Developing Soundcrafters. Constructing Recordings

There are many names for those who create and master audio recordings. The names for the practitioners of this audio artifice have shifted over time, with former titles littered across the history of recording sound data. Still, two names that have had some staying power are producer, the English-speaking world’s name for a recording studio manager, and Tonmeister, a German-speaking world’s equivalent, which hearkens back to guild crafts. One way of expressing the Tonmeister idea’s kernel is with the neologism soundcrafter, which we will use in this paper.

The term soundcrafter is particularly appropriate for use in early childhood through high school settings due to the playful and creative nature which is at its heart. Soundcrafting spans both art and technology: it is working with musicians on a musical level to help them achieve the best performances and interpretation and employing or directing the use of appropriate technology to create the best experience for listeners, including proper editing, sound balance, and other post-production skills (Colquhoun, 2018). This role balances the techniques grounded in scientific and mathematical knowledge (including microphone use, digital recording, skillful amplification, etc.) with the creative imagination to audiate possibilities that may result in unique approaches to what the finished recording might be like before the process begins. The integration of these skills fosters wonderful experiences and illusions for performers and listeners alike.

A soundcrafter is the project’s creative and technical leader. Like a film director, the soundcrafter’s role may include gathering ideas, collecting musicians, proposing changes to song arrangements, coaching performers, scripting sessions, supervising the recording session set up, mixing of the recording, and supervision audio mastering. Frequently in school settings, the roles of executive producer, which in commercial settings is the person who oversees business partnerships, the record or recording producer who makes creative decisions, and the sound engineer who does the technical aspects of making the recording and mixing the products overlap with one another and it common to have one student or a small group of students working collaboratively to ensure each aspect of all of these positions are covered. The key to the term soundcrafter is that it semantically breaks down the division between an audio engineer, a doer, and a producer, a director. Within this role, students are actively doing both.

Constructing Recordings. Even aficionados of live music, such as the authors of this chapter, experience most of their music mediated through recordings. It is so ubiquitous that we may be unconscious of the clever artifice employed to create a listening experience akin to live performance. Thus, one might close their eyes and imagine being in a concert. Yet recordings are far from a passive document of the sounds created by instruments and voices; elements such as intonation and timbre are co-constructed by the musicians who are recorded and by the soundcrafters. The craft involved in creating music recordings rests best upon a foundation of knowledge about how musical instruments and voices vibrate, how rooms resonate, and how loudspeakers operate.

Music recordings are stored sound data that describe air vibrations. The stored sound data is converted into electricity that causes the cones called woofers in a loudspeaker to vibrate, thereby reproducing vibrations in the air locally. Most audio recordings today store air pressure data digitally over time, meaning that a given number of measurements called samples are recorded over equal intervals of time, described with a sampling rate such as 44,100, 48,000, or 96,000 samples per second. Samples have a bit depth, which identifies the precision with which the samples are recorded, with a higher bit depth providing greater accuracy. Voices and instruments produce air vibrations just as loudspeakers do. Influencing the data collection through types of microphone placement is part of a soundcrafter’s interpretive decision-making.

An ever-present companion as we listen to music is space, such as a concert hall, the cafeteria, an athletic stadium, or any other venue. Our ears are highly attentive to space, and our sense of localization of sound is primarily achieved through the short time interval (usually less than 50 milliseconds) that it takes for the sound wave to reach one ear and then the other. Unlike live performances that occur in specific spaces, musical recordings have the potential to distort time-related sound data related to spaces. The most common way to represent space on a recording is a stereo image, wherein the intent is for discrete vibration patterns to reach each ear and thereby create the time-delay cues our brains interpret as localization. Short-time periods of sound-objects/musical- events (circa 50 milliseconds or less) are processed differently by human auditory systems than more extended timer periods (circa 100 milliseconds up to circa 16 seconds).

A soundcraft curriculum should foster an understanding of what short time periods of sound objects sound like and feel like.