This is the second in a series of posts documenting the development of Play With Your Music, a music production MOOC jointly presented by P2PU, NYU and MIT. Read the first post here.
Alex is fond of the phrase “pedagogies of timbre and space.” By that, he means: ways of studying those aspects of recorded music beyond the notes being played and words being sung. Timbre is the combination of overtones, noise content, attack and decay that makes one instrument sound different from another. Space refers to the environment that the sound exists in, real or simulated. These are the aspects of music that get shaped by recording engineers, producers and DJs. Audio creatives usually don’t have much input into the stuff you see on sheet music. But they end up significantly shaping the end result, because the sonic surface is the main thing that most non-specialist listeners pay attention to (along with the beat.) For many pop and dance styles, the surface texture is the most salient component of the music.
The work of audio professionals, be they recording artists, engineers, producers, remixers or DJs, consists mostly of close listening. Making recordings consists of doing a lot of asking yourself: Does this sound good? If not, why not? Is there something missing? Or does something need to be taken out? Is the blend of timbres satisfying? Are the sounds placed well in the stereo field? Are they at the right perceptual distance from the listener? No one is born able to ask these questions, much less to answer them. You have to learn how, and then you have to practice. In a sense, music production software is like the Microsoft Office suite. Before you learn about the fine points of formatting or making equations, you need to learn how to write coherently, how to organize data, how to structure a presentation. So it is with music. There’s no point in learning the nuts and bolts of particular software until you know what you’re listening for and what you want to achieve.
So how do you learn to listen like an audio pro? The first thing to do is to practice on a song you know well. Imagine that you need to give a detailed description of the song to someone who has never heard it before. You need to identify all of the voices, instruments and other sounds; chart out their entrances and exits; locate them in perceived space; and describe their timbral qualities. The specific methods we teach for doing this description are drawn from Bill Moylan’s classic book, Understanding and Crafting the Mix.
One useful way to practice deep listening is to create a musical structure graph. On the horizontal axis, you make a timeline of events in the song: verses, choruses, breakdowns and bridges. On the vertical axis, list all the different sounds you hear. Then you can draw a graph of their entrances and exits. Here’s a structure graph of “Tightrope” by Janelle Monáe.
You can also create a graph of musical space. The horizontal axis shows the stereo field from left to right, and the vertical axis shows depth from close to distant. You place each sound in a box at its appropriate location. If the sound is located in a specific place, like a kick drum dead center and up close, its box will be small. If the sound is spread across the stereo field, like wide-panned backing vocals, the box can be correspondingly wider. Here’s a space graph for “Tightrope.”
The depth of listening that you need to do to make these graphs can reveal startling new dimensions to songs you’ve heard a thousand times. Before doing my analysis of “Tightrope,” I had always enjoyed its distinctive blend of percussion sounds, without ever considering what made it so appealing. It was only after making the graphs that I was able to parse out the way the drum kit omits snare and cymbals, the way the congas are overdubbed multiple times and spread widely across the stereo image, the way the 808 kick interacts with the acoustic kick. “Tightrope” is a dense track with a lot of layers, but it doesn’t sound cluttered. After deep listening, I was able to hear how the parts are separated into their own regions of the frequency spectrum and the sonic space, so they all peacefully coexist.
Once you’ve learned to listen, then it’s time to apply your attention to your own mixes. The next post will discuss the way our MOOC participants practice mixing in the web browser.
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