Abstract
A significant body of academic literature and music journalism has explored the historical trajectory of Jamaican dub music and its innovative use of audio recording technology. The present article seeks to demonstrate the similarities between the studio compositional methods of Jamaican dub innovator King Tubby and those of Canadian soundscape composers Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp. Rather than attempting to identify aesthetic and stylistic similarities between Tubby’s dub music and soundscape composition, this article presents a comparative analysis of dub in relation to soundscape composition focusing on artistic articulations of contextual meaning and acoustic communication. Specifically, this work argues that Tubby’s compositional approach directly addresses the following conceptual themes common in soundscape composition: 1) referential composition and the invocation of past listening associations through sonic abstraction, 2) timbral play as a means of linking sound processing to acoustic communication, and 3) the evocation of real-world motion cues by way of ecologically informed sound-processing effects. Exploring the conceptual similarities between Tubby’s work and the established academic-affiliated genre of soundscape composition provides a new perspective on his work as reflecting a multifaceted musical approach that warrants further scholarly study.
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