Academic literature on the topic 'Sound recording industry – Zambia'

The recording industry is now over 120 years old. During the first half of its existence, however, few archives documented or collected its products. Many early recordings have been lost, and discography, the documentation of historical recordings, has mainly been in the hands of private collectors. An emphasis on genre-based discographies such as jazz or opera has often left other areas of record production in the shade. Recent years have seen a growth of national sound collections with online catalogues and at least partial online access to content. While academic historians have been slow to approach the field, there has been outstanding new research on the history of the recording industry, particularly in the USA and UK. This has encouraged the development of new academic research on musical performance, based on historical sound recordings. The article discusses some recent works in this field.

The author discusses performance utilizing his greis software system, which is built around the principle of a “scrubbing” interaction with roots in the recording industry and the paradigm of scrubbing tape across a magnetic head.

During the first half of the twentieth century, new mass media practices radically altered traditional cultural forms and performance in a complex encounter that incited much debate, criticism, and celebration the world over. This essay examines how the new sound media of gramophone and sound cinema took up the live performance genres of Tamil drama. Professor Hughes argues that south Indian music recording companies and their products prefigured, mediated, and transcended the musical relationship between stage drama and Tamil cinema. The music recording industry not only transformed Tamil drama music into a commodity for mass circulation before the advent of talkies but also mediated the musical relationship between Tamil drama and cinema, helped to create film songs as a new and distinct popular music genre, and produced a new mass culture of film songs.

Jazz is the first type of music art the earliest stage of development of which had been recorded. A single play recorded in 1917 by the quintet Original Dixieland “Jass” Band from New Orleans is known in history as the first jazz record. There’s a perception in the academic community that the musical material on this record can hardly be considered as a typical representative of jazz music of that period. The music was performed by the white musicians, though most first jazz bands were black, and the music was far from a real solo improvisation. However, it was not typical in the first place because it had been recorded. The research subject of the article is the influence of sound recording technology on jazz culture at the stage of its foundation. In those years, if jazz musicians wanted to make a recording they had to bear in mind numerous peculiarities of sound recording technology. The author gives special attention to the analysis of the consequences of reproducibility of a recording for jazz musicians, and for the audience’s perception. As a research methodology, the author uses the comprehensive approach which includes the study of historical sources and jazz musicians’ memoirs related to the sound recording industry. The research proves that audio recordings are not sufficient as a source for critical research of the first jazz gramophone record, and suggests alternative approaches to its interpretation.   

Abstract ““Aura””——configured as an interplay of preservation and loss or——to quote the first version of Walter Benjamin's famous artwork essay——as an ““interweaving of space and time””——is central not only to sound recording, but also to the musical dramaturgy of Wagner's final work. This article examines ways in which this unusual alignment affected early (pre-1948) recordings of Parsifal. The potential contradictions implicit in the concept of aura are nowhere more strikingly revealed than in these early recordings. On one hand, they foreground the problems of reducing complex and lengthy works to easily recorded excerpts or arrangements. In this quasi-Adornian reading, early sound recordings of Parsifal manifest the inexorable power of the culture industry to undermine the authentic work of art. And yet sound recording can also be seen as the fruit of a different impulse, the impulse toward a fully transcendent work of art, the realization of the ““invisible theater”” for which Wagner himself supposedly yearned. Indeed, Parsifal (even more than Wagner's other works) was recorded primarily as a symphonic work, divested of what Adorno so tellingly called the ““phony hoopla”” of operatic production. Early sound recording of Parsifal thus amplifies the conflict between materialism and transcendence that forms the ideological substratum of the plot. This conflict manifests itself in the ““resistance”” that Parsifal offers up to the process of recording, a resistance that is ironically most audible precisely during the age in which the recordings themselves are most ““imperfect.”” It is in these traces of resistance, I will argue, that we may imagine the aura of Wagner's final work.

Radiophonic art could not have emerged at the end of the 1920s without an intense period of experimentation across the creative fields of radio, new music, phonography, film, literature and theatre. The engagement with sound recording and broadcast technologies by artists radically expanded the scope of creative possibility within their respective practices, and more particularly, pointed to new forms of (inter-)artistic practice based in sound technologies including those of radio. This paper examines the convergence of industry, the development of technology, and creative practice that gave sound, previously understood as immaterial, a concrete objectification capable of responding to creative praxis, and so brought about the conditions that enabled a radiophonic art to materialize.

