I presented a research paper entitled, “Sonic Color and the Transparency of Live Music Production: Mixing Porgy & Bess on Broadway” at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Canada conference at the University of Ottawa on May 29th.
The following is the abstract for the paper:
Sonic Color and the Transparency of Live Music Production: Mixing Porgy & Bess on Broadway
Whitney Slaten, Columbia University
How do live sound engineers’ consideration of social and technological transparency both clarify and obfuscate colorations of musical sound in the process of amplifying live popular music? In addition to amplifying music to intelligible sound levels for audiences, engineers also amplify music in ways that assert their hidden sound art, working to sonically and visually mask themselves and their equipment. Transparency is an industrial ideology that outlines methods of faithfully reproducing sounds without coloring or obscuring an original quality. Engineers use the term “transparency” in their discourse to describe this hidden mode of labor and the functionality of amplification equipment. However, live sound engineers inevitably and strategically resist this ideology by creatively coloring musical sound. These colorations not only occur technologically, but through the cultural expectations and musicality of the engineer who mixes. The practice of engineering live sound involves negotiating a series of sonic colorations that engineers associate to the visuality of computer-based graphic equalizer settings. These sonic colorations or resonances describe acoustic dimensions of a performance venue, resonance expectations of musical genres, as well as the resonances of human hearing. Thus, the practice of transparency entails engineers’ faithful adherence to fulfilling these resonance expectations, as well as a faith in their own expectations for sonic qualities of musical color. Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork at the Broadway production of Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess,” this paper analyzes the mixing practice of a live sound engineer in relation to the social science of sound engineering and studies of creative labor.