METHODOLOGY: GETTING THE CREATIVE AND COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES ‘ON RECORD’
3.4 Getting it ‘On Record’
The final, and in some senses most pertinent, characteristic of documenting, analysing and recounting the activities that took place during the recording project were the intricate links between the ethnographer and the participants, which may be unintentionally revealed through interpretation and representation in the text (Van Maanen, 1995). As John Van Maanen acknowledges, aspects of the subjective experience of the author are often reflected in the text:
It should not be surprising that a discourse heavily dependent on the authorial presence (e.g. Clifford, 1988) will incorporate feelings of the author. Emotion presumes that the author’s self is positioned in the text, and so, we find echoes of fear, sadness and exaltation (Van Maanen, 1995: 166)
However, acknowledging the distortions that subjective and objective views can create is not the immediate problem as Jean-Paul Dumont explains:
The problem is not to eliminate the distortions of subjectivity and objectivity, but mainly to reinstall experience in its place; in other words, to let it all happen, to accept the radical character of the fieldworking experience. Once subjectivism and objectivism are rejected, what is left to turn to? The answer was given to me indirectly in the field and amounts to the experience of intersubjectivity… Intersubjectivity depends exclusively upon the possibility of establishing a dialogue, that is, upon the reversal of perspective whereby not only are the natives anthropologized – they are also, in turn,
anthropologizing (1978: 60-61).
For this reason, aspects of participant narrative have been included throughout this text, primarily to support the observations made but fundamentally to provide the necessary context for creative decisions and collaborative actions. Although these include relevant and distinctive details of the individual, they have been included to
suggest a more ‘collective story’ (Van Maanen, 1995: 212) that reflects the experiences of recording musicians, engineers and producers who work in a recording studio more generally. As Van Maanen clarifies: ‘Although the narrative is about a category of
people, the individual response to the well-told collective story is “That’s my story, I
am not alone”’ (Ibid). However, unlike ‘classic’ ethnographies that focus on the cultural, political or historical aspects of recording studio practice (Bates, 2008; Meintjes 2003) this study had the added intention of exploring a creative system at work (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999; Kerrigan, 2013) and illustrating some of the individual and group processes that were evident during the making of a popular music recording. An ethnographic approach has been described as: ‘The focus upon people and their musical practices and processes rather than upon structures, texts or products’ (Cohen, 1993: 127). However, this particular study illustrates the convoluted intersect between the musical practices of people and the structures in which they take place, and
therefore accurately interpreting the actions, interactions and intentions of the participants was a fundamental consideration.
As a recording practitioner with a degree of familiarity with the recording process a fundamental issue was also that of interpreting relations within the field and accurately representing the participants’ intentions because: ‘even so-called insider
ethnomusicologists, those born into the traditions they study, undergo a productive distantiation necessary for the explanation and critical understanding of their own cultures’ (Rice, 1997: 117). In interpreting and representing the actions and
interactions that occurred in the recording studio, the participants’ voices were a vital inclusion throughout. Responses from the conversations and interviews used in this thesis were also reviewed by each of the participants to help prevent misinterpretation or misrepresentation. Participants were able to correct or amend my interpretations and descriptions. For example, I had recorded in my field notes that engineer Darren had performed an action on the mixing desk so he was able to hear something more clearly. However, after reviewing this interpretation, Darren explained that he had done it for the benefit of the recording musicians in the live room.
Rather than the typical term of ‘informants’ found in the writing of ethnography, the musicians in the band, the engineer and the record producer were instead referred to as ‘participants’ for two reasons. Firstly, the term informants would not adequately describe the role played by the musicians, engineer and producer, chiefly because of their constructive engagement during the interview process in which they became co- collaborators in evaluating, analysing and explaining their actions and interactions. Secondly, I too became a participant when engineering one of the sessions and therefore the term ‘participant’ acknowledges the blurring of the discreet boundaries between the ethnographer, the musicians, the engineer and the producer throughout the process. The participants gave their explicit consent to use only their first names in this thesis in order to provide some level of anonymity but maintain their identity within the research process. Using the participants’ first names also allowed them to later identify each other when reading some of the passages of the thesis.
The overarching issue of attempting to represent the multi-faceted, multi-layered and convoluted process of sound recording in words alone still remains, however, and it has been further argued that: ‘a recognition of multiple interpretations is a reminder that we impose our analytical structures upon the social world we endeavour to describe’ (Van Maanen 1995: 96). The limitations introduced by the subjective imposition of interpretation and representation is often subsumed in the promotion of triangulation in which multiple perspectives are combined in an attempt to ‘know’ a fundamental ‘truth’. However, instead of a triangle the image of a crystal illustrates a combination of:
Symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmutations, multidimensionalites, and angles of approach…Crystalization provides us with a deepened, complex, thoroughly partial, understanding of the topic (Richardson, 2000: 934)
Furthermore:
Crystallization does not depart radically from other recent developments in the wide field of qualitative methodology, but rather offers one valuable way of thinking through links between grounded theory (and other systematic analyses) and creative genres of representation (Ellingson, 2009: 5).
Crystallization therefore is a useful term in explaining this study’s use of combined methods in which the principle research goal is to ‘construct situated knowledges, generate description and understanding, and trouble the taken-for-granted’ (Ibid: 8).
Conclusion
Building upon previous studies on creativity and collaboration in the recording studio (Fitzgerald, 1996; McIntyre, 2008, 2012) ethnographic methods have been used to empirically explore the creative system inside the recording studio. Conducting an ethnographic study in the recording studio introduced a multitude of issues that were related to ethnographic methods more generally. These issues included the initial and on-going problem of access to the data, cultivating and maintaining relationships with participants, the inherent problem of observing and collecting data in the specialised and unique construction of the recording studio, and the interpretation and
representation of the participants’ actions and interactions. The issue of access was addressed by negotiating access through the gatekeepers of a recording studio session: the musicians who are recording there. Observing studio etiquette helped to preserve the naturalness of the setting and avoided any unnecessary disturbance to the recording process. This, in turn, helped to build and strengthen relationships with participants, both inside and outside the recording studio, which further enhanced access to the participants’ thoughts, interpretations and perspectives throughout the study. A multi- mediated approach that included sound recording, video recording, participant- observation and field notes was used to capture the actions and interactions inside the studio during the recording sessions, particularly where observation alone was not
possible. Finally, a clear acknowledgement of the researcher’s ethnographic self (Coffey, 1999) in the interpretation and representation of the processes of the participants places the methodology of this study in the middle of the qualitative continuum between interpretivism and positivism, with an overarching social constructivist perspective.
Before exploring the creative and collaborative interactions that occurred during the three observable tasks in the recording studio (performing, engineering and producing), the following chapters set out the re-contextualised components of the creative system so they apply to rock record production. The following chapter presents the domain, which is the culture and symbol system of rock record production, and primarily draws upon discussions with the participants and uses formal and informal literature to support some of these discussions. The subsequent chapter presents the re- contextualised field, the social organisation that understands, uses and alters the domain and also illustrates the participants’ knowledge and understanding of its mechanisms and criteria for selection.