CHAPTER THREE THE INFLUENCE OF 'AUDIO CORRECTORS' IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS: BETWEEN THE PERFORMATIVE REALITY AND THE ARTIFICES OF THE DIGITAL MUSICAL PRODUCTION MARCO ANTONIO JUAN DEDIOS CUARTAS UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID Work dynamics that characterize music production have been profoundly affected by the incursion of digital audio. The multiple possibilities of audio manipulation currently offered by DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software on the one hand, make it possible to 'make up' inaccuracies and mistakes by solving the performer's shortcomings, but on the other, offer the possibility of 'molding' the interpretation, thus acquiring an indisputable protagonism within it: in this technological context, audio edition and musical interpretation suppose two activities closely related. Langford (2014) distinguishes three editing methods that are clearly differentiated according to their purpose: corrective, creative, and restorative. For the author, the usual corrective tasks include cutting, copying, pasting, and comping, while the most common creative tasks include time-stretching and pitch manipulation. But some of the tasks that are usually associated with a 'corrective' edition have, as we will try to demonstrate through this research, a clear artistic intentionality, enabling the deconstruction of the original rhythmic or melodic motif and generating new texts. The restoration tasks referred to by Langford are far from our object of analysis and therefore will not be taken into account when selecting the case studies proposed in the second part of this work. Current digital edition allows carrying out spectral repairs, reducing background noise or manipulating individual sounds within a complex mix, but in any case it involves activities that prioritize technical decisions The Influence of' Audio Correctors' in the Creative Process 41 over any artistic repercussion, which might alter the original meaning of the work. It is precisely digital edition what allows an unlimited modelling of the sound object by varying all the parameters of interpn~tation. In this sense, we must distinguish three phases within the evolution of edition, which go from the analogue edition to the appearance of digiital audio editors that allow visualizing the amplitude values of the wave along the time axis, and a final evolutionary phase where audio correctors appear and which enable the recognition of the height of notes, showing them in a grid of tuning. This evolutionary leap has managed to position the work with audio at the same level of versatility as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), giving the concept of 'quantization' to audio recording and allowing the actions of the engineer-producer to interact with the original performance of the interpreter. The recording studio of the digital age enables this profound process of mutation, which goes from the capture, as regards recording, to the stereo mixdown that the listener will finally hear. This fact has generated numerous debates about the 'authenticity' of the production, due to new dynamics of interpretation where technical dishonesty entails emotional dishonesty (Frith, 1986). The fact that audio correctors allow altering the tuning and amplitude of the note, the modulation and fluctuation of the pitch, the control of the duration and attack of the notes and even allow changing the characteristics of the formants of the voice, a deep debate on the ethical background of these practices, which may be corrective but, nevertheless, have a very high creative potential, is generated. We intend, therefore, to leave aside the debate of the authenticity associated with the ability of audio correctors to provide 'sound make-up' that masks the interpretative mediocrity, and focus on the musical discourse that these audio editing practices generate. This brief contextualization leads us to establish an initial premise: the creative use of audio editors and correctors generates a new musical discourse in which the engineer-producer plays a leading role. Audio editing as the object of musicological analysis The possibility of storing and then manipulating a recording, constitutes a true revolution in the development of musical technology from World War II, both in classical music -think about its repercussion in certain theoretical and aesthetic proposals as the concrete music of Pierre Schaeffer- and in popular music: the emergence of multitrack recording will constitute the basis on which the developmell1t of rock music is 42 Chapter Three technologically based. Authors like Moorfield (2005) or Theberge (1997) point out the importance of incorporating the technological evolution in the study of popular music, taking also into account the recording studio as the main instrument of this evolution. The evolution of the recording studio as a meeting place for a 'creative collective' (Bennion, 1983) is an important object of analysis, too, which includes different agents of the production process: artists, session musicians, engineers, artistic