Background. Contemporary audio art in search of new sound design, as well as the artists working in the field of music show business, in an attempt to draw attention to the already well-known musical works, often turn to the forms of “remake” or “remix”. However, there are certain disagreements in the understanding of these terms by artists, vocalists, producers and professional sound engineer team. Therefore, it becomes relevant to clarify the concepts of “remake” and “remix” and designate the key differences between these musical phenomena. The article contains reasoned, from the point of view of art criticism, positions concerning the misunderstanding of the terms “remake” and “remix”, which are wide used in the circles of the media industry. The objective of the article is to explore the key differences between the principles of processing borrowed musical material, such as “remix” and “remake” in contemporary popular music, in particular, in recording studios. Research methodology. In the course of the study two concepts – «remake» and «remix» – were under consideration and comparison, on practical examples of some works of famous pop vocalists from Ukraine and abroad. So, the research methodology includes the methods of analysis for consideration of the examples from the Ukrainian, Russian and world show business and the existing definitions of the concepts “remake” and “remix”; as well as comparison, checking, coordination of the latter; formalization and generalization of data in getting the results of our study. The modern strategies of the «remake» invariance development in the work of musicians are taken in account; also, the latest trends in the creation of versions of «remix» by world class artists and performers of contemporary Ukrainian pop music are reflected. The results of the study. The research results reveal the significance of terminology pair «remix» and «remake» in the activities of the pop singer. It found that the differences of two similar in importance terms not all artists in the music industry understand. The article analyzes the main scientific works of specialists in the audiovisual and musical arts, in philosophical and sociological areas, which addressed this issue in the structure of music, such as the studies by V. Tormakhova, V. Otkydach, V. Myslavskyi, I. Tarasova, Yu. Koliadych, L. Zdorovenko and several others, and on this basis the essence of the concepts “remake” and “remix” reveals. The phenomenon of the “remake” is described in detail in the dictionary of V. Mislavsky [5], where the author separately outlined the concept of “remake” not only in musical art, but also in the film industry and the structure of video games. The researcher I. Tarasovа also notes the term “remake” in connection with the problem of protection of intellectual property and the certification of the copyright of the performer and the composer who made the original version of the work [13]. At the same time, the term “remix” in musical science has not yet found a precise definition. In contemporary youth pop culture, the principle of variation of someone else’s musical material called “remix” is associated with club dance music, the principle of “remake” – with the interpretation of “another’s” music work by other artist-singers. “Remake” is a new version or interpretation of a previously published work [5: 31]. Also close to the concept of “remake” the term “cover version” is, which is now even more often uses in the field of modern pop music. This is a repetition of the storyline laid down by the author or performer of the original version, however, in his own interpretation of another artist, while the texture and structure of the work are preserving. A. M. Tormakhova deciphered the term “remake” as a wide spectrum of changes in the musical material associated with the repetition of plot themes and techniques [14: 8]. In a general sense, “a wide spectrum of changes” is not only the technical and emotional interpretation of the work, including the changes made by the performer in style, tempo, rhythm, tessitura, but also it is an aspect of composing activity. For a composer this is an expression of creative thinking, the embodiment of his own vision in the ways of arrangement of material. For a sound director and a sound engineer, a “remix” means the working with computer programs, saturating music with sound effects; for a producer and media corporations it is a business. “Remake” is a rather controversial phenomenon in the music world. On the one hand, it is training for beginners in the field of art; on the other hand, the use of someone else’s musical material in the work can neighbor on plagiarism and provoke the occurrence of certain conflict situations between artists. From the point of view of show business, “remake” is only a method for remind of a piece to the public for the purpose of its commercial use, no matter who the song performed. Basically, an agreement concludes between the artists on the transfer or contiguity of copyright and the right to perform the work for profit. For example, the song “Diva” by F. Kirkorov is a “remake” of the work borrowed from another performer, the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 1998 – Dana International [17; 20], which is reflected in the relevant agreement on the commercial use of musical material. Remix as a music product is created using computer equipment or the Live Looping music platform due to the processing of the original by introducing various sound effects into the initial track. Interest in this principle of material processing arose in the 80s of the XXth century, when dance, club and DJ music entered into mass use [18]. As a remix, one can considers a single piece of music taken as the main component, which is complemented in sequence by the components of the DJ profile. It can be various samples, the changing of the speed of sounding, the tonality of the work, the “mutation” of the soloist’s voice, the saturation of the voice with effects to achieve a uniform musical ensemble. To the development of such a phenomenon as a “remix” the commercial activities of entertainment facilities (clubs, concert venues, etc.) contributes. The remix principle is connected with the renewal of the musical “hit”, whose popularity gradually decreased, and the rotation during the broadcast of the work did not gain a certain number of listeners. Conclusions. The musical art of the 21st century is full of new experimental and creative phenomena. The process of birth of modified forms of pop works deserves constant attention not only from the representatives of the industry of show business and audiovisual products, but also from scientists-musicologists. Such popular musical phenomena as “remix” and “remake” have a number of differences. So, a “remix” is a technical form of interpreting a piece of music with the help of computer processing of both instrumental parts and voices; it associated with the introduction of new, often very heterogeneous, elements, with tempo changes. A musical product created according to this principle is intended for listeners of “club music” and is not related to the studio work of the performer. The main feature of the “remake”is the presence of studio work of the sound engineer, composer and vocalist; this work is aimed at modernizing the character of the song, which differs from the original version. The texture of the original composition, in the base, should be preserved, but it can be saturated with new sound elements, the vocal line and harmony can be partially changed according to interpreter’s own scheme. The introduction of the scientific definitions of these terms into a common base of musical concepts and the further in-depth study of all theoretical and practical components behind them will contribute to the correct orientation in terminology among the scientific workers of the artistic sphere and actorsvocalists.

