blues aesthetic and ritualization.

This chapter focuses on recording studios, as a symbolic space that is fundamental to understanding music cultures. Functionally, studios allow rappers to record songs that involves mastering various techniques such as breath control, pitch, delivery, and assorted mechanical skills while minimizing bodily movements to avoid being audible to the microphone. Studios operate as gathering places where artists collaborate, network, educate, and learn, as well as enable enterprising musicians, producers, engineers, and beat makers to earn additional income. The chapter concludes with a discussion of studios that have symbolic properties and serve as sites of legitimization and personal transformation for aspiring rappers.

In much of South Asia, “regional” music albums in vernacular languages are released on audiocassette and video compact discs in larger numbers than albums of Hindi film music or international pop. The availability and affordability of recording and playback technologies, coupled with the increase in rural-to-urban migration on the subcontinent and in the diaspora, have significantly—and disproportionately—increased the growth of regional music, as is evidenced in the catalogues of some of India’s largest companies like T-Series and Saregama. This chapter offers one of the first ethnographic studies of a regional music industry in India, particularly as it coexists with other regional music industries and with the comparatively larger and better-financed Hindi film music industry. In particular, I explore the studio production of Garhwali geet, a genre of popular song consumed by native Garhwali speakers living in the central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, as well as their migrant populations living around Delhi, Mumbai, and in a number of Middle Eastern and North American cities.

This chapter describes events that occurred following the opening of the Starday Sound Studios in May 1960. The studio became one of the top four recording outlets in Nashville, alongside Owen Bradley’s Quonset Hut, RCA Victor, and Fred Foster studios. Despite having two talented house bands and a growing roster of top talent, there were still many challenges to be met in the Starday studios, including poor acoustics and equipment. An echo unit was later built to enhance recordings.

Chapter four focuses on the experiences of Sohan Lal, one of the few individuals from the Bajgi caste of hereditary drummers to have established a professional career in both rural and urban contexts, for both lower- and upper-caste patrons. Being labeled a folk artist has benefited Sohan Lal in some respects, earning him both monetary and social capital, but it has led to significant compromises in terms of the presentation and reception of his music. Sohan Lal’s experiences illuminate an uncomfortable paradox within the contemporary folk music industry: sounds that are indexically linked to folk are valued as long as they are decoupled from the Shilpkar bodies that historically produced those sounds.

This chapter describes the studio that almost became home to the group—a one-story, flat-roofed, redbrick, boxlike building that was part of a five-store strip mall located on the corner of Danny Thomas Street and Chelsea Avenue in North Memphis. It presents the stories of music producer Chips Moman, and musician Quinton Claunch, who launched the record company Goldwax in late 1963.

This chapter explores the conflict between live- and studio-centered aesthetics in the context of the San Francisco and Los Angeles rock scenes in the late 1960s. Bands such as Jefferson Airplane, who had spent their careers playing live concerts, were faced with new challenges of working in a more technical setting. By the same token, the technological capabilities of studio recording practice allowed for increased creative opportunities. Contributors to nascent rock magazines such as Crawdaddy often disagreed about the true meaning of “authentic” rock and roll, some advocating for a more polished and produced sound while others argued that rock should imitate live performance, even in a recording studio. Over time, artists and producers developed means to oscillate between live and recorded styles depending on their artistic intention.

This chapter describes events in the summer of 1967. American Studios was evolving from the ragtag operation it had been several months before. The studio’s success can be attributed to a concept Chips Moman had held from the beginning: the notion of the recording studio as an experimental laboratory where anyone who had an idea and wished to put it on tape was free to try it out.

The month of August 1954 brought about the flowering of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. With the personnel complete and Brown's new compositions in place, the time was ripe to record the new group and to develop plans for touring with it. With unbounded energy, the musicians launched into the recording studio. There would be seven sessions (including the second Pacific Jazz date) in less than two weeks. On Monday, August 2, the band walked into Capitol Recording Studios at EmArcy Records and recorded three tunes. The next morning, the quintet recorded Duke Jordan's “Jordu”, which has since become a jazz standard. The melody is harmonized with Brown and Harold Land. Richie Powell has an opportunity to play without the horns in a trio cut of “I'll String Along with You”. Before he left the group, Sonny Stitt had worked out an interesting approach to “I Get a Kick Out of You”. During the short breaks between recording dates and jam sessions, Brown finally had time to share with LaRue Anderson.

