Making Sense of Recordings

Book excerpt: Building on ideas from cognitive metaphor theory, Making Sense of Recordings offers a new perspective on record production, music perception, and the aesthetics of recorded sound. It shows how the language about sound is intimately connected to sense-making - both as a reflection of our internal cognitive capacities and as a component of our extended cognitive system. In doing so, the book provides the foundation for a broader understanding of the history of listening, discourses of sound quality, and artistic practices in the age of recorded music. The book will be of interest to anyone who asks how recorded music sounds and why it sounds as it does, and it will be a valuable resource for musicology students and researchers interested in the analysis of sound and the history of listening and record production. Additionally, sound engineers and laptop musicians will benefit from the book's exploration of the connection between embodied experiences and our cognitively processed experiences of recorded sound. The tools provided will be useful to these and other musicians who wish to intuitively interact with recorded or synthesized sound in a manner that more closely resembles the way they think and that makes sense of what they do.