producers, etc. In this new context, the performance carried out in the recording also becomes an object of study, where the technological evolution happens to be a determining factor for its analysis: from the very appearance of the multitrack and the development of techniques like overdubbing 1 or punch,2 to the possibility of performing different editing tasks on the tape, the technological aspects inherent to the practice of recording become decisive when analysing performance. Chris Cutler (1984) indicates how the recording process assembles the piece-by-piece execution freeing it from time constraints, and thus causes a demystified production: Tape can run back and forth at high speed. It can be cut and pasted. On the other hand, recording is a means in which improvisation can be incorporated to composition or transformed into composition through later applications (Cutler 1984, 287). Analogue audio editing has been a key part of the history of production since Jack Mullin acquired two AEG tape recorders in a Germany already occupied by the allies and took them to the United States to produce modified versions that would later be marketed by the brand Ampex. Our object of study is therefore focused on the audio formats, which allow the storage of a performance that can be later reproduced and processed. In this sense, editing allows reinterpreting performance by bringing changes that affect height, structure, or intensity. Analogue editing allows changes to be effected to the shape, at the macrostructural level, by changing for example the different sections of a song, but also at a microstructural level, allowing the creation, for instance, of rhythmic patterns derived from the multiple cut superposition. 3 In the pre-digital age, there was already a total awareness among audio engineers and producers about the possibilities of editing as a tool for the performance of music. Decisions such as keeping a breathing in a vocal interpretation or not, are part of the usual actions of audio editing since the analogue era, and have decisively influenced the final expression of the interpretation within a record production. There is, in this sense, the vision The Influenceof' Audio Correctors' in the CreativeProcess 43 of the analogical edition as a handicraft activity that requires a high degree of specialization. Geoff Emerick, audio engineer for EMI recording studios at Abbey Road, says: Today, a computer can quite easily change the pitch and/or tempo of a recordingindependentlyof each other, but all we had at our disposal was a pair of editing scissors, a couple of tape machines,and a varispeedcontrol (Emerickand Massey 2007, 139). From a traditional perspective, there seems to be a certain dichotomy when differentiating the degree of difficulty in the process of editing classical music and popular music. The recording of classical music 'studio records' entails the ,constant work of 'supervising' and 'editing' of the audio engineer based on a score to be followed alongside the musical director of the recording. Eugenio Mufioz points out how the work of analogue editing was really important and considerably more difficult in classical music than in pop: Handlingpop in editing was a silly thing. If you had to make a cut [on the tape] and remove a chorus and place it somewhere else, this was an easy thing to do. [...] It was much more complexto edit classical. [...] Before the recording of that disc there is a 'meeting' to see how we make the fragments, and that 'meeting' is done with the technician. It is the technician who decides 'from where to where'. He [musician or music director] suggests something and you say [the audio engineer] no, one before, one after, or it's better here, because of the blade (Mufioz2014).4 Mufioz points out how the figure of the engineer 'specialist in editing' arises from the recording of classical music, where the task of cutting and pasting tape required a high degree of precision. Tape edition is related during this stage, therefore, with the professional activity and the use of professional devices. But this vision of audio editing seems to change from the 80s. In 1986, Barcelona's electronic music label Max Music released its fourth Max Mix compilation, which incorporated a kit with material to cut and paste tape together with a book written by the Djs of the time Toni Peret and Jose Maria Castells, where they explained 'how to make your own megamix'. Beyond the anecdote, this commercial promotion of the "Do It Yourself', which brought an amateur audience closer to a task which was beforehand only accessible to a specialized audience, is very significant. Although electronic dance music thus brings creative editing tasks to what we might call a proto-home studio, one of the main differences between the current scenario of audio editing software and the relationship of technology with musical production in the pre-digital era is 44 Chapter Three the fact that the devices intended for recording, editing or mixing belonged exclusively to the professional world and forced potential users to face large sums of