TUNING IN SITU: ARTICULATIONS OF VOICE, AFFECT, AND ARTIFACT IN THE RECORDING STUDIO A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by William Owen Marshall January 2017 © 2017 William Owen Marshall TUNING IN SITU: ARTICULATIONS OF VOICE, AFFECT, AND ARTIFACT IN THE RECORDING STUDIO William Owen Marshall, Ph. D. Cornell University 2017 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines practices of digital vocal tuning in the fields of audio engineering and music production. Drawing on an ethnographic study of two Los Angeles recording studios, it accounts for the recorded voice, and the tools used to shape it, as a collective sociotechnical accomplishment. It begins by tracing how recording engineers have historically thought about and worked with “emotion,” specifically with respect to its relationship between the studio’s technological artifacts and the voice of their client. It goes on to examine two major digital tuning tools – Auto-Tune and Melodyne – in terms of their initial development and the different technological prescriptions they brought to the technological problem that would eventually come to be known as “pitch correction.” It first traces the ways that recording engineers developed for working with, problematizing, and repairing digital tuning techniques understood in terms of a “covert” and “corrective” approach. It then looks at the various ways that pitch correction was repurposed as an “overt effect,” primarily by non-engineers such as songwriters, performers, and listeners. We then “zoom-in” an instance of corrective tuning as an interactional accomplishment that draws upon techniques of inscription, repetition, and inflection. The remaining chapters take as their starting point the distinction between “place” and “time” theories of pitch perception in psychoacoustics and signal processing, in an attempt to thicken and ethnographically respecify the ways that place and time are structured and performed in-studio. This respecification provides a more adequate understanding of how the objects of digital tuning are practically constituted in two senses. The first of these is the topical structure of the recording studio, or the way that studio life is performed through various acts of place- making. The second concerns the temporal structure of studio life, taking up the various ways of keeping, making, and marking time in the studio. In the Appendix I develop the concept of the “shibboleth ” as a complementary concept to boundary objects and boundary work, as well as a new way of thinking about the mutual production of social and perceptual difference in STS. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH William Owen Marshall studied political science and global studies at the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, where he also worked at the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes and served as the Music Director for KASC 1260 AM. After college he produced radio stories for Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo.org project. He began his graduate work in Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University in 2010. Following his PhD he will work as a Postdoctoral Scholar in The Science and Technology Studies program at UC Davis. He plays music. He grew up in Utah. v Dedicated to my mother, the musician, and my father, the engineer. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the thoughtful, generous, and patient support of my committee members, Trevor Pinch, Rachel Prentice, Mike Lynch, and Steve Jackson. For their feedback and support I would also like to thank Karin Bijsterveld, Joeri Bruyninckx, Cyrus Mody, Alexandra Supper, Mara Mills, Viktoria Tkaczyk, Peter McMurray, Myles Jackson, Melle Krumhout, Tim Choy, Joe Dumit, James Griesemer, Tim Lenoir, Colin Milburn, Mario Biagioli, Alexandra Lippman, Dierdre Loughridge, Alexis Walker, Kasia Tolwinski, Danya Glabau, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Hansen Hsu, Park Doing, Malte Ziewitz, Ron Kline, Paul Nadasdy, Suman Seth, Sara Pritchard, Stacey Stone, Debbie Van Gelder, Ryan Heichel, Trina Harrison, Vinny Ialenti, Tyson Vaughn, Marit McArthur, Jennifer Stoever- Ackerman, Patrick Brown at Sociology Compass, Eliot Bates, Samantha Bennett, Gretchen Gano, Lori Hidinger, Clark Miller, Dan Sarewitz, Dave Guston, Ira Bennett, Derek Anderson, the staff of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at UC Berkeley, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the staff of the Gannett Counseling and Psychological Services, WFMU, WRFI, KASC, KDVS, WBEZ, Vocalo.org, and Antares Audio Technologies. I would not have been possible without the help of my friends and family. For their love and support I would like to thank Clare Casteel, Merrill and Bill Marshall, Cayla Marshall, Judd Anderman, Jeff Valla, Bahar Akyurtlu, Heather Fae Speaker, Adam Southard, Andris Balins, Jötunn Ymir Ginnungagap, Andrew Smith, Marty Royce, Tedd Roundy, Andy Roundy, Carl, Harold, Lucille, Bob, Seth, Barry, Hunter Davidsohn, Bubba Crumrine, Jason Muffler, Michael Hagblom, Illya Riske, Wasef El-Kharouf, Tobie