Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures.(Book review)

Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures. Edited by Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello. (Music/Culture.) Middle-town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. [viii, 228 p. ISBN 0-8195-6517-2. $29.95.] Index, bibliographical references, illustrations.

The role sound engineering plays in determining meaning in recorded music has until recently received little scholarly attention. Possibly due to the ambiguous nature of "engineering" sound itself, this neglect interferes with even the most basic understanding of the way cultures mediate their recorded musical output. This largely excellent collection of essays attempts to offer several new approaches to understanding this oft-thought-invisible layer of meaning embedded in technologically mediated artwork. In his afterward (which serves as something of a key for the essays contained within, and functions better as an introduction than the introduction proper), Thomas Porcello acknowledges the two ways one can interpret the term "sound engineering," both of which are highlighted in this collection. The first, more obvious, way occurs at the level of musical details; the specific choices behind the twiddling of knobs, amplification, and attenuation, as well as micro-level studio adjustments. The second sees sound engineering as the use of recording decisions "to execute ... social strategies" (Paul Greene, "Sound Engineering in a Tamil Village: Playing Audio Cassettes as Devotional Performance," Ethnomusicology 43, no. 3 [Fall 1999]: 459-89). The majority of chapters succeed in combining these two aspects of "engineering."

This collection grew out of a panel entitled "Sound Engineering as Cultural Production" at the 1999 annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Consequently, the contributors are predominantly ethnomusicologists and anthropologists, a fact reflected by the large number of ethnographic studies contained within this book. This works both to the collection's advantage, when ethnography offers a unique perspective on the influence of recording technology, and disadvantage in those occasional essays that offer frustratingly little to the field other than a cultural "snapshot" of studio practices.

The ethnographic approach works best here in those studies that attempt to account for various musical practices in non-Western countries, using an insider's perspective to understand the specific technological choices made, often described as an expression of nationality, subjectivity, and ethnicity. Several of the essays discuss how "the West" exerts a strong yet invisible influence on studio decisions. Frederick J. Moehn, in his chapter on the shift in recording techniques from essentially "live" to more "controlled" releases for Rio de Janeiro's annual carnival samba, effectively demonstrates this influence. Likewise, Louise Meintjes's fascinating chapter on the specific cultural position of the sound engineer in South Africa's recording industry also concerns how this culture reflects an almost obsessive desire to look to the West for authority and technological inspiration. Several other chapters also explore the difficulty music engineers face when recording indigenous music, alternating between a perceived "authentic" indigenousness and the "inauthentic" Western. This is, perhaps, overly familiar territory for ethnomusicology, and occasionally this repetition reveals the frustratingly narrow political positions of the field in general. It would have been nice, for example, for an author to discuss a contemporary non-Western musical recording technique in terms outside of politics exclusively. While I acknowledge that all musical choices are inherently "political," certainly some timbral, instrumental, and engineering decisions have been made by producers that have as much to do with visceral, emotional, or intellectual effect as they do the purely political. A more careful integration of these equally important aspects of musical production would have resulted in "thicker" descriptions in several essays that rely predominantly ...