money only accessible to large investors. The cheapening of technology has enabled the access of a large majority of users to the devices destined to musical production, significantly multiplying the number of productions. But leaving this price reduction and the consequent democratization in the access to technology aside, we must take into consideration other facts which are not less important: in the current scene of musical production, the devices on which the work centre is fixed (software DAW) are no longer exclusive of the professional sector: the laptop, iPad or smartphone share their use in music production with other professional uses and with different leisure activities. The incursion of digital sampling in the late 1970s (with the apparition of Fairght CMI and Synclavier) and its popularization during the 1980s through more affordable devices such as Ensoniq Mirage or Akai S900 will be what provokes the true revolution in audio editing as a technique of musical production. The first samplers' used techniques of sound treatment familiar to all those researchers and composers who, from the early 1960s, had investigated the possibility of synthesis and recording in creative contexts disconnected from the immediate commercial demands -think about the compositional applications followed in Max Mathews' investigations, on the one hand, and in the initial experiments of Iannis Xenakis and Lejaren Hiller, on the other. In the late 1980s, Andrew Goodwin in his article Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction, through a play on words between the condenser and the Switch that intervenes in the process of digitalisation of a wave by converting voltage in a binary word, addresses the use of these digital technologies in the process of 'deconstructing' ancient texts. For Goodwin, the new technologies that allow the sampling and sequencing of these decontextualized sound materials encourage the debate of authenticity and creativity as a consequence of the increasingly automated nature of their processes. The novelty lies, according to Goodwin, in the problem of distinguishing between original and copy, on the one hand, and between human performance and automated performance, on the other. There are four processes that lead to the blurring between automated and human performance according to him: the first is the increasing sophistication with which engineer-producers can program digital technologies. In this sense, Goodwin emphasizes the fact that some of these interpretative techniques executed by machines consist on imitating those that the human being already did. The second focuses The Influence of'Audio Correctors' in the Creative Process 45 on the fact that digital devices allow triggering samples of 'real' sounds that are indistinguishable from the originals. These first two uses of the digital sampler will be determined for economic reasons in many cases and will have, since this moment, an important impact in the creative industries. The third process is described with the possibility that an instrumentalist, for example through a drumbeat, can trigger a previously sampled sound, changing the timbre of the instrument being played. These triggering practices have become customary and have been incorporated within the menus of editors as drum replacer. The fourth process is related to the possibility of performing loops from a single interpretation, building the rhythmic basis of a production, something common within DAW software. Goodwin adds in his analysis the confusion between the synthetic and the natural 5 in the sounds that are generated by digital technologies provoking a discourse that adapts, although with some nuances, to the analysis of current editing techniques. On the one hand, audio correctors have been able to definitively blur the line that separates what is 'real' from what is not, but on the other hand, they bring new creative possibilities that increase the distance between what we might call 'performative production' and the original performance. The sound artefacts applied as part of the process of editing current musical production allow us to apply concepts such as ZagorskiThomas' 'sonic cartoons' (2014). Just as we recognize the differences between a photograph of a house, a realistic painting of a house and a schematic drawing of a house, we can also recognize the different levels of realism and artifice in the recorded sound. Zagosrki-Thomas sets the example of Britney Spears' Oops!... I Did It Again (2000), where the Swedish producer Max Martin decided to exaggerate the harsh tone of the beginning of Britney's melodic phrases by adding the sound of 'guiro' from the percussion set of a Yamaha keyboard that had been sampled and was then placed several times throughout the song. If we listen to it taking this aspect into account, we are fully aware of an artifice we have given as valid, as an exaggerated expression of the interpretation. Digital editing technique takes to its maximum expression the statements made in the 1950s by the producers Leiber and Stoller, when they argued that they did not 'write songs' but 