Mashup Religion: Pop Music and Theological Invention

4 The Grain of the Voice

109 4 THE GRAIN OF THE VOICE INVENTING THE SOUNDSCAPE OF RELIGIOUS DESIRE The “grain” is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. —Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice” Touch is the most personal of the senses. Hearing and touch meet where the lower frequencies of audible sound pass over to tactile vibrations (at about 20 hertz). Hearing is a way of touching at a distance and the intimacy of the first sense is fused with sociability whenever people gather together to hear something special. —R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World Our focus at this point shifts from inventive decisions focused on the selection and organization of sounds to decisions in the studio regarding the sound palette or voicing of a song. In song-making, this involves a shift away from decisions about what to track on a song and what instruments, sounds, and styles of tracks to include, toward the business of actually recording and mixing those sounds together into a sonic whole. When drawing parallels to theological composition, we will shift our attention to the way the words of a 110 — Mashup Religion composition will sound and the final performance or presentation of theology, whether as the spoken word, multimedia, music, or some other form. Decisions about the sonic palette of a song are usually made in relation to a particular desired soundscape or musical landscape into which the song fits. Studio mixing and mastering are focused on the invention of particular qualities of sound. At this level, we are confronted with studio engineers who fret, on the front end of recording, over the use of particular microphones, microphone placement strategies , the warmth of preamps, the relative transparency of ADCs, and the smoothness of compressors in the actual recording of the artist. On the back end, once the audio has been recorded and organized within the edit window of the DAW, the tracks are mixed in the DAW’s mix window (see figure 4.1). During this mixing process, various audio plug-ins or hardware sound processors are inserted into each track in order to add dynamics such as compression, limiting, phase adjustments, equalization (treble, midrange, or bass), stereo panning (left, center, right), reverberation and delay, and a host of other sonic effects. From microphone placement to the choice of mixing effects, the studio engineer is obsessed with certain qualities of sound. Within a more conservative aesthetic, the goal is transparency. The job of the studio engineer, from the placement of microphones to the final mix-down, is to get out of the way in order to foreground the (usually acoustic) artistry of the musician and instruments in real time. Transparency is not, however, a technology-free achievement. Certain microphones, preamps, compressors, and audio plug-ins are sold and purchased based upon their transparent qualities. These technologies are known to attract less attention to themselves and draw out certain qualities (woodiness, ambience, clarity) that signify to the listener that the audio is sonically pure. Engineers seeking transparency leave audio uncompressed or lightly compressed, use more distant microphone placement, and remove from one instrument frequencies that compete with another, more important instrument in the mix. Within an alternative aesthetic, the goal is color. The studio engineer becomes more intrusive in the sonic process, and the listener becomes aware of the engineer’s presence. In this approach, the The Grain of the Voice — 111 Figure 4.1. Pro Tools mix window. listener’s identification is not as much with the performing artist or beautifully sampled audio as with the more intrusive recording technology and the editor-producer of the sonic material.At the extreme of this aesthetic, the audience is invited to identify with the recording or editing device itself. In this model, reverb, delay, compression, dramatic stereo panning, subsonic bass, doubling, robotic vocal processors , and other special effects are added in large doses. At the far end of this mixing process is the mastering portion of the production chain. The mastering engineer takes the final mix and strengthens the overall sonic palette. This can involve widening the stereo field, adding depth, presence, smoothness, volume, volume normalization, and equalization, and matching the sound of one song to others on a CD, even those recorded with different instruments or in other recording studios. Again, each part of the larger whole is analyzed, edited, and reintegrated...