Performative Mixing and Musical Creativity

Research question: What can studying performative mixing reveal about musical creativity more generally?

Introduction

This is a sub-problem within the main Open Research Project (ORP) of ‘Manipulating Sounds: musical performance as alteration of a pre-configured system’s output’ which comes under the C21MP Research Centre theme of Technology and Musical Creativity. In the ‘Manipulating Sounds’ Research Problem, four modes of practice that are important in genre definitions were identified and performative mixing was the second of these four – with dub reggae as a foundational genre in that mode of practice. In the main ORP’s Rationale, these four modes of practice were characterised as having two phases: firstly the design and configuration of a system that will produce a stream or streams of audio and provides tools by which that stream can be altered. In particular, it uses Cadoz and Wanderley’s (2000) typology of the functionality of musical gestures as excitation (or triggering), selection and modification. In the second phase the practitioner performs (rather than has automated) some combination of these types of gesture to produce a new musical output.

The impetus for this specific research question has come from a thirty-year intermittent engagement with dub mixing techniques working either with or for reggae and ragga artists or experimenting with those techniques in my own (non-reggae) music. I have always found that this has widened my horizons of thinking about what the tools can do but also how any given piece of music might develop structurally and how it might sound. In short, it has revealed to me that engaging in performative mixing can reveal new knowledge about my musical creativity. The research project is therefore aimed at what that knowledge is and how the process of performative mixing can reveal it.

A slightly shorter term (only twenty years) but more persistent engagement has been with a set of theoretical concepts that I have developed separately and am now applying in the context of this practice. The twin core of this theoretical model has been the combination of Gibson’s (1979) ecological approach to perception and various approaches to embodied cognition (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Fauconnier and Turner, 2002; Noë, 2004; Ingold, 2013; Zagorski-Thomas, 2022). As outlined in the Rationale / Hypothesis section of this output, these ideas have developed recently and with some specific alterations that have grown out of my initial engagement with this research question.

Research Question

Given that the overarching research question is ‘What can studying performative mixing reveal about musical creativity more generally?’, I have attempted to break this problem down into a series of six sub-questions. They are based on my prior experience and infused with the theoretical model mentioned above and outlined more fully in the Rationale / Hypothesis section.

Six sub-questions

1. Does the process encourage gestural / transitional thinking versus conceptualising the music in terms of static staging?
2. Using the Gestalt principles of Similarity and Common Fate, does the use of fewer processing types provide better “glue,” in a mix?
3. What difference does it make to explore the process from a perspective of breadth (many systems in shallow detail) vs depth (one system in greater detail)?
4. Exploring mixing as a songwriting and arranging tool through section-based sub-groups.
5. First-take energy vs later-take competence.
6. What does this form of repeated / looped listening teach us about tools and structure?

Practice observations

Before breaking down this problem into these sub-questions, I want to make a few observations about the nature of performative mixing practice. The first is looping and repetition which is a common feature of mix practice in general. Performative mixing, like all mixing, involves listening to a track over and over but the difference is that performative decisions have to made instantly in the moment. The other three observations – structural, technological and aesthetic – are concerned with how I believe we can learn from performative mix practice because it encourages us to think about music and musical practice differently.

Looping

The main feature of performative mixing in practice — based on dub mixers I’ve observed and my own experience — is that because there’s no audience, the aim is to get a good take onto tape. But because each performed take differs significantly from the others (different reverb textures, different timing, and so on), takes are very difficult to splice together. So the goal of a session is usually a single good take, not a composite built from segments of several.

The mix is run on repeat — looping — but this process is much more akin to practice than to rehearsal. Rehearsal, in the way instrumental musicians use the term, usually means working through problem passages in isolation rather than playing the whole piece repeatedly. Looping a dub mix is closer to practice in that sense: repeated whole run-throughs rather than targeted drilling of specific bits.

Most of the issues being worked through aren’t technical — getting a hit to land at the right moment, or a reverb to have the right density, does happen, but it isn’t the main issue. However, as we shall see when we get to sub-question 3 in more detail, unlike a musical instrument, part of the ‘job’ is to design and configure a different ‘instrument’ every time. And those differences can be relatively small or very extensive. The initial looping process of the second phase can often be as much about getting to know the potential of the system you have configured as it is about getting to know the musical material. However, the main goal of this repetitive work is aesthetic consistency: finding a version of the mix that works from an aesthetic perspective.