'wrote recordings'. But, how does the process of reinterpretation of the recordings take place in the later musical performance? We would have to find the connections between the original interpretation in the studio, the technical-artistic processes that lead to its deconstruction in the production process and the new discourse that is generated in its adaptation to the real space represented by the stage. This 46 Chapter Three adaptation brings back the debate of authenticity associated to the process by which the artist must adapt and defend that humanization of the performance before an audience that has already given the discourse presented in the recording as valid. Schmidt Homing (2012) emphasizes the influence that the recording in the performance began to exert when the musicians started to hearing themselves in the recordings for the first time, something that allowed them to critically value their mistakes and that would end up being determinant to change their technique. On his part, Mark Katz (2004) uses the term 'feedback loop' between recording and musical interpretation when analysing the performances in jazz recordings, noting how a particular recording can become so well-known and admired that listeners will want or expect to hear the piece performed in a concert in exactly the same way. But this approach to the analysis must face the fact that in some cases musical production feels the need to perform a certain 'technological ostentation' that generates an 'idealized production', which although it may be detached from reality, nevertheless ends up being adopted as a 'standardized aesthetic canon': cut breaths, 'chopped' melodic sequences impossible to repeat in a real performance, overlaps in the solo vocal line, abrupt changes in the envelope, etc. Despite this, the listener is able to validate the discourse by naturalizing and humanizing melodic lines that have been 'mechanized' in the production process. A methodological approach to the analysis of audio editing in music production Methodologically speaking, we must differentiate four techniques which correspond to four different historical moments, but which, for different reasons, have coexisted as part of the production process within the recording studio: the analogue edition on tape, the digital edition on sampler hardware, the digital edition on a linear audio editor based on a time axis and the digital edition on a horizontal (temporal) and vertical (corresponding to the pitch) axis. The ability to convert voltage to zeros and ones that can be later manipulated by software greatly extends the potential of audio editors. From the 1990s, computers allow the development of editing techniques with a greater control over the selection of phrases, and even individual notes within these, by means of an increasingly accurate zoom,6 and incorporating the decisive 'visual factor' that affects the work of the engineer in many other phases of the production process, linking the digital recording studio to the constant The Influence of'Audio Correctors' in the Creative Process 47 monitoring of the process through a screen and introducing the concept of 'screenology' referred to by Erkki Huhtamo (2004)7 in record production. It will be the so-called 'audio correctors' what will raise the processing of digital audio to the same editing level as MIDI, using different functions such as pitch and amplitude control, modulation, pitch fluctuation, duration control and attack of the notes and even the alteration of voice formants. Obviously, these are techniques far removed from the simplicity of the vertical or oblique physical cut of the blade on the tape that blur the line between what has actually happened in the live performance and the technical-musical re-interpretation by the engineer-producer. In this sense, although in some cases it is extremely difficult to know to what extent the original musical interpretation has been manipulated, one of the objectives of the analysis of the audio edition should be to discern those performances that have been manipulated from those that keep all the parameters of the original interpretation. The 'performative production' inherent in the work of the engineer-producer therefore acquires a definite influence on the final result of what we hear and constitutes the true object of analysis. We will compare two productions as an example to argue this proposal of analysis: one belonging to the same time in which Andrew Goodwin writes his reflection on the contribution of sampling to the creative discourse, and another one pertaining to the current development of audio correctors. Ride on time is a 1989 song of the Italian band Black Box, which forms part of the so-called 'Italo House'. The song was sampled, edited and cut from the theme Love Sensation by Loleatta Holloway8, making use of editing both at the macrostructural level, by generating a new form (for example, by using a bridge of the original theme as intro of the new song), and at the microstructural one, using editing as a tool for the creation of new phrases and melodic lines. One of the advantages