On Sunday, November 8th, I presented a research paper entitled, “Liveness, Sonic Color, and Transparency: The Creative Agency of Mixing Recorded and Live Broadway Productions of Porgy and Bess” at the Art of Record Production in Philadelphia.

The following is the abstract for the paper:

Liveness, Sonic Color, and Transparency: The Creative Agency of Mixing Recorded and Live Broadway Productions of Porgy and Bess

Whitney Slaten, Columbia University

How do sound engineers’ consideration of social and technological transparency both clarify and obfuscate colorations of musical sound in the process of recording or amplifying popular music? In addition to engineering musical sound to intelligible sound levels for listeners, engineers also 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 sound reproduction technologies. However, these production workers, in both live and recording studio contexts, 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 sound engineering involves negotiating a series of sonic colorations that engineers associate to the visuality of computer­based graphic equalizer settings. These sonic colorations or resonances describe acoustic dimensions of a musical performance environment, 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 2012 Broadway production of Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess,” this paper analyzes the mixing practice of a live sound engineer in relation to the cast album recording, as well as the social science of sound engineering and studies of creative labor.