MIRC Lecture Series:
Samantha Bennett on Recording Studio Ornamentation

Drawing on extensive research to be published in Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies (forthcoming, The MIT Press), this paper examines hardware professional audio recording technologies–gear–and their presence in today’s music and audio technology cultures. Today’s production praxes are reliant on computer-based digital audio workstations, software plugins, and digital distribution and dissemination of recorded music files. Yet gear–technologies including microphones, consoles, and signal processors–is ever-present in professional and amateur production domains. Compared to their skeuomorphic counterparts, gear is expensive, cumbersome, heavy, time consuming to integrate into workflows, energy inefficient, and space-dependent. Why then, do we need it? What are the reasons for its ongoing appeal and success, decades after the introduction of DAW-based systems, which dominate 21st Century production workflows?

This paper focuses on how organisational norms, to include pairing, chaining, racking, and stacking, workplace and space ornamentation, precious presentations, and other gear accoutrements, amplify fetishization, reinforce technological canons, and uphold gear traditions. The paper traverses conservative gear organizations and examines the structures in which gear is presented, observed, and socialized. Drawing on Thorsten Veblen’s theory of conspicous consumption (1899), and Susan Pearce’s work on Victorian collections (1999), the paper then focuses on how gear spaces are decorated in specific ways using lava lamps, fairy lights and specific items adorning console meter bridges. Some gear is organized and presented as precious, as analogous to jewelery. Above all, the paper shows how various ornamentations occuring in recording and production settings come to stand in for missing female bodies. How does the organization of gear amplify gendered and sexualized understandings of technologies? And what extra-audible work is this ornamented gear called upon to do?