of implementing the digital sampler in the musical productions of the 80s was to offer the possibility of 'triggering' samples through MIDI events through a sequencer. The process of deconstructionre( creation) of this song starts by reversing the order of some parts that in the original version have a secondary role and that in the 'technological reinterpretation' of Black Box, acquire a main role: the intro of the version sampled by Black Box uses a chorus that in the original theme does not appear until the minute 2:28 and after a passage of piano -apparently of new composition, although inspired in a rhythmic cell that is used in the original piano- there is a melodic hook from a melisma that in the original Chapter Three 48 theme constitutes a simple adornment that gives way to the first verses after the intro (minute 0:53). These two simple notes (D and C) serve to develop a complete melodic motif in the Black Box version. We are particularly interested in this part because this decontextualized melodic cell is used as a production resource using the voice as if it were an instrumental solo, a kind of 'scat'9 of electronic dance music in which the vocal performer happens to be the sampler. The two original notes are developed in the version of Black Box generating a melodic motif of four bars: 1(?f Fig. I. Melodic vocal motif that appears after the intro (bars 19 to 22). Author's transcription. In order to analyse the process of construction of this melodic motif, we must take into account that MIDI is able to store and afterwards reproduce data of musical interpretation, for example, a note that is activated (note on message) or the intensity with which it is executed (velocity). The idea at this point is that the real notes we are listening to do not actually correspond to the notes programmed into the MIDI sequencer or the notes that have been triggered through a controller keyboard. The two notes of the original theme by Loleatta Holloway were sampled and edited as a single audio file that is triggered by a single action: a MIDI event that is painted on the piano roll of the sequencer or a 'note on' sent by the action on the corresponding key. Each of these triggers is characterized by a determined envelope, which is the result of playing each 'audio clip'. Ifwe look at the waveform of the 'a cappella' voice in Sonic Visualiser we can analyse how the 'note on' and the 'note off are executed without there being a correspondence with the melody that is generated: The Influence of 'Audio Correctors' in the Creative Process 49 Fig.2. Analysis of the waveform in Sonic Visualiser showing the note on and note off It includes the analysis of the attack of the notes through the plug-in of Mazurka Project. Correspondence between notes and audio clip (bars 19 to 22). Author's transcription. The 'audio clip' is activated in the sampler 8 times in order to develop a melody consisting of 12 notes. Although the complete development of the sampler after being activated has a duration of one minim plus one crotchet, from this maximum duration the device, through the use of MIDI programming, allows the execution of shorter notes, in this case crotchets and quavers, than generate notes with a very fast attack acquiring a percussive character and distancing the voice from its natural interpretative characteristics. We must take into account that the success of the result of this technique with the technical limitations of the moment in which it was made, is due to the fact that the sampler conserves the pitch and tempo of the original theme. Technically speaking, from a root note that must be assigned in the sampler -with all probability note D- there is a 50 Chapter Three mapping later on that allows to extend that sample to the whole extension of the MIDI controller keyboard or the piano roll of the sequencer. Although this action usually affects the pitch and therefore the duration of the sample, it has not been an influential factor in this case because only one fragment of those notes that are not the original root note has been used. The final result of the sampling process generates an intentionally mechanized, dehumanized melody, performing a technological ostentation that becomes part of a technological discourse related to the tendencies of the industry in which the commercial launching of this song takes place. From the visual level, an interesting approach to this study could be made through the analysis of the expression of the model deliberately chosen to represent the image of this product, the French model Catherine Quinol, who tries to 'humanize' in her performance a deeply 'mechanized' interpretation by the action of the sampler. In this case, the performer is not on the side of technology, not merging her attitude and aesthetics into a hybrid man-machine as part of the message, as it happens in other cases like, for example, The Robots by Kraftwerk, where the use of the Vocoder serves precisely to claim their dehumanized projection. But once again, as in the case of the song by Britney Spears, in tlie video clip or the television performances