Recording

Recording is the technical process by which a sound is inscribed on a material support to be preserved and replayed. Based on analog or digital technologies, its evolution from the late 19th century affected both the industrial and creative conditions of musical production. Recording can capture sound and reproduce it.

Consequently, scholars and researchers take an interest in recording in a dual perspective: on the one hand as a creative tool and expressive means for musicians and producers, and on the other hand as an object of cultural consumption, socialization, and aggregation for listeners. Another key feature is the possibility to store and reproduce aural documents for various purposes, making them available across temporal or geographical distances, or allowing them to be closely investigated using software for audio analysis. Finally, recording is also significant because its history raises aesthetic and technical issues regarding sound as a distinctive mark of specific musical practices, especially in popular music.

The awareness of the many changes associated with the introduction of mechanical or electronic sound reproduction deeply affected the traditional panorama of musical studies. In the study of Western art, music recording changed the concept of text, expanding it to include written and aural documents.

If written sources still retain a crucial role in musical historiography based on a philological approach, aural sources are precious in studying the chronological development of performing styles. Scores can be seen as the starting point for a plurality of possible performances, whose individual meanings are shaped according to different expressive intentions, interpretations of the written text, and both historical and cultural circumstances.

From the point of view of musical transmission, recording crosses the clear-cut boundaries between art and traditional music because it blurs the established distinction between literacy and orality. This is particularly clear in popular music studies, where the concepts of close reading and textual analysis have been stretched to include not only the lyrics and diastematic and rhythmic parameters (which are easier to put down on paper), but also issues related to sound construction, spatialization, and their associated processes of meaning production.