Analyzing Recorded Music

2023 Winner of the Society for Music Theory Award for Outstanding Multi-Author Collection

'Moylan’s analytical framework provides a flexible yet coherent structure for this wonderfully eclectic and useful collection. Analyses of the recorded ‘texts’ of popular music are woven together with the ethnography of practice and cultural theory to provide an excellent range of case studies which, when combined, also provide a unifying methodology for future work.'

Simon Zagorski-Thomas, University of West London

'This essential collection beautifully illustrates how close sonic analysis can feed interpretations that skillfully enlighten how music impacts, and is in constant dialogue with, cultural, social, aesthetic, historical, technological, and other fundamental aspects of our lives. It makes us better understand why we love music so much.'

Serge Lacasse, Laval University

'In this expansive edited volume, Moylan, Burns & Alleyne invite a broad range of engineers, historians, theorists, and analysts to apply Moylan’s listening approach (2020) to a specific track within the history of recorded popular music. Analyzing Recorded Music provides a rich and diverse addition to any musical bookshelf for readers who seek to understand the interconnected elements and conditions that contribute to the creation of a recording.'

Paul Thompson, Leeds Beckett University

'We have thankfully arrived at a moment in the history of serious musical scholarship when the implements and artistry of the recording studio are understood to be as central to the creation of music as are the traditional considerations of pitches, harmonies, rhythms, song forms and "traditional" musical instruments. Mike Alleyne, Lori Burns and William Moylan have assembled an excellent collection of essays that will force and inspire music scholars across genres to come to terms with the ways our soundscape has been not only mediated, but shaped, by the creativity and ingenuity of the recording studio. The essays here span the analog and digital eras, brilliantly summarizing the interplay of studio technologies, aesthetics, histories and identities at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.'

Michael Veal, Yale University