Arthur Smith was a guitarist, bandleader and songwriter with a couple of standards to his name, “Guitar Boogie” and “Feudin’ Banjos.” But most of all, he was a multi-media genius who created a business empire in Charlotte based on his syndicated television show “Carolina Calling,” which aired for more than three decades. Everyone from Johnny Cash to Richard Nixon appeared on his show. Arthur Smith Enterprises also owned record labels, publishing companies, and the Charlotte recording studio where James Brown recorded “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” in 1965. When “Feudin’ Banjos” appeared in the 1972 movie “Deliverance” as “Dueling Banjos,” Smith sued and won.

In the mid-2000s, Ableton’s Live became a dominant software for electronic music producers working across genres. Designed for “real-time” musical performance onstage and in the studio, Live introduced unique affordances for engaging digital sound, such as a nonlinear “Session View” which allows for the modular juxtaposition of musical ideas, as well as increased interoperability between Live and other media. Through design analyses of Avid’s Pro Tools, Apple’s Logic Pro X, and Live, as well as discourse analysis among producers and designers, this chapter details how the design of music software moved away from the representation of preexisting instruments, toward more abstract interfaces for engaging digital sound. Further, the chapter considers how these changes in design reflected social and cultural changes in user demographics, especially following popular feminist movements such as Me Too.

In much scholarly discourse there is an assumption that women are the natural repositories of folk culture. Although this assumption is often rooted in an important feminist motivation to challenge oppressive ideologies within patriarchal societies, this chapter argues that it is ultimately unhelpful to think about folk culture as an inherently male or female domain of cultural production. Chapter five critiques the gendering of the folk concept by comparing and contrasting the experiences of two professional female artists in Uttarakhand, Meena Rana and Bachan Dei. Both women have established their professional identities through interpretations of village-based repertories of song and dance, but each performer has experienced a different degree of acceptance and inclusion within the vernacular music industry as a result of her social position and caste background.

This chapter examines the relationship between audio and audiovisual recordings following the release of John Coltrane’s seminal album, A Love Supreme, in 1965. The lack of the visual and Coltrane’s sound create a context for the studio recording to be experienced as profound and mysterious; thus, the album transcends its status as a physical object to become a reified phenomenon. In contrast, the chapter draws on video footage of the Classic Quartet’s live performances at the Antibes Juan-les-Pins and Comblain-la-Tour festivals in 1965. The Antibes footage is fragmented, distant, and low-quality, while the Comblain-la-Tour recording conveys a sense of chaotic liveness. Counterintuitively, the chapter argues that these audiovisual recordings of the Quartet performing “live” are clearly products of mediatization and have less impact than the profound experience of the studio album. The chapter also discusses how mediations of Coltrane’s music following his death chart his transformation from trailblazing musician to mythic spiritual master.

This chapter explores the quintet's approach to the studio recording of the album Miles Smiles, known for its effortless negotiation between the traditional and experimental. It analyzes the album's singles, namely, “Orbits”, “Circle”, “Footprints”, “Dolores”, “Freedom Jazz Dance”, and “Ginger Bread Boy”. It discusses the harmonic structure of each, concerning the head, improvisations, and mode/scale organization. It looks into how the Miles Davis Quintet further developed their celebrated sense of airy openness and space by highlighting their studio techniques and indicating each member's contributions to the composition of songs.

This chapter explains the significance of live performance in hip-hop culture, describing historical shifts from collective, community-based cultural practices to passive, technology-centric activities that take place in private spaces. As hip-hop culture became more popular in the 1980s, rap thrived under corporate rule but became a more self-contained pursuit that is created in recording studios and increasingly consumed in automobiles or through headphones. In rap microscenes, gaining experience as a live performer is a critical stepping-stone in the career trajectory from rookie to professional. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how social class shapes the performative context.