ABSTRACT The small professional independent recording studio (commonly known as a ‘home recording studio’) has arisen in South Africa as it has in other countries over the past fifteen years. It has become an alternative service to that of major recording studios such as EMI and Gallo. My research discusses the history and development of the home studio with relation to technologic and socio-economic expansion in the commercial industry. I use ten established home studios in Johannesburg and its surrounding areas as case studies, working towards a definition of this phenomenon and exploring its influence on the South African music industry as a whole.

This thesis studies the development of the British recording studio from the mid-1960s to the early-1990s. Although there are now a growing number of academic studies of popular music they have, so far, largely failed to study the evolving process by which artists were able to reproduce their music for mass distribution. Consequently, this dissertation investigates the image portrayed of the studio and its utilisation and representation by a combination of human, technological and locational factors. The first part of the thesis constructs an overview of the recording studio industry, as based on contemporary trade journals, in order to produce a traditional historical narrative, so far absent from music’s historiography, which provides the framework in which to place more detailed research. The prominence given by the industry to the ‘progress of technology’ is then compared to the public perception of the recording studio, as shown by the extent and content of its inclusion in the popular culture media of the period, both print and film based. How far the process of producing recorded music managed to permeate through the presentation of a music industry that was becoming increasingly reliant on the image and personality of the artists themselves is then analysed. The second part of the thesis is based on Latour’s concept of actor-networks and deconstructs the recording studio into three main components; technology, architecture and the human element within it. Using one particular studio (Strawberry Recording Studios in Stockport) as being representative of the increasing proportion of small independents in the industry, the further deconstruction of these three components into their constitutional networks, provides the key theme of the dissertation. Consequently, studio technology can be viewed not simply in terms of functional machinery in the studio setting (of Latourian ‘black boxes’) but more as a confusing and intrusive element that was developed, shaped and created by the requirements of those in the studio. And, whilst contemporary society has always elevated the status of the performer in the music industry, the human element in the studio can also be shown to comprise the industrial and social interaction between a wide range of support staff, whose roles and importance altered over time, and the artists themselves. Finally, studio buildings were not just backdrops to the work taking place in them but were seen to extend their boundaries and influence beyond their immediate location through their architecture, interior design and geography. In other words, the recording studio might be seen as the combination of a number of fluctuating networks rather than just as a passive element in the production of recorded music. As a result of the content of the subject being studied, this thesis utilises a number of sources that, in Samuel’s terminology, moves the study away from a ‘fetishization’ of the traditional historical archive towards those of ‘unofficial learning’. Given the immediacy of the period being studied, the personal accounts of those involved in the studio, mainly through the use of oral history, form a major part of the research material.

The link to subjective parameters and objective parameters in the field of room acoustics has been the source of much research. This thesis surveys some of the available objective room acoustical analysis methods, quantify their advantages and disadvantages with respect to the measurement of acoustical qualities of professionally operated critical listing rooms, and implements these methods in a range of critical listening rooms. In conjunction with the objective room analysis, a subjective component of research was also performed. A series of anechoically recorded standard instrument sounds were presented to professional listeners in their critical listening spaces with the listeners asked to alter the sounds to taste: to

This thesis develops a relational geography perspective on creative work and practice, with a specific focus on the recording studio sector. Drawing on an extensive social network analysis, a questionnaire survey, and nineteen semi-structured interviews with recording studio engineers and producers in London (UK), the thesis reveals how recording studios are constituted by a number of types of relations. Firstly, studios are spaces that involve a material and technological relationality between studio workers and varied means of production. Studios are material and technological spaces that influence and shape human actions and social inter-actions. Secondly, studios are sites of relationality between social actors, including engineers, musicians and artists. The thesis reveals how the ability to construct and maintain social relations, and perform emotional labour , is of particular importance to the management of the creative process of producing and recording music, and to building the individual social capital of studio workers. Finally, the thesis argues that studios are sites of changing employment relations between studio workers and studio as employer. In the recording studio sector, a complex and changing set of employment practices have re-defined the relationship between employee and employer and resulted in a set of employment relations characterised by constant employment uncertainty for freelance studio workers. It is argued that the three types of relations revealed in this thesis, manifest at a multiplicity of geographical scales, construct recording studios as distinctive social and economic creative spaces. In conclusion, it is argued that a relational perspective is central to progressing geographical accounts of creative work and of project-based industries in general.