In mid- to late-1960s America and Britain, against the backdrop of escalating
socio-political disappointment, countercultural ideologies and fantasies of a musical
youth dovetailed with improvements in recording technologies to generate new sonic
languages of limning in sound utopian pastoral spaces to which recordists and listeners
could escape, virtually. Seeking alternative spaces that their alternative identities could
more comfortably inhabit became a central project of many progressive groups and
individuals, often, but not always, hailing from middle-class white society. The cultural
and musical trends did eventually have a global sway. Coeval advances in sound
recording and reproduction technologies made musical recordings a major avenue
through which the sought spaces were limned and even materialized sonically, but other
media, especially album cover art and film in conjunction with musical soundtracks, provided additional avenues for pastoral spatial projects of this generation and afford us
ancillary resources for better understanding these projects. While the specific utopian
spatial projects and the underlying ideologies of musicians working in various branches
of country rock, soft rock, progressive country, progressive bluegrass, art rock, Afrocentric
avant-garde jazz, and proto-New Age music were not always exactly the same,
there were considerable overlaps in the societal sources of their disaffections, the
wellsprings of their inspiration, and in the textural sonic languages they developed in the
recording studio.
Unlike music with overtly spatial projects, the sonic aspects of music that
subtly captures a hyper-real sense of the natural have remained underconsidered and their
contribution to the aesthetic and psychological impact of music has slipped by under the
radar of most listeners' conscious attention. This dissertation, then, is an attempt to
analyze the subtle acoustic and musical communicative codes devised by musicians and
recordists that do inform later music.
Through close listening and textual analysis, this dissertation identifies the
different levels at which spatial allusions are encoded into a musical product.
Ethnographic interviews help distinguish between deliberate manipulations of studio
technology and responses based in tacit understandings thereof. An overall cross
disciplinary approach, borrowing especially from acoustics and psychoacoustics, aided
me substantially with the analyses. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6543 |
| Date | 16 October 2009 |
| Creators | Kalra, Ajay |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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