the public adopts the playback performance as valid, normalizing its meaning within some standardized parnmeters in popular music 1°.The limitation on the length of the size of the samples and the basic audio editor used to count the hardware samplers of this time were undoubtedly conditioning factors in the development of a mechanized sound aesthetic that characterizes the dance music of this moment. For Zagorski-Thomas (2014) there are two aspects that condition the line that separates interpretation as an expert human being and when the sound begins to sound like a machine: "a recording can sound inhumanly performed or inhumanly processed" (Zagorski-Thomas, 2014: 63). A performance that is processed with 'audio quantizing' and 'pitch correction' may sound inhumanly performed, but it may also sound like an 'unnatural' performance when it is processed to allow other 'impossible' features: lack of breaths, whispers, screams, vocal lines with a duration that exceeds the diaphragmatic capacity of a singer, etc. One of the many habitual resources of creative edition applied to the vocal melodic line is to give it a 'percussive' character that the voice itself does not have. The editing allows changing the acoustic envelope accelerating the times of attack and getting 'transients' of similar characteristics to some instruments of percussion. In this way, the vocal line becomes part of the rhythmic base as a main element of electronic dance music. This concept approaches The Influence of' Audio Correctors' in the Creative Process 51 Owsinski's (2006) vision of mixing as a set of 'arrangement elements', moving away from the vision of a composition as a set of individual instruments: "Generally, a group of instruments playing exactly the same rhythm can be considered a single element" (Owsinski, 2006: 38). An arrangement element may consist of a single instrument (a solo guitar or a voice) or it can be a group of instruments (drums-bass, a duplicated guitar line or a choir). One of the categories analysed by Owsinski, in a similar analysis to the concept of layers by Alan F. Moore (2012), is that of 'foundation', formed by the drum set and the bass line. The main function of this layer, called 'explicit beat layer' by Moore, is to articulate an explicit rhythmic pattern that constitutes the main groove of the song. The decomposition of the melodic phrase in cells that include small motifs or simple notes, allows the use of the characteristic grid of the MIDI piano roll as the platform in which rhythmic patterns that give this percussive character to the vocal melodic line are constructed. But this technological trip that starts from the original recording and goes through its adaptation to a device like the sampler in a (de)constructionconstruction process, follows its path of musical mutation in the actual performance on a stage. If we analyse the subsequent live performances of this song, we can appreciate the effort to humanize a melodic line previously mechanized by the action of the sampler, in front of an audience that has already accepted it as valid and therefore expects it to be performed in the same way. In this case, the copy of the deconstructed version is chosen, due to the imitation of the machine. The use as a live alternative of previously recorded audio clips or MIDI rhythmic sequences as a basis for a real interpretation (overlapping, in this case, real voice and recorded voice) reveals what Zagorski-Thomas (2010) calls the negotiation between the authenticity of the performance and the practice of recording, and brings to the debate other issues faced by this same author like the negotiation between the performance and its gestural appearance, in some cases exaggerated in its interaction with the public. The 2013 song Burn by the English singer Ellie Goulding represents the second case of study. The voices were produced by the singer and leader of the band One Republic Ryan Tedder, under the technical supervision of Rob Katz. The melodic line of the second verse is created from the use of advanced digital editing tools such as the conversion of audio passages into a sample track or the speed fades of the DAW Logic software, which serve to close the end of the melodic sentence. 52 Chapter Three With an aesthetic intentionality similar to the previous case, the technicalartistic action of the engineer-producer develops a melodic cell from the phrase 'we just gonna be right now', chopping the final 'right now' and generating a melodic and rhythmic cell in which the voice again becomes an instrument with percussive characteristics adding a quick attack in which we can appreciate a digital click that could have been avoided with a 'fade in', but that the engineer and the producer probably have decided to leave for the character that it gives to that part. Once again, the voice acquires a 'mechanized' aesthetic away from its natural characteristics, making a technological ostentation that in this case is not defended in the video clip as it happened in Ride on Time: after the previous sentence 'We don't wanna leave, no' in which Ellie Goulding is singing at the forefront, there is a change of the scene during the development of the phrase which had been 'mechanized' by the action of digital editing. In this case, the performer does not try to defend the authenticity of that technical action in a process of dramatization inside the video clip as it happened with Catherine Quinol. A comparative analysis of the different adaptations of this 'performative production' to the live performance, allows us to observe how the singer opts for different formulas: directly suppressing the most mechanized part by the production process, replacing it with a new melodic line or using improvisation in an attempt to interact with the public. 