Since Thailand's Copyright Act became law in 1979 an indigenous music industry has emerged. In the past, the small recording business was concentrated on two aspects: the sale of imported records and the manufacture of popular, mainly Lukkroong music, and classical records. However, the organisation of the Association of Music Traders – an immediate reaction to the enforcement of the Copyright law – coupled with the advent of cassette technology, has transformed the faltering gramophone trade. Today, middle-class youngsters appreciate Thai popular music in contrast to the previous generation who grew up with western pop and rock. Young people in the countryside have begun to acquire a taste for the same music as well as enjoy a wider range of Pleng Luktoong, the country music with which they identify. How did this change which has resulted in the creation of a new pleasure industry come about? And what are some of the consequences of this transformation.

This article analyzes discursive linkages between acts of listening and eating within a combined multisensory regime that the authors label the gustasonic. Including both marketing discourses mobilized by the commercial music industry and representations of record consumption in popular media texts, gustasonic discourses have shaped forms and experiences of recorded sound culture from the gramophone era to the present. The authors examine three prominent modalities of gustasonic discourse: (1) discourses that position records as edible objects for physical ingestion; (2) discourses that preserve linkages between listening and eating but incorporate musical recordings into the packaging of other foodstuffs; and (3) discourses of gustasonic distinction that position the listener as someone with discriminating taste. While the gustasonic on one hand serves as an aid to consumerism, it can also cultivate a countervailing collecting impulse that resists music’s commodity status and inscribes sound recording within alternative systems of culture value.

The Bombay film music industry has been dominated by male music composers for the past eight decades. In this essay, the author explores the work of Sneha Khanwalkar, a young female music director who has brought forward new sound practices on popular television in India and in Bombay cinema. Instead of working in Bombay studios, Khanwalkar prefers to step out into the “field,” carving out dense acoustic territories using portable recording technologies. Her field studio becomes an unlimited space as readers see her backpacking, collecting sounds and musical phrases, and, finally, working with the material she has collected. Khanwalkar's collaborative approach to musical sound has challenged genre boundaries between film music and folk music on the one hand and the oral and the recorded on the other. Her radical intervention in sound and music brings together unexplored spatialities, voices, bodies, and machines by foregrounding the process of citation, recording, and digital reworking. Through an exploration of Khanwalkar's work, involving travel, mobility, and a prosthetic extension of the body through the microphone, the author brings into discussion emerging practices that have expanded the aural boundaries of the Bombay film song.

