Repetition and Performance in the Recording Studio

Abstract

The recording studio is a performance setting in which popular music performers often produce multiple takes, using particular strategies to vary outcomes in search of the 'perfect take'. However, repetition offers the opportunity to discover the unexplored liminality between what we expect to hear and what is performed. Observing multiple takes of one's own recorded performance within the temporal limits of a vocal recording session yields qualitative data to create an ethnography of both the process and the Work itself. Presenting artefacts from a recording session in conjunction with an autoethnographic text provides a demonstration of how evolving external cues, and internal cognitive scripts interact with technology and social conventions in the recording studio to impact a popular music musician's performance and, in effect, the creation of a new Work.