This makes performed mixing closer to recording improvised jazz solos than to conventional overdub-based recording. For jazz musicians, editing together sections from different solo takes is often felt to be problematic — not because it doesn’t work musically, but because “I wouldn’t have played that in that moment”: for many improvisers, it’s a matter of personal identity in how they solo. Some are comfortable with editing/comping solos together; many aren’t.

A performed dub mix works the same way. It’s about getting the momentum right — the energy building and falling where you want it to. Because a dub mix effectively recomposes the piece, it’s a sequence of in-the-moment aesthetic decisions with an internal logic of their own, at least when the mix is going well, and that internal logic tends to be disrupted by splicing two different mix passes together. This isn’t to say editing never works, but most of the dub engineers I’ve worked with or observed are, like soloing jazz improvisers, aiming to nail one complete take rather than to build a good composite from several — which is a different goal from most popular-music production today, where comping a composite performance from multiple takes is standard practice.

So the repetition in performative mixing is a different kind of repetition from the technical practice most musicians actually do, which is mostly about drilling difficult passages rather than repeatedly attempting a great, fully-realised solo in isolation with no one listening. That specific kind of repetition — trying to nail a complete performance alone — mostly only happens in the recording studio. This issue is revisited in sub-question 3 and closely related to sub-question 5’s first-take / later-take framing.

Structural

With performative mixing, there generally isn’t the same feeling instrumental performers often have that the first take is always the best because it’s got the best energy. Instead, the process is about developing an aesthetic understanding of the piece through repeated familiarisation with the recording as well as the familiarisation you may have to achieve to be in full control of your re-designed and re-configured ‘instrument’. Musically, it involves thinking about the function of each component and how the components can be recombined in different ways.

Part of that is deciding what structural coherence from the original needs to be maintained in a dub mix. There’s nothing genuinely new beyond the original recording, but sometimes there’s a structural element that needs to stay recognisable — a chorus hook, say, where the vocal needs to come through. In addition, the decision is often whether to go purely instrumental, use the vocal as punctuation, or, in rarer cases, build the dub mix as a deconstructed instrumental background specifically to sit under and support a separate vocal mix: maintaining the structure of one component while deconstructing the rest. This idea is revisited and extended in sub-question 4, on mixing as a songwriting tool.

Technological

Most engineers would say they already know exactly what their gear is capable of and wouldn’t need to dub mix to understand it better. What’s interesting about this relatively unusual set of circumstances isn’t discovering new technical capability as such — it’s discovering the aesthetic possibilities of a technology’s affordances specifically when that technology is used in particular ways, in particular real-time performative contexts. The history of production is replete with examples of technologies being re-purposed for creative effect and the vast majority of those ‘Eureka!’ moments happened in the heat of busy session when an idea and its solution collide. These are the embodiment of Noë’s (2004) ‘Action In Perception’ and the very stuff of practice research. Sub-questions 2 and 3 explore this from the angles of processing-type numbers and study breadth vs depth.

Aesthetic

All of this keeps coming back to the aesthetic as the primary focus. It requires developing the kind of intuitive, instant expertise over technology that instrumental musicians already have with their instruments — whereas mixing more generally is usually done by adjusting things while listening back, without needing to respond in real time. Performative mixing is therefore a genuinely different way of thinking about the aesthetics of the process, because it demands that instrumental-style real-time intuition rather than the normal iterative, non-real-time mode of mixing.

That’s a key takeaway of what this sub-project can offer — both to how engineers and composers might think about using electronic technology generally, and, from the other side, to what it might suggest to performers and DJs who use similar technology to functionally different ends: that thinking about things from a dub or performative-mixing perspective gives a genuinely different perspective on the whole territory.

The six sub-questions

1. Does the process encourage gestural / transitional thinking versus conceptualising the music in terms of static staging?

The aim of this sub-question is to explore the difference between gestural or transitional thinking and static staging. The normal way of working with a mix is to set up a static template as a base point, and that’s how many dub mixers start too — but they move into the performative side of things quite quickly. Their objective isn’t to create a stable state; it’s to create a starting point from which to move through other dynamic states.