The purpose of this research was to gather information about the production, marketing and distribution of Zambian contemporary music by Zambian musicians. Very little information has been documented about the development of the Zambian music industry, particularly from the perspective of those within the industry. As a result this study attempted to add to this knowledge. To achieve this Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of ‘fields’ and ‘habitus’ were used to gain an understanding of what affects the creation of art forms such as music as well as the structures and underlying processes within the music industry. The concept of ‘fields’ usefully framed an explanation of the struggles and connections within the various fields in the industry and a view of the Zambian music industry in relation to the international industry. To gather the data necessary for this research a qualitative approach was utilised involving semistructured in-depth questionnaires from twenty-three interviewees. These interviewees were selected from various sectors of the music industry in an attempt to gain a holistic perspective of the industry in the 21st century. There were four subgroups: the artists (singers, rappers and instrumentalists), managers, radio DJs, and a miscellaneous group made up of the remaining participants, a Sounds Arcade manager, a music journalist, the National Arts Council Chairperson, a Zambia Music Copyright Protection Society (ZAMCOPS) administrator, and the then President of the Zambia Association of Musicians (ZAM). With the limited exposure to formal musical, instrumental and production training, musicians, instrumentalists, managers and studio production personnel interviewed had had to learn their craft on-the-job. This limited knowledge appears to add to the hindrance of the development of careers and the industry, particularly in terms of how to register and distribute music correctly to earn royalties and protect their intellectual property against piracy. From an institutional level piracy is being addressed more forcefully with the introduction of holograms and the tightening of policies and structures to do with the music industry.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of North Texas, 2006.
System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Accompanied by 4 recitals, recorded Apr. 10, 1997, July 17, 1997, Mar, 3, 1998, and Nov. 14, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (p. 40-41).

What is a record producer? There is a degree of mystery and uncertainty about just what goes on behind the studio door. Some producers are seen as Svengali-like figures manipulating artists into mass consumer product. Producers are sometimes seen as mere technicians whose job is simply to set up a few microphones and press the record button. Close examination of the recording process will show how far this is from a complete picture. Artists are special—they come with an inspiration, and a talent, but also with a variety of complications, and in many ways a recording studio can seem the least likely place for creative expression and for an affective performance to happen. The task of the record producer is to engage with these artists and their songs and turn these potentials into form through the technology of the recording studio. The purpose of the exercise is to disseminate this fixed form to an imagined audience—generally in the hope that this audience will prove to be real. Finding an audience is the role of the record company. A record producer must also engage with the commercial expectations of the interests that underwrite a recording. This dissertation considers three fields of interest in the recording process: the performer and the song; the technology of the recording context; and the commercial ambitions of the record company—and positions the record producer as a nexus at the interface of all three. The author reports his structured recollection of five recordings, with three different artists, that all achieved substantial commercial success. The processes are considered from the author‘s perspective as the record producer, and from inception of the project to completion of the recorded work. What were the processes of engagement? Do the actions reported conform to the template of nexus? This dissertation proposes that in all recordings the function of producer/nexus is present and necessary—it exists in the interaction of the artistry and the technology. The art of record production is to engage with these artists and the songs they bring and turn these potentials into form.

Abstract Whenever a film is produced and distributed, a license to use the music and sound recording may be needed. While the film producer usually owns the copyright in the film and underlying works or actors’ performances, responsibility for the clearance of rights in music and sound recordings remains largely on the shoulders of users (broadcasters, cinema operators, VOD platforms). They usually need to get a license through a CMO or directly from the rightsholder. In the case of musical works, the procedures are largely standardized, mainly in offline use. When it comes to licensing the rights for cross-border use online or when phonogram producers and performers are involved, the licensing situation becomes messy which introduces significant uncertainty into the market. Instead of advocating state regulation, the author pleads for the development of cross-border industry standards and procedures, good practices and reciprocal agreements between CMOs to be developed in a collaboration of global organizations representing rightsholders.

