Towards liveness: collective memory and reproductions of studio reverberation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through a consideration of their reverberant characteristics, this article places representations of recording studios as an active cultural process that plays out through the recorded sounds such spaces become associated with. Like other heritage sites, the work to define, maintain, and allocate certain structures as unique or significant relies on the cultural process of collective memory. By focusing on the concept of sonic recollection, the reconfiguration of unique tracking room environments for “in the box” digital audio workstation software, exemplified through reverberation, is shown to draw from a network of people, sounds, and technologies that cumulatively reflect various stages of a recording studio’s trajectory. By uncovering this network – encompassing well-known and unnamed engineers, famous to merely aspiring recording artists, established or defunct studios and software companies, and technologies such as convolution reverb, all of which articulate one another in digital audio workstation software – it suggests that the theoretical underpinnings of collective memory studies are a useful tool of analysis to more fully frame reconstructions or representations of physical spaces undertaken through recorded sound, and that reverberation is an ideal metaphor for the work of collective memory.