The History of the Music Studio

The Music Studio is a 7,500 square foot teaching, research and recording facility that houses the Audio Technology program at NYU Steinhardt. The studios are located on the sixth floor of 35 West 4th Street.

Just as scholars in the history of science and STS have tended to focus on the internal dynamics of workshops and laboratories, musicologists have focused on studios as sites of musical production and on studio-specific sound signatures. However, as this collection of articles demonstrates, studios are not closed off spaces and their hinges bridge the supposedly clean production inside to a vibrant scene outside (Born 1995; Loubet, Robindore and Roads 1997; Rheinberger 1997; Knorr Cetina 1999).

Studios are not simply containers of the sounds that emerge from them but also of the social practices that shape those sounds. Following the trajectories of the people and objects that inhabit a studio opens up longue duree approaches by revealing overlooked filiations. For example, Alexandra Hui shows how field recording bounded environmental psychology, sound engineering and composition; Jonathan Goldman reveals the expansion of Gordon Mumma’s studio as he incorporated an organ into it; and Martin Brody tracks how the synthesiser, itself a technology anchored in previous musical soundscapes, came to be inscribed with avant-garde musical aesthetics.

These insights into the broader social and cultural implications of studios show how studios are not merely places for producing songs but that they have become the sites of the articulation of music, social change and the creation of new worlds. In addition, these articles demonstrate that studios are not just spaces of production but also of performance and play. This is evident in the ways that producers, engineers and musicians transform their control rooms to make them more comfortable, less intimidating or more like the womb. For example, Red Hot Chili Peppers producer Rick Rubin brings carpets, soothing tapestries and lava lamps to his studios in order to create an environment that his musicians find nurturing.

In this way, the articles in this volume challenge assumptions about the sanctity of the studio and about the separation between producers and their clients/artists. They reveal that the ‘client-service model’ in modern record studios has long been a site of negotiation between different actors and genres.

The studio thus embodies the complex topographical arrangement of heterotopias that are capable, as Foucault (1991) puts it, ‘of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces which are in themselves incompatible.’ They are not simply sites of production but a site for contestation of ideologies, hegemonies and power relations. This article series is a contribution to this ongoing conversation. Its aim is to contribute to the development of a transdisciplinary field that explores the social, political and cultural dimensions of music studios.