Chapter two begins around 1900 with a discussion of the United States music industry in the early days of sound recording, which is examined for its impact on the categorization of popular music, and the new possibilities afforded for the circulation of genre-identity relations. The category of “foreign music” emerges in response first to an interest in music of faraway places facilitated by sound recording, and then to the discovery of marketing possibilities to recent European immigrants. The subcategories of Hawaiian and Jewish music are analyzed in more detail to show how foreign music moved from an emphasis on imaginary to homologous music-identity relations by the 1920s. The category of foreign music established a model for how the music industry could be structured around the concept of homological relations (that is, a direct one-to-one correspondence) between categories of music and categories of people.

This chapter introduces the gabinetes fonográficos that appeared after the introduction of the Spring Motor Phonograph, Edison Home Phonograph, and Edison Standard Phonograph between 1896 and 1898; these were small recording labels which recorded their own wax cylinders employing local musicians and sold them directly to their customers, operating often precariously or for a limited amount of time. The chapter then discusses the gabinetes that were active between 1896 and 1905 in Madrid, then the main center of the nascent Spanish recording industry. The chapter examines how the Madrid gabinetes built upon ways of listening developed earlier in the decade to transform recorded sound into a commodity, and how, in doing so, they drew upon regeneracionista discourses concerning science, technology, modernity, and national identity.

This chapter focuses on the rise of the concept of “crossover” in response to the transformation of radio formats and music industry categories during the 1970s and early 1980s. Country music is examined for its close proximity to the “Adult Contemporary” radio format, and the music for the film Urban Cowboy is analyzed for how it uses a variety of country music sub-genres. The transformation of Billboard’s popularity chart from “Soul” to “Black,” and of the radio format for black popular music from “Soul” to “Urban Contemporary” is examined in relation to the almost all-white format of “Album-Oriented Rock” (“AOR”). Michael Jackson’s breakthrough album Thriller is discussed for its ability to transcend what were widely viewed as impermeable boundaries. In spite of Thriller, however, a recording such as George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” reveals how mainstream popular music remained largely segregated at the beginning of the 1980s.

Recordings have progressed from wax to shellac, vinyl, tapes, and CDs with recent variants of downloads or streaming. In every case the sound and type of distortion are different. Nevertheless, they all have impact on every type of music and the quality of reproduction with different challenges for each genre. This chapter details many examples. There is no ideal answer because all systems produce music that is distorted from the original performance. It is a matter of personal preference as to which is favoured. Of considerable concern to the music industry—and to audiences interested in listening to classical or jazz—is the trend of the mass market pop music to be heard via streaming. This produces very poor financial returns for the industry, and to most performers. A discussion of future scenarios is timely and is included in this overview.

The chapter looks at descriptions of sound across texts and across historical contexts. Starting from the invention of the phonograph through multitrack recording to digital audio, the chapter accounts for change and stability in the way sound quality is processed in relation to discourses of sound. It shows how listeners, the industry, and other communities build specific listening preferences through the discourse of sound quality. The chapter also addresses the contributions of the phonograph, vinyl disc, cassette tape, CD, and MP3 formats to the discourse of sound, and it enumerates two cognitive metaphors, the ONE REALITY type and the MULTIPLE REALITIES type.

Flatt and Scruggs went into Herzog Studios in Cincinnati, Ohio, on December 11, 1949, to record his recently composed tune “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” the first instrumental recording for Flatt and Scruggs. E. T. (Bud) Herzog had started the studio a few years earlier, attracting name artists such as Patti Page and Hank Williams. Producer Murray Nash used the new medium of magnetic tape recording at the sessions, almost certainly using several microphones to achieve a widely praised sound. Nash, from the Midwest, had quickly gotten up to speed on the record industry, which was growing quickly following the end of the union ban on live recording and with the postwar growth of the economy.

This chapter is a commodity biography of drought-resistant carnauba wax from northeastern Brazil and primarily concerns the fabrication of wax cylinders and 78-RPM records in the early years of sound reproduction. The wax, which was sold to the nascent recording industry in the United States to be molded into cylinders or pressed into wax masters, became a profitable industry for Ceará, enabling many people in the region to acquire the very technologies of mass mediation that used the local wax. Most generally, the chapter shows the circulation of this natural resource, as well as the conditions for workers involved in the commodity chain from wax to mass-mediated sound.