As a music theory geek, I love to get inside songs and figure out why we like them. There’s something beautiful about the ability of a mainstream hit to bring people together. And when the songwriter and singer is as extraordinary a talent as Ariana Grande, we can be sure we’re putting the very finest pop product in our ears.
So let’s dive in, intro first, middle bit in the middle, and outro at the end, as has been the way since the dawn of time.
Intro – 8 bars [0:00]
We hear a single reverbed synth sound playing half notes, with occasional 8th note passing notes, and no indication of what’s to come. That’s sparse, even for a trap-pop intro. At this point, we don’t even know if we’re hearing 140BPM (fast pop) or 70BPM (slow ballad).
ABSTRACT: It can be argued that since the persona of the performer is widely perceived to be the locus of meaning in popular music – as opposed to the more indirect voice of the composer in the western art music tradition – that the timbre of the voice and its control during performance should be the focal point of popular music analysis. This paper uses a framework combining the ecological approach to perception (Gibson, 1979; Clarke, 2005), embodied cognition (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) and the neural theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003; Feldman, 2008) to explore how the disembodied sound of the recorded voice in popular music is interpreted as a schematic representation of a human entity and action: a sonic cartoon (Zagorski-Thomas, 2014).
ABSTRACT: A commercial pop music production is rarely the result of a single individual and pop music producers and songwriters are often part of a larger creative collective (Hennion, 1990) in creating a musical product. A team leader typically manages this group activity. That team leader requires an appropriate level of cultural, symbolic and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1984) so they can effectively evaluate the contributions of the rest of the team and guide the project towards commercial success (Thompson & Harding, 2017). This study explores the role of the team leader within the creative production workflow of pop songwriting and production since the 1990s and investigates the ways in which pop songwriting and production teams work within a creative system of pop-music making. Building upon previous studies in this area (Harding and Thompson 2017) the ‘Service Model’ flow system is illustrated with distinct linear stages that include the processes of pop songwriting, pop vocal recording, post vocal production and then mixing. However, within each of these production stages the ‘highly nonlinear dynamics’ (Capra and Luisi, 2014) of the creative system (Csikszentmihalyi; 1988, 1999) can be viewed in action as the team work together to make the pop record. Drawing upon a series of interviews and data gathered during a Practice Based Enquiry (PBE) conducted at Westerdals University in Oslo, this paper presents the pop music ‘Service Model’. Importantly, the model underlines the value of the collective (rather than individual) in the commercial pop songwriting and production process.
Misty opens by describing her particular students as ‘in the box’ producers – that is to say, they create the entire sound recording in a Digital Audio Workstation. The problem she’s trying to solve is this: the students’ recordings are just not ready yet [for the commercial marketplace]. So today, she will be sharing her approach to helping students to make their song recordings competitive, in the genre they want to produce in.
On the bus to the university this morning I introduced myself to the person sat next to me, who turned out to be John Bigus from my own institution (Berklee’s a great community, but it’s a BIG community, so it’s possible to work there for a long time without knowing everyone’s name). John is responsible for the 
Welcome to the 2018 Eurovision live musicology blog, now in its eighth year. This site has provided live music analysis of the ESC final every year since 2011, previously during the UK live broadcast. Since 2016, the text has been written from Boston USA, 5 hours behind UK time and, this year, also the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal, where the live show takes place.
Thus far, the 
Claudio is one of the world leaders in this field, and one of the inventors/developers of 
I’m in Miami at the 
Bill begins with a description of his own background, and like many at ARP he traces his first inspiration back to the moment he first heard the Beatles. He tells stories about his enthusiasm for acquisitiveness in audio, having recently bought three SSL desks after using one for a particular session in an opera house (he notes that, as a Texan, he believes everything should be big).
Abstract: “Slap back echo” was created by Sam Phillips for Elvis Presley´s early Memphis recordings. Using cepstrum and autocorrelation, we find that the tape delay used in Sun Studios was 134-137 ms, which is so long that the echo is perceived as a single, distinct echo in the time domain, and not the comb filter coloration of timbre in the frequency domain defined as Box-Klangfarbe. Such coloration would be perceived if a distinct, separate, reflection gave a comb filter with a distance between the teeth (CBTB: Comb-Between-Teeth-Bandwidth) comparable to the critical bandwidth along the basilar membrane in the cochlea. When Elvis changed to RCA Victor´s studio in Nashville, “RCA was anxious to recreate the “slapback” echo…To add them to Elvis’ vocals Chet [Atkins] and engineer Bob Farris created a pseudo “echo chamber” by setting up a speaker at one end of a long hallway and a microphone at the other end and recording the echo live”. Analysis of these recordings gives that the echo is somewhat shorter (114 ms and 82 ms), and much more diffuse, so “slap echo” was not actually recreated. The main findings is that even though the delay time of the Sun Studio “slap tape echo” is long, the echo is still perceived as rather “close”, because the echo is in mono. Panned in stereo, the feeling of being inside a small room would disappear. In addition, we analysed also a shorter delay, as for a possible reflection from the floor of the studio back to the singer´s microphone. These results are more unclear, but we found that such shorter delay would have given Box-Klangfarbe, but if this actually was a floor reflection, the measured deviation of the delay time must mean that the singer moved his head during the recordings (a highly reasonable assumption for Elvis!)
Abstract: Among the more absurd sonic concoctions to come out of the recording studio, gated reverb offers a unique aesthetic possible only through loudspeaker-mediated sound. Born in the 80s, it relied upon creative, even counterintuitive application of some of the newest signal processing technologies of the time. The genesis of gated reverb was part discovery, and part invention. Its further development was motivated by rebellion, and confusion. Peter Gabriel did it first, with “Intruder” (1980). Phil Collins made it famous, with “In the Air Tonight” (1980). But David Bowie likely inspired it all with tracks like “Sound and Vision” (1977). This paper tours the development of gated reverb, with audio illustrations showing when, how, and why. What began as a radical reshaping of timbre has evolved into a more subtle form. Gated reverb remains relevant in contemporary music production, not just for 80s pastiche, but as a tool for overcoming masking through the strategic leveraging of its unique psychoacoustic properties.