Part of setting up for that is practical: if you’re pulling something out of the mix with a fader rather than a mute button, you need to know where to push it back to. Ideally you’d want everything in the mix to sit at a fader position of zero, so that wherever you’ve moved something away from that, you can find the starting point again relatively easily.

But working that way pulls you away from trying to find one setting that works for the whole song, and toward thinking about transitions between sections. Mix engineers like Spike Stent and Michael Brauer use that kind of gestural flex as a way of transitioning — generally with one component or effect, or in Brauer’s case, a cross-mix between two of his group sub-mixes. Beyond that section-to-section level — the standard verse/chorus way of thinking about change in a mix, rather than keeping something static throughout — there’s also a micro version happening within each section: continually finding interesting dynamic shifts that create interest and draw attention to a particular feature at a particular moment.

A theme worth returning to several times in this project: Gestalt psychology, and the more general evolutionary point that our attention is designed to be drawn to change and difference. Mixing practice uses this constantly — something stays the same so it recedes into the background, then some small detail brings it forward: an increase in volume, a change in the part, or a change in its spatialisation, like a big reverb on a snare hit introducing a chorus. This is common in ordinary mixing practice but thinking explicitly about how attention is drawn to movement means you can think more deliberately about what needs to stay still while something else shifts. It’s not about making everything interesting at once — it’s about finding the one thing you want to be prominent and using the other elements to create the right context for it: the groove, the shape.

So, as a summary: performative mixing practice makes us pay attention to things in different ways, and notice things in different ways — and noticing through that kind of practice means we can then decide which elements are jumping out of the mix through a Gestalt process of being different from everything else, or ungrouped because they lack “common fate” with the rest. That process of noticing is itself the way of listening and engaging with the musical content that this sub-question wants to explore.

2. Using the Gestalt principles of Similarity and Common Fate, does the use of fewer processing types provide better “glue,” in a mix?

On an anecdotal level, I’ve heard many mix engineers say that one way to make something stand out in a mix is to put a unique piece of equipment on it — historically, perhaps one particular type of compressor used only on the vocals, specifically to make the vocals sound different and avoid blending with everything else. That’s an anti-Gestalt move: avoiding common fate, whether that means a similar envelope shape from the compression, or similar coloration from the machine, when what you actually want is something that behaves differently from the rest.

There’s a lot of semi-emotive discourse around this too — claims that hardware has more variety of colour than software, which was probably true in the early 2000s but less true now that software emulation has become more sophisticated. The reverse of this is what engineers usually call “glue”: routing a whole drum kit and bass guitar through the same group bus with the same compressor imparts a shared dynamic envelope, and that common fate is what ties them back together perceptually.

I suspect the perceptual skill involved here isn’t really the complicated technical skill it’s often treated as — it’s something we’ve already learned simply from ordinary acoustic experience. Everyone in the same room shares the same reverberation, and also the same kind of natural “compression” that a room imparts to sound. That level of detail becomes embedded in subconscious perceptual processing, and it’s what later lets us feel a group of sounds as more unified than a group that’s been processed individually and differently — not in the sense of being able to identify the specific gear (a highly skilled engineer might be able to say “that’s a UREI 1176 on the drums,” but that’s a different, much more specialised skill), but in the sense of simply feeling and hearing them as belonging together. A shared dynamic envelope from a group compressor is a strong common-fate cue.

So: does using fewer types or sets of processing create a better perceptual glue between elements, via these Gestalt principles of similarity and common fate? I’m not aiming to run perceptual experiments — statistical analysis of listener preference or understanding — but to explore the creative possibilities of more limited setups through practice and see whether a simpler set of tools produces something that feels more coherent to the artist than a more complicated one.

Practically, that means doing things one wouldn’t normally do: using three entirely different setups to create dub mixes of the same track or using the same setup on three different artists’ material immediately one after another, to get a direct sense of what it feels like to work with a system at a particular level of complexity.

This connects to technological awareness on two levels: technically, whether a simpler setup actually produces better glue, or just a simplification of the perceptual process; and aesthetically, whether there’s a creative payoff in wanting glue in some situations and complexity in others, and what kinds of musical content each of those calls for. For this project these issues will be explored through practice rather than through perceptual testing.

3. What difference does it make to explore the process from a perspective of breadth (many systems in shallow detail) vs depth (one system in greater detail)?

