Proposal: Realising clarity: an interpretive phenomenological exploration of multi-faceted approaches in dense music production

Robbie Tooth

My proposed project for this challenge emerges from my PhD research, Realising clarity: an interpretive phenomenological exploration of multi-faceted approaches in dense music production, which examines how mix engineers work with maximal, densely layered material. In this context, I will focus on one strand of my practice: working as a ‘finisher’ mix engineer on a current collaboration with a Leeds-based artist and producer in contemporary pop/alternative music.
For the first video, I will document a typical unattended mix session using screen capture and audio recording as I build a first-pass mix from supplied stems. I will not explain during the session, allowing my habitual, relatively impulsive workflow to unfold as it normally would. The following day, I will use the screen recording for video-assisted stimulated recall, talking through what I now notice about my earlier decisions: how I handled the arrangement, where I hesitated or changed direction, and whether the mix feels exciting, coherent and right for the client.
The aim is to bring out automatic aspects of my mixing practice that are hard to capture in written reflection and to offer a simple way for other mixers in similar situations to examine their own work more honestly

Proposal:

Analysis, Performance, and Autoethnographic Reflective Journalling 

Gabriel Jones 

I discovered quite by accident during my PhD that I was an artistic researcher: a musicologist-performer. The process of diarising and reflective journalling that I instinctively undertook during my practice-based research on Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke contributed to this personal development and the emergence of a methodology in which traditional methods of score-based and phonomusicological analysis became closely bound up with my embodied analytical insights as a performer.  

As a post-doctoral researcher, I am currently contextualising, theorising, and expanding this methodology within the broader field of New Music performance studies. The qualitative artistic research methods I will share involve the autoethnographic integration of reflective digital journalling on both my daily practice at the piano and my analytical activities away from the instrument. I am thus interested in capturing the technical decisions and diachronic paths taken in these domains, as well as the cross-fertilisation of my emergent insights. Above all, I am interested in documenting how I feel about these concurrent activities, both alone and in combination, with the aim of investigating and inviting my audience to engage with the valual qualities (Berger 2010) of satisfaction, worry, excitement, and even boredom that colour my experience and inform the dynamics of my analytical process. 

 Reference

Berger, H. M. (2010). Stance: Ideas about emotion, style, and meaning for the study of expressive culture. Wesleyan University Press.