Milford, Dave Gironda Jr., Valerie Lu, Chris Kasych, Luana Hakes, Scott Bransford, and Grey Ferran, This project was supported by an NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grant (award #1455647), a grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell’s Innovation Creativity and Entrepreneurship project, travel grants vii from the Cornell Graduate School and Dept. of S&TS, and a Sage graduate fellowship. Thanks finally to anyone omitted by accident, my anonymous reviewers, and to you for reading this. viii LIST OF FIGURES 67 The Lambdoma Matrix (B Hero & Foulkrod 1999) 71 The Cylinder Sampling Model (Thielemann 2010, 2) 98 Screenshot 1 from Melodyne tuning demonstration (Libertini 2016) 99 Screenshot 2 from Melodyne tuning demonstration (Libertini 2016) 134 Spectrograms of pitch correction shootout, with audio. (Hughes 2016) 143 Auto-Tune 8 Graphical Mode screenshot (Walden 2015) 150 Melodyne “blobs” (Celemony 2005) 163 Staff notation of “… just say it’s on purpose!” by author 163-4 Spectrogram and autocorrelation of “…just say it’s on purpose!” by author 190 An ambiguously numbered thing in Studio A, photo by author 194 Sketch of floor plans for studios A and B by author 197 Pro-Tools 10 session screenshot by author 272 Facebook comments from Morpheus “accidental bypass” meme. Screenshot by author ix TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT III BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH V INTRODUCTION 1 AUTO -TUNE AS BREACHING EXPERIMENT 3 ARTICULATING VOICE , AFFECT , AND ARTIFACT 13 THE FIELD SITES : STUDIOS A AND B 21 CHAPTER OVERVIEWS 25 CHAPTER 1: EMOTION AND THE RECORDING ENGINEER 27 PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION MODELS OF EMOTION 27 NEW ORIENTATIONS TOWARDS EMOTION AND APPLICATION 36 CHAPTER 2: COMPETING PRESCRIPTIONS IN DIGITAL TUNING 48 EVOCATIVE OBJECTS 49 AUTO -TUNE : “I T’S ABOUT TIME ” 54 THE SALESMAN ’S WIFE 57 MELODYNE AND PETER NEUBÄCKER ’S HARMONIC PYTHAGOREANISM 65 THE SOUND OF A STONE 70 CONCLUSION 72 CHAPTER 3: TUNING AS COVERT CORRECTION: REPAIRING AUTO-TUNE 75 PITCH CORRECTION BEFORE AUTO -TUNE 76 THE INITIAL UPTAKE OF AUTO -TUNE AS COVERT CORRECTION TOOL 80 HUMANIZING AUTO -TUNE 83 DEATH AND AUTO -TUNE : THE ROLE OF MELODYNE IN LATE -PERIOD MICHAEL JACKSON 86 MAKING TUNING INAUDIBLE : DEVELOPING COVERT TUNING TECHNIQUES IN-STUDIO 90 MELODYNE ’S PITCH CORRECTION MACRO – TUNING IN EMOTION AND CREATIVITY 96 LEARNING TO “T ELL ” WHAT INAUDIBLE TUNING SOUNDS LIKE 101 CHAPTER 4: TUNING AS OVERT EFFECT: REPURPOSING AUTO-TUNE 118 OVERT TUNING AS A CRITICAL PRACTICE 118 OVERT TUNING AS SONGWRITING TOOL 129 CHAPTER 5: DIGITAL VOCAL CORRECTION AND CONVERSATIONAL REPAIR 139 REPETITION 151 INFLECTION PART 1: A DECISION TO NOT USE AUTO -TUNE 157 INFLECTION PART 2: A DECISION TO USE AUTO -TUNE : 162 CONCLUSION : ON PRODUCING AN ACCOUNTABLY UNACCOUNTABLE TRANSCRIPTION 165 x CHAPTER 6: THE TOPICAL ORGANIZATION OF STUDIO LIFE 170 PLACING VOICES 170 STUDIO AS HETEROTOPIA 172 LISTING 175 FLOOR PLANS AND SESSION VIEWS 193 STAGING AND GAIN -STAGING 197 CONCLUSION 211 CHAPTER 7: THE TEMPORAL ORGANIZATION OF STUDIO LIFE 212 STUDIO TIME AND THE PROVERBIAL VOICE 212 PROFESSIONAL NARRATIVES 215 REPETITION AS AN INFRASTRUCTURAL TEMPORALITY 219 “C LOCKING ” AS THE MATERIAL MANAGEMENT OF TIME 221 “B LURRED LINES ” AND THE THICKENESS OF STUDIO TIME 234 CONCLUSION 242 CONCLUSION 244 VOICE , EMOTION , AND ALGORITHM BEYOND THE STUDIO 247 APPENDIX: SHIBBOLETHS IN THE STUDIO 251 INTERPRETIVE BRITTLENESS AND THE PRACTICAL -SYMBOLIC DISTINCTION 255 PARTIALITY , ASYMMETRY , AND BREAKING 259 SHIBBOLETHS IN THE STUDIO 262 CABLE WRAPPING : THE OVER -UNDER METHOD 264 GIVING WINGMEN FAKE FADERS , CHEATING COMPRESSORS 267 THE CASE OF THE LAPTOP ON THE NEVE 274 808 SNARES AND THE N-WORD IN WAVEFORM 275 THE KEY TO THE REVERB 280 ABX TESTS 285 CONCLUSION : CRACKS IN THE VOICE 289 BIBLIOGRAPHY 293 xi INTRODUCTION The digital pitch correction software Auto-Tune and I have at least one thing in common: we both got into music in the late 1990s. I can still remember when and where I first heard it: twelve years old, sitting in the passenger seat of my parents’ car in a grocery store parking lot, listening to Top 40 radio. My childhood obsession with stage magic was fading (not a moment too soon) and I was in the beginning stages of what would be a prolonged interest in weird- sounding music.1 The sound of Cher’s voice during the second word of the pre-chorus of her song “Believe” (“I caaaan’t break through!”) seemed to bridge those two interests readily. Though I did not much care for the song itself, I was captivated by that particular sound as an instance of sheer production. It reminded me of the sound of a dial-up modem, or the sounds you hear when you call a fax machine by mistake. It was like listening in on the conversations machines have when humans are not around. 2 It sounded like a voice being possessed by a demon or infected by a computer virus, or like the musical equivalent of the scene in Terminator 2 where Arnold Schwarzenegger peels the fake skin off of his forearm and reveals a metallic skeleton.