Nests, arcs and cycles in the lifespan of a studio project

Abstract

Middlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted.

A new breed of home studio producer: Agency and cultural space in contemporary home studio music production

“…When interviews are considered, the strength of this method for the interview lies in it "being interpretative in a double hermeneutic form" (Martin 2009: 55;see also Smith et al 2009: 3). Furthermore this method has successfully been used before in similar studio ethnographic case studies in the field of the study of music production (Slater 2015;Slater & Martin 2012). The role of memory supported by videos, photos and field diaries "as a part of formalized reflection" (Slater 2016: 171) has also been of some importance.…”

“…The concept of creativity in the music production context has previously been discussed by, for instance, Bennett (2011), McIntyre (2008), Gibson (2005), Slater (2015) and Slater & Martin (2012). All of the aforementioned more or less draw upon Csikszentmihalyi's (1997) When considering creativity in the case of "popular song the experts in question are consumers, albeit mediated by the mechanics of the music industry's preselecting gatekeepers (A&R, record companies, music publishers, radio playlisting etc)" (Bennett 2011).…”