As a follow-on from sub-question 2: is this studied by comparing multiple systems horizontally, or through a deep dive into many versions of the same system? Both methods will be useful. Repetition is already established as useful for developing aesthetic understanding and exploring a mix’s creative possibilities.

As with the jazz-improviser point already made, handing a soloist an entirely unfamiliar tonality doesn’t usually produce their best work instantly — depth and repetition in one system is what allows its aesthetic possibilities to be properly explored.

This kind of work involves continually redesigning and “pimping” the instrument in effect — adjusting the system that will produce and process the material, selecting different effects even on the same units, rarely settling on identical settings twice. That necessity for getting to know an instrument requires depth in one system and the repetition to explore its aesthetic possibilities. But the experience that informs which choice suits which context — which reverb or delay setting, which process, for a given track — is probably more interestingly explored through breadth: trying things out across many different technological and musical contexts.

The aim is to apply the deliberate-practice literature on skill acquisition (Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer, 1993; Sloboda et al., 1996; Lehmann, Sloboda and Woody, 2007) to a production tool that is malleable — one the user can reconstruct and reconfigure based on context. That creates real problems for skill acquisition, but also real flexibility, requiring quick thinking and a working knowledge of the possibilities to decide what to use and what not to use.

There’s plenty of scope for qualitative or quantitative studies here — how computer-native versus hardware-native engineers might perceive different affordances from a compressor or EQ because of their prior technological exposure — but that’s not the aim of this project. These are practice-research studies, about exploring my own potential for this kind of work and potentially inviting others to explore theirs.

4. Exploring mixing as a songwriting and arranging tool through section-based subgroups.

One way into this sub-question: instead of subgrouping by instrument function across the whole track (drums and bass in one group, guitars in another), subgroups could be organised by section — a rhythm-section verse subgroup, a rhythm-section chorus subgroup — or something more flexible again: changing the texture of instruments through thinning or thickening via live processing that’s preset and ready to trigger, building a songwriting structure that lightens the texture or increases the groove as needed.

This connects back to the structural material from sub-question 1 and the Structural section above, but as a sub-question in its own right it’s specifically about devising new configuration and design strategies that enable structural thinking that wouldn’t normally happen in the mix process — treating performative mixing as an arranging process that changes the character of instruments dynamically, altering intensity, dynamics, spaciousness, or rhythmic busyness (via delay) section by section, not necessarily uniformly across a whole section or across all instruments at once. Different combinations of processing could thin the rhythm section while making the guitar parts more rhythmically accented, for instance. And these forms of processing, by using schematic versions of aural phenomena – simplified audio ‘line-drawings’ (what I call Sonic Cartoons (Zagorski-Thomas, 2018) – involve Gestalt principles about learned expectations to suggest metaphorical meaning. Thus, an aural exciter produces a schematic representation of increased energy expenditure and might be applied performatively to creative a narrative of increasing energy.

What distinguishes this from the earlier structural point is that it’s about deliberate design of possibilities in advance: listening through the track to know what kind of change is wanted at a given moment — more strident, more poignant, more tender, an emotional response to the music — and then asking how to pre-configure the mix so that shift can be made in real time as a performance, gradually or suddenly, into different textures that suggest different metaphorical interpretations.

5. First-take energy vs later-take competence

This sub-question returns to expertise and skill acquisition — the balance between first-take energy and later-take competence in performative mixing. This depends on several things already discussed. Some dub mixers use the same technical system enough that it becomes their instrument, known by them as well as a guitarist knows their guitar. But within this ORP’s own two-phase framework, the point of phase one is precisely to develop a setup that inspires something different.

Across the four case-study genres, this system-design question runs throughout: sequenced/generative electronica’s phase-one patch-building is a major creative activity in its own right — people spend a long time developing and adjusting a patch for a particular piece; interactive live electronics involves building custom Max patches to do particular things a mix wouldn’t normally do. Both change the relationship a performer has with their system in phase two: a complex, steep-learning-curve system makes for a very different phase two than a simple one.

So the question isn’t simply first-take energy versus later-take competence — that framing is a way into thinking about what it means, performatively, to be constantly redesigning the system, or constantly choosing between complexity and simplicity, a theme running through all of this. This sub-question specifically focuses on the feeling of being energised and surprised by a system designed by oneself, versus feeling fully in command of it through familiarity — relating that to both system design and performance approach.