11 ( r ~ vU r r r F Ivpv~ Wedon'twanna leave no Digitaledition ) vUF-1p, t wejustgonnaberigbt now right 'ri"ri'right now Fig.3. Melodic motif with digital editing process. Author's transcription. The Influence of'Audio Correctors' in the Creative Process 53 Fig.4. Analysis of the waveform in Sonic Visualiser. It includes the analysis of the attack of the notes through the plug-in of Mazurka Project. ( Live adaptation ) @b,hf - t r CCcI r Wedon'twanna leave r p i no 1t bf'FFF F Ii ~ tP tP-.---P wejustgonnaberight now right- e - e Fig.5. Melodic motif in the live adaptation. Author's transcription. In any case, and as in the previous example, the option is to dispense with the technical ostentation exhibited in the 'performative production' and focus on the real performance, naturalized through melodic twists characteristic of the melodic tradition of pop or other genres such as soul or funk. The issues related to 'liveness' (Auslander, 1999), the meanings that make a performance to be considered natural or unnatural, is something really complex but, in the same way as the features that characterize authenticity (Moore, 2002), should also be reviewed and updated before being considered attributes attached to the very nature of music. After all, "an electronic circuit is no more or less natural than a piano or a violin" (Zagorski-Thomas, 2014: 204). 54 Chapter Three The technological development contributes to the recycling of genres of other times as a practice that has been increasing throughout the nineties and that reaches our days. In the 'postmodern era' the re-make -in many cases as an alternative to creative exhaustion- or 'pastiche' processes, appear in popular music as original compositional techniques. On the one hand, dance music, introduced into the capitalist dynamics of the ephemeral fashions, returns to the past in a cyclical way. On the other hand, the so-called 'rare grooves' -old songs of soul, jazz, funk, or rhythm & blues- are recovered by the Djs, making them the raw material of their compositions. But this imbrication between technological use and musical discourse confronts new paradigms in the process that involves its live performance, generating many debates about the 'authenticity' of production. Conclusion What we have called 'performative production', referring to the technological decisions within the recording studio with a clear musical intentionality, can be part of the discursive analysis of performance studies. In this technological context in which our object of analysis unfolds, the process of interpretation-production-re-interpretation acquires a great interest as an object of musicological study. The development of digital editing techniques, which allow cutting and pasting multiple copies of the same 'audio clip' in each of the tracks that make up a production project within a DAW, brings new compositional resources that allow the creation of new melodic lines from the original interpretation. This fact has multiple consequences on the way in which the compositional process is dealt with: on the one hand, it allows a structural decontextualization of the original theme as it happens in the analysed theme of Black Box, but on the other hand, it determines new methods of work within the recording studio, where the interpretation of the musician is no longer carried out thinking of the song as an execution that must be performed from beginning to end providing the expression that each part demands. In this technological context, the singer becomes an actor led by a music producer who demands a concrete interpretation of each section, thinking about the use that he will make of these audio files during the post-production process. In this way, the final result is no longer the 'real' performance of the singer within the studio but the 'director's cut', bringing the figure of the music producer definitively closer to that of the cinematographer. The musician is directed and instructed to carry out the takes in a particular way, thinking in the technological resources that the engineer will apply to The Influence of' Audio Correctors' in the Creative Process 55 obtain specific results. Thus, we can consider audio editing and, within it, the different techniques derived from the use of sampling, as part of the interpretation, an interpretation with practically unlimited capacities within the current scenario of the 'digital audio correctors' like Melodyne or Autotune, which allow the manipulation 'note by note' of each and every one of its characteristics. References Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance m a Mediatized Culture. Routledge, 1999. Cutler, Chris. "Technology, politics and contemporary music: Necessity and choice in musical forms". Popular Music 4 (1984): 279-300. Frith, Simon. 'Art versus technology: the strange case of popular music', Media Culture and Society, SAGE, Vol.8 (1986): 263-79. Geoff Emerick; Howard Massey. Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. Penguin, 2007. Goodwin, Andrew. "Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction", in On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. Frith, Simon and Goodwin, Andrew. Routledge, 1988. Hennion, Antoine. "The Production of Sucess: An Anti-Musicology of the Pop Song". Popular Music, Vol. 3 (1983): 159-193. Huhtamo, Erkki. "Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archeology of the Screen", !CONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image, 7 (2004): 31-82. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Langford, Simon. Digital Audio Editing: Correcting and Enhancing Audio with DAWs. Focal Press, 2014. Moore, Allan F. Analyzing Popular Music. Cambridge Unisersity Press, 2002. -. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Music. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2012. Moorefield, Virgil. The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music: From the Illusion of Reality to the Reality of Illusion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Owsinski, Bobby. The mixing engineer's handbook. Boston: Thomson Course Technology, 2006. Schmidt-Homing, Susan. "The Sounds of Space: Studio as Instrument in the Era of High Fidelity". In S. Zagorski-Thomas and S. Frith, eds., The Art of Record Production: an Introductory Reader to a New 56 Chapter Three Academic Field. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pp. 29-42, 2012. Theberge, Paul. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Notes 1 It consists on adding new parts (guitars, strings, choirs, etc.) to a previously recorded base (usually a rhythm section). Overdubbing as a recording method has only been possible from the incursion of the open reel multitrack into the recording studio. In the analogue era, the overdubbing process required that musicians could listen to the tracks already recorded on the tape while the new ones were recorded with their performance, without the listening being affected by any kind of delay. This was technically possible thanks to the synchronous reproduction (Sync), which allowed the recording head to be used as a reading head for those tracks that were not being recorded. This avoided the delay between the previously recorded material and the current material, conditioned by the distance between the recording head and the playback head. 2 Punch consists on inserting a new take into a specific location within the structure of a song during the recording process; for instance, recording a new take of the chorus from a previously recorded verse. This recording technique requires that the audio engineer must facilitate to the instrumentalist the listening of the previously recorded material before the arrival of the agreed-upon compass to do punch. 3 We can find an example of this in the characteristic remixes of dance music that were commercialized from the 80s in the 20th century. 4 Eugenio Munoz is a Spanish audio engineer and music producer whose career began in the 70s. He has worked in different recording studios in Madrid such as Musigrama, RCA, Track and Box (in the last one as owner). Personal interview conducted on April 4, 2014. 5 The difference between organic and synthetic sounds is usually common in electronic music analysis or in tutorials that can be found in the web. 6 The current zoom of audio editors is extended up to 'sample level' allowing even to redraw the waveform, which is very useful when editing for corrective purposes. 7 The concept of 'screenology' applied to musical practice has been developed by Israel Marquez in a communication titled Pantallologia Musical, presented at the IV Congress of Music and Audiovisual Culture (MUCA) at the University of Murcia. 8 Spotify link of the original theme: https://open.spotify.com/track/4OmDR18n!EllkWkwS82nY3 (access: July 10, 2017). 9 The use of vocal improvisation for conducting solos that imitated the technical resources of certain instruments dates back to the origins of jazz in New Orleans. The Influence of' Audio Correctors' in the Creative Process 57 10 In the same way that a melody that is impossible to reproduce live by a singer is assumed to be valid, other situations, like for example the fact that all the instrumentation is 'interpreted' by only two keyboardists, or that in some parts of the performance they stop 'playing' to enliven the audience, are also assumed. 11 Youtube links of the live adaptations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HToISqOG6I8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPE2qqhrl0M (access: July 10, 2017).