6. What does this form of repeated / looped listening teach us about tools and structure?

There’s a common joke that dub mixing is done best when stoned — the thinking behind it is, I think, similar to how minimalism is often understood: entering a different way of experiencing musical texture not by focusing on a kind of problem-solving understanding of it, but by letting simple textures and repetitions suggest subtle changes of meaning and mood.

This holds across the other three case-study genres too — modular synthesis has plenty of minimalist practice, as do certain strands of Ableton Live mixing / performance and electroacoustic performance — though repetition works differently in each. Stripping a mix down to a minimalist core is a different move from simple repetition, but the two combine naturally, since the elements that tend to survive stripping down — bass and drums, say — are usually repetitive to begin with, which makes small variations within them a target of interest and a way of expressing an aesthetic.

Practically, this might mean taking a short section — reducing everything to the interaction between kick and bass, filtering them to feel separate then joined, adding delay for rhythmic complexity while preserving the underlying repetition — and working it for ten seconds rather than listening through a whole four-and-a-half-minute track, in order to get that one passage right.

What tends not to happen is that the audience hears the same level of detail the mixer has spent so long developing for a passage that lasts only a few seconds — an interesting question minimalist music raises generally: whether it’s more interesting to play than to listen to. Entering something like a trance state seems easier when doing the repetitive action than when only listening to it, since the whole body is involved, and it’s that bodily involvement that makes the micro-changes in the music noticeable in the first place.

Conclusions

Across this discussion, three connected themes kept surfacing for why these six sub-questions have wider resonances beyond performative mix practice, all converging on the same point: dub is the site of investigation, not its scope.

First, each sub-question turns out to be a general question about mixing, composition or musicianship that happens to be tractable through dub, rather than a dub-specific finding. Gestural / transitional thinking, Gestalt-based glue, breadth versus depth of technical exposure, first-take energy versus later-take polish, and the pedagogy of looped listening are all recognisable concerns for engineers and composers working in any genre.

Second, several sub-questions have direct precedent already active elsewhere, which undercuts the idea that dub invented or uniquely owns them. Michael Brauer’s own language about “expressive control, almost like playing an instrument” describes mainstream mix engineering in the same terms as the gestural-transition question. The section-based subgrouping idea already exists, unnamed, in how electronic producers build stems for live and DJ sets.

Third, several questions connect outward to established academic literatures that have nothing to do with dub specifically — deliberate-practice research on skill acquisition, Gestalt psychology’s principles of similarity and common fate. That connection suggests these questions are under-explored at the intersection of music psychology and production practice, rather than narrow to begin with.

Taken together, this reframes the project’s real contribution: not a study of dub as a genre, but a use of dub — as an unusually well-documented, practice-rich case — to investigate what performative mixing more broadly can reveal about musical creativity, for engineers, performers, DJs and composers regardless of genre.

References

Cadoz, C. and Wanderley, M.M. (2000) ‘’Gesture–Music’, in M.M. Wanderley and M. Battier (eds) Trends in Gestural Control of Music. Paris: IRCAM – Centre Pompidou, pp. 71–94.

Ericsson, K.A., Krampe, R.T. and Tesch-Römer, C. (1993) ‘The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.’, Psychological review, 100(3), p. 363.

Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending And The Mind’s Hidden Complexities. Basic Books.

Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press.

Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London and New York: Routledge.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind And Its Challenge To Western Thought. Basic Books.

Lehmann, A.C., Sloboda, J.A. and Woody, R.H. (2007) Psychology for Musicians: Understanding and Acquiring the Skills. 1st edn. OUP USA.

Noë, A. (2004) Action in Perception. MIT Press (A Bradford book).

Sloboda, J.A. et al. (1996) ‘The role of practice in the development of performing musicians’, British Journal of Psychology, 87(2), pp. 287–309.

Zagorski-Thomas, S. (2018) ‘The Spectromorphology Of Recorded Popular Music: the shaping of sonic cartoons through record production’, in R. Fink, M.L. O’Brien, and Z. Wallmark (eds) The Relentless Pursuit Of Tone: Timbre In Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.

Zagorski-Thomas, S. (2022) Practical Musicology. